Weighing in at 16 tonnes, the armoured personnel carrier is used to ferrying weapon-laden troops into the heart of battle.

But today the fate of its passengers lies in the hands of one oversized and slightly clumsy journalist.

Luckily we're not heading into the heat of conflict but crawling nervously across a bumpy dirt track on a military playground just outside Thetford.

Here vehicles retired from the battlegrounds of Europe roar back to life as the public lives out schoolboy fantasies of piloting behemoths like a Chieftain main battle tank and Saracen troop transporter.

I'm wedged into the tiny cockpit, wrestling with the two steering handles as I peer out of a hatch, trying not to pitch us into a crater.

But by the time our jaunt was finished I was eager to fire up another of the 12 military vehicles which Fantastic Days books out to private parties.

FD managing director Tim Dockerty and Barbara Harrold have a dream to turn this into more than just a boy's-own adventure.

The pair want to create a museum of armoured vehicles, the Living Tank Museum, where visitors not only learn about the machines but also take them for a test drive.

Even more ambitiously, they hope to achieve this in an unlikely union of environmentalism and brute force, using green technologies, fuels and tree-planting schemes to offset carbon dioxide emissions.

Mr Dockerty said: "People are used to going to a museum and learning through exhibits and static displays.

"But you don't really know a vehicle until you hear the roar of it starting up, the clatter of the tracks and feel its raw power."
Pictures courtesy Watton & Swaffham Times