WARNING! Unpleasant Photos



Seriously, this is nothing to do with my toe; some of these photos ARE distressing and show graphic pictures of war in Angola.

My toe is healing at an almost miraculous rate.  I have finished the lengthy course of antibiotics I was on and last night fell asleep in bed before I had read even a single page of my book.  At four in the morning I ran out of ammunition.  The guy to one side of me was dead, to the other side the young lad whose name I kept forgetting was staring at me with impossibly wide open eyes, a huge red stain spreading across his shirt and his mouth opening and closing like a fish ashore as he drowned in his own blood.  Then they were on top of me, teeth bared, bayonets fixed, insane with blood lust.  I screamed. 

Marcia shook me awake.  Little Alex was sitting up in his bed looking terrified, Marcia also looked very concerned.  I was bathed in sweat.  The sheets of the bed were all in a tangle and soaking wet.

'Have I been talking in my sleep again?' I asked Marcia.

Jean Charles Gutner was everything I expected a war photo journalist to be.  Tall, slim, indecently good looking as only blonde long haired Frenchman could be and very, very fit.  He dressed, looked and acted the part.  While everyone else was either keeping their heads down or at the very least keeping low and moving fast, he had his head up and was taking photographs.  I had been billeted in what was supposed to be only temporary accommodation for me in the same guest house as a number of international journalists and stringers.  That’s where I first met Jean Charles along with the BBC stringer, Chris Simpson and the Reuter’s correspondent, Nicholas Shaxson.  We are all friends to this day.  Chris and Nick had laid bets that I would not survive three months.  If I was up against long odds, I couldn’t imagine what Jean Charles’ were.

It wasn’t my job to take photographs and the few that I did have not survived.  Jean Charles was, however, kind enough to give me a few hard copies of his photos taken while we were together which I fortuitously concealed in a large book (on Swedish Architecture actually) so they wouldn’t get bent and I dug them out this morning to take a look.  Maybe by looking at them again, I could once again come to terms with what I had witnessed and put those memories to bed in the hope they would lay dormant for at least another decade.  Since they cover the subject of my nightmare last night, I reproduce them here along with a little explanation of each.

A moment of peace, Cubal, Angola

Captured enemy weapons, Huambo 1995

Independence Day celebrations.  Angola gained independence in 1975. 
The civil war carried on for another 27 years.
Russians, Cubans, South Africans and mercenaries of every nationality fought on Angolan soil.

The rich in the capital, Luanda, largely unaffected by the war, played on the beautiful beaches of Mussulo Island.

While civilians in the rest of the country buried their dead in the soil that they thought,
after a long struggle for independence, belonged to them.

Children of war.  Caimbando, Angola.
Boys as young as fourteen were pressed into service.
Girls of fourteen were raped.

Civilian casualties being buried in a communal grave after a night artillery bombardment
during the battle for Gabela.

Civilian killing his cow, they had to eat.

Civilians executed by UNITA rebels, Balombo.
The photograph has been cropped so you cannot see the children.
They were forced into a large water tank, petrol was poured onto them and then they were set alight.
Atrocities like this occurred all too frequently.

Most African soldiers had their Fetishes, their Ju Ju dolls to protect them.
I'd have been happier if they had just kept their fucking rifles clean.

The artillery bombardment of Gabela begins.
The rebels had already withdrawn, any men left in the town had melted into the bush. 
All that was left in the town were terrified women and children.
Many medals for bravery were won.

A moment to relax.  Mabubas Dam.

A lost child, Benguela.
Government held cities were flooded with orphaned street kids.
Many sought refuge in the drains at night and begged during the day.

More fresh graves being dug

 

Civilians, desperate to flee, trying to storm an aircraft during the UN evacuation of Huambo.
Huambo was fucking hammered afterwards.

An assault group moving into position through the bush prior to an attack near Ganda.
Logistics were woeful and it was impossible to stop the men stealing anything they could eat from civilians.
All men of fighting age who were not involved in the conflict would do a runner leaving the women and children defenceless.
You can imagine that by then, my opinion of the bravery of the average African man was somewhat tarnished, a view shared by no less than Che Guevara in his Congo diaries.
As a soldier, the average African is a complete waste of fucking rations yet capable of the most unspeakable brutality against his own people.

The UN tried very, very hard but it was impossible to evacuate whole populations.
I forget the name of the tall UN official, the guy with the sunglasses sticking his finger up to say he could only take one more passenger but he was brilliant.
As you can see, he stood head and shoulders above all of us.
I bet he got no recognition whatsoever for his sterling efforts.
Just think how his heart bled having to turn people, especially kids away.

Some mother's son, 
Sadly for him, he was on the wrong side and met a good man behind a bayonet.

Landmines and booby traps were a constant threat for citizens moving around Angola,
as they are in Afghanistan and the countless other conflict zones engineered by
venal politicians and the lobbyists who support them.
Twenty people died in this refugee transport, most of them women and children.
Lucapa. 1995.  One of the few photographs of mine that survived.

 

And here I am whining like a wussie about a piddly little nightmare. 

Look at this young Orphan of War.


Who is going to stroke his poor little head when he wakes up screaming?

You Silly Goose!

I have to service the generator every 200 hours of running time.  In practice, I just do it every two weeks.  Besides an oil filter, two fuel filters and an air filter, I need eight litres of oil. 

It also means that every month, I have to dispose of sixteen litres of waste oil.  Here, most people just dig a hole and tip the waste oil into it.  After a few years of that you do not need to be an environmental scientist to appreciate what the ground looks like or how unproductive it has become.

