Duty

A moral or legal obligation; a responsibility

 When someone recognizes a duty, that person theoretically commits themself to its fulfillment without considering their own self-interest.

Just before I, along with a bunch of other keen young men, was commissioned I attended a morning Church service in the Royal Memorial Chapel.  When I say I attended, what I mean is we were compelled to but it represented the end of a pretty arduous year of training and confirmation of our status in society as Gentlemen.  So unless one of us went mad and shagged the vicar on the altar, in less than 24 hours we would be Officers.  And on a cold December Morning, that was bloody cool.

On the wall of the chapel is an inscription.  Actually there are hundreds, all dedicated to ex Sandhurst cadets who fell in the line of duty, and unless they rebuild and vastly extend the chapel, there is no more space for such poignant reminders of the fragility of young officers faced with concentrated enemy machine gun fire while trying to lead understandably reluctant subordinates over the top.

The inscription we all giggled about, the one I am on about read, and please hopefully Peaceful Soul, forgive me for not remembering your name but I, as well as every other about to be commissioned officer in the British Army, can remember your memorial at least… ´In loving memory of Blah Blah Blah… accidentally shot by his gun bearer´, or something along those lines.  The killer (c´mon, we were all in hysterics by now) was the final line: ´Well done thou true and faithful servant´.

Someone paid to have this carved in stone as a memorial to their dearly departed.  If he had a gun bearer he obviously must have been a sport.  Let´s hope he was a good one.

What made that service so special though, was the fact that every cadet sitting in those pews would have laid his life down for his Country that very second if need be.  Everyone who knows me recognises that I am a cynical bastard, invariably only in it for the beer (and in this case a very smart fanny magnet uniform) but I felt exactly the same way.  Had Ivan and his massed hordes been pushing their tanks through the gates of the college they would have been annihilated.

Remembering how proud and honoured we all felt to be serving our country it is sad to see how many in public service are genuinely only in it for the beer.  Mr Blair inherited a rich country as a poor man and left a financially devastated country a rich man.  But he isn´t unique.  It appears de rigueur for politicians and increasingly, anyone senior in the civil service to surround themselves with PR teams, hamstringing themselves.  All initiative and strength of character diluted in an effort to stay on the gravy train that little bit longer and hang the electorate.  Members of the Lower House are more concerned with holding onto their seats than dealing decisively, perhaps unpopularly, with the serious issues facing the country.  As Chancellor of the Exchequer, we need Mr Micawber, not George Osborne or his ilk (Gordon Brown, accurately if unkindly described by Jeremy Clarkson as a ´one eyed Scottish git´, should burn in his Presbyterian hell).  We don´t vote these people in to play the markets or sell off the family silver, all we want them to do is balance the flaming books.

Recognising that all our politicians are essentially mercenaries to gluttony, we should not be unduly concerned, for we have an Upper House the members of which are little influenced by public opinion.  While not always successful, their neutrality having been heavily watered down by successive governments creating Life Peers and their powers being limited anyway, they still do a reasonable job of sense checking proposed legislation.

Mr Clegg sees the existence of an un-elected Upper House as an affront to democracy.  Really?  Perhaps he would prefer the American model?  One in which big corporate interests dictate both domestic and foreign policy? 

The man is mad and is missing the nub of the argument entirely (hardly surprising, I am reliably informed he can´t even find his own nub in the dark).  Why do we need two houses?  Everyone in every country in the world whines about bloated civil services.  Look at Europe.  If Mr Clegg argued for a reduction in bureaucracy and was going to start with the House of Lords, I may not agree with him but I would at least be able to see his point.  Any company, their shareholders at least, could argue convincingly for a leaner, meaner board of directors.  Yet while attacking an institution of his own country, one that has played its part in providing us unprecedented political stability and a buffer to venal interests, he is in favour of subordinating the democratic right of this country´s elected parliament to set its own laws for the people it represents to the greatest unelected bureaucracy the world has ever seen.  He can’t have it both ways.

Perhaps he would be decent enough to piss off back to Spain and help them pay their bills out of his own pocket rather than ours.

What the Country needs is strong and courageous leadership, with a bit of dignity, please.  And that´s what the Army tries to provide for its soldiers, the men and women officers are charged to lead and look after, requiring them to swear their loyalty to a monarch, not a dictator, and through a simple church service, reminds its new young leaders of their Duty.

I think it should be obligatory for incumbent Prime Ministers and other senior civil servants to attend the morning service of the day of the passing out parade at the Royal Memorial Chapel, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and lend their voices to those of the young men and women who really do know what it means to selflessly serve one´s country, and sing this without blushing:

Turn those speakers up and stand to attention!  Thumbs in line with the seams of your trousers!  Press down on the thumbs!  Lock those Elbows!  Stomach in!  Chest out!  Neck in the back of the collar!  LOOK UP!  For Christ´s sake, I never knew they could stack shit that high!  Call yourselves Fucking leaders of men Gentlemen?

The lyrics for those who can´t pass the ´Cricket Test´:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.
I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,
I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

By higher (democratic) authority we are now discouraged from singing the second verse as it is considered politically incorrect,  potentially causing offence to previously disadvantaged minorities.  Remarkable then, that our leaders seem so keen on the sound of guns in distant lands and can shuffle shamelessly through the dying, the dead and the economic ruin of their own country.



And so to supper

Well, we missed afternoon tea and biscuits so Alex and I had to make do with fresh avocado, raw tuna (I called it Sushi meaning I really could not be arsed to fry it), tangerines, water melon, a salad of lettuce and tomatoes laced with cream and dill, and  thinly sliced filet of beef which Marcia did fry to perfection (like I said, I wasn´t in the frying mood tonight but I did arrange it all artistically on the plate) and the perfect seafoood sauce consisting of salad cream mixed with tomato ketchup, a dash of hot pepper and ground black pepper.

Naturally, there was a lot of juice left on our plates (of blood and citric origin) and watching Alex heave his to his lips and slurp the lot down his throat, I knew he was over his Nitrolingual overdose.

He´s a bit of a lad.  But he is Our Lad.

Can´t see that dish on any European menu, can you?  But it was great.

Alex thought so.

Turf Wars

Oh for Goodness´ sake!  It must be Tea Time by now!

From my last post readers will be aware that there is a little bit of a turf war going on at Fat Hippo´s.

I cannot say there are two sides to this, there are instead many facets to a rough diamond that will either turn out to be FL or one with all sorts of irritating and expensive internal characteristics. Expensive in the sense you paid for flawless but got screwed.  

