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...

A calm wife. Pretty bloody scary...

I have been in Angola for nearly twenty years. By now you would have thought I had got the hang of local culture and had eased my way down through the gears so that the overdrive of the first chunk of my life remained a distant memory as I changed down a few gears and cruised through the rest of it but, as regular readers know, I still bloody lose it sometimes.

This all came in to focus this afternoon when I drew out the various plans and designs I need to keep the municipal licensing authority aware of what we are up to. They can see the mountain of timber slowly being chewed into sawdust by a bunch of craftsmen. Marcia had quite reasonably pointed out that me having it all in my head hardly made it a project easy for an outsider, basically anyone else, to visualise and appreciate so I thought, fair enough, I’ll painstakingly draw and print the whole bastard thing out on sheets of A4 paper and stick them all together and put it up on the spare wall in the cubicle that will be our kitchen but we are currently using as a bedroom, so they can all come in to the ‘project office’ and rubber neck it.

I don’t know if any of you have tried to do this using a laptop with a processing power barely able to send and receive an email coupled to an HP printer that insists on throwing up a ‘Wizard’ to help you but all it succeeds in doing is screw up your scale. Give me Macintosh every time. Sadly, my MacBook Pro is in Doc in Germany and my big Epson printer died ages ago so I slogged on with Marcia’s handbag laptop and the HP (half pissed) printer.

As the sheets crawled with glacial velocity out of the high speed HP printer it occurred to me, how would I stick them all together on the wall? Sellotape wouldn’t work; we are talking dusty bare cement render here. I needed something else. I nipped down to the shop. Wood glue? Hardly. Superglue? That wouldn’t work either, I’d end up gluing myself to the wall, have to tear myself off and spend the rest of my days with half an unfinished kitchen clinging to my fingertips. Chewing gum? I would vomit before I had masticated enough of that shit and my cement laden fingers would leave sticky prints all over the designs. And then my eyes lit upon the perfect product. Colgate Toothpaste. Viscous enough to stick to cement but not moist enough to leak through and cause the ink on the designs to run and giving, I suppose, a fresh smell for anyone enamoured enough with my artwork to want to kiss it.

Flushed with my ring of confidence, I started trimming the prints, carefully aligning them and pasting the wall and had all but finished when Marcia came in. She was impressed. Even she had only seen bits of what was in my head, never the whole lot (not very much, really) laid out so neatly. She ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ as she stared at my vision of our future in 1:250 scale. I was so chuffed I decided to get technical, explaining to her that you could take a ruler to the design and with simple mathematics calculate the size of and distance between any building. You could calculate the size of the swimming pool, the width of the roads, the lengths of pathways, the amount of perimeter fencing required.

Now, as an adhesive, toothpaste has its drawbacks. For one, it takes its time drying. In the Army, it worked fine when, for a prank, we would squeeze half a tube into the door lock of a colleague absent on leave knowing that when he dragged himself back to the mess some two or three weeks later and with only minutes to go after an all night drive to rejoin his unit before morning parade, he discovered a cemented key hole on a door the other side of which he knew was his smartly pressed uniform.

As a single officer I always thought that if any manufacturing company really wanted to test a product of theirs to destruction in as short a time as possible, then they should give it to a serviceman, of any rank. Years later, as a father, I realised the record of Her Majesty’s finest was easily smashed by the average three year old. Then I came to Angola.

My big generator is stuffed because the trucking company that brought it here, to replace the one that had been stolen, managed to drop it off the side of a truck knackering the engine mounts so I am running on a small petrol generator. These things, especially when loaded right to the limit, do use a bit of oil so it is always wise to check the levels every morning and I explained all this to one of my employees every day for a week, letting him watch me as I went through the pre start checks. This morning I caught him with the small generator on its side pouring oil into it down the oil filler hole.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Every two or three days I have to top it up with oil so I am really going to fill it this time and turning it this way up means it doesn’t keep running out of the filler plug’. Oil dribbling out of the filler hole of a normally orientated generator, or engine of any kind, is an indication to a normal, sane human being that the sump is full.

‘How much have you put in so far?’

‘Nearly four litres but I think I now know why it uses so much oil’

‘Oh?’ I said reaching for the nearest lethal weapon.

