Charity Begins at Home...So Does Discipline.

I taught my son Dominic to ride a motorcycle when he was four and tried, as much as possible, to give him as long a leash as I dared in the hope he would develop at an early age a sense of responsibility which, largely, he has.

Like all growing boys, though, he has on occasion muddied the distinction between what strictly speaking is right, and that which to us in the know is definitely wrong; youthful curiosity and sheer mischief backing him up on the sticky wicket of feeble excuses and inevitable retribution.

Like the time he was pinched by the local police driving my Range Rover, aged nine.

Or the time, wishing to prove that eggs can bounce, he raided the neighbour's hen coop and stole all her eggs to augment those he and his friend had already emptied from my fridge in a continuing and ultimately futile attempt to get eggs to ricochet off sun baked African soil.

He doesn't ricochet too well off hard sunbaked soil either but he'll learn not to go nuts on his 'bike. He does look sorry for himself, though, doesn't he?

As a kid if I stepped out of line, or merely into the sights of unbridled frustration, I would get a thrashing with the length of bamboo my mother used to stuff the laundry down into her top loading washing machine. With the pain and, moreover, the indelible impression of fear, humiliation and sense of betrayal this branded on my soul (and sore bum), I swore I would never lay a hand on any of my children. And I never have.

This does give me a problem, though. Sometimes, all kids, especially boys, get up to things which push even the most reasonable adult over the edge; beating the little beggar a welcome salve, ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’, that sort of thing. Crude retribution eliciting only hatred and deceit rather than the respect the thrashing demanded.

I live in Angola, a country half the size of Europe but with a population only half the size of London so the chances of him hitting anything were fairly remote but, nevertheless, the car incident did warrant a stern talking to, an explanation of the folly of his actions, my disappointment that he would try something like that without asking me first. Deep down I knew he could drive but what if something unexpected had happened? An out-of-control water tanker hurtling down the hill or, God forbid, a toddler running across the road after a ball. He was only going around the block, his first solo so to speak. He now realises the awful anguish and grief he could have caused if his inexperience had allowed him to lose control of two tonnes of V8 powered Solihull steel. He accepts, if he wants to drive, I can take him somewhere safe so he can practice. By the time he is legal, he should be a lot more mature than the average first timer.


See? He knows what he is doing.

The ‘Eggscapade’ was a little trickier. This time he had caused loss to another citizen, a now extremely irate citizen. When kids hide behind you and cling to your legs, you know they have been up to something.

The eggs smeared along the road represented future broilers, the sale of which provided income for the plaintiff, a dear old lady. She was also our neighbour, part of a community to which we all belonged. Naturally, once she had confirmed that the bandits responsible were my son and his friend, she had every right to call the police. Instead, she accepted a heartfelt apology from Dominic. Dominic's friend, I noticed with dismay, was too chicken to admit his role in the crime.

Now this was to me a heinous offence. I replaced the lost eggs with all the fowl from my own stock, depriving us of eggs for the forseeable future, but Dominic could not possibly get off with something as light as an albeit honourable confession and apology. After I smoothed ruffled feathers, I went back inside to discover the boys calmly watching Disney Channel as if nothing had happened. A sort of 'Let Dad sort it out' attitude. A beating was surely the only option.

And this is where a tight community identity comes in. Instead of whipping the delinquent within an inch of his life, I went to see another of my neighbours, the Commander of the Presidential Guard, and explained the situation to him. He was as one of the leaders of our community, all for a quick solution. Justice had to be seen to be done without invoking the blunt instrument of the law. The Community would sort its own problems out.

I went home and told the boys that despite my best efforts, the Egg Lady was going to call the police. That would mean they would be arrested and taken to the local police station and would probably have to spend at least a night there until their case was heard by a magistrate the next day. I would try to provide them some clean drinking water, maybe even a bit of food but God knows what the punishment handed down would be as, I couldn’t help pointing out, everyone hates thieves here.

Well familiar with the local gaol, a Dickensian horror they passed every day on the way to school, both boys had involuntary bowel movements and went pale as sheets.

Looking suitably ashen, as a concerned father should under such circumstances, I told the boys to take their last bath in freedom and dress in clean clothes. In the meantime, I said, I would try to work something out.

While they were trembling in the shower, I nipped back to Colonel Henriques' place where he gave me a tumbler of scotch and introduced me to the 'Military Police' (some of his men dressed up for the part) so we could brief them.

By the time I got home the boys were spruced up and perched on the edge of the sofa clutching school bags stuffed with a pathetic selection of essential belongings looking as if they were about to faint. After all, with less than an hour's notice of being banged up for life, what comforts would you pack? As far as they were concerned, this was far more pertinent and frighteningly more immediate than idle supposition on Desert Island Disks.

I asked Dominic if his friend wanted to call his father.

'He hasn't got one' Dominic said simply.

Turns out the boy is the illegitimate offspring of a long since absent expatriate. His Mother then? No good either. He was too scared to admit to his mother he'd been up to mischief so had instead resigned himself to his fate. How awful that a little lad would rather face certain incarceration in preference to calling on his own mother for help, trusting instead a friend’s father, a man now guilty of cruel deception. Again I was ready to wilt; the frantic looks of hope, the utter faith in me, that I would sort this one out and make it all go away. It was heartrending. And all because of a bunch of eggs.

'OK boys', I told them, 'this neighbourhood being under military jurisdiction, I have managed to persuade the Egg Lady to allow you to be dealt with by the Military Police, not the Civil Police so you boys sit tight, they are on their way. At least this way, if you do have to spend a night in jail, Col H can ensure you don’t get beaten and I can bring you food. When they come, please don't lie, you are just going to have to accept what's coming'

In due course, the 'Military Police' arrived. Goodness, they deserved Oscars, they were brilliant. They waved handcuffs at the boys, sat them down at my dining table and took full statements. Col H put in another Academy Award winning performance speaking up on their behalf and stating that although I was a foreigner, I was a solid member of the community (how I managed to keep a straight face I have no idea).

The boys were told they could stay under house arrest in my charge but would have to attend a Military Court Martial the following day, a tribunal populated by the community and held at Col H's place. Released from the threat of a mosquito ridden cell, I told them to go to bed.

They never slept a wink. Dominic's friend did a lot of crying and I could tell that Dominic was scared because his voice was trembling while he comforted him. I know all this because I couldn't sleep either, instead standing outside their room all night wondering if I was taking things too far. Both boys were essentially decent. I liked Dominic’s friend and now understood why he was so desperately insecure. With no Dad and a mother he was too scared to call, he must have died a thousand deaths.

I firmly believe that it is terribly hard for just one parent to bring up a well adjusted child so am immensely impressed by those who succeed and can understand, though not condone, the remainder who perhaps overwhelmed, allow frustration, even desperation to overcome good judgement. Children need both parents. Death is occasionally a tragic check to this and abuse invokes essential institutional separation but under normal circumstances, fathers and mothers are essential.

Imagine, though, growing up knowing your father couldn’t even be bothered. As far as this little lad, Dominic's friend, the poor little Tike sweating in a strange bed in a strange house was concerned, in his father's eyes he didn't exist. And now he was going to jail. Aged ten.

Sometimes, the reasons for abandoning a child are economic and I have embraced two young children into my family for that very reason. You would have to have a heart colder and harder than Dartmoor granite in winter to turn a child in such need away from the warmth of your hearth, the bounty of your table or, more importantly, the sense of belonging a family environment brings in preference to any material desire you may have entertained. Parents who divorce yet cannot reconcile their often acrimonious differences in favour of harmony when it comes to decisions regarding their children are just as selfish.

I felt very sorry for Dominic’s friend but realised that no purpose would be served if I let Dominic off scot free just because his friend, through no fault of his own, lacked the parental guidance all young kids need from an early age. The theft of a bunch of eggs may seem chicken feed to those accustomed to knife wielding teenage Hoodies terrorising old pensioners and stabbing each other to death outside Tesco’s but it is a worrying start. If they get away with minor offences now, who knows what they will be up to in five year’s time? Swift retribution for the theft of something as minor as eggs, right now, while they are still young and impressionable, could just be the opportunity to instil a respect for fellow citizens and their property.

Once, as a very young man, I went skiing in the southern Bavarian Alps. Apré Ski, walking through forests glittering under their burden of snow bathed in the light of a full moon and with a gutful of locally brewed beer, I was really impressed with the cleared pathways and routes well posted with hand carved wooden signs screwed to the trees. I just had to have one as a souvenir.

When I got back to my Grandparent’s place in the Black Forest, my Grandfather noticed the trophy as I unpacked and asked me how I had acquired it. I could see he wasn’t impressed.

He explained to me how the local community funded such improvements by themselves, not relying on government funds but doing it solely to improve their own lot. How each citizen, blessed with his own particular skills, gave freely his labour for the benefit of the community as a whole. A sort of ‘Cameron style Big Community’ but executed with Teutonic efficiency. He didn’t shout at me, or give me the belting I deserved. That wasn’t his style. He had painted a picture in my mind, a utopia that ungrateful Oiks like me destroyed. The man was possessed with a vast intellect. He did not need to resort to something as vulgar as violence.

