Hello! I'm Rob!

For That Is The Alias I Go By In Real Life
You can still call me Conrad, however.  None of that bunkum about "Call me Ishmael", because 1) I am not Ishmael and 2) "Moby Dick" is a horribly slow novel that I binned after spending many days reading it.  That was the novel where my vow to "Finish It Because I Bought/Borrowed It" broke down.   I have not regretted this choice since.

Moby, being a - .  No.  Let's not go there.

     Now, I can sense your misapprehension and perturbations from here.  The reason for today's title is that I am once again adrift amongst a new team of fellow-workers, whom I shall have to induct and educate in my Weltanschaung*.  Conrad having a face not made for smiling, with a perfectly horrid sense of humour and an intolerant disregard for other people's musical tastes, must now try to indicate when he is joking.

O hilarious Conrad!
(Seriously, is he smiling here or not?)

     <long slow heart-felt internal sigh>
     The rule of thumb is, if my hands are not around your purple-faced visage and you are not desperately gasping as the darkness rushes in - then I'm joking.
     And also Rob (or Conrad if you prefer).

Back With The Battleground
Har!  Yes, I may be typing this up at work, without the ability to upload photographs from my very own Devil's Digital Device, but Your Humble Scribe took precautions last night, before plugging himself into the mains for a recharge going to bed.  Behold below, more of Staffordshire Regimental Museum.
     If you really want to set the mise en scene, go stand under a cold shower with the bathroom windows wide open, and there you have last Thursday's weather.
     That thought experiment done, we shall now carry on - oh, but not before we lock the motley inside an industrial waste-bin and push it down the hill! - and arrive at the Anderson Shelter.  Art?


The unprepossessing exterior

The equally unprepossessing interior

     This was a DIY air-raid shelter, meant to be erected in a hole dug in a family's back garden, where the corrugated iron was bolted together and covered with earth.  The collective principles of being mostly subterranean, covered with spoil and considerably smaller than a house meant less likelihood of being hit by a bomb.  If you lived in a row of terraces or a block of flats then - good luck running for the nearest public shelter.

 

Replica public shelter

     Oops!  I forgot to be snide on Sunday.  Art?

The officer's dug-out of earlier



Take note of that large brown stone jar on the shelf.  This would be labelled as "S.R.D." which is "Service Rum Diluted", from which a tot of rum would be issued to the men.  Many are the tales associated with this benison, which was also slyly known as "Seldom Reaches Destination."  Indeed, Robert Graves relates how an orderly arrived with an SRD jar for distribution to his infantry company in a front-line trench.  The orderly arrived, absolutely paralytic after having consumed the whole jar himself, and then fell down.  The adjutant, leading said company, was apoplectic with rage.  "COMPANY, ADVANCE!" he seethed, and all one hundred and twenty men - or 240 pairs of boots - trampled over the hapless orderly.

     There was one division, I forget which one, whose General Officer Commanding was a teetotaller, and he strictly forbade the issue of daily rum.  He was not well-liked.

 

No!  Not a club.  A mace, Colour Sergeant, for the use of.

     I bet you feel warmer just looking at that picture.

 

 

And this one.

     For yes, we are now back inside.  I shall give you a minute to warm up and then it's off to -

 

What's In A Name?
The name in this case is "Alabaster", which kind of popped up in my mind yesterday, as words and phrases are apt to - the Takoradi Route, anyone? - with no warning and little reason.
     Okay, alabaster.  A very soft stone used since Biblical times for carved decorative work.  Art?

Thus

     Yes yes yes - it's the name I'm interested in.  It seems that it may date all the way back to the Egyptians and either pays homage to the goddess Bast or the town of Alabastros.  Take your pick.
     From there it was picked up like a linguistic palimpsest, firstly by the Greeks, and with them "Alabastros" meant a container for perfumes.  Then the Romans got hold of it, transforming the word into "Alabaster", the dirty curs.  The French adopted it, also, until it finally ended up as part of the Queen Of Languages.**  So - alabaster.

Bast.  Stoned.

Little Katie, The Cutie Who KILLS!
So, we are back to rocket artillery systems of the Second Unpleasantness once more, and here we have a demonstration of how the apparently-ferocious Sinisters had a heart of the softest marshmallow.

The very choicest Ruffian marshmallow.

     Here a note about Ruffian names.  You don't just call Ivan Ivanovich that name, you call him Gaspodin Ivanovich if you know him only formally.  If you are slightly better acquainted then you call him Ivan Ivanovich.  Closer still - close enough to share a bottle of vodka - then it would be Vanya, the diminutive of Ivan.
     Thus with Yekaterina (the Ruffian version of "Katherine" in God's Chosen Language**).  This becomes Katya, and then Katyusha, or "Little Katie".
     Got all that?  Good.  There may be a quiz later.  Art?
                                                                      Katie, your kiss is so cruel!      Initially this weapon didn't have a name, because it was so Utterly Top Secret, No Really, So Much More Secret Than Anything.  Because they were marked with a "K" those pathetic softies in the Sinister army nicknamed it "Katyusha", after a popular song of the time.
     The Ruffians liked them quite as much as the Teutons hated them.  For one thing, they made a horrid caterwauling shriek of doom as they launched, which is bad for the nerves of those expecting them to arrive in a minute.  Whilst shockingly inaccurate, they could deluge an area with high explosive in seconds, and they were cheap and easy to make.  Once they had fired, the irfirst job was to run away, as the smoke of launching and launch trails would instantly reveal their position, which would inevitably lead to retaliation.
     They are still around now.  Little Katie is now about 80 years old but has still not grown up.

Takoradi.  More of this tomorrow.

     Bandits in force inbound from the south-east at angels twenty, squadron SCRAMBLE SCRAMBLE SCRAMBLE!
Chin chin!

*  "Way of seeing the world".  That is to say, through a glass very, very darkly, until it gets broken into pieces and those very pieces ground into powder underfoot by a jackboot.

**  ENGLISH! for those slow on the uptake.