You have a pathological need to clean a house before you move out of it. It’s a matter of personal pride. You could no more leave a house dirty for the next person than walk about without your head on. You are also extremely unlikely to start unpacking in a new house before you’re cleaned it from top to bottom either. This state of affairs has 2 possible explanations. Either all Army brats are bonkers. Or there is a squad of secret squatters with highly questionable personal hygiene who move from empty house to empty house wreaking their manky havoc and the moving on before they are discovered.
You really don’t get redecorating. Walls are magnolia. Doors and edges are white. Carpets are exactly the same throughout, normally beige. You definitely don’t understand degrees of beige-dom. However, you do draw the line at curtains, you do have some standards! Army curtains shriek at you, so you have your own curtains handy somewhere, definitely freshly laundered, and almost certainly folded neatly at the top of the first packing crate to arrive, and clearly labelled. But they are for standard sized windows. So you don’t really understand measuring up for new curtains either.
Where you are from is not the same as where you live. So you can be “from Edinburgh” but “heading home to Germany”. Come on folks, it’s really not that hard. If where you are from is ever the same as where you live, you’ve either left the forces, been sent to boarding school or been very very fortunate (well, that’s if you actually like being where you’re actually from). The latter won’t last.
You don’t sound like where you’re from. Your accent is an amalgamation of the local accent(s) deriving from the geographical locations of your early years, and your parents’ accents. Usually this boils down into a standard army issue accent. However, it can also be influenced by how posh your regiment is. The more highbrow your regiment, the fewer the number of vowel sounds you are able to enunciate with any noticeable level of aptitude.
You can pack an entire room into a wooden crate in about 10 minutes. You can wrap china so that it will not break even if the box were to be dropped off the back of an army lorry, a distance of roughly 1.5 metres.
Your relatives are usually on a different continental landmass to you. This is sometimes a good thing, relatives being what they are. Any relatives to whom you happen to find yourself geographically near are usually not the ones to whom you would choose to be geographically near. This is a little-known facet of the Law of Sod. Lioness spends her days on the opposite side of the globe to me, and I would really rather she didn’t do that. It would be nice to exchange her with one of my less-favourite relatives who lives a bit closer. Someone who would enjoy the sunshine and lifestyle of South Africa perhaps. The makings of a win-win I think!
You spent your younger days kitted out in clothes from the Thrift Shop. Your jeans had hem lines and a mismatched selection of those iron-on patches in the knees. For those civilians amongst us, being dressed out of the Thrift Shop is like having all your clothes bought for you out of a charity shop, except it’s worse because you are almost certain to meet the person whose cast-offs you are sporting, army life being the village that it is. This state of affairs will push you one of 2 ways once you reach your teenage years and beyond. You will either obsessively spend lots of money on absolutely beautiful clothes. Or you will grow up to have the fashion sense of a goat. Possibly this latter is just me, and it may even be disrespectful to goats, some of whom wear cashmere all the time, let’s face it.
You can calculate amounts in sterling of almost any currency in the world in record time without the need for a calculator. Unless of course you happen to be Little Vulture, in which case you never know how much money you have, how much money you are spending, or how much change to expect. Thus a childhood spent in multiple different countries spawns an adulthood of total and utter blind panic-stricken confusion with all numbers. A quote from LV circa 1983:
“HOW many Deutsch Marks to the £?!? Good God…it was so much easier in 1976 when there were 4. I can sometimes divide by 4. I can’t ever divide by 2.5.”
I think you see the problem. Today’s army brat has it so much easier, with the advent of the Euro, an unexpected benefit for the pro-European politicians to claim I think, and probably the only positive thing they have ever done for the Armed Forces.
There are gigantic proportions of your life you will never get back, spent in airport lounges in Lyneham, Brize Norton and various locations on the European mainland waiting for the RAF to deem the weather to be good enough to take off in, whilst all the while watching civilian flights taking off left, right and centre, apparently immune to the ‘fog’ currently preventing your journey from taking place. You are usually surrounded by around 600 other Army dependants at the time, all with rapidly depleting senses of humour.
You can hold a conversation with absolutely anyone. Heck, you almost certainly know someone they know.
You don’t really understand class. Unless of course it’s to do with how cool your regiment is compared to everyone else. On this basis, The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders are the aristocracy of the Army, obviously.
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