'One Of Our Boys Is Missing - Part 4, Contractual Obligations.

Charlie 'Terminal' Moraine is a former special forces soldier who served in the legendary (especially since it's now defunct, along with most of the legendary British Army regiments) 53 Assault Reconnaisance Squadron in some of the world's hot spots (well they were hotspots if you were a special forces operative anyway) including Northern Ireland, Oman, Columbia at the height of the drugs war, and Chelmsley Wood in the West Midlands. The Puumaja Crew is proud to present, in serial form, his new book, 'One Of Our Boys Is Missing', covering his life story and over 20 years in the front line of one of the deadliest units since the Ottoman Janissaries.
In Part 4 our steely-eyed-deliverer-of-death-and-destruction-in-the-making visits the army 'liaison' office, and agnonizes over which regiment to sell his soul to.

'What makes you think you'd be any good to us?' the 'liaison' officer sitting in front of me snapped. He was an oldish man of about 34, greying hair, glasses, a warrant officer. I guessed that he'd had a long and active career behind him, and resented slightly having to drive a desk around a provincial recruiting office, dealing with the likes of me.
'...er, I like sports and the outdoors...er, and I'm keen and can follow orders' I stuttered. 'Well you can't follow them very well' he said 'you were supposed to bring two passport photos with you and you haven't...'.
The walls were covered with regimental badges from all over the army; famous regiments such as the Black Watch or the 17th/21st Lancers, and of course the two which held the most mystique and all-out boy's own promise of adventure, the SAS, with its winged dagger, and 53 Assault Recconaisance Squadron, with it's now-legendary badge of the skiing owl.
But these outfits were a pipe and slippers dream to me and the overwhelming majority of potential recruits who walked through those doors. A few months beasting in a depot, followed by a few tours or duty and maybe eventual promotion to Corporal was all that most of us had in front of us. '
..I suggest you take some of this literature away, read it and think VERY long and hard over it...' the liaison officer's voice abruptly cut into my frenzy of daydreaming
'...and if you're really stupid enough to think that we're going to need you you can come back in three weeks'.

After a great deal of deliberation, which amounted to talking it over with some mates in the pub (we were getting served in some of the less selective hostelries in the area by then) and a brief discussion with my parents who were in the odd situation of being dead set against it and yet wanting shot of me at the same time, I decided to go for the Royal Tank Regiment (RTR). Those tanks just looked fearsome, from the small reconnaisance vehicles through to the beast that I really wanted to get into, the main battle tank of the day, the Chieftain.
' Well you'll have to wait another six months before you can go to Bovingdon' (the armoured division's depot)
'..and even then you may not be suitable' said the same liaison officer.
‘It's a tough existence, cooped up in one of them tin cans while the hatches are battened down.' Six months? I was devastated. There was no way I was going to be able to stick another six months at home.

I took the trouble to read about the history of tank warfare. It turned out that they'd been invented during World War One, when they'd almost managed to keep up with a man walking at a moderate pace over easy country, but they'd never fulfilled expectations of breaking the deadlock. The heyday of the tanks was on the Eastern Front in World War Two when the Panzers and Tigers of the Third Reich had run headlong into the diesel-powered T34s of the USSR, the latter proving ultimately superior in the ensuing pile-up. But what I read about anti-tank weaponry made me blanch. The modern anti-tank weapons utilised the 'shaped charge' effect, which meant that the blast from the projectile was directed inwards through a tank's armour, rather than being dispersed evenly as in a conventional explosion. This would closely be followed by the contents of the shell, which could consist of molten metal or shrapnel, which would be squirted into the interior of the tank, showering everything in its path. Nice. I didn't fancy that much, strangely enough, and this combined with my impatience to join caused me to look for something else.

I worte to Ted an asked what he thought about it. He actually took the trouble to call on a payphone to give me advice.
‘BEEP BEEP BEEP…yeah, don’t bother with the armoured regiments, they’re shit’ he hollered at me. It sounded like he was talking to me through a vibrating plastic drainpipe.
‘…YOU WANT TO GO FOR ONE OF THE SERVICE ARMS LIKE THE REEMIE…’(whatever that was)…’
Nowadays I wouldn’t be able to have a conversation like this, harsh noises or distorted sounds just come across as a sort of white noise – another one of the effects of the occurrence.
‘…THEN YOU CAN USE YOUR SKILLS ON CIVVY STREET WHEN YOU COME OUT IN A FEW YEARS. WHEN I COME OUT I’LL BE ABLE TO WORK AS A COMPUTER PROG…
BEEP BEEP BEEP…….’

Well, that was my bimonthly contact with my brother over already. I didn’t buy his advice though. I knew from the outset I was going to make a career out of this, I don’t know why. So I poured scorn on going for one of the units like the Royal Corps of Transport, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (for this was the Reemie) or his own unit, the Signals. We call these units REMFs (Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers) in the Special Forces, our contempt for them just a little above that of civvies, notwithstanding the fact that we’ve all benefited from their services a lot down the years.
But I agreed with Ted that the tanks were out. The infantry - now here was something that might be suitable for me. It looked like fun, plenty of weapons training and some very famous and glamorous regiments to boot – important factors for a show-off like me.
'Infantry now is it?'
By now the liaison officer's patience was expiring fast.
'What makes you want to join them? It's a tough life. But here's some more literature'.
I was starting to wonder about all this literature the army churned out, they were regular little Charles Dickens's. It explained that the infantry regiments were organised on a regional basis and drew their personnel largely from particular counties. For example, the Staffordshire Regiment recruited from, er, Staffordshire, the Cosbies from the Scottish Borders etc. Officers were exempt from this parochial Domesday Book-style system; presumably it was felt that they were above such quaintness and were not bound to the land in the same way that the villeins were, so you had a situation where, for example, English officers could serve in Scottish regiments. I bet they loved that.
The two units which recruited in my neck of the woods were the Fusiliers and the 8th Royal Calthrops (Prince George's Own - and very nice for him too).

I plumped for the Calthrops straight away, They had a cooler badge and didn't wear a kind of feather duster on their berets as the Fusiliers did. They had a long and distinguished history, tracing their ancestry back to the Duke of Marlborough's wars in the early eighteenth century. Their speciality back then had been anti-horse warfare, hence their motto of ‘cave viam’ (watch where you step). With the advent of armoured warfare their role had been switched to anti-tank duties. Ironic given that I'd wanted to join the tanks only a few weeks before. I filled-out the necessary forms and was chuffed when I heard back from them within days giving me a date in October to arrive at their barracks in Thrushingfold. The town wasn't too far from my home area, in the Warwickshire/Oxfordshire borders. It meant I'd be able to go home at weekends, or so I thought, on the 100 cc Honda (yes I’d got Ted’s bike off him!).

So it was that my relationship with the British Army began, the best and only stable relationship of my life, and the first stage of my development into a total war machine commenced, though just what I’d have to go through to reach that stage was only about to be revealed to me, although that didn’t become fully apparent until a not-inconsiderable length of time had elapsed since that non-realisation failed to arise in my awareness at that time..


To be continued ...if you didn't see the previous 2 parts and are having a sleepless night, see Part 1 here, Part 2 here... and Part 3 here.