Once, I admit, he gave me a boot in the pants, launching me out of his office and into the corridor because I couldn’t keep my loud gob shut while he was receiving a phone call but that was about it when it came to battering kids as far as he was concerned. There was the time he shouted at Granny in front of us, an event so exclusive, it had us kids glued wide eyed to the sofa, all because I had eaten all the marzipan balls from Granny’s not-so-secret hiding place and then been sick as a result. But he cooled down immediately when she calmly explained that in England, they did not have anything as civilised or decadent as Lübecker confectionary and I had merely been showing good taste. So long as Germany won at something, he was happy and I continued to be awed by my Grandmother’s sange froid and eloquence under fire.

Realising that the frosty paradise I had so recently enjoyed was the fruit of altruism, a community spirit sadly now alien to us in UK, I felt terrible. Even worse was knowing I had disappointed my grandfather.

When the war started, he was studying to be an architect in Berlin, following in the footsteps of a father who had designed many of the great buildings in that magnificent city. At nineteen, instead of calculating loads and stresses, he did his part to squeeze the British out of Dunkirk (he once showed us the mile marker in France behind which, gut shot, he had crawled for cover), before being posted to the Eastern front. His war ended not in that desperate spring of 1945, when the German high command thankfully threw in the towel ending a decade of tyranny, but in 1947 when after two year’s of evading capture by the Soviets, he led what was left of his unit south through the Balkans and then north back through Austria and onwards towards his beloved Berlin. The indescribable horrors he witnessed left him with a polarised view of right and wrong and a clear sense of the futility of unbridled violence as a solution. He was highly decorated but his medals, including an Iron Cross, remained ignored except by me, in the bottom drawer of his desk.

He went on to design the Mercedes factory in Sindelfingen near Stuttgart (or ‘Daimler Werks’ as the old hands who’d been bombed to stupefaction during the war insisted on calling it). As a kid, I and my brothers had free reign and used to run through the factory and had loads of lifts in the brand new cars leaving the production line to the railway sidings from which the very best of German automotive engineering departed to their new owners all over the world. We had the authority of our grandfather but we still addressed the labourers as ‘Sir’ and did as we were told.

Crawling with shame, I offered to send the sign back but, as he pointed out, it now bore the scars of having been brutally torn from the tree that had supported it. Once a faithful indicator of safe passage home for travellers lost in an unforgiving winter landscape, now rendered useless by my vandalism. How many innocent people had died a cold, lonely death on my account? I would willingly have perished on the spot but youthful vigour let me down, my lungs refused to stop breathing and my heart continued to beat inexorably. Instead of blessed oblivion, I was justly rewarded with a forehead dripping with perspiration under the cool gaze of a dispassionate observer upon whom, at the same age I was then, had been forced the privations and stark discipline of a Prussian military academy. No sympathy there then.

He reached for the phone on his desk and asked to be connected to Sonthofen Police Station. A few minutes later he handed me two addresses, one for the police chief and another for the Mayor of Sonthofen, the village I had so recently violated. He suggested, as he placed paper and pen on his desk, I might like to write them a letter. It took me all night. How many ways can you say Sorry? The next day, both letters went into the same envelope along with a cheque from my grandfather.

A few weeks later my grandfather called me into his study and gave me an unopened envelope. It was a reply from the Mayor of Sonthofen. In it the Mayor expressed his admiration for the courage needed to confess to such a misdemeanour, how pleased he was that I had enjoyed the beauty and hospitality of his town, and how fortunate I was to have a grandfather like Ernst Günther Diepenbrock von Borken.

I was still too young and stupid to work out whether the good fortune His Excellency the Mayor referred to was the family connection that may have just helped me avoid a custodial sentence or a genuine respect for the guidance given by a wise old sage to an adolescent moron. Sadly, my grandfather died before I could tell him that the penny had finally dropped.

It was only a stupid wooden sign. But the Mayor knew that it was the crime that was stupid, and that the subsequent apology and compensation was a family matter. My grandfather had made amends as well as making me bleed. I would never let him down again. I am sure that my grandfather, ‘Opa’ as I called him, suffered the same then as I was suffering now at the thought of the mental trauma I was inflicting on these boys but if, without beating me stupid, he gave me a lesson I would never forget, then these lads surely deserved a punishment no less refined.

The tribunal convened, the Egg Lady was allowed to explain to the court how her livelihood had been ruined by the two boys standing before her and how insulted and disappointed she felt by the invasion of her property, compounded with the knowledge that the culprits were members of the same community. She laid it on thicker than an omelette. The lads had their turn and expressed, with total humility, their guilt and resultant shame. From their demeanour, all that was missing were the executioner's blindfolds.

The decision of the court, delivered in the presence of the community, was that the boys would collect all the litter from the streets of the neighbourhood and clean all the weeds from the Egg Lady's property and that I, as the father of one of the boys and temporary guardian of the other, responsible, therefore, for their actions, would work alongside them and provide the transport to dispose of the rubbish.

It took us a whole weekend.



Dominic and his young brother Alexander. Eleven year's old and already Court-Martialed, surely a record?

Look at it this way. Dominic wasn't beaten. He had the wits scared out of him in such a way as to give him ample time to ponder the consequences of his actions. He had time to reflect on how badly he had damaged a poor old lady's ability to earn her living. He realised, as I worked alongside him in the hot sun under the eyes of indignant neighbours, the shame he had brought both upon himself and his family, notably his own father. When it was all over, the streets were clean, the Egg lady had a smart yard, and she had a new flock of good egg layers. And hopefully, there are two less bandits in the community.

Dominic has never stepped out of line since and recognises that I, as his father, am equally liable to censure for anything bad he gets up to. It may have been a bit of a cruel trick but I think it was worth it. If more parents accepted joint responsibility for the actions of their offspring and could, most importantly, call on the support of their communities to help nip such anti-social behaviour in the bud, then maybe all of us could enjoy a better society without the need for ASBO's, youth detention centres and no-go areas in our neighbourhoods. And Fathers would not have to thrash their sons.

Dominic’s friend seems to enjoy his visits here, in spite of his scare, and is turning into a pretty mean fisherman. His mother, who really loves him dearly I am sure, still cuts his food up for him. Imagine how she would react if she knew I was giving him a razor sharp fillet knife to cut up bait fish.

I think it would spoil the effect if I confessed my deception to the boys. Dominic is convinced that only my amazing influence, the powers that every real Dad has, saved them from jail. His friend thought it was so cool that Dom's dad would slave alongside them in the sun for the sake of family honour which included him, a case of while you are with me, you are part of the family too.

So now that I have a well behaved son, with the help of Amish Tom and the unwitting encouragement of Raschman and SBW, I am going to get Dominic a hunting bow so that together, father and son, and the young lad without a Dad, we can track down, kill and eat the feral pigs that have rooted up the garden around my restaurant. A sport allowing me to both further instil in the boys a sense of responsibility (and piss their respective mothers off), as well as letting me settle a personal score with the evil little truffle hunters reducing my herb gardens to ploughed mud.


Dominic and his Dad. It's a Man thing.

By the way, which of us as boys never got up to any mischief? As a youth, I was a pyromaniac and in my day, every school chemistry lab shelf was groaning under the weight of everything we needed to wreak havoc. Iodine crystals, 0.88 molar solution of Ammonia, Flowers of Sulphur, Salt Petre, Pure Carbon, Nitric acid and in the groundsman's shed, sacks of fertilizer. My Dad would have burst a blood vessel if he had discovered the amount of home made explosives being brewed under the roof of his own house.

Which is why I found this reminiscence, the link kindly provided by Amish Tom, so bloody funny…

Something-they-wont-learn-in-school

He's cool. Obviously he didn't get that from me.

Last of the Summer Logs

Mummy, am I a Polar Bear?

Of course you are, darling, look at your fluffy white fur, just like me and Daddy!

But are you sure I am a Polar Bear?

I keep telling you, of course you are. Just look at your little black nose and sharp claws in your paws. Why do you keep asking?

Well, Mum, if I’m a Polar bear, why am I so fucking cold?

Most might imagine tropical Africa as a place with no seasons; cooling rain showers washing into fertile earth providing regular relief from a baking sun. Lightweight safari suits the norm for those in business, the rest happy with shorts and T-Shirts. Sundowners on the verandah every evening.

Maybe I have been here too long and my blood, now well diluted by alcohol and malaria is too thin to perform as successfully as it did in Europe: efficiently cooling or centrally heating my system according to need, albeit aided by a seasonal wardrobe and Pimm’s or Glühwein as required.

Here in Angola, we are in the middle of what they call the ‘Tempo de Frio’, or ‘Caximbo’, the literal translation of the latter being ‘pipe’ (the one you stuff tobacco in and smoke, not the fluid or gas type). Either way, the Cold Season.

