It Only Takes Some Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Months, Years Or Other Unit of Time to Make an Impression

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 Billionaire Whilst On The Toilet, Walt is the Puumaja Crew's personal realization and fulfilment coach, whatever that is.

I was talking to a woman once..but she made her excuses and left, ha ha. Anyway this incident reminded me of the short space of time we have in which we have to make our pitch; do you know, it takes in the region of two seconds for someone to form an opinion about us, so those first two seconds are absolutelöy crucial. I can't count the number of times I've ballsed up an opportunity by sneezing at an inopportune moment.

If you watch the movie 'a lie' (which incidentally I didn't contribute to, purely because I was, I think, in the shower when the phone call probably came through offering me the gig) you'll remember just how critical a soft focus shot and funny moving background is in making that ciritical first impression, something that some of the world's most notorious people - Sadam Hussein, Price Edward and that guy that ended up on various outtakes programs for going on TV and trying to juggle without having practised properly and cocking it up - will never grasp.

This is equally true of a blog post; if you've made it this far you evidently don't have a whole lot to do at the moment but you can console yourself with the fact that you're probably unique in having made it to the end of this, so you can at least take that away with you.

So have a killer day!

Walt

Why I Don't Like Facebook Part Two

I've already posted about Facebook but that was way back in November, so this is just an update to say that nothing in fact needs to be updated.

I still dislike it, despite having a profile. I don't care if someone regretted eating that whole bag of revels, wishes the snow would melt or is returning from somewhere (and 'friends' who are supposedly employed in full time jobs are often the worst offenders). It's just a devourer of time. Maybe it's just me - maybe I'm too antisocial (I don't have time for twitter or even instant messaging, barring one person of course, either) but I think you'd have a hard  time trying to disprove the time wasting aspect.

Seth Godin will back me up on this - think you know better than he does? In fact he's not having a go at Facebook or social websites per se, just their abuse. He recognises the technology does have its uses, well, more than that, it's a central plank of his approach and seemingly noone below the age of about 90 can really afford to ignore it. I suppose once something's available to the masses it runs the risk of getting compromised and degraded - look how people drive cars compared with (I presume) the requisite etiquette or mandatory detailed knowledge of how a car actually works that was the case in the early days of motoring, yet they have made our lives incomparably easier (again, I presume).

So, maybe I'm wrong. But I still don't like Facebook. And I don't even want to hazard what the next social networking site round the corner is....

Business How Usually

The PMC is back open following almost a week in London, and it's good to be back in the cold.

Spotted a certain media star on the same flight (so even they have to fly sleazyjet!) which amused us; they look a lot better on the TV...

Forthcoming contributions to look backward to including offerings from Walt Gleeson, the Rabbi and a short awaited new installment of Charlie Moraine's 'book', so watch this space.

Londo Zoo Revisited

Seth posted a while ago about how we have to accept that some things just won't recur. The media have for as long as I remember been searching for the next Beatles, applying this tagline in even the most pitiful of cases (Kajagoogoo anyone?) when of course, there won't ever be anything like the Beatles again. Just as on a personal level, one's schooldays will never be recaptured (there is a huge variation as to whether this is a good thing or not of course) nor will the initial rush of enthusiasm for a new hobby (without starting another and the recently-divorced ponce de leon has been mocked sufficiently by more worthy pens than that of the PMC..

..so it was in this spirit that PMC man in London (this week) went to the Zoo for the first time in over quarter of a century. With that in mind, it was actually quite good. Not so huge as the writer's eight year old memory had retained, and it was perfectly doable in half a day; some of the animals didn't cooperate of course but we've learnt to accept that too, and watching the pecking order within a group of hyenas as the keepers threw half a mutilated calf into their enclosure made an impact.

I'm not too keen on the 'hey, animals are really funky, check out these [insert piss poor alliteration here] spiders/bugs etc; surely the animals themselves are the draw, they certainly used to be in my day (same applies to the same patronising and rather silly treatment that seems to be applied to history nowadays) and the entry price is, well, London priced;  but you know what you're getting, and there's something timeless about the appeal of viewing other species than our own..for a bit anyway.

On This Day 344 Years Ago

21st March 1666...