‘It keeps running out of here’, he pointed to the carburettor, the evidently oil soaked air filter and the big pool of oil on my otherwise pristine concrete pathway.

This was brand new 3.9 Kva Honda generator number two in only six weeks but, mindful of Marcia’s advice against murdering more than one employee a week, I told him to put the bloody thing back on its feet and clean the mess up. Unless anyone else ballses up seriously, his horrible death will give me something to look forward to next week.

I had spent the whole day on this patchwork technical drawing and I was chuffed that Marcia obviously appreciated it. I was pleased when I saw her eyes light up, finally able to see a big, comprehensible map of the new site. Then she stuck her finger on the top right hand corner, leant on it and drew it down to the bottom left and started to say, ‘so this covers two hectares?’ but then stopped as 20 odd sheets of painstakingly trimmed and toothpasted A4 sheets curled up under her hand and crumpled off the wall into minty fresh bog roll.

‘For Christ’s sake Marcia,’ I exclaimed, ‘when will you bloody Angolans learn to stop looking with your bastard fingers all the time?’

She gave me a cool, but dark look. I guess it was a dark look, it’s hard to tell. She is as black as the ace of spades, after all.

‘No Darling,’ she replied, and far too flaming calm for my liking, ‘not bloody Angolans… bloody Marcia’.

Oops. Guess that’s me told then. I’ll nip off and feed the dogs. I might be some time.

Stats, boring stats...

Unashamedly proud to be British! Photo reproduced with the, er, anticipated kind permission of The San Pedro Scoop... Ooer, what if she gets mad?

I was never vain enough to bother looking at the stats of my blog (honest. C’mon, give a guy a break). I felt bad enough putting a counter on the side of the page (at least I stuck it at the bottom and not the top like some insecure bastards, you know, those that only get fifty million page views an hour) but it is nice to know that I am not merely casting words into the ether and that someone is reading this stuff even if, judging by the search terms used that landed the reader on my site were things like, ‘Plastic Garden Hippo’, or ‘Goat with slit throat’, ‘Snake found with human head’ along with a host of some quite frankly unrepeatable terms, meaning that their arrival in Hippo Land was wholly accidental and no doubt frustrating but, there you go, that’s Google for you. The other thing I like are the themed adverts, tailor made for me every time I use Google. Google has decided that I am rich enough to have disposable income, a portion of which I want to invest offshore and blow the rest on cookery courses, and that, as a 53 year old drop out, I am interested in further education. I wonder how accurate the background checks are on their own employees.

Today, though, I did take a good look at my stats. I did this because I noticed the visitor count for my blog had jumped from three since inception to over twenty thousand in 0.3 of a nano second during the night. Golly, I thought. The biggest and most consistent referrals to Hippo on the Lawn came from John Gray on Going Gently, Josh at Agrianista over the pond, SBW the Cockney plumber, and The Idiot Gardener (IG) who, given the relatively short time we have been reading each other’s blogs and I am using the ‘All Time’ stats, has made it into the top ten. I have not counted a few Google referral mechanisms listed because they aren’t human. Actually, reading some of your posts I am not entirely sure you all are human either but still, I do enjoy them. Chris, over at Grow Fish Eat makes it easily into the Top Ten if I use the monthly stats. Consistently in the Top Ten whether I use daily, weekly, monthly or all time stats are Jobsforsmartpeople, so they must be just as daft as Google and don’t, therefore, count. Still in first place after nearly three years polishing the same chair at the top of the class with his increasingly pert little bum is John Gray, the St Francis of Assisi in Wales, don of an allotment full of waifs and strays and living in a country home to Irishmen who could not swim and itinerant Northerners. So later in the post I will point him towards some, um, tips.

After only 48 hours, though, a very special mention must be made of San Pedro Scoop, the best blog I have found about life for an expat in Belize. Imagine, it is rather like starting a race three or so years after the starting gun and in only two days scoring your first driver’s championship points. Sixth place goes to the San Pedro Scoop and, just to remind you, these are All Time stats and, as I say, mine have gone through the roof, which, I will confess, is rather rewarding.

I have not bothered embedding all these links, by the way as all the sites I have mentioned are already listed down the right hand side of the page and I urge you to take a look at each others blogs and hope you like them as much as I do.