Fortunately, I still have a use for it.  I soak the bottom few feet of the wood piles that support the new cottages I am building in it to stop them rotting and to keep the termites away.  I drain the oil from the generator into a bucket and then I carefully transfer it into a 200 litre drum.  This time, however, I was distracted so left the oil in the bucket.

I was sitting on the sofa watching the news when the kids ran in shouting excitedly that Goosie had 'painted' himself.  We have no paint here.  How the hell had Goosie managed to paint himself?

Place three children together with an easy going adult who hardly ever raises his voice and never offers corporal punishment and you have the ideal environment for budding pranksters and practical jokers.  Some of their pranks are really quite good.  I smoke SL cigarettes, a local brand.  They are white their entire length.  One day they carefully extracted all the cigarettes from a nearly full packet and replaced them the other way around.  An experienced smoker can remove a cigarette from the packet and light it without taking his eyes of whatever task he is engaged in.  I know I can.  It is highly unusual to have the kids sitting in a row, being perfectly still and well behaved, while watching me type.  Being a heavy smoker, however, they knew their patience would not be overly tested.  I finished the paragraph I was typing and then, as I was proof reading it I reached for my cigarettes.  They all stifled sniggers.

'What?' I asked turning to look at them as I placed the cigarette between my lips.

'Nothing, Daddy!' squealed Alex.  Mauro and Marta were squirming, their faces twisting as they tried hard not to laugh. Well something has obviously tickled them, I thought as I lit up and dragged in a lungful of the poisonous fumes produced by the burning filter.  As I hacked up my sphincter the kids shrieked with delight and rolled about in paroxysm of mirth.

'Very funny!,' I told them, but I meant it; it really was clever and I told them so while lighting up another cigarette.  A DOUBLE whammy!'  The kids howled, they couldn't believe their luck!

With that kind of track record, I wasn't just going to take their word that Goosie had somehow managed to paint himself without first considering what practical joke I might be walking into.  Ever more insistent, they persuaded me out into the garden.  Goosie had indeed painted himself.

Can Geese look sheepish?

For some inexplicable reason, Goosie had stuck his head into the bucket of waste oil.

One unusually well behaved oily goose

Nothing else for it but to get out the detergent and give him a good but gentle sponging followed by a bath in fresh water.

My God!  I am going bald!
Wash Day at Uncle Tom's Cabin

Normally, Goosie is, as our American cousins would say, an 'Ornery Critter'.  He must have known I was trying to help because he stood there between my legs and let me get on with it. For a goose whose favourite pastime is to hide under the house next to the steps and then burst out suddenly surprising the hell out of anyone descending before chasing the unfortunate individual across the garden, wings outstretched administering painful pecks on bare calves, he was very well behaved.

Afterwards I went to decant the oil into the drum.  As I got to the bucket, I realised that under the sun, the still surface of the oil made a surprisingly good mirror.  I resolved to redouble my efforts to find anyone round here with a couple of female geese for sale.  If poor old Goosie tried to mount his own reflection, clearly he is in desperate need of a leg over.

Taking a Hint

My first Father-in-law (a sad reflection on my character to have to admit to more than one) had a dairy farm in Leicestershire.  In addition to his herd of milkers, he had a duck pond and was raising ducks, selling their eggs and culling excess birds.  I remember helping him when I was on leave from the Army.  We’d string ‘em up by the feet and stab ‘em through the eyeballs, straight through the brain.  I was just an amateur when I first started so often had to chase back up the line to finish a ‘flapper’ off.  Bryan used to get very angry with me if I ballsed one up and made it suffer.  He could do it clean and had no tolerance for inept morons like me.

It was a nice little earner for him until a fox recognised an easy source of food.

I had just returned from Central America with my trusty old Remington 700 BDL in 30 odd Six calibre.  That wouldn't just kill a fox; with soft point core locked ammunition, it would spread it across the countryside. 

This persistent fox was going to screw his business up so I rashly volunteered to kill it.

I selected an ideal firing point on the landing of the wooden stair case leading to the second floor of one of his barns overlooking his yard, separated from the duck pond by a four foot high dry stone boundary wall.

It was a cold November night and the fog settled in.  Pretty soon I could not see the pond well enough to guarantee a clear shot.  Since it was only a hundred yards and night, I had taken the scope off and was going to shoot using the iron sights but, don't forget, I had done all my hunting in the tropics so I was unused to freezing fog.  I needed another firing position.

Rather than wander around with a loaded hunting rifle, I left the rifle where it was on the landing, crossed the yard and hopped over the wall close to the pond to find a better position.  As I sat there thinking that the position behind the wall I had found, in the shadow cast by the yard lights was ideal, the fox trotted past me, bold as brass, crossed the little bridge to duck island and entered the coop.

My Father in Law, a sensible God fearing farmer had always been sceptical of his wild son-in-law so had laughed when I suggested I could shoot his fox for him by staying up all night.  In his critical eyes, I was a pastiche of a Great White Hunter.  Well fuck him, I thought.  Welshmen are nothing more than Irishmen who couldn’t swim.  I could not only swim, I could shoot straight.  I’ll bring him his damn fox, I thought.  But it was jolly cold.

Now I found myself with the fox in my field of vision but not within the sights of my rifle which lay a hundred yards beyond my grasp.  In the Army we were always taught that our rifles were our wives and we must keep them close, sleep with them.  I had committed a cardinal sin by laying the rifle down and abandoning it.  If my Father-in-Law lost a duck this night, I was doomed to incessant ridicule.

