Not the Sharpest Tool in the Box

Me that is, not the

Chef’s Choice Diamond Sharpener 110

I’m only doing this review of an electric knife sharpener because the Suburban Bushwacker asked me to when he heard I was buying one.  He’s a nice bloke and since the contractor building my house hasn’t turned up today, I have bugger all else to do.  Besides, I am getting tired with Marcia interrupting me asking for confirmation that she is fat.  For Christ’s sake, I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s pencil.  If I agree with her and say she’s a slob, I get a kick in the pills.  If I pay her a compliment and tell her she is barking fucking mad if she thinks she is overweight, she gets strangely upset with me.  What it boils down to, of course, is that she is broody again. She is so broody, in fact, that if she sat on a golf ball it would hatch.  How old is Alexander?  Just over three years?  That means I must have serviced Marcia less than five years ago.  Given that Dominic is thirteen, clearly she hasn’t figured out for herself that I am a communist working to Ten Year Plans and just as productively.  Some women are bloody unreasonable.

To distract myself from disquieting thoughts of matrimonial duty, I dug out the electric knife sharpener my brother brought me from Germany. 

I have always believed one cannot beat a quick lashing with a decent steel (assuming one isn’t on the receiving end) but with a girlfriend who has both combusting knickers and a tendency to use my knives to saw open tin cans because she cannot be arsed to use a can opener, it’s hard to keep an edge on anything so I asked Micky to lug an electric knife sharpener all the way from Europe to Angola as well as a complete set of chef’s knives to replace the all but one of my set that have disappeared.  The one very heavy dropped forged chef’s knife I have left has chunks out of the blade as big as the Bay of Biscay and just as rough so there was no point trying to swipe that through my new toy.  The new knives had an edge on them so perfect there was no way I was going to risk putting them through the sharpener.  This is me we are talking about, if you want something ballsing up, just ask me, 100% satisfaction guaranteed (although Marcia might disagree).  What I needed was another blade.  It had to be decent steel, something worthy of this machine’s attention and then I had it.  My sword!

It is a pretty ancient piece arriving in my hands via my German Grandfather’s having seen action at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866 with his Grandfather and is still on duty with that esteemed Gentleman’s Great Great Grandson as my last line of defence sitting quietly these last years by my desk.  With an edge as blunt as my libido, if anything deserved a good sharpening, it did.  After all, it is a blade, only longer.  Naturally, my son Dominic was all for it.

The manufacturer describes this appliance as for domestic, not commercial use.  They are quite clear about that.  That was OK then.  My sword was only ever destined for domestic use. It would be terribly inconvenient to skewer a bandit off my property requiring, as it would, considerable effort to drag his leaking corpse all the way back to my place before calling the police.  And I am too bloody old for that.

The Chef’s Choice 110 comes with three diamond grinding wheels.  I’m sorry, I have to pause here for a moment.  They’re not bloody diamonds are they?  There may be a few tiny crystals of diamond in the amalgam making up the grinding wheels but for the money this machine cost, that’s got to be it.  Anyway, let’s not be unduly pedantic, three diamond grinding wheels.  The one on the left of the machine is for serious grinding only and for that reason has a World War II fighter pilot’s cap over it to make you think twice before using it.  The other two slots on the right are for progressively sharpening and honing, all you should really need in a day to day kitchen environment.

The slots are designed so that if you lay the knife along the guides, the perfect grinding angle is guaranteed.  Knives come in all shapes and sizes but I bet the design team never considered an Eighteenth Century Sabre so I was interested to see if it could fit into the slots.  It did.

I was going to say, 'Look! Even kids can do it', but we all know when it comes to technology, kids are invariably more adept than cack handed old gits

There’s an art to this, especially if you are wielding a metre or so of fine Prussian steel.  Pull it through too fast and the blade bounces.  Press down more than gently on the blade as you guide it through and the motor gives up and groans to a halt.  Draw the blade through too slowly and the grinding wheel binds on and the motor throws in the towel again.  This is not an industrial grinder by any means.  Treat it gently, however, and it’ll purr away nibbling away at the blade, etching it with what looked to me like a reasonable edge.

