Leeches and Blood Letting! How Could I Forget That?

It wasn't just my toe any longer, it was my foot.

Again last night I was awake before four in the morning in absolute bloody agony.  Back in the Eighties, I was blown up in Northern Ireland and was back on duty inside six weeks.  I was stabbed in the Lundas (very painful, no seriously, it is a place in North East Angola) and although not completely mobile, I was back on duty in only four days.

I just got a nip on the toe while going across my garden to switch off a bloody generator and I have been off my feet for six weeks.  Now this was really starting to piss me off.  I was so pissed off, in fact, I was nearly ready to do a Ranulph Fiennes and saw my own digit off in the shed.  Every time it seemed to be getting better, it would suddenly swell up in a different place and ooze goo all over the place.  Marcia banned me from her bed unless the offending digit was bound tightly in a bandage encased in a pillow case and a plastic bag from the shop.  The trouble was, it was exploding.  At least if felt that way.  Binding it only made it worse.

So today I was delighted when my old mate turned up for a visit.  He is now a local police chief dealing, ironically, with illegal immigrants,  Since I have only really been legal for half the twenty years I have been here, we both have an excuse to share a drink and a laugh.  The thing is, we were in the bush together.  In the bush we had to look after ourselves, there was no health service.

He looks tired but he's had a hard day in the cellar

He had a look at my foot.  'It's a snake bite,' he said, 'you need to cut it'.

'There's some razor blades in the shop, do you mind?' I asked him.

Off he trotted while I heated up a bowl of water and threw loads of salt in it to soak the foot.

'Have you any Agua Oxigenada (Hydrogen Peroxide) or Alcohol?' he asked me when he got back.  I gave him a bottle of whisky.

I sterilised his surgical tools, laid them out on the floor. took a slug of the whisky (well, it is a shame to waste it), lit a cigarette and let him get on with it.

You know, every time I take a photograph of the floor I get pissed off.
I mean, what they hell did they sand it with...  Rocks?

I have seen this guy torture people in cellars so he had no qualms whatsoever about slashing deep into my foot.

Yes it was painful but technically I still outrank him so I could not betray even the merest flicker of discomfort.  So he had another slash saying the first cut wasn't the deepest, proving that Cat Stevens doesn't know shit and that rank may have its privileges but if you bang on about it, it doesn't half piss people off.

God, the relief!  It was instantaneous!  God the mess, that was instantaneous too!  I plunged my foot into the bowl and let nature take its course.  Over a gallon of hot, salty water turned to soup in front of my eyes.



Bleeding from all its new orifices.
Blue toes, all the rage in Angola

But for the first time in weeks, I am free of this incessant pain.  Maybe tomorrow I will be able to get my boot on again.

Quiteta

A Peasant collecting Clams, God Bless her. 
She deserves more than four bucks a bucket.

Yesterday I decided I would prepare a fine chicken curry with a smooth peanut and coconut cream sauce.  I like curries with a spiciness categorised as ‘Burning Bum By Morning’ but little Alex’s palate is refined enough to sense chilli in his food even if the last time I touched the local very fiery hot peppers was a week ago.  Maybe I should try washing my hands more often.  Anyway, there was no way I could put chilli into it so I went for smoothness, a rich, creamy sauce lathered around chunks of deboned chicken ladled over rice.  Creaminess of texture takes time, so I started early.

Marcia was in town and Alex was off with his friends so I was on my own in the house.  Sometimes I like being on my own.  I don’t know about you but every now and then I think I could have been perfectly happy living as a bachelor in converted stables in some mews in London.  Looking back, I know exactly where I went wrong.  Shagging my farming neighbour’s daughter and accepting the gracious offer of the light of his life’s hand in marriage rather than two Ely cartridges discharged at point blank range into my guts.  With hindsight, of course, I would have dared the outraged father to shoot me.

I just wanted to clean.  Women have no idea how to clean.  Oh sure, they can wash dishes, do a bit of dusting and can run an iron over dhobi but clean?  Not a chance.  For a start, any dirt above eyeball level is invisible.  To fry one single egg they need three litres of olive oil, four frying pans, a casserole, a pressure cooker and about ten plates.  I have never yet met a woman who can pour herself a bowl of cornflakes and eat them without destroying a whole kitchen.  And, I know I have banged on about this before, ANY flat surface is a repository for icky feminine things.  What woman would accept her husband rinsing his kecks out in the sink and hanging them out to dry on the shower taps?  Steaming socks on the radiator, would they go for that?  At least this is a hot country so I don’t have to fight my way through dangling stockings to get to the shower.  Who washes stockings or pantyhose anyway?  I thought they were disposable, like nappies, another disgusting consequence of productive co-habitation between the sexes.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love kids, but like puppies they are just so bloody messy until they are house trained.

So today I could clean.  And having cleaned I decided to cook.

I took five chicken legs, dropped them into a pan with a couple of chopped onions.  I added very roughly chopped stalks of fresh coriander, a few bashed to shit garlic cloves and a couple of ripe, slashed tomatoes and a dash of salt.  I poured in about a pint of water and set the pan on a high heat to boil the crap out of it for ten to fifteen minutes.  I then fished out the chicken legs, checking to see there was no blood oozing from them as I stabbed them with a fork, and laid them on a plate to cool.  I strained the liquid and set it aside.