So I went after the fox.  They are bloody fast.  As I came over the bridge, this one was out of the coop in an instant and dived into the back end of the frozen pond.  It was the ice that did for her.  She could neither swim nor scrabble over the ice which just collapsed under her weight.  I dived on top of her with the most enormous splash and she bit the shit out of me.  I held her under the ice cold water until she stopped struggling and the jaws clamped onto my hand relaxed.

Pretty bloodied, I struggled up the muddy bank and deposited her body onto the frost crispy grass.  Amazingly, she was still alive but exhausted.  I was bloody exhausted as well and freezing my nuts off.  But I hadn’t given up.  This animal lying next to me had though.  It had accepted it was going to die by my hands so just lay there waiting for the inevitable.  I had it by the throat and my leg over its body so it wasn’t going anywhere as we each caught our breath.

What a beautiful creature.  She was a hunter like me.  No.  She was a real hunter.  If I came home empty handed, I could go to a supermarket and stock up feed for the family.  If she failed to kill, she and her offspring would die.  The stakes in our game were vastly different.  She started to struggle and bit me again so I strangled her a bit more and sank my teeth hard into her ear.  What she didn’t realize was that it was very important for me that I present her to my Father-in-Law.  Having thus bonded but not trusting each other in the least, with a firm grip around her snout and body, I carried her into the farmhouse while she did her best to scrabble the shit out of my ribs.

I think they had all been expecting my abject failure or, in the unlikely event I had been successful, the corpse of a fox.  What they weren’t expecting was me walking in, soaking wet and freezing, with a live one under my arm.  I could see that they were all ready for bed and evidently quite prepared to leave me outside in sub-zero temperatures.  My Father-in-Law very decently offered me a warming scotch but with me having only two arms, both of which were fully occupied taming the untameable, I could only stare at the glass.  My Mother-in-Law was worried about fleas.  My young wife, to her credit, seemed more concerned about the blood I was oozing.

Naturally, the question arose, what were we to do with it?  I guess my Father-in-Law would have been happier had I just shot it (and I wasn’t about to explain to him why I hadn’t managed to do that).  Faced with an infestation of fleas now that I had introduced a wild animal into her lounge, I think my Mother-in-Law would have been more comfortable with supporting her daughter during the funeral of a husband who had been mauled to death by a wild animal in a lonely field, anything but beasties in the house.

‘I can hold her down and you can shoot her if you want,’ I suggested to Bryan, ‘after all, she seems pretty calm with me’.  Having been expelled from the house the two of us were now sitting in one of the stalls of his barn, the fox cowering in the corner, my hand still on its neck.

‘Alright, you hold her and I will shoot her’, I suggested when he said nothing, ‘I just need to go and get the rifle’

We sat there a while longer in silence.  Bryan was never really talkative.  Not with me anyway.

I hauled out my hip flask from the inside of my Barbour jacket with my left hand and we each took a few slugs of whisky.  Despite my heavy winter clothing the sleeves of my jacket had been torn to shreds and I was bleeding from my face and hands.

‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ I said, only to break the silence while I lit up a cigarette.

This Vixen had destroyed Bryan’s duck business.  He had every right to be angry.  Foxes, like rats, are vermin and should be shot on sight.

Bryan got up and came back with a shovel.  In the right hands, a shovel is a pretty effective way of dispatching a wild animal but it is bloody horrible to watch, especially if you are the one holding the unfortunate beastie down.

Bryan looked at me.  He was a tough Welshman who made his living off the land.  As far as he was concerned, I was just another soft city kid. Not only that, I was an Englishman who had shagged his wife and consumed his daughter’s cherry.  He hated me.  I could tell by the way he gripped the shovel.

‘How about we just let her go?’ I said, ‘She’ll never come back’.   

He stood over me for a while, long enough for ash to drop off the end of my cigarette.

‘See that she doesn’t,’ he said before leaving me alone with the fox in his barn.

And do you know what?  Having had the fright of our lives, neither of us ever set foot or paw on the farm again.

Time for a whole box of Black Magic

Mmm.  Milk and dark chocolate with a soft centre.

‘He’s here’, said Marcia walking into the lounge.

Marcia is from Uige, the Bakongo tribe.  She is to all outward appearances educated and cosmopolitan but she is still African.  She will eat international dishes using cutlery but use the fingers of her right hand if it is a traditional dish and there are no foreigners present.

I was bitten by a snake that even I admit I did not see and two months later I am, if anything, worse.  I am not going to muck about with typically British understatement anymore, I am in agony.  I have not slept in weeks.  Marcia is doing all the work because I can’t walk.  It started with a nip on the toe, now my whole foot is involved.  All the Docs say is to keep swallowing the antibiotics and, most recently, iron tablets as well.  I am sick and dizzy with the pain and all the tablets I am ingesting.  I am sadly all too familiar with the bowl of my toilet as I vomit into it every night as quietly as I can so I do not disturb hard working Marcia’s sleep or that of little Alex.  Saturday afternoon I finally keeled over out of sheer exhaustion and Marcia thought I had suffered another heart attack so squirted a whole bottle of Nitrolingual between my teeth.  I am still recovering from the bloody headache.

‘Who’s here?’ I asked, not interested in the slightest.

‘The N’Ganga’

I averted my gaze from my book and surveyed the N’Ganga.  He must have been right at the back of the queue when God was handing out skin and fat.   Talk about ‘chiseled’, or ‘muscle definition’.  There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him.  All his veins stood out, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.  He was at least a foot taller than I was and had to bend down to come in through the door.  The man was bloody scary.  I had no idea what an N’Ganga was.

