Coturnix coturnix africana and other fowl issues

 

 

 

Klein came by the other day and dropped a load of books off.  They’re all about raising chickens, ducks and geese.  I was fascinated.  Or perhaps I was just bored with Montgomery’s tedious six hundred page tome, ‘A History of Warfare’ (and his part in it), a Director of Studies prize I received at Sandhurst in 1985 and with which I was so delighted, it is the only book in my household I have not managed to read to its conclusion.

There are lots of books out there on raising poultry and all the information anyone could wish for is available on the internet.  What makes these books special is that they were published in an age when small holders had little choice but to be largely self-sufficient and able to improvise.  One, the Muskator Geflügelbuch was written in 1956 and another, Hadlington´s Australian Poultry Book ten years earlier in 1946 (Australia: Large island south of the civilized world, famous for football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.  Population: Largely imported from Asia).  Both are full of handy tips and hints, Hadlington’s more for the commercial poultry farmer while Muskator seems aimed at those raising chickens for food while rebuilding a country. 

Nice bloke.  Mad on chickens.

While implicit in Hadlington’s advice is an assumption that everything required can be obtained from an emporium dedicated to the poultry farmer, Muskator illustrates artisan drinkers made from bottles, flower pots or tin cans and feeders made from what look like spent artillery shell cases and steel helmets.  Thankfully, the German who wrote Muskator’s guide had heard of S.I. units of weights and measures.  I was keen to learn what and how much of it I should feed to a laying hen each day.  Hadlington advises a morning mash made of pollard, bran, Lucerne meal, wheat, maize (whole and cracked), meat meal, linseed meal, coconut meal or cake, and salt.  The liquid may be offal soup, milk or just water, preferably hot.  He also advises an unlimited supply of shell grit stating that no other substance is of use.  Oyster shells are the best. Yes, yes, yes, I thought, but what are the quantities?  ‘A kerosene or petrol tin is the measure most frequently used,’ advises Hadlington leaving this keen reader still none the wiser, ‘as well as the most common conveyor of poultry food on the farm.’  Depending on the product, a kerosene can holds between 12 and 18lbs I discovered after many more pages of this.  It’s all delightfully vague, isn’t it!

Living here in Africa, I don’t need books which list all the latest techniques and are full of glossy pictures illustrating all the Gucci must have kit every smart poultry farmer can’t live without; I need the sort written by those living in the dark ages before Amazon was invented. The chapter entitled ‘Selbstbau, zweckmäβiger Hühnerställe’, offers detailed plans for practical self-build hen coops for 5 to 8 chickens, 10 to 14 chickens, 20 and 50 chickens.  They appear so simple to construct I think I shall buttonhole the Filipino carpenter in the morning and tell him to knock some up.  This poultry farming lark is beginning to look easy.

Marcia collecting a day's egg production while wearing zweckmäβiger clothes.

Klein also had the prices for birds.  I asked him what breed of chickens they were and he said, ‘Brown ones’.  I know enough about chicken breeds to be confident that brown ones lay more eggs so US$15 per bird seems pretty reasonable as at 80 cents an egg, they would only have to lay twenty each to cover their purchase price but buying 100 of them will dent my piggy bank a bit so I will go for 30 instead and see how I get on.  45 bucks a beak for ducks made my eyes water a bit but they are made in Peking apparently so should crisp up nicely.  I had planned on 40 of those but half that has a nicer ring to it, I think.  Geese are still unobtainable so poor old Goosie is going to have to wait a while longer before he gets his first leg over.  I was very disappointed that in a country where they run round wild (just not round here), Guinea Fowl were also off the menu.  Klein asked me if Coturnix coturnix africana would do instead.  Coturnix?  Sounded like an under garment Asterix the Gaul would wear.  ‘Codorniz,’ he said in Portuguese witnessing my baffled expression.  ‘Wachtel,’ he tried in German.  ‘Quail?’ I asked querulously. ‘Ja! Qvail!’ he confirmed, ‘nur neun hundert pro stück!’  Nine hundred Kwanzas, nine bucks a bird.

I did a very quick mental calculation and decided to bin the ducks for the time being and get quail instead.  The chickens would provide eggs, the quail would be for raising and eating.  I’ll go for fifty or sixty quail and blow the rest of a thousand bucks on chickens.  I will wait until the restaurant and cottages are all fenced and then buy the ducks and geese and put them on the pond, they’ll be happier there than here although God knows how I will find my duck eggs.

