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Journalists who are exposed to the news every minute of the day, I guess, must be subject to the same professional deformation as any other profession.

I've heard some of my colleagues saying that when they come home in the evening they can't remember what the leading news story of the day was, and are reminded of it when they watch the 10 o'clock news.

But some news somehow sticks to mind and to the great irritation of your family you find yourself telling them about the same piece again and again.

This happened to me this week with a news story from Russia: The Russian army have stopped buying Kalashnikovs because they have so many of them and also because they want to try something new instead.

I never thought that I would write about Kalashnikovs, let alone sing its praises. But that story has made me think.

Does it stick in my mind so much because the facts of the story have been kept from the machine gun's inventor - the 92 year old Kalashnikov himself?

Those who have dealt with the history of modern Russia might know that at the very beginning of the Bolshevik regime, when its founder Lenin fell terminally ill with irreversible brain damage, his closest comrade Stalin ordered special daily copy of Pravda to be published for Lenin's exclusive consumption and to keep him happy in his madness.

So did I see some ominous parallels in it?

Or was there something else which made me come back again and again to the same news?

Then I understood what exactly the cause of my reminiscence was.

The AK 47 machine-gun itself.

There are books devoted to it, which compare Kalashnikov to an atomic bomb, to the ubiquitous 'fast food' chain of the battlefield, to any most popular invention of the 20 century.

It even became one of the icons of the last century.

My story is a different one.

In my young days I served in the Soviet Army and the AK 47 the serial number LA 8276 belonged to me for three years.

That weapon is etched into my memory.

In the nights of the field camps during the exercises I used to put it under my head, cushioning it with a rucksack. While I was on guard on my own in freezing Prussian nights it used to protect me, at the firing range while I was aiming a cardboard figure at 300m it was my extended sight, extended arms, extended breathing.

I knew every smallest part of it, being able to deconstruct it to bits and pieces and reconstruct again in 11 seconds.

I spent hours and hours cleaning it to perfection, because according to our old colonel commander there were two parts of soldiers ammunition which must always be absolutely clean and ever ready for action and one of those was the AK machine-gun.

I know that AK 47 is a killing machine.

One of the most efficient ones.

Therefore I can't be proud of my sudden nostalgic reminiscence.

However exactly this point made me write this piece.

Recently a friend of mine, a well-known Uzbek writer wrote a novella which nostalgic about the Soviet era.

I know for a fact that he hated and hates the Soviet system.

But at the same time such a big chunk of his life - dare I say the best (young) part of his life - has been left forever in that period of time.

So his nostalgia, I guess, for his youth, for his life, rather than missing the Soviet past, made him write that novella.

In the novels of the great Russian writer of the 20 century Andrey Platonov, one can find many vagabond characters, who while wandering aimlessly along the earth ploughed by revolution, collect all sorts of unnecessary things: a bolt, a cork, a nail.

In the time of losing the big sense of life those characters tend to stick to small random things which are witnessing their existence in this world.

This bolt, this cork, this nail could stay much longer keeping the trace of your touch when your short presence in this world ceases to be.

So with age one understands clearer that not any 'isms', be it communism, capitalism, patriarchalism, primitivism or anything else, but the human life has the value which gives birth to our nostalgia, which may be attached to anything: to a silly song, an out-of-fashion dress, or indeed the AK 47 machine-gun.

Here's a fragment of a poem, which more succinctly makes this point.

On your road there are nails, staples,
rusted corks, the dried apricot of time,
a concrete path, the railway, grass here and there,
a living snowdrop or simple, ordinary wire...

In actual fact, in fact all this
leads one to think then, but at the same time your premonition
realises: your life in its complete uselessness
can be tied in with these things.

Do not grieve about this,
death in fact is neither high nor low.
It is not death that is greater
but the thought of the road to death
that overcomes death itself.