Sir Robert Long told us of the plenty of partridges in France, where he says the King of France and his company killed with their guns, in the plain de Versailles, 300 and odd partridges at one bout. With Sir W. Warren, who tells me that at the Committee of the Lords for the prizes to-day, there passed very high words between my Lord Ashly and Sir W. Coventry, about our business of the prize ships. And that my Lord Ashly did snuff and talk as high as him, as he used to do to any ordinary man. And that Sir W. Coventry did take it very quietly, but yet for all did speak his mind soberly and with reason, and went away, saying that he had done his duty therein.

On Seeing Alice in Wonderland in Estonian...

I thought it worked rather well, 'Kallis Alice' and all; well, Tolkien used the related Finnish language as a basis for either the Noldorin or Sindarin tongue, I don't remember which and the books are just slightly out of arm's reach on the PMC bookshelf, so why shouldn't Estonian have an other-worldly quality all of its own, huh?
Film itself was a bit too Tim Burtoney for my liking, since he made it, I guess that wasn't unexpected.

Thought For the Day No. 10 - With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

.religious leader, psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

 In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

Is This All Politics Really Is?

I had an interesting dream last night. I found myself assisting the current Mayor of Tallinn in a rather puerile ridiculing of some of his political opponents. These antics took the form of simply scrawling moustaches, glasses, sideburns etc on photos of the aforementioned, but he didn't have a pen or his pen ran out. My role simply involved finding a new pen with which to continue this visual character assassination, and all I could find was this crappy old broken black biro (I actually do possess one, I broke it yesterday by stepping on it) which I was worried about as not being something sufficient to present to such a pezzonovante. It didn't seem to matter however and after scribbling a bit to get the ink flowing he continued to work on making a picture of the current Prime Minister look like Groucho Marx.
Not very significant, maybe even just childish, but it occured to me, that much of modern politics is little more than this. The UK political landscape in particular, is to my mind simply and endless "you are"..."no, you are".."no, you are" conversation of the type that most of us have left long behind, and perhaps they might just as well resort to defacing pictures, sticking notes saying "kick me" on each others backs or forming a circle and chanting "new kid, new kid" at any neophytes on the political scene. It would save money anyway.

Walt Gleeson's Ovular Analysis for the Day

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 Billionaire Whilst On The Toilet, 

Hi, this is Walt...you know, and old British commercial advised people to 'go to work on an egg', a very clever play on words worthy of Shakespeare, Joyce or even Richard Stillgoe, and it had me thinking about eggs...stay with this for a minute because it's brilliant, or so my PA told me when I was thinking it up last night in the hotel bar. After all, we all eat eggs, don't we? There's noone in the world who doesn't- you'd die if you didn't eat eggs.

Think of all the ways you can cook an egg; you can boil it, fry it, poach it, scramble it; you can put it into an omeletter or even bake it. but has it ever occured to you that they way you cook an egg shows exactly what type of person you are, wholly accurately and reliably with no hyperbole, speculation or cod science thrown in? No, me neither.

For example, people who favour boiled eggs are usually dependable, cautious sturdy types but maybe a little unimaginative, while those who like fried eggs tend to be flashier, more of a risk taker. If you like poached eggs that definitely means you are turgid and unglamorous, rather than trying to be a bit healthier. Those who like to scramble their eggs are a bit too reckless, and making an omelette is just too complicated and involved. There is a more sophisticated variant, namely baked eggs. This is really for the international club sandwich set. Finally, you can also eat eggs raw, although this is only for real plebs.

If I were to analyse myself, I'd say I'd have to be whatever the best one is, probably a combination of fried, baked with a bit of boiled thrown in on the side. I suggest you do the same, and if it's not exactly the same as mine, I suggest you change your habits and follow my directive, or you're going to die, freezing in poverty in the dark.

Have a great day! - Walt

In My Day We Only Had Colour TV

Something which I'd noticed recently but thought was only peculiar to the Puumaja was that I virtually never watch TV any more. Admittedly, notwithstanding the improvement in language skills that watching TV here could bring, when most of the stations are not in your mother tongue it can sometimes induce you to seek other forms of entertainment; but I don't think that's the reason.
Clay Shirky (we're not going to take the mick out of people's names here at the PMC any more, he is american after all) a writer and consultant whose been using the internet since it began (that's welll before you or I) did this excellent little presentation some years ago where he attempts to shed light on the role of TV (filling what he calls the 'cognitive surplus') and how that has changed particularly since the rise of the net. Glad to know I'm not alone. Still, I'd never be a wikipedia contributor..