On Seeing Arvo Pärt at Riga Airport

I normally try to be cool towards famous people. Maybe it's having lived for several years in London, where pointing and screaming at famous people or asking for an autograph was so provincial and sad....
Here in the baltic states it's even more so; you just don't even look at famous people (or ordinary people). Maintain the poker face no matter what.
So it was with some trepidation that little 'ole me approached Arvo Pärt, one of the greatest living composers, notebook and pen thankfully with me. Would he rebuff me. Worse still would he get angry, a bit like this old Father Ted clip (not that I shouted out his catchphrase, he doesn't have one anyway - still, could have whistled spiegel im spiegel..)
I took the plunge, nothing ventured and any other cliches that spring to mind as cliches do, and approached him, starting off in Estonian and switiching to English in the hope that he might forgive my impudence on the grounds of being a, well, impudent foreigner. He was somewhat bemused at first and looked at me blankly.
I suddenly thought, what if it's not him??! I may as well have gone and put my head into the turbine of the jet taxiing across the apron at the time if that had happened, it would have been easier for all concerned. 'You are Arvo Pärt?' I said
'Yes'...so I reiterated the autograph question. Maybe he doesn't get asked very often. He's not exactly a pin up, and as noted the baltic ... in such things probalby sees off most of the fans. But in the end it was quite a big signature that I had to take away with me and will now keep forever.
I then spent the rest of the time studiously avoiding him and therefore continually running into him as we waited for the plane, then again as he was only a coupld of rows in front of me, and once we'd landed at Tallinn as well. I was starting to look like a stalker, or at least it was a bit painful, like this, again from Father Ted (1.00 - 3.30).
Oh well...Arvo Pärt.

Richard v Bill (an old youtube clip)

..it's not a question of does God exist or no, but something far more important than that....

It's Britain v. the US in an argument;-) !!!!!

....down-home, corny, side of the mouth schmaltz v. urbane, laconic pithiness...

... brash, intimidatory loquacity versus cool understatement

...and shock horror, those dangerous, shifty Europeans and their non-God fearing ways..

..see for yourself..

Going Out On Friday Evening Since There's Nothing On Telly Any More..

A bit whistfully mournful for a Friday night but I don't like to follow the herd all the time....what happened to

Music Videos (or for that matter bands) like this...

...comedian chat show guests like this...

or, combining the two, comedy music shows like this....


All the good people are dead:-(

Great Wedding Party

I slipped off the waggon, without hurting myself I'm happy to say, last Saturday night, but in a good cause - at a friend's wedding party. The actual ceremony was in Melbourne, it's one of those Aussie-Pommie love stories, which was a bit of a distance, but the party was in a hotel which I would in the past have thought was out of my league, in Farnborough, near London. It's only really on the map for having a great big airshow there every other year or so.
It was lovely to be back however fleetingly, putting up my feet as the football scores were coming in on the 'vidiprinter' as I think they still call it, walking round without a coat in the middle of November and being smiled at by strangers...
Anyway, bit like walking through a hole in time as I found all the old crowd from Wycombe days to be mercifully unchanged, and caught up with people I hadn't seen since I'd been away. All way to short and sweet. Cheers Dom!

What Accent Does My Blog Have? (Seth)

This is a little item my big brother wrote which you can view here,..
..to paraphrases someone who I wouldn't normally even phrase, let alone with paras, GB Shaw, who said something to the effect that it's impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without another Englishman hating him...ah yes, we English really 'do' accents more than anyone in the anglosphere and probably beyond...I'm talking accents, not dialects, that are made much of in the region of Europe where I live, or these little minority languages ( which reminds me of a witty aphorism, which means you've probably heard it long before me, that a language is nothing but a dialect with an army). But accents, proper, absurd, comical-sounding accents of the type which suddenly disappear when you're beyond 20 miles in any direction and are replaced by something else.
It's puzzling to north americans how such a huge variation of accents can be found within such a, to them, piddling little area of land. I remember Aleksei Sayle on a show with, I think, Bill Bryson, pointing out that a scouse (Liverpool) accent suddenly fizzles out in some side street somewhere in St Helens only to be replaced by another, presumably Lancashire or Mancunian, accent. In my own experience, growing up where I did which was very middle England and therefore quite 'posh', if people had an accent at all it was a Coventrian one, a rather flat sounding but quite homely chatter that's quite distinct from the more well-known lilting brummie accent. In fact in the next village along to us, a commuter dormitory town in effect, you suddenly started hearing brummie accents, particularly amongst younger people whose social lives leaned more in that direction.
What's even greater about England is it's possible to have no accent, and still be English (I've never met an American without an American accent or a Scot below the age of 80 without a Scottish accent of some kind, and rightly so).
I fancy that I fall into this category. As noted, I was from near Coventry but definitely don't have that accent any more (and am often berated down south for not having a 'brummie' accent) but I don't think I'm especially posh either. Of course it's in the ears of the beholder, but if Shaw's right, someone, somewhere has to despise me on the grounds of the way I speak.
But in any event, accent-neutral it is, which leads me to ponder Seth's thoughts on the fact that blogs have 'accents' too - the tone, vocab, syntax and even punctuation can create a written accent that can put people off or attract them simulataneously. I'm acutely aware of the plethora of sarky attempts at pithiness that bloggers, journos and the like come up with, so I must apologise for adding to this already-crowded field. I suppose that makes the blog's accent something like, though it hurts me to say it, 'mockney'. Hmm, I think I need to go to elocution lessons...

Intellectual Thirst - Seth's Blog

Something interesting from my big brother Seth Godiney, a very short post indeed (see, even he does it, so it's ok!) in which he ponders which comes first, success or intellectual curiosity (as expressed in reading books and, nowadays, blogs). I tend to think intellectual curiosity comes first and in fact needn't necessarily be followed by 'success', whatever that means.
But I take the point, all 'successful' people (by which I mean people who are truly human, not that necessarily make a lot of money or have a big, important job, though it's ok to do these things if you want) are intellectually curious, of that there's no doubt in my mind.

Puumaja Mees Is Unwell

I am ill today, will be back online tomorrow I hope.

Don't Believe The Hype - Seth's Blog

This is a (sorta) regular blog post dedicated to blogging the blogs of one of the most successful bloggers in the blogsphere.
Sethie Godiney is the diminutive sidekick to Seth Godin, an internet marketing guru, by my own unimaginative and lazy summation.My big brother's just posted a great piece about how irrational people are when they make purchases. Everyone 'knows' it's ok to, say, eat salmon at a wedding regardless of what the effects of salmon farming might be on the environment. People make purchases based on the flimsiest of try outs (kicking a car's tyres is one example he gives) and the experts know this. I'm guilty of this - once I just instructed an IFA (Independent Financial Advisor) to get me a deal whereby I could keep my old flat and rent it out and buy a new one (in which I rented the 2nd bedroom out) so he set me up with what was the UK equivalent of the Sub-Prime mortgage, the collapse of which in part started the current recession. I agreed on the basis of him running some meaningless numbers past me. I found out later he'd told the mortgage lenders that my income was about double what it actually was. Nothing particularly bad happened in the end (though the rental lost money and I'm having to sell that flat now) and a lesson learned, but better to learn from someone else's.
Essentially, he says, people are irrational, and there's a great example of this around the swine flu 'epidemic' and his cynical but sensible thoughts on marketing a swine flu vaccine..