I finely chopped onions, garlic and fresh coriander stalks and fried them off in a heavy cast iron pan.  Just as they were caramelising I added two heaped tablespoons of Garam Masala, gave it all a stir to sear the spices a bit before adding a tin of skinned tomatoes, bashing them with the wooden spoon to break them up and thicken the sauce before adding a squeeze of locally produced peanut paste (you could use two tablespoons of unsweetened smooth peanut butter), stirring that in before adding some of the stock and giving it all a good stir to combine.

I chopped into cubes a chunk of fresh pineapple and threw that into the mix along with a few roughly chopped coriander leaves.  Rather than swamp the mixture in the pan with all the chicken stock, I added it a bit at a time so as to keep the sauce thick as it reduced.

With the chicken legs cool enough to handle, I stripped the flesh off the bones.  I like the skin but neither Marcia nor Alex does (do? Help please YP) so the skin joined the bones in the bowl for the dogs.  I know that a lot of experts say one should not feed cooked chicken bones to dogs.  But they are not ‘dog’ experts, they are ‘soft fluffy pet’ experts.   Real dogs will eat the arse out of your pants as you are running and mine will happily gnaw on the skeleton of a bony fish as well as the bleeding bones of any intruder.  Cooked chicken and fish bones to them are just an appetizer and while I may have had a couple of them hack up spectacularly on my living room floor, none of them have ever choked to death and they look pretty damn healthy to anyone entering my property uninvited.

I finely sliced a couple of ripe but still firm red tomatoes and a couple of green sweet deseeded peppers, added them to the reduction giving it all a stir and then had a whisky and smoke break which allowed enough time to soften the peppers without them turning to mush, we want a bit of al Dente here.  I then chucked in the bite sized chicken pieces and added half a can of Coconut milk and half a handful of finely chopped coriander leaves, stirred it up again and left it on the heat until it started to bubble (not boil) before banging the lid on the pan and taking it off the heat.  This is why heavy cast iron pans beat everything else hands down.  There is enough latent heat in the iron to make sure everything warms through without the coconut milk curdling.  We’re going for creamy smoothness here and once again, free from distraction, I had not only achieved this, I had been able to accompany an episode of Midsomer Murders, choke down a few cigarettes and a couple of whiskeys.

I placed a pan of water, about a quart, on the burner to bring to the boil adding a good pinch of salt.

I very finely chopped a couple of Garlic cloves and half an onion and fried them off in a bit of olive oil in a heavy based pan.  I added two cups of rice and gave it all a good stir to make sure the rice was evenly coated with the oil before tipping in the boiling water (if it does not sizzle and scald your hand, you have chickened out and not roasted your rice) and banging the lid on the pan.  Like I said, my pans are heavy cast iron so it is hard to put their lids on quietly.  I turned the heat down to minimum and left it alone for the time it took me to smoke another fag and swig another glass of the amber nectar.

Lifting the lid off the pan, I could see no sign of liquid, just the steaming craters formed by water boiling through the rice so turned the heat off, banged the lid on again and left the rice to steam through gently.

My job was done.  The place was clean, the kitchen immaculate and the food was ready.

Half an hour later Marcia walked in carrying a bucket with Alex in tow.  A trip to town can be pretty unpredictable here so I was rather pleased with my timing.  My lovely family walk in, no doubt tired and hungry, and I can serve them immediately on the nicely laid out dining table.  I was pretty bloody chuffed.

‘Have you cooked?’ asked Marcia, sniffing the air, ‘Oh dear’

It's obviously a cultural thing, a sign of our vastly different backgrounds but most arguments Marcia and I have can be put down to a simple lack of mutual comprehension, things get lost in translation so, rather than take issue at her obvious dismay that her husband, housebound due to a rotting snake bitten foot, had cleaned the whole house and put food on the table, I asked her what she had in the bucket.

‘Quitetas’, she said.  Clams.  She had a whole bucket full of fresh clams.

‘We have to eat them now,’ I said, ‘I love Quitetas,’ I said, ‘It would be criminal to waste them.’

‘But what about your food?’ Márcia asked me.  I really hate her sometimes but she is such a love.

‘It’s a curry,’ I told her, ‘curries always taste better the next day.  I’ll stick it in the fridge and we’ll have it tomorrow.’

Márcia grabbed the last of the fresh coriander and tossed it into a very light, aluminium pan.  She chopped up an onion and added half a pint of white wine, threw in the rinsed clams and… carefully placed the wafer thin lid on so she didn't accidentally bend it.

So often, nowadays, people like to sit in splendid isolation and gorge their food in front of a TV.  I like to honour meal times by sitting at a table surrounded by family.  In what are sometimes arrogantly considered Third World cultures, food is served up in a communal pot, those choosing to absent themselves going hungry.