Feed is available in Luanda.  50 kgs of chicken feed is $38 (compared to the US or UK, is that chicken feed or is it expensive?) and quail feed is $46 a bag.  I have absolutely no idea how much a quail eats but I have tentatively concluded that a laying chicken eats 110 grams of feed twice a day.  Please correct me if I am wrong!

So there you go!  I was a bit worried that I had all those varieties of sea food on the menu but not much exciting as far as fowl was concerned, I mean, who is going to come all this way just to eat chicken unless it is in one of my amazing curries?  Quail along with the guinea Fowl when I lay my hands on them should really add something to the menu especially as I will also be offering venison.



Coturnix coturnix Africana. Lovely, tasty little game birds.
I want them to go from here...

... to here.

Caro Cliente!

Dear Client,

Welcome to MoviNet Portal, the best wide-band internet of Angola.

This site is a way to communicate with you! Inform you about your modem, discount promotions and new services that only Movicel Have.


This is the logo of my internet service provider in Angola, Movinet, and what they have to say about themselves on their website.  Although a suggestion of further useful information is made, there is none other than a reminder of my account due date.  I pay US$100 per month for which they promise 2 GBs of traffic at a speed of 3 Mbps.

Is it just me or does their logo look like a misshapen molar?  If it does, then at least they are being honest about that even if they are lying about everything else.

Movinet makes my gums bleed.

He Does Not Look Happy...

Alex's first day of school today.

Yesterday evening we unpacked new clothes and shoes for him, his school bag, writing books, pencils normal and coloured, his juice bottle and snack box and he was so happy!

Normally, recourse to tyre levers is the only way to get him out of bed at six in the morning.  This morning he was up at five, tugging at my hair shouting, 'Daddy! Daddy!  It's time to go to school!'

We left the Barra de Kwanza at seven and arrived in front of the school at ten to eight.

Would he go in?  Would he hell!

If looks could kill!

Marcia went in with him to help him settle.  Ten minutes later, she came out again assuring me that everything was OK.  Thirty seconds later, Alex bolted out the gate with a member of staff in hot pursuit.

'I am sorry!' she said as Alex clung to his mother, 'I only took my eye off him for a second and he was gone!'

Picking him up, it was a different story; he didn't want to leave.

'Daddy!  They have a crocodile!  They have lots of birds!' he ran back inside.

They also have an ostrich, I discovered, but the crocodile was quite small, only about three feet long.

Class sizes are acceptable, there are sixteen pupils in Alex's class.  For children his age, apart from the 'Three R's', they concentrate on physical education (on their own playing field), swimming (in their own pool), music lessons, drama, singing and field trips using their own buses.  It is Angolan fare but the food is good, prepared as it is in their own restaurant.  It is a longish school run every day, a hundred kilometres there and back but, because of its location in the southern suburbs of Luanda, I can dive off the main road before I hit the traffic and go cross country through the bush and do the trip in less than an hour.  I say I can; Marcia goes up to town three times a week so she can do it on those days!

Alex has already invited two of his new friends to come and stay for the weekend which I think is a smashing idea.  Naturally I have already offered to host his year group here at the Barra where I can knock them up a decent nosh and take them on a fossil hunt down the beach.

Alex had a great time today and I am pleased.  I had a miserable time.  This house and garden is a bloody big and lonely place without Alex getting under my feet and up to all sorts of mischief.

Generators and Eccentric Germans

Andy’s boys turned up on Friday and set to rebuilding the generator.  There were three Sri Lankan Mechanics supervised by Jako ‘Slim’ Nieuwenhuizen, a damn great Boer who told me never to call him ‘Slim’ so naturally he’s called Slim.  No slight is intended.  It is just the same as calling a vertically challenged individual ‘Lofty’, a particularly skinny bloke ‘Billy’ (as in Billy Bunter) and a non-reflective bloke (am I still allowed to say that?  I want to say black man, but I know that’s illegal now) ‘Chalky’.  So, for example, I was flattered, not offended when my ever considerate CO in the Army at his weekly ‘O’ Groups, clearly reluctant to overtax his subordinate would, with an appreciative nod in my direction often state, ‘No point asking Captain Stupid’.



