Marcia is the boss of course....

But the real winners were the kids.

And all it cost me was a close shave...

It's alright, it'll grow back.

As Megan has reminded me, it is a Mohawk.

Admit it Megan, I looked the part ever so briefly.




I just love it when the kids come to visit.

What a Cock(erel)

A few days late but no less welcome for that.

Part II, 'The Wrath of Marcia' to follow...

Shit. Shitty. Shittiest. A Horrible Way to Wake Up

The other day, I decided it was time to shovel shit.  I need some weathered goat pooh for the raised beds around the restaurant, about a truck load, and I knew just where to go and get it.  Even though Joaquim, one of my neighbors, is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard, he is a well-built fellow and would be able to help me shovel the valuable product from the upper floors of the nearby restaurant, abandoned since colonial times and now the dormitory of the local goat population.  The floors are about six inches deep with the stuff and if I didn’t nick it soon, someone else would.

Joaquim had promised that he would turn up early in the morning returning at the same time, the wheelbarrow he borrowed from me a month or so ago.  Angolans, by the way, do not shop for tools and equipment; they augment their stock by borrowing so it is worth keeping on top of them.

Marcia had left for town at eight, I was already dressed and ready for Joaquim.  He had taken my truck to give Marcia a lift to the main road where her personal taxi driver was waiting for her.  On the way back he would collect the wheelbarrow and then we could get stuck into shoveling the smelly stuff.

Nine O’clock passed.  Then Ten.  Midday I helped myself to the cold left over duck and red cabbage from the night before.  By one pm I was seething with rage.  If you really, really want to annoy me, agree to help me at a certain time and then switch your phone off for the next few hours and cruise around in my truck.

Finally, at 2pm I heard my truck coming.  It isn’t just dogs that can recognize the sound of their master’s vehicle arriving from a long way away, master’s themselves are pretty good at it.  I know every creak and groan of its chassis, every clank and rattle of its drop sides, every asthmatic complaint of its exhaust and groan inwardly in sympathy with its gearbox at the sound of every missed gear.

I am always lending Joaquim my truck.  I own the only ones in the village so of course I will help out.  Life can be pretty tough for these people and fishermen can’t afford the outrageous hire charges just to move a load of material, often with a lower value than the diesel consumed, yet so important to them.  But I fucking hate it when they take the piss.  Where the hell had he been all these hours?  This time I was going to fucking have him.  I bent down to put on my sandals to give thr traction I would need to plant to really good one on the end of his nose...

Joaquim came into the room.

‘Kimmie, my dear and trusted friend’ I gasped, ‘I can’t move!’

I was on my hands and knees, one sandal gripped in a white knuckled fist.

‘Sr Thomas,’ he started, ‘I am really sorry I took so long but…’

‘Fuck where you’ve been all this time, you bastard, get me off the floor’ I politely encouraged him through gritted teeth, I was in agony.  Sweat was dripping off me and I was convinced I would vomit.

Like I say, he is a big bloke so he scooped me under the armpits and had me on my feet in only ten hours of excruciating pain.  Actually, he achieved that maneuver in seconds, it just felt like hours.  I hate showing pain in front of natives but I think I did squeal a bit.

Blokes like Joaquim, the skivers of the world surviving without regular employment through a wit that escapes honest, hardworking citizens have all the luck.  We had earlier arranged through his contacts with the Catholic Church (building their new Church here) that he would fix an hour’s use of the damn great front loader the Left Footers had on their site to bring in a couple of bucketful’s of black soil so that we could shovel it by hand into the beds.   The front loader broke down so that notion was stillborn.  He promised me he would arrange a couple of helpers to shovel the soil into the back of my truck but then it rained which would mean my truck bogging down in the soft soil.  He gets away with it every time.

I sat there gasping wondering just how many of my vertebrae had shattered into razor sharp shards and was ready to call it a day when the git pushed me too far.

‘Shall I call Marcia?’ he asked solicitously.

You little shit, I thought, we ARE going to shovel shit, you’re not going to get away with it this time.

‘Have you got the wheelbarrow?’ I demanded, ‘Good.  Throw them shovels on as well and let’s go’

The old restaurant is quite an intricate piece of architecture.  My original idea had been just to park up with the truck as close as I could and then run the wheelbarrow empty up the stairs and then back down them full creating a pile of droppings on the ground we could then shovel into the back of the truck.  Double, even treble handling I know but efficient enough if you are not in a hurry and your spine is in one piece rather than millions.

I let Joaquim drive for two reasons.  Firstly, I needed to remind him who was the boss so it was his duty to drive me.  Secondly, because it was all I could do to climb into the passenger seat; trying to press on the clutch or haul on the steering wheel would have been terribly embarrassing as I wasn’t wearing highly absorbent nappies.  Back pain is debilitating in the extreme but, as I was finding out, can be subsumed not only by painkillers, but by pure hatred as well.

When we arrived, I realized that I would suffer something more acute than physical pain, I would endure the shame of allowing Joaquim to do all the shoveling by himself.  Bollocks to that, I needed a simple solution.  I needed to find an efficient way to get the shit from the top floor into the back of my truck.

The restaurant stands on the banks of the Rio Kwanza.  Shoreside are staircases preventing any vehicle coming up alongside.  Riverside, however, were pathways leading to a bankside terrace lined by mature palm trees.  Beyond the terrace were the kitchens and leading off to the right, a small courtyard above which was an upper storey window.  The courtyard was sunken but otherwise ideal if only I could back the truck in there.  Joaquim has the attention span of an amoeba so it wouldn’t to do hang around trying to figure out the last bridge I had to cross before I arrived there so I climbed into the truck, reversed it in through the entrance, maneuvered across the restaurant floor and onto the terrace, gave it a lot of right hand down and along the bank before reaching the old kitchens.