A week ago, it looked to be Included.  After yesterday, William Hill are giving favourable odds on Slightly Included but I have the inside knowledge that the Soba, who just stuck his head round my door and told me that he had spoken to the protagonists, hinting at a possible solution, has been working on my behalf so I reckon anyone betting on VS₁ could enjoy a windfall.  I am still holding out for FL but, having endured a negotiating skills course in Dubai of all places, have already decided that I would go to VVS₂, the difference between that and FL coming, inevitably, out of my pocket.

Being white, I thought I had best keep as low a profile as I could and leave the negotiations to Marcia.  To say that Marcia was incandescent with rage when these locals came onto our land while she was away in town and planted their posts would be an understatement equivalent to describing the nuclear test programmes in the Pacific as a ´bit of Cumulo-Nimbus´.

A couple of years ago, another piece of land we owned was occupied by primarily discharged Angolan Army veterans.  Now, as an ex serviceman myself, I had a degree of sympathy for them for, as any ex serviceman knows, once you are out, you are pretty much on your own and pretty much unemployable.  In a place like Angola, you are stuffed.  I did help a former employee of mine, also an ex serviceman, set up a security company getting him his first contract which employs only ex servicemen.  They are disciplined, paid well by local standards and intensely loyal.  A fact that is increasingly being recognised and the company´s client portfolio is growing.  And my old, loyal employee is now building his second house having moved out of his rented shack a year ago.  I feel that friends should stick together as tightly as do Asian families in UK.  They do seem to do rather well, don´t they?

Still, losing the serious investment the land represented was a bit of a kick in the guts but Marcia said she would deal with it and left immediately.  An hour or so later, having heard nothing, I rang her.  I could barely hear her over the noise of automatic gunfire. ´I can´t hear you, Darling,´ she said, ´because of the gunfire… the land is being cleared now, though, so don´t worry!´

I tried to picture the mother of my son standing, Rommel like, in the turret of an armoured car calmly directing machine gun fire on those foolish enough to occupy her land.  Shortly afterwards, this time me behaving like Pontius Pilate, I sold the land and washed my hands of it and bought the land here at the Barra de Kwanza instead.

I want to retire to the Barra do Kwanza.  I want to spend my days in peace and harmony with my new neighbours fishing and trying to write like Hemingway.  I don´t want to spend the rest of what could be a considerably curtailed life passing backwards and forwards through the village in an armed convoy and manning the balustrades at night.  Of course I am angry.  Of course I´d like to tie the guy responsible to a tree and rupture his internal organs with relentless blows of a rubber hose.  Yes, it would be nice to see one of Marcia´s infantry firepower demonstrations and even nicer if I was allowed to give a demonstration of my marksmanship but, unlike the land at Benfica, I want to live here.  In peace.

I agreed with Marcia that we have legal title to the land.  I agreed with Marcia that she had every right to throw them off.  I agreed with Marcia that we would win any litigation.  I agreed with Marcia that ´they´ didn´t deserve any of our largesse (she has stopped credit in the shop and banned me from doing the water runs or giving a lift to anyone but I got round it by giving old Joaquim the keys to my truck so it isn´t technically me that is giving them lifts although it is my truck.  A decent lawyer would have me off in no time.).  I tried to tell her that I did understand.  After all, how homicidal would you feel if, leading your three year old down to the river at the bottom of your property you came across some git manning an improvised checkpoint, a bit of rope strung between two posts supporting a crude stop sign to be told that this was now private property?

Asking Marcia to be reasonable was like asking the Americans to adopt an equable and democratic foreign policy.  My fear was the knowledge of what impetuousness by the Western Powers has done for their homeland security.  Seeing the Queen shaking hands with Martin McGuiness must have stuck in many a craw but it was better than bombing the crap out of Afghanistan and all its consequences.  A sort of firm patience and skilful diplomacy by the British resulted in a handshake that implicitly acknowledged the sovereignty of the Queen over Northern Ireland.  The six counties are more or less at peace so who won in the end?  Well, everyone involved really, and isn’t that a nice outcome?  But I realised I would have a job on to convince Marcia to wait generations for an equable solution.  It took so long in Ireland because there were some serious wounds on both sides that were suppurating rather than healing.  What I needed to do was avoid the wounds in the first place.  After all, we had only suffered a minor nick in the flesh.  As an ex soldier and then irregular, I know all to well the consequences of war and was keen that Marcia should at least grasp that.  We weren´t talking about Right or Wrong as Mr Blair so glibly quipped before launching Britain into an un-winnable conflict that would contribute so much to the country´s financial and moral bankruptcy, we were talking about the future harmony we could enjoy within this impoverished community.

I asked her what the roof of our restaurant was made of.  I asked her how much it had cost.  I asked her how much it will have cost us once it is all wired and plumbed in and full of equipment and furniture.  ´But we will earn all that back in less than a year´, she said.

´Not if someone comes along during the night armed with five litres of petrol and puts a match to the thatch,´ I pointed out.  It would take too long to explain what a Pyrrhic Victory was but I think she got the idea.

So yesterday the Soba pitched up with two intermediaries.  One which he hoped would be acceptable to Marcia and I, and another clearly there to represent the antagonists.  I noticed, with regret, that the Soba was pissed as a rat but had dressed himself up in my old No. 4 Dress uniform jacket that I gave him a while back (very Daktari and colonial British Administrator).

Marcia quickly eliminated any doubt as to title.  She then went on to confirm that the president of the Angolan Council of Barristers was a relative and that I had the money to pursue litigation into the next century.  All of which I reluctantly acknowledged but made a mental note to ask her for a squint at the bank statements as clearly, I was flusher than I thought.  When it comes to family, you cannot allow your wife to lose face so have to at least publicly agree even if you are silently begging God to strike her dumb.

The woman sat at the other end of the table from me was the mother of the man who had brokered the deal.  I could see why she was there.  Obviously if, as the antagonists were now contending, the sale of the disputed piece of land was illegal and we had lost our money, her son was in my sights at least.

I thought she was gorgeous.  Petite, perfectly formed and with beautiful teeth.  Look, I wasn´t sizing up a horse but in a country where dental treatment is even worse than that offered by the NHS in UK, it is rare to see such a stunning smile.  Even if her son (coincidentally the one who tried to kill his girlfriend outside my shop the other day causing me to throttle him half to death) was her first, and they do start young here, I figured she must be knocking on her half century. 

