Right: Sounds like you were all lucky. We lived for three weeks in a brown paper bag in a septic tank east of Biggin Hill proper, poring over Trevor Thom volumes until our eyes dropped out. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, and one day, we sat four exams one after the other AND a radiotelephony test, and then that's when purgatory hit us...
... Suddenly we were packed off on Air UK or was it Britannia Airways to Nice, and before we knew it we were out over t'lake west of Cannes-Mandelieu looking out for an old French water tank doing loop the loop so we could make sure we got no rotten fish dumped on us, and we hadn't even seen a glass of Chateau de Chassilier by that point (... "who'd have thought ... "etc) ...
But then the real hard graft began ... we used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work down mill at Aeroport du Cannes-Mandelieu for fourteen hours a day week in-week out for two whole weeks. There were six of us and they'd ask us to fly over mountains three times a day, eat mountains of pizza in the evening washed down by something that was not Chateau de Cassilier and not cold tea, because our CFI told us whatever it was it were good for us, and when we got home after 40 hours and two weeks, almost even before our spanking new CAA licences arrived, but not quite, our CFI or his resident deputy would send us off to see Chris down at Headcorn and maybe on to Shoreham or Sandown, and when we got back, he'd thrash us to sleep with his belt if there were the tiniest risks of incursions reported back by the Biggin or Fairoaks or Redhill controllers or Thames Radar, and book us straight away on twenty five hours of decent cross country, on Night Ratings, then IMC courses too. That were even before we had a chance to rest for five minutes or get to shout anything about Torremolinos, or about the lizards we found in the bidets or suspiciously like the meat on the pizzas while were were getting our PPLs!
Aye. it was BECAUSE we quite liked to be poor, but we were 'appy. My old CFI used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, but it does buy you
something very close to it, so sign here!"
And before we knew it we had 100 hours inside eighteen months, half of which was on instruments, and so we'd found out all about licking road clean with our tongues metaphorically speaking, so we could confidently say it were in front of us and still below us, and available for landing on safely under the hood, and all about rotten fish, and the septic tanks that could be hired at other aero-establishments, and even about Chateau de Chassilier back in France if we were very very lucky, plus how not to get sliced in two by an Italian breadknife up in the clouds beyond Nice
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
ALL: Nope, nope, they won't.
With sincere apologies to both the Monty Python team and the FTI team!