One thing I did notice was that the blade became magnetized.  At least I knew the heavy shit grinder was doing something.  Last time I saw iron filings like that was in a physics lab.  No wonder the manufacturer places a plastic cover over that slot to make you think twice before using it. 

Before...

Before I started, the blade edge was dull, corroded and pitted in places.  A few passes and I could see I had something to work with, even if I could see the striations left by the rough grinder, so I moved to the next stage.  Again I had to be careful to draw it through evenly and horizontally, not easy with a blade that long and curved, one hand on the handle and the other steadying the grinder so it didn’t flip over.  The grinder comes with suckers for feet, ideal for the kitchen work surface it was designed for but I was using it on a rough wooden bench.  It is a knack easy to acquire, however, and within a few strokes I had the hang of it (Marcia would disagree, of course).

During...

At this point Marcia pitched up with a raggedy old chef’s knife and asked me to sharpen it.  I gave it two passes either side on the rough, then a few passes either side on the sharpener and then a couple of swipes on the honer.  With a blade that short relative to a bloody great sabre, it was easy and the results very impressive especially considering that before I started, this knife of Marcia’s bore all the scars of the tins it had opened.

I went back to the sabre and passed it through the honer.  Again it bound a bit and I realized the first pass at each stage needed to be suave, a really light touch.  The weight of the blade alone was enough; all I had to do was ensure I kept it on the guide.

The question now was, would it cut the mustard?  Cutting mustard seems to be some sort of benchmark but I can cut mustard with my bare hands so I asked Dominic to nip off and ask Marcia for a hunk of steak.  Steak is expensive here so I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised when Dominic returned with a lump of kidney telling me that Marcia wasn’t going to allow me to experiment on good meat with a blade that once sliced through an Austrian.  Bloody irrational, it must have been cleaned a few times since then but like I say, she is broody.

After... a clean slice

Still, steak is actually quite easy to slice with even a rubbish knife.  Slippery, slimy kidney is a different kettle of, er, fish. Let’s just say kidney is slippery and slimy and harder to slice finely than steak which has a bit of, er, meat to it.

Well, a once dull and corroded blade certainly cut the mustard, I mean kidney.  I would not say I could have shaved myself with the edge (then again who would want to risk trimming off morning stubble with a sword?) but it was sharp and I was impressed.  I tracked Marcia down and asked her about the knife I had sharpened for her and she was also evidently impressed.

The whisky bottle is only there to add a sense of scale.  Honest.

So what conclusions can I draw?  For one, Chef’s knives longer than a metre are pretty awkward to handle no matter how keen the edge.  Secondly, whilst this electric knife sharpener probably could not match a good man with a steel, it comes closer than any normal person could manage coping admirably with a both historic swords and kitchen knives.  As such, it deserves a place as a ‘wise’ accessory in every domestic kitchen, well sharpened knives being safer than blunt ones of whatever quality.  One flick of a switch, a couple of swipes later and those ripe tomatoes are thin enough to lay out on any homemade pizza.  I am pleased with my new toy and it will be fine for normal domestic use which, let’s face it, is all most of us could wish for.

I suppose there is one other observation I could make: sharpening your over worked girlfriend’s knife so she can prepare dinner for you while you are wasting time and she is hot to trot really does not cut the mustard.  Actually, it’s pretty bloody suicidal.

What's Luck Got to do with it?

It's a wonderful photograph.  How do they do it?

‘My brother is building a tourist lodge in Africa, by the way,’ my brother Micky informed one of his German neighbours recently.

‘In Kenya?’

‘No, in Angola’

‘ANGOLA! Who in their right mind would go there?’

‘Well, Angola Tom says the sport fishing is world class’, he told him.

And it is.  Fishing Planet Earth – An Angler’s Guide to Fishing the World’s Trophy Hotspots put out a survey in which they reconciled world record fish with the countries they were caught in.  I was more than a little surprised when I discovered there was only one country, and only one place listed for Africa.  My own back yard here on the Barra de Kwanza in Luanda.  In a sense, this is misleading, suggesting as it does that nowhere else in Africa is worth fishing.  Anyone fishing off Mozambique or Kenya would be outraged but this survey was based on record fish, the quality, not the quantity and out of the top 150 location ranked by trophy fish, the only African country that made the cut was Angola.  England had three locations, one of them being Canvey Island.  I know where I would rather fish although there are pubs in that part of London serving a better pint of beer, I’ll give them that.