I delighted little Alex by showing him that to eat clams, he did not need to struggle with a knife and fork.  All he needed to do was suck the flesh from one shell and then use the original, pincer or tweezer like, to fetch the flesh out of the rest.  I crisped some fresh bread up in the newly rewired oven and made up a garlic butter dipping sauce.  We sat together around the table as a family for over an hour. 

The clams were delicious and a bucket full cost Márcia 400 Kwanzas.  That’s four dollars.  Talk about value for money.

My smooth chicken curry is, of course, outstanding.  But I’m glad we did not eat it last night and had communal clams instead.

 

I didn't do a bad job of restoring the table either, did I?

 

This is England

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

 

“Teenage girl admits punching frail Sikh pensioner, 80, to the ground, knocking off his turban and then SPITTING in his face in vile daylight attack filmed by shoppers” 

Quote from the Daily Mail yesterday.

 

Well, that says it all about community spirit, doesn’t it?

I’m not talking about the fact that someone would senselessly attack a poor old codger in the street just because he looked different, the English have been doing that for decades.  When I arrived in England with my younger brothers in tow, the natives abandoned Paki Bashing and added to their list of sports (the victories which, as they never failed to remind us, included one World Cup and Two World Wars) Nazzie Bashing.  As a youngster, therefore, and with what would now no doubt be classified in a detrimental light as Teutonic efficiency,  I quickly realised how useful a sock with a rock in it in one’s school satchel was compared with a pencil case and a geography book,  To my mind, the English were bloody animals and to defend myself and my brothers, I resorted to my own form of Blitzkrieg.  Nowadays, and with the benefit of years of experience, I would dispense with the rock and just stab them in the eye with a pencil.  But in those days I was still civilised.

What I am on about, in part, is the fact that passers-by would film the assault and presumably sell the footage to the Daily Mail, rather than step in and help the poor sod.  After all, the assailant was only a teenage girl.  Are there no men left in England with the courage to take on a teenage girl?  If my Mother had seen that in her younger days she would have told us kids to hang on to the shopping while she slapped the shit out of the assailant.  But then, she lived through Cristall Nacht and saw what happened to her neighbours who had, from one day to the next, been classified as legally different.

Instead of the headline the Daily Mail posted perhaps they could have, unusually for them, been honest and simply stated,

‘Uncaring, Cowardly and Venal English People Watch Old Foreign Looking Person Who Has Lived In England All His Life and Made a Contribution to Society Being Beaten by Uneducated Dopey Stupid Kid Redolent of English Youth and Do Nothing Except Ring Us to a Cut Lucrative Deal for the Vídeo Footage and Photos!’ 

To be fair to the Daily Mail, they did describe the attack as ‘Vile’, which it was.  But the Daily Mail missed the point (again).  These sorts of mindless xenophobic assaults occur daily.  How about all the Homophobic assaults?  How about the assaults on people with pink dyed spiky hair?  The story the spotty faced youth who penned this article, typically shallow, failed to appreciate was the deeper sickness, the evil virus infecting a society that allows one member of it to beat another, just because he is in non-compliance with their norm, while others just film it.

I am sure a decent Editor could tighten my strap line up a bit to something like: ‘Oh, The Shame!’

This reporting by the Daily Mail made the news in Angola.

The Angolans immediately picked up on the fact that English shoppers stood by as this poor old non-English looking guy was beaten up on an English high street and instead of diving in to help him, the natives just filmed the attack.

For the Angolans, the story wasn’t that someone got beaten up in the street, that happens all the time.  For them the story was that everyone would stand around watching it happen.

And do nothing.

Meet Eddie

Charlie's brother out of Doggie fathered by Kizomba.

Of the thirteen puppies from Doggie's third litter (she has now given me a total of 35 puppies) I had to keep this one.  I was in amongst the pups helping a prospective new owner to select a couple when this one snuck up on me and bit my toe.  Yes, that toe.  Clearly the dog has a bit of character and is not intimidated by our difference in size.  Clearly the couple looking for a puppy thought so too for they immediately dumped one of the two puppies they had selected and demanded him instead.

Bitches can, and do, mate with more than one dog and can store sperm until they feel the time is right to get pregnant.  I can see at least three fathers in the mix but I prefer the obvious isssue of Kizomba.

Kizomba is my neighbour's dog.  He was fished out of the river years ago with a badly lacerated leg.  Against all odds, he not only survived but made a perfect recovery to become the Alpha male of the neighborhood.  As Doggie came on heat for the second time and Charlie, his son, started to go a little wild eyed and crazy with hormones, Kizomba beat Charlie up so bad he damn near ripped his balls off and I had to suture Charlie's ball sack if he was going to stand any chance of fathering his own puppies.

Unlike most feral dogs, Doggie included, Kizomba is inteligente and comfortable around humans.  He was willing to be trained and obey his master in exchange for a decente bunk and regular food.  Charlie, his son by Doggie is the same.  Oddly enough I chose to keep Charlie, out of Doggie's first litter, because when I had finally tracked down the hole in the ground that Doggie had dug to give birth in and was stuffing the puppies into a pillow case to transfer them to the box I had made up, he bit me.