Joaquim, master dodger of work, was impressed.  Actually, I think he was both impressed and amused.  So I had proved to him that I could pass a truck through the eye of a complicated series of needles but I was well and truly confounded now.  In fact he even called out some encouragement:

‘Estas fudida agora!’  he exclaimed. (You’re fucked now).

You see?  This is where natives consistently underestimate their expatriate guests.  Think of Rorke’s Drift.

The power steering pump mountings on my truck failed ages ago.  As the mounting bolts have sheared in the block, to rectify this means an engine out.  Bugger that, I thought at the time, it’s nothing a foot on the dash and heaving on the steering wheel can’t sort.  So I pulled the belts off the power steering pump pulley and ran the truck like that.

Now I was faced with a hundred and thirty five point turn and a bloody great drop into a yard if I made it.  The width of the esplanade I had just reversed down was half the length of the truck.  On a normal day, I wouldn’t even have been there, it was just that Joaquim was really starting to piss me off.  He pissed me off even more when he said if I dropped the four rear wheels in, he was convinced I could get it out again.  Like hell I would, I just spin the tread off the tyres trying.  The little shit, he just wanted to see me bog the truck so that he could go home.

There’s a lot of rubble, both wood and hard core that falls off a restaurant after twenty years of neglect.  So I started collecting it to make a ramp.  Joaquim caught on and lent a hand.  Pretty soon, I was satisfied but basically I was aiming at two 40cm wide ramps over which I had to run the rear wheels of the truck.  Once again, I was threading needles.

Perhaps overcome by a bit of conscience, Joaquim tried to stop me, irritating me yet further by suggesting I could never do it but then he saw the red mist and stood back.  Marathon runners (I was one once) have to go through something called ‘The Wall’.  It is bloody painful and sorts the men out from the boys.  Those who fail drop by the roadside.  Those who do get second wind and a crack at the win.  I had my second wind by then and five minutes later, the bed of the truck was underneath the upper storey window.

All we had to do was drag the wheelbarrow up to the first floor, fill it and then tip it out of the window into the truck and repeat.  I got my truck load of fertilizer.  Joaquim muttered something about me being hard as stone but the Portuguese also translates into stupidly stubborn.  No shit! I thought.

The next morning, after a sleepless night, it took me half an hour just to carefully roll myself into a position that would allow me to swing myself out of bed.  As I stood there, naked, one hand on the back of the sofa and the other on the surface of my desk, several things occurred to me at once.  Marcia was nowhere to be seen, my cigarettes and lighter were beyond the reach of a man with a shattered spine and I really desperately needed the loo which was an impossible twenty yards, two steps and two doors away.

I could hear the maid in the kitchen.  Could I really be so desperate as to call out allowing her to discover me shivering with spinal rigor mortis, my shriveled willy hanging out and in danger of giving her a hell of a lot more to clear off the floor than a bit of trampled dust?

Marcia covers the furniture with cloth, drapes, not sure of their proper name.  They are just great swathes of material disguising the shabby nature of our mobilia.  At the other end of the sofa arm I was clinging to, I could see my mobile phone.  So with my left hand, one that only has two working fingers, I started to chew the sofa cover.  Tantalus.  Til now I thought it an interesting parable.  I wasn’t desperate for juicy fruit or sweet water, I wanted to get my hands on a Nokia phone but by Hell I was beginning to realize what he went through.  Every time I tugged on the cloth, the phone stayed where it was, out of arm’s reach.  Finally the last fold of cloth was absorbed by my grip and the phone started to move in the right direction.  Gently I tugged it toward me.  By now the sweat was dripping off me.  I was in excruciating agony and the phone was so close.  My knees were trembling, my bladder was bursting and my bowels were in desperate negotiation with the last loyal bit of my anatomy, my sphincter.  I tugged some more and the phone slid off the sofa and tumbled to the floor.  The back flew off and the battery fell out.  To understand Woe, one has to experience it.  Phoning Marcia for help wasn’t a bad plan, it was a jolly good idea, I just cocked it up.

Many years ago when I was stationed in Belize, I was persuaded to have a go at the annual Easter cross country cycle race.  Sherman, my mate and trainer warned me that once we reached Cayo district and started to make the climb onto the Vaca Plateau, I would get ‘real ugly’ with the pain.  If Sherman could have seen me trembling, about to explode from every bodily orifice including my eye sockets, I am sure he would have agreed that no man was ever uglier.

 The door burst open and Alex rushed in, dodged around me and grabbed the remote for the TV.

‘Morning Daddy!’ he chirped happily, ‘My turn for the TV now? I want Charlie and Lola!’  He calls the BBC children’s channel Charlie and Lola, sometimes Sean the Sheep.  Heswitched the TV on, plonked himself on the sofa and started to flick through the channels.  He has no idea what he is doing, he just keeps pressing buttons until he sees something he likes or the decoder loses its mind and decides to rescan all the channels.

‘Alex?’

‘Yes Daddy?’

‘Daddy is sick’

‘Sowwy Daddy’, he replied without taking his eyes off the TV.

My survival, my last dregs of self-respect, now depended on a distracted four year old.

‘Alex, you see my phone on the floor?  Can you pass it to me please?’

He gave the phone a quick glance, ‘It’s bwoken Daddy’ and carried on changing channels.

The enduring bond between parents and their children depends to a large extent on the lack of perceived injustice.  As a kid, I used to be thrashed by my mother for reasons that completely escaped me and those indelible memories have coloured our relationship ever since.  So whilst suddenly overwhelmed with an urge to scream at him, ‘Give me the fucking phone NOW you little shit!’ I elected instead a more subtle approach.

‘It is your turn, Alex.  If you pass me the hand control, I will put Charlie and Lola on.  While I am doing that, can you pick up my phone?’

He gave me the control and while I selected CeBeebies, he gathered up the bits of the only link I had to relief.

