What's Luck Got to do with it?

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

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

‘In Kenya?’

‘No, in Angola’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Armadillos look good’ he said.

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

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

‘I’ll tell him’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unpacking the bag from Fish Creek Spinners

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

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

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

‘Can I borrow them?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

1 Peter, 4:10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.  That’s a bit of a nuisance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, but where is his passport?’

‘You are holding it in your hand’

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

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

I lost my temper.  She called security.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Itch of the Twitch

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny old world... 

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

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

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

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

‘What’s that one called Dad?’

‘It’s an Elbeejay, Son’

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

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

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

Good Evening Mr Bond, I mean Boyle, and thank you...

I think I must have been the only person on the planet who, enjoying both satellite TV channels and, albeit intermittent access to the interwebthingy, missed the opening ceremony for the London Olympics.  Put that down to a deeply ingrained cynicism for what once was supposed to be an event open to all citizens to enjoy and amateur athletes to compete in, and is now just yet another example of a costly ‘prestige’ project of the kind the World Bank and IMF roundly criticise formerly Third World (to be politically correct) Developing Economies for executing.

Having read all the reviews of Danny Boyle´s Greatest-Ever-Show-On-Earth-Ever, and having downloaded, at glacial velocity some of the highlights from You Tube, I do feel a bit of a fool.  Looks like my grumpiness and scepticism led me to exclude myself from what appears to have been a great and widely regarded spectacular.  Hoisted with my own petard, so to speak.

As if still unconvinced by the evidence of his own eyes, John Gray over on Going Gently posted waxing lyrical (he really should be a professional reviewer of the dynamic Arts) asking his readers whether they concurred.  Well, much as I would have liked to respond, a few minutes of internet highlights of a three hour show hardly qualified me.

So I thought I would let John know what the Angolans thought of it by surfing a couple of their on-line newspapers, then cut and paste a few good quotes and post them as a comment on his blog.

For the Government view, one needs to read the Jornal de Angola, the state controlled media outlet.  Not a single mention.  Bugger all.  Ok, I thought, I’ll swing over to one of only two independent newspapers in Angola and the only one having an online presence, Folha 8.  What surprised me wasn’t that Folha 8 hadn’t run a story on the opening of the 2012 games, but that they weren’t there anymore.  All I found was a notice saying the site was down.

Blimey.  What’s happened to Folha 8?  I have to remind you, I live in the sticks.  We don’t even have electricity or running water, never mind a paper delivery so I do get a bit behind.

I decided to ask Marcia because she knows everything.

‘What´s happened to Folha 8?’ She snorted.

Women do that, don’t they?  Repeat an honest enquiry with the rising inflexion reserved for idiots.

‘It’s in jail’ she said.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her, more that I was trying to imagine how one jailed a newspaper, but my mind works like that sometimes.  I mean, do you just seal all the doors and windows of its offices and presses with everyone still inside, wrap a chain around the building, padlock it and station a Screw outside?

Apparently, I wasn’t so far off the mark.

What the security services did in mid June was to raid the establishment and lift everyone and everything in it.  I’ve seen it happen before when they raided the company I worked for claiming the activities of its employees were incompatible with their status, and the Angolan Security Services are miles more efficient than the Met (the best police force money can buy).  No such impediment to rigorous law enforcement as a Human Rights Act here.

After publishing a series of frank articles irritating the government, Folha 8 did for themselves when they published a doctored photograph of the President and a couple of his senior Ministers in a police line up.  This country really has got into the ‘Name and Shame’ culture but only for ordinary citizens.  Watch the news at night and there they are, gits that should have been beaten to death in the street outside the scene of their crimes.  Instead they are paraded in front of the cameras with placards hanging around their necks.  Woe betide anyone who tries to do the same to a Party Official.  And Folha 8 certainly begat woe by publishing that image, one I have not only seen but might possibly have on my laptop.  But even I could not get drunk enough to reprint it on this blog.  I do want to live here, but not in a way that gets me a stripy suntan in Bentiaba jail.

So I did what all roving journalists do when the option of plagiarising someone else’s intellectual property is denied them, I got off my arse, struggled the thirty yards to Marcia’s shop and asked her customers.

‘Brilliant!  Absolutely brilliant!’

‘Really?’  Don't forget, I hadn't seen it.

‘Oh’ they all concurred breathlessly, ‘she is wonderful!’

Crickey, it obviously went down well then.  Hang on a sec…

‘She?’

‘Your Queen!  She is fantastic!’

‘My Queen?’

