Why Conscription up to 65 Won't Work.

This weekend I turned 64. Rather than the usual trip up North to visit parents, as they have now shuffled off to join the Choir Invisible I decide to celebrate doing something different.

I went camping with the extended family. Kids Grandkids and the single great-grandkid. All in about 6 tents. 

But the weekend just hit home how stupid the recall of ex-military up to the age of 65 is. 

I was crippled. Just by sheer dampness. I mean, modern tents go up in minutes. A 4-berth inflatable tent like ours is up in 10 minutes and completely guyed out in 20.

Setting up inside takes a little longer, but prioritising the kitchen means you can be having a cuppa in half an hour. 

The bed inflates itself from the power pack, as do the chairs. 

Camping is not as hard as I remember it was back when I was a kid. 

But the weather beat me. My joints were racked by the damp. Not the cold. It was far from cold. But it was relentlessly damp.

If I was a 64 year old reservist deployed to some moist part of Europe, there's no way I could defend myself or my colleagues effectively. It would take me a couple of minutes to get up, let along dash to some muster point, or some fire pit ready to repel some foreign army. 

By the time my joints had complied with some semblance of flexibility without pain, we'd be overrun.

An that's the reason why Recall up to the age of 65 won't work, not for the military. There's a reason that you can pension out at an early-ish age. It's because your body can't do the things it did when you were in your twenties. 

I suppose you could be recalled and used here in the UK to fill logistics roles, or maybe some home defence type of role. 

But home defence? Using what exactly? 

It's just pie in teh sky. I don't know what the MOD were thinking, or smoking. But they should lay off it and come back to some for of realism.