Alex sat there just out of reach and attempted to put the various bits of the phone back together.

‘Please, Alex, just give me the phone’

‘I can do it Daddy!’

Tantalus all over again.  Alex can be a girl’s blouse sometimes.  If he thinks you are criticizing him, he will just drop everything, flounce out and descend into a God Almighty sulk.

When Alex burst into the room, he had left the door wide open.  With one hand on the sofa and the other on my desk, hunched as I was, I was presenting my arse and a couple of fifty four year old dangling prunes to the casual scrutiny of anyone passing by on the way to the shop.  Usually, with the door open, they see me sitting behind my laptop, now they were seeing a brown eye wink.  All I needed to complete my misery was a passing Arab climbing off his camel at the sight thinking, ‘OOH!  There’s everything on the menu here at Fat Hippo’s!’ before tucking in.  With everything unimaginable happening to me so far this dreadful morning, I wasn’t ruling any further embarrassment out.

‘Alex, please, just give me the phone’

‘No, I can do it!’ he insisted while trying to stuff the battery in upside down.

I heard a shocked intake of breath behind me.  It was Mengita, the maid, come to clear the detritus of the previous evening off the table.

‘Mengita, please, don’t go!’, I bawled, ‘just throw a towel around me!’

Considering that Africans are happy to bathe naked in a river, they are surprisingly prudish in a domestic environment.  She carefully inched her way into the room with her eyes firmly glued shut.  I had to give her the ‘left a bit’, ‘right a bit’ instructions so she could unhook a towel from behind the door.  It was only once she had draped it over my rump she opened her eyes again and I could explain.

‘Oh, Sr Thomas!  That happened to my Father!’ she exclaimed, ‘He never walked again and died in his bed!’

Considering that all this started because of shit, and now I badly needed one, this was a historically based prognosis I could have done without.

‘Mengita’, I asked, ‘is there anyone in the shop, customers of mine with discretion, who could help me to the loo?’

‘Sure’, she replied.

I think half the village turned up.

 

Girls

Poor sod.  Head down, ears back and trailing a leg. All for love, eh?

I can’t remember the number of fights I have got into over Girls.

I can remember a few spectacular ones.

I was seventeen, had just collected my pay packet and was invited by the Boss to dinner at his hotel, the Royal in Ashby, and a few drinks afterwards.  We were alone in the bar apart from two very attractive young ladies, two guys that were hitting on them as hard as they could and a barman that could have contrived a convincing display of an Egyptian Mummy in any museum.

Now don’t forget, I was a seventeen year old virgin, very fit with testosterone flowing through my veins and brought up on tales of derring do usually involving a man saving a damsel in distress.  To flinch in the face of impossible odds would hardly be Wagnerian.  My boss begged to differ and went to bed.

Clearly, these two elegant and sophisticated young ladies, dressed in miniscule skirts, impossibly high heels, strident make up and light blouses with no bras (it was a very hot and humid evening to be fair), found the pressing attention of the two gentlemen unwelcome.

Now even though I had exceeded my usual alcohol limit of a whiff of a barmaid’s cloth by about three pints of heavy, I recognized that these were Damsels in Distress and that a true Gentleman should intervene on their behalf.

The last thing I remember was the heavy faux medieval bar stool crashing into my skull.  I had just endured my very first, ‘Good Kicking’.

The two girls took me to their place which was quite close by.  We went on foot and it was the first time I had experienced anyone sticking their tongue in my ear.  The last person that had passed their hands all over my body so intimately was my mother when she was bathing her little baby in a nursery.  Now I had two girls, a few years older than me doing it on a public highway.  I can think of far more romantic places than the A50 but at the time, I just wanted to get my beaten head together in the hope I would get some, well, head.

Sadly, after burying hotel bar furniture in my swede, the attention of my assailants had been diverted to my goolies.  My eyes were closing, port had been spilt, my lips were split and the pain down below had reached my spleen. 

I made it home the following morning, pushing rather than riding my bicycle, still a virgin and it took me four days to recover but, as I explained to my father later, it was worth it to spend a night in agony wrapped in black satin sheets and lithe female limbs even if I didn’t get to shag the owners.  At least I knew what a woman’s breast felt like and learnt that heaven lay twixt their thighs.  Badly beaten as I was, I had already decided it was something worth fighting for.

Poor old Charlie, he is going through the same now.

For years Kizomba, Charlie’s father, has ruled the canine roost that is our neighborhood.  Finally Kizomba has, through Doggie, bred a true contender.  He, Kizomba, knows that of all his proliferate male offspring, Charlie is the biggest threat to his dominance.  So he is beating the shit out of him.

The thing is, Kizomba belongs to Rico, my neighbor.  Regular readers will know that there is a bit of history between me and Rico.  Thankfully, Rico and I are starting to co-operate.  We are both operating in a very corrupt environment so really it is better we combine our resources and present a united front.  Being reluctantly forced into bed together, though, doesn’t mean we have to consummate a marriage born only out of convenience.  Just as Angola was forged out of a proxy war, our war, the one between Rico and I, is now being fought by our dogs, the delicious irony being that my Champion is his dog’s son. In Doggy terms, Charlie is an adolescent male full of the juices of spring and will one day soon, chew his father's arse. 

One of the local bitches started to come on heat a few days ago and poor old Charlie lost his mind.  He disappeared for three days. 

This morning, a shade short of ‘Oh my God, it’s early’ (it was still dark), he limped back severely beaten up and whining piteously.  He is trailing one very badly chewed right rear leg and licking a few other open wounds.  Kizomba, his Dad, had clearly given him a bit of a thrashing.

So what could I do?  Obviously, I hoiked the fridge door open and hauled out a tray of steak.  I need to beef the lad up and give him somewhere decent to sleep while he recovers.  Marcia may not like it but the lad needs a safe berth so his will be next to mine; on the floor but on a bunk made of the clothes I wore that day.  That way he gets my scent and knows I care for him and he can bleed into my discarded clothes instead of the bush.