Charlie will sit when he is told to and come back when he is called.  I can put a plate of food in front of him and he won't tuck in until I tell him he can.  He won't climb up on the furniture or nick food off the table.  I once caught Doggie on the table tucking into our Sunday roast, na opportunity she had seized just because I had turned my back to make the gravy.  Charlie will also dog Alex and get extremely viscious if he thinks the boy is under threat.

Between here and the restaurante site is a pack of feral dogs.  I have to drive between the two almost daily and Charlie will not stay at home.  He just has to gambol alongside the Jeep.  The one thing he does not do well is ride along in vehicles.  And every time he gats beaten up by this pack of feral dogs.  One on one I am sure he would murder them but faced with such a co-ordinated attack by so many, it is hardly surprising he always comes off worst.  On more than one occasion, I have been tempted to ride down the middle of the road at night and shoot these dogs but I just know I would get into all sorts of trouble.  What Charlie needs is some back up.

'This puppy is special', I told the prospective owners.

'Special?'

'Yes.  This one is a pure bred Tiger Dog, look at his stripes.  Look at his brother Charlie over there.  This one will come out bigger and meaner than him'.

'I want him,' said the guy.

'It'll cost you,' I said.

The guy picked up the puppy and it struggled manfully before sinking its sharp little teeth into his thumb.

'I'll give you a hundred bucks,' he said.

'Not even close,' I countered, 'How many real Tiger Dogs have you seen?'

I can see this guy really wants this puppy but I want to keep him too so I throw out a ridiculous figure.

'OK, 500 bucks', I say.

'Done,' he says.

Now that wasn't supposed to happen but 500 bucks, US mind, is not to be sniffed at and, after all, I hadn't really earned it, Doggie had done all the work.

Just then, Alex pitched up.

'Daddy! What are you doing with Eddie?'

'Eddie?'

'Yes Daddy, Eddie.  Eddie is MY dog!'

The guy's wife looked at Alex's trembling lip and, no doubt with a mixture of maternal pity and the thought of what she could buy with the five hundred her husband was willing to toss, persuaded him to hand Eddie back to Alex.

To train a puppy to be loyal the first thing you have to do is stop bathing.  Dogs rely on scent so if you shower regularly, it just confuses them.  Now I have no problems eschewing running water and soap.  For a start, unwelcome visitors are suddenly less inclined to darken my doorway but wives, whose bed husbands are expected to share, take a diferente view.  Anyone who came off the tit and was immediatley packed off to boarding school will understand the trauma of being seperated from Nanny.  Eddie felt the same way.  He had lost all his siblings and his mother, Doggie, was kicking him off her teats.  Clearly, Eddie needed to be introduced the the inside of the house and learn to eat the meat he would need to build up his muscles so he could back up his brother. 

And this is where sweaty, unwashed clothes come in.  At night, I peel off and make a bed up for the puppy with my stinky garments.  It gets used to my smell and the fact that I feed it.  We become inseparable.  It's all over my feet and biting my toe to get attention.  If I am working late at night it whines piteously so I pick it up, stuff it inside my shirt and it calms down as I type.  Then it wakes up, struggles out of my shirt and settles down  right between my eyeballs and whatever it is I am doing.

Can we go to bed now Daddy?  I'm tired and so very pissed off, oh so pissed off with this blogging lark,
Can't we go hunting instead?.

Marcia hates animals in the house.

'Isn't your best friend called Eddie?' she pointed out.

Oh, so that's where Alex got the name.

'That's alright,' I assured her, 'I'll just tell Ed I am naming my dogs after English Princes'

Porkinglês

"All I wanto is a beero, understando!!!!

 
Blogger has decided that I am Português.   It has analysed my laptop, recognised that I have a Pork and Cheese version of Windows installed and anything I posto originates from dodgy, third world servidores.

I ave tried to override the default spell checker but doing so changes my keyboard to English as well, which is a bit of a bugger as it is a Português keyboard and changing it to English, which it clearly isn't, screws everything up.  The keys representem the letters of the alfabeto remain the same (more or less) but every other key assumes a new, incompreensível idêntico.   Try having to press Control-Alt-2 to get @.  Try figurem that out in the first place when all you are trying to do is send a bleeding email!

I thought, perhaps, I could change the default linguagem for Blogger and confirm that I am indeed writing in English but while Blogger admits I am English, it insistas on spell checking using a Portuguese dicionário.  Now I wouldn't mind if all I had to endure were loads of red wiggly lines beneath every word I typed but no, to add to my woe, whatever malevolente programa there is running in the background automaticamente respells whatever it is I have written.  Since I am half blind, I need to tip the screen down so it iluminares the keyboard, meaning I cannot see what I am writing on the screen.  When I lift the screen to proof read what’s displayed, I am sometimes left bewildered.

I'll give you a few exemples: (I mean, examples)

Na (this is supposed to be 'an' as in 'na exemple'. Oh, for goodness' sake, AN EXAMPLE!)

Restaurante.  Yes, just add na 'e'.  AN 'e'.

Distante, instead of distant. They love their E's

Arrogante.  Yet another extra 'E'

Then there's the accents.  If I write taxi, lo and behold, it appears as táxi.  Ç’s appear randomlçy as far as I can see.

