I was fortunate to get a “Red Letter Day” voucher from my colleagues at World Vision when I left., and I decided to spend it on something fun that I wouldn’t normally do - so I booked a half day “Spy Day”.
I enjoyed some parts, but didn’t enjoy other bits.
We were split into groups and we each did 5 things but rotated round. There was a session on bugs and trackers which I found fascinating, and was the best session of the morning. Then a session on "close up combat" or rather self defence which was also pretty interesting, but the rest of the sessions were weapon related. The next one was firing an automatic rifle at targets and was more about getting down and firing quickly than any measure of accuracy, then up - run forward, down on one knee fire, forward... frankly I'm not interested in that, plus I'm too old to be playing SAS! The next session was more about accuracy with an air rifle and that was ok - but as I have my own rifle (not that I use it) it wasn't so much of a novelty, but it was good trying to hit targets accurately. The penultimate session was learning how to draw and aim a pistol - though they were rubber replicas, and then throwing an axe - which I was pretty good at. The final session was like an outdoor laser quest with hiding places behind piles of tyres, oil cans and so on. I left that one half way through cos I found it boring and was sick of kneeling / bobbing down into mud. It was more of SAS training than spy training. I'd rather have done stuff such as surveillance and bugging.
I also had an "accident". During the self defence training, we were in pairs and
after the trainer had showed us something we tried it out gently on the partner.
One of the things he showed us if confronted by someone is to hold b
oth your hands
up palm out, like a stop signal, rather than in an aggressive boxing stance, put
your weight onto one foot then shout "back off" really loudly and use your whole
body weight behind your hands on the persons shoulder blades to push them back. Everybody
did it fairly gently - except my partner who clearly thought we had to do it for
real and I went backwards like a cardboard cut out and landed flat on my back. My
legs didn't even buckle - I just went flying. God was I winded. I was helped up and
made a joke of it (to hide that I just wanted to cry!) and said "Hey - at least we
now know it works!". The poor chap was devastated and kept apologising to me the
rest of the morning.
With hindsight though, the trainer should have made me lie still and called an ambulance in case I'd broken my back or neck or something, so it makes you wonder just how rigorous their training is. Anyway - would you mess with this woman?
Spy day