On Religion

I got Hare Krishna'd the other day in the street in Tallinn, near Kaubamaja. Not for the first time...Still, far less likely to get mormonized here, than was the case in when I was working in Riga (which I'm now calling little Utah).
The guy who approached me was perfectly pleasant and not wearing any weird clobber. I later saw him having reeled someone in, a woman, they were speaking in Russian. I think that could be a part of the reason the mormons don't seem to meet with as much success, they're outsiders and, even if they may make some progress with members of the Russian community (as I think their organisation trains them up in that language, certainly all the mormons who've ever approached me have opened in Russian) they're still outsiders. Furthermore, approaching native Estonian speakers in the street in Russian isn't likely to endear yourself to them. It's just the way it is. Better to speak English.
I suspect the real reason is that Estonians simply aren't a very religious bunch at all; as you'll see, if you can find Estonia on a map, according to this survey they're right down there below even Sweden in non-belief in a deity, and coupled with a marked uneasiness with strangers makes for proselytizers having a pretty thin time of it here, especially in the winter!
I've been reflecting that, if this street proselytisation is valid (and I'm inclined to think it isn't, though if there's to be freedom of information I'm not sure how else one tackles that particular arena, for those that are genuinely interested but lack access to information) the 'correct' religion that a person could end up in might just be based on such happenstance of who you bumped into in the street. Which seems to me just wrong. No doubt they'd refer to that as God's will, providence etc, that this encounter happened. Which in some cases it could be - if the person was out looking for answers. On that other hand what if they were bludering along half drunk, or looking for a way to rebel against authority figures, or just to stand out from the crowd.
And this is my real beef with organised religion. Not that I think the whole thing is based on a lie; as an agnostic I don't believe you can prove one way or another about the existence of God, though from my own personal feelings and intuition there's something resounding down the ages, providing a basic moral framework (are there any countries where you get anything other than punished for murder, as murder?). There are truths to be found in all of the major religions and probalby most of the minor ones too. But...I believe, if you spend any time with people who claim to be representing an organized religion, sooner or later, you'll run into one or more of the following as the real reason behind their adherence:

1) cultural and historical (they were 'born a catholic' or whatever. Noone is born anything other than a baby human).
2) a badge (ie, 'you're not one of us').
3) to stand out ('my religion's different (ie better) than yours/the majority religion', etc etc).
4) to rebel ('my family were prods so I'm gonna spite them by converting to catholicism').
5) to conform ('my family are catholic and they'd never speak to me if I left the fold').
6) to get a sense of belonging ('catholics are different').
7) to get a sense of importance (you can 'be' somebody even if you're a nobody in everyday life).
8) to dominate others (religions vary hugely on hierarchies or the absence thereof, with catholicism way up there, islam much less so but with a nasty tendency to throw up self appointed seeming troublemakers. As an aside, this is a trait religions can share with the world of ESL teaching).
9) to prey (note spelling!) on others sexually (speaks for itself).
10) for something to do (especially for old ladies).
11) compelled to do it (forced attendance at 'worship', and I'm not only talking about the Taliban but this might include, in the US, court-mandated attendance at 12-step 'meetings', for example.
12) a sense of being a world changer, and almost messianic figure (Bono).
13) to proselytize (in islam it's called 'dawa'. In other words you get more kudos for the more people you hook in, and are really little more than a salesman or woman).
14) for the laughs (especially true of judaism!).
15) because you believe it is truth (ok this one's ok).

..there are probably loads of other reasons I haven't identified.

I'm not some pleb who's just watched a Richard Dawkins 'lecture' or something and proceeded to reel it off as if it's my own opinion; I've actually studied some of the major religions (including islam) in quite a lot of depth and even in the past been an active participant in (christian) communities, and as noted, I see myself as agnostic, not atheist.
I haven't really defined 'organized' and 'religion' and there's a certain vagueness here which doesn't make things any easier; indeed there collocation could be used to describe to a greater or lesser extent anything from the really major world religions, through to the smaller ones, social clubs, shamanistic local practices, crazy cults and even the 12 step groups of alcoholics anonymous and its clones.
This isn't an attempt to cause offence by dissing the various named and unnamed religions and I'd always welcome freedom of religious expression for all, including attire, right to worship, etc, something that you're unlikely to get as a dhimmi in some countries where islam prevails. But there has to be a trade off, including the right to criticize or portray religion and even God in a humourous light. But this has been raked over and over again enough in the media already, I'm not adding fuel to that fire..