Everything she said made sense.  Every time, in her own very calm way she made a point, the Soba, now sticking into a bottle of my wine would interrupt.  As soon as he did, she would stop speaking immediately and lower her head and eyes in respect.  I wondered what she would have made of herself in a different environment, one where she was treated as an equal and had good access to a decent education.  I wanted to brain the Soba, knock him out.

I interrupted the Soba.  ´I need to go for a walk with this young lady´, I looked directly at the woman opposite me, ´Do you mind?  Just a hundred yards or so…´

As we walked the short distance so I could show her what I thought was mine and what had been taken from me, I asked her name.

I had a girlfriend called São, I said, she looked just like you.  In fact, had I married her, she´d be the same age as you.

I didn´t marry my São, I replied to New São, because her Padre said she could not marry anyone outside her Church and that kind of religion scares me.

´Did you love her, Sr Tomás?´

‘Yes I did, Donna São, very much indeed but it was all a long time ago´

´Was she a baixinho (shortarse) like me?´

´You are exactly as I remember her´.

I showed São the marker post they had knocked down, the amount of my land they had taken but really I was thinking about my São.  This, I said standing on the old marker post and indicating towards the fallen tree, was where I wanted to put my fence in.  Everything to the left, I would give to the Povo to use as their port.  To the right, that would be my bit.  I didn´t mention the clinic or the water, Marcia had done that I was sure.

Today the Soba pitched up saying that the intermediaries had spoken to everyone and now they all wanted to talk to us.  I told him to wait until Marcia got back from town.

I really love Marcia.  I have been with her longer now than any other woman and she is the mother of my beloved Alex but right now I hope that São, or her unexpected reincarnation at least, can quench the embers of bloody warfare because at my age, the last thing I expected to be doing was polishing the edge of my sword with a steel.

São, arguably the most beautiful woman in the world.  All 5´2" of her.

After all, I am bloody tired of prejudice and extremism in all their forms.

Marcia has just arrived and seen São´s photo on my laptop as I write this.  If I fuck up the next five minutes, I could be fighting on two fronts... and as so manycommanders in the past have realised to their cost, such a position is almost invariably untenable.

53, going on 90

I may have mentioned that a few days ago my heart started to misbehave again and Marcia, reacting like all wives do when they think their husbands might pull through, emptied half a bottle of Nitrolingual down my throat and, I am sure, had I not regained consciousness, would have stuffed my nostrils full of Inderal tablets.

I never noticed, and I guess the emergency being over Marcia didn´t either but the spray bottle of Nitro remained on my bedside cabinet.

Today I was bashing happily away on the new laptop.  I had just been to see the boss of the company from which I had been renting my excavator and told him that I had paid for three effing days and only received one day of work out of the machine and he backed down.  So I was bloody chuffed.  Now I will get two more days but with a new, lighter machine, ideal for smoooothing.

So I was working on the accounts (which are well overdue) when I smelt something familiar.  Alex was bouncing up and down on the bed while watching Little Red Tractor on TV so he was happy.  I was busy trying to decide how hard I could load up capital expenditure and whether I could jimmy the necessary receipts and then there was that smell again.

I glanced over at Alex and in his hand he had a spray bottle of red liquid.

FUCK, JESUS, SHIT!!!!

´ALEX!  Did you spray this in your mouth?´ He is only three and was terrified so he lied.  ´No Daddy´

´OK Son, it´s alright, give Daddy a kiss´.

His breath reeked of the stuff and the bottle was half empty.

There is no 999 or 911 here.  Marcia was in town with one truck, the other was dead,  The nearest hospital was two hours away and just trying to check a patient in would take another couple of hours always assuming I had the cash on me they would demand which I didn´t.  I thought about ringing Marcia but then realised, what´s the point? All I would do is provoke a mad rush back from town and the death of my beloved wife and mother of our beautiful son in some horrible car smash.

Basically, there was fuck all I could do.

Alex went very pink.  It was hard to hold him down, he was off the wall.  He was panting like a post race greyhound.  Then he fell asleep and try as hard as I could, I couldn´t feel his heart it was just so slow.  I died a thousand deaths and offered myself unreservedly to whatever horrible fate the Almighty may have chosen for me in exchange for this little boy´s life.

Then Marcia rang.

`I have your Visa charge card´ she said, dead chuffed. ´And you´ll have your passport back next week!...´

and then since I didn´t ooze joyful backflips down the phone...

´How´s Alex?´

´Fine, but I think you should come home´

Now that was pathetic but I defy anyone reading this faced with the same circumstances to come up with anything better.

In the meantime, Alex slept in my arms.

Before Marcia got home, Alex was awake and leaving footprints across the ceiling.  He demanded I take him over to Rico´s and terrorised them as well.  ´Them´ were a bunch of BP employees on one of those management training sessions.  They were very impressed with how high Alex could bounce off the sofas and confessed they had never seen a three year old break dancing on dining tables.  Given English cynicism, I wasn´t sure whether I should be proud of my son or be expected to shoot myself but I was so pleased to see him alive I told them to find another table.  Sort of.

This was clearly a very smart management session as they had brought not only a photographer, but a film crew and even an artist whose unasked for caricature of me, I feel, captured my mood and about how old I felt at the time.

The phone rang.  It was Marcia, now at home, demanding to know where the hell we were.  Like all mothers, she just knew something was up, had set fire to the only decent tarmac leading south from the Capital and was ready to stuff into that dickhead of a husband she had left in charge for less than a day.

I explained to her what had happened.  She was mortified that she had left the Nitrolingual by the bed and I said, ´Let´s just be more careful in future, after all, I should have noticed as well´.  To be honest, I was just too knackered to have a fight and I don´t know how many times I have told Marcia to keep the medicines hidden away.  Seriously, if I find them lying around, I throw them in the bin and they are fucking expensive here.

Marcia is pretty angry about the way the locals have come in and nicked a chunk of our land.  She is young and feisty, twenty odd years my junior, and up for a punch up.  All I want is to settle down, to try and write like Hemingway and go fishing.  So long as the boy´s school fees are covered, I´m happy.  I have paid for a local clinic and also a water purification plant.  After the land invasion, though, I agreed with Marcia that we should convert the clinic into a few extra cottages and then, like that arsehole dickhead of an instructor I had in the Army, taunt the thirsty and exhausted by pouring drinking water into the ground.

Much as you can hate anyone, though, who could wish the anguish of watching a child suffer on anyone, even if they are complete fucking arseholes.