My Father always used to say that ‘Work’ was merely the tiresome means by which a chap earned the money he needed to engage in the pursuits he really enjoyed.  Generally I suppose that is true, but there are those lucky enough to stumble upon a way to both enjoy their vocation and get paid for it.  Gary Burger of the Kwanza Tarpon Lodge is such a man.

The Kwanza Lodge is a fishing lodge in an idyllic setting at the mouth of the Kwanza River in Angola just where on the West African coast it, with a wide sweep overlooked by the Quissama National Park and its elephants, empties into the Atlantic Ocean.  Fortuitously, The Great Architect of the Universe in his infinite wisdom decided that this should be the place where the cold northward flowing Benguela current collided with the warm southward flowing Angola current.  This allowed for a rich marine bio-diversity and the Kwanza Tarpon Lodge boasts countless (thirty at least) IGFA world records as a result of its blessed position.  Even if the trophy fish are on holiday, the fishing is still excellent.  Pitch into a weed line from the river out at sea and you’ll be hauling Dourado until yer arms fall off.  Personally, once out of sight of land I always seem to be re-acquainting myself with my breakfast which is a terrible waste of good malt whisky, but I understand the bill fishing is about as good as you get and the records support that.  Even the billfish like the place.  One was tagged off Puerto Rico and turned up here, 4,776 nm from where it was tagged to gamely gnaw on some sport fisherman’s lure.  I prefer going after Tarpon, they hang around the river estuaries, and so does my oldest son Dominic who aged 11, hauled in a 90 kg specimen.  Or was he only nine?  I don't recall, they grow up so fast these days.

I follow a number of Huntin’ and Fishin’ Blogs so when I saw a review by Albert Rasch about Fish Creek Spinners’ hand made fishing lures, I flippantly posted a comment suggesting I would be willing to write a review of them if I could fish them in these verdant waters.  Naturally, in order to do so I would need a slack handful.  I never expected a reply; I never get replies when, fortified by distilled grain I launch cheeky comments into the ether.  But, blow me down with a feather, this time I did.

John Delaney of Fish Creek Spinners sent me a message offering a few spinners.

I am a keen fisherman but by no means an expert, so I thought I had better check with Gary about the sorts of lures we should test from Fish Creek Spinners extensive offering so that they were given a fair crack of the whip.  Besides, I needed to use Garys’s boat.  I strolled over to his place and gave him the address of Fish Creek Spinners’ website.  The next day I was sipping an afternoon gin and tonic by the lodge swimming pool when Gary shoved a bit of paper at me with a few product codes scrawled on it.

‘The Armadillos look good’ he said.

Armadillos?  To me, an Armadillo is an odd looking animal that local lore says can be cooked inverted using its own carapace as a pot.  I could hardly imagine employing one as a fishing lure. 

‘Tell the guy from Fish Creek to forget the hooks and send the lures over just with split rings so we can mount our own hooks, his look a bit lightweight’

‘I’ll tell him’ I said.

‘And tell him that whatever he sends, it’d better be tough, some of the fish here’ll straighten out a butcher’s hook’

‘I will’, I replied, wondering how a bloke as slight as he could hang on to a demon fish like that without being pulled overboard and going waterskiing instead, especially since Nice Paul, built like a brick shithouse and also a lodge skipper, had embarrassingly been heaved out of his own boat gaffing one of these monsters, leaving his astonished and very inexperienced client to work out for himself what the man overboard drill was.

So I passed Gary’s advice on and this is the advantage of getting your lures from someone who makes them by hand, in this case a father and son team based in Colorado, about as far as you can get in the civilised world from Angola.

‘No Problem,’ came the reply by email, ‘we’re very busy at the moment so give me a couple of weeks.’