Beckham's Out...

...not really news nor particularly earth shaking (it was news to me that David Beckham was in the offing for the squad in the World Cup in South Africa in June)  but there's going to be no repeat of the World Cup in 2002 when, if memory serves as it  (which, despite watching games either as dawn was cracking or during the office lunchbreak accompanied by several rounds of stella,I think it does) the whole coutry was behing Beckham's partial recovery ready to go out on penalties in South Korea/Japan and added the word 'metatarsal' to its collective vocabulary. Not sure the news justifies what even by Puumaja Crew standards is an unnecessarily long sentence, either.

Thought for the Day No. 9 - With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

..religious leader, psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning".
Henry Ford.

"My people perish for lack of knowledge."
The Book of the Prophet Hosea, 4:6

Fun Wordplay

This is an intriguing little web app. It's called wordoid and was developed by one Oleg Podolsky. Not being a technophile, I can only do my best to explain it as being a naming app, best used if you want to devise a URL which stands out a bit. Apparently it's difficult to come up with a good domain name (what sort of a name is 'the Puumaja Crew' after all?!?) which can really make or break a start up, but this app can help you. You type in a word, and it comes up with a load of permutations using that word in 'natural', 'almost natural' and 'hardly natural' modes. You can also limit the number of letters in the name (obviously domain names don't want to be too long; wordoid won't let you go beyond 15 or below 5) and devise names in a few languages other than English (sadly Estonian isn't included here!).

For example, when we entered "Kentigern", after our beloved BFK in the natural sounding mode, with a limit of 12 letters, we got names like "kentigernoon", "kentigerness" and "kentigerned", we're sure he loves that. Do the same in hardly natural yields such shibboleths as "kentigernal" and "crokentigern". Doing the same but in German threw up "sickentigern", which is what BFK will be if Lotus don't recreate former glories in the new F1 season, and "kentigernauf"..  etc. Try it!

How to Pronouce Seth's Name Finally Revealed

Since I started posting regurgitations of my big brother Seth Godin's blog here at the P'maja Crew we've been agonizing, or at least thinking, about the correct pronunciation of his name. Well, here he is now to clear everything up. Those émigrés..tchah.
 
And a worthwhile quote 'Just because it's important to YOU that I see your press release [or blog!] doesn't mean it's important to me. And even though it costs you nothing to send to me, doesn't mean you have the right to do so". Hear, hear, as they say in the House of Lords.

BFK's Dream

Benedict Francis-Kentigern, or BFK as we know him, is an affable motoring journalist of the old school. Dropping out of some big public school somewhere in England to pursue his passion pretending to race cars, he's acquired such an array of tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, arran sweaters and empty travel sweet tins, that you can't help but ignore him. Look forward to BFK's "weekly" reports on motoring, cars, and what drives the people that drive them, in his section to be found somewhere on the site.

Today BFK asked us to post this grainy and jerky picture he managed to take, somewhere in Tallinn,  of one of his fave machines of the moment, an Aston Martin DBS! Nevertheless it's the first pic we've ever posted here! So here it is...

Providence Doesn't Want Futile Things Glorified..

..good old you tube. Managed to find an old favourite, the Name of the Rose made over 20 years ago with Sean Connery, whose career I think was at a bit of a nadir at the time (and seeing him playing a celibate monk makes for worthwhile viewing) and a very young Christian Slater.

Needless to say it didn't make a splash in the States, but its international cast, including a German, a Latvian, even Feodor Chaliapin Junior (not to be confused with Feodor Chaliapin Senior) as the venerable Jorge, its extremely evocative music, climactic finish and the fact that it's not nearly so subtly meaning-riddled as the book, makes it something in a category by itself. Seem to remember as an undergraduate studying medieval Europe as part of my History BA that I was excited to find that two of the characters, Ubertino de Casale and the inquisitor, Bernardo Gui, were actually real people.

Forget the Oscars if this didn't win one. You foolish boy Adso, try thinking with your head and not your heart..

Noone Is Really Cool...