‘He has come to look at your foot,’ explained Marcia.

‘Oh, he’s a Doctor?’

‘Sort of,’ said Marcia.

He examined my foot carefully.  ‘It’s Gimbassa,’ he announced.

‘I knew it was Gimbassa,’ Marcia said.

‘What’s Gimbassa?’ I asked.

‘Mina Tradiçional,’ they both chorused.

‘A Traditional Landmine?’ I translated in my head.  I must have come across as a little bit confused so Marcia reminded me of her brother who had, apparently stepped on one last year and in the end had his leg amputated just below the hip.  I remembered the amputation but I hadn’t realized he had stepped on a mine.  The N’Ganga told me, with a gravitas that would make a high court judge summing up before awarding a penalty of death look like a standup comedian, that this was very serious and definitely life threatening.  He told me to take my trousers off.  One look from Marcia silenced the outraged objection about to fly from my lips.  He examined my leg.  ‘It has nearly reached his knee,’ he told Marcia, ‘if it goes above the knee, he will die.  There is no time to lose, I must treat him now.  Has he been circumcised?’ The two of them were now conversing across me; I felt like a laboratory animal under inspection.  What the hell does a foreskin have to do with a snake bite?  I tell you, I was bloody relieved that Marcia could confirm my todger had already been snipped.  The way this conversation was going, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had whipped out a razor blade and told me to drop my keks and behave like a man.

It is terribly easy to insult an African so rather than leap to my feet shouting, ‘Who the Fuck is this guy?’ I merely asked what a traditional landmine was. Marcia translated for the N’Ganga.  They both laughed the sort of laugh people use when they realize they are in the presence of the congenitally stupid.

‘There is someone who wants to kill you,’ Marcia started to explain.  I suppose some people would be quite shocked if their wife casually pointed out to them they were on a hit list but I found it amusing.  Someone?  I thought.  I am sure there are many, I could write a list; ex wives and girlfriends, outraged fathers, people who owe me money, most recently the guy I smacked with the ashtray… ‘so this person has gone to a Quimbandeiro and he has arranged for you to step on a Mina Tradiçional.’ Marcia concluded.

‘Quimbandeiro? A witch doctor?’

So I hadn’t been bitten by a snake after all, I had been Hexed!  Cool.  Imagine having someone who cared enough about you to have you hexed.  I was quite flattered.  Whoever it was hadn’t the guts to square up and try planting one on me.

Sensing I wasn’t taking this at all seriously, Marcia tried again.

‘Andy!’ she always calls me Andy for some reason.  (My last boss was called Andy so maybe I should have him hexed just in case Marcia had liked more than just his name), ‘you are going to die!’

Ooh I was so tempted to be flippant and point out that her prediction was one she could bet on, but I could see she was genuinely upset so bit my tongue.  Being blessed with a wife who loves you so much she is willing to try anything to keep you alive is not something to ridicule so I would play along.  But, no matter how much I cared for Marcia’s feelings, I wasn’t letting this guy anywhere near my dick.

He unpacked a small, genuine Gucci leather Man Bag made in China out of plastic and pulled on a white robe before laying out a cloth and a bottle of Eau de Toilette.

‘Can I get my camera and take pictures of this?’ I asked Marcia.

‘Tómas!’ Marcia shot back, horrified.  She only ever calls me Tómas if I am in the shit.  Pity really.  I would have thought an image of a tall black African dressed like the Pope kneeling at the feet of a fat white bloke clad only in his underpants could have excited a few comments on my blog.

‘I need a plate you no longer require’, the N’Ganga announced.  Marcia hurried off to fetch one.  Have you ever noticed that if you ask your wife for a glass of water she will bring you one in whatever cheap bit of molten and molded silica that’s quickest to hand but if a complete stranger pulls up and asks for the same, she’ll serve him with your best crystal and probably offer him first dibs off the plate of scones you had been patiently waiting to cool down?  I haven’t got much decent bone china left so was quite relieved when Marcia returned with a bit of market bought porcelain.  Obviously she had already decided the value of my life had a limit.

The N’Ganga, clad in his robes, performed a more detailed inspection of my afflicted appendage and announced that there were five points of infection.  Fair do’s I thought.  I still couldn’t see any sign of a razor blade so I was pretty relaxed.  He sprayed his hands with Eau de Toilette again and then started to massage my foot, which wasn’t so relaxing and then unexpectedly clamped his lips on the base of my toe and sucked hard which was pretty alarming.  Before I could jerk my foot away, he leant over the plate and spat out a damn great black thorn.  I was surprised, not least because at over three inches long, I reckon I would have noticed its presence in my toe long before he decided to perform religious fellatio on it.  Four more times he performed the same procedure on my foot, each time resulting in a new object spat onto the plate; a palm seed, a pebble tied with string, a dried berry and, finally, a bit of twisted dried root; a regular Houdini regurgitating the keys to a cure. I was really disappointed when I glanced over towards Marcia.  Instead of seeing her creasing up with mirth, thereby allowing me to explode with laughter and, with my good foot, kick this charlatan out of my house, her face was as inscrutable as a championship Chinese Mahjong player’s.

The N’Ganga went into a fairly convincing catatonic state but I did notice he rolled one eyeball down to see what I was doing.  I was staring at him slack jawed.  No doubt reassured I was paralyzed with awe, he continued doing nothing.