Slim

They had brought with them an impressive variety of filters, gaskets and seals as well as the reconditioned head of my generator engine.  They had, they claimed, removed about two kilogrammes of sooty carbon and clinker from the ports which did not make the heavy cast iron lump feel any lighter but certainly left it looking cleaner and rather like someone who had rapidly sucked a handful of Fisherman’s Friends, able to breathe easier.  The problem, apparently, is that the generator is running under a woefully insufficient load. 

US$665 worth of filters, gaskets and seals

So that's what a head is supposed to look like!

 

Without a decent load, I was told, the engine would run inefficiently, half the diesel fuel turning to clag rather than burning clean, and produce far more pollution.  I was not only wasting fuel, I was damaging the engine as well as our precious environment.  Diesel engines, like women, need to be worked hard to get the best out of them.

And that got me thinking.  Most people who are off grid buy generators powerful enough to cope with the maximum load that can be expected but virtually all the time, these generators are just yawning along well under capacity.  I considered my own case, what were the chances I would have absolutely all my electrically powered devices running at the same time?  I have some heavy load items on the circuit, the water pump, the oven, the washing machine, several air-conditioning units and seven large fridges and freezers but they are never all running at once.  The pump only clicks in if the water pressure drops as a tap is opened and shuts off as soon as the tap is closed.  The oven is on about twice a week and then only for a couple of hours, less if all I am doing is crisping up yesterday’s bread, and things like aircon and fridge compressors only spool up as required.  At any one time, the most my appliances were drawing was about 5 amps on each phase, perhaps an extra ten when the ice cream machine was freezing the mix.  Had I known when I ordered the ice cream machine that merely by digging a well I would encounter a reliable supply of fresh cool water, I would have ordered a water cooled machine instead of the power hungry air cooled model I have now but even so, it is hardly worth my generator getting out of bed in the morning just for 25 amps.

I have decided, therefore, to install a hybrid system.  The extra amps the generator is capable of producing will be used to charge a bank of batteries.  While the generator is charging the batteries, it will be running at around 80% capacity and far more efficiently.  Once the batteries are charged, the generator will switch off and my power requirement will be drawn through an inverter from the battery bank.  The generator will run a third of the time it is currently running, I will save loads of fuel and treble the service interval.  By running the generator at full chat for a shorter period, I will actually reduce my carbon footprint.  Before anyone congratulates me for Going Green, let me assure them that my motives are to save money, not the planet which is why I will not go the whole hog and install tens of square metres of very expensive solar panels.  With diesel costing 40 cents a litre here, it is cheaper to run a generator.

Note the clinically clean environment in which the engine is being reassembled

With the engine bolted back together, the time came to start it.  I had no idea whether the influx of water, normally occasioning disastrous consequences for a compression ignition engine, had stuffed the bottom end of my motor.  Jako has the optimism which only comes along with a deeply religious upbringing.  If your belief is intense and sincere enough (I fail on both counts) nothing can go wrong but if it does, it is merely God’s mysterious way and nothing to get upset about.  I have known Jako for must be six years now.  When we first met, we had to come to a mutually acceptable understanding.  He had to understand that my soul was, in my opinion, beyond salvation so he need not waste his time.  I just wanted to understand him.  English is not his first language, as it isn’t for many Boers who were, let’s face it, yet another race treated appallingly by the English so were understandably disinclined to learn the hated sprache.  With his help I learnt to understand the peculiar syntax and grammar of Afrikaans English.  I give you a simple example: ‘I are wearing a jeans pant’.

Jako was standing at the downwind end of the generator when it coughed into life.  He immediately disappeared in amongst a cloud of the thick white smoke spewing out of the exhaust.  Fuck me, it never did that before, I thought. 

‘Normal!’ shouted Jako coughing his lungs up, ‘they always do that after a rebuild!’  The guys quickly shut the generator down again.  We all moved upwind and gave it another go.  This time it started easily and the smoke quickly disappeared.  I was delighted.  Marcia appeared looking equally happy.  Then I noticed Jako and the Sri Lankans weren’t sharing our joy.  Actually, they looked anything other than happy, not quite ready to throw the towel in but still the wrong side of glum.  I said nothing and Marcia folded her arms in the way women do when they suspect things aren’t going as swimmingly as their husband’s had suggested.

