There's never enough time when you're on leave to do all the things you want to do. It matters little whether you're on leave from the army or got a rare day off from rehearsals and promotions. Between seeing friends and catching up with family, your free time is gone before you know it.

So it's good that we have quiet time here at weekends. And that noonas have packed me a bundle of fan letters to bring back and read, knowing quite well that I wouldn't get a chance to do it any other way. They'll bring a bunch with them every time one of them comes to visit and the guys have started to look forward to them as much as I do.

Not because they particularly want to read my fan letters, mind you - however sweet they are. But for the obvious entertainment they offer to us while we're stuck in here.

I think it started with an exotic looking stamp on one of the letters sent to the band that one of the guys ended up drooling over. He's a collector and for the next hour we got a lecture on rare stamps and how to treat them. He almost wept when I offered him the bundle of envelopes to see if there were any he fancied.

The next time letters came it had been raining and some looked rather battered. We couldn't go out, and TV wasn't an option, so we started calculating the total distance all the letters had travelled to get here to amuse ourselves. It was a small bunch of letters by my standards, but the mileage total was friggin' huge!

Which brings us to the latest game. The one that has everyone waiting for my fanmail. Don't tell the brass, but the guys in my unit are running a book… how many miles did the most widely travelled letter cover to get here? They're damned serious about it too. Postmarks and GPS and Google maps and all that jazz... I hear the pot of winnings is substantial.

And since I have no idea how noona makes up the bundle of letters she sends, and there seems to be no shortage so far, we have a lot of games yet to play.