‘It is a woman,’ he announced suddenly.

‘Who is a woman?’ I asked.

‘Ssshh!’ hissed Marcia.

I shushed.  For God’s sake.  I reached over to the coffee table, grabbed my fags and lit up.  ‘You can’t smoke!’ protested Marcia.  I bloody well can, I thought and, as if reading my mind the N’Ganga said it was perfectly in order for me to smoke.  So I poured myself a whisky as well.

‘It is a girl your husband knows very well’, he intoned.

Ah well, that’s Marcia then.  I always knew she would tire of me and kill me in the end.  Jeez, I’m amazed I lasted this long.

‘Does she live in the village?’ asked Marcia.  What a daft question, I thought, of course you do!  Then I went cold.  This was getting dangerous.  If he said this was a jilted lover of mine living in the village, I was in deep shit with a life expectancy less than a First World War pilot.  Marcia has forgiven me for many things but I really did not want to test her tolerance to accusations of me tucking into the local natives.  I was as regularly unfaithful to two previous wives as they were to me, the only difference being they got theirs for free.  Marcia is my last chance and I really did not want to literally and physically fuck it up so in all the years I have been with her, I have never stepped over the traces.  If she can believe that this guy just sucked a thorn out of my foot, what chance did I stand trying to convince her that the guy was a lying con man if he accused me of infidelity?  Grabbing a kitchen knife and stabbing him through the heart before he could utter another word would be construed as a sign of guilt hard to argue against in an Angolan court of law so I held my breath wondering what dramatic turn my life was about to take.

‘She lives’ he pronounced before pausing to great effect (please, I thought, just get on with it, I am sat here only in my flaming underpants with a lot less material available to soak up a bit of unexpected incontinence), ‘in the CITY!’ he finished.  Thank goodness for that!  Even Marcia knows I have only visited the city twice in the past three years.

‘I have only visited the city twice in the past three years!’ I told Marcia, ‘and on each occasion Roddie drove me!’

‘Three times,’ she said, ‘are you forgetting when you drove to town yourself to collect Dominic?’

Oh hell.  I’d forgotten about the time I was so angry when my diver welshed on the agreement to bring Dominic down here for his hols so I jumped in the car and went to fetch him myself.  Normally it would only take about four hours but we just had to keep stopping off to buy delicious snippets at the various markets and a football and a really cool pair of swimming shorts for little Alex on  the way back.  We had a great time.  It took six hours.  Marcia was frantic by the time we got back.

‘Ok’ I said, ‘so I was in Town six months ago.  This happened six weeks ago.’  Wonderful how women can ignore pure logic.  So somehow, during this flash trip to the city, I had stepped on a traditional mine laid by an irate female city dweller hell bent on killing me blessed with the skill to wire in a six month time delay to detonation.  To be brutally honest, I really wasn’t buying it but wanted to avoid an argument at all costs.  Besides which, most of the women I slept with in the past carried stilettos (thin bladed knives, not high heeled shoes) in their handbags and resolved issues with non-paying clients in seconds, not months.  This would have to be someone who had held a grudge, nurturing murderous intent for over seven years, the time I have been with Marcia and then suddenly decided, that’s it, I’m gonna kill him!

‘This is a woman who knew your husband well and is jealous.  She does not want you to have him, she wants to drive you apart’ he told Marcia.  Death would do that I suppose.  Young wives do like to have their husbands stiff, but in a bed, not a coffin.  It was impossible to read Marcia’s expression so the N’Ganga continued. ‘Perhaps, on his last trip to the city, she saw him in his expensive 4x4 and became jealous.’  Expensive 4x4?  It’s a ten year old Jeep with 235,000 kilometers on the clock that cost me $2,000 and a dead truck!  And who, in their right mind, could possibly be jealous of any woman with the courage and fortitude to take me on?  This was, as my old English teacher once told me having read an essay of mine, a load of bollocks but if Marcia became convinced I’d been playing for another team, the razor blade would come out and I’d lose a lot more than a bit of useless skin.

‘I know who it is,’ Marcia announced.  On such scanty evidence, even Poirot would have been impressed at the deductive powers I was witnessing.  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Marcia continued, ‘It is your ex-wife!  She wasn’t going to let you have Dominic so you drove all the way into town and fetched him!  Of course she hates you!’ 

Well I am sure there is no love lost between my ex-wife and me but with all the alimony I owe her, I doubt she wants me dead.  At least not until I pay up.  Had the N’Ganga invented a secret concubine, however, Marcia would want me dead so I guess I was pleased with the result.  Just to set the record straight, Dominic’s mother was perfectly happy for me to have Dominic.  I hurtled off solo into town angry as hell not with her, but my driver who had once again let me down deciding that he could only collect Dominic the following day.  Any parent separated from their child would agree that even just one extra day with them was worth burning rubber.  Did you know, a V8 Jeep Cherokee will do an indicated 120 mph and fly over potholes?  I am still impressed with my old Jeep.  So was Alex, strapped in the back shouting ‘faster Daddy!’  As I said, on the way back we meandered, just having to stop at every roadside market.  Chicken gizzards roasted over charcoal, delicious in the company of two boys separated by ten years, yet exuding the love and respect that exists only between siblings.  Sad isn’t it that adults, who should know better, fuck everything up to the detriment of their own offspring?

