Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Daniel Kalder has been reading the semi autobiography of Leonid Brezhnev, sometime ruler of the Soviet Union and twice voted best eyebrows ever to grace the Lenin Mausoleum by the Central Committee for the Dialectical Analysis of Facial Hair in the All Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).

The memoir sound terminally dull, but Kalder's manages to find some macabre humour in a few of Leonid Illyich's war experiences:

At last Brezhnev locates his hands and seizes a machine gun, opening fire. However, this moment of action comes to a swift conclusion when real soldiers arrive in the trench. "One of them touched my arm," says Brezhnev. "Let a machine-gunner take over, comrade colonel," he is told.

I found this scene curiously affecting. I could see the battle-hardened Soviet soldier watching the pompous propagandist playing at being the warrior, and then gently intervening as if to say "there there, give it to me, hairy eyebrows. I'll kill the fascists for you."

This last phrase is so wonderful that I'm determined to try to find a way to inject it into every day conversation, regardless of how challenging this might be...