'One Of Our Boys Is Missing - Contractual Obligations' Part 3

Charlie 'Terminal' Moraine is a former special forces soldier who served in the legendary (especially since it's now defunct, along with most of the legendary British Army regiments) 53 Assault Reconnaisance Squadron in some of the world's hot spots (well they were hotspots if you were a special forces operative anyway) including Northern Ireland, Oman, Columbia at the height of the drugs war, and Chelmsley Wood in the West Midlands. The Puumaja Crew is proud to present, in serial form, his new book, 'One Of Our Boys Is Missing', covering his life story and over 20 years in the front line of one of the deadliest units since the Ottoman Janissaries.
In part 3 Charlie's older brother Ted leaves home to join the army, leaving a dejected young deliverer of death and destruction in the making behind to keep watch on the home front.

Ted was two years above me and left school at 16, to go and join the army. I was impressed. My mother wasn’t so much and had wanted him to stay on and do his A levels (as I think all her friends’ sons were staying on) but in fact he ended up doing science A levels at Shrivenham military college, before going on to a career in the Royal Signals. I remember how jealous I was of him the day he left, he had several girls hanging on his every word and looked the part as he donned his motorcycle helmet, ready for the step into the unknown. My mother was crying, my sisters had come back from Uni especially to say goodbye. I was resenting not being the centre of attention but there seemed little I could do to change that. This was Ted’s day, not mine, and my turn in the limelight (or UV light) would come one day.

‘Hey Caspar, I’ll write you’ he said.

What US film or TV programme he’d been watching and why he thought it would sound cool was anybody’s guess but he didn’t half sound like an arse saying it. And he’d never called me ‘Caspar’ before, it was weird. But as I said it was his parade so I let it go.

‘I sure will, Teddy-baby’ I replied, and with a manly punch on the shoulder and a wink, he was off, flipping his visor down as he did so. Or at least he made it to the end of the street before skidding on a patch of oil, hitting a parked car and ending up on his side with the motorcycle on top of him, bent and damaged. The screams were distressing enough from inside the helmet, and were twenty times worse when we’d removed it. “My ankle’ he squealed. Minutes later he was sitting upright on the sofa in the living room, his leg stretched out on a chair, loving the attention. He’d just twisted it a bit and it had swollen a little and needed some ice. But to see him carry on, curling his lip at the assembled gathering of admiring girls and playing the wounded soldier, you could be forgiven for thinking he’d escaped from Colditz. Later on that day our mother put him on a train to Shrivenham, the bike had to stay behind (I had my eye on it) and Ted’s military career was on its way to a slightly inauspicious start.

I was pretty lost after he’d gone, and started thinking about what I was going to do once I’d left school. I was 14, and time was ticking. Indeed next birthday I came to realize I’d be 15, so a short mathematical calculation showed to my horror that I wasn’t getting any younger. I was hugely influenced by Ted’s letters home. It sounded great, heavily subsidized bar, all the food you could eat, a great social life, woman hanging off every extremity. He was due to go to Cyprus as soon as he’d finished basic training and that sounded fantastic. There was no army tradition in our family – my recent ancestors were, so far as I can tell, complete losers, who never got further than such dead-end pursuits such as International Aid Work, prison rehabilitation, nursing and other such pansy vocations.

The only person I'd come across in early life who did live up to this ideal was my uncle Don, who used to come round sometimes when my Dad was away on business, I think to keep us company. He'd been in the commandos in World War Two, partaking in the Normandy landings and subsequent action in France. He'd been wounded twice, married thrice, and didn't have a girl in every port so much as inhabit a kind of girl-filled free port, of which he was the chief customs inspector. The first thing he taught me was how to play french cricket. The last thing he taught me was also how to play french cricket, as one day my father came home from work very distracted and said that we wouldn't be seeing him again. It was a real shame as I always identified much more with Uncle Don than with my father, I was much more like him both in temperament and looks.

But I decided to follow Ted’s lead and go for the army. My mum was beside herself
‘I’ve already got one son in the army, what if there’s a war and I end up losing both my sons’ she whimpered. Mothers eh? it’s just self, self self.

My father seemed a little more receptive to the idea, probably getting me off his case was the major consideration.

‘Well your brother seems to have done well out of it. He got his science ‘As’ and has been made up to lance-corporal already’.

Yeah, he also got two local girls in Shrivenham up the duff I thought to myself. So the extra pay his promotion brought in will come in handy.

The very next day I was off to the army recruitment office in nearby Coventry, a small, functional place (the office I mean) tucked inconspicuously away between the Navy and RAF recruitment offices. It was covered from top to bottom in glossy posters promising a life of glamour, excitement, and lots of out-of-focus flames rolling out in the middle distance, or recruits standing around in the sunshine holding spanking new shiny weapons whilst a smiling NCO looks on. How little we knew. The only time it was ever anything like that for me was when we appeared on an episode of 'Blue Peter' doing a sponsored four tonne lorry-pull to raise money for Biafra. Most of the avergage recruit's time would be spent crying into their blankets, their teddy bears taken from them, wishing they'd never joined.

To be continued...if you didn't see the previous 2 parts and are having a sleepless night, see Part 1 here and Part 2 here...

Starting A Business Is As Hard As They Say It Is

Just put in my first order of Dodo Juice products. Dodo Juice produce a range of car detailing products, waxes, clay (for removing all the grime from a car's paintwork) sealants and a whole lot of other things that are a far cry from the bowl of washing up liquid and old sponge from under the sink, or exhorbitant swirl-o-matic paintscratcher machine, every four months or so.
It's been a learning curve just getting my head round the products but as luck would have it a buyer, a car valeting service here in Tallinn, got in touch with Dodo Juice who passed him on to me. Could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The niceties of buying items at trade price, VAT in the UK and the Sales tax here, setting prices in the pegged Kroon and having to buy the products in the floating pound,  previously things that happened to other people, are slowly starting to make themselves known. What HAVE I started? Could be something good...watch this space for the forthcoming website..

Kitten Madness

..it started in the cellar of the puumaja.....nieghbours reported that items had been moved around, strange shadowy figures had been seen, and there was an odd smell in the air... Then the workmen finished and left, but not before they'd managed to inadvertently kill one of the two kittens that had been nesting there - the wee thing fell down a crack in the pile of rocks which I've inherited and guess I have to remove at some point, and froze to death. The mother, a very prolific begetter of kittens by all accounts , removed the sole surviving kitten and took up residence in the garage at the bottom of the garden. I'd decided to take it on as a pet, had wanted a cat for ages but never got round to it, and having cleared it with my flatmate the neighbours said it's all yours.
So now it is, I guess it's about a month old and so can't really walk but can certainly squeak a lot. I've got this bottle that's much the same as a baby's to feed it with even. If only people back home could see me now. Looking forward to when it starts doing some cool stuff, attacking things etc.
It was really a dry run to see if I could cope with a baby; not that that's on the cards any time soon. I thought that if I couldn't look after a cat then kids are out! And it's going well I'm glad to say. Anyway it won't be a kitten for long.
I keep referring to 'it' because it's too early for a layman to ascertain it's gender! It's name is Hapukoor which is gender-neutral anyway.