This means that what should take only a minute or two, writing a comento on one of your postas, for exemplo, can take ages as I arguir with a machine that insistes I cannot spell.

So I ave had na ideia.  I am not going to bother anymore.  I shall justo type away in English and if the sistema changes things, well then it will give you all a little brainteaser working out what the hell it is I am on about.  I shall invente a new língua: Porkinglês.

I thought I would share this because I had this imagem of you wading through all my typos thinking of me slumped half comatoso over my keyboard, fingers numb with álcool unable to hit the correcto key.  Nothing, I assure you, could bê further from the truth.

Honesto.

Toe Update

A couple of the boys from Rico's place came to see me yesterday.  Since the toe issue, I haven't been as mobile as I usually am so not having seen me propping up their bar at Rum & Coke time for a few weeks, they decided to ride down and see how I was getting on, and get one of my increasingly famous ice creams each for which they very decently swapped a bottle of scotch.

I promised the Fifth Columnist I would not display any more gory photos on the blog but I am sure he will indulge me this, hopefully, last time.

I suppose I have become a bit blasé about injury confident, as I have always been, that if you survive the first couple of hours, you're probably going to be OK.  Pain, to me, is something to be borne rather than complained about.

In my last fight my opponent broke my nose and a couple of ribs in the first round.  In the last, I broke a bone in my hand returning the compliment.  Afterwards, both of us were loaded into the same ambulance and taken to hospital.  I was most of the way through training at Sandhurst and knew that if I took the medical ticket, I would be back termed and have to do it all again so I made damn sure I passed my medical knowing that any drop in the standard of my performance due to injury would not be considered a valid excuse.  It was called 'Soldiering On' in those days.

I was burned in Northern Ireland and ended up in the appropriate unit of the Military Wing of Musgrave Park Hospital in Belfast.  Due to the very bad reaction I had endured to the morphine with which I had been injected immediately after the incident, I refused any pain killers whatsoever and to this day, will not take even a headache tablet. After I left the Army, I obtained my medical records and note from that time the consultant's hand written remarks stating that my recovery rate was faster than expected and I had a 'well above average tolerance of pain'.  I don't know what that means really.  I was in agony when twice a day they peeled off congealed dressings and sliced away dead and often, not so dead flesh.  Of course my recovery rate was faster than expected.  I couldn't smoke, I couldn't drink, I couldn't sleep (I so desperately wanted to shag one of the nurses looking after me and you know what the difference between 'light' and 'hard' is?  You CAN go to sleep with a light on).  I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, hook up with anything remotely female and unload a few gallons of dirty water; you try wanking with burnt hands encased in plastic bags filled with Eusol.  I honestly think that the idea of having strip shows with a strictly enforced no touchy feely rule on the wards would do much to free up scarce NHS bed spaces as, the chaps at least, discharged themselves and waddled off with a John Wayne swagger back to waiting wives.

I had my fingers chopped off in Belize.  I knew I was a day's march away from any sort of medical attention so there was no point whining about it, all I could do was bind the hand, pop the fingers in my shirt pocket and start marching north.

I bust my ankles on the Nurburgring when I highsided a Ducati.  By then I was self employed and no, my personal injury insurance did not cover motorcycle racing.  Every day I spent in hospital was costing me my savings.  Every day I wasn't in the shop selling 'bikes, I was losing income so four days later, I was hobbling around on crutches doing what I did best in those days (certainly better than racing 'bikes), flogging motorcycles.  I even sold my trashed Dainese leathers for twice the sticker price to a client who clearly wanted to pretend he was a motorcycling hero.  I didn't care, I had just tossed a 'bike worth 25 grand down a track comprehensively destroying it so I needed to make up the bottom line.

In Moçambique I was contracted to clear a road from Quelimane to Malawi of land mines in six months and within budget.  I got sick with Malaria but carried on.  I finished the job, on time and within budget, but was then evacuated by air to a hospital in Jo'burg suffering from pneumonia and acute malaria; pulmonary oedema being a complication of long term malarial infection.  I arrived in Africa weighing eighty kilos.  When they weighed me in hospital, I was fifty-seven kilos.

I was on a 'Juice in, Smarties out' run to Lucapa in North East Angola during the war.  A juice in, smarties out run was where I flew in a Beechcraft to one of the Diamond buying offices up country bringing the buyers cash to by more diamonds (juice) and to carry the diamonds they had bought out (the smarties).  This time it didn't go so smoothly and by the time I had managed to pull the door of the aircraft closed and the fans where spinning for a shortfield, downwind take off, some of my guts had spilled out into my boxer shorts as a result of quite a nasty stab wound that missed the one organ I really cared about by only a matter of inches.  Instead of electing to be flown back to Jo,burg, I allowed myself to be operated on in an Angolan clinic and 24 hours later walked out of it, minus my handmade brogues which had been nicked while I was under the knife.