It was only running on two of its four cylinders.  Injectors were swapped around to see if the fault followed them.  It didn’t so the injectors were OK.  I heaved a huge sigh of relief.  These things are indecently expensive.  The fault was traced to the injector pump.  This is hideously expensive and can only be properly rebuilt and set up in a laboratory.  My heart was in my boots again.  The thing is, and there was no point me trying to kid myself, I had not been able to tell the difference between a diesel engine running on four cylinders and this one running on only two so there was no telling how long it had been running like this before it finally gave up the ghost.  If the pump was knackered then, once again, it was my fault.  The fuel system had been fitted with an extra, very expensive and very efficient fuel filtration and water separation unit made in Germany and universally held in high regard by those who know what they are.  I didn’t.  I did not know that the unit I thought was merely a water separator also contained a 10 micron filter so never changed it.  Naturally, these guys knew all about Separ Filters and the first thing they had done when they were stripping the engine had been to attempt to remove this filter.  I say ‘attempt’ because through such prolonged neglect, it had collapsed and was bloody hard to fish out of its housing.  If the pump was gummed up, this was why.

Air intake makes a good drinks cabinet

At times like this, rather than moping over the shoulders of those who really do know what they are doing,  it is far better to leave them to it and get on with something within one’s limited skills base.  I went back to the kitchen and busied myself finishing off the much delayed lunch.  I was just cruelly boiling lobsters alive when Jako came in and asked if it was OK to throw the trip switches on the generator to feed power to the house and shop.

‘Is it running?’ I asked in astonishment, ‘I can’t hear it!’

I looked through the kitchen window.  Normally, if the generator was running, there was a faint exhaust haze discernible.  I couldn’t see any sign of it.  I had to go out onto the veranda before I could detect a very gentle humming noise.  I was impressed.

‘I just need to shut the small gennie down and take it out of the circuit,’ I said hurrying off across the garden.  They waited until I got to the big generator before throwing the switch.  The revs hardly altered.  ‘No load,’ they said knowingly.

'So what was wrong with it in the end?' I asked.

 'You got shit in the injector pump,' replied Jako.

 ‘Really?' I said. 'How often should I do that?'   

A typical snack at Fort Hippo's

We had lunch and then the generator alarm went off.  This time I remained calm, it was only a low fuel warning.  Jako and Marcia headed off for the gas station to fill the drums with diesel on Jako’s car while the Sri-Lankans and I set about changing the oil on the Jeep.  If you recall last week’s episode, I had drained the oil from the generator and changed the oil filter with a new one, not the correct one but one that fitted, that I had found lying around amongst the mechanical related clag I kept in a box under the house.  Since, after an engine rebuild, it is always advisable to change the oil and filter after only a few hours, it was decided to run with my filter rather than the new Perkins one which I would use when I changed the oil next week.  The Sri-Lankans told me that the filter I had bought for the Jeep would not fit.  Sure enough, the new filter supplied by Jeep downtown had a much larger diameter thread.  Naturally, I was reluctant to put new oil on the car and then fit the old filter.  That would be like washing your hands scrupulously clean and then drying them on an oily rag.  ‘See if the Perkins filter fits,’ I told them.  It did.  So I now have a generator running with filter for which the true application is unknown, and a Jeep running with a Perkins filter.  Never mind, that’s two oil changes needed in the next few days.

Jako and Marcia crawled up to the shop in low gear.  An old white guy on a push bike was following close behind.  I looked at Marcia quizzically.  ‘He’s German,’ she said.  Oh well, that explains it then, I thought.  ‘I found him at the petrol station,’ she added as if he were no more than a particularly interesting bit of driftwood she had stumbled upon, ‘he needs a place to stay.’

‘I am looking for somewhere to stay,’ he said, no doubt to eliminate any doubt.  Do I really wander about all day looking confused?

‘What sort of place are you looking for,’ I asked him in German, ‘a tourist place?’

‘Somewhere very cheap,’ he said.

‘That’ll be us, then, ‘ I told him, ‘wheel your bike up to the cottage.’