I was getting these things for free so I could hardly complain.  Not that I would have complained anyway.  These are bespoke lures.  Have you noticed how long it takes to have a suit cut by a reputable tailor nowadays?  Besides, I live in Angola so I am used to waiting.  In queues mainly and it is always encouraging to know you are getting something from someone who is busy.  Since most people vote with their wallets, clearly this was good kit if I had to wait for it. 

I also had to figure out how to get them to Angola.  ‘It’s a postal service, Jim, but not as we know it’ sprang immediately to mind.  The safest way would be using DHL as they have offices here, not just agents acting on their behalf.  But that kind of service costs.

It always pays to be nice.  My place isn’t even built yet but when I see a few lost souls wandering around the wonderful countryside surrounding the confluence of the Kwanza River and the Atlantic, I always have a cold beer and something on the stove to offer them so long as they do not mind dining in the middle of a building site, and so I met Tom from Florida, here to build a power station.  I spent three years building power stations across Angola before keeling over in the site office with a heart attack so clearly Tom has balls the size of planets.  Believe me, when you have the Governor of a State five hundred miles away spitting expletives down the phone at you at four in the morning demanding to know why the lights have gone off in Lubango, it is wearing to say the least.  Earning my living feeding people and taking them out fishing like Lucky Gary and Nice Paul seemed infinitely preferable which is why I have retired, accepted that I will be forever poor and am building my own lodge instead.

So I emailed Florida Tom and asked him if he could hand carry a few lures to Angola next trip.

‘No problem’ he replied.  ‘I also have the junior softball kit for the kids’ he continued.

Blimey, what a bloke.  We were well through cracking a case of beer when I mentioned that I really wanted to get the street kids here together and teach them softball (playing baseball I was a steady hitter but deadly at short stop).  It would get them off the streets, give them something to do and, most importantly, it’s a team game with all its social benefits.  And he’d remembered.

What is it about Americans?  They’re so laid back, they have gravel rash on the backs of their heads.  Except those, thinking about it, who wear razor shades, carry everything in Velcro pouches and talk in calibres.  They’re arseholes.

No surprise then, when I received a phone call from Andy ‘The Hammer’ Mallet, Tom’s English colleague based here in Angola, saying the lures had arrived and he would be driving down to my place on Sunday.  Andy is decent like that, he gives me enough notice to fill the fridge full of cold ones and rattle the pans so he can help me empty them.

On their website, Fish Creek Spinners categorize their lures by, among other things, weight.  Two ounces, if it were Gold, is a respectable weight but for a lure?  I wasn’t so sure.  Mind you, I have never weighed a lure before.  Even Gary had used the term, ‘a bit lightweight’.  First off then, I was surprised by the size of the package.  I was expecting a padded envelope, instead here was a stuffed carrier bag, its contents neatly ensconced in bubble wrap.

I unwrapped a couple and, man, they looked good.  Don’t ask me to qualify lures by build quality, as I said, I am not an expert even though I have seen and used more than a few in my time, but even I could tell that these were something special.  Down to the tiniest detail, they were beautiful.  So much so that I had to quickly pack them away again as my three year old son was so entranced he was busy stealing them off the table by the pool (another good reason to ship lures without hooks when sending them to inattentive parents).

Unpacking the bag from Fish Creek Spinners

Suddenly bored with the lures his father was so keen on, Alex decided there were more pressing matters requiring his urgent attaention

I took the bag around to Gary to show him.  His parents were visiting from South Africa and I can see where Gary inherited his fishing genes.  They are out fishing every day.  Gary’s Dad held these lures in his hands the same way a concert violinist would cradle a Stradivarius. 

‘Where did you get these from?’ he asked so I explained they were hand made in the United States and how I had flippantly, no, cheekily suggested I write a review of them being wetted in Angolan waters thereby scoring a few.

‘Can I borrow them?’

I hesitated.  After all, I ought to take a load of artfully staged photos as they came out of the box and then be there when, after such a long journey, they finally went off the back of a boat.

It is a question of ethics, though.  If I have received the very generous gift of these superb looking lures, how can I be impartial when reviewing them?  I really, really wanted to be the first to put these lures to use but if I am to write about them, better to leave them in the hands of experts, don’t you think?  After all, a Ferrari is a great sports car but let one loose in the hands of a novice and it will end up in the kitty litter with its driver complaining vociferously about its handling.  So, ever so reluctantly, I did the decent thing and handed these over to the experts to see what they would say.  Then, and only then, will I have a go.

