Category Archives: History

Some M’s

m23

M23 – A rebel group that operates in the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was formed by loyalists to the Tutsi warlord Gen. Laurent Nkunda and takes its name from the date of an agreement signed on 23 March 2009 between Rwanda and DRC to cooperate on the eradication of a Hutu rebel group called the FDLR. It is widely believed that M23 are directly controlled by the Rwandan government.

m25

M25 – A motorway that encircles Greater London. It has various cultural meanings for people in the UK, defining for many the boundary between city and countryside. It also played a huge role in 80’s rave culture as people whizzed around it on their way to parties in rural barns and warehouses. Iain Sinclair wrote a geeky book about it which was made into a movie by Channel 4.

m83

M83 – A nice and melodic electronic band from France. They used to be pleasantly obscure but they recently composed the soundtrack for a movie called Oblivion that’s being advertised on a lot of buses at the moment so they may become famous and lose some of their exclusive charm. They are named after a spiral galaxy called Messier 83.

Well just fancy that!

JFK was assassinated on 22 November 1963 at 12:30 and pronounced dead at 13:00 CST. That makes his time of death probably about 18:32 GMT. On the very same day Aldous Huxley died at 17:21 and CS Lewis died at 17:32. So they all died within roughly an hour of each other. According to Wikipedia, Huxley had two large doses of LSD that morning. No shit.

Gun

Gun

When I was ten my parents lived in a small modern house at the end of a terrace. My bedroom was really a box-room built above the stairs and so about a third of the floor area was occupied by a metre high platform that was actually the ceiling of the staircase below. Before the box-room became a bedroom my Dad had built his gun cupboard in the corner of the room above this platform.

I was ten, the cupboard contained guns. I don’t remember how long it took me to figure out a way of opening it but I was pretty pleased with myself when I finally did. There was a bolt-action .303 rifle in there and a semi-automatic pistol wrapped in a cloth. I knew how to work the rifle but the pistol was a seductive enigma. The safety catch was pretty obvious but I couldn’t figure out how to determine whether or not it was loaded. I didn’t know how to take the magazine out and I wasn’t really strong enough to pull back the slide and see if the chamber was empty. Also, although I was irresistibly drawn to it I was actually quite scared of that gun.

One day I was sitting on my bed fiddling with the pistol, wondering how to find out if it was loaded without actually firing it, when I noticed that I could slightly push in the knurled button on the front of the gun below the muzzle. I was holding the pistol between my knees with the barrel pointing straight at me and when I looked closely I could see that if I pushed the button in with my thumb it could be turned. I pushed it harder and suddenly there was a terrific crack and a terrible pain in my forehead. I fell backwards onto the floor.

I wasn’t dead. I felt my forehead and there was a sort of dent but no blood. I was very confused but when I looked at the gun I realised what had happened. There was a very powerful and oily spring behind the knurled button and it was now lying on the floor. It was the button itself that had hit me, not a bullet. Later on, when I looked in the mirror, I discovered that the button had made a very clear impression in the centre of my forehead. I was delighted and relieved to have survived, but terrified as it dawned on me that I had to find a way of getting that spring back into the gun and hiding the tell-tale injury when I went downstairs for tea.

I’m afraid that I can’t remember now how I accomplished either of those things but at the time I believed that I had got away with it. However, now that I’m a parent myself I realise that there are a great many things your children think you don’t know that you actually do, so maybe my parents decided not to do anything because they thought I had learned my lesson. I’m sorry to say that I hadn’t.

Note: The pistol in the picture above is the only one I could find with the view I wanted but it is of an American gun made by Union Switch & Signal. I think that my Dad’s gun was a rather lovely Star Model A Super pistol, made in Spain.