A 61 year old German and his 28 year old 'bike

Dr. (Ing.) Stefan Frotscher is 61 years old, comes from Coswig near Dresden and is barking mad.  He is riding from Cape Town back to Germany on a 28 year old standard bicycle which, were it not missing a basket in front, would look like the sort of wheels a butcher would issue to his delivery boy.  His only luggage consisted of a couple of small panniers front and rear the limited volume of which, he admitted, was mostly taken up by water.  He had covered 121kms that day and was, he said with heartfelt sincerity, ‘very hungry’.  There are only two places he could have stayed around here that night, the cheapest of which was $400 a night so he was bloody fortunate to have run into Marcia.  He was even more fortunate that the Sri-Lankans had not eaten everything so, much to his delight, he was immediately served a plate of chicken curry and a couple of lobsters with a nice dipping sauce along with an ice cold beer.  His timing had been perfect; two hours before, we didn’t have any cold drinks.  He was halfway through Angola and, best of all, did not speak a word of Portuguese.  His next country will be Congo.  He doesn’t speak French either.

After dining, of course, he really wanted to bathe.  I showed him to his room and told him to dump all his kit in a pile and I would run it through the washing machine for him.  All through Angola he had been sleeping in medical posts or police stations and washing out of buckets.  Figuring that he already knew water in Angola was a precious commodity so he would probably just have a splash and dash to save my water, I told him about my well and its limitless supply of fresh, clean water.  ‘Sie können ruhig unser Wasser gnieβen,’ I assured him.  The sum total of all his clothes (I had lent him a fresh set of mine) wouldn’t have stretched a Tesco’s carrier bag so I threw a load of my stuff into the washing machine as well.

When he came out, much refreshed, I asked him if he wanted to catch up on the news in German.  He did, very much.  As I switched over to Euro News and changed the language, I casually asked him what he thought about Angela Merkel being dismissed for drunkenness.  ‘WHAT!!!?’ he exploded.  I had intended to wind him up further knowing he must be months behind on current affairs but the thought of old Angela being tossed drunk out of her office had clearly nearly given him a heart attack so thought I had best not tell him that Germany had pulled out of the Eurozone and changed all deposits held in German banks from Euros to Deutsch Marks at a one to one rate; the last thing I needed was to explain a recently expired German to the Angolan authorities.

As I have already intimated, there was something quite eerie about Dr. Stefan’s timing.  There is an old Portuguese guy who has a bakery on the outskirts of Luanda where we used to live.  He has a van and working to a strict schedule best described as ‘when he feels like it’, he runs his van full of bread down to the Barra de Kwanza to sell it to the two tourist lodges and Marcia’s shop.  The bread is really nice, especially his rolls, quite unlike anything bought from the State bakeries and very similar to the bread available in France or Germany.  It freezes well and is delicious when crisped in the oven.  To announce his arrival in the village, he has fitted an ice cream van style electronic Glockenspiel to his van with a volume control which is either off, or more usually on so you can hear him coming miles away.  I was just making an early morning pot of tea and had only just asked Stefan what he missed the most and learnt it was buttered fresh brötchen with jam for breakfast when I heard the Glockenspiel. 

‘Is that an ice cream van?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s selling your breakfast.  Why, do you like ice cream?’

‘I love ice cream,’ he confessed.

‘What flavour?’ I asked.

‘Sahne’

Timing again.  Now that the power was back on, Marcia was mixing up a batch of ice cream.  Our machine can do two flavours at a time.  I asked Marcia to make one of them rich cream and the other, just so he had a taste of the tropics, coconut flavour.  It is also bloody fast, probably why it draws so much power.  Stefan enjoyed his fresh bread rolls with butter and Guava jam and for me, the sight and smell of it was so evocative of my time in Germany, for the first time in years, I had breakfast too.

Andy Mallett appeared in the doorway along with Richard, a mutual friend.  Keen golfers, they had just finished an early morning round at the nearby resort and dropped in, as Andy stated, to quality control the work on the generator.  Lunch was Tagliatelli Carbonara with ice cream for dessert.

By now, Stefan was making some serious, ‘I’ve got to go’ noises.  He intended to split the seventy odd kilometre trip to Luanda into two stages as he only needed to arrive in Luanda on Sunday so that he could get his visa from the Congolese Embassy on Monday.  There is only one sizeable village between here and Luanda and while it offers places to stay for tourists, the cheapest is about a 100 bucks.  Furthermore, it is only 25 kilometres down the road so seemed to me hardly worth the effort; after all, he had covered 121 kms the day of his arrival.  Why didn’t he spend another night with us and start off very early Sunday morning and do Luanda in one day?  He was adamant.  He would never spend more than one night in the same location otherwise, he said, he would never get back to Germany.  Fair enough, I thought, but I still felt he would end up cycling into Luanda in the early hours not having found anywhere to stay on the way.  Marcia wrote him out a note in Portuguese which stated.

