I’m now retired – taken medical early retirement due to MS is then term I use to extract sympathy but I’m 60 shortly so it’s more just enjoying myself while I can early retirement.
1. Having more free time now I just idly looked back over previous posts, including the one below from St Petersburg some years ago. Key updates :
The OMOH name I took the piss out of for being HOMO in reverse, given the famously homophobic views of Putin is actually pronounced OMON, so that idle joke just falls a bit flat. I learned that from reading an amazing book called ‘Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride, Through Chaos, Corruption and Murder in Putin’s Russia’ by Jamison Firestone. From that title, alone he’s evidently not given any more to brevity than I am.
The point I mentioned below about them being a paramilitary force brought in to police a 6th Form party for 18 year olds in St Petersburg when we were there is true but, their more normal role is to be really, really nasty bastards, given to imprisoning people without charge, torturing them and leading to a long list of unexplained deaths. In short they really are as scary as they looked.
Given that, my cunning plan of using our daughter Anna who was school age then to covertly take pictures of them, as they’d be unlikely to arrest a child, may not have been quite as shrewd as I thought.
2. I’ve recently had my gall bladder removed. That is a small organ only needed to help with digesting fatty foods. All done by keyhole surgery so a pretty minor thing except before the operation, they inflate your stomach area below the skin with gas to give more space below to fiddle around with their camera and surgical tools. They warn you that you’ll continue to look inflated for some time afterwards, so not just a question of deflating you like a balloon. This was a month ago and, I looked at myself in a mirror this morning and I don’t appear to have deflated properly.
There’s a line in PG Wodehouse book about a man who ‘looked like he’d been poured into his clothes and forgot to say when’. There’s now a good hint of that in my post surgery physique.
Or there always was a good hint of that
3. There is an English language expression made by holding one hand out forwards with the palm downwards and just saying Da Da Da Da Da.
It means please stop pouring, my glass is nearly full.
Not as clever as the works of PG Wodehouse or as detailed as Jamison Firestone but it does get the job done and everyone knows it
Well, I’ll get onto OMOH presently, but let me first say that recessions are self fulfilling prophecies – if you talk about them, people believe it, stop spending and so on.
Regarding previous News From Russia Post, I’d just like to say things will be fine and all the UK shenanigans will be over by Christmas.
Farage is still a loathsome, slug-like creature though.
OMOH news is that the trucks pictured here were deployed yesterday outside St Isaacs Church, a church similar to St Paul’s Cathedral, in central St Petersburg.
They were there along with other paramilitary types to police an end of school party that’s a tradition for all 17 year olds to attend here.
We were laughing quietly at the irony of the backward spelling of that, given Putin’s evident lack of enthusiasm for gay people.
They looked back at us with such disdain (the guy at the back in particular) that Anna took a photo, using the camera lens on the back of the iPhone whilst appearing to film us at an angle from the front.
A cunning plan, with the side benefit that if they turned nasty, she was more expendable really. We’d taken all the Roubles off her too, just to be on the safe side.
A quick browse on the web shows the OMOH are a kind of paramilitary riot police established by Putin.
Now I went to a few slight rowdy VIth Form parties, but paramilitary riot police is surely going a bit far.
They also have a reputation for violence against gay people apparently, so using Anna also evidenced Emma’s/my generally heterosexual nature.
Outwitted them there as well I think.
Other News from Russia is that we had meringues cooked at a restaurant table in Liquid Nitrogen, that was dispensed from a metal container, with a level of flamboyance that’s common in chemistry labs, Will tells us.
Greater care is appropriate in catering circles though I would have thought.
The waiter did wear safety clothing though, so he was fine.