On Travelling And Returning Home

Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Aaron... step aside please..there's a new success guru in town! Walt Gleeson is a highly successful, internationally renowned author of motivational books and CDs and other products. With a career spanning over half a decade, he has enthralled readers all over the world, from Alaska to Florida and from Hawaii to Rhode Island, with such titles as You Can Do It!, You Can Do It! Too, Literally Make Your House Work For You and Become a Millionaire Whilst On The Toilet.
Hey, it's Walt here again. I'm typing this on my  gooseberry device, because I can do that.
I'm at O'Hare International Airport (executive lounge) en route to hold a 'crush your opposition to dust and then piss on the dust' seminar in Solihull, England. I look forward to going to the old country, it's always a pleasure to see the little antique churches and police-bobbies (they don't carry guns, how quaint is that?!), go for a cold beer and traditional English pretzels in one of the 'pubs', and take tea with Queen Elizabeth and King Phillip.
I was reminded whilst I was sitting in the executive cafe sipping on a Starbucks, of the lesson that Buddha , an important spitirual leader who lived over a hundred years ago, taught us. He said that, and this took the form of one of his 'cones', that you shouldn't speak unless you have something interesting to say....and I happen to think he was right on that score, maybe not in everything else he said (eg giving up worldly possessions and becoming a renunciant loser). I had to chuckle - you know, I ALWAYS have something interesting to say, so I'm fortunate in that regard, something I remembered as the waitress I just attempted to engage in conversation made light work of clearing my table and disappearing.
Oh well, which of us is on the minimum wage?!

I can see my plane is sitting there like a giant bird made of metal, ready for me to board through the first class entry, and I remember just how far I've come since I was a high school flunkout working part time in the bicycle store in Disney, Idabama. And you can too! IF you're prepared to follow exactly what I say and not dare to question any of it (if you fail to follow all of my steps you'll have no children and die by drowning). So I'm very happy to be able to spread the messgae to the other side of the pond, if I can understand their murdering of the English language in the (pre-selected) Q&A session after the seminar, as they've been in the dark for so long (quite literally, I think some areas of that little country only started getting a regular electricity supply a few years ago).
But however great these trips are, it's always even greater to come back to the US and remind myself how wonderful it is to be American and normal. Have a killer of a day.
Walt.

Russian v Estonian (Languages)

Having lived in the Baltic States for the last four years I've come to realize what a useful lingua franca Russian still is. Not a popular statement with some, no doubt. But the fact remains, since I've moved between Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn, eaten in enough restaurants, had enough run ins with police for minor traffic infringements (I was never once stopped by the police in 15 years of driving in England; in the first year of driving in Lithuania I lost count once I'd got into double figures) and tried to chat up one or two girls, it's become abundantly clear that Russian language skills are a must have here. Still.
The being held up for half an hour at the Lithuanian Polish border by officials suspicious of my UK passport and LT registered car ('I think he's from the Ukraine' one was heard to say, in Lithuanian) in pre-schengen days could so easily have been avoided; though I could have just spoken Lithuanian to them.
Here in Tallinn it's a bit different 'cos the standard of English is higher than in Riga or Vilnius (both of which were also good) in my experience, and also since Russian has a political connotation to it that's, if certainly present, not quite so seemingly contentious in the other two cities. But there's still a sizeable Russian speaking population here. Only yesterday I was surprised when the Russian shop assistant at my local Comarket perked up and said 'pazhalasta' in reply to my 'spaseeboh'; she had assume I was Estonian and used the standard 'aitäh'... since I'm neither Estonian or Russian it's not an issue for me and I give both languages equal footing.
There are few things more turgid or egregious in my opinion than ex-pats pontificating about Russians, or the relative situations of the Russian and Estonian languages here, seemingly almost always people who can speak neither language.
For the people that live here, sure it's a live issue. For outsiders, STFU. I don't think British people would think much of someone coming over there and gobbing off about Northern Ireland or, Scottish independence or the position of the muslim community in the UK regardless of their views.
So, I'm learning Russian and making really good progress. In fact in some ways my Russian is better than my Estonian already, even after just two weeks of learning (as opposed to a year and a half of Estonian). How so? Well, for English speakers, Russian is easier than Estonian, of that I'm convinced. There are plenty of cognates, and it is a very efficient language. But more than that (all foreign languages are hard in the end!) I've got hold of the Michel Thomas courses. For those not familiar, he was a language teacher who set up a school in Beverley Hills and whose clients were the great and the good, although he'd come from a Polish-Jewish background and fought in the French Resistance during WW2. In fact his discovery of the ability to block out pain whilst being tortured by the Gestapo was something he applied later to the language learning practice, which is effortless and certainly painless. No myriad of teacher's and student's books with catatonically dull or irrelevant subject matter and opaque grammatical explanations, no notes, no memorizing. His method's a bit like marmite, it tends to polarize people between likes and hates and it has its detractors. I'd done the German one some years ago and so was already a fan, and so I tried the Russian course, which is not done by the great man himself (he passed on a few years ago) but uses the same method and has an engaging lady teacher. One of the two students is intensely irritating, sitting  a bit close to the microphone I think, and abusing Russian pronunciation horribly, but not enough to put me off. I'll see how I go next time I'm in Comarket....

Top Ten European National Anthems

'cos Europeans do rousing tunes that put the rest of the world in the dark...

In no particular order...

• Poland
• Netherlands
• Hungary
• Scotland
• Latvia
  
• Estonia/Finland
• Portugal
• Lithuania
• Italy
• ...and what should be England's

Why You Should Invest in Silver Rather Than Equities or Even Property

Mention investing to a lot of people and it'll have them running for the proverbial hills. This can be for several reasons. Some are just afraid; it's risky - I could lose it all. Others don't think they're worthy of it. It's for well spoken people (or alternatively cockney barrow boys) in suits who drive flash cars, I can't cut the mustard with those types. Others still see it as selfish or greedy, or at the outer fringes of this continuum, part of an evil world system destined to be destroyed sooner or later by mass, direct action.

As with most prejudices and mass beliefs, this bears little resemblance to how it really is. I'll look at the above points in reverse order. Investing isn't in my opinion inherently wrong, or evil, or harmful to poor people in itself. Yes, it can be, and ethical investing could be one of the biggest growth areas in years to come as people seek comodities, industries or companies which don't exploit third world labour or damage the environent unduly. A good way to help the poor is to avoid joining their ranks if you can; productive people can and often do create wealth, not just horde it. Certain religions even require a fixed percentage of income to go to the poor and, call me old fashioned, but philanthropy is one of the nicest words in the English language.

It's easy to be intimidated by the appearance of the 'wealthy' , or at least what many people picture the wealthy to be like (but then again is anyone intimidated by a specky geek in Washington State or an old buffer in Omaha, Nebraska?). But it's OK to swim with the minnows. Swim with the sharks and you'll get eaten pretty quickly but starting small and keeping in the middle of the shoal until you've reached a decent size can be one of the smartest things anyone can do, and possibly a lot of fun too. There's no shortage of help out there with the internet, books etc and, surprise surprise, some investors might actually want to help other people to learn investing too. I don't see my ESL students as competition to my English language skills such as they are and am delighted by any progress that gets made.