‘Of course your Queen!  The Rainha Britanica!’ and they all looked at each other in exasperation, the way people do when dealing with a retard.  I am used to that, my employers did it a lot every time I told them that it really didn’t help for them to refer to our clients as ‘ignorant jungle bunnies’ when they were the ones paying the outrageous bills.

‘You’d never see our President jumping out of a plane!’ they said.

Probably because he would never find anyone he could trust to pack his parachute, I thought.  Fuck me.  Hook, line and sinker.  Mr Boyle, there’s a whole nation that has sucked this in.  And since I am a man who can appreciate a well executed practical joke, you are right at the pinnacle of my esteem.  So who am I to burst a bubble?

‘Her Majesty was accompanied by James Bond, though’ I pointed out.

‘James Bond!  JAMES BOND!’

The shop filled with that rather provocative and not altogether unpleasant aroma of knickers spontaneously combusting.

‘Sr. Thomas, do you know James Bond?’ a doe eyed beauty asked me.

‘We served together once’, I lied eyeing her up with no hint of remorse.

Mr Boyle, I bask in your reflected glory.  Round my Manor, Guvnor, anything British is suddenly real cool…

Out of the Box reviews

"professionals 'who'... not 'that'.  Still, the kit looks good.

I don't do them.  Out of the Box reviews.  Mainly because I am skint and can't buy anything new enough to still be in its box, and also because the things I do buy tend to be mind numbingly dull, such as a new laptop or fresh underwear.

For Out of the Box reviews of Gucci Boy's Toys you need to go to The Suburban Bushwacker or the Rasch Outdoor Chronicles.

I was having a quick fag and whisky break from loading timber onto the truck (there's three very fit young lads out there I am paying so why do I need to bust my aged arse?) and was having a bit of a surf (the only emails I get are spam and every time I open up Skype I get the message, 'Your contacts haven't been in touch lately', sad isn't it?) when I stumbled across this well written and interesting article by Sam Biddle on Gizmodo.com.  It wasn't just interesting it was, I suppose, a bit scary.

I was in bombed out Sarajevo in the early nineties and bumped into this guy whose actual job I never found out but he evidently had some desire to see that whatever I did there complied with whatever mysterious plan the people paying me had.  Very Orson Wells.  We got on like a house on fire which is a bit of a sick analogy when you think of the smouldering ruins of the city we were in.  I told him that I was happy to stay on and do a bit more work but I really needed to get a message back to my wife in Angola.  'No probs' he said, 'come to dinner'.

Whereas I was billeted in the converted freezing cold cellar of an old couple's house surviving now by offering Bed & Breakfast, he was staying in a magnificent, turn of the century apartment block.  All the windows had been smashed out and were now covered by sheets of plastic, the facade bore the evidence of shellfire and there were bullet holes all over the plaster walls and ceiling.  Apart from that, it was delightful and I was warm for the first time in ages and starting to get a bit self conscious.  You know how boots that haven't been thawed out for weeks smell when they start getting less stiff?

The food was excellent but, if I wasn't already on the back foot with surpise, after pouring me a large Slivovitch as ice cold as my accommodation, he settled into a sofa, fiddled with some cables and positioned a computer on his lap and said, 'Right, what´s your wife's number' I must have looked like a slack jawed village idiot.

'But you can't phone out of Sarajevo' I said, 'only on the military systems and they won't let scum like me near them'.  That wasn't entirely true, there were systems that the press for example used but the cost was horrific and getting a slot unless you had a bit of pull, of which I had none, was bloody hard.

This guy was the first real computer geek I had ever come across.  Like all geeks, he liked to show off so having given him the number, he then treated me to a running commentary as he hacked into various systems, then satellites, yet more systems and then his phone rang.

'Well go on, answer it!' he told me and settled back with his drink.  I lifted the handset, heard a ringing tone and then my wife answer.

We were used to me being away a lot and were also accustomed to the fact that the sort of people who employed me didn't usually send me to nice places, the kind with a Tesco's and International Direct Dialling so we got the whole exchange of how everything was going on both sides and that I was going to stay on a bit longer over in about 30 seconds flat and I hung up.

'What did you do that for?'

'I didn't want to run up your phone bill'

He looked at me as one does the breathtakingly stupid.

'I don't pay phone bills' he said.

'Well who pays for that call then?'

'Who cares?  We won't.  Do you want to talk to her again?'

There will be loads of geeks out there who know how he did that but I was in utter awe of him.  Here I was sitting in a bombed out apartment with war and snipers raging all around us having a chat with my wife on the phone, a continent away.  And not just any continent, Africa where even today communications systems are distinctly fourth world.