Gary’s parents were out of here the next day and wanted one last dip in the water.  It didn’t matter if the tide was way where it shouldn’t have been, the moon in the wrong position in the firmament or the temperature bloody Arctic, they were going fishing one last time with their boy, even if it was for only half an hour.

So I was very pleased for them, and the Delaney´s (junior and senior) that is was another father and son team that with first splash had a nice little Kingy jump onto the lure.

'Lucky' Gary, Fish Creek Spinner dangling from the mouth

Number one son, Dominic, is on his way down to me from Luanda and I have the boat ready.  Then it will be yet another father and son team giving these lures a real testing.  Dominic is on holiday for a whole month so I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if we don’t catch something special on these lures… in these waters.

Clearly, this article has a way to go and will only be concluded after some serious fishing.  I want the Father Son action too so I am waiting impatiently for Dominic to arrive and then we’ll be out on the water.  In the meantime, they don’t call Gary ‘Lucky Gary’ for no reason.  Here are a few snaps of a fraction of his haul over the few preceding days….



It is seriously hard not to hate a guy like him.

Rich divorcees of any nationality (we aren’t racist here in Angola) should address all enquiries to Gary through my blog but I warn you, he seems to favour tall, slim, dark haired types so lanky Hispanics will jump straight to the front of the queue.  Gary is still young and has a lot of water left to fish.  Me, at my age? I’m satisfied with these lures.

1 Peter, 4:10

“You know Honey, when Micky he come everyone is happy.  When he go he leave big hole.”

OK, Marcia’s English may not be perfect but I think she banged the nail fairly squarely on the head.

All too soon after his arrival, and temporary detention, he was on his way again.  The sad part was Dominic having exams at school so he could only see his Uncle for 24 hours.  The irony is that Dominic, only days later, is now on holiday but happily for me this means I have the boy for a whole month and we have a lot of fish to catch.  He might even see us move into our new house the pace of construction suddenly speeding up with the arrival of electricians and plumbers.

The builders appeared at the half finished restaurant this morning which, this being the weekend, surprised me.  Normally they bugger off around Friday lunchtime and only reappear sometime Monday afternoon. 

‘Have you come here for more materials for the house?’ I asked them.

‘No, we have come here to go to Church.  Don’t you pray, Sr Thomas?’

‘Every day,’ I replied, ‘I pray that you’ll finish my fucking house!’

Obviously this upset their Holinesses but I didn’t care.  I was in the mood to both baptise them and give them their last rites in quick succession by drowning them in the river.

To be fair to them, however, it is not their fault.  The guy I paid to do this job is a fellow expat and, as Marcia never tires of reminding me, a good mate.  She’s not alluding to that warm fuzzy feeling of comradeship and loyalty, she’s saying I’m a dickhead.  Now I agree that it is rarely a good idea to get a mate in to build your house if you want to remain friends but I do believe, especially in an environment as unforgiving and ruthless as Angola, that mates should stick together.  All of us have had our ups and downs, the peaks and troughs of the generally stormy sea that is life.  Sadly, too many go under for lack of a lifeline.  So when my mate confessed he had serious cash flow problems, a refined way of saying he was bust, what could I do other than reach for the last lifebelt we had in our boat and toss it to him?  Christ knows I have needed a steady pair of hands to haul me out of the drink on a few occasions.

I am not a financial expert but console myself with the thought that the Ark was built by amateurs and the Titanic by experts.

I know it is hard not to, but I mustn’t look at all this in the light of lost revenue, which God knows hurts, but in the knowledge that if we all help each other to caulk our leaky boats, there will always be one serviceable enough to carry us all to safety.

He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named has arrived in Angola

This is not my brother.  This is Miss Belize.  She is a damn sight better looking.

‘He forgot his Yellow Fever Vaccination Certificate.’  It was Marcia on the phone. ‘They’ve arrested him’.

Oh.  That’s a bit of a nuisance.