I came out of Sarajevo suffused with Malaria (once you've had it, you never really get rid of it and in cold climates it really can flare up and, believe me, Sarajevo was bloody cold) as well as a toothache that was driving me wild.  At 7.30 in the morning I was due to give a presentation of all my findings to those interested in clearing booby trapped mass graves in the Balkans and gathering enough evidence to convict the guilty of war crimes at a smart office in Central London.  At four in the morning, unable to stand the pain any longer, I was in a dentist's chair somewhere in Docklands being told I needed a root canal job and that the anaesthetic would take half an hour to take effect and the job itself would take another two.  The presentation was at eight, would take about an hour plus one more for questions, I then had two to get to Heathrow and catch my 'plane.  I still had to go back to my digs, collect the files and my bag.  'Forget the anaesthetic', I told him, 'you've got an hour.  I’m not an NHS client, I'm paying cash.'  The dentist was a Pakistani, a Muslim, but he let me take a swig from my hip flask every now and then but I did have to go outside for the one smoke break I needed.

I had my first heart attack and when I woke up, alarmingly in the same clinic of which I had so many horrible memories, I unhooked myself from the drips and monitors and had made it barefoot half way down the Ilha before hospital security staff caught up with me and brought me back in handcuffs.

I had another contract in Uganda to dismantle an oil rig, load it onto a three hundred and fifty tonne barge which had to be assembled from bits arriving by the truckload from America by the side of Lake Albert accessible by roads that I had to build and serviced by light aircraft landing on a runway I had to build.  Bilharzias is endemic to Lake Albert, as is malaria.  The only way I would be able to build the jetties capable of handling a 350 tonne barge was to get into the water, plant my surveyor's poles and encourage the local labourers to do no more than I was obviously prepared to do myself and, since I was the only one present who appeared able to swim, this included free diving with the cables and straps of the crane to hook up and haul out great rocks that were in the way.  The job was a success, part of which is down to a chap called John Lawrence.  He taught me to sail and, thanks to him, I could tie a bowline underwater in zero visibility.

Once again, I left an African country desperately sick and a fraction of my normal weight but went straight back to Angola to build power stations.  As usual, it was a project desperately behind schedule yet politically imperative it was delivered on time.  The last 72 hours I worked my team without any sleep whatsoever and at nine in the morning, Christmas day, the lights went on in Cazenga, a suburb of Luanda, Angola's capital city.

For the three years I worked for a Private Military Company I took only three weeks leave.  I took no leave at all while on the Uganda job.  I worked for three years building power stations here and again, took only three week's leave even though a typical expatriate contract gave me an entitlement to one month off for every two worked.  For years I lived with radios strapped to my hips.  I could sleep through all the chatter but awoke immediately when I heard my callsign, Delta Three.  Even now, I can hear a mobile phone ring a mile away.  If the dog barks in the night, I am awake.  If I hear a car pull up or an engine stop before its noise has faded into the distance, I'm awake.  If the generator just coughs, I'm awake.

Pushing the envelope of physical tolerance that far I suppose it was hardly surprising that I would keel over in a site office with another heart attack.  Lying there in that same Gottverdammte clinic strapped up to drips and monitors did make me wonder, ever so briefly, whether the salary they were paying me was worth it.  So I unhooked myself and walked out.

I am not a rich man by any means.  I am not even comfortably well off.  I don't even have a debit card anymore.  If I flew to Germany, I wouldn't be able to hire a car or book a hotel room.  Amazon on the internet leaves me feeling like a penniless kid with his face glued to a toy shop window.  At the two divorce settlement hearings I have attended, based on the evidence presented by the expensive lawyers my estranged wife had engaged and I was paying for, I recognised that living with me must have been truly awful so never argued.  If a wife really felt that way, enough to have such testimony transcribed publicly in a court of law and sleep with her work colleagues while I was away, I knew our differences were irreconcilable.

As a contractor, my income was sometimes spectacular but generally irregular and not something a spouse bereft of patience could count on for her fair share of in the future, ad infinitum.  So skilful lawyers always concentrated on something far more concrete, my assets.  In my time I have signed over three houses, furniture, cars and objets d'art.  I have to admire the lawyer’s arguments.  While recognising that my income was erratic, they averaged out what I had earned during the relationship and projected that forward to a highly optimistic retirement age of sixty five.  Then, as a concession sympathetically received by the court, admitting that all this poor woman required was a degree of security representing only a fraction of my projected future earnings best satisfied by the liquidation of my current assets.  The courts graciously allowed me to keep all my future earnings in exchange for all my current assets.

Twice I have walked away clad only in the clothes on my back and a half empty rucksack.  I have slept in ditches and beneath starlit skies scarred only by the branches of the trees beneath which I was resting.  I have taken comfort where I could find it and have even paid for it and felt no shame.

So perhaps it isn’t so surprising that something as minor as an irritating little snake bite would do no more than, well, irritate me.  Actually, I lie.  It annoyed me beyond belief.  After everything I have been through, after everything I have done, don’t I deserve a decent break?  I have built and opened the new shop.  I have built and moved the family into the new cottage.  The build of the new restaurant and cottages is cracking on.  And now I was to die horribly of a snake bite while engaged in something as innocuous as walking across my garden to switch the generator off?  Well, Fuck You, whoever you are in charge of the Greater-Scheme-of-Things, I won’t.  Not until I see the whole business up and running.  Only then can you come and get me and contract me to widen the highway to Hell and sort out an improved calorific return for burning souls.