On This Day 349 Years Ago...

From the pages of Pepys' diary, 4th December 1660 (Puumaja comments in [ ]).
"This day the Parliament voted that the bodies of Oliver, Ireton, Bradshaw &c, should be taken out of their graves in the Abbey, and drawn to the gallows, and there hanged and buried under it..."
[If I'm not mistaken, Oliver is none other than Oliver Cromwell, former East Anglian MP turned 'Lord Protector' of England, Scotland and Ireland and now somewhat out of favour; Henry Ireton was his son-in-law and a Parliamentary general, John Bradshaw, a judge who presided over the trial of Charles I. This episode concerns the 'execution' and mutilation of their corpses as an act of vengeance.]
"...which (methinks) do trouble me that a man of so great courage as he was, should have that dishonour, though otherwise he might deserve it enough".
[Little bit of politics, I assume Pepys kept his thoughts on this to himself (the diary was encrypted in fact). And people really did say 'methinks'!!!. I can't help thinking what a shame it is such things don't happen any more...digging up the body of out of favour politicians (former PMs spring to mind) and publicly hanging, drawing and quartering it in the middle of Westminster in the rush hour..well, you could charge money for tickets. Better than Simon Cowell anyway..]

Unattractive Enough to be a Model

I just saw a bit of a notably asinine program from the UK, one of those 'we're gonna have to let one of you go, and this time I'm afraid it's...', which is seemingly a sacred cow of a format nowadays. In this case it was models, or would-be models, and there were the requisite tears as one of the 'contestants', with a delightfully glamorous West Midlands accent, was told she was out.
Thing was, and I don't know if this is worth saying but anyway, noone's reading, I can see stacks of far, far more beautiful girls here in Tallinn every time I step out of the house practically.
I don't say this to boast, just I find it a bit frustrating how these people are held up as paragons of beauty when to my eyes they're very unappealing-looking, androgynous or bordering on ugly.
Maybe that's not the point, and models aren't here to provided titillation for males; fine with me, and I don't doubt that the objectification of women for men's pleasure is a bad thing, in which case would you please explain to me exactly WHAT they do to enrich our lives?
No doubt their critics are less kind; if they'd had any vestige of a personality it might have been something but they were equally or even more bland and off-putting in that regard too.
One of the 'judges' on the show perhaps encapsulated it best when he said, of one of the contestants, 'she looks like a model'.....so there it is, not she's beautiful or even just attractive. Provided she conforms to the industry standard that's already been set in stone, for the time being. A bit like saying this car looks like a car.

10 Heroes (relatively speaking) of Mine I've Outlived (at least in numbers of years - James Dean and Jimi Hendrix Guaranteed Not Included)

- Robert Johnson - musician
- Wing Commander Guy Gibson - Pilot
- John Bonham - musician
- Captain Laurence Oates - Explorer
- Francois Cevert - racing driver
- King Henry V of England - er, King. Actually he may have been slightly older depends on dates
- Jim Clark - racing driver
- Franz Schubert - composer
- Charlotte 'Marmalade Atikins' Coleman - actress
- Bobby Sands - political activist

...if I hang in another year or two I'll overtake Robbie Burns...

Noone Killed in Freak Accident And No Footage of Celebs in Compromising Situations Here

When trying to set up a business, I've noticed a phenomenon which I call SS- concentration-camp-guards-at-the-end-of-the-war syndrome, namely, that I've switched to attempting to get on the best terms with people I previously held in utter contempt. I've suddenly started having more sympathy for internet marketers, cold callers, even spammers in a way (no let's not go that far). Or at least I seem to feel I should do.
The logic behing this is that now the boot's on the other foot and I'm my own boss, surely now I have to go out and do all the networking, sales-y stuff and the like, something which fills me with a huge amount of dread and awe I don't mind saying.
So it was nice to hear confirmation from Seth that I was right all along and if I interpret my big brother correctly, that these people are indeed scum (not that he'd couch it in such terms, gent that he is).
Anyone who thinks it's ok to hit a hundred people at the same time, no matter who they are, on the grounds that if one of them replies it's paid for itself already, never mind the effect on the other 99 people, probably doesn't deserve a high place in the pantheon of worthwhile people.
In fact I wonder if the prostitute-card placers in central London phone boxes think along the same lines.
He opens by looking at the phenomenon of juicy headline writers reeling in even otherwise sensible people with promises of scandal and hype, hence the reverse heading of this post. Check it out.

'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..