Some of you may be wondering why I wasn’t at the airport to pick up my own brother.  After all, he only visits once every three years so I could at least have made the effort, couldn’t I?  Quite simply, it is the length of time it takes to get a visa renewed here in Angola.  Mine expired last December and the stupid little bit of paper they give us, the Talão, the receipt, has long since disintegrated.  I was once detained and held for a whole day because my driving licence, which was also made of paper and spent its time being sat on by my invariably sweaty arse, was illegible

So I had been faced with a choice.  Leave for the airport a day early to allow time to get nicked, argue and then buy my freedom at any one of the three checkpoints between here and the city or send Marcia to collect my brother on her own.

As much as I felt bad about my brother, who doesn’t speak a word of Portuguese, being lifted at Angola’s international airport for want of a bit of paper and me not being there to either help or get banged up with him, I know that Marcia is one girl with her head screwed on straight.

Now this got me thinking.  Last time I went to Germany, I took my son Dominic with me so he could meet his uncle, his great aunts and his great grandmother.  Dominic has an Angolan mother and a British father, just like Alex.  Unlike Alex, though, Dom wasn’t travelling with his mother in whose passport he was included.  If he left Angola on his British passport, he would need a visa to get back in again.  Either that or the Angolan passport I had been bugging his mother, my estranged wife to get.  Of course she didn’t because she is a lazy, dizzy stupid thing, one of the reasons why finally exasperated beyond belief, I walked out on her.  So Marcia, I and the kids left Angola for Belgium and then Germany with Dominic on his UK passport which gave his mother precisely three weeks to get his Angolan passport and DHL it to Germany so she could have him back.   Of course, she didn’t because she is a lazy, dizzy stupid thing but I think we have already covered that.

All she managed, the night before we were to return, was a faxed copy of his newly issued Angolan passport.

We caught the ICE train from Stuttgart to Frankfurt, me lugging the proceeds of a well melted Platinum American Express Card and then caught the flight to Brussels. 

People wax lyrical about Brussels.  They say that Belgium is the forgotten secret of Europe.  I say it has been forgotten for a reason.  For me, it’s no more than a sign indicating a turn off to utter boredom on the motorway through it to Germany.  It is an anomaly, two provinces, one that really belongs to France and the other to Holland.  It is dull, characterless and I am only mildly impressed that it is the only country in the world with its entire motorway network illuminated at night.  Ainda bem (good) as we say in Angola.  Means I can keep my foot buried into the carpet of whatever car I am driving.  The only international speeding tickets I have ever been awarded have been from irate Belgium policemen.  I am not talking about on-the-spot fines, I’ve had loads of those.  What I mean are the kind where all the resources of Interpol are used to track you down. The Belgians, in fact, got so pissed off with everyone racing through their country as fast as possible, rather than stopping to take a look around, that they started confiscating the cars of those who exceeded their national speed limit by what they considered an excessive amount. 

They tried that with me once.  I think they were really annoyed with me because, having checked my rear view mirror when I heard the siren and noting that it was only a bloody Volvo, and realising that it was only 20 clicks to the French border, I went for it.  I never found out what they had under their bonnet but it certainly wasn’t laid back Swedish furniture.  They were very polite, I’ll give them that, as they slapped the cuffs on and very sympathetic when I told them I was late for a funeral, this filthy lie made more credible by the sight of my dress uniform complete with medals draped over my suitcase so it would not be crumpled.  So they let me go pointing out, though, that I would be summoned to appear in court in Brussels to face the music.  I did receive a summons eventually and, of course, failed to appear.  After all, no chocolatiere in a fancy uniform and an unsportingly fast Volvo can boss an Englishman around.  I was a cadet at Sandhurst at the time so it would have been bloody awkward asking for leave to attend a court case when I had signed a declaration saying I had no convictions or outstanding summonses at the start of the course.   It was unbelievably bloody awkward when the police turned up.  Still, the vast majority of coppers, be they British, French, German, Scandinavian or even Belgian, are decent honest folk just doing their jobs.  Being human, of course, this leaves them open to scum like me and they bought my excuse that not speaking either Flemish or French (yet another shameful lie) I had innocently been left with the impression I had been let off with a caution.

