Thank you! There are no additional privileges, but the recognition is nice.
Not a great deal been going on recently. I took last week off to celebrate my birthday - a couple of pub crawls, a family BBQ, a meal out, did some hiking and played some games. Nothing particularly special. My parents paid for my iPad as my birthday present, which was nice.
Nothing wrong with a gap year, you just have to ensure that you actually DO something with it. You need to work, volunteer, whatever, to make sure that you don't get out of the habit. I worked for about 10 months to pay for my 3-month conservation project.
HMAS Brisbane? I think I've heard of that - destroyer deliberately sunk as an artificial reef? There's a frigate called HMS Scylla that was sunk off Portsmouth for the same reason, that I've meant to get round to diving on.