SBW would love to shoot wildfowl on Big Falls, an abandoned rice station and Chris over at Grow Fish Eat might realise what it is like to cacth a fish. Megan and the Barefoot Crofter could compare Mayan weaving and knitting and Ursula could freak people out in beach bars with her way off the wall conversation. IG as, we all know, loves banging on about all the exotic places he has visited (did he mention that he had been away?). If He has never been to Belize, he should seriously consider visiting. It is a beautiful country and offers such a diverse range of activities it more or less guarantees enjoyment for visitors of any age and I shall let the excellent photos on the San Pedro Scoop speak for themselves but, as IG is so very well travelled, I can’t think of a really compelling reason for him to go. For John Gray, however, I can think of one and direct his attention, therefore, to: The San Pedro Scoop is Being Read in Angola and: 70 British Troops Storm Pedro's Inn

A little cheeky of me, I know but, enjoy…

I guess it is a cultural thing

Having given away in a recent post that I am well into a fiction based on fact novel set in Belize, I think most of you are aware of the fondness I have for the place.

Several times I searched for any decent blogs from Belize but all I could turn up were the sort written by retirees living in log huts in Cayo district which, while I had the most enormous respect for authors with balls enough to try and make a go of it, were hardly reminiscent of the Belize I knew, an altogether rather more lively place. I only ever went up to Cayo to dig around in Mayan ruins to see if I could find any jade pieces and most times never made it even that far along the Western Highway, preferring to stop off at Big Falls, an abandoned rice station, with a five shot semi automatic Browning 12 bore to blow some wild fowl away. Apart from dropping ducks, I really enjoyed sport fishing and diving and for that I needed the crystal blue waters of the Caribbean, the beach bars and restaurants being a welcome diversion.

Finally I found one, the San Pedro Scoop. It is written by an ex Lehman’s employee (I know, ex Lehman’s and living la dolce vita in the Caribbean, but I am sure many of the rank and file were left with no other choice than accepting a sudden lifestyle change or a long walk out through a twentieth storey office window). Her blog is worth it for the photography alone. San Pedro is by no means the only beautiful place in Belize but it is right up there and the San Pedro Scoop really does give the reader a flavour of what it is all about, almost literally when you see some of the food on offer.

In a recent post, “Sailing on San Pedro’s Rum Punch II”, she described a trip on a classic wooden sailing boat, now run more for casual days out over the reef for keen snorkellers and epicureans than serious fishing. Naturally, there was plenty of fresh sea food and booze on board (otherwise, why would anyone want to pay for a bumpy ride through the surf in the first place?) and once again the narrative and photography were mouth watering. All I can say to her is that now I have found her site, she needs to do a quick deal with the Belizean tourist board and claim a percentage of revenue generated from Angolan tourists because the sudden spike now I am showing her site to everyone I know here will have all been down to her. If she is really switched on she needs to quickly set up a legal platform to assist these rather affluent individuals acquire similar chunks of paradise and park the revenue from oil and diamond deals into the safe haven that the Belizean banking system currently profess to offer.

The first comment she had for this lovely post was one complaining that because ten days before she posted someone had drowned for reasons unknown, she should not have written an article in which booze, boats and women were so closely connected. Crickey. People drown all the time. Of course it is sad. I only knew that someone had taken that final dive on my bit of the river and had washed up on the beach because the police came to me asking if my shop sold batteries for their camera. This was yesterday, I had just shot my dog and wasn’t thinking that well so I said no, but I had my own fully charged camera I could lend them. The camera is now evidence so, realistically, I will never see it again. Now this pisses me off more than the history of the body dragged off my beach especially when the police pathologist took one look at this sodden corpse and said, ‘Yeah, skunked and fell off his boat’.

Naturally, I was bloody annoyed and as a certifiable witness getting back to my very busy shop I was grilled by all the rubber neckers that the police no cross lines had diverted to my coolers filled with beer. The shop was packed.

‘You saw the body?’ was the general enquiry.

‘Yes I did. His throat was sliced through from ear to ear and he had two bullet wounds in his back’,

I paused for effect,

‘The police have decided it was suicide’ I finished.

I grabbed a cold one from the freezer and stalked out of the shop but not quick enough to avoid hearing Marcia say, ‘It is English humour, he doesn’t like seeing dead bodies’.