‘Let’s have a look at the toe, then,’ my visitors implored, helping themselves to my present of scotch.

‘Eek!’ they said when I showed them.

That’s when they gave me their other present, John Visser’s and David Schapman’s book entitled ‘Snakes and Snake Bite’ subtitled ‘Venomous Snakes and Management of Snakebite in Southern Africa.’

After they left, I had a quick scan through it and decided I had been bitten by a juvenile Puff Adder.  Clearly, that's what they reckoned too as they had 'dog-eared' the appropriate page.

 

 

Looking at the blisters, I can see a resemblence here.
The thing that concerns me is that the poor bastard's índex finger in the top photo was amputated SIX months after the bite!
This begs the question: How long does it take to recover?

It's all in the mind, though.  Don't you think that looks much better?
And I was no burden on the local health service.
I will lose the nail but, so what?  They grow back better than amputated toes.

Addendum:

I think I still have a way to go.  I finished typing this post, uploaded it and then looked down at my foot.  This is what had oozed out of it while I was typing... I'm really pissed off about the substandard finish of the floor.



Trust me.  If you can possibly avoid it, don't get bitten by a snake, even a baby one.
You know the instant relief you feel when an inflamed boil finally bursts or is lanced by a sadistic nurse?
Well that's how I feel now.
 

A Few Random Pics...

Last night I grilled a leg of pork.  It took hours and an awful lot of attention to keep turning it so it did not burn.  Now why would I try grilling a leg of pork instead of roasting it in my brand new Bosch fan oven I hear you ask?  A very good question deserving an honest answer.

I went to switch the oven on to preheat it and heard the unmistakable loud PFUUT of electrical wires shorting.  We live in a wooden house and having once been contracted by Norsk Hydro to investigate the causes of a fire that completely destroyed one of their residences here in Luanda, I am almost paranoid about earth leakage protection.  Next to my generator is a sturdy copper rod that has been driven deep into the water table and all the earth circuits are connected to that.  So, instead of the shorting oven setting fire to my house, the main board tripped plunging me into darkness leaving me with a number of choices.

I could slice the leg of pork up and fry it.  I could stick it back into the fridge until I had sorted out the oven or bought a new one if it was really stuffed.  Or I could grill it.  I really wanted pork crackling so I decided to grill it and, perhaps because of all the extra attention it received, it came out fantastic.

This morning I pulled out the oven from its housing and started to dismantle it.  I had switched it off but had not disconnected it from the mains as I wanted to use a multi-meter to check the circuits.  As I lifted the back panel off I noticed a cable completely devoid of insulation.  Ah, I thought, an earth cable and grabbed it to move it out of the way.  The lights went out again and Marcia hurried over to see why I had suddenly launched myself from one side of the room to the other.  With the main board tripped I figured it was safe for me to investigate further.  First thing I noticed was that all the heat insulation had been chewed to heck.  Then I noticed all the cables that had been chewed as well.

'Rats', I told Marcia, 'rats have been living in our oven.'

Marcia was appalled.  I wasn't too chuffed either.

In disaster lies opportunity.  It won't be long before rats start invading our new home.  The temporary accommodation we had just vacated was infested with them at one time.  They chewed every cable, nearly caused two fires and stank the place out.  Marcia laid enough poison to kill a city, all to no avail and then I started introducing snakes into the room.  Marcia was not happy about that but within a couple of weeks, we saw not hair nor hide of any rat.

Now I could have told Marcia the truth, that this was not recent, that the rats had attacked our oven while it was in storage and had long since left.  But I didn't.  I looked at her standing there striking a B movie horror film pose and said, 'I think I need to catch some snakes'.

'Oh please no!' she implored, 'I can put down poison.'

'Marcia,' I crooned, 'it didn't work in the last place but the snakes certainly did,' I added.

I settled down to rewire the oven and decided that as soon as my snake bitten foot had healed, I would be off on a snake hunt.







The lounge in the cottage 
Once I have built a few more of these, you can rent them to rest in after spending the day sport fishing the Atlantic

Marcia praying at the Altar of Ice Cream.
With such a short skirt and shapely legs spread wide, I am sure the machine will give her a good squirt.

Inside the shop, the boring section

The interesting section, all the booze! (look beyond the fruit juice rack)

Front view of the shop.  The temporary fence will be replaced with a smart one soon.

Another view of the shop

The cottage.  Soon I will start irrigating the land and planting a lawn.

Cottages under construction at the restaurant site

A right mess now but pretty soon it will all be cleaned up and organised
Notice extensive use of Cro Magnon orange

Bandit.  It didn't take Alex long to work out how to pour himself and his friends an ice cream.
He thinks that by hiding under the shop his larceny will go unnoticed.

Come Home, All is Forgiven!’