Before I came to this continent, I had heard of dry and rainy seasons but never imagined a cold one. Indeed, during my first few years here I never noticed and was one of those startlingly pale individuals (obviously foreign and hailing from genuinely colder climes) that splashed about in the sea enjoying empty beaches while all the locals were huddled around charcoal braziers and wrapped in shawls. The kids used to chant ‘Russo, Russo’ at me, so rare the sight of anyone in Speedos at that time of year and a reflection of just how many Russian advisors, also presumably clad in Speedos and whiter than the sand they lay on, there were in Angola back then.

I was born in Berlin, where winter brought an arctic wind hurling itself westwards across the Steppes from the foothills of the Urals sawing everything in its path in half and summer, parched forests that would spontaneously combust, village ponds evaporating before one’s eyes. Only in spring and autumn would we feel we weren’t in an all out war with Nature.

I am still a little surprised, therefore, having once been accustomed to the extremes of a continental climate, I should now suffer under such a relatively insignificant seasonal temperature variation. I do not have a thermometer to hand but at four o’clock in the morning I can assure you, the pool is not covered in ice and there is no frost killing the garden plants, yet I wake up with teeth chattering in spite of all the blankets.

The onset of the cold season is heralded by a warning evening chill which encourages one to dig out the old pullover brought over from Europe ten year’s ago, the state of which when found brings the awful realisation that while we were lying on the beach, mice have been nesting in the wardrobe all summer. And then there is the thought that having buried myself in every duvet and blanket I can find, Marcia will get up during the night to heat Alexander’s milk and then defrost her feet on me.

When I designed my house, I had a particular feature in mind. The lounge and open plan kitchen (they call them ‘American' kitchens here, no doubt because the only exposure they get to the inside of an American home is a TV soap opera studio) were laid out so that this feature would be the focal point of a cosy family bolthole. Marcia back then thought I was mad and since I was away in Uganda at the time the house went up, told the builders not to bother.

I rather suspect she regrets that decision.

I have had to wait three years but I am going to install, where it should have been in the first place, a bloody great open fireplace.

I am too old to be motivated by the prospect of frolics in front of blazing logs so will be quite happy to lie on the preserved fur of some dead animal by myself, glass of scotch gently warmed by radiated heat and Caravanserai playing on the stereo but, I bet I won’t be alone for long.

Which reminds me, I must buy flea powder for the dogs.

F@ck my Dad says

As an avid follower of the Suburban Bushwacker, it wasn’t long before I picked up on his link to really quite an odd blog, ‘Shit My Dad Says’.

Eh?

SBW, in my experience, doesn't link to tosh so I thought I'd wander over.

Basically, it is just some young man pasting in all the crazy stuff his Dad, obviously one of the original Grumpy Old Men, has said to him. Now it looks like there is a book and a film on the way. Brilliant, and good luck to you young Justin, your Dad sounds great.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my Dad. He was lean and very mean when he wanted to be and, as an ex Sergeant Major, had the razor sharp wit that used to verbally flay even the cockiest recruit or over arrogant young officer and continued, post service, to be aimed at anyone that irritated him, especially me.

He started off in the King’s Own Rifle Brigade and then transferred over to the Ordnance Corps. He ended up as the Stores Materials Control Manager for British Gas with offices in Derby, where he built the National Strategic Stockyard (and I learnt to drive), and the Natwest Tower in London. I started in the Light Infantry, one half of the Light Division that subsumed the Rifle Brigade and was then commissioned into the Ordnance Corps so had unwittingly started in his footsteps.

When I pointed this out to him his reaction was simple. ‘So you think ending your days working for the bloody Gas Board is some kind of achievement?’

Judging by the number of people who turned up at his funeral, the lovely house and pension he left our Mum, yes Dad, I think it was.

There was a massive intellect there that never had the chance to flower. He could quote any passage of Kipling you cared to mention and once recited the Ancient Mariner while driving well over the speed limit all the way from Leicester to Newcastle. He was Captain of the British Army Trials team and could shoot the balls of a gnat.

When he was a kid, his Dad dumped him off in a pub in York where he slept under the counter before making his way back to Liverpool and ended up carrying his younger half brother on his back through the burning blitzed out streets to safety. He lied about his age and joined the Army as soon as he could. I never met his half brother, Trevor.

Oldest sons can never do right. We are expected, especially once the younger siblings arrive, to be blessed with a maturity well beyond our few years. How many of us are guilty of the same? The nagging doubt you may have bred a mutant retard; the neighbour’s kid is walking, what’s wrong with ours?

Well, speaking from experience, nothing actually. I was perfectly content to dribble porridge down my face and shit in my nappies. I wasn’t going to crawl, let alone walk to reach a bunch of coloured blocks when I knew that patience would be rewarded by these ‘big’ people eventually bringing them to me. I was too young to realise I was surrounded by dizzy aunts who spoilt me rotten. It was only when I saw something really interesting, like a scorpion, that I felt I just had to wander over and have a chew. That got me loads of attention.

My earliest recollection is sitting on my father’s lap behind the steering wheel of some car driving through Tripoli. He was dead keen that I would do well but, being a Sgt. Major, he was sometimes a bit colourful with me.

I was devastated when my father died so suddenly. I had left the Army and opened a motorcycle dealership in Germany which grew until I went international and opened another in Bratislava. I never really earned much money out of that outlet, my customers were basically the local Mafia but God, was it fun. I would run a Mercedes panel van all the way down Germany, through Austria and then be met by these hoods at the border so crossing was easy.

I’d build the ‘bikes up, usually in the car park of whatever night club the big man owned and then we’d go racing around Bratislava at quite frankly, really scary speeds, across greasy cobble stones first laid when the place was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until His Highness was satisfied that I had sold him the very absolute pinnacle of unbeatable hot snot.

The business turned out to be sort of self sustaining as each ‘boss’ realised he had just been upped by his nemesis down the road and demanded something even more crazy from me. I felt like an arms dealer selling to all sides, one of them was bound to get pissed off with me in the end.

So I invited my Dad along.

He was due to retire in six months but there was no way he was going to spend his twilight years with his feet stuffed into slippers, hunched in his wingback sipping cocoa.

'You are running empty vehicles back from Russia’ he said to me one day.

'Not Russia, Dad, Czechoslovakia’

'Commies, same thing. Bet you they’ve got loads of antiques over there'

‘Antiques?’

'I want to be an antiques dealer when I retire and if I have a son too stupid to get loads for his returning vans, I might as well cash in'

So I contacted the Boys and next trip, my Dad rode shotgun in the truck.

We got to Bratislava, met the gang, built up their bikes and then, because they really, really respect older people, especially father’s of colleagues, fell over themselves to help my Dad out. First with a selection of Italian birds that had me exploding in my Y fronts, and then with what he was really interested in, antiques.

There was no real open commerce but there were always those places were simple folk could flog the sort of stuff they didn’t need anymore. We would walk in, score what we fancied, and then let the boys do the negotiating. Once I had the temerity to ask the shop owner the price before leaving it to the minder and she told me X Squillion Dollars. The boy went in, came out, told me not to do that again and the price was 50 bucks. For a Viennese wall clock. I say boy. He was built like a brick shithouse.

When it came time to go home, all our loot was concealed in the footwells of a fleet of Ladas complete with mothers and suckling babes under the feet of whom was concealed the stock for my Dad’s fledgling Leicestershire antique shop.

In those days the length of the queues waiting to cross a communist border was measured in days, not miles. The man squished into the cab between me and my Dad directed us into the oncoming traffic and, at the head of a convoy of Ladas we hurtled at the border. Cartons of cigarettes sailed out of the window landing in the arms of border guards as easy as we sailed into Austria.

Two weeks later, my dad was found dead in his workshop having died of a massive heart attack while carving a garden bench he had made.

Even now I dream about him sometimes. For seventeen years I have only thought of him fleetingly. I miss him like hell and obviously it hurts if I think about him too hard. But while reading the shit that young Justin’s Dad says, I started to remember all the grief my dad gave me. I loved doing things with him and he obviously liked to have me along because he took me with him everywhere, into his office, down the armoury letting me pick up pistols and SMG's, helping him work on his cars but God help me if I did anything dumb. Actually, I think everything I did was dumb because my ears always seemed to be ringing from some flash remark of his.

So, here are just a few:

I asked you for a fucking ring spanner not an open ended you dozy bastard, don’t you know the difference?

No dad.

Well stick your finger up your arse. That's a ring. Then stick it in your ear. That, in your case Son, is open ended.


What the Fuck are you doing?

I’m sorry, Dad, my dick itches like hell, I was just scratching it.

Well try washing it more often… By the way, I hate men who lie. You’re a wanker so just admit it.


C'mon Dad, tell me about the scars on your arms

OK Son, I was riding a motorcycle across the desert when an Arab shot me

Christ Dad! What did you do!!!

