I've been wallowing in nostalgia, revelling in remembrance of things past. I've just been to a school reunion, the first return visit for 36 years.
And of course we all did our best to outdo each other with tales of how tough things were way back then: how we slept 25 to a dorm with only a narrow locker separating each bed; how we were roused from our much-needed adolescent slumbers at 6am, whatever the weather, to take a three-mile run around the block (no excuses, hobble if you must); or were turned out, our dreams pierced by the inhuman shriek of the alarm bell, to run down through the frost to the swimming pool for an early morning polar plunge.
Or how the communal showers almost invariably ran cold by the time the elder boys had had theirs; how it was the legendary sandshoe of "Footer" Ashmore - boot size 14 - that was applied with savage force to our backsides the time three or four of us were caught playing up at night after lights out: we had reckoned that if we all owned up, the prefects couldn't beat the lot of us. They did - the entire dorm.
We wore black and blue Skellerup sole imprints on our bottoms for days afterwards, collective badges of pride.
Then there was music and drama and club activities and chapel and, naturally, sport.
We graduated after five years and went on to the next chapter in our respective lives.
Last weekend, we looked back fondly and caught up with old classmates and contemporaries, many of whom had not been seen in three and a half decades.
Which is why all this talk about boot camps has a familiar and comforting ring about it.
That's what it was like for us. A bit of discipline and physical exercise - it was the making of us.
Only we were not recidivist young criminals coming from broken homes, with violent and abusive upbringings.
Quite the opposite. Most of us came from comfortable, if not privileged, backgrounds.
You paid a lot of money - private school fees - to experience our kind of military-style discipline.
And it was just the icing on the cake. The rest of the time we were being taught by mostly dedicated, sometimes inspirational teachers who had a stake in our education and every reason to believe there was nothing we couldn't do.
Now the Government is crashing the party, going to sort out the most at-risk and troublesome of our youth with a short sharp fix of discipline and rigour. Boot camps of a slightly different ilk.
The thousand most problematic repeat offenders: march them up to the top of the hill and march them down again.
Get them saluting, doing all that "grunt"-style, swearing, sweating and learning self-respect, just like they do in the movies.
Heck, it'll only cost $35 million - about $35,000 a kid per annum - which is a pretty darned exclusive school fee.
But, if it's going to sort out the worst of our troubled youth, put them back on the straight and narrow, then it's worth it, isn't it? The lives of our worst young offenders realigned before they emerge from the chrysalis of criminality.
It sounds good; it's an attractive idea; it's a concept most of us can believe in.
There is only one problem. If the primary goal is to correct recidivism, it does not seem to work.
In the United States, correctional boot camps for adults have been around for more than 25 years.
By 2000, there were about 70 in 26 states for juveniles.
Notwithstanding the fact that boot camps vary considerably in the extent of their therapuetic and or educational intent, the evidence from the US as to their value in correcting the behaviour of the most antisocial delinquents is less than compelling.
Doris MacKenzie is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.
In December 2007, she provided testimony for a hearing on the "Oversight of State-run juvenile correctional facilities known as boot camps" to a subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.
She said she had been studying such programmes since 1987.
Her most recent studies on the subject involved a statistical analysis of all the published studies available that had examined "recidivism rates of boot camp releasees and compared these rates to a comparison group of offenders who did not participate in the boot camp".
Her analysis indicated that the expected recidivism rates were almost identical.
Out of a sample of 25 studies on adult programmes and 18 on youth programmes, nine studies found boot camp participants had lower recidivism, eight found they had higher recidivism, but the majority - 27 studies - found no difference between the two groups in recidivism.
"So at this point in time," she concluded, "there is no evidence that correctional boot camps are effective in reducing the future criminal activities of adults or juveniles."
Shame, really. I would like to believe in them. Intuitively, they seem like a great idea. And they never did us lot any harm.
Inconveniently, the evidence does not appear to stack up.