...I'm happy to say. The whole thing's just a front. If you're a member of a highly successful band, sooner or later you're going to end up releasing a 'greatest hits' album; fashion designers get old and ugly in the end, and writers get misinterpreted by legions of clones who like to hold up one of their efforts whilst on public transport or

I once worked with the former manager of a band who made it very big in the UK and worldwide in the late 70s and early 80s, and he used to eat his lunch with a napkin tucked into his collar so there was this kind of white triangle hanging over the front of his shirt, like people did in Edwardian times or something. He was a former Lloyds' name and didn't he just know it. I was not impressed.

In the final go round, being cool is incredibly hard work, one slip, one overheard conversation about train times, prices or whose turn it is to feed the cat and your cover's blown. And not even stupid people can maintain that indefinitely.

The only way round this is to die young, then you might just make it, but a fat lot of use it's going to be to you

So wear your horizontally striped jersey, red corduroy shirt or fleece top with pride, and take some comfort in the fact that your life is not a lie.

Thought For the Day - With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

 ..religious leader, psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

 Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

 

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning.

 

 

The Genius From Dunfermline

The Puumaja Crew is today feeling reassured that it's ok to like Andrew Carnegie, the emigre Scot who effectively WAS the US steel industry there for a good while and was the second richest man in history according to some reports (Rockefeller was the richest). The moderator's mother had in fact told him that he was 'horrible to his workers' without elaborating.

The seal of approval comes from our older brother Seth Godin who tells us today that Carnegie realised the value of people over infrastructure, capital, process, culture etc. something that in our experience has been lacking in every place we've worked, big or small. And we guess, unless your name's Rockefeller you're not in much of a position to question that!

How to do Cover Versions Properly

..in our view is to add something more. Slavishly following the original as seems to be the norm nowadays doesn't really add anything new. We have many favourites, some of the Byrds' Dylan covers spring to mind, Cream's 'I'm So Glad' (originally by one of the delta blues greats Skip James)  or the Sex Pistols' genuinely novel and rather good treatment of the Who's 'Substitute'. But the the latter almost win the award for sheer added value, with the admittedly already great song 'Young Man Blues' by one Mose Allison, who was about 40 when he wrote it, as Pete Townshend slightly sneeringly (and now very ironically) mentioned on the remastered Live at Leeds album. This is from that era, at the Isle of Wight festival. The real winner in our view isn't really a cover; just take a middle of the road French hit from the mid 80s, change the lyrics (and the language) and add in a cool sound (and Sarah Cracknell) and you're away...

TV Idents of Yore

It's Friday and the Puumaja Crew is going to be a bit self-indulgent, because we can do that, and rewind back to our childhood and the various TV idents that could be seen on British tv. Type 'TV idents' into youtube and you invariably get a slew of British TV clips, not American or any other country. Not sure what this tells you about us

Like a lot of people I grew up with the slightly snobby assumption that ITV, the commercial channel, was somehow lower rent than the non-commercial BBC, even though it was responsible for some real quality programming if memory doesn't fail to serve. But it was the various idents which were the real hook for me. Since the channel carried programs made by various companies, generally delineated on regional lines, that company's ident often preceded the program Although there was a bias towards programs made in the region which you lived in, in my case the midlands, as there was a lot of networking, you tended to see all the various idents no matter what part of the country you were living in.


Thames TV - the grandfather of them all with the rather grand and strangely reassuring theme and mirror image set up. It wasn't for years that I came to realise how geographically inaccurate it was and thought that the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral and Towere Bridge were indeed next to each other like that. Also remember that there was a special one before the Morecambe and Wise show after the latter had defected from the BBC, in which the ditty 'here they are now, Morecambe and Wise' was sung to the same theme, rather shitly.

LWT - London Weekend Television, as I remember took over from Thames around a Friday evening until the following Sunday evening. Well, that would make sense anyway. But I can't be sure since I didn't grow up in or near London. For some reason I'm getting glitzy game shows which appealed to me at the time, Bruce's Play Your Cards Right sticks in the mind. Awful signature tune which was later lampooned by Victor Lewis-Smith in one of his inspirational hoax calls (to LWT as it happened).

ATV - I think this was the company that covered my area; I say think, the graphics used to disorient me so much I'm not sure now, the RGB circles merging into this horrible yellow and blue thing which as a very small child in the late 70s I somehow got confused with the 'Jet' petrol station sign. Was replaced by...