Apparently, under local lore, anyone stepping on a traditional mine who, before they died a horrible death, had the prescience to engage an N’Ganga could not only be cured, but arrange to return the compliment.  I was now offered the opportunity to occasion the demise of my ex-wife using traditional means.  Dominic is widely regarded as a polite, well behaved and intelligent young man.  I had no hand in that.  The good man he is turning into is all down to his mother and I am very pleased with the result.  The very last thing I wanted to do was curse her.  She and I may have been incompatible but there can be no question, she was a better mother than I was a father so the last thing I wanted to do was anything that would disturb this happy equilibrium. I may not believe in this Hexing shit but I wasn’t about to let people start opening fire just in case traditional stray bullets existed.  Dominic loves his mother and in my book, that makes him a real man.

Marcia always suspected that I still held a candle for my ex-wife ignoring the fact it was me, finally exasperated, who walked out on her.  I didn’t want her dead though, so once again I found myself treading carefully through a mine field.  If I did not leap immediately at the chance to suffer horrible death on the mother of my first born son, could this confirm all Marcia’s suspicions? 

Maria reads the bible every night (I also read every night before going to sleep but I tend to choose a good book).  Just like everyone else around here, she manages to reconcile a belief in traditional magic with Christian religious dogma.

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘but Jesus says I should just turn the other cheek.  Thou shalt not kill’

Now that was rich coming from me but they both bought it.

Having agreed I was happy with just a cure and not revenge as well, he sprayed Eau de Toilette directly into suppurating wounds.

‘Ouch!’ I said as my glasses steamed up as a result of the sweat I broke into.

Then he unwrapped a squib of newspaper, about the size of a walnut, exposing a black crystalline powder.  It looked very worryingly like the smokeless powder contained within modern firearms cartridges.  I put my cigarette out and surreptitiously pocketed my lighter.  He rocked back and forth moaning as he waved his hands over the powder before sprinkling some over the sores and rubbing it in.

FUCK ME SIDEWAYS!

It was jolly painful.  My eyes watered ever so slightly.  I may even have squirmed a bit.

‘Força!’ encouraged the N’Ganga, telling me to be brave.  Bugger the seventh Commandment; I wanted to strike him dead.  As full blown shock set in, the pain subsided a bit.  Fortunately the loss of circulating body fluids that occasion shock had exited through my pores and not my willie.  The N’Ganga then announced he had to inspect the garden.  I hobbled after the two of them as far as the verandah so I could see what was happening.

The N’Ganga hauled out his Eau de Toilette again and started giving each fence post a bit of a squirt.  Having covered fifty yards he finally realized what I had figured out immediately I saw his strange ritual start; 250 mls was never going to be enough.  To do my place he would have needed a crop sprayer.  Still, it was fun to watch the solemnity with which Marcia, at a respectful distance, accompanied his every move.  Finally the N’Ganga stopped and inspected an otherwise unremarkable patch of sand.  He returned to the house, collected the plate on which rested the surprising contents of my foot and his packet of powder and asked Marcia for an empty rice sack.  He spread out the sack, laid the plate upon it and sprinkled over the last of his powder before igniting it.  There was a bit of a woosh and I was pleased to sense in the breeze the scent of sizzled hair as a brief column of white smoke rose to the heavens around his ears.  Then, using his walking staff, he smashed the plate with an enthusiasm suggesting he was pretty annoyed about the loss of his eyebrows.

We all settled back in the lounge.  I have no difficulty with Portuguese but occasionally like to play the illiterate so Marcia translated giving me confirmation of what I had just heard the N’Ganga tell me.  The evil spirits he had sucked out of my foot had been cremated allowing the wind to scatter them.  I was now cured.  Magic, I thought, why does it still hurt?

I suppose I could be pissed off that I survived being a bomb disposal officer in the British Army.  I survived clearing landmines in Moçambique and Angola.  I survived running diamond shipments through bandit country.  I have been blown up, shot at, stabbed, suffered all sorts of tropical diseases, had my head kicked in more times than I care to remember, have been evacuated by air to South African hospitals twice to be patched up, have had two heart attacks and now, in retirement, I was finally disabled by stepping on a traditional landmine (they’re not covered in the three volumes of Ammunition and Explosive’s Regulations so I was not trained to deal with them let alone recognize them). 

No, what really pisses me off is that after two months of ingesting antibiotics and letting Nature take its course, my foot was about due to start healing anyway.  But, when it does, it won’t be as a result of modern medicine, it will be because of the intervention of a Witch Doctor.

‘So What?’ I hear you all say, ‘So long as you can walk again!’

Yes.  I agree.  But I will never hear the end of it.

Once he'd gone, I got the camera out
The plate may be dead but the sack'll still do for bagging the rubbish

 

A young priest took over the parish of an old, retired priest.  Every Sunday, as the young priest rode past on his bicycle on his way to Church they would exchange pleasantries.

One Sunday the old priest noticed the younger one pitching up, late, on foot.

‘What happened to your ‘bike?’ asked the old priest.

‘Somebody stole it,’ said the young priest.

‘Ah,’ said the old priest. ‘What you need to do now is give a sermon on the Ten Commandments giving special emphasis on Thou Shalt Not Steal’

The next Sunday the young priest rode up on his bicycle.

‘Told you it would work, didn’t I?’ says the old priest.

‘Well, not exactly, Father.  I got to Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery and I remembered where I had left the ‘bike’

 

Prescience

I had just finished returning all the washed dishes to the cupboards and then gave thought to what I would cook for dinner.  I always think better in a clean kitchen.