Charlie is just a dog, but when it comes to trainers, he could not have found a better one.  I am not scared of dogs and Kizomba, large and vicious as he is, is scared shitless of me.  Big as he is, last time he had a go at me I hauled him up by his ears and gave him a damn good kicking.  I may have returned home with blood dribbling down my arms and chest where he had savaged me but the bastard hasn’t forgotten.  I am so looking forward to the rematch.  This time with my dog Charlie which kind of makes it fairer.

Nothing personal, you understand.

 

'More steak and eggs, Charlie?  How about some sauteed calves liver?  I'll go easy on the onions and only use Basmati rice.  Marcia, there's some bread in the fridge, it is only three days old.  Make yourself a cheese sandwich and give me your pillow so I can make up Charlie's bed...'

Watch With Mother (I mean watch with John Gray).

For whatever reason, we have lost all the BBC Children's channels.    It has been like this for over a week. Naturally Alex has been pretty frustrated.  He likes Charlie and Lola.  He loves Shaun the Sheep (I do too) and he likes 'Mr Maker' (utter shit in my opinion, an ultra cheap version of Blue Peter).  So I had to do something.

 

I was sure there were ways of making videos and posting them.  Everyone else seems to be able to do it so surely I could master a skill iindigenous to the masses.

 

Obviously, inept as I was, I needed something to keep my boy's face in front of the hitherto unused web cam built into my laptop lest my viewers decided they were not so much volunteers in this experiment as victims staring at my bemused visage.  As I fiddled with the system I realised it was possible to have the web cam little thingy with the green eye above the screen active while looking at other stuff on the screen below its all seeing eye.  Ha ha.

 

It is tough to get a four year old to stand in front of a green light peering at him from the top of a laptop screen.  Bugger me, having figured out moving digital pictures thus far, I was as bored shitless as the boy especially considering I was shirtless and dirty having just lugged a dead generator off the truck and onto a bit of hard standing so that I could sort it out.

 

There was no way he was going to waste time talking to his reflection on a screen.  With the digital satellite system dead, what I needed was 'Watch with Mother' internet style.   It was a very close call.  I tended towards Cro Magnon.  Surely the boy would go nuts over HMS Dangerous?  Nope.  All I did was pull up opening pages of blogs and let him choose.  Guess which page we finallly discusssed here?

 

I think I glossed over the boy's kissing boys bit fairly well.

True Grit – What’s Your Definition?

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, CVO, OBE FRGS
Look at his grim expression.  He suffered from True Grit.  It could be jolly painful (but chaps didn't discuss that) and in Victorian times, other than awfully long walks of the kind that made you miss tea, Ascot, Henley and the Debs coming out, there was no cure.

I read with interest an article published in today’s Independent explaining how US psychologists have identified ‘True Grit’ as a distinctive personality trait.  Good Lord, really?

No doubt after years of highly funded research they have determined that "People high in grit are more passionate about their goals and more dedicated to accomplishing them, so the importance of success should be higher for gritty people."  That and soft toilet paper.  After all, a diet of grit must be wearing on the old sphincter.

“According to academic studies gritty adults achieve higher education results, gritty kids spell better and gritty military cadets are more likely to graduate with honours from elite military academies.”

Let me get this straight.  Gritty adults achieve higher education results?  Adults? Grittty adults achieve higher education results?  Send me back to school for my fifty-fourth birthday and I'd cream my Eleven Plus exam.

I think this is all codswallop.  All they have done is re-identified character traits such as intelligence, focus and desire to succeed.  Plenty of people have these qualities yet lack ‘grit’.

“Researchers in the United States believe it is the reason why among groups of equal intelligence, some people achieve more.”

What they are suggesting is that success and grit are linked.  I achieved Cadet Government at Sandhurst, an institution which by the author’s loose definition could be considered an elite Military Academy, placing me in the top 5%.  On my Returning Officer’s Course at the same academy I won a Director of Studies award and at the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, I came top of my entry yet at school, I was as thick as two short planks and failed my ‘A’ Levels.  Having been rubbish at school but having done rather well at an ‘elite’ military academy, does this mean ‘grit’ can be acquired? Clearly I did not have it as a teenager but seemed to have it in bucketloads in my early twenties.  Can it be ground into the heads of cadets in some way?   Hitherto useless could I suddenly achieve outstanding success by rubbing grit into my eyeballs or even going so far as to eat it?  Do Americans really eat ‘Grits’ for breakfast?   If so, then it debunks the theory that it is a distinct, genetically acquired personality trait already identifiable or deniable in a child’s ability to spell. 

The report seems to suggest that people are born with ‘grit’.  I am suggesting that it is more to do with circumstance and experience.  Are we saying that all the richest people in the world have True Grit?  Are we saying that the least successful in the world lack this useful quality?

Unquestionably, being determined is a facet of True Grit and many successful people are so because of their single minded focus but just being determined doesn’t endow the individual with True Grit.  The vast majority of people are successful because they were simply very good at their jobs; they were clever and may have studied hard.  Some were blessed with good fortune or a damn good idea, being in the right place at the right time. Do they have True Grit? 

How many intelligent, successful people have stepped out of their upper floor office windows just because their business had failed?  Did they have True Grit other than that they acquired gratis as their bodies slammed into the pavement?  All those people who accepted Fate’s poisoned chalice and in desperation drunk deep, meekly accepting their fate, did they have True Grit?

