The Major returns !!!

After receiving  many e-mails saying that your Sundays would not be the same without the old fellow, he is back. Thank you for caring as I had no idea that he mattered to you so much. Thank you.

I shot into my club the other day, panting like a fish out of water, and straight into my comfy wing-back chair by the large bay window with its glorious view of the harbour. I waved down my preferred waiter, Rogers, who leapt towards the bar at my unspoken but clear request for a restorative martini, not unlike plasma for a battleground wound. Some days are just like that, wouldn’t you say?
I know you must be wondering why your old Major would sprint to his sanctuary by the sea with his mind teeming in fear. The answer is: I read too much history, especially just before bed.
The previous night I had been scanning documents concerning the Stalin terror trials in Moscow (1936-39), when he had systematically murdered all his rivals as well as most of the leadership of the armed forces. Stalin filmed a great deal of the show trials of his one-time Soviet friends, many wearing pancake makeup to hide the bruising from the torture administered in the basement of the Lubyanka building.
There was a look of naked terror on those faces still hoping that their old friend Kobo (Stalin) had made a terrible error and would right it before they were convicted. No such luck, I am afraid. A bullet in the back of the head awaited all. Everyone was guilty.
But the piece of news I had not seen before as the cocoa turned to sewage in my mouth and I sat upright in bed was that Stalin would often liquidate the first man who stopped clapping. The paranoid, pockmarked short fellow was used to at least 20 minutes of applause as he strode to the lectern to give another meaningless plan to his people. What I did not know were the dire consequences for those who did not have a watch and perhaps cut short their enthusiasm.
Can one imagine the plight of the arthritic or palsied in the audience, smacking their poor limbs again and again with a fixed grin and tears of pain pouring down cheeks? Miserable.
With my luck I would have scratched my nose or waved to a friend, because I could never put up with that kind of boredom. I would have disappeared with the rest. There was one speech that was said to have elicited more than an hour of clapping, no doubt draped with fervour and fear.
There are still people around like friend Stalin, Kim Jong-un, for instance, of North Korea, as mad as the March Hare and the only stout man in his frightful country. Castro gave many four-hour chats at Revolutionary Square in Havana that were obligatory for the populace to attend. Communist states always seem to have an unhealthy cross of incredible boredom and wild-eyed terror and oh yes, closed borders. Anyway that was what I ended up dreaming about that needed one or two martinis to stop me shaking in my boots.
Several chaps came over to commiserate with me, calling generously for another round of martinis and some club nuts. It still took me awhile to calm down. To live in an atmosphere like that for your whole life as people did in the U.S.S.R. would be, to say the least, a not very pleasant life.
I am sure with my self-destruct mechanism I would have done funny faces at parties of Stalin and Beria, his favourite killer. My family no doubt would have turned me in to the authorities for a few bagels and a tour of the Kremlin. You could not trust anyone in those days as they had no clubs such as mine to reflect and relax at, which is mandatory for a healthy society.
Trust, martinis, butter tarts and loyal club mems are on the menu here every day. No loud clapping would be tolerated as it jangles the minds in this quiet life. No communism and certainly no Stalin. Bad.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2016