I fell off


OK, Son, indicate right and just ease up to the junction... Is it all clear, Son?

Yes Dad

Ok, Go!... That's it, now I know my son is a genius!

Why Dad?

Only you could stall a fucking automatic!


Look, Son, it's dead simple. Look through your windscreen. Tarmac, blue sky? Good, accelerator. Big fucking mountain of earth and trees? Bad, brake. Can you grasp that? Maybe I didn't explain enough about what that bloody great round thing you're holding does...


Dad! I qualified as a Marksman!

I can hit a running Arab at two hundred paces, your Mum says you can’t even hit the toilet bowl so don’t give me that shit.


How long did it take for you to make Corporal, Dad?

First or third time son?


What did he call me?

I didn’t hear Dad.

Look, I’m the deaf sod around here, what did he say?

He called you a Wanker, Dad

Right, that’s it

I don’t know Dad, he looks pretty big to me.

That’s alright Son, if he takes a swing at me, you stand in the way and I’ll get him while you’re going down.


Don’t worry Son, you look like a fit, young bastard so he’ll go for you first and then while he’s kicking your teeth in, I’ll get him with this.

Christ, Dad, that’s a starting handle!

Yeah! Beats the shit out of a Karate chop.


Fuck! Shit! Bastard Fucking Hell Christ Almighty!

Bash your head on the chassis of the car again, Dad?

It’s your fault, you little shit!

By bringing you a cup of tea?

You should have brought it five minutes ago.


So you’re an Officer now Son?

Yes Dad

Well you know what Officers are, don’t you?

Leaders of Men?

I didn’t ask you what officers are supposed to be you stupid sod, I asked you what they are!

Don’t know, Dad

Lighthouses in the desert, Son. Very bright but fuck all use.


Don’t give me that one about officers and maps, Dad, I am brilliant at map reading

Well, keep that one quiet, Son, or you’ll get the map, fuck up one day and prove me right.


So you're going to be a motorcycle dealer, Son?

Yes dad

What do you know about motorcycles?

Everything you taught me

Don't blame me, Son, there's a hell of difference between everything I tried to teach you and what you actually fucking learnt.


Why aren't you coming to see me Son?

I got the auditors coming around, Dad.

Fuck 'em. Auditors are the bastards who get an all expenses paid trip to the battlefield in order to bayonet the survivors.


Of course I am doing OK, Dad, I just got a brand new convertible for my wife

You selfish bastard, you never thought of getting me a good deal like that too?


What the fuck is that?!!!

It's an SL Mercedes Dad.

A GERMAN car?!!

Yeah Dad, I like them.

OK. Give us the keys, you can drive my VW Passat.


Stop! STOP! You've gone too far, GO GO GO! Around the block. NOW! FOR FUCK’S SAKE! Who taught you to drive?

What the F… hang on Dad…alright, we’re coming around again

THAT’S IT! Slow down, SLOW DOWN! Christ you’re such a dick.

Click

Hang on a sec Dad, you just got me to break every fucking traffic law in a communist country just so you could take a photo of some tart in a short skirt?

Believe me Son, when you get to my age you’ll realise it was worth it.


Why are you such a grumpy old bastard, Dad?

‘Cos it beats the shit out of being nice to idiots.

Does that have to include me, Dad?

Like I said. Idiots.


God I love my Dad so much. Pity Dominic and Alexander will never get to meet him in this life.

Yo Yo's for the Troops?

Albert Rasch, author of a blog I follow, The Rasch Outdoor Chronicles has clearly been spending far too much of his time in the Afghani sun. Either that or he has gone stir crazy. An obsessive recluse, the sort of withdrawn individual that spends all his time training a pet cockroach to do somersaults.

With Raschman, it all started when he found a broken Yo Yo lying in the desert sand. Only a born and bred outdoorsman would have thought to deploy to Afghanistan with everything needed to fix a broken Yo Yo.

You might imagine that the sight of a rugged mountain man playing with a Yo Yo in a war zone would have resulted in the hasty medical repatriation the mentalist was obviously going for but no. The first to stumble upon this weird scene paused to watch and then had a go themselves. Now, instead of turning as much ordnance into scrap as possible, our steely heroes are ‘walking the dog’ and ‘rocking the cradle’.

Raschman’s most recent post, Yo Yo’s for the Troops, has reminded me of what it was like to be on call all the time, never knowing what was going to happen when the call came. Life for the troops really is long periods of boredom laced with trepidation interspersed with really scary shit. They are all roughy toughy hard men but deep down, we are all fun loving kids at heart. Something as innocent as a Yo Yo in an environment as brutal and tragic as Afghanistan just has to be a welcome sanity saving distraction.


Albert A Rasch, Afghan Yo Yo Champ

So Rasch isn’t as mad as a hatter after all. His idea is for as many people as possible to send a Yo Yo out to the troops. Maybe a few of them would fall into the hands of local kids. No bad thing. In the First World war, they had a Christmas day ceasefire for an impromptu football match (at least the Germans won something) so maybe we can call a halt for the Yo Yo International? At the very least it would be good for Hearts and Minds; those of our troops and maybe those of the locals too.

So, daft as it sounds, there is logic to Rasch’s lunacy so please, read his post and send a Yo Yo to him. It won’t cost much as the postage to forces post offices is subsidised. It’s a tiny individual contribution but will make a big difference.

If he starts banging on about Hula Hoops though, I will send over the men in white coats.


A Yo Yo, for those of you who don't remember. This one, apparently, is a 'Duncan Butterfly'. Gosh! But is it bullet proof?

Clarkson Junior?

Nothing a decent haircut couldn't sort out. He even dresses like Clarkson...

So many half finished posts.

It’s ridiculous considering I have so much time on my hands. My wife sees me typing away at the keyboard and assumes I am finally pulling together my novel when really I am only plugging key words into Google, a useless distraction to avoid having to replace failed hinges on the visitor’s bedroom door, changing the oil in the generator, securely fixing that dodgy curtain rail or anything else remotely ‘Man About the House’. I am pathetic at the moment.

Still, so much time wasting did allow me to stumble across a new blog. A petrol head blog and, therefore, potentially dear to my heart now that The Times Online has gone the subscription route denying me my weekly Clarkson fix.

I would willingly pay to have access to The Times but, with my UK bank constantly allowing anyone to rob my identity, I have had to cancel all my charge cards and am now struggling, yes struggling, to create my own new identity.

This, I have been told, is illegal.

I can't see why. Somewhere in Slough, not even the same hemisphere as me, there is a git pretending to be TG and buying up all the local Comet warehouses and leaving a trail of grief for me to sort out. If my bank has been careless with my identity, why can't I choose a new, safer one? But no, Tom Gowans cannot henceforth be known as Rock Hunter and must instead endure constant communications from bailiffs armed with liver excising scalpels demanding payment for wide screen TV’s bought on credit in his name in Brixton, or somebody else’s weekly shop in Sainsbury’s. I live in Africa, for Christ’s sake. So I am sorry, Jeremy, I cannot pay on line anymore. I need a free alternative.

Sam Skelton is a full time student of politics and has been published by several well known journals some of which, amazingly, I have heard of. Thankfully his blog, ‘From the Captain’s Chair', is less to do with politics and more to do with cars.

Here’s but a fraction of the slagging he gave the new Range Rover Evoque:

‘The interior is even to be designed by a team led by the original 'footballer's wife' - Victoria Beckham. A Rangie with a Spice Girl interior. It's sacrilege…’

I couldn’t agree more.

In another article he admits to experimenting on his own mother after bribing her with the offer of a picnic in the countryside.

How about his take on an old British Leyland colour in his article about Jaguars?

‘Alpine Green is a slightly musky pale metallic-silvery green colour with a hint of gold, which in the right light really manages to look the part on the leaping cat’

Well you try describing the colours that BL paint shop workers mixed up when not warming their hands over picket line braziers.

‘Right light’ is the key here. I had a Triumph Stag painted a colour the factory documentation of which recorded as Magenta and the registration authorities, and anyone else not colour blind, considered Purple.

Under street lamps at night, it looked really cool.

In the daytime the colour resembled the mixture of blood, puke and spilt beer I had waded through the night before in Pop’s and Eddie’s, two pubs across the road from each other close to Joint Head Quarters Rheindahlen in Germany and mostly frequented by a fairly even spread of Army and RAF, a fairly volatile solution. Down right explosive if you mixed in a few visiting Americans.

But whereas I often resort to the vernacular, Mr Skelton has the eloquence that no doubt he will one day use to verbally eviscerate his opponent at the dispatch box, wit thankfully triumphing over bragado. The most risqué remark of his I have read so far was one referring to the new Morgan EvaGT:

‘The company have released a teaser sketch – one of those that barely shows you anything, but what it does show is pure pornography’.

Hmmn. When my wife isn’t looking, I might surf over to the Morgan site.