Back to the first point, the risk. True, investing can be very risky, if you don't know what you're doing. Hand over your hard earneds to someone who has a qualification which may (as is the case in the US apparently) have taken a shorter time to acquire than official accreditation to practise as a masseuse, to invest in little pieces of paper (not even pieces of paper any more, just numbers floating in the ether) which can be extremely volatile, in an environment which no doubt lends itself to favours, incompetence and downright dodginess, and you could spend a good while regretting it. You wouldn't give your weekly food budget to a stranger and say 'go out and buy me some food' after all.

But there are safer, less or acceptably risky ways of investing if you're prepared to do your homework. Equities are possible, and there are indeed day traders here in Tallinn who, so far as I know, make a good living just doing that, sitting at their computers buying and selling and clearing all their positions by the end of the day .You have to know what you're doing there and of course you need the time. And equities markets can and do crash as we all know. Try borrowing money from banks to invest in equities!

Real estate (with the emphasis on the word 'real') can be a better bet. Speaking from experience, again you need to monitor things closely. Handing over your property to an agency and disappearing overseas can come back to bite you on the arse later on if you don't keep tabs on things. Of course you can't manage things yourself from a distance, and if like me you have practically zero DIY ability you'll need to pay people from time to time for the repairs and alterations which will happen from time to time even if you do live in the vicinity.  And there's been a lot of bullshit surrounding the real estate market in the UK; the buy to let bubble in the early '00s attracted squillions of amateurs (like me) who didn't really know what they were doing, on the premise of being able to make a quick buck because they were 'buying at the right time' whatever that means. Suddenly everyone became an expert on real estate and 'knew' when was the 'right' and 'wrong' time to buy (like there's a right or wrong time to buy a bag of potato chips, for example).If only it were that simple. This goes just as well for so-called experts (journalists, surely the lowest in the primordial ooze of the food chain, certainly way below salesmen and women, who at least aren't as a rule bone idle and silly).

There are professional investors out there who know what they are doing, but to join their ranks you need to have a bit of capital behind you for deposits (especially now, since although banks will still queue up to lend you money to buy property, the days of self-cert. mortgages, the UK equivalent of sub-prime, are over) and that's just the beginning. You need to have a good idea of why you're buying a certain property. Just so that you can say you own property like everyone else isn't a terribly good reason. One sensible reason is for capital gains, ie how much it will go up over the years so you can sell it at a profit - and remember the property market can sort of crash too, though not like equities. The other is for the income. If the rent you get from it is higher than the outgoings from the mortgage, insurance, service charges etc then it's a (taxable, probably small) income. You also need to know how you're gonna pay off that mortgage - is it interest only (in which case you're just giving money to the bank) or repayment?; are the tenants gonna be able to pay it off for you through their rent payments (something called amortisation)?, is the rate fixed or variable? (mine is variable meaning it goes up or down with the Bank of England base rate - since that is low right now in an effort to rejuvenate the economy it's nice 'cos the monthly payments are much lower than the rent, but when the economy picks up they'll go up again. It's not possible for me to change to a fixed rate at the moment, that's how tight the banks are right now, they're seemingly not taking on any new business from existing customers;  what is the yield? (ie the profit you can expect to make in relation to property value - calculated by total rent for the year x 100 divided by market value, this naturally changes but 5 per cent is considered a benchmark minimum); what you're gonna do when there are void periods (when there is no income cos the flat's empty - I've just had two and a half months of empty flat simply 'cos one of the tenants was a freak who disturbed other residents in the house and caused the co-tenant to move out, thus ending the agreement); what's the plan if the roof caves in or the boiler breaks down?..

..so the key word is control., how much influence you have over what goes on at the property. If you've not done your sums and continued to do them, you'll slip up sooner or later. As I'm overseas I have very little control over what goes on and so have to pay fifty quid every time a lightbulb needs changing (I'm only half joking) and I didn't do my sums in the beginning, I got an IFA (read: salesman, same as for equities) to do them instead. He told the banks my income was twice what it actually was. So I'm selling. Fortunately even in the downturn there's capital gains there so all is not lost, though this is largely down to chance.

An alternative is to do the same here in Estonia, and I may well do in future, but again, knowledge, control and, here, contacts are necessary if you wanna minimize risk, along with ideally Estonian language skills, and I don't have these fully yet.

Which brings us to the silver thing. If you'd mentioned this in the past it'd have conjured up images of pirate mapes with little Xs on them or shrewd, one eyed (not necessarily Jewish) dealers looking at things under magnifying glasses, but things have moved on since then. You can buy actual physical silver in the form of coins or bullion bars, but of course need somewhere safe to keep them. You can also invest online, for example here. Be sure to check out the credentials of the website beforehand of course (the aforementioned is kosher). So you don't need any physical silver in your home, they'll store it for you...at a cost, naturally.

But why silver? It's often dubbed the 'poor man's gold' and that's seldom if ever been truer than today. Silver has been hovering around the 17 USD per ounce (about 28 grams) mark in recent weeks, whereas the yellow metal is as high as 1100 USD for the same amount. So if you've got that kind of money lying around then go for gold, but otherwise, you don't need to be rich to start investing in silver. Furthermore it's a precious metal, of course, so it's never going to be worth nothing. Not ever. The only crash I'm aware of was in the early 80s after changes in regulations following the aptly-named Hunt brothers' attempts to corner the market led to a hugely artificially inflated price. Gold's price seems way high right now and we may see something of a downturn there in the future.

Silver is also likely to become scarcer. According to one figure I read, 95 per cent of silver has already been mined, so unless they suddenly find a whole load more, supplies will dwindle Add to this the fact that, unlike gold, silver has an industrial application. So a lot of it gets used up (compare that with gold - most of which that has been mined is still in existence somewhere). Photography is still an important use, even with the advent of digital cameras. It's value seems likley to rise more, although over the last ten years it has seen a steady increase from a little over 4 USD per ounce 10 years ago, to around 17 today (though the peak was in December 2007 at about 21 USD). So put simply, if you bought silver ten years ago (as I'm fairly certain, no less a man than Warren Buffet did) you'd have seen more than a quadruple return if you sold it now. Which sounds pretty good to me. Compare that with real estate in the UK at least, where over the sane period you'd be looking at less than double your money at current prices, depending on when and where and how etc. Then you'll have to deduct the mortgage debt from that.

There are potential pitfalls with silver too. Not everything that's called silver really is silver, rather like those silver stars you used to get as a schoolkid for a reasonably good essay; this is where the one-eyed magnifying glass person comes in. If you're buying physical silver coins or bullion you wanna look for something like Ag 999 which means it's practically all silver (but technically still an alloy). If you're investing in virtual silver you don't need to worry about that as noted above.

Another downside is environmental damage. Silver mines in places like Papua New Guinea, Indonesia or Peru, operated by the big mining companies such as BHP Billiton or Rio Tinto can and do cause environmental damage (silver is rarely found on its own but often along with other metals like lead). And I doubt the miners get paid all that much.