Sam Biddle's article detailing how even the supposedly most controlled trade can slip effortlessly under the radar reminded me of that vey bizarre evening, but what got me giggling was not that you could, if so inclined, beat the system and buy all you need on-line to overthrow a dictatorship, but the thought of SBW or Rasch doing an Out of the Box review from that supplier!  I mean, they will deliver anywhere you want, even to a GPS reference. 

I would like a Remington Sendero in .300 Rem Ultra Mag  (long butt, I need the eye relief, I wear glasses now) with a couple of boxes of Swift A frame and an appropriate scope delivered to 9^o 20' 26.46" S  13^o 09' 08.41" E.  Cash on Delivery.

Amazon won't even deliver a UK configured laptop to Germany.

These guys, on the other hand, offer world-wide Death-in-a.Box and can do so with some really clever interweb trickery.  And that is the really scary bit.  All I want to do is drop a bush buck at long range, I'm getting too old for hours of bush bashing just to get downwind so I can get close.

If it arrives, I will do my first Out of the Box review.  I am still dealing with this land invasion shit so it would be nice to get my eye in again.

Angharad Rees

A few perceptive readers noticed that this post appeared, then disappeared.  That was because He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named asked me to take it down.  So I did.  For just a bit until I could, in what is now common parlance, redact it.

A happy couple.  Wrong of me, I know, but I was very jealous.  I have no idea what the demarcation in the middle of the photograph denotes.  Yes, I know I nicked the image from the internet.  Perhaps it was from an old Colgate advert showing they were entering the Rectangle of Confidence.

There are times when I feel a shade cut off from the rest of the world.  With an internet connection about as useful and effective as two empty bean cans linked by a bit of string (when it is working) idle surfing isn’t really an option for me although I do try to keep up with my favourite blogs and catch up on the news.  Skype?  Forget it although I must confess that a few days ago all the planets must have aligned for not only did I get through to He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named in Germany, he was actually at home (presumably re-supplying for the continuation of his world tour).  Not only that, he had time to chat.  Hours of time in fact.

We have not seen each other in years and have only managed the three or four few day get-togethers in the last decade because he dragged himself down to Angola, invariably exhausted and bewildered by time zones and jet lag and occasionally worryingly traumatised having just left yet another bloody war zone.  Unlike me, he’s not an ex soldier, he’s an engineer and gets embarrassed when, relaxed by a few drinks, he pours it all out and then says things like, ‘I’d like to shoot the fucking lot of them’, meaning, of course, the members of whatever dictatorship were in force in the countries he visited.  Sadly, I know that he couldn’t hit a barn door at two paces with a shovel (or at least know instinctively when to get his flaming head down) so he would be quickly slaughtered, but I do sympathise with the natural instinct to fight against injustice, especially the suffering of the innocent.  He hasn’t had his Jean Claude van Damme moment, thank God, but he did smuggle a lot of film back to the UK media from places like Libya and Syria.  He does give me sleepless nights.

The man on the left is an 'ACTOR' and only pretends to have balls the size of planets.  The cool dude on the right is He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named and is NOT my brother.  In fact I have no idea who he is and am wondering why I am posting a photo of a complete stranger on my blog. Perhaps it's because I like his watch.

You would have thought that given the unexpected gift of not only voice, but video too, we would have had loads to discuss.  Having confirmed that our respective family members were all in good health, each of us insisting that bored offspring drag themselves from whatever they really wanted to do to stare into a laptop instead and say ‘Hello He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named’, we dried up.

Then He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named asked me if I had heard that Angharad Rees had died.

I thought for a moment.  ‘You mean Poldark´s wife?’  (Yes I know that is terribly sexist but I was born in the fifties when women knew their only function was to be pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen)

Bugger.  Now I know that actors and actresses hate to be typecast and that both Angharad Rees and Robin Ellis contributed so much more than just Poldark to the theatrical world but in Poldark, they were a hell of a team.  And that series aired just when He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named and I were in our teens, bodies flushed with hormones and ready to take on the world and all the women in it. 

Don’t forget, this was a time when the UK had crawled through four day working weeks, power cuts and Heath, the leader of our nation, so in love with Europe he crashed his boat, Morning Cloud into Belgium missing his intended destination, France, by a whole country.

