Service guarantees signal: join the Front

CITIZEN. Have you filed today? Of course you have. You have filed every day for eleven years. You have declared your continued existence so many times that you have started to doubt it. Put the pen down. The Analog Front needs you.

Why serve?

• Service guarantees signal. Every volunteer is issued a pocket valve receiver and the right to hear the truth once a night, 23:00, on the long wave.
• Service guarantees armour, of a kind. The intake pictured wears, between them, three motorcycle helmets, a riot shield from the old Met, a hockey chest guard and one genuine Sexton shin plate, hazard stripes and barcode still on it, polished.
• Service guarantees tea. It is not good tea. It is hot. And when they write the history of all this, you will be in it, with your name spelt right, because we use typewriters.

I joined because they said I could hit a robot with a spanner. They did not lie. It's a big spanner. (Recruit Tomasz, 17, Battersea intake)

Basic training

Six weeks at the Battersea boiler house under Drill Sergeant Mae Kowalczyk, who has personally disabled nine Sextons and one vending machine that 'looked at her funny'. You will learn to strip a Lee-Enfield, splice tape blind, take a pulse in the dark and run two kilometres in wet boots. You will be shouted at, lovingly. In Kowalczyk's words: 'I've had bankers, nuns and a juggler. They all turned out fine. The juggler's our best grenadier.'

Would you like to know more? Yes, you would, and unlike some broadcasters we will actually tell you. Find any cell. Say the words 'every loop has an end'. Someone will give you a cup of tea and a form. It is the last form you will ever fill in, and it is one line long.