Knowing I might have a teensy weensy problem at check in, I encouraged the family to be ready for an early start but we all beat the wake up call I had booked but never came, we were so keen to get out of the hotel and enjoy the relative comfort of a check in queue instead.  If there is such a thing as a nice hotel in Belgium, I remain sadly ignorant of it.  Even my Grandfather would split the journey back to England when he was taking us to see our father by overnighting on the German side of the Ardennes before pushing his Mercedes flat out through Belgium the next day.  But that could also be something to do with the fact that the last time he overnighted in Belgium, he was leading a column of German panzers proving that if you are part of a Blitzkrieg, advance bookings aren’t strictly necessary.

The check in clerk was not impressed with Dominic’s British passport, sans Angolan Visa, the faxed copy of his Angolan passport nor his Angolan birth certificate.  A really alarming case of ‘the computer says no’.  ‘You can all travel,’ she said helpfully indicating us adults and the infant Alexander, ‘but the boy has to stay’.

‘You agree there is no doubt this boy is an Angolan citizen?’ I asked through very clenched teeth.

‘Yes, but where is his passport?’

‘You are holding it in your hand’

‘This is a British passport and there is no visa, I cannot check him in unless he has an entry visa for the country of destination’

‘Even if he is obviously a resident of the country of destination?’

I lost my temper.  She called security.

The security man was very nice.  They are trained to be nice while they check the safety on their Glocks and make sure the Tazer is charging nicely in its holster.

He admitted that this was an unusual situation, bizarre even.  He agreed it was ludicrous that the rules prevented them boarding a boy who so obviously had the right of domicile in the country of destination.  He also politely alluded to parents who failed to recognise the fairly simple rules governing international travel, a principle requirement of which was a valid passport or visa for the country of destination, and that a mosaic of loosely interconnected documentation, no matter how pretty, just wouldn’t cut it.  And he said all that in English.  I thought I could not have been more stunned if he had ordered one of his two bruiser like side kicks to Taser me but then he went on.

‘Why don’t you phone someone in Angola, anyone, and get them to get Angolan Immigration to send a note to us, or our office in Luanda saying the boy will be granted entry?’

I was about to dive in there and protest that this was a Sunday so who the hell could I call and who the fuck would be around in Angolan Immigration to send a note on a day they would all be down the beach when my ire was stayed. 

‘In the meantime’, he said to the check in staff, ‘Check these bags through on white tags, the customer will have about two hours to sort this out and if he doesn’t, we can intercept him and his family at the gate’.

Customer?  Not Shitbag, nor ‘This Irritating Arsehole’, but Customer. Marcia had been bashing the plastic so we were about an elephant over our baggage limit but it all slid off down that conveyor belt into the unknown and we proceeded to the lounge.  Clearly, I had just bumped into God and for once in my life, I hadn’t pissed him off.

I thought I had arrived in heaven when I tucked into the free booze in the lounge, albeit still nervous about us getting on the plane but then I realised this was just a rest stop before Nirvana. 

A rather tall, distinguished looking gentleman approached introducing himself as the Chief Executive of Brussels Airlines.  He was accompanied by a rather svelte looking guy the sight of whom caused Marcia to leap out of her comfortable armchair and, ignoring both the CEO of an international airline and I a mere mortal, bang on in French with a fluency I never knew she possessed.

‘It’s alright, darling,’ she confessed after they moved on, ‘The Belgian Ambassador has had a word’.

Not only did Marcia have Micky out of the airport in no time, she had customs officials carrying his bags.

The Itch of the Twitch

Not my work but I am taking lessons off his site.  A Man called Robert Kirk.

I recall bringing a kite back from Germany when I was a little kid.  It was big and in the shape of an eagle and looked the part.  This was well before exotic kites could be bought anywhere in UK.

I flew it in the field at the back of the house and within ten minutes, three twitchers armed with cameras and binos had turned up.  They had a good laugh about duping themselves, had a go with my kite and let me play with their binos. 

