This afternoon was a strange one. No doubt about it. If I were an impressionable teenager I would almost certainly be thinking now, as I sit here writing about it, that God wanted me to do what I did this afternoon in order to show me something of his world and those who live in it.
As a man of fifty who has turned his back on religion in disgust after seeing how it empowers the mysogynist, the nepotist and the bigot alike (and one bloke who was all three rolled into one) I sit here marvelling at the opportunity this afternoon brought for me to realise that it is, after all, a wonderful world.
A few months ago I sat in front of my TV on a similarly rainy sunday afternoon and watched in wonder as a Discovery Programme called "The Wreck Detectives" covered the story of the discovery of the wreck of a Sunderland Flying Boat in the waters off Pembroke Dock. The programme explained how the wreck was found, how strenuous efforts were made to identify it, and how it was rediscovered and bits of it were raised for renovation and display.
But the programme succeeded beyond what might have been thought its wildest dream. For not only did the team raise bits of the aircraft, but they found some of the men who flew in her.
And this afternoon, by sheer chance and luck, I was privileged to meet one of those men, and his friend.
I knew the conservators of the raised items were planning to show some of the items in a local museum. And I also knew that the 'Martello Tower' in Pembroke Dock had recently been reopened as a museum. SO on the offchance that I might catch a piece of history, I took some time out today to go and have a look.
I never realised just how much history I was going to bump into.
I went round the tower not least because I have a more than slight interest in gunnery. In days when we were a sovereign state of which people sat up and took notice of, we had a three mile limit around out shores which we called our territorial waters. And it was three miles for a good reason. Our finest shore mounted artillery was able RELIABLY fire on a target three miles distant but beyond that our threats were empty. And as a naval friend once told me, we can claim as much water as we like around our shores, but unless we can reliably sink a transgressor at the point of their transgression upon our claimed territory, our words are empty rhetoric.
Now there's food for thought. Gordon Brown would do well to read and mark those thoughts.
But to return to the point. I went to the powder store where now a video presentation of the martello towers and their role along with the palmerston forts was explained. I already knew it from my O Levels of thirty years ago but it still stirs the soul to recall a time when we had a country worth fighting for. And then I saw what I had come to see. Pieces of the engine from the Sunderland, raised from the sea bed and apparently now in a glass case for all to witness.
I went upstairs and asked the staff if they were indeed parts of the engine from the flying boat that featured in the documentary. I wasn't prepared for the answer.
"Yes, they are, and here's a man who flew in her". And the man she was speaking to turned round. Standing before me was a gentleman whose blazer insignia needed little explanation. He must have been a kid hardly as old as my daughter with me at the time, but now easily an octogenarian he told me of his days when he was transferred to the base at Pembroke Dock having accompanied one of the aircraft in which he served as engineer when it left Singapore.
Standing with him was a similarly venerable, wiry gentleman with a blazer badge proclaiming his part in a small operation you might have heard of in a hell-hole called Normandy, in 1944.
There are times when you think Doctor Who's Tardis is parked round the corner, there really are.
I don't recall the names of these two gentlemen and it doesn't matter because to me they represent a generation of teenagers and little more than teenagers that "did its bit" when push came to shove.
It was a pleasure to meet these gentlemen and I wish them well.
But there is no god. For if there were, he would have sent Rhodri "I'd Rather Go Golfing Than Go To Normandy" Morgan to walk in the door just as I was chatting to this chap and his D-Day veteran friend.
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