Central - definitely my home area's station, I'm ashamed to say. Not a lot you can say about it, I'd managed to more or less excise it from memory until I purchased 'the Last Place on Earth' with Martin Shaw, on DVD; whether for copyright reasons or not, the ident had been left on before the theme tune.

Anglia - notable for three things. The silver knight looked vaguely like a botched airfix model of the Black Prince that I had; I only ever remember it preceding 'Sale of the Century' with Nicholas Parsons (which I now notice from the Youtube comments that other people had this association too) and, notwithstanding this, something tells me that in a nutshell, the ident said 'the next programme's going to be shit'.

HTV - as a child, had no idea where in the country this was from; I now know it stands for Harlech TV (they get a station all to themselves?!?) so evidently it was Welsh, but the shiver that the wobbly theme sends down my spine is largely due to the fact that it was the ident which was followed by Robin of Sherwood..

Granada - just weird, the music, the strange logo reminiscent of the 'male' sign, and in any case where the hell is Granada, I thought it was in Spain?

and finally, no compilation of TV idents would be complete, or at least not for me, without the catatonically safe and reassuring Border TV ident, which may well have been nationally relatively unknown; I only ever saw it when staying with my Grandparents in Dumfries and Galloway during school holidays, and it always seemed to precede stories about minor criminal incidents or country fairs in the regional metropolis, Carlisle.

There were others - I haven't included Yorkshire TV largely due to the intensely irksome and boastful nature of it's folk, coupled with the fact that I couldn't find an old clip, Tyne Tees because it looked too much like Yorkshire's, Southern, since they eveidently didn't make anything worth networking as I don't remember it, or Grampain 'cos the only thing I associate with that is 'Take the High Road' and the suffering is now too great..

Sprezzatura

The Puumaja Crew would love to be able to exhibit sprezzatura, a for us hitherto unknown Italian word which originated in rennaisance author Baldassare Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier", presumably as a trait seen as virtuous and worth having.

Put simply, or put in some way or other, it is "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it". So the embattled rail traveller in the UK tutting and sighing over delays, the beer drinker who announces that they're on their nth pint of the evenint,or the  ESL teacher who flusters into a lesson or comes out f-ing and b-linding or the blogger frantically tapping away, deleting, tapping away again then posting out of frustration. Then taking the post down...all these people DON'T have sprezzatura, if we understand the definition correctly.

Of course, this shouldn't be confused with laziness in our opinion; remember the swan, serene on the surface whilst the legs are going 19 to the dozen. But it seems a quality difficult to cultivate, even in Estonia. But a worthwhile one nonetheless.

How Long Does It Take To Get It?

The 'Crew has observed that it takes some of us longer to 'get' the rules of a game than others. We've noticed this in ESL teaching. Some people understand almost immediately off the bat when a follow up activity has been exemplified or explained, whislt the enjoyment of their slower contemporaries isn't in any way jeopardized, the more awake ones can and generally do explain things for the not-so-sharp in their own tongue, and this often has little bearing on enjoyment or the outcome or the 'winner' of the activity, the latter group often coming from behind; remember the hard and the tortoise.

We've noticed that it could be this way with life too. Some of us get it straight away and for others the conundrum can take a while to unravel, but this doesn't make one group winners and the others losers. Not at all.

So it could be a good thing if it's taking you a while to get it.

Do the Thing and You Will Have the Power

..so said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and now my big brother Seth Godin has reiterated it in his own admirable style. Very few of us (in fact none of us) 'feel' like getting up on a regular morning or doing the things we're supposed to, and yet we still scrape through somehow. That's just because, once you start to do something, no matter how much of a running jump was required, you find yourself warming up to it. Procrastinate too much and you'll end up feeling much more uncomfortable than you do when you start the job. So in essence the way to find the energy to do something is to do it; waiting until you've found the energy to do it is a bit like saying "I'd put some wood on that fire if I could get any heat out of it", or "if I won that marathon I'd start training for it". Maximum respect all round.