I have put the link to ‘From the Captain’s Chair’ in my Interesting Blogs column on the right of the page. Drive over and have a look.

If you do, leave your monikers there. We should encourage this guy. Not least because I can't pay my Times subscription. Yes, I know. Just do it.

Bureaucracy

Lamenting the fact I was no longer a Black Pouched Pistol Packer, I gazed out of the window for inspiration



CZ 83. Works straight out of the box

I have just heard from Nicholas Shaxson, a friend of mine for the last fifteen years, the man who encouraged me to start this blog. He’s given me a sharp poke in the ribs for being so lazy so here I go again.

I met Nicholas in 1994 in Luanda when I had the good fortune to check into the same wonderful old guesthouse where he and another poverty stricken stringer, Chris Simpson were staying.

The Hotel Avenida is next door to the Centro de Imprensa, the Press Centre, the only place at the time where one stood even the remotest chance of getting an international connection or sending a fax, located in a side street under the shadow of the Ministry of Foreign Relations where, in 1976 the Angolans tried and convicted three British and one US mercenary executing them by firing squad soon after a fair trial, and opposite the rather optimistically named Café de Paris. More importantly, it was cheap.

It was straight from the pages of a Graham Greene novel with its wide mahogany central staircase and colonial architecture. Think of the Hotel Trianon without the lush tropical gardens but still with earnest looking young men in mirror shades clutching AK47's in the lobby and street, along with a strange assortment of visitors and you get the idea. Chico, the owner, was no Richard Burton but was as much of a character in ways that would, had Mr Burton emulated, been grounds for yet another divorce and quite a few videos in the scandalous section of the yet to be conceived ‘You Tube’.

There was only a breakfast room so for lunch, we had to walk to one of the few cafes within striking distance where paying in Dollars could get you arrested by the Economic Police who seemed always to outnumber the clientele. For dinner, we would stroll to the Hotel Tropico on the road up to Kinaxixi, not to eat there, it was far too expensive for us, but to buy chicken grilled on charcoal braziers at the road side and drink beer that arrived on demand by a bucket on a string from the flat of the local entrepreneur several floors above.

The short walk entailed, however, at least half a dozen demands for papers from alternating police and military checkpoints or, frankly, anyone else who decided he did not like the look of us or was simply short of cigarette money. Much to the consternation of my colleagues I tired of this and stopped carrying my documents choosing the inevitable verbal duels instead. I believe Chris set up a sweepstake betting on how long I would last. Fatalism seemed to be endemic in Angola back then.

Next to the Tropico and, I have to confess, more of an attraction than chewy road kill and warm beer, was the sort of steamy night club that seemed to draw in everything from itinerant oil workers to mercenaries (the ‘Black Pouched Pistol Packers’ described by Karl Maier in an article for one of the US broadsheets). I once saw a Russian (NIET! I am not spy. I am correspondent for Pravda!) towed at speed several hundred yards down the street after a couple of opportunists in a Corolla tried to snatch his bag as they drove past us. We that remained didn’t see the final outcome but he was back presently with a bit of road rash and his bag. None of us had the courage to ask. Whatever blood that hadn’t already been replaced by Vodka was boiling.

There were also a fair few individuals of various nationalities who mysteriously described themselves as ‘Accredited Trade Attaches’ and, of course, the Journos. If you wanted to know what was going on in a country as dictatorial and mad as Alice’s wonderland, you went there. Or the French Club. But that’s definitely another story. I can say this without fear of contradiction. Back then, there were more guns in Angola than cars. Even the bandits would have to steal a car before they could pull off a heist. Something they did with almost monotonous regularity spawning a massive security industry and, paradoxically, yet more guns.

Thankfully, all this has changed and most of us have moved on. Chris I know not where but over the years, rather like the soul soothing sensation a familiar vista evokes after a long time away, he pops up every now and again. Nicholas appears to have lost his itchy feet somewhat and settled down in Zurich (he's clearly not a petrol head; Switzerland?), and has found the time to encourage two children to spring from his loins, has had one book published and is finishing off another, no doubt equally well researched.

‘Poisoned Wells’, his first, was a very good, thought provoking read so I am looking forward to the next one. I recommended Poisoned Wells to Hazel Hector, a Senior Official for the Department of Trade and Industry visiting Angola for the first time when I was fortunate enough to be seated next to her at dinner at the Embassy the other week. Unlike some of the visiting civil servants I have met, she was bubbly and intelligent and had the courage to ask all the right questions and make more than a few perceptive observations of her own, which got even a cynical old bastard like me thinking. She is a vegetarian but then again, no-one’s perfect.

Given that there is no such thing as a free meal I recognise that the small guest list was comprised of those Brits who have spent some time here and are in business, the idea being we were to give Ms. Hector an idea of not only how to do business in one of the fastest growing economies of the world but the opportunities and pitfalls as well. So I hope the Ambassador will forgive me when I confess that the animated conversation he observed between Hazel and I across his table had nothing to do with Angola but ranged from Glasgow tenements through John le Carre and on to a common familiarity with Berlin.

The new Ambassador is great. He had the foresight to buy up loads of whisky, shoved it into old port casks and has been hoarding them for fifteen years now. With that kind of foresight, patience and taste, he will be a great asset to the Foreign Service in Angola. I have seen so many come out here for a short two year tour only to see them crushed when they realise they are not going to teach these wily Angolans anything. At least this Ambassador will be able to demonstrate that, just because it says on the label that Chivas is 12 years old, it is still undrinkable in comparison to a well matured malt. It may do a lot for small distillery exports from Scotland but, standing in the Embassy garden under the same tree that Livingstone did all those years ago it would be ironic to reflect that the most recent civilising influence the British will impart has nothing to do with abstinence.

Although not usually indecisive, nine months gestation (or at least the time between his wife exiting the bathroom clutching one of those little white sticks with two accusing blue stripes across the window, and the subsequent birth) appeared insufficient for Nicholas to decide on a name for his latest. I can imagine that in a country infamous for its ramp of legislation and enforced cuckoo clock efficiency, this was simply unacceptable to the authorities and, indeed, Nicholas was given an ultimatum. Pressed, he came up with ‘George’.

Living in Switzerland, it would have been unbelievably Kitschy to have settled on William, a similarly regal name, although it would have made it incredibly easy for me to choose a christening present. I would simply have bought the lad a crossbow.

Now George isn’t a bad name. Granted, England had a King called George who was so mad he shook hands with a tree, mistaking it for the King of Prussia and never noticed that he had lost a trivial colony, subsequently called the United States. But, all in all, it sounds the sort of name that evokes images of nannies and private education.

The authorities in Switzerland appear no different to those here. Unlike Nicholas, I had my son’s name chosen from conception: Alexander. Come the day though, the Cuban trained bureaucrat told me that Alexander was not Angolan enough. It had taken Marcia and I weeks to get to this desk clutching the forlornly limp collection of now very clammy 'necessary' documents to register him so, lamenting the fact I was no longer a Black Pouched Pistol Packer, I gazed out of the window at the street below trying desperately to think of an Angolan name.

‘How about "Autocarro"?' I said. ‘Autocarro’ is Portuguese for ‘Bus’. I find it quite romantic that Native Americans call their children after the first thing they see after the birth. Why do you ask, Two Dogs Shagging?

‘Now you are being ridiculous', Comrade Stalina snapped, nay, spat.

'And you aren't?'

At that point Marcia dived in and after a heartfelt and sincere apology from me delivered through gritted teeth, we got away with 'Allessandro'.

Now to me, that sounds a real sissy’s name. It’s the sort of name that is usually uttered by those with a lisp, the kind who always look gawky, have labels around their necks so they can ask a nice policeman the way home and have their tongues permanently resting on their lower teeth. Instead of ‘Alexander the Great’ I got ‘Allethandro the Thweet’.

Now that I have had time to think about it, it isn't bad. It still irritates me when the maids call him ‘Shandy’. I got beaten up at school for having a German mother. Imagine the abuse if your nickname is Hand Shandy.

I insist on calling him ‘Alex’, but the bureaucratic nightmare has resulted in one unexpected advantage. He has an Angolan passport in the name of Allessandro Manuel and a British passport in the name of Alexander Gowans, which expands his career options from the kind of successful financial consultant who never pays tax anywhere in the world, to international spy. Either way, it will be a lot easier for him to disappear suddenly if the need arose. Or would have been if I hadn’t just blown his cover.

Given that they demand the presence of the child being registered in the relevant office and the conditions endured during the process, I now understand the high infant mortality rate: most of them expire through heat exhaustion before even being officially recognised. If after an hour of waiting, the queue shuffles forward an inch and the person in front of you doesn’t move, check their pulse. If they are dead you can legitimately push by.

I am constantly amazed at the quiescent nature of the Povo who continue to endure this trauma with exemplary stoicism. It isn’t the legacy of slavery that is retarding progress, it is inherited Portuguese red tape. Try that shit in UK and the average life expectancy of a registrar would be as long as it took him to get outside. Old Joe Soap might not use an AK but would definitely administer a well deserved kicking in the car park.