True Grit is born out of adversity and failure.  True Grit is having your teeth kicked in and your face ground into the dirt yet being able to get up, dust yourself off and start again. True Grit is the timorous lad who suddenly rushes out into withering enemy fire to rescue a fallen comrade.  The poorly rewarded who freely give of themselves to the service of others have True Grit.  The otherwise unremarkable individual who, suffering some terrible calamity, rebuilds his life against all odds, he has True Grit.  Children fighting debilitating disease, they have True Grit.  The thick, uneducated Private soldier on duty at a railway station in Northern Ireland all those years ago who threw himself onto a parcel bomb thrown into the concourse and minimized the blast with his own body saving countless lives, he had True Grit.

Yes, determination is an essential characteristic of those who possess True Grit but I do not think success is necessarily a measure of it.  As I have suggested, even a moron can stumble across success and geniuses so often blow it.  Success is fickle.  Grit is something else entirely and has fuck all to do with intelligence, success, genes, money, satus or the lack of it. 

Shackleton was spectacularly unsuccessful but no-one would deny he had True Grit.  Clearly he was driven.  He wanted to cross the Antarctic from sea to sea and raised the funding to mount an expedition.  It was his goal, his dream, his reason.  But what he wasn’t prepared to do was sacrifice the lives of his men chasing it when it all started to go wrong.  Not only did he have the True Grit to consign his raison d’être to unfavorable history and return home, not as a success to be lauded by xenophobic press, but as a failure suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he was more concerned about saving his men trapped on unforgiving ice and embarked on an epic, and to this day, unsurpassed feat of leadership, seamanship, navigation and personal endurance to bring them all home. 

I think there are other qualities of True Grit not mentioned or measured by our esteemed American academicians:

Honesty, Integrity, Compassion and Self Sacrifice.

Blimey.  I've stumbled across the Four Pillars of Leadership.

Some of God's Creatures Deserve to Die

A fluffy little bastard

The Idiot Gardener has just posted about his frustration with domestic cats defecating in and destroying his seed beds.

I am not sure it is enshrined in our unwritten constitution but the basic right of any UK resident to keep pets appears inalienable.  The society to prevent cruelty to animals, the RSPCA, is a Royal society whereas the society to prevent cruelty to children is only a national society (NSPCC).  It’s quite bizarre really.  Not a year goes by without at least one child being mauled to death by someone’s cuddly little pet and dozens of others being scarred for life. Within the last few months, two children were even mauled by foxes in the ‘safety’ of their own cots.  Yet libertarians howl in rage at the suggestion we should return to dog licences, the tagging of pets and good old fashioned fox hunting.  They would go berserk at the idea of the ordinary citizen being able to blow them off their lawns.

I have, of course, merely cited a fraction of the most extreme consequences of keeping carnivores with a genetically coded hunting instinct as pets and no longer being able to rid the countryside, and increasingly our urban areas free of dangerous vermin.  I can legally buy, and place around my property, rat poison.  Rodents are scavengers and survivors.  They will eat a tiny bit of something and see if there are any ill effects.  If there aren’t, they will tuck in.  So rat poison has to be firstly attractive enough for the rats to eat, and then slow acting enough, usually two weeks, so the rats, lulled into a false sense of epicurean security, tuck in and  eat a lethal dose.  It is a horrible death.  The poison is an anti-coagulant and the victim slowly and incredibly painfully bleeds to death.  Their intestines disintegrate.  They defecate oily black blood and their eyes bleed.  They rot from the inside out.  It is a slow, miserable, messy and lonely death.  Most decent people don’t like to think about the details when they lay down the poison but, let’s face it, a rat in the house is terrible. A single rat dropping can close a restaurant and an infestation can bankrupt a farm.

A dead rat that died a miserable death

 

And yet under UK/RSPCA law, if I caught a rat with my bare hands and ripped its head off killing it instantly, which I have done on numerous occasions, I would be liable to prosecution especially if I posted on U Tube a short video entitled ‘How to Catch a Rat With Your Bare Hands and Kill it Instantly By Ripping It’s head off (Warning, Graphic Content)’.  I am sure the RSPCA would also bring in a prosecution if I happened to film one of my dogs cornering a rat in my shop and tearing it to shreds.  But it is OK to poison rats.  And it is perfectly OK for cats to wander into their owner’s home and drop the little present of a dead mouse on the carpet or the corpse of a little bird robbed off the feeding table.

The Idiot Gardener  has his bit of God’s earth and is determined to suck out of it all Mother Nature, her fertile erogenous zones suitably tickled by spade, compost and liberally applied seed, can be tempted to offer.  He travels the country in search of the Holy Grail of seeds, be they potatoes, onions, herbs, spices, exotic tobacco, no matter.  The back of 34 Winsome Gardens will be the Shangri-La he has worked his whole life for and invested in.  One day he will lie there supine on a deckchair surrounded by the aroma of home grown combustible intoxicants and fruiting healthy vegetables knowing that the mortgage and school fees are paid.   

Instead his neighbor’s cats shit and piss all over his effort and dig over his beds.  Yet if, while sitting on his stoep, he put down his ice cold Gin and Tonic, shouldered his properly licensed shotgun and blew a neighbor’s cat defecating on his radishes to smithereens, he would be prosecuted.  If IG collected all the cat poo dumped in his garden and shoved it through the letter boxes of their respective owners, he would be prosecuted.  If he trespassed on his neighbor’s property and laid an enormous, charcuterie induced walnut whip in the middle of their lawn, he would be prosecuted.  If he dug up their flower and vegetable beds, if he pissed on everything in sight, if he had wild and noisy sex on the roofs of their conservatories and sheds in the middle of the night, he would be sectioned.

My father had a wire haired Dachshund that used to lie in wait concealed in the shrubbery surrounding the bird feeder.  Beppo caught and killed seven cats and one fox in total before the surviving cats learnt to stay away.  My father would quietly bury the evidence and even managed to look sympathetic while denying to distraught owners having seen their little tinkerbell recently.  Sadly, neither Beppo nor my Father are with us anymore but I am sure my Father would have happily lent Beppo to IG for a couple of weeks.  The difficulty would be if IG’s garden was overlooked by neighbors.  Beppo had mastered the art of stealth but still had a lot to learn when it came to the technique of killing silently.