One of Our Boys Is Missing - Chapter 3, The Civvy in the Bivvy: Part 1

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.
Chapter three and Charlie passes out from the Calthrops, only to have tragedy strike for the first in a number of times sufficient enough to warrant publishing his memoirs


Our final day at Thrushingfold, and thus the day we'd step out into the big bad world of the British military, finally came. It was a shame to leave the place, I'd grown quite attached to it. It had certainly been an experience, I felt I'd aged about a year in about nine months. I was earmarked for 3 Battalion, who were also usually resident in the same barracks we'd trained in, but at the time were in Gibraltar. The great news was the Kev and Phil the eyebrows were coming with me! Gareth was going to 1 Battalion, who were tasked with the heavy duty anti-tank weapon of the day, the Carl Gustav 84mm, and were up in Catterick in Yorkshire.

Seating was set up in the parade ground for our passing out, it was going to be a real big show. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a small lump in my throat as I heard the crippled palomino played absolutely note perfect by our fantastic regimental band, as I stepped up to receive my beret. Actually I'd had this lump for some days now, it was very sore and I was very worried; turned out it was my tonsils and I had to go and get them taken out by an army doctor a few days later. My parents and sisters had come to watch, though there was no Natalie, which I was disappointed about. 

Colonel Cam, the boss of the whole regiment, came briskly down the serried ranks stopping every so often for the requisite questioning of the new soldier “Bloody well done...I remember when I passed out...where are you going next?...are your family here?”. I'd attempted to get round this by strategically placing myself next to Jake, the one and only black dude to pass out in our troop, he was bound to stop and talk to him thus missing me out, but in a novel twist he actually got both of us, unexpectedly turning to me after giving Jake the once over.... “..and where are you going next?” he almost unthinkingly asked me, so I gave an almost unthinking answer “well, straight after this sir, I'm going to head for the bar for a bit. Then if I'm still able to, I'm gonna go back to my room and get my stuff. After that I'm meeting up with..”..the game show host frozen smile and glazed expression morphed into something a whole lot more pissed off as it slowly dawned on the Colonel that I was actually giving him a real reply to his answer “alright don't get clever with me sunshine” was the rebuke I earned and I was disappointed. He could have ruined my career right from the get go if he'd wanted. Still, some people have no sense of humour.

The folks came for a brief chat at the post-parade reception in the bar, Ted was on leave from his unit and was in fine form, bantering with the guys about how our unit were just souped-up traffic police, and they responded in kind, noting that the signals were nothing more than glorified switchboard operators. The time came for them to go, and I waved goodbye to them at the barracks gates. My father gave me a final wink through the opened window and, still turning back and waving, shot away rather quickly, only to slam into a car in front of him. It was quite an impressive car, a Merc, in fact it was the adjutant’s.

‘Where the bloody hell did you learn to drive? In France?’ the adjutant bellowed as his imposing frame emerged from the car door. I just heard my father mumbling some platitudes before turning tail and sprinting away from the scene.

I decided to go into town to find Natalie, and discover why she hadn’t turned up to the parade. I still remember to this day that it had clouded over, and was starting to spit rain here and there. I’d changed into casuals and I was wearing a new bomber jacket I’d just invested in. I was eager to see her before we left. She was going to come up to Aldershot where we were to be held for a couple of weeks before going to Gibraltar, we'd even talked of marriage.

 
Then I saw it...a local newspaper hoarding, the words seemed to scream at me 'Decapitation of Tragic Natalie: Pictures'. I knew it was going to be her even before I read the article; it turned out she'd been sucked into one of those giant hairdrying machines they used to have in hairdressers, whilst she was getting ready to come to the parade. Apparently her last word was 'Char...'. I just ran and ran in the pouring rain, not knowing where to go, until my feet literally dropped off.

The previous installment can be viewed here.

International Treat Yourself Day Today!

The Puumaja was thinking of revising its opinion of abolishing Friday as posted a few days ago, and changing it to Monday, though we decided that might be a bit predictable.

Instead, we are happy to announce, as a special thankyou to both of our readers, that today, 1 March, is " international treat yourself day"!!! So go ahead, treat yourself. You wanna beer or two after work? so waddacome-adda-go, treat yourself (we won't be doing this alas, on the wagon for the lenten period). You want that new i phone? It's yours (pending certain contractual stipulations). Fancy some chocolate cake? We support you nine tenths of the way (kept back a tenth as a disclaimer for complaints about weight gain or compulsive chocolate cake eating).

After all, you're l'oreal!