Poor Ranulph Fiennes ('Knuckles' to his friends), the great contemporary British adventurer has, I read recently, been responsible for a little high street pile up after competing in yet another highly physically demanding event, allegedly having fallen asleep at the wheel of his car after spending the whole night tramping up and down mountains in the snow. If he is still so keen on ultimate tests of endurance, he should come to Angola and apply for a driving licence.

It can only be the sheer malice of the person who designed the application form that resulted in separate boxes for date of birth and age. By the time your process is finally complete and you receive your summons to Mumbai Haupt Bahnhof to get your fingers scanned, wait patiently in the queue and miraculously reach the counter seconds before they knock off on mass only to be told your application has been rejected because of inaccuracies (no corrections being allowed on the form which now bears the stamps and signatures of the various civil servants through the hands of whom the document has passed at glacial speed and cannot, therefore, be changed in any way whatsoever) and then discover said inaccuracy is that you are now 50, no longer 49, the age you were when you originally filled out the form so the mistake is your fault, even Mother Theresa would cast restraint aside and pin her faith on an involuntary manslaughter plea. And she is so laid back, she’s dead.

The other problem with my application was that the fingerprint card had ten spaces but only eight prints on it. Clearly, I was a moron and had wasted all their valuable time. I was told I would have to go for prints again. I waved my hand in front of his face to prove I had but eight fingers, waggling my stumps for emphasis. I would have enjoyed going on to tell him I was Yakuza and had fucked up a couple of times like he was about to, but thought better of it. Changing tack quicker than a politician and without a flicker of emotion, he told me the error was not the fact that the prints of the missing digits were missing on the card but that the fact that the digits were missing had not been officially recorded on the card. God these guys are good (or at least able to talk faster than I can think).

Actually, this would be an excellent endurance test for Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, OBE. He hasn’t got a full set of wagglies either. For those of you who don’t know, Sir R was severely frost bitten during one of his Arctic expeditions and on return to UK, medical advice was to allow the maddeningly irritating blackened stumps to fall off naturally. For a man determined enough to be the first to walk to both Poles and be the oldest, at 65, to climb Everest (among dozens of other achievements and his way of recovering from double bypass surgery), clearly this advice was bollocks so rather than sitting in his wingback struggling to hang onto a glass of scotch in his claw-like hands while waiting for his fingers to eventually drop into his soup, he used a hack-saw in his garden shed to complete, in what could only have been eye-wateringly agonising hours, the task that nature and his doctors intended many painful months to achieve. This is the kind of man who would strangle the crocodile attacking him with his bootlaces, and would then use the same laces to sew his own arm back on.

Given that these clerks are about as literate as Bengali fishermen yet can zero in on such ‘errors’ strikes me as yet another example of how their ilk can easily circumvent any anti-corruption initiative poor old President Dos Santos tries to install, exploiting a subservient population too numb to care. They look at you with the sort of smug expression, a face you know could be greatly enhanced if your fist was planted in the middle of it and they know that you know, any sign of irritation and they will suddenly note that you are over fifty and wear glasses. Not only would they insist I need an eye test, they would have me take my driving test again.

Naturally I coughed up the extra immediately and now have my licence. Like Sir R, I could see the merit of short sharp pain in favour of prolonged agony.

It is the same, I am sad to report, with my company registration. The fact that registering a company, rather than merely applying for a driving licence, takes far longer should elicit no surprise. I have been on the case for over a year and gave them everything, right down to their own notarised copies of the building plans. In recent emails to friends I rashly suggested that my import-export, hotel, restaurant and car hire business, collectively and rather grandly known as the Complexo Turistico Floridita (in homage to Ernest Hemingway’s favourite watering hole in Havana) was now legal. That was because I knew the licence would be published in the Diario da Republica today.

A copy has just landed on my desk.

Entry No 4025 of page 185 of Register Number B-54 of Number 2 Archive of the 9th of October 2009 (yep, five months to get it published in the Government Gazette) licences me as 'Flordita' (spot the typo? All my company stationary is now little more than toilet paper) to be active in the area of 'Restaurantes com Lugares ao Balcao'. To add insult to considerable injury and just in case I hadn't already burst a major blood vessel reading it in Portuguese they even, in parenthesis, translated that into English as 'Snack Bar'. Imagine, a restaurant where I can only legally sit clients at the bar, not at all the tables and chairs I imported and set out in the beautifully thatched Jango. I guess the poor bastard guests will have to sleep on the bar stools for if the tables are illegal, I suppose the beds in what will soon be beautifully thatched en-suite rooms are too. God knows where they can legally take a dump.

I used to joke that I was going to retire from Aggreko to flip burgers. Looks like that's all I am allowed to do for now.

But, it is my own fault. You would have thought that after fifteen years here I would have worked it out and at least learned from the experience with the driving licence. I was, the emphasis being on 'was', licensed in addition to cars, for motorcycles and HGVs. The licence fee goes up for every category of vehicle you apply for, a consolidated fee that I paid. My only form of transport at the moment is a truck but my new licence only allows me to drive a car. My admin guy, once I had relaxed my hold on his throat enough for him to gargle, explained that had I insisted on waiting until the process had passed through all the various departments necessary to obtain the categories I applied for, I would wait years for the licence. In other words, it was my fault again. I was in a hurry. No mention of the fact that I had applied in March and the licence expired in May. Last year. After some further encouragement he explained that the now extra money I had paid for the categories I did not get was a sort of float that officials could help themselves to as, in the end, their books would balance (only one category going through them and only one being issued) and they would be more inclined to deal with such lucrative applications…er…faster.

You should not believe everything a man in fear of his life tells you but there is a twisted logic in this and it explains the short change on the company registration. They have given me enough to be getting on with and they know, rather like Patagonian Killer Whales waiting for seals to calve, I will be back.

I suppose that after lighting the burners for the first time in the kitchens of 'Flordita' I should expect a visit from the Fiscal Police (even more venal than civil servants. And they have guns). Marcia persuaded me ages ago to place my hunting rifle and shotgun in safe custody (she said she was worried about the kids getting at them. I wonder now just whose health she thought at risk) but I will still be working in a kitchen. A decent dropped forged steel chef's knife wielded by a pushed-over-the-edge maniac could be just as lethal I would have thought, especially in a space as confined as a ‘snack bar’.

On the TV right now is a football match airing from Brazil between two teams of leggy Amazons dressed in skimpy underwear, stockings and suspenders. Unreal. But they are going at the game hammer and tongs and there have already been two bookings, a penalty and two stretcher cases. I have decided that I fancy the referee. I hope the idea catches on. Beats the hell out of watching Beckham limping off every five minutes and they are a lot better looking than Wayne Rooney.

I note that having been distracted by this missive and the football match, I failed to notice that Alex needed a dump and couldn’t find his potty. So he’s just eased springs in the corner of the lounge. Only eighteen month’s old yet such a decent chap. He could have laid one on the rug, instead he chose the wipe clean parquet.

I like a man who is honest and clean. A man who can stare his enemy in the face and then put an ounce of lead in it...

Antonio is three month’s old. Just a guess given he was found dumped in a drain. Sister Elsa from Peru had to put something on his record card. After all, no-one in Angola is allowed to un-exist. Even his name is an invention, one of hundreds the good sister doles out every year to ensure her records are acceptable to the authorities and at least a little dignity accorded her charges. Without a name, despite the plaintive wails that are an infant’s primeval plea for love and sustenance, they do not exist and are not, therefore, entitled to a place on the ration roll. A handwritten entry in a cheap exercise book could mean the difference between life, or as in the case of little Antonio, likely death. 

Outside, I can hear the traffic on the new dual carriageway, fruit of high oil revenue and blessed peace, linking the affluent southern suburbs to the commercial centre of the city and the beachside bars and restaurants of the Ilha beyond. The coiffured elite of Angolan society hurrying through the squalor of Cazenga in air-conditioned and multi-cylinder powered isolation. 

I have a four-month old son, Alexander. He was born in the Sagrada Esperanca, the best clinic in town and separated by a palm fringed boulevard from Miami Beach, a restaurant with its own exclusive section of the beach where girls in miniscule bikinis are kept safe by a private security force paid to keep the original residents away and prevent the awful whiff of poverty spoiling the appetites of the Beau Monde. Where sundowners and a snack two nights ago worked out at over a hundred dollars per person. 

The hospital bill for the birth of Alexander and one night’s uncomplicated internment was $6,700. 

Antonio, officially three month’s old, is smaller than Alexander was at birth. At four month’s old, Alexander is massive in comparison and is already making his first, clumsy and occasionally heart stopping attempts to crawl. But then he has two doting parents, various cousins, aunts and uncles and a nine-year old brother to provide the sustenance and attention his enquiring and developing mind and body crave. 