German humour, darling and no dear, what I don’t like is losing yet another bloody camera all because some besoffene Arschloch got smashed and fell off his boat and was then inconsiderate enough to wash up on my Strand. And I bet the rozzers are drinking for free. The thing that really pissed me off, though, was that the uniformed Criminal Investigation police all pulled on surgeon’s gloves but were then very reluctant to get their boots wet so finally I just waded in and dragged the bastard out, after all, if rats and cockroaches can close a restaurant down, imagine what a putrefying corpse would do for business.

I got back to my room and could not find the church key so had to bite the top off my cold bottle of Charlie and then I remembered another San Pedro Scoop Post, ‘Monday Night at Average Joe’s (AJ’s) Blues bar’. Never mind listening to Blues on a Caribbean beach which, at my age, is seriously better than sex, just check out the beer bottle opening rings, I posted a comment saying these were a must have but I never received a reply. Being ex Lehman’s and safe in paradise, I guess she isn’t going to get out of bed for a deal worth less than a million but I really would have liked a box full of those rings.

As I was trying to chew the top off a Carlsberg bottle I noticed that Nice Paul must have come by while I was wrangling the body out of the river because there was the latest edition of Ski-Boat from South Africa lying on my laptop keyboard.

I went for the boat adverts first and then scanned the mag for anything else that might be interesting. It has bugger all to do with water skiing and miles more to do with sport fishing in all the exotic places in Africa. It is brilliant. Then I saw the advert that ties all this shit in together, me finding the best blog about Belize, the comment beasting the lady author because she posted about a trip mixing booze and snorkelling and me dragging a dead drunk off my beach.

This is what Yamaha South Africa think about all that yoghurt knitting touchy feely stuff about Rum and Water not mixing and the exploitation of women as printed in the April 2012 edition of Ski-Boat:

Gosh.

Not a particularly good day

I shot my own dog

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find - it's your own affair, -
But ... you've given your heart to a dog to tear
Rudyard Kipling

Well that’s one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.

I have only just replied to a comment by Chris in which I said that Dinge, after looking as though he was improving last night, had taken a drastic turn for the worse this morning but that I would have to wait until Marcia got back from town so that she could take Alex and the two other dogs for a walk while I took Dinge down to the pond and let him relax a bit.

Then I heard Dinge whining desperately. He was in agony and was trying to crawl up to my door. From both ends he was leaking an evil smelling slough. I dug out the pistol, loaded it and told the workers to distract Alex by taking him down to the river. I then carried Dinge down to the pond and sat with him for a bit, stroking him and telling him what a good boy he was and what fun we would have had hunting together. I thanked him for his wonderful company and told him how Dominic, who had saved his life, really loved him. I reminded him of all the feral pigs he had flushed and how sorry I was that he never got laid. Then I shot him.

I sat with him for a while and smoked a few cigarettes, all the while stroking him. It took a long time for his eyes to glaze over. Apart from the small hole in his head, he just looked as though he was having a kip in the grass.

Alex came back and found me in my room with tears streaming down my face. ‘Are you hurt?’ He asked. ‘O Dinge Morreu’ I told him. ‘Vamos jogar Football?’ he replied. Yes son, I thought, let’s have a good kick around.

Alex may be refreshingly innocent but I haven’t a clue what I will say to the boy who rescued Dinge from the jaws of death. ‘Where’s my dog, Daddy?’ ‘I had to shoot him, Dominic’

Now that I have calmed down a bit, I suppose I had better wrap him in my shirt and bury him. Poor little bugger.

One of the labourers said, derisively, that he had never seen a man cry over the death of a dog so I decked him and gave him a good kicking, playing football with his head while he was down.

All the Angolans marvelled at how well trained and loyal my dogs are, or in Dinge’s case, were. How they follow me everywhere, even to the extent of chasing my truck all the way to the main road and then when I accelerated away on the smooth black top, waiting there until I came back. Instead of tying them up or beating them all the time I loved them and they reciprocated. The guy I beat up said he was going to the police, as if I could give a shit. I heard one of his mates remonstrate with him saying how could he be so stupid to say what he did, didn’t he know that for white people, dogs are pets (animais de estimacão), part of the family?