´We need a clinic here, Marcia´ I said.

´I´ll go and see the Administrator tomorrow morning´, she replied.

I asked Alex how he felt.  He said, ´Let´s fight Daddy´ and punched me in the balls.

Who´s going to look their best after not one of their best days?

Honest(l)y



"Spot of bother Sir?"  "No not really, just another boundary dispute."  "Should I bring you your red tunic, Sir, you know, blood and all that?"  "Thank you.  Oh Corporal! My brown trousers as well, please"  "Very good Sir"

It´s not that I have been lazy with the blog, it´s just that I have been so busy.

One big problem was my laptop dying.  I would like to blame Bill Gates and his crappy software but, truth be known, I was stupid enough to play football indoors with Alex and he scored a direct hit on a full bottle of beer which emptied itself over the keyboard.

Now kids don´t like to see adults scream in panic, this sets off a sort of primordial chain reaction that only expensive therapy can calm so it was with immense self control that I confined myself to an,´Oh Gosh!  Hang on a sec Alex, just let me mop this up…´

Well, it was stuffed and Angola is not the place to be with a stuffed up laptop.  I rang an Angolan mate of mine who arranged for two engineers from the local IT store in town to come out and take a look.  Bring a caddy drive that´ll take my hard drive I told them before they left.  When they got here I knew I was doomed.

I know it is very wrong to judge individuals by their appearance and the fact their laptops are covered in inane cartoon stickers but even for Geeks, they were off the flaming wall.

´Did you bring the caddy drive?´ I asked.

´Don´t need one´ they said, ´We´ll just pop your drive into this laptop´.

Now all this was especially bloody frustrating as my bother will be visiting from Germany within the next month and has already bought a brand new laptop for me complete with all legal software which he will hand carry out.

´Will it fit?´ I asked.

Well of course it didn´t.  The dickheads didn´t even have the right tools.  I just wanted a caddy drive then I could have hooked it up to Dominic´s laptop with it´s vast hard drive and transfer all my info and use that until the new laptop arrived.  They wanted to take my laptop away.  No way was I letting it out of my sight.  I made them ring NCR and ask about a caddy drive and, having done so they said NCR was out of stock so I had best let them take my laptop.

To cut a long story short, I lost my rag, sent them packing and lashed out on a new laptop.  When Marcia came back with it the next day, bought from NCR and guaranteed to accept my old hard drive, she also had a caddy drive which the helpful man at NCR said I would need…

Of course, my hard drive was incompatible with the new $1,000 laptop.  But the $50 caddy drive worked.  We tried to take the new laptop back.  I had been fastidious with keeping all the packaging intact but was told that opening the back had invalidated any guarantee.

Oh, there is so much more I can tell you.  Just when I thought I was getting fit and healthy again so spent a day filling my raised beds and planting 100 palm tree saplings, Marcia found me collapsed by the door and sprayed enough Nitrolingual down my throat to leave be bouncing off the walls with eyes like bastard saucers.   Doggy gave birth to ten pups in a hole in the bush so I made a box up and placed them all in the restaurant bar, they are all doing well but I fear Number Three is up the chuff as well so am expecting another load soon.  The argument over territory with the locals continued to rage so after the last fiasco of plant drowning in the river I decided not to mess about and hired a bloody great excavator which worked intimidatingly for precisely three hours before throwing its fan belts and expiring in a cloud of steam allowing the locals to come in during the night and plant their posts.  Since I am not made of the same stuff as Lts. Chard and Bromhead, I did not dig out my regimental sword and wade in but meekly observed, ringing Marcia instead.  Of course, at 4 o´clock the following morning and with a gutful of whisky, I was all for it but by then the locals had gone home.

I was, therefore, in absolutely the right mood to read, once I managed to get on line again, Bambi Basher´s article on Telling It As It Is and then Cameron´s prevarication over his pre election commitment to a referendum on Europe.  So I sent the Prime Minister an email telling him how badly I felt he was letting the side down and he wrote back immediately (clearly he has a bit on his mind as well and can’t sleep either) giving me the following link to the e-Referendum on Europe he had just set up:

Europe Referendum: YOU decide!

Now I thought that was pretty damn sporting of him.

Just when it was all going swimmingly...

It went swimmingly.


Now THAT's bogged in#

What kind of fuckwit, what kind of degenerate moron, what kind of certifiable lunatic would go driving bucket first into a river looking for deeep water to wash his machine in?  Only the machine I am renting at hundreds of bucks an hour to fill in and level my land after the floods.  Only the machine without which all work stops and I go back to picking fluff out of my navel.  And then instead of coming to me (after all, I am known as a very reasonable and patient man never prone to violent outbursts) try to dig himself out and then chain himself to the flimsier of my two trees and haul it out of the ground?  My tree that it is, not the effing machine.

And then to cap it all, decides he has had enough and in spite of me and Nice Paul begging him not to, drops both buckets into the mud, switches off and fucks off home.  Now there is no way this thing can be towed out as there is certainlyu no way the engine can be started between high tides to engage the hydraulics.

I guess it is bloody clean now...

Of course, I am not paying for it any more but will I get the money back I had to pay to have the thing transported here in the first place? Now if I want the job finished, I have to find another bit of plant available and pay through the nose to have that one brought here.  Jeez.

Google Earth has finally put up updated imagery of the Barra de Kwanza so I can give you before and after photos of the Great Inundation (otherwise known as God's Wrath, I really must stop taking the piss).  I think you will agreee, considering the very obvious loss of land, I wasn't exactly being lily livered when I grabbed Alex and headed for high ground in the truck...

Before...

And after.

He loves a good laugh as well

Now that May has drawn to a close, I am reminded that the contractor responsible for building our new home, the new shop and finishing off the restaurant promised, when I paid him on the 4th January, to have the job completed in six weeks. This means he is now 20 weeks behind schedule.

This would drive a normally sane man wild with frustration, crazy with suffused rage. Anyone who knows me would hardly drop me in the category of ‘sane’, inclining their opinions rather more toward the psychopathic end of the emotional spectrum.