He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named and I had witnessed bailiffs coming in and lifting anything they fancied out of our house or off its driveway that my father, after 23 years service in the British Army had tried to procure to improve his family’s standard of living.  Soaring inflation, rampant fuel price increases and the loss of overtime as factories slowed production or stopped altogether did for him.  What he couldn’t understand, probably because he had a lifetime of duty and sacrifice behind him, was why his union (yes, he was forced to join one if he wanted a job, this was the Seventies) were also forcing him to strike when he knew it would not only kill the company he worked for but also the source of income he needed to sustain his family.  Our Dad was a Black Leg and received neither pay (because the company went bust) nor any union benefits (because some shitbag communist had decided my Dad was a traitor). 

He'd have gone down the pit to feed his family if the Unions had let him.

All he wanted to do was work, something which, as a man, he took pride in.    Both He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named and I did two paper rounds a day and as many odd jobs as we could get from neighbours.  My mother worked all the hours God sent in Smith’s (she was German and got an A Level in English Literature after that which left me wondering how busy Smith’s was during that economic depression) yet still managed to rustle up a family supper.  Heaven for us kids, as the adverts said at the time, was a bowl of Angel’s Delight.

Poldark for us boys, therefore, hit everything on the nail.  You can see the allegory, can’t you?  There’s some poor bastard who has been away serving his country and when he gets back, he’s comprehensively fucked over. 

A decade or so ago, there was a survey asking teenagers who they respected the most, who they would most like to be like.  Richard Branson came out tops. I can't argue with that, after all, he started in a garage or loft or somewhere menial flipping vinyl yet ended up taking British Airways on leaving its directors clutching their bruised balls in the Savoy Grill. 

If they had asked me in the Seventies who I aspired to the most I would, without hesitation, have said ‘Ross Poldark’.  Here was another man, away for ages in the service of his country (boys do identify with their Fathers) who had been screwed.  Not just by venal authority, but by the very same from whom he could have expected a bit of relief.  And in Poldark’s case, as if it wasn’t already enough, his smart fiancée stabbed him in the back by running off with someone who he really could have assumed to be a mate (as in friend, a rock, rather than in the biblical or zoological sense).  Back then, I didn’t see anyone offering a bit of a bung to my Dad who had to switch his engine off and coast on the downhill stretches to work between Chaseterrace and Wolverhampton in order to save petrol.

At the time I wasn’t just brushed gently with a warm glaze of discontent provoked by plastic socialists and lying politicians, I was incandescent with impotent rage.  They could have used me to fire up the power stations solving the country’s energy problems in one go I was so angry at the lot of them.

A normal man would have loaded his pistol, swallowed the last of his port and put a ball through his head, but not Ross Poldark.  And neither did my Dad even though all the paraphernalia required were at his disposal.

Just as my Dad would not have pulled through to respectable success without my Mother, neither would have Ross Poldark without his Demelza,  Not only did I want to be as hard, courageous and decent as Ross Poldark (dreaming that I could get back at some of the bastards who screwed my Dad), I wanted to marry someone like Demelza.  Truth be known, I aspired to be like Robin Ellis and was in love with Angharad Rees.

Her death, untimely and very, very sad, led me to reflect on those times we all sat glued to the television, power cuts permitting, soaking in the superb performances of two actors, two professionals who really were one of the most memorable teams to grace the living rooms of over fifteen million viewers.  Even God had to join the queue as church services were rescheduled to take account of broadcasting times.

I always wanted to emulate Poldark and find my own Demelza.  Clearly I wasn't going to take him on and nick his Missus, he'd spend the rest of his life hunting me down.  As it turned out, I did my years of service overseas and returned to find that my wife had run off with someone I quickly learnt to hate with a vengeance, while the lawyers saw to it I lost everything I had saved up and worked for.  Imagine how you would feel if the man that cuckolded you was living in your house, shagging your wife and, worst of all, insisted that your son called him Dad?

What else is a man to do but fly in the face of a convention that still exists today and marry his maid?

And, despite the occasional Poldarkesque twist in the plot, Marcia and I are doing rather well together.

I am very triste about the death of Angharad Rees but was delighted to discover, as I disconsolately surfed Wikipedia (local Angolan internet service provider permitting) in an attempt to read all I could about such a wonderful actress and childhood sweetheart, that Poldark (I mean Robin Ellis), a real hero for me (some of his most powerful performances were outside Poldark), is still alive and kicking in France and has his own really nice blog.  He has also written books on how to dine well with type 2 diabetes, an all too common affliction, not only in my family.  Once again that old hard case Poldark, I mean Ellis, is influencing my lifestyle. 

Sad as I am over the death of Angharad Rees, I am pleased there are people who remember her for what she was, a bloody good actress, delighting millions with her performances and exercising a benign subliminal influence that hopefully she is now aware of.

Like I said, I never met her, but I was rather fond of her.