Anyway, I think I have calmed down now so if you will all excuse me, I have to bury Dominic's dog. By the pond I think. That’ll be a good place. I like to go there to watch the birds come in of an evening and Dinge liked to go there to chase them, the little bugger.

A post script a couple of hours later.

This was his favourite place...

Alex was pretty subdued...

And Three tried to dig Dinge up again.

Fishing. It is all a question of faith.

Nice Paul with an armful of sushi. I think he is nice in a Manly sort of way but, c'mon girls, at 63 he is pretty cool

And the other two portions on the ground...

Never mind hating Mondays, I hate Sundays. Weekends, I mean. No bugger wants to work so once again I loafed about my building site kicking a half finished this and prodding an unstarted that. The Church wars are driving me nuts but they are good for business. Today we had pick up loads of sweaty Catholics turn up followed by luxury air conditioned coachloads of pilgrims of the Universal church. The Catholics set themselves up and started to sing. The Uni’s unloaded portable generators and speakers the size of Brinks Mat armoured cars and set them up on the beach. Pretty soon all we could hear for miles around was Angolan rap, a particularly distressing form of white noise the Americans have picked up upon as an aid to reducing hardened terror suspects to dribbling wrecks willing to sign any confession. Unlike the left footers, the Uni’s know that if you want adherents, bugger the gospel, spill the beers and play anything you want so long as it is loud and go for the All Nite Rave. I moved out of the city to get away from that kind of shit and now I had them on the nearest bit of beach that wasn’t mine so I could not nip over there and empty my pistol into their ardent faces.

God, who is Catholic by the way, (I have this on very good authority), works as we all know in mysterious ways and the first thing he did was to tell me to go and visit Nice Paul. Naturally it was not for me to question his Mightiness so I slopped over to Nice Paul’s. He, (Nice Paul, not God), told me he had been given a bottle of Snow Grouse. I had heard of jugged hare but I never realised you could buy bottled snow grouse. It looked and tasted just like whisky and I agree with the instructions on the label, it must be served cold. Single malt it wasn’t but free whisky has a quality and flavour all of its own.

Nice Paul had some clients but not nearly as many as he expected so the barbecue was still groaning with lobster tails and chicken drumsticks so Nice Paul and a guy called Mike tipped Alex the wink and he got stuck in, polishing off a hundred and fifty bucks at Angolan restaurant prices and feeding another three hundred or so to the dogs, except poor old Dinge, who had followed us and were lurking under the decking. I am way too overweight to risk things like grilled lobster and chicken preferring instead marbled beef in a mushroom cream sauce with spaetzle, kidney braised in cognac and more cream with a cucumber dill cream salad, and red cabbage braised with bacon, plum preserve, apples, sugar and vinegar followed by half pears, lots of them, steeped in port wine and brown sugar lathered with fresh cream and all washed down with a passable Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, so for health reasons I continued to race Nice Paul to the bottom of the bottled game bird.

In the background we could hear the heathens prostrating themselves in front of their noisy idols so God, who is a Catholic by the way, told Nice Paul to take me out fishing. Naturally, Nice Paul immediately offered and I, really not wishing to piss the Great Architect off, immediately accepted.

It really does pay to listen to the Really Big Boss because less than an hour later we were rewarded with these three tiddlers. Jack Trevally’s Nice Paul said but I can’t be sure as the snow goose, I mean grouse, had been sucked dry by then. And before anyone gets all upset at the thought of me taking a three year old out on a boat while under the influence, calm down. I left Alex playing in the swimming pool after giving him a strict safety brief to stay out of the deep end.

When we got back, the Uni’s were still giving it hammer and tongs with their massive speakers on the beach when all of a sudden the wind kicked up. Any African rain storm is always preceded by a wild shit storm of wind so we knew what would happen in about ten minute’s time. I just managed to get home before God, being a Catholic, pissed all over the Uni’s party.

Alexander is lying alongside his mother fast asleep in bed with a gutful of lobster. I have three monster fish in the freezer.

Instead of lying awake with the noise of rappers from hell, I shall fall asleep to the sound of rain from heaven bashing on my wriggly tin roof.