Clearly, there is something about the Barra do Kwanza that can stay a maniac’s hand, soothe a fevered brow and quench a raging thirst for blood because I have still not lost my temper. Quite the contrary. Not only have I maintained a for me, highly unusual sang froid, I am serene rather than irritable, have successfully given up whisky, have lost quite a bit of weight and am far more active than I have been for years. I have gone fishing and shooting and, together with Dominic the company of whom I have enjoyed for nearly two weeks, have more or less taught little Alex to swim. I have filled in and levelled a 25 x 50 metre plot for my seed beds, I now enjoy excellent relations with my erstwhile nemesis and neighbour Rico, and Doggy, the shameless hussy, has got herself pregnant the father being Rico’s very impressive and unusual tiger striped hound. In addition a German tourist company want to start using Flordita as soon as it is finished and I am only a hair’s breadth away from seizing control of my security company and ousting the two local directors. Both trucks are on the road and the shop is doing so well Marcia is on almost daily resupply runs. The sea is behaving itself and the weather is gorgeous.

Rather than fume at the delays and bemoan lost income, I have decided that life is good. There is no hurry, the family are well fed, happy and enjoying themselves and it is all miles better than living in the city and reporting at Oh 7 Hundred hours for tedious duty every morning.

Still, you can have too much of a good thing and I really would like to open so I was very pleased to see our new home, after much sawing and planing of rough timber, rise up out of the ground. Naturally, having approved the design and having admitted that it looks good so far, Marcia had to have a dig at me for positioning the house incorrectly. Apparently it is the wrong way round, whatever that means. I aligned it the way I did so that I could sit on my veranda and watch the sun sink into the palm trees. Marcia, evidently, would have preferred a view of the road. Happily, she realises it is too late to change and is looking forward instead to her fully fitted Bosch kitchen, complete with dishwasher.

An automatic dishwasher in Angola is rather like having an ice cube making machine in the Arctic. So far in Africa I have always managed to stumble along using the much more environmentally friendly ‘maid’. But I suppose a dishwasher would be handy on Sundays when maids have to go to church and enjoy a ‘rest day’ (legal idleness clearly invented by God and enforced by communists). Marcia did sell me on the idea though when she reminded me of just how little was left of my bone china dinner service which, wherever you buy it, is not guaranteed Maid Proof. Good point, well made I thought but if this is a cue for me to lash out on another load of expensive crockery to go with her smart kitchen, she can dream on, I can’t afford it. If it was up to me, we’d be eating out of army mess tins and everyone would get an issue of KFS and if they lost a knife, a fork or a spoon, tough shit.

The other day, Dominic told me that this had been the best holiday he had ever had. Considering we were both up to our elbows in blood and guts at the time, I was a little surprised but he insisted.

You see, Chris?  Even kids can catch fish here...

He has been out fishing nearly every day. Last night he had his first go at night fishing, beach casting on a stretch of white sand he and his companions had all to themselves with a roaring camp fire over which they could roast their chicken legs. He is back on the beach again today, determined to catch one last big one before he goes back to his mother tomorrow.

For a few days we enjoyed the company of Marcia’s nieces which was fun even if the numbers meant we had to turn the shop into a dormitory at night but for the kids it was brilliant. Fancy a midnight snack? The little beggars must have hoovered away half Marcia’s biscuits and sticky buns and no wonder they were all hyper and up at six in the morning with all that fizzy pop inside them.

Dominic, Dead Bambi and Mad Dog

They made up for their insatiable greed for sugary snacks when Dominic and I shot a Bushbuck and I needed able bodies to carry water and sluice down cutting tables and floors. There were very good reasons why I could not gut it in the field, instead having to get the hell away from the scene of the crime as fast as possible (note to self: it is all very well trying to drive away in tactical mode using moonlight instead of headlights but remember to fill the windscreen washer bottle first and then you might not run slap bang into the tree that wasn’t there on your way in), so I performed the grisly task in the Jango when we got home.

Yes kids, this is where your food comes from...

Through the initiative of Dominic, this job was gory but none too arduous

The bugger was too heavy for me to haul over a beam so I asked Dominic to nip down the shop and see if there were any drinkers there who could lend a hand on the rope. Mindful of the need for a bit of discretion, an attribute which my feebleness at hoisting had encouraged me to abandon, he instead unhooked the chain block and tackle from the engine hoist and dragged it back to the Jango. This lad shows real sparks of brilliance at times but then I remembered there had been a generator hanging off it waiting for new engine mounts. It’s alright, Dad, he assured me, I blocked it up before letting it down. The sump isn’t on the ground? No Dad. You know what a sump is Dominic? He sighed. That expressive measured inhalation followed by a slow release accompanied by rolling eyes scanning the heavens or, as in this case, the thatched roof of the Jango. A sump, Dad, he said, is a reservoir, a low point which collects a liquid. In this case the sump is what we, translated from Portuguese, call an oil pan.

I could only stare at him dumbfounded.

Halfway there?  That loony hippy HFW would be proud of me.

How's that for a chunk of venison?

I have been busy clearing away the last remnants of the huts that were destroyed by the apocalyptic flood God visited upon me when he decided that a lifetime’s worth of savings were nothing more than grounds for a test of character. As I watched the front loader tear up the Eucalyptus posts that until a few months ago had supported cottages, I had to have a hearty ‘wipe moist tears of mirth from eyes’ laugh. Like most blokes, I do enjoy a good joke. The wood I could salvage and I have a big pile of it now but the bordão, the stalks of massive palm leaves I had used to clad the buildings for a bit of ethnic authenticity, were shot. So that was all stacked in the burning pile.

I can’t remember what I had been doing that was important enough to allow Dominic and his cousins to drop off my radar but when I suddenly got missile lock I realised they had barricaded themselves into what will be the bar of the restaurant and had a bloody disco going. I have cleared minefields and been shot at countless times so the last thing I was going to do was to push my luck by barging in on a load of teenagers so I asked Marcia what was going on.

Every weekend we get loads of visitors from Luanda to the Barra do Kwanza, all of them eager to escape the stress of the city and enjoy a bit of unspoilt nature, rare indeed in Angola. While the sun is shining, not one of them pauses to wonder what will happen once it gets dark, the rather chilly onshore wind starts to blow and the sound of the surf, so soothing as the waves sparkle in the sun, at night turn into monstrous masses of water beating inexorably at the sand which, all too late they realise will be their bed for what promises to be a night somewhat less romantic than that portrayed in the films. I have been woken up at two in the morning by people begging for a bit of floor space in the Jango or at least a few scraps of wood with which to make a fire.

Marcia, who had been busy in the shop, had no idea what the kids were up to. She did say they had come in and bought loads of cakes, biscuits and fizzy drinks. Now this was quite remarkable since, as far as I knew, none of them had any money so I was mildly concerned I might, Fagin like, be host to a bunch of pubescent kleptomaniacs. On this point, Marcia was quick to reassure me. The kids had been selling my bordão to the weekend’s usual crop of itinerant beach dwellers.