I have always wanted to write about local colour but Marcia has always stopped me from doing so.  She feels embarrassed and even suggested I would take the piss.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I know some weird things happen here and it is only by recording them that we can begin to understand the cultural gulf that exists between nations.  Marcia reads my blog and I think she has now decided that I am not an arrogant white racist, merely a man penning his experiences so I was delighted when this evening she relented.  I am now officially allowed to relate village gossip.

What I am about to tell you is the absolute God’s honest truth.

The next village is about 3 miles from here and sits in a commanding position on the top of one of the two escarpments overlooking the mouth of the river Kwanza.

Three or four months ago, a foreign company with business there decided to donate a big generator to the village.  They employed one of the local youths, taught him how to change the oil and swap all the filters; fuel, oil and air, every 200 hours and provided him enough money each month to not only service the generator but to keep its tank full of diesel. 

For three months, the community enjoyed uninterrupted power.  Those who could afford to do so, went out and bought fridges; the more extravagant, satellite TV systems.

The village Co-ordinator and the elders did not like this.  They were outraged that a foreign company would come in and employ a young lad who, because of his youth and poor family connections had no standing in the community and not only place him in charge of the electricity supply, entrust him with all that money.

So they decided they would have to kill him.

Naturally, they couldn’t march into his humble abode and slash him to death on his cot with machetes.  Of course they could not drill him through the head with a round from an AK 47.  Why?  Simply because this poor boy’s death should be unattributable.  In our enlightened society, murder is against the law.

But we live in a village and anyone who has lived in a village knows that two people can keep a secret only if one of them is dead.  So the boy heard that these Elders were planning to kill him using Voodoo.  They wanted to ‘Feiteçar’ him.  They may all be Christians here and belong either to the Catholic or Universal Church but they really believe in the power of the occult and marvel at the lack of fear for my own soul I demonstrate every time I beat up a Seventh Day Adventist or Jehovah’s Witness who turning up on my doorstep clutching inane publications, does not immediately respond to a fervent, ‘Fuck Off!’

This boy, though, was taking no chances so he fucked off pretty sharpish and responsibility for the village’s power supply fell to the Elders.

A week later, for the first time in months, the generator stopped.  Naturally, it was both night time and a weekend so nothing happened until Monday.

The company sent an engineer down who serviced and refuelled the generator and it started.  Two minutes later it stopped again.  The engineer tinkered around some more, started the generator and two minutes later it stopped again.  This went on for an hour and eventually the engineer gave up.  There was nothing wrong with the generator as far as he could ascertain.  The poor bastard was stumped and did what any honest engineer would do under the circumstances.  He packed his tools up and went home.

Naturally, half the village had turned out to watch the expert engineer at work.  Seeing him fail and knowing everything in their new fridges had spoiled and they weren’t going to be watching the soaps for a third night one of them muttered, ‘Não podiam feiteçar o rapaz’.  You should not have hexed the boy.  This sentiment rippled through the assembled masses and then fed through the dark village.  No blame attached to the engineer.  He was just some poor white guy, what does he know about magic?

The word on the street is that having heard he was about to be hexed, the kid hexed the generator before pushing off.  Now no-one is allowed to touch the generator and an all points bulletin has been issued begging the kid to come back and get the generator running again.

When he does come back, I want to be there for two reasons.  One, to understand how he managed to skilfully disable a generator well enough to confound a professional engineer and two, to see the Elders eat shit when he starts it.

Milestones

Joining the Army 1978

Royal Military Academy Sandhurst

First posting as an Officer

First parachute jump

First solo flight

Skippering a motor yacht in the Caribbean



First visit to México.  The Federales, seeing me dressed like that arrested me moments later suspecting I was up to no good..

Skippering a Nich 55 in the Solent

Qualifying as an Ammunition Technical Officer



First Mercedes

First business

First son propped up on pillows in my first Ferrari in the garden of the first house I ever owned outright.

Second son eating the first ice cream delivered out of my new machine outside the new shop, 2013

From the Horse's Mouth

Finally managed to track down a previous owner of my Jeep in South Africa.  Turns out he runs a Jeep dealership.  This is what he had to say:

"Hi Tom,

The transfer case has been upgraded to a 242 with a 2 wd option for just  a situation you have now.  Also to help with fuel mileage.  It will be fine to drive without the front driveshaft installed. Other than the T-case, there have been no modifications to the drive train."

He has even offered to supply me with all the bits I need at, when I compare them to the internet and especially what they want to charge here, very reasonable prices.  I'm also going to go for heavy duty shocks, new control arms and a heavy duty sway bar.  OK, the guy is a salesman and I am a sucker for a good pitch but if it makes the car safer for Marcia to ride around in, I'll go for it.

Actuallly, while I am at it I might as well go for new filters, plugs, brake pads, assorted suspension bushes etc and really tighten the car up.  It is too good a car to spoil for a ha'porth of tar.

I tried driving the truck which has been our back up transport but it was too painful.  Now that I know I can safely drive the Jeep (which is automatic so I can drive with my left foot), tomorrow I will whip up to the restaurant site and take photos of the new cottages going up.  I have been laid up for nearly two weeks because of an irritating little snake bite and am starting to feel left out.