Antonio, on the other hand, lies on his back, not even the energy to hold out a hand desperate for human contact. His eyes are impossibly large and devoid of any emotion other than, 'please'. Underneath a rib cage etched with a sculptor’s exageration and through translucent skin, I can see his heart beating. It seems strong, healthy even, but Sister Elsa tells me they are all that way before they die, the body concentrating all its depleted resources on a last ditch effort to survive. The infant should be in hospital, on a drip with trained and equipped nurses and a consultant paediatrician in attendance, but I have been here too long to question why Antonio is dying in his little cot in an under-funded orphanage cruelly situated right next to the state owned oil company’s well supported crèche. 

 No-one can blame the children of the affluent for enjoying the life all children have the right to, nor parents for providing the best for them, but it was heartbreaking to realise that while the kids next door were chauffeured to and from a beautifully restored complex and fed a square meal every day, hundreds of others on the other side of a high security fence were trying to survive on watered down, irregular supplies of out-of-date powdered milk. The luck of the draw? God’s will? 

The only gift from God Antonio will have is an exhausted Nun to pray by his side as he slips back into the arms of his creator. 

Sister Elsa has been looking after all the waifs and strays a city the size of Luanda can throw at her, the lucky ones, for over five years. I asked her if she had ever taken a holiday. She gave me the fleetest of glances, a flash of irritation, then returned to the litany of needs we had been discussing; more cots, the place needs painting, none of the kids have shoes, plastic flip flops will do; the slices of sponge they call mattresses, soiled by youngsters incontinent with trauma, all need replacing. Yes, she conceded, I had arranged loads of mattresses and shoes but that was over a year ago. Sister Elsa was gentle about it, but left me in no doubt that such things do not last forever. She doesn’t need give and forget, she needs constant support. And truckloads of it. 

That slight moment of eye contact had exposed me as crass, stupid, inconsiderate. With only twenty-three cots and over fifty infants to fill them at any one time and a couple of them dying every week, just in the creche, and another three hundred or so older orphans all desperately calling Pai! (Father) and clinging to the trousers of any visitor, begging for a hug, who could ever think of taking a holiday? 

But where do all these children come from? Sister Elsa was clinical. ‘Some are dumped, like Antonio. Some are traumatised by the war and their families cannot cope. Some are defective.’ 

Defective? I can imagine that little Carlita could be a handful. Incapable of accepting any form of human contact, she sits by herself oblivious of the saliva dribbling from her mouth and down her T-shirt, staring vacantly into some terrible vista only she can see. Tiny Paulo, he can’t be more than four, crouches with his little bottom in the air and his face buried in the dust, futile protection from demons that torment him still but worse was to come: ‘And then there are the castaways.’ 

So matter of fact I almost missed it but Sister Elsa fixed me once again with her tired, but soul searing gaze. I had to ask. 

Apparently, if a family endures a period of bad luck, or if the good luck they think is their due does not appear, they get in a Quimbandeiro, a sort of Witchsmeller Pursuivant, a person whose power is evidently absolute, the antics of whom as portrayed in Black Adder were hilarious, but here are deadly serious. He may point out a decorative object, a cheap market bought trinket and suggest its removal would take with it the bad spirit. Just as casually, he may point an accusing finger at a bewildered child and condemn it as Satan’s spawn. 

Fully one fifth of these tiny residents have been ejected from their homes as ‘evil’ but have been lucky enough to find sanctuary in Sister Elsa’s care. God only knows what happens to those that don’t. So here we have it. The world’s most vibrant economy. A population raucous with riotous indignation at the first suggestion they may not quite be as civilised as the new builds and platinum cards suggest and yet, behind the Hollywood film set thin veneer, evil incarnate stalks in human form, dragging apparently sane individuals from reason back to the darkest side of primitive belief, an utter moral bankruptcy that justifies dropping the issue of their own loins down a drain. Or as in the case of poor little Adam from Benin, cutting the boy up and dumping him in the Thames. The perpetrators of that most evil deed, and there were many, seriously believed that sliding Adam’s mutilated remains into the slime of centuries with a gutful of powdered bone, clay and gold dust would bring them good luck. 

We hear about such affronts to humanity, read about them and are horrified. I have not only read about them, I have now seen the results. Not the ritualistic ‘Muti’ killings, thank God, but a lucky few who, probably through the divinely inspired intervention of some still sane relative or sympathetic witness, the woodsman in The Sleeping Beauty, were spirited away to relative safety, their saviours gambling their own traditional spirits for the soul of an infant. 

This is just one tiny orphanage, three or four hundred lost souls in a city of millions. I am told that children do disappear, two in my neighbourhood and almost every week we read about 'ritualistic' murders of children in the provonces. I’m not just horrified, I feel homicidal and, like these condemned children, bewildered and distraught. Why? What purpose is served? What possible belief could still be so deep rooted in a common psyche as to provoke such awful crimes, and how to excoriate it?

 I would advocate rising on mass, dragging these Quimbandeiro’s into the street and setting fire to them. 

While such a solution has considerable merit, it will never happen. Relief from this insidious scourge lies in the hands of the young and educated. Despite what our elders may tell us, it is not for us to blindly carry the torch of unforgiving tradition. Tradition is important, it is what differentiates one society from another, the pomp of the Changing of the Guard, the ceremonial splendour of bedecked warriors proclaiming their chief but why must we obediently and, evidently, blindly preserve laws and customs we know to be at least inappropriate and at worst criminal, contrary to all reason? Much as I respect my father, if he told me to despise a man because of the colour of his skin, I would beg to differ and would not be afraid to leave his house if that difference proved irreconcilable. If some respected elder suggested I abandon my son or worse, I would roast his eyeballs, but perhaps that is just me. 

We are so terrified of ‘not belonging’, of being expelled from our family or community, that we are willing to be party to any manner of collective crime, or at least ignore it. It takes real guts to provoke change and sadly, very few people have what it takes. Until a few more sons return home, brave the inevitable censure and denounce what they know to be archaic and cruel, stand up to their elders, all these terrible atrocities will continue and those who lacked the moral fibre, the wit to call attention to the sham, are just as complicit. 

We can best respect our elders by taking the very cream of their experience and traditions, blending it with our own sense of humanity and ditching what we know to be wrong. The world changes slowly but dinosaurs do die out, making way for young blood, those who will never forget their origins, will hold dear the best but show contempt for the rest. Stay the hands of the Quimbandeiros of the world and have the courage to look them in the eye and say, ‘No more, old man, go home and leave us in peace’, and let others see that our success did not depend on the death of a child. Fail to do this, and with every mutilation and every abandoned child’s futile wail, we bear yet another scar of collective guilt. 

"Don't worry, there's a hug and a present for everyone!"  

Post Script: I started writing this six months ago but have only just found the time to finish it. Sister Elsa told me Antonio passed away a week after my visit. I should have done more than just stroke his wee little head. Obviously, I have not properly recognised in this article those parents who, with genuine love for their children but bereft of the ability to care for them, and blighted by a state of utter desperation, consigned their children to the care of an institution. 

The article, as well as its tone, was spawned by the awful realisation that such a large proportion of children are cruelly abandoned, or subjected to unbelievable torment for the most incomprehensible of reasons. 

Gratifyingly, having slid the draft past Angolan colleagues of mine for their opinions, I have been informed that there are an increasing number of instances where these Quimbandeiros, overstepping the mark, have been dragged into the street and severely, even fatally, beaten. Given the excesses they have been able to get away with in the past, it is hard to define what recently drawn line in the sand they traversed but clearly, for the civilised amongst us, it was a step in the right direction. 

My father’s claim to fame, not his fault, he came from an era bound by archaic prejudice, was his ability to hit a running Arab at three hundred paces. It would be so nice if my son would recall me as the man who could hit a fleeing Quimbandeiro at a similar distance.

Road to Cazenga, a brief update...

Three weeks! Doesn't sound like much in the scheme of things and bugger all in comparison to the rest of the world (I am reading Professor Hawkins' 'A Brief History of Time') but to me it is an awe inspiring achievement the keen significance of which is only slightly dulled because I have found it so ridiculously easy.

Dear old Dr Abel, the man who since I met him had been warning me of my imminent departure if I failed to cut down on the booze and cigarettes has been visiting me frequently (even my office provided no sanctuary) and when he heard I was back from Kenya and Dubai, was here the next day (today) to check on me. Having enjoyed a hefty lunch and one of my last bottles of decent wine, he is now sleeping it off in one of the guest bedrooms. Heal thyself, physician...

He and Kieren, who were evidently worried that such a sudden end to a constant and significant intake of alcohol would leave me dribbling and screaming in a foetal ball in some corner of the closet, respectively advised me to take Diazapam or a collection of vitamin and other drugs resembling an exploded Smarties bag but I am sure neither are disappointed to learn that I require no supplements of any kind.

Exactly why this should be, I have no idea and shall not question my good fortune either. I am happy and the family, as well as those who still care about me appear ecstatic. This is all the support I need. I shall not let them down.