‘Hi!  My name is Stefan, I am German.  I am riding from Cape Town to Germany and I would like somewhere cheap to stay the night.  Thank you for your help’

Cynically, I thought this translated as:

‘Hi! I am vulnerable, please take me down a dark alley and rob me’ but kept such unpleasant thoughts to myself.

Before he set off, I noticed him carefully logging his mileage in a book.

‘How many kilometres have you done with this 28 year old bike?’ I asked.

I was not ready for the answer.

‘342,000 kms,’ he said indicating the speedometer on the bike.

‘Bloody hell!’ I said, ‘you must have done some long trips on it!’

‘I have,’ he confirmed, ‘don’t forget, I had to ride to Cape Town from Germany down the eastern side of Africa before I could ride back up the western side…’

He thinks he will get home by March… next year.

Mad.  Stark staring mad.  But what a bloke, eh?

‘There’s water coming out of the air filter housing, is that bad?’

It is 14.45 hrs the day before a bank holiday.  You have 300 dollars in cash, the banks close at 1500 hrs, your generator has stuffed up and you have seven freezers and coolers loaded with meat and drink that have stopped working.  In three hours it will be dark, the one rechargeable emergency lantern you have is uncharged, no water pump means no water, your phone is beeping at you because its battery too is about to expire.  You are hot, sweaty and incredibly dirty, and the last time you spoke to your wife, who is in town, she was clearly in the foulest of moods.

What do you do?

Well, the first thing is to invite all your mates round for a barbecue because by lunchtime the next day, the meat will be nicely defrosted.

The next thing is come up with the mother of all excuses to explain to a tired and very pissed off wife why she is arriving home to a house in darkness.  I normally face up to my failings and would never lie to worm my way out of a situation of my own creation but it is one thing throwing one’s self on the mercy of a boss the worst punishment at his disposal being a sacking, and entirely another admitting to Marcia that the reason the generator is now 850 kilograms of expensive scrap is because it wasn’t serviced on time.

This is irritating as I had included servicing the generator on my Ivan Denisovich list of things to do some two weeks ago and even more galling because I had firmly resolved to service it first thing Monday morning; the night before I had even ensured that Marcia included 10 litres of Castrol’s finest lubricating oil on her shopping list.

Before I had Dominic go and find an anthill on which to stake me out saving Marcia the effort, I rang my old boss.  He is to the knowledge base of all things mechanical, especially power generation what the encyclopaedia Britannica is to general knowledge.  When it comes to fault diagnosis, three or four honest answers to his perceptive questions is all it usually takes.  If he was a GP, he’d save the NHS billions.

‘Apparently Marcia switched on the gennie early this morning, it ran for an hour then stopped,’ I told him, ‘so I let it cool down, checked it over, topped up the radiator and started it up again.  It ran for an hour and stopped with an overheat alarm.’

‘Has it got a blocked air filter?’ he asked, beating his own record.

How does the man know?  As I was checking it over, I noticed the pneumatic warning valve had popped on the filter housing and was now showing red along with an advisory stating, ‘Change Filter when Red’.  How long it had been red, I had no idea.

‘Yes,’ I admitted and told him why I thought so.

‘Well, that’s probably it then,’ he continued in his low, steady tone, ‘the engine was struggling to breathe and the head has overheated.  Sounds to me like a blown gasket or a cracked head.’

Shit.  Symptom, overheating.  Reason, cracked head.  Cause, lack of maintenance.  Fault,  All mine.

‘But that’s not all,’ I said, ‘I filled the radiator again…’

‘How much did it take?’ he said interrupting me.

‘About a litre.’

‘About enough to fill a cylinder,’ he remarked.

‘And now there’s water running out of the air filter housing.  Is that bad?’ I asked, fearing the worst.

‘Well, it’s not good!’ says he with a sigh. ‘You haven’t tried to turn it over have you?  Because that would be really bad.’

‘No!’ I exclaimed, ‘I’m not that stupid!’  Whatever opinion he had of me he held in reserve.

‘Tell you what,’ he said brightly, ‘tomorrow is a public holiday and we fancy a run out of town, how about I come down with a couple of blokes or three and we whip the head off and have a look?’