I had serviced the generator in the morning, changing its oil and filters and it thanked my by giving up smoking, its exhaust was pure and clean when I restarted it.  My foot is still giving me hell but I have decided to ignore it.  If it falls off I shall deliberately not notice out of spite.

The night before last I did beef.  Last night I did a Chilli con Carne without the chilli (Dominic can't stand chilli but doesn't play with Barbie dolls so I am not overly concerned.  He'll be a man one day).

I had a root around the freezer. 

There were some joints.  They'd take far too long to defrost. 

Loads of mincemeat.  We had that last night.  I suppose I could have done a Lasagne but when I checked, I didn't have enough cheese. Besides, the weevils had got into my half kilo bag of Italian herbs so I would have to microwave the bag and sift out the corpses,  I hadn't time for that.

Chicken it was then.

I have absolutely no idea why, but I defrosted seven chicken legs.  Alex, Marcia and I only need one each.  I then peeled loads of sweet potatoes.  I hate peeling sweet potatoes.  The juice turns to sticky glue and the skin gums up the peeler so why did I sit there on the stoep peeling so many sweet potatoes?

I decided I would roast the chicken with a honey pepper glaze, par boil the sweet potatoes before crisping them off in the oven after rolling them in olive oil and dusting them with a sprinkle of sea salt, use the juices of the roasted chicken to make a smooth cream sauce and serve it all with steamed broccoli.  Sounds delicious but completely over the top for three people.

The only production I was interested in from my Filipino carpenter were the houses he was building for me.  This evening I realised that during his many years in Angola he has been productive in other ways.  For whatever reason, still unclear to me, he turned up with his four delightful children.  They will be billeted in my house.  Alex, of course, is thrilled.  So many new pals to play with.

Tired, obviously bewildered (like I say, I have no idea what's happened but there's always a spare bunk in my house if you need one), the kids were starving and in desperate need of a shower.  Nicely scrubbed up they reappeared and by the merest chance, I had enough food for all.  Well, not quite.  If you count me, that makes eight.  I only roasted seven chicken legs basting them carefully with that rich, delicious mouth-watering sauce I had been looking forward to all day.

Fuck it. I need to lose weight anyway.

Just something I spent all day knocking up and didn't get to eat.
The kids are all lined up on the sofa watching cartoons.
I am sitting here starving, writing this shit.

Advent Calender

An old mate of mine who I met when we were both working as consultants with Angolan Customs has just sent me this:

Now why did I immediately think of Cro Magnon in France and the Fifth Columnist in Thailand?

Diplomacy

I guess he did not include beetroot in his diet

I once asked a Scottish Minister whereabouts in England he came from.  Such a faux pas could have been excusable, at a stretch, had the Minister not been wearing a kilt, a Sporran and no doubt a Skean Dhu tucked into his sock he was itching to use.  Even Marcia had twigged the guy was definitely not English.

Marcia and I had been invited to the Queen’s birthday celebrations at the British Embassy and the Ambassador was kind enough to introduce us to the Minister.   A UK politician.  You can imagine how I danced on tippy toes sucking in and out of a paper bag to cure my palpitations.  I don't suppose I will ever again get the chance to apologise to the Ambassador for not taking the introduction seriously.

We all, in our time, ask stupid questions and are in turn sometimes asked stupid questions and have different ways of dealing with them.  In this case, the Minister diplomatically took it as a joke and merely said, ‘Aye, right!’ and laughed it off but the Ambassador knew I’d spent too much time at the cocktail bar again.

Here in Angola, the question I am most often asked to answer is how, in my opinion, such a small island as Britain could end up dominating half the known world.  Well, it is quite simple, really.  A chap called Robert Moray pulled together an unlikely alliance of former Parliamentarians and Royalists and after the Restoration secured royal patronage for a society dedicated to the philosophical study of the sciences whose initial, but unstated aim was to improve the King’s Navy, especially the means to determine Longitude and improve ship design so that Britain could kick the Dutch in their herrings and dominate world trade…

Much later…

…and with access to all these natural resources, both domestic and international, Britain was able to kick start the industrial revolution and with an efficient Navy was able to extend its influence across the globe and ensure that any colonies with nascent notions of independence were subdued lest there be another tea party…

Much, much later…

The guy is standing there friendly as anything just trying to break the ice, I’m not going to bore him to death with a considered answer.

‘Comfortable furniture,’ I usually say and then, sensing the bewilderment of my interrogator add, ‘especially chairs.  A chap cannot be expected to formulate the means to exploit original thought unless he is comfortable enough to consider them. 

An African assimilating post prandial positive thoughts in my battered old English chair.
He's only three P's short of getting it right.

There can be no doubt.  I am getting bloody cynical, worse than usual. 
Let's just cut the bloody toe off and have done with it.
Leave me with enough leg to have a leg over.
I just want a decent night's sleep.
I'll confess to anything. 
I shot Kennedy and I can still remember where I buried Jimmy Hoffa.
I just want to sleep.

Just some stuff. I guess I am tired and pissed off.

When I was a kid, I loved to read. If I walked into someone’s house and they had a loaded bookshelf I was instantly impressed with them.  This is why I liked Uncle Trevor.  He wasn’t my real Uncle, he was a long term mate of my Father’s from Army days but the two of them, on discharge from the Army settled on the same road, Myatt Avenue in Chaseterrace, a village in which, for the first time, I went to school in England.  It was horrible.  If I wasn’t being beaten up for being me (which, as the years have gone by I realize is hardly a crime), I was being beaten up for protecting my younger brothers. 