This is, I admit, a very brief post but what more should I say? Count yourself lucky, dear reader, had I been a real case, you would have had to endure page after page of self recrimination and the ravings of a paranoid schizo...

Now, if you will excuse me, I must spray a whole can of Sheltox into the bedroom to kill all the little green men with horrible teeth and long, deformed claws that are waiting for me under the bed.

Road to Cazenga

My Name is Thomas and I’m an alcoholic.

It’s hard for me to say at what point in my life I became one, the deceptively slippery slope from social drinking to alcohol abuse being so insiduously gradual. If the ‘beginning’ was one or two drinks every other evening, maybe a blast on the town once a month, and ‘now’ is the first large scotch at ten in the morning and a dead bottle by midnight, when exactly did I cross the line?

I tried to remember the last time I had not drunk whisky in any 24 hour period. I couldn’t. Not with any accuracy. I had to go back decades to a period when I knew that drink was the last thing on my mind, a period when I always seemed to have something to do aside from work; fishing, ski-ing, cycling, driving down to the Black Forest with some mates just to buy an ice-cream. It must have been a long time ago because my first wife called me a ‘functional alcoholic’, and she left me sixteen years ago.

My second marriage lasted about six years by which time I was nothing other than a very hardened and to be honest, embittered drinker.

Still, the work kept coming in and I got paid, promoted and get my bonus every year. I met Marcia and we have been together ever since. In addition to the adorable Dominic from my second marriage, I now have Alexander, a truly delightful little boy. I have a nice house, a good job and lots of business prospects. With a loving family and no real worries, what demon had possessed me and was now driving me inexorably down the path to self destruction?

I have reached the stage where I can polish off an entire bottle of whisky in a day. I always have at least three bottles on hand scattered in places I might end up and minimum consumption averages two-thirds of a bottle a day. I buy whisky like other people buy beer, by the case. For every-one’s safety, I gave up driving ages ago and for years have employed a driver. Add that to the cost of two cases of scotch a month and it becomes an expensive habit, certainly a lot more than Dominic’s school fees.

And how did all this affect my family? I don’t know, you’d have to ask them because that’s the thing about serious alcoholics, they wander about in that self delusional fuzzy mental state, confident that everything is OK. In the meantime life, both theirs and those of their growing families and ever wearier friends, slips them by. Normal people, looking in from the outside, would say, ‘God, what a selfish bastard’.

I am not saying I have only just recognised my problem. I have been very worried for years. I desperately wanted to give up alcohol, to kick that monster in the teeth, but no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t just lose the battle, I was routed. I couldn’t even manage a day. The worst thing was, having abstained for a body and soul torturing six or seven hours, my feeble will failed every time and I would collapse onto the bottle as a shipwrecked sailor would a flagon of water and over compensate, sucking a bottle dry not gradually over the course of a day, but in the remaining hours left to me before sliding into temporary oblivion. If I was lucky. If not, I would spend the night thrashing in the mire of self-revulsion, haunted by the demons come to mock me.

But, I would be up in the morning and ready for work so I couldn’t be that bad then, could I? I might have the slowly fading evidence of carpet pile pressed into my face and the itchy bumps where mosquitoes fed all night free of the risk of slapping hands but, all in all, I was always in pretty good shape and could do my job. A functional alcoholic. That rare breed of Real Man who works and drinks hard and can take it. I have had a tough life at times; an exciting, sometimes very dangerous life so it is hardly surprising I do some things to excess. Men like me are scarce. In times of war, they come looking for blokes like us.

Thus fooled, and fortified with a quick slug, I would start yet another day. My life cycle had reduced to about the same span as my memory was reliable. A day. People loved borrowing money from me.

We are all intelligent enough to understand the effects of sustained alcohol abuse on an individual, apart from making them generally very unpleasant to sit next to. But try pointing these out to an alcoholic. Unless you hit him at that awful maudlin stage (and if you were still around by then you are either a masochist or a Jehovah’s witness) he is more likely to chew your head off than listen to reason. I know I have a beautiful family and I know they would rather have me around than bury me and I know that one day my employer’s patience will run out and I will get the sack and we will all starve ‘cos I’ll never get another job, my wife will leave me, again, and my kids will grow to despise me so why don’t you just fuck off and let me drink my whisky in peace instead of reminding me, you postulating pustule?

Gits. What do they know? I bet I am doing better than they are. I bet they have a huge mortgage on their house. I don’t. Bet their car is on HP. And besides, my job is crap anyway, I’d do much better concentrating on my other business interests. I’ll be a millionaire by the time I am 40…45….50?

Then there are those, even more crass, who become unwitting allies to the ever increasing hopelessness of the afflicted who, having no apparent relief in sight, gradually accept their fate and give up. These are the self styled ministers of the hospice. They can be found beneath every turd. My miserable end is unavoidable. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. I will beat my children and murder my wife. And the postman, because as my son grows older, to my alcohol sodden brain, he will start to look like him. There follows a gruelling monologue, a detailed list of damned souls and the suffering that preceded their passing, their futile attempts at self salvation, of once sane men strapped to hospital beds being intravenously fed vitamins and Thiamin, their central nervous sytems suppressed to stop them going mad with fright at the little green men clawing at them, the inevitable tragic outcome. They point out that with the amount I consume and the period over which I have done so, I stand no chance and all the aforementioned evils, especially the withdrawal symptoms will, for me, be the severest imaginable.

‘Is that so? So, no point me even trying then. Aah! That hit the spot! Sorry, you were saying?’

OK, I understand that at my post-mortem, the mortician would marvel at how God managed to stuff a liver the size of a bouncy castle in my gut but that’s only fat. I’ll start exercising in the morning. Maybe I’ll take Dominic for the walk he keeps asking me for. I will even try to be good and not take my hip flask with me. Just a short walk then. A breath of fresh air might be all I need to give me the energy to cuddle up to Marcia tonight. God knows I haven’t done that for ages.

We have been very busy at work lately and I have not been home for a while. Instead of a romantic meal for two with Marcia, I was bouncing over Luanda’s roads on my way back from the new site to the Cazenga site. For some reason, I was really sad I wasn’t going to see marcia that day. Somehow, that day seemed important and it being Dia das Namoradas had nothing to do with it.

The boss was in the car with me reeling off a list of things categorised as ‘urgent’, ‘fucking urgent’ and, ‘we’re dead if it doesn’t happen, urgent’. I wasn’t listening. It had just dawned on me that I had not had a drink that day. We had started early and it was now sometime in the afternoon. The thing that really struck me was that this realisation had been sudden, not the gradually increasing ache and anxiety I normally felt when my blood/alcohol ratio fell dangerously close to the legal limit. The fact was, I had not noticed. I had gone hours without a drink and I hadn’t noticed. Gosh.

The boss had stopped talking and was gently snoring as we weaved our way between the rusty Toyota Hiaces and clapped out Corollas that make up ninety per-cent of Luanda’s traffic. I knew I had whisky in my room and with every yard we covered, I was getting closer to my first drink of the day. I looked at my watch, eight waking hours without a drink. And then it hit me. I pulled the sun visor down and took a good look at my reflection, maybe I had finally gone mad. Instead, I saw myself wearing a stupid, lopsided grin. I knew exactly what I had to do. What a Valentine’s present for the family. I sat back in the seat and willed the driver on.

As soon as the car stopped, we piled out. ‘Boss, I need to see you in my room, thirty seconds, that’s all I ask’. On the way I saw Manuel, and then Rodrigues. ‘Hey! You two! Come with us, it’s important’.

Bewildered, and not a little bemused they shuffled uncomfortably in the small bed space a twenty foot container allows. ’So what do we do now?’ the boss says, ‘start dancing?.

I reached under my desk and hauled the bottle of whisky out. ‘Ah, we’re celebrating!’

I cracked the top off, stepped over to the sink, and started pouring. The bottle had one of those plastic things in the neck, the kind of bottles bar owners stock to prevent over serving a client, and it seemed to take forever. The golden liquid splashed this way and that and gurgled down the pughole. The air was pungent with the aroma of scotch. Rodrigues, the man who every day for the last two years had faithfully gone to the bottle store to get me my ‘medicine’ murmured a breathless, ‘Wow!’

I dropped the empty into the waste basket. It hit with a loud thud, something final about the bang. I said, ‘That’s it’.

I had been unable to remember a single day without whisky. Tomorrow will be the start of my sixth day free of the bloody stuff and I feel fine. I am doing what they all say cannot be done, go from a bottle a day to zero in one hit. I was due to go on leave this weekend and was looking forward to spending some time with the family. Instead I must go to Kenya and then on to Dubai. Before I go though, I will nip home. It won’t take long but there is something very important I must do there as well. In front of the family.

The road I travelled didn’t go to Damascus, it went to Cazenga. But on the Road to Cazenga, the light doesn’t blind you, it shreds the veils of self delusion.

Three Little Chefs