But on the plus side, today's price is today's price, not some wishlist price that can be the case with real estate either 'cos the owner gets greedy and believes they can get an overinflated price, or were hooked in by an estate agent who wanted the business and so overvalued the property, only for things to get protracted for long enough for the real value to drop further than was really the case in the beginning.

I remember laughing at some younger kids of a family friend who, upon visiting them, boasted about their 'real money' that they had, before producing a small gold bullion bar each, but they were right and this is the real reason you should invest in silver (or gold if you can, or why not Platinum, or Rhodium, or Palladium...) - it is real money. The cash we carry round with us, or (in some cases) spend ages squirrelling away for a rainy day, is forever losing its value. You need to spend it on something concrete really. This is why it's called currency. What do currents do but move, if they're any good? I remember as a kid being confused by the wording on UK banknotes about promising to pay the bearer on demand the sum of...however many pounds it was. I hopefully thought it meant somebody had to give me another ten pounds for the one I already had, if I demanded it, that was. This in fact derives from the days when a note was just a receipt for ..... a precious metal like gold or silver! Someone kept your gold for you safely so Dick Turpin or whoever didn't get it and you or the person you paid (or who robbed you) could retrieve that gold or silver at a later date by presenting this promissory note. Over time, it just became easier to pay and be paid in notes but the physical precious metal to back it still existed somewhere. These gold or silver standards have come and gone, but the final coup de grace was delivered by Richard Nixon who removed the US dollar from any kind of gold standard and made it free floating in December 1971, surely his biggest fuck up after (or even ahead of) Watergate.

Most other currencies followed suit if they hadn't already which means we now have'fiat' currency, which essentially means it's the monetary equivalent of the cars, if that...there's nothing backing the currency and government are free to print as much as they want when they feel like it. In the most extreme cases this can lead to crises such as that of the Weimar Republic when, as the story goes, someone going to buy bread left a wheelbarrow full of notes unattended and came back to find the wheelbarrow gone but the money untouched, or more recently, the million trillion dollar notes, or whatever they were, in Zimbabwe.

I wouldn't normally pay any attention to 'survivalist' extremists in the US and elsewhere as such people have an agenda that goes far beyond a mere desire to survive come what may, but I think they are right in their reported practice of  storing silver and gold for the very reason that in a currency collapse, as real money,  this could be the difference between life and death; at least if the hordes of lowlives streaming out of the big cities don't get their hands on it.

Don't just take my word for it, I'm just a humble part-time ESL teacher with an 11 year old Toyota Corolla diesel after all; good advice and information can be found here and here. And just to show I am trying to practice what I preach, I got myself down the Bank of Estonia Museum (much more interesting than it sounds) on Friday to make my first silver investment - 850 kroons (a bit less than 50 quid) on a couple of commemorative coins. These are the kind of thing I used to thing so boring as a child, or something that geeks collected. The 100 Kroon one actually costs 500 Kroons! Shit, I hope my address isn't anywhere on this blog - never mind, there are lots of Puumajas in Tallinn!

Don't Think Too Much, Or At All

Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Aaron... step aside please..there's a new success guru in town! Walt is a highly successful, internationally renowned author of motivational books and CDs and other products. With a career spanning over half a decade, he has enthralled readers with such titles as You Can Do It!, You Can Do It! Too, Literally Make Your House Work For You and Become a Millionaire Whilst On The Toilet.

Hi, it's Walt here again, with a few thoughts for the day...How come people say 'meteoric rise', when meteors go downwards, through the earth's atmosphere? Where did all the gruntled or ruthful people go? Why can't I have dain for something? Where is Old Zealand?
Well, if you're gonna spend time thinking about these things you're not gonna get rich and successful, like me. Thinking is a useful skill, I know I do it from time to time. But sometimes it's better just to act without thinking about something, and just see what happens. It's bound to be something good. When you get an idea or an urge, remember the adidas slogan - 'just do it now, you prick', whether it's making an impulse purchase, crossing the street or firing someboday. Just do it now, you prick.
Here's hoping you won't be thinking too much today, it's for losers who become perpetual students and earn less in a year than I spend on lattes with cinnamon to go.
Walt.

Talented Estonians

Came back from teaching yesterday evening to find my neighbour constructing what I thought was a bed (it was actually a shelf) in the hallway. What a useful ability to have! I recently bought a crap flatpacked wardrobe for my flatmate, which was about on a par with one of those Nicholas Owen Priest holes in its complexity but without the aesthetic value, and even then the doors don't shut properly. And I don't wanna think about how much it cost...
..my neighbour tells me that under the old system, if you wanted something quality like that you really had to make it yourself hence learning such skills but, and all of us westerners who live here in the baltic states probably feel this, it makes us look like a load of feeble, spoilt incompetents, especially when it comes to home improvement matters! Maybe I'll ask him if he can make me one.
For some reason mozilla doesn't like aljazeera.net, at the moment, I don't know why. Have to access it through IE.

Why I'm Not Sure About Teaching English Anymore

It's not the crap pay (measure for measure - it's possible to receive something halfway decent for your teaching hours but then one has to prepare and, if you're like me and have a little bit of OCD regarding these things, that's a lot of time consumed where you're working for free)...it's not even, in this part of the world anyway, the surly, uncooperative students (sometimes, not the majority of the time)...it's the fact that English seems to be the linguistic equivalent of the cane toad, or that green slime that you get on ponds that gets everywhere and chokes everything.
In the way that, I understand, when cats were introduced to the Antipodes by the Europeans, it had a catastrophic (feeble pun intended) effect on the local ecosystem, since there was no equivalent predator of that size endemic there, English seems to have a stranglehold on the rest of the world's languages.
From tacky loan words, something that Russian got an early start with (the story behind the Russian word for train station being particularly poignant) to hilarious websites with Chinese 'Engrish', to the Basil Fawlty-like expectation that 'there must be someone here who speaks English' that virtually any native speaker of English seems to have, it seems to be everywhere.
I must say it's great that there's a lingua franca that might at times iron out misunderstandings between people and nations (and on the other hand probably causes them too) and it's even better when that language happens to be your own mother tongue, but I'm not sure if I want to be a part, however small, of the global tide of language hegemony.
On the plus side, for the rest of the world anyway, this may not last forever. If you'd said to medieval man that Latin would be a dead language understood only by a handful of people in a few centuries' time, he might have laughed at you. What the next lingua franca might be I have no idea; Spanish seems to be the only one that comes close in terms of 'ease', or so they say, and ubiquity. I can't see it ever being Chinese whatever happens with the country's status in the world.

Quality Soda Street

This video, which Seth linked to in his blog, is, as people used to say in England (or maybe still do, I've been away 4 years) quality - it speaks for itself so I won't, but needless to say I wish there was a store like this in Tallinn, particularly as I'm now on the waggon indefinitely...

Introducing The Puumaja Crew's Latest Addition

Tim Flowers is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher based in the capital city of one of the baltic states. He is 42 years old. His previous job was working for the Post Office (main sorting office - as a superintendent) and this excellent and relevant background has given him a good grasp of the fundamentals of the English language, and the art of teaching it to others.
He hails, as he likes to say, from Northamptonshire in England, a very glamourous part of the world indeed, and so is not at all out of place mingling with the gliterati of the Old Town where he hangs out on a Friday or Saturday night.
He likes beer.
We join Tim's diary of an ESL teacher just as he is emerging, pumped and swearing, from a successful lesson...

