One Of Our Boys Is Missing - Chapter 2, Hero in the Neighbourhood, Part One

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 two opens with Charlie's embarkation on a journey which was ultimately to culminate in killing loads of people, though nothing hinted at that yet.

So there I was, three months short of my eighteenth birthday, packing my kit ready for the trip down to Fedioukine Barracks, at Thrushingfold Depot in Oxfordshire. I had my travel warrant, sports kit, civvy clothes, and not much else.

The last few days at home I’d been doing a lot of reflecting; this is the point where, if this was on TV, a faded sequence of home movies would kick in - washing the car, with someone hilariously picking up a sud-coated sponge and throwing it playfully at another family member; my brother giving me a pummeling, then breaking off when he realized the camera was on him and hugging me and pretending we were the best of friends; one of my sister’s moodily slamming the door of her room in the camera’s face; no doubt the scene bookended with a fade-in of a jangly number by the Beach Boys or the Byrds.

But we’re not on TV and in the event it didn’t get much more sentimental than simply going out and getting lashed about five nights in a row. I was feeling a little bit unsettled, but I decided to repress this in the interests of playing up to what a hero I was and generally gobbing off about it. The last night came, to the pub as usual. I felt a bit guilty as my family had arranged a ‘going away’ dinner, which I proceeded to shovel down as I had an urgent appointment with John Barleycorn to get to.

The next morning, and with the mother of all hangovers, I did a final sweep of the house to check I hadn’t left anything, and felt my heart quite literally in my mouth, which made talking very difficult, as I came down the stairs and into the blinking sunlight, the taxi’s diesel engine idling, reminding me it was best to make this short. My mum and sisters presented me with an assortment of goodies - jam, books and the like, which I hid at the bottom of my bag and ditched before I reached the depot. I felt a few jabs of remorse, but the reality was I was going into the world of the military, a million miles away from the civvy world of jam and books, and I just couldn't risk the embarrassment of being busted as a secret reader. I did however find space for Quentin, my childhood teddy bear, and I'd even made him a little cammo suit. I had to keep him well under wraps though, and designed a secret compartment in my bag for the purpose - this was real contraband.

I'd like to be able to say that my father broke down when I left, chewing the flagstones in a display of abject anguish, and pounding his fists into the ground wailing 'why, why, why?' but in fact he just said 'good luck', and gave me a firm handshake. He was never one for goodbyes. But it was sad to be leaving the family fold, however dysfunctional they might have at times been, they were soon going to resemble the Von Trapps in comparison with the new 'family' I was joining.

All the neighbours turned out for my send off, and I felt like the most important person in the world, like Chistopher Columbus or someone, leaving for terra incognita. I reality I probably looked more like Christopher Robin, laden down with my little pack and sauntering off, naive, innocent, and with locks which were far too long and curly for my own good. As I shut the door of the taxi, I wondered when I'd next see them all again and how much I'd have changed (probably at Christmas and my hair would be shorter, and I'd be fitter).

The taxi pulled away, and, before I had time to warn the driver, shot over the give way sign at the crossroads at the bottom of our close, broadsiding into an early morning milkfloat, sending bottles full and empty crashing all over the place. The milk float driver was incensed, and in the ensuing argument between him and the cabbie I made my way back, feeling very foolish.

‘Come on I’ll take you’ my dad said – buying some extra time with the old man made things a little easier.

To be spun out some more...

If you missed the last installment, it's here

How to Stop a Kitten That Keeps Biting You

A vexed question indeed. I've found that keeping a big water spray thing, the kind that you use for ironing, to hand and giving it a blast every time seems to be working. Another ploy is to have a big tin of coins and shake it once, vigorously every time they nip you. The downside is if you don't have these cumbersome things to hand, and I don't always, and get it immediately you've been violated (or better still just before) the stupid thing doesn't seem to make the connection and just thinks it's being sprayed/rattled for no particular reason.
Good luck!