To me it was scrap. To anyone faced with a cold and gritty night on the beach, it was a building material. To the thirteen year old issue of my loins, it was a business opportunity.

I was so proud.

And so sun the sets on the Happy Campers of the Barra do Kwanza

Beef. Still expensive at half the price...

I have been a bit crook over the last ten days or so. Actually, at one point I thought I was dying and then I began to worry why it was taking so long. Had I been in possession of a bathtub, it would have been a most convenient repository for my festering body, all Marcia having to do being sluicing me down with a bucket of water every now and then. I shan’t go into gruesome detail save to say it was awful. In Africa we must all carry the germs, bacteria and parasites endemic to the region but a normal, healthy individual’s immune system beats these back into a benign state of equilibrium. If one does get the upper hand, however, weakening the body, the rest of the opportunistic little bastards dive in to give their host a good kicking so what may have started out as a bout of malaria quickly degenerates into Typhoid, Dysentery and Bronchitis, the muscular spasm occasioned by a hacking cough eliciting unpleasant and uncontrollable explosive venting at the other end.

I was so ill, I could eat no food whatsoever for four days without quickly transferring it from the very temporary home that was my ravaged stomach into the bucket which by then had become my constant companion. I could not even bear the smell of scotch, let alone get one down my neck and have not touched a drop since so some good has come from all my suffering. I can’t see alcoholics getting such treatment on the NHS, though, unless they were admitted for something else and were infected by the food and hygiene standards.

Still, I am on my feet now (I am lighter on my feet by several kilos as well) and, unusually sober, can start considering the birthday party Marcia wants to throw for me on Saturday. Marcia has been planning this for a while but whenever she asked me anything at all about my preferences while I was in extremis, I hardly encouraged her. Who would I like to invite? No-one. What did I want to eat? I gagged at the thought. Did I want a cake? Marcia, please go away and die a thousand deaths…

With only a day to go it is really too late for me to invite anyone but I know that Nice Paul will come and Dominic will be here so that’ll do me. Marcia, though, has invited loads of people so the place will be humming. With a lot of mouths to feed Marcia and I decided that we needed plenty of Picanha (top sirloin cap) and Lombo (tenderloin). We decided that 20kgs of Picanha and 14 of Lombo would be about right. The Lombo we would barbecue whole, some of the Picanhas we could roast and slice thinly, others we would cut thick so they stand on their edges and grill Brazilian style with plenty of rock salt on the edges before searing the sides quickly and then butterfly cutting the slices open. We would also have plenty of sauce chasseur, sweet potatoes, grilled plantain, salads, coleslaw, beans in palm oil, funge, quisaca (a spinach made of pounded manioc leaves and peanuts), lobster salad, crabs etc. No one will leave hungry, that’s for sure.

Picanha (Top Sirloin Cap or Coulotte)

Lombo (Teenderloin)

I will be honest with you, I have no feel for the price of things nowadays. Beyond that which interests me, I haven’t a clue. I know how much fags and whisky are but a litre of milk? No idea. So I was more than a little stunned when I saw the invoice for the meat. US850 (£531). Gulp. How can meat be so bloody expensive? And these were wholesale rates from Marcia’s supplier. We sell meat in the shop so I trotted down there and looked in the freezer. Sure enough, we were selling, albeit smaller cuts, at much more than the wholesale price per kilo, and we could not sell it fast enough. Gosh.

Last year, an international survey declared Luanda the most expensive city in the world. Clearly, then, this was an example. I wondered what the same quantity and type of meat would cost in UK, so I went on line and had a look. I was in for another shock. Had I bought that meat in UK from Smithfields, the bill would have come to $1472 (£920). Crickey! That’s only a hundred quid short of being double the price in Angola! How is that possible? UK has excellent worldwide communications and easy access to world markets, a huge and efficient transport and distribution infrastructure and loads of competitive retailers so how come Angola, with all its problems, can sell imported meat cheaper, nearly half the price they do in UK? I wonder what the wholesale price would have been in Brazil or Argentina…

By the way, I realise I do know the price of one other commodity, fuel. Petrol is 60 US cents a litre, about 37p. Diesel is 40 cents (25p a litre). SL cigarettes are $1 (62p), imported fags double that and whisky (Grants, White Horse, Famous Grouse) $12 (£7.50). Carlsberg beer is $1.25 (78p) for a 33cl bottle. These are retail prices. Wholesale you can knock a third off.

Since I am evidently in the mood, I nipped down the shop to check out the prices of some other staples. Bear in mind these are our shop prices so there is quite a mark up. Thai polished jasmine rice is $1.24 (78p) a kilo, bread is 30 cents (19p) a loaf, eggs are $4 (£2.50) per dozen, milk is $1.50 (93p) per litre, bottled mineral water is 83 cents (52p) per litre, 100% fruit juice litre $3.50 (£2.18), 250g coffee $3.50 (£2.18), sugar kilo $2 (£1.25), butter 250g $1.50 (93p), choc chip cookies 150g $1.50 (93p), tinned fruit salad 450g $2.50 (£1.56), flour kg $2.50 (£1.56), cooking oil litre $3 (£1.87) tinned tuna 185g $1.50 (93p). I have no idea how the grocery prices compare with UK and I can’t be buggered to look them up. I left UK over twenty years ago but I have a sneaking suspicion if I ever went back there I would be left slack jawed at the prices. Perhaps someone will post a comment and let me know how much a pint of decent bitter is.

Anyway, I no longer feel as aggrieved as I did when I first saw that meat invoice so I might actually enjoy eating it rather than choking on it while mentally working out how much each mouthful was costing me or, worse still, calculating just how much the scraps left on the plates would come to.

So tomorrow, I shall just be grateful I have made it to 53 and shall do my best to stack on all the kilos I just lost so if you turn up, keep your hands and feet away from my mouth and you should be OK.

Fat Hippo's

I am not much in the mood for writing. I spent all last night alternatively shivering and sweating myself through another bout of Malaria and, of course, I had forgotten to get in a resupply of Sulphate of Quinine after the last episode a couple of months back so I just had to chew on the pillow and be brave. Marcia was very considerate and with all the tossing and turning, the groaning and the staccato rattle of chattering teeth, she asked me if I might not be more comfortable on the sofa instead of the matrimonial bed. To cap it all, I had to make a sudden dash to the toilet and fell arse over tit in the dark when I tripped up over Three who with inexplicable loyalty, insists on sleeping on my doorstep. All in all, last night was the pits and I hardly feel any better today. Even my whisky tastes foul. That’s how bad it is.