Staff Room Rant

F*ck me, those f*cking students are really starting to piss  me off...
...oh it's you, sorry, I thought I was in the staff room again, gobbing off about how hopeless a group of pre-intermediates were in grasping my cursory and mumbled treatment of what is actually a conceptually very difficult area of English grammar (and which I don't understand myself, incidentally).
Yes, these students are such easy targets; spending good time and money and erroneously seeming to expect English lessons from me  in return.
Ha ha, they aren't as smart as me, since I got my diploma in post office relations and scraped a TEFL qualification, after having spent a drunken weekend in this city and, purely on that basis, decided I wanted to live here .
I had to laugh today, somebody in an elementary group said 'in every Russia there is a problem'..yes, I got a lot of mileage in the staffroom announcing it to all and sundry. Never mind that I don't speak a single foreign language myself (though I like to put myself forward as an expert on which lanuages are inflectional and which aren't, how many cases they have, articles, personal pronouns etc ...).
Anyway I have to fninish now, have to go and prepare a lesson on the present perfect continuous; so that'll kill five minutes anyway.

A Blog - A Refuge From Facebook ('Cos Noone's Reading it Anyway).

Gripe today - Facebook. Is there anything good about it at all? Why do I need to know that someone I have a tenuous relationship with at best has just been / is just off to the gym? Why should I give a toss if someone I worked with 5 years ago apparently is more like Clive Owen than the other dozen actors their 'personality' was matched against? Why do I wanna go through the despair of not being accepted as a friend by someone who I fancy whilst getting a load of requests from people I've not heard of or work with and so sit metres away from them anyway?
Ok I'm as guilty of facebook loitering as anyone else but that's just my point, it even eats into productive people's time and lives. Don't get me wrong it's great to be able to keep in touch with distant friends, relatives, people who have young families and post pics of them etc, but surely that is what it is there for? Not some global mingle which doesn't even have the advantage of awkwardness (or time restriction) which bring such things to a swift and righteous termination.
Anyway, to get my point, check out this funy clip.

Don't Follow the Herd

This is a regular blog post dedicated to blogging the blogs of one of the most successful bloggers in the blogsphere.
Sethie Godiney is the diminutive sidekick to Seth Godin, an internet marketing guru, by my own unimaginative and lazy summation.
My big brother posted something interesting today that I'd like to think I've noticed myself too, which is to say, the time lag that seems to take place between something blindingly obvious being seen empirically, and belief in that being widespread. He cites the examples of Gallileo, who kept dropping things of high places to show that light things fall as rapidly as heavy things, which nevertheless people didn't take on board until much, much later, or a doctor who pushed for the now-accepted practice of doctors washing their hands before delivering births. It seems we don't want to change even when the evidence smacks us in the face, just 'cos that's what everyone is doing. The Emperor's New Clothes springs to mind.
So to that end, when are people gonna realize that this is a great blog, and start following it;-)
Sethie.

You Can Vote For Anyone So Long As It's Me

I wouldn't normally get political but just as a one off, I notice that Afghanistan has been rolled over again and Karzai, who so far as I can tell is a US puppet, has been 're-elected' as President. This was after his only real rival, Abdullah, pulled out of the second round of voting, Karzai not having received enough votes in the first round.
Yet only last week they were talking as if Karzai had lost, so what happened between then and now that caused Abdullah to simply give up I don't know. In any case it seems likely that Karzai's presidency's legitimacy might be questioned in a lot of countries.
More to the point it's likely to be questioned by a lot of people in Afghanistan itself; the US-led invasion in 2001 was billed as being a restoration of democracy, not that I like using such a hackneyed and misuderstood word, after the Taliban period and yet it seems they have only one choice now as well.
In short, I think they're losing Afghanistan. I hope not, I don't think the US is all bad and need always be a force for instability in the world; preferable to the taliban anyway. But it's not augering well at the mo', especially when added to the taliban forces' increasingly brazen attacks in neighbouring Pakistan.

Introducing the puumaja crew..

...the Puumaja (literally 'wooden house' in Estonian) crew makes no apology for adding one more humble blog to the already saturated blogsphere. In due course full penance will, hopefully, be done through the introduction of the five or six members that make up the crew (see the 'labels' tab below. Yikes, not sure if that use of quotation marks wasn't superfluous), and which will hopefully keep some of you entertained long enough to stay for more, and even to become followers...

Flat Tasks In The Puumaja

List of things to do at Õle Street 3-3 (hugely abridged to fit this page, and not in order of importance):
- install light above cooker.
-sort out transfer of electricity bill, still in the previous owners' name.
- buy a comfy chair for the living room.
- fix a kitchen cupboard door which won't shut and another that won't open.
- get curtains for the living room.
- backdoor keys cut.
- decide on whether one of the litter of kittens in the cellar is going to be adopted by us.
- sort out Ali's door so it shuts (ditto his wardrobe).
- rake leaves in the garden (other people would do this, it'll just look good if I do something communal for once!!).
- get to a bric a brac shop for memorabilia and old looking stuff.
- scrape off the terrible looking coloured paint on the bathroom windows (done by me, it's not lime green at least).
- get a throwover for the (old) sofa.
- get a wardrobe and bedside table for my room.
- fix the fire extinguisher, modem and wireless router to the wall.
- find a solution to small gaps in the exposed floorboards, where little bits and pieces of crap fall down.

...the list goes on. Not bad for 54 square metres! All has to be done by the end of the month or certainly xmas!

Small Beginnings - Seth's Blog

This is a regular blog post dedicated to blogging the blogs of one of the most successful bloggers in the blogsphere.
Sethie Godiney is the diminutive sidekick to Seth Godin, an internet marketing guru, by my own unimaginative and lazy summation.
I was quite heartened by a recent post my older brother put up on his site (by the way you should check it out even if you're not interested in marketing, don't take it from me! - ).
People tend to follow the herd. Believe urban myths (Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world springs to my mind, according to wikipedia's most recent stats that dubious accolade belongs to another Northern European country, Lithuania, with Estonia falling higher up the scale than Sweden. Not that this is something that can (or perhaps should) be easily quantified of course).
Nothing new there, that people follow the crowd I mean, but it means that organizations, companies, even blogs need to have people believe in their product, but that's not going to happen over night, he writes. In fact everything starts with a small cadre, as he puts it, of maybe 10 believers which will then grow. I say this is heartening, since I just need to get 10 followers for the puumaja crew (currently zero!) and we're on our way!
Nice one, Seth!

'One Of Our Boys Is Missing' - Part 2

Charlie 'Terminal' Moraine is a former special forces soldier who served in the legendary (especially since it's now defunct, along with most of the legendary British Army regiments) 53 Assault Reconnaisance Squadron in some of the world's hot spots (well they were hotspots if you were a special forces operative anyway) including Northern Ireland, Oman, Columbia at the height of the drugs war, and Chelmsley Wood in the West Midlands. The Puumaja Crew is proud to present, in serial form, his new book, 'One Of Our Boys Is Missing', covering his life story and over 20 years in the front line of one of the deadliest units since the Ottoman Janissaries.
In part 2 we learn a little about Charlie when he was growing up, including a lesson in how to stand up for yourself that would make your Korean War veteran grandfather sit up even straighter than usual.