Of Bibles and Snakes

The Sermon on the Beach

The Universal Church is evidently causing the Catholic Church here some angst. The UC is very big in Angola. Whereas a typical Catholic Church will be a breeze block construction with a wriggly tin roof, UC’s are massive, spacious arenas with vaulted ceilings capable of accommodating congregations numbering in their thousands. The UC is so wealthy it has bought a sizeable acreage of the beach up the road from me and with a no doubt considerable investment, judging by all the hardcore they trucked in and all the heavy plant needed to push it around, the poor pastors have their version of paradise on earth complete with air conditioned condos so that they can ‘retreat’ in comfort between sermons. All paid for by their genuinely poor parishioners.

Rather than wait for Catholic brethren to come to church, the Catholic Church is now coming to them. I received my visit yesterday. Now I am not talking about a couple of breathlessly earnest geeks clutching Watchtower drivel and jamming their feet in the door as you repeatedly slam if harder and harder in their faces, I am talking about a whole crowd of devotees including a priest who pitch up and conduct the full Catholic multi course meal. Now I let myself in for this. The weekend before last, some of the devoted, having spent the day treating other sinners to the salve of God’s love in human form pitched by my shop to sink some beer and whisky so, being the sort of sociable bloke I am when I am looking at some big and unexpected turnover I joined them rather than just serving them. They were all dressed the same and apart from the priest (who unlike the Irish Catholic Priests I remember from my youth, preferred Gin to Whiskey), were all women. Some of them were really good looking, definitely in the extremely hot category and with bras clearly not part of official attire and nipples tracing circles on thin, sweat moistened T shirts, already I was damning myself with very impure thoughts. Please don’t be appalled, I have always fancied shagging a nun but I guess cuckolding God would be a bad idea which is probably why Catholic priests go for altar boys instead.

It just popped out and then kept coming. I am not religious. In fact I can be very irreligious but even I could not believe I could do such a thing. I admitted that I was Catholic. Not only that, I buried myself further by telling them I had been an altar boy. Unable to stop digging I told them of how peaceful I felt hearing the church bells pealing across a Black Forest valley summoning the faithful to Sunday morning service and how the Church used to be the focus of the real communities that now, sadly no longer exist. As I started to tell them that it bothered me a bit because I had not been to confession in nearly twenty years, Marcia started frantically studying the labels of the whisky bottles in case she had inadvertently bought in counterfeit hooch made from industrial methyl alcohol.

Joking aside, I have seen, and heard them on their rounds. They don’t amble around as an unholy rabble, they process with candles and all and they sing, boy can they sing. It is truly spine tingling, lump in the throat stuff. I have never heard anything so wonderful as the harmonised choruses they pour out like warm honey. You can’t beat live music but when you hear this kind of passion and simple devotion captured in every nuance of their vocals, you are talking top of the charts stuff. Don’t ask me how the date was picked, except to say that perhaps it would be nice for such an occasion and the inevitable party to coincide with his birthday, but Alex will be christened in the local Catholic Church in September and these people, this wonderful choir will sing at the service. In keeping with the biblical significance of such an event, I will slaughter some animals and roast them up. Since relying on some hippie to turn water into wine might be a long shot, I will truck loads in.

A week later, then, I received my own personal mass on the banks of the river. I honestly thought that they were going to strip me and dunk me in it but no, they were really quite restrained. The amazing thing was that even though they were speaking Portuguese, I knew where I was during the service and could remember it all in German. So while they gently intoned in what is quite a musical language, I laid on with a thick layer of guttural discordance. Still, they were all terribly pleased with me and I felt quite unaccountably chuffed. It really is nice to have a bit of a community get together and since the Catholic Faith is the best of all in that you can do what the hell you like and with a few Hail Mary’s, or maybe working through a whole Rosary if you have been really naughty, a simple confession grants you absolution. Maybe I’ll get to shag a nun yet.

I am very pleased to read that after a long and sometimes frustrating search, Josh over at Agrarianista has finally found himself a lovely looking dog. She looks gorgeous and sounds just the ticket. I really hope that Josh details her training. I am pretty pathetic at training dogs and count it a success if they come back when they are called anything more than half the time.