Origins of the Estonian Language Part 2

..see yesterday's post for the preamble..
As noted, old woman who swallowed a fly style, Estonian falls in the Baltic-Finnic sub-group of the Finno-Lappic sub-group of the Finno-Volgaic sub-group of the Finno-Permic sub-grop of the Finno-Ugric sub-group of the Uralic group of languages!
It's spoken in, er, Estonia, with emigre communities in the kind of places you'd expect to find them, by a bit more than a million people, and as a second language by a good couple of hundred thousand people from the "Russian" community in Estonia, plus, in tiny numbers, attempts at speaking it as a second (or third or fourth) language by those from other parts of the world mad enough to live here.
The language was standardised towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the South Estonian dialect (centred on the University town of Tartu) losing out to the Northern dialect (centred on the capital, Tallinn). Apparently there's still a strong difference today but I haven't spent enough time in South Estonia to catch it. There are also apparently strong dialects in the islands, notably Saaremaa. More than that, there are at least a couple of distinct, but closely-related languages, spoken largely or wholly within the confines of the Estonian border (both in the South East of the country in fact) namely Võru and Setu. I have no idea about these two.
As I have said, Estonian is quite closely related to Finnish, though the two aren't mutually intelligle. That many people in Tallinn can speak Finnish is largely down to tourism and the fact that Finnish TV could be received, presumably illegally, in the latter decades of the Soviet occupation, Helsinki being only 80km across the sea.
It shares the large number of inflectional cases as well, and the endings are similar, but not the same.
For much of its history, Finland was a province of Sweden, being ceded to Russia after the Napoleonic wars as a semi-autonomous grand Duchy, whereas Estonia came under the German orbit. Thus, German influenced Estonian (but not Finnish) profoundly, and Swedish much less (though there was some influence, especially in the islands where Swedish speakers resided until WW2. German lexis, paricularly concerning matters of governance, bureaucracy and the church, flooded the Estonian language and we still have many of them today (a few examples: "kirik" (church), "kraad" (degree, as in temperature), "plats" (town square)..).
The standardisation of the alphabet must have come a bit later than that of grammar; on visiting the bank of Estonia museum (more promising than it sounds) I noticed that on some of the early bank notes from the first period of independence (after WW1), twenty (viiskümmend in modern Estonian) was written wiiskümmend, i.e. using the German 'w' as a 'v' sound, and I'm told that the German double 's' letter was also used.
The unique letter 'õ' in Estonian, which causes problems for foreign learners, is something that sums up the language in general. Very difficult to reproduce accurately or even to distinguish from the more familiar "ö" sound. For instance, the Puumaja being located on Õle street, I'm constantly having to say "yeah that's what I just said" in response to corrections at my attempt to pronounce the street name. Apparently even some Estonians have a problem with it, most notably from Saaremaa where people, presumably due to the Swedish influence noted above, tend to default to the "ö" letter, much to the amusement of the rest of the country. This was lampooned in the film "Malev". In terms of its sound, the spoken language is, to the uninitiated ear, quite lilting and scandanviany sounding, though not as much as Finnish, and also has a certain breathy quality due to the high incidence of aspirated 'h' sounds (which I assume Russians have as much difficulty with as I do with pronouncing their 'kh' (as in 'ya khachoo') sound.
Despite the old stereotype of Estonians being slow, most people speak quite quickly, although sounds aren't run together as much as they usually are in English or Russian.
In general it's a very hard language to learn, exacerbated by the fact that people here speak such good English, though any efforts will usually be well received, and presumably something of a novelty, though the disappointing tendency, as in the other two baltic states, to be used as a pawn in the "these Russians who can't speak Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian who've been living here since .." gripe.
Now on to actually learn the language rather than pontificating about it...