We had one of the more comfortable existences you could imagine. I had to watch day after day as friends and other kids in the neighbourhood had to go past on their old, rusty bikes (I had two, a flashy racer and a kind of off road thing that was the antecedent of the ‘chopper’ with gears and pretend suspension and the whole bit). I still remember the hardship of being woken up at about 10 in the morning on a weekend in the winter, as the highest quality coal was delivered to the door, giving my paper round money to my mum, and her giving it straight back to me, with interest, or the day my Dad announced ‘it’s no good. We’re going to have to rein in the expenses a bit. It’s just Disneyland this year I’m afraid, the Maldives are out’.


Primary school was fairly uneventful, just the usual memories spring to mind of the school nativity play, playing rounders every afternoon in the summer, denouncing some of my classmates as communists etc. and it was with some resignation that I looked backward to another seven years of mediocrity.

I was under pressure to pass my eleven plus, especially as Ted had walked it, but I managed to scrape through. Maths and English were ok but I did very poorly on verbal reasoning apparently. So I joined my brother who was two years above me, at the local grammar school, the Henry de Hastings school for boys. I hardly soared academically, though I enjoyed chemistry, and learnt early on to respect the properties of phosphorous, a lesson which I’d come back to time and again in my career. I was quite good at sport, making the Rugby team at fullback. I liked the responsibility and being alone at the back, the last line of defence and having to think on your feet quickly.

We used to get the bus to and from school, and one day I jumped off the bus early. One of my hobbies was making airfix model aeroplanes, particularly from the second world war, in lieu of a life or a girlfriend, and I wanted to check in at the model shop to see if the Handley Page Halifax I’d ordered had arrived. It had, and I was clutching the parcel close to me on the bus home when some lads from rival school, the Thomas Moorcroft RC school got on. Soon they spotted me sitting alone at the back.

‘There’s a boffy boy’ said one of them, as another spat manfully on the floor, and started menacingly pulling one of the seats back and forward, making an intimidating wrenching noise as he did so.

I was starting to get scared, and, knowing my stop was still some way off, thought about getting off early. Then I thought, who were they to dictate to me when I should or shouldn’t get on the bus? I decided to stay.

Soon after some girls from their school also got on and sat behind me, and a monosyllabic, rife-with-pubescent-posturing conversation began between them all. I was getting more and more agitated, particularly when one of the girls said to me ‘my mate fancies you’ followed by the deonuement,
‘no she doesn’t really, you ugly bastard’.

I was feeling a bit like a rat in a trap; actually I don’t think I was feeling like that, a rat doesn’t get humiliated by female rats in this way, and anyway, who knows how a rat in a trap feels. That was a stupid thing to write.

I was glowing a whiter shade of red by now and sweating like the proverbial blacksmith’s butt-crack. One of the lads walked over to me and sat next to me, on the pretext of talking to the girls. Outbursts of four letter words from all parties were grating on me as if someone was runnig a corkscrew down my spine. A couple of old ladies sitting further towards the front of the bus kept turning round and tutting, but nothing more. I was looking at them to beseech them for help, but with no success. Old ladies – they can talk the talk but you just can’t rely on them when action is the order of the day, I guess that’s why we don’t have any of them in the Squadron.

Back to this lad, he’d taken an interest in the contents of my parcel and started asking what was in it. I wasn’t going to say.
‘cat got your tongue?’ he asked
The two girls also joined in this interrogation, and finally he grabbed it, ripping the paper bag as he did so.
‘Ahhh, what a bender’ he shrieked, his adolescent voice running the gamut of pitches audible to the human ear in the space of those five syllables.
‘A model aeroplane – hey, Ozzy, look at what this Boffy Boy does at home, I bet he wanks over it an’ all’.

I tried to snatch it back, and, inevitably, it was whisked from beyond my reach as he threw the whole box to one of his mates. The girls gave a kind of ‘the chase is on’ whoop, as I went to grab it off the other guy, who then, of course, threw it back to his mates. This cruel game of piggy in the middle continued until the box fell apart, scattering plastic pieces, instructions and decal sheets all over the place. One of the girls stamped on one of the plastic frames; it was going to be a crashed Handley Page Halifax, then. Peals of laughter filled the bus and I felt like the smallest person in the world as I knelt down to try and salvage the pieces of the kit. And then BANG a blow to the back of the head sent me skidding to the dirty cold floor of the bus. Amidst the ensuing flurry of blows all I remember was adopting the foetal position to try and escape the worst; I don’t remember much else until I suddenly found myself lying in the mud at my stop. I was in a sorry state, I could hardly breathe as I spasmed with great sobs, the tears obliterating my view (this was before the occurence, when my tear ducts still functioned). I suddenly heard a familiar voice, and two hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up. It was Ted.

“What the fuck have you been doing?’
he said, exhibiting the family tenderness to the full. I explained I’d been jumped by some kids from Moorcrofts. He listened impassively, grinding his jaw so the moving bones, or muscles or whatever they are, were visible through the skin, staring into the middle distance. I could tell he was angry, though I didn’t know whether it was at me or them, or both.

'Alright...’ he said after a short, silent contemplation.
‘Do you know who they are?’.
I didn’t and gave a description; Ted thought he might know the brother of one of them and vowed that we’d get even.
‘Let’s get you home and straightened out, thank God the parents are out’. When we got back I saw the full extent of the damage; my eye was swelling up, and my school shirt was ripped to buggery – how were we going to explain that to mum? But the worst part was when I realized I had an RAF roundel stuck to my forehead and another decal saying something like ‘walk aft of this line’ across my cheek. After I’d cleaned up it was time for a fraternal advice session.

‘These people are arseholes’ said Ted
‘but you’re the bigger arsehole for letting them walk all over you like this’.
‘but there were about six of them!’ I reasoned/
‘Doesn’t matter – you should always fight back. Always!’
‘But they’d have battered me!’
‘That’s what they’ve done anyway! Look, I was in a situation like this once when some lads at the tennis club started hassling me to get off the court as they wanted to play. I told them to fuck off, one of them went for my racket, I slammed it into his face and he went home crying; since then they’ve never bothered me’.
I thought this was a little beside the point since he’d used a weapon, and in any case the kids in question were three years younger than him.

‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll find out who it is and get a group together and go and give them a kicking, OK?’
I wasn’t keen on this degree of escalation, I really wanted to forget the episode. But a part of me was hugely indignant as well, and resolved never to get pushed around like this again. In the event we never tracked them down for the promised revenge attack, Ted always was a bit of a gobshite. We blamed my injuries on a fight we’d had with each other, which backfired on Ted when my mother thrashed him roundly for bullying me. But we’d learnt three valuable lessons: One - that you may as well go down fighting, you’ve nothing to lose if they’re going to attack you. Two – watch your back for surprise attacks and don’t put yourself in a vulnerable position such as kneeling on the ground. And three, airfix models are for geeks.

I decided to join the local karate club so I’d be better prepared the next time, and this in fact sparked an interest in martial arts which is still with me today.

To be continued..(probably)