Still, the work must go on. Now that the carpenters are here I cannot let a mere lethal disease stand in the way of progress. Pflicht is Pflicht and Dienst is Dienst so regardless that today is a communist worker’s paradise holiday, I dragged myself out there. If the lads were giving up a day getting smashed on the beach, it was the least I could do.

After days of seemingly just restacking and shuffling wood around, Robin the Filipino carpenter is really getting stuck in. His reorganisation was designed to create for himself an efficient working area and, judging by the speed he is planing and shaping the timber, it was worth the effort and I am starting to believe him when he says he’ll have the first two buildings up in six weeks. Now I know that even by geological time frames that is way behind schedule but if he can achieve it, I might just forgive his boss. Even Marcia has stopped giving me the most merciless hard time for employing a mate to do the job, compounding the error by paying him up front, and if I wait until about 2 am when she is really fast asleep, I can crawl into bed with her. So long as I don’t have malaria, of course.

Considering that Robin is working all this timber essentially by hand, I was very impressed with the pile of wood panels he had finished by lunchtime. The buildings will be double skinned and with the thickness of the panels, they will be all but bullet proof. They will be substantial structures and if the sea gets really nasty again, then at least I will be able to paddle away in my own Noah’s Arks.

I have one of these touch pads on my laptop, by the way. I hate them, much preferring a mouse but I agree that they save space. But with sweat pouring off me like a thrashed horse, I seem to be shorting it out or something so keep having to wring my hands dry with a towel and then when I wipe the touch pad, it does select all, delete in one single sweep. Like I say, it’s not really my day today.

There has been an entertaining exchange of comments on a few of my recent posts not least those regarding the name of my enterprise. One suggestion for the sport fishing bit was ‘Gobber’s Shark Expeditions’. Now I realise that this remark was made with all flippancy (although cleverly alluding to my nickname at Sandhurst) but once I started to think about it, it wasn’t as daft as it first appeared. Then I thought about the name of the business, Flordita. It was supposed to be Floridita, in honour of Hemingway’s favourite watering hole in Havana but a typo by the licencing authority in Angola meant it lost a ‘i’ and would henceforth and forever be Flordita.

Now that sounds very ‘twee’. It gives more an impression of sombre moods, maitre d’s, sommeliers, hors d’oeuvres and amuse bouches than a rip roaring grill restaurant and bar with scantily clad waitresses and even scantier clad sport fishermen swinging from the rafters and chugging beers. Clearly then, while Flordita would be an admirable name for the big a la carte restaurant I will build, for the grill and bar, it is a toss name. Now that Chris over on Grow, Fish, Eat had me going, I got to thinking and decided that ‘Fat Hippo’s’ would be an excellent name. Think about it. There you are a roughy toughy oil worker on shore leave and with cash burning a hole in your pocket and someone asks you where you are going for the weekend. Would you rather say, ‘Well, actually darling, I thought I might spend a quiet evening dining at Flordita’, or would you rather say, ‘I am going to get blitzed at Fat Hippo’s, shag the new waitress and then go fishing at Gobber’s’?

Chris has kindly said he will think about a logo. Between bouts of shivering, sweating and chundering, I’ve been thinking about it too. Does anyone remember the old Coppertone sunscreen adverts which showed a little girl having her bikini bottom peeled off by a puppy revealing her tan lines? Well how about a modern version of that but with a busty beauty suspended by her bikini bottom, revealing a nice bit of pert botty, on the tooth of a grinning fat hippo? Now that’s the sort of class logo I think speaks volumes for the quality of my joint:

Fat Hippo’s Grill Bar and Whorehouse (Double Green Shield Stamps on Saturdays).

Bugger my drivel...

...you have to read this post over on Bambi Basher:

http://bashingbambi.blogspot.com/2012/04/lifted-from-old-comrades-facebook-page.html

"...This did not please the missus, as she was relaxing in there at the time surrounded by floating petals and candles, although she did say that the sight of my ringpiece flashing like a brake light was impressive..."

Please, stop it, my sides hurt too much.

Stinky Fish and the need to slot Pigs

I live in a small breeze block shack with an unlined wriggly tin roof and it gets bloody hot during the day so I usually leave the door wide open when I am in there reading or typing. I was sort of getting myself psyched up for an hour or two of keyboard bashing by sucking on a cold Cuca and choking down a stump when the doorway was darkened by this bloke. Not at all unusual. When you run a trading post in Africa and there is no one in it, they will come knocking on your door, even if the lights are off and it is two in the morning. What was unusual was that this man was white, clearly not a vagabond and seemed a little uncertain, especially when the bloke that returned his gaze was also white and clearly an unshaven, shirtless vagrant.

‘Erm, I’m sorry’, he stammered, ‘I was told that there was a cantina here?’  Marcia hates her emporium being called a 'Cantina' but she'll have the African equivalent of Harrod's pretty soon.

‘You found it, buddy, what can I get you?’ There was something about this lad. He was around thirty but anyone young enough to be my son is still a kid. As soon as he opened his mouth I reckoned I knew him. I had no idea from where but his voice set something off in the sodden recesses of my mind. Then there was his build, the confident way he carried himself and the sharp, angular features of his face. What really got me though was his bemused, almost apologetic smile and the eyes which stared straight at me, not scurrying rat like from corner to corner of his eye sockets. It may have been a bit of a surprise for him to discover a white man in a shack literally at the end of the road but his demeanour betrayed none of it.

I realised I was grinning like an idiot as I hauled the shop keys off my desk and guided him along the path so I said, ‘Look, I am in a really good mood because my son has just been accepted into a decent school in England’. This was true. I had only just read the email confirmation. So this lad, well spoken and although casual, elegantly dressed looked at me, three day’s growth and dressed in raggedy shorts, no top, my bare feet kicking up the dust and clutching a smouldering stub in my fist and said, ‘That’s wonderful. Congratulations!’

I unlocked the shop, invited him in and asked him what he wanted as I instinctively made for the beer cooler.

‘No, I don’t want beer’ he said, ‘I just came for cigarettes’

Bugger. It was late Sunday afternoon and we get hammered at weekends. We had run out of pretty much everything and fags were on the list of don’t haves. A broken truck or a bank system that was down could mean a resupply could be days away so for that reason I jealously guard my stash of fags and whisky.