The area surrounding my last house in Benfica was infested with cats so feral even my dog was frightened of them.  After little Alex was bitten and scratched by one that had entered the house, I borrowed a high powered .22 air rifle and shot every cat I saw.  A .22 air rifle is not enough to drop a cat dead in its tracks but if they didn't die a lonely, miserable death and survived instead, they learnt not to come near my property anymore.  I suppose for the people IG describes, cats make nice pets but to me, like foxes and rats, they are vermin.  I had turned my garden from desert to oasis.  When I bought the land it was little more than desiccated scrub infested with the lice from the goats that grazed there.  There were no birds, no wildlife whatsoever except rats.  I planted trees and exotic shrubs, flowers and herbs.  I irrigated and within a few years, the birds came back.  They nested in the new trees, under the eaves of my house, even bats moved in, snatching moths and other insects midair and drinking water off the surface of the pool on the fly.  The garden was truly a very pleasant place to sit and I was proud of it.  Then the cats came back, robbing the nests, raiding the house and intimidating both children and my dogs.  They dug up my seed trays and shit and pissed all over the place.  Had I been seen in UK shooting a cat off my asparagus tips, I would have been prosecuted.  Had I, instead of shooting the cat, sought damages from its owner, I would have been laughed out of court.  But this was Angola.  So I shot them.

When I moved down here to the Barra de Kwanza, we again had a rat infestation.  They were everywhere, they chewed all my computer and electrical cables.  They got into the drawers of my desk and chewed up my paperwork.  They chewed our clothes and the stink, it was dreadful.  They even ran over us in bed at night.  I put down poison, but since all poison looks like an enticing sweetie for a toddler, we could only place some in the spaces inaccessible to a child. 

Finally, I persuaded Marcia to overcome her phobia and allow me to introduce African House Snakes into the house.  They are not venomous, they are constrictors, grow to a metre in length but are no thicker than your thumb.  They leave no discernable piles of poo, need no looking after and keep themselves to themselves.  In other words, ideal house guests.  Marcia missed the point entirely when she ridiculed the idea saying that there was no way such a snake could kill a rat.  She was desperately, flushed with horror at the idea of live snakes crawling under the bed, trying to scotch the idea but also quite correct, such a snake could not take on and kill an adult rat.  What it can do is kill babies.  It finds rat's nests and gobbles up future generations.  Since I introduced snakes into our humble accommodation, we have no rats or mice and the dogs do an excellent job of keeping cats, goats and pigs away.  I do like natural solutions to natural problems.  I no longer need to lace house and countryside with poison or blast God’s inedible furry little creatures away with my rifle, I am just allowing nature to take its very satisfactory course.

Well I have rambled on a bit, all the time hoping that a solution to IG’s problem would pop into my head.  If he doesn’t have a dog like Beppo and doesn’t want the responsibility owning a dog entails, his easiest solution is denied him.  Since cats are quite large, relative to rat’s babies, if he chose the reptile route, he would need a pretty healthy sized constrictor but they tend to slither off if left unattended and would really upset the neighbours if they ate the wrong kind of baby. 

So, quite frankly, I am at loss.  He can’t shoot domestic cats, it’s against the law.  He can’t put down poison; that is indiscriminate and, therefore irresponsible.  The snake option isn’t one he can coil his mind around.  If he electrifies his boundary fences and a burglar cooks himself, he’ll be on a manslaughter charge.  If he lays gin traps and is in any way like me, he’ll forget where he laid them until he finds himself in A&E after a weeding session.  And yet pet owners, unless their animal mauls someone half to death, are largely immune from any claim for compensation.  There is a planting season.  If someone’s ball of fur comes along just as the green shoots are sprouting and digs the lot up, that’s it for a year.  And what would the owner and the RSPCA say?  Well, animals will be animals, it’s only natural.



Armex Sniper
150lb compound crossbow
With FREE Walther competition red dot sight!

Possibly the best quality and value for money compound crossbow available in the UK.

"Yes, yes.  But will it kill cats?"

The only thing I can suggest, IG, is a cross bow with broad heads fitted to the quarrels.  Crossbows are silent and a broad head will kill a cat pretty much instantly (so long as you can shoot straight) but please avoid practicing in your overlooked back garden in daylight.  Neighbours are nosey, tend to gossip and stupid as they can be sometimes, are often  able to put two and two together.  Also, a 150lb bow can send a quarrel a long way and it will easily punch a hole through a pine lap garden fence so think about where the quarrel will end up once it has ripped its way through the cat eviscerating it in the process.

Oh yes.  These will kill cats.
Photos courtesy of http://www.bladesandbows.co.uk
Of course I didn't ask them first and given the enormous disclaimer on their site regarding the legality of bow hunting in UK, I am positive they would not condone slotting neighbour's cats.

Please remember. Hunting with bows and crossbows is illegal in the U.K. !!!! 

But can be so satisfying.

(OK, I added that last bit myself)

Go on, IG, I KNOW you are tempted....

So You Want to Walk the Streets at Night?

Luanda once used to be known as the Nice of the West African coast.  The city surrounded a huge natural port so beautifully positioned; strategically, economically and aesthetically that the Dutch and the Portuguese fought over it.  The Portuguese, who eventually came out on top, created a wonderful boulevard, lined with palm trees and street side cafes.  The Fortaleza overlooking the Marginal as it was known was the spectacular start and finish for the Angolan Grand Prix, a race that formed part of the Springbock Series and saw famous European and American teams dueling it out during the European off season with the latest Ferraris, Fords and Porches racing through the streets of the city.  The Le Mans winning GT40’s were tested here.