Origins of the Estonian Language Part 1

...go back in time five or ten years and tell the then-me that I'd have been posting items with headers like this and see a very perplexed man..
The Uralic languages, which Estonian forms an albeit-small part of, are a language "family" of about 39 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. In this Estonian differs from the languages of the other two baltic states, which belong to, and in fact are the only extant examples of, the baltic sub-group of the vast Indo-European family.
For historical reasons there are Hungarian speakers in neighbouring countries including Romania and the Ukraine.
As the name suggests, it has been postulated that these languages emerged somewhere in or near the Urals, a range of apparently unprepossessing mountains (though I've not been - yet) which have been lifted from relative obscurity as marking the delineation of Europe and Asia. This has however been disputed and some have placed the original homeland of the Uralic languages either to the South or West.
You may see Estonian listed as a "Finno-Urgic" language, in fact this is the more common classification for the layman or woman at least. I find this designation a little cumbersome; it hyphenates Finnish and Hungarian (or "ugric") which, as anyone who's seen or heard both will struggle to comprehend since they bear no resemlance to one another at all. Furthmore it leaves Estonian out of the equation along with a large range of languages spoken across, for the most part, North-Western Russia, but also including the various languages of the Sami people (formerly known as "Lapps"). Conversely there is nothing more in the "ugric" part of that designation bar something called "Ob Ugric"; whereas there are zillions of Finnic languages. Estonian and Finnish have a whole lot more in common, a similar inflectional system (though Finnish has 2 cases more and slightly longer case endings) and a lot of vocabulary, often concerning things like geographical features which have been around forever, seemingly either the same (e.g. kala (fish), maa (country/land)) or very similar (Ranta (Fin.)/Rand (Est.)=beach; Saari (F.) / Saar (E.) = island, Joensuu (F.) / Jõesuu (E.) = both towns meaning "mouth of a river" etc.).
Aside from all their differences, the Uralic languages have such features in common as the large set of cases noted above, no verb to have (you simply say "on/by/at etc. me there is..." a bit like in Russian, no grammatical gender (thank God), and the stress always falling on the first syllable (much easier than Russian or Lithuanian then).
A simplified breakdown of classifications is:
Samoyedic
Finno-Ugric
Hungarian (Magyar)
Ob Ugric (Ob Ugrian)
Finno-Permic (Permian-Finnic)
Permic (Permian)
Finno-Volgaic
Finno-Lappic
Sami languages
Baltic-Finnic
Estonian
South Estonian (including Mulgi and Tartu)
Võro (Voro, Võru, Voru; including Seto or Setu)
Finnish (and variants)
Ingrian (Izhorian) — Nearly extinct
Karelian
Livonian, Vepsian, Votic, all nearly extinct, incidentally Livonian is/was confined to one small region of the Kurzeme peninsular in Latvia.
Source, if you're interested: Wikipedia, of course!

The Puumaja Mees Is Unwell and Will Return Soon

Cold Weather

According to the thermometer on the car it was -14 degrees in the afternoon yesterday. Anyway it felt cold, but it's kinda nice too, a proper season too. Got the wood burning fire going daily now in the puumaja, which means I'm gonna run out of wood soon. Hopefully there's somewhere that will sell me some more..

Top Ten Stones Songs

Just a random list, which more or less fizzles out not long after Brian's demise..
1) Come On - simply as it was the first. Great harmonica work too.
2) 19th Nervous Breakdown - fantastically bitchy lyrics.
3) Under My Thumb - relatively sophisticated chord progression for the time, brilliantly evil (note to self, stop using '-ly' adjectival qualifiers, or whatver they are).
4) You Can't Always Get What You Want - so true.
5) Lady Jane - I was never sure if this was a reference to Lady Jane Grey, but it's a nice idea.
6) Ruby Tuesday - kinda renaissancey sound that an American band would never be able to pull off.
7) Stupid Girl - simple, get the impression they wrote, recorded and finished it in about two hours and that was all it needed.
8) Sympathy for the Devil- Purely due to the sentiment and the historical references to the Russian Revolution etc.
9) Start Me Up - great subject matter for a mainstream song, 'you make a dead man come' - just admirable.
10) Connection - from the Between the Buttons Album, again something that was probably intended as a filler and yet pisses all over most bands' finest tunes.

On This Day 341 Years Ago

[...ie 14th December 1668..]

This day I hear, and am glad, that the King hath prorogued the Parliament to October next; and, among other reasons, it will give me time to go to France, I hope.

[..would that it were that modern day monarchs in England would prorogue Parliament, preferably until twentington o'clock on the 33rd May.]