I was new to the area, they were all neighbours and we remained friends, me eventually earning pocket money baby-sitting for them.  One encouraged me to paint, even getting me a show in Ashby-de-la-Zouch and then a commission from Times Furnishing (one of the first furniture companies to adopt the ‘let’s display our furniture like a room’ marketing idea) to paint a whole series of sea and landscapes in oils for their displays.  If you consider how little time it took me to knock out one of these daubs and how much I was being paid, for a while I was earning more per hour than my Dad.  It was only in my later years I realised that it was these guys, these true neighbours, who were helping my Dad out in a way that would not embarrass him, as the money I earned was a much needed adjunct to the family income.  This was the early seventies and I was getting 80 quid a painting.  That was serious money in those days. 

Years later another one of the original twitchers, who was a local beak, wrote the reference that got me a shot at the Regular Commissions Board.  To thank him, I invited his daughter, a girl I had baby sat, to the Sandhurst Commissioning Ball.  I behaved honourably, not because I was inherently decent, nor that her father was a beak and could have easily come up with a way to legitimately excise me from my testicles but because when she got tired, I still wanted to party so I dropped her off at the hotel before going back and getting paralytic with the rest of the chaps.

A couple of weeks later, the bank phoned me saying they were worried about one of my cheques.  The signature was, in their opinion, highly suspect (this was back in the days of personal banking, remember that?).  I asked for details and then realised it was a cheque I had signed for petrol the morning after the ball when I was taking the girl home.  OK, I did not betray my trust and shag the beak’s daughter but I did drive her home still so pissed I couldn’t even sign my name.

Funny old world... 

After my first tour of Northern Ireland I never painted again.  I lie, I did one more painting which now hangs in Germany.  My Grandfather bought my Grandmother a small paintbox as a birthday present and she complained bitterly to me, convinced she could never paint anything decent with such a small kit compared to the easels and paraphernalia I had in the old days.  So I asked her to fetch me a small kitchen knife and armed only with that, the few tubes of oils and the canvas on the newspaper protected rug, I painted her a landscape.  Obviously, an expert looking at it would describe it as a piece of shit but I painted it for my Granny. Last I heard it was hanging in Baden-Baden with the original kitchen knife suspended below it.  I hope it remains an inspiration to all budding and, therefore, inevitably impecunious artists.

I really wanted to study art but my father said only socialist drop outs studied art before spending the rest of their lives huddled around braziers on picket lines, their only contribution to art being, he said, ‘Their Fucking placards’.  Mind you, he also said that only pimps, wogs and pop stars drove Jaguars.  A father’s influence on his boys should never be under estimated.  I liked Jaguars but never bought one buying a Ferrari instead,   Now if ever there was a car deserving of my father’s somewhat bigoted opinion…

It was my mother who did for me though.  She wanted me to do something respectable and safe, to follow in her father’s footsteps and be an architect.  I couldn’t settle, I hated Maths, I just couldn’t do it, and really itched to study English Literature and Art.  I bombed out at A Level failing maths but I did get physics (a few years later I came top of my entry at the Royal Military College of Science, a large part of our course being nuclear physics and ballistics, both of which require some serious number crunching so figure that one out).  But instead of becoming an architect sitting safely in my cosy office, I became a bomb disposal officer and later a gun for hire.  And now I am going to be a restaurateur.

Now that I really do live out in the sticks, I have suddenly become aware of nature and especially the birds.  I can see that Dominic has the twitch as well and I have even dug a lake to encourage our feathery friends to come and stay.  I am not very good at it (identifying birds that is; like any thug with gravel rash on his knuckles I’m ace at digging lakes, after all they’re just like shell scrapes, only bigger), but boys think their father’s know everything so we can’t let them down.

‘What’s that one called Dad?’

‘It’s an Elbeejay, Son’

An LBJ being a ‘Little Brown Job’.  Trouble is, we also have some really beautiful blue birds fluttering around, nesting in the eaves and some black ones too, so I need to come up with some other system.  They can’t ALL be LBJ’s.  He’s my son so he’s going to recognise a bullshitter pretty damn quick.

As I said, it’s a funny old world and there’s no explaining the Itch of the Twitch.  So I might as well just scratch it. 

‘Dominic, can you pass me the binos...  and the 2B pencil while you’re at it?’