Sadly, the city and more importantly its West African harbor and oil resources would be fought over again as America, itself a country born of revolution, made the same mistake it had with Cuba and failed to embrace the Angolan revolution.  The Angolans then made the same mistake as the Cubans and turned to the Soviet Union and the seeds for the proxy war were sown.  The war for Angolan independence started, officially, on the 4^th of February 1961 and ended fourteen years later at 11 O’clock (at night) on the Eleventh day of the Eleventh month of 1975.  It should have been eleven in the morning but, being Africans, they were late.

Then the proxy war started.  America and South Africa supported and supplied the rebels, and the Soviet Union and Cuba supported the government.  Twenty seven years later, in 2002, the proxy war ended.  Over a million were dead, millions were displaced and starving, the country was littered with the dangerous detritus of war and the country’s infrastructure was trashed.  Luanda, a vibrant and beautiful city of two and a half million at independence was now groaning with an extra three and a half million refugees living in abject squalor.  Raw sewage ran down the streets and oozed across the shattered pavements of the once charming marginal and into Luanda Bay.  Where once families enjoyed evening strolls along a park like avenue lit by the many cafes and restaurants on one side and soothed by the sound of gently washing surf on the other, now only the foolhardy or the desperate ran the gauntlet of the many police and military checkpoints set up amongst the rubble in the total darkness of a capital city with no power and people willing to murder for a piece of bread.  Homeless children, many of them refugees fleeing the terrors of the interior and failing to hook up with family in the city, begged in the streets and slept in drains.  Girls as young as twelve prostituted themselves in order to feed their families and were eagerly devoured by some UN employees and other expatriates who flooded the city and frequented the illicit bars and nightclubs that sprang up in broken down buildings.  The black market flourished and armed car hi-jackings were a daily occurrence.  Not a night passed without the chatter of automatic weapons and the sight of little red comets of tracer streaking through the sky.  The stench of the place was unbelievable.   It wasn't just a horrible city, it was a desperate one which is far worse.

Eleven years after the war, things couldn’t be more different.  All the main roads have been repaired and new ones built.  Now we can say that the electricity, in the city at least, is more on than off.  I have lost count of the number of new hospitals, the airport has been refurbished, and the police are almost human.  Whereas before you were doomed whatever if they stopped you, now if you are bang on legal, they will wave you on with a salute and a smile and if you are only slightly illegal, it’s still open to reasonable negotiation.  It is all terribly civilized.

The Marginal is unrecognizable.  It has been widened.  They have rebuilt the bridge over to the Ilha and have obviously reclaimed a chunk of the bay.  Neatly trimmed grass grows between well laid pavement shaded by countless palm trees.  It is a three mile long park.  There are intersections connected by dual carriageways to get you there.  It is all quite astonishing. 

Naturally, it is not just the well-heeled who are attracted to the marginal and its restaurants and other diversions.  Anyone wishing to exchange the eye bleaching view of yet more apartment blocks from their own can quickly be sucking on an ice cream, happy family in tow, strolling down the marginal with a westward view towards Brazil only interrupted by the curvature of the Earth.

Sadly, the well thought out marginal attracts not only the honest citizen but the odd and the criminal.  Often, it is hard to distinguish between the two, I pity the police, but instead of family groups, this wonderful initiative, this public investment was being dominated by thugs and groups identifiable only by their dress.  Bleach blond Mohican haircuts and a tendency to dump litter as soon as they had evacuated the contents of their beer cans.  A willingness to square up to anyone who tried to pass through ‘their territory’.  Muggers, pickpockets. If you wanted drugs or a prostitute, this was the place to go and I am certain not what the city burghers had in mind when they made this enormous investment on behalf of their citizens.

Responsibility for sorting out this distressing state of affairs fell to the local Police Chief. Clearly the old technique of declaring more than three collected together as an illegal manifestation and machine gunning them all to death was no longer acceptable.  Equally he understood that arresting them all and consigning them to an overloaded court system would serve no purpose either. They’d be out of his cells in hours and by the time the case, even if it ever came to court, arrived in front of a beak, it would have cost the taxpayer a fortune and would be dismissed through lack of evidence.  He could, of course, ask his troops on the ground to keep moving them along but we are talking about a three kilometer long and very wide boulevard so it would be like trying to keep track of the letters in a frequently stirred bowl of alphabet soup.

So do you know what this guy did?  He sent a fleet of vehicles down the marginal after midnight and rounded up everyone who looked dodgy.  Now looking dodgy in Angola isn’t exactly a crime so he didn’t arrest them and throw them into cells.  What he did was have them driven 100 kms south of the city limits (which is bush) and dumped.  They then had to make their own way back to the city.  His argument, and let’s face it, questions were bound to be asked, was that if they were old enough to be out after midnight and cause problems, they were old enough for a bit of exercise.  If the police moved into a town centre in UK, rounded up anyone who looked ‘dodgy’ and took them for a one way ride into the countryside, it would cause outrage but I bet there would be plenty of long suffering citizens who would roundly applaud the man who ordered the operation.  And that’s exactly what happened here.  As a government official being interviewed on a government controlled TV station he wasn’t exactly given a hard time but his reasoning, if we ignore the basic human rights issue, was flawless and smoothly delivered to a wide eyed, slack jawed and largely delighted audience.  No-one was hurt, the court system wasn’t clogged with petty offenders; all that happened was that those citizens hell bent on inconveniencing other citizens were themselves inconvenienced.

No-one can deny the effectiveness of the initiative; once again it is a pleasure to stroll down the Marginal.  Maybe I have been here too long but try as I might, I can see bugger all wrong with this low cost zero tolerance approach.



Misbehave here and it could be a long walk home

School Fees. Are you prepared?