Uncle Trevor could quote most of the famous English poets.  He could recite the Ancient Mariner from start to finish in a manner so expressive it would grace any Shakespearian stage in Stratford and enthralled us boys.  It was Uncle Trevor who introduced me to Kipling and Owen.  When my father died so early and, as his oldest son, instead of a boring eulogy I recited Tommy Atkins, Uncle Trevor burst into tears, a fact that did not escape me even though he had positioned himself quietly at the very back of the church in his ill-fitting suit knowing my mother did not approve of him, and caused my own voice to break. 

Uncle Trevor was an alcoholic.  But all us boys loved him.  If we were in for a thrashing from our Mum, we knew we only had to run round the corner to Uncle Trevor’s.  He was a big fat bastard and no.one could get past him down the corridor to where we were hiding trying to avoid a hiding.

Alcoholics don’t have many friends so it was hard for Uncle Trevor to see his last real mate buried so he cried.  I wanted to cry too.  It may have been his mate but this was my Dad we were burying but, nevertheless, I was suddenly more concerned about Uncle Trevor.  I knew that he was fucked.  There was no longer anyone for him to lean on anymore, no more bungs to get him out of the shit.  All that was left was Mother and she wasn’t particularly keen on either of us.  We both knew we were screwed.  So the pair of us stood, side by side beside my father’s graveside and the only thing I could think of to say as they lowered my dead Dad down was, ‘Do you know why they line the graves with crimson  cloth?’ ‘No,’ sniffed Uncle Trevor.  ‘It’s so you can’t see the worms queuing up to get in’ I said.  I know it is wrong but two old soldiers were giggling as we lowered one of our own into cold Leicestershire soil.

My mother had the last laugh.  I was in Africa so she just forgot to tell me that Uncle Trevor died after a short illness a few years later.  I recall her outrage when I cleared my dead Father’s shelves of his Kipling collection and gave them to Uncle Trevor.  She was never going to read them.  Now there was no chance I would hold one of my father’s treasured books in my hand.  Both he and Uncle Trevor were dead.

As a kid, I learnt how to be selectively deaf.  Well that’s what they call it now.  Looking back, I see it as retreating into a world of Enid Blyton or later on, all the other wonderful books I was exposed to on people’s bookshelves.  I can recommend High Citadel by Neville Shute, I read it aged ten.  It’s brilliant.  Ever since I have been itching to try chewing coca leaf paste so I could climb the Andes without oxygen.  You could shout my name, you could scream in my ear.  If I was buried in a book, the rest of the world did not exist.  My real world was horrible.  The worlds of Captain Marryat and Biggles were so much more attractive.  Why should I wake up to yet another thrashing?

Alex is five and he can’t even write his own name on a piece of paper yet he is an absolute whizz on an iPad.  How is this possible?  He can type his own name and access You Tube.  I had to ask him to show me how to pull up a type screen which he did in an instant, but he can’t put pen to paper.

So we spent the afternoon trying to copy out alphabets and writing names.  I could see he was constantly distracted by Ben 10 and other cartoons on the TV so I switched it over, for the first time ever, to a music channel.  This seemed to work.  I would print out alphabets in big block type and together we would work our way through them.  Basically all he had to do was copy the letters.  Then I printed out our names, Alex, Marcia and Tom.  He did well with those too.  Then we danced a bit to the music.  A few tough rappy ones came on so I let him punch me in time with the beat.  He still hit like a girl, slapping rather than punching so we worked on that for a bit and pretty soon he had bust my lip.  Blood never tasted so sweet.  In only a few hours I had taught the kid to write not only his own name, but those of his parents as well.  And his right jab was spot on.

Then this appeared on the music channel.

 Substitute the abusive father for a very aggressive mother and you can see why I tried to lose myself in books.  So many people have asked me why I ended up in Angola.  Well, basically it was to be as far away from my mother as I could get before I ran out of money.

I am by no means the best father in the world but I will make damn sure my kid does not go selectively deaf like I did at his age. 

The thing that genuinely upsets me about this video (don’t get me wrong, I love and related to the music and lyrics), is that in the end, the kid gets shafted, literally.  They dump him in a mine and steal his dog.  Well that’s the way I see it.

I may be cynical, but as far as I am concerned, it can be bloody tough being a kid if all you have to rely on is adults.

It's Progress Jim. But not as we know it.

Six weeks ago, after two years of stuttering progress, the new shop and cottage were finished and we moved in.  Five days after that I was bitten by a snake.

Rather than continue with the original contractor, we poached his Filipino carpenter and two labourers and took possession of all the woodworking tools on site and sent the crew down to the restaurant site to start building the cottages. 

Whereas before their morale had been rock bottom (it was not unusual for them to wait months for their salaries), they are now a really cheerful bunch.  Four weeks into the new job, now working for us, it was pay day and they were paid.  The materials they need arrive on time and they get fed.

Normally I would be all over them, all but living on the site but because of this festering foot I can only visit occasionally.  Running around on site giving them detailed directions is out of the question so they have largely been left alone to get on with the job.

 

Four cottage bases and the walls going up.  Eventually there will be twelve.

This will be an en-suite air conditioned  double bedroom with sliding glass door leading onto a veranda

Charlie likes the windows.  Who says windows should be square?

I was hoping my young quantity surveyor would give it the thumbs up
but he was still in Ninja mode

All the wood is raw from the sawmill and must be planed and thicknessed on site.
This takes time, of course.

A view to the restaurant.  A bit of gardening in order as soon as I can walk again!

This is what it is supposed to look like when it is finished.