‘Come back to my room, I can help you out with a couple of packets’

He handed me four fifty kwanza notes and asked me if that was enough.

‘How long you been in Angola?’ I asked.

‘About three months, but I have been here before.  How about you?’

‘Knocking on nineteen years’

‘Bloody hell! Doing what?’

I handed him his fags. ‘Originally, humanitarian mine clearance, then I went into the security business.’

‘Diamonds?’

‘Yeah, during the war I earned beer tokens running cash into the Lunda’s and diamonds out for the traders. We used to call them 'Juice in, Smarties out' runs’

‘In that case, you’d know my Dad’

Last time I’d seen this kid he was fifteen and I was tooled up with a 9mm Llama in a hog leg under my jacket taking my turns as his bodyguard. How’s that for a bloody coincidence?’

Since he was now his own man, he fetched his mates from the roadside kill grilling shack on the main road and we polished off a few cold ones, all my whisky and cigarette stash and Marcia served us up filet in a mushroom cream sauce with chips.

The day after, I was fragile to say the least. Christ, I had to ask the maid what day it was when I finally stumbled out of my pit feeling every one of my fifty two years to make a cup of tea. I badly needed fresh air so I went fishing. And we caught a big one.

It is longer than I am tall but not as fat

I have no idea what kind of shark it is. I think it is a ragged tooth but I am not sure. The boys are kind of used to the idea that I will not kill what I am not going to eat. Or, now that I am a trader, kill what I will not carve up and sell in the shop so they asked me should they cut it loose and I said no, haul it aboard and kill it, I’m not keen on sharks. I feel the same way about crocs and, now that Dinge died a miserable death, about poisonous snakes. Fuck ‘em. I am top of the food chain and while I can do my bit, I don’t want my kids to be part of it.

Marcia salts and dries all the fish I catch which she sells in the shop. She reckons that she will make $500 in total with the shark so it didn’t really die in vain. I had fun catching it, I’ll make money out of it and it will feed a lot of people. It did get the last laugh, though. I gashed my hand on its teeth while I was cutting its jaws out. Still, they’ll look good nailed over the bar. Unfortunately, Marcia dries the fish by laying it out in salted strips over the pile of wood salvage not five yards from our room. Drying fish, especially that quantity has, shall we say, a rather distinct odour. I am sure this is Marcia’s way of saying, get off yer fat arse and build me a drying rack… So little to do and all the time in the world in which to do it, I guess I will just have to get used to the smell.

Then there’s the Iberian pigs. I have finally secured permission to shoot them and by keeping the dogs under control, they are once again coming out of the forest and foraging across my land so I could drop them easy as heck. A mate of mine has just arrived from UK with two bloody great rolls of muslin so in eight months time or so I will have perfect air dried ham made from the most pure line of Iberian swine.

Well within range...

Getting permission to shoot them was surprisingly easy in the end. The Police had told me flat out that this was a reserve and all forms of hunting were illegal. Bugger, I thought, that puts the mockers on that. And there it would have rested had I not been having a few beers with the village coordinator and I saw the pigs come out of the forest and told him how badly I wanted to hunt them and turn them into hams and bacon. Just shoot them, was his opinion. To be honest, under normal circumstances, that is exactly what I would do but my circumstances weren’t normal. The police, (and don’t forget, the Esquadra is based at the bridge over the Kwanza just a kilometre distant) had specifically warned me in a friendly way not to even think of shooting in the forest or even on my own land. Friendly, but still a warning if you see what I mean. Also, I am a foreigner. Get convicted of anything and then see what chance your visa stands for renewal. Finally, all the police come for breakfast and then visit throughout the day, every day. Even assuming they didn’t hear the shot, I would have to butcher the animal in the bush, pack the meat into Tesco shopping bags and pretend I had just returned from the supermarket. The sight of a pig carcass bleeding out next to the Jango would be a bit of a give away.

‘Bota’, I said, ‘no one owns these pigs, right?’

He agreed, and he also agreed that this was probably why they were classed as wild animals, even though they were really just feral, and that is why they came under the protection of the wildlife laws.

‘But if they belonged to someone,’ I continued, I could shoot them?’

‘I guess so’

‘So why can’t you do me a favour and say they belong to you?’

I didn’t give him time to think about that and pressed on. The idea, I explained, would be to convince the police that these were the coordinator’s pigs, that they kept escaping and he could not catch them again; that I wanted to make hams and bacon so wanted to buy the pigs but I would also not be able to catch them, but I could shoot them and then pay Bota for ‘his’ pig.

The 2i/c of the police detachment looked at me quietly for a few seconds after I had finished explaining this to him on his next visit. No flicker of emotion, not even a hard stare, just a sort of cool appraisal. He turned to Bota.

‘So these are your pigs?’

‘Yes’

‘I didn’t know you kept pigs’

‘I did until they escaped’

‘But there have been pigs in the forest ever since I can remember?’

‘My Father kept pigs as well’

‘And they all escaped too?’

We must have appeared about as plausible as a politician claiming he was honest.

‘Bacon, you say?’

‘And presunto,’ I pointed out. The police were our biggest customer for bacon and ham. They have a lot of mouths to feed at the Esquadra. ‘Real bacon, real presunto, not the fatty salty slime that comes in plastic shrinkwrap’ I added, although I am sure Marcia wouldn’t feel too comfortable having her most lucrative sellers described in such a way.

‘Real bacon’ he repeated.

‘Home made’ I finished.

‘Do yourself a favour,’ he said as he planted his beret back on his head before standing up to leave, ‘let me know when you want to go out shooting, otherwise you’ll have a battalion of intervention police all over you’

Cool. Now I know that some of that bacon and presunto will end up on his men’s breakfast table but hey, I’ll just have to shoot more pigs!

What I really need is a decent reflex bow (my arms are like sparrow’s legs) and broadheads. You can see from the photo I was definitely within range before it looked up and spooked. But how to get a bow and arrows into the country? Perhaps I could have one completely dismantled and then hand carried in bit by bit, each piece having some innocuous description attached to it for customs purposes.

Arrival (being checked by Customs): ‘This, Officer? Oh this is my Access Remote Server Extension so I can receive emails in the field’.

Customs Officer (laughing): ‘You do realise that spells ARSE!’

Arrival (laughing too): ‘Gosh! It does, doesn’t it! It never occurred to me, how clever of you to notice! I can go now? Thank you. Yes, you have a nice day too!’

You see? I’m scheming again…

My kind of bacon slicer...