"Payment in installments for the uniforms?  You always have a nice little joke for me, Sir. 
I shall just invoice you at the end of the month as usual"

I spoke to Dominic yesterday morning before his exam.

'I did what you told me to do,' he said. 'I didn't revise last night and I slept with my books under my pillow,' he reminded me (oh yeah, THAT advice).

'I thought your exam was supposed to start at nine?' I asked him.

'The exams started at Nine, Daddy, but they are doing it by year. There's some younger boys ahead of me so I guess I will be starting in about an hour as I am Grade Nine'.

Crikey. I remember how nervous I used to be before an exam. Imagine pitching up all ready to go and then being told to get in a queue. An Embasssy with all its formality can hardly present an atmosphere conducive to calming the beating heart of a fourteen year old, never mind the poor nine year old who was wheeled in first.

'Well, good luck son, call me as soon as you have finished'

And so started the long wait.

Hours later, the phone rang.

'It was easy, Daddy!'

''Really?'

'Yup. Piece of cake!'

He babbled on, more enthusiastic than I had heard him in a long time but he was making no sense.

'Can I talk to your Mother, please Dominic?' I asked him.

'He did well then,' I said as Bina came onto the phone, 'but when do we get the official results?'

'Could be as soon as Tuesday but he did impress the interviewers'

'I thought if he passed he would be going to Portugal in September but he was babbling on about having to go there soon?'

'Ah, yes, I didn't realise that either,' Bina continued, 'this was just the first stage. If he passes this one he has to go to Portugal for final selection'.

Goodness, the poor sod, he wants this so bad and the agony drags on. 'And how long is that?'

'Four days'

FOUR DAYS! Four days to select kids for a school? And they have to fly in from Lusophone countries all over the world? For goodness' sake, that's tougher than the Regular Commission's Board.

'And his fees will need paying as soon as he is accepted'. Of course. The Portuguese are slow at everything except when it comes to receiving money.

'Can you get Dollars out of the country?' I asked Bina, 'you know I am still not a resident so I am having a few problems on that score'.  Right now I am trying to get a measly five grand out so I can bid on a bronze and I have until Tuesday to do it.  So far it is not looking good.

'No problems', she said, 'get the money to me as soon as you can. Have you renewed Dominic's UK passport?'

'Yes', I lied.

Now there's a rush job for me next week. I wonder if the British Embassy still sends all applications for new and replacement passports to South Africa? If so, I am deep, deep in the shit because that'll take bloody ages. And it isn't as if I can ask for any special favours having, as a recluse, steadily ignored the dwindling invitations to British Embassy functions over the last couple of years. Oh, woe is me. I doubt I even have a suit left I can stuff my corpulence into. And, I have just remembered, I gave my blazer away to Eddie because he needed one and I thought I wouldn't need it anymore. Bollocks. I am being dragged back into the real world.

'I'll have the money and passport dropped round sometime next week', I said at the same time rejecting the idea of asking my ex-wife to get the five grand out for the bronze lest she start asking about overdue maintenance payments.

'Apparently there is a recommended tailor in Lisbon who fits them out for their uniforms, once I have the list I shall send it to you'

'Yes, dear'.

I'll have to call Roddie to bring the car. There is no way I am driving all the way into the city. This'll take more than a day. I can't face the drive in and out of that hell hole two days on the trot so I'll need somewhere to overnight. Christ, I haven't been in the city for nearly three years. For two years I have never been further than three kilometres from the Barra de Kwanza. I know, I'll bunk with Klein. As he's a sixty three year old German bachelor, he won't try and drag me out on the town.

I don't know why, but I rang my Mother. I haven't spoken to her in, ooh, I don't know how long, Dominic must have been three or four so that is over ten years. I could not remember her telephone number so I had to look it up on the BT website. I kidnapped my son, got him out of Angola and tried to hand him over to my mother in UK who refused, so after a worldwide round trip, I eventually gave up in Cape Town and paid the consequences. Naturally, I lost custody of the boy and had to take a bit of a hard time from the authorities. There's a bit of history between my Mother and I as a result.

It's a long time since I rang a UK number but the ringtone is distinctive. Then a woman answered.

'I'm not sure if I have the right number', I said, 'I want to speak to a Mrs Gowans'

'Speaking'

It didn't sound like my Mother so I thought I had better test the voice further.

'Do you have a son in Germany and one in Africa?'

'Who is this and what do you want?' she replied.

Well, that definitely sounded like my mother, thick German accent and all.

'It's Andy, your son', I said.

There was a pause.

'Andi? Wo bist du?'

I explained to her that I was still in Africa, that Dominic was trying for the Portuguese Military Academy, that little Alex was a horse of a man and that Marcia, the black girl she had refused to meet, the mother of the whore’s spawn, as she had described the issue of my loins, was lovely. She confesssed that she was seventy six and hated being old. We spoke for an hour. I had to recharge my phone another time with my last card and as I heard the beeps warning me even that charge was running out I explained my phone was about to die. I wasn’t hanging up on her, I had run out of credit.

‘I’m sorry’, she said, ‘tell Dominic…’ and the line was dead.

 
Today is Sunday.  All the shops are closed.  I cannot buy any more recharge cards until tomorrow unless I do a 140km round trip to the city.  Bugger that.

Was she sorry because my phone had run out of credit?  Was she merely about to be polite regarding my son’s exams?  Or was she sorry for letting me down when I turned up desperate with my little boy ten years ago begging for someone to look after him until I got myself organized?  Was she sorry that as a result I was condemned to stay in this truly awful place, not as a normal citizen but as an officially expelled undesirable staying here under licence with no rights whatsoever?  Was she about to finally acknowledge her half black grandson by wishing him good luck?

To be honest, I have more serious issues to deal with, starting with Dominic’s passport.  If he has breezed the exam as he seems to think he has, then I don’t want to be the one who lets him down because I was too bloody idle to renew it.