Sadly Dinge, who you may recall was ripped from his mother’s teat and flung into a cage with a Python as the snake’s supper, has had a pretty bad run in with a snake again. I was typing at my desk with the door open as usual and I could see the dogs beating about some scrub clearly worrying some beastie. They do this all the time and usually it is a lizard or a mouse they are after. I paid them little attention until suddenly I heard Dinge yelping furiously, running around in circles clearly very distressed. Just catching him was a hell of a job and when I did, other than the fact he was clearly panic stricken and seemed to be really bothered about an area on his flank, I could see nothing wrong. There were no broken bones, no blood, so bemused I let him go again.

Still he kept worrying at that area on his flank, jumping around like a puppy chasing its tail. I noticed that his back was starting to arch and that he was tottering on tip toe, his back legs stiffening. Several times he all but toppled over. His eyes were wide and frantic and he was panting desperately. Then he really started to whimper, a keening series of quick yips followed by longer yowls. I grabbed him again and tried to take a really good look but he wouldn’t keep still. His muscles were all strung as tight as steel hawsers and saliva was pouring from his mouth. Every time and every where I touched him he flinched and shivered and yipped and yowled. I tried to brush back the stiff fur on his side to see if I could see anything but I could only see a millimetre of his flesh with each sweep and as it was clearly causing him enormous discomfort, I gave up.

The night before last, the day it happened, I let him crawl into our room. He always liked sneaking into my bedroom at the old place and now that we are cramped into what is destined to be a kitchen he quickly learnt that the Old Man has no peripheral vision so he could easily sneak in while I was typing and kip under the bed. Usually I would toss him out if I caught him but this time I let him in, put a bowl of fresh water and some food down and left him to it. All night long he whimpered like a baby, occasionally suffering a fit that had him thrashing around with such force I could easily feel it through the mattress. Marcia wasn’t best pleased.

In the morning, he looked terrible. It seemed as if he was half paralysed with some sort of rigor from the waist down. His back was arched and his rear legs were little more than stiff stilts. His eyes were ruby they were so bloodshot. Then I saw the swelling, the weal on his flank. The hair had fallen away leaving a dark inflamed stain of suppurating flesh, two closely connected mounds, rather like a figure of eight with the two circles overlapping. In the centre of each was a puncture mark, like oozing burst boils. Bugger me, I thought, you poor sod Dinge, you really have some bad luck with snakes.

Sadly, apart from trying to make him comfortable, there is little that can be done for him. He will either recover or he will die. Since making venom is a serious investment for a snake, often they do not inject, or if they do it is only a tiny amount, anything they do not see as prey. Their strikes may come without warning but they are just that, a warning. I am not an expert by any means but judging from the spacing of the puncture marks, this was no worm sized snake so a full dose would have killed a dog the size of Dinge, if not in minutes then certainly in less than an hour. The fact that he has survived into his second day, albeit looking like a wild eyed skeleton, is hopeful. Naturally I am worried that his internal organs, frantically trying to clean the venom out, may have suffered irreparable damage but only time will tell.

This morning he still looked awful, his ribs standing out in stark contrast to the sleekness of only a couple of days ago but he seems to be moving around better. He is still a bit stiff, a little unsteady on his pins but his back isn’t so arched and he has stopped whimpering. He is spending less time lying in my room and a bit more lying alongside Dog and Three although he doesn’t even try to keep up with them when they decide to chase a shop customer that they for some reason known only to themselves do not like, what used to be the trio’s favourite sport. This could either mean he is slowly recovering or that he is slowly dying.

It would be a terrible irony if the dog that Dominic saved from being snake food would finally be killed by one. And please believe me without any cynicism when I say I am praying hard for the little sod. Don’t forget, if he doesn’t get better, if he slowly wastes away half paralysed and in obvious pain, the vet having told me there is nothing he can do for him it being a case of wait and see, I am going to have to shoot my own dog. I would rather do it that way than make the poor bastard suffer the awful trip to town to unfamiliar surroundings and have a stranger stick a needle in him. If he is to go, then he will do so the same way he was introduced to life in my family, sleeping next to my pit on a bed of the clothes I had been wearing that day and I will do it myself so I know it is done right. It is the least of very little I can do for him.

Viper venom. Leaves a pretty mean rotting hole in yer side and just generally buggers you up.

Marcia asked me, ‘What if it had been little Alex?’

Quite. Maybe I should stop wrangling snakes in front of Alex, carrying them out into the field to release them, and just kill them on the spot instead, instilling a fear of beasties into the little boy that might just, one day, save his life.