I have never really considered having a man’s babies before but I was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to have his.

Now I had bad news for Marcia that I could temper with some good news.  I told her that I was preparing some extension cables and fitting plugs so if she could buy a small petrol driven generator in town, I could rig something up to keep at least the freezers going and maybe the TV as well.  She wasn’t, I confess, particularly impressed but took it all better than I could have hoped for.

Sure enough, Tuesday morning they pitched up.  It had taken Dominic and I over an hour to get one panel off the sound deadening canopy so we could see if the radiator was gummed up with dust.  It took them only two hours to have the rest of the canopy off and the engine stripped down to the block.  As the rocker cover came off, we could see the valve gear was full of water.  As the head came off, we could see the number one cylinder was, as the man had correctly predicted, full of water.  Trouble was, no reason for the water being there was readily apparent.  The gasket was in good order, no cracks were visible in the head and the bores looked ok. Everything seemed as it should be. 

Water, water everywhere...

...everywhere it should not be.

 

One of the mechanics finished scraping the last of the muck off the head, ‘There you go!’ he said.  I don’t know off hand how much a core plug is but it can’t be more than a couple of dollars.  There are four of them fitted to the head, invisible to casual inspection as they are hidden under the rocker cover, and two of them had rusted through allowing water into the inlet ports.  They could only just have failed for if the gennie had sat overnight with an inlet valve open allowing a cylinder to fill, water being incompressible would have destroyed the engine had an attempt to start it been made. 

 

A few posts ago I mentioned the need for ant-freeze in the coolant and a lot of readers wondered why I needed anti-freeze in a country where it never freezes.  Well, here is the reason.  Anti-freeze is also a rust inhibitor.  By running this engine with only water as a coolant, it had quietly started to rust inside allowing the failure of a tuppenny-ha’penny component to potentially destroy a ten thousand dollar engine.  As it is, we won’t know for certain until it is back together and cranks up for the first time again.

Fortunately, it is a common and highly regarded engine and as such, is fitted to a wide range of applications from Cummins, New Holland, Perkins et al in everything from generators to tractors and plant.  Amazingly, all the components required were available off the shelf in Angola… at a price, of course.  A complete head gasket set was US650 plus another couple of hundred to have the core plugs replaced.  A new head gasket in the US is $65 so a full set wouldn’t be more than twice that.  $850 is good value for money though, because the parts are here.

The engineering company doing the head has promised it will be ready tomorrow so my ex-boss has said he will be back here on Friday.  If all goes well, we’ll have light and running water again in time for the weekend.

In my experience over twenty years in Angola, for a generator to suffer a major breakdown and have it stripped, the fault diagnosed, the necessary parts located and be rebuilt within one working week is nothing short of a miracle.  Some would say it was all down to whom I knew which is, of course true but in this case seems cynical smacking as it does of corruption.  No, what really made the difference was luck, pure and simple.  I was very lucky to have had a boss like Andy Mallet who, rather than take a hard earned day off and enjoy a much needed stress break on the beach with his family, elected instead to drop everything and help out one of his ex-employees.

Now, I must be off.  Marcia bought a small petrol driven generator that can just keep the freezers and the laptop going.  The well pump is too much for the poor little thing so water for washing and cooking has to be hauled up a bucket at a time from the well.  Guilt ridden as I am, I have ensured there are always a full 100 litre container in the bathroom and a full fifty litre plastic washing bowl in the kitchen.  Normally I heave the water for cooking onto the dining table but today I was giving the house a good clean so placed the bowl on the floor and was then distracted by blogging.  In the background as I write, I have just heard the lapping sound of three thirsty dogs burying their snouts deep into our cool, clean cooking water.  Now it would probably shock, even nauseate a few but really, that doesn’t bother me; after all I have drunk water from streams and animals don’t just drink out of them but, in all conscience, I couldn’t possibly allow Marcia to cook with what she would consider water no less than poisoned, even if she were ignorant of the fact, so I have a bit of water carrying to do before she gets home.

All that is powering Fort Hippo at the moment

I Did Warn You…

I suppose it was bound to happen.  All this running around behaving like a native navvy, digging holes, carting soil, sawing logs and timber then nailing them together was just asking for it.

I was late out of bed this morning.  The last of yesterday evening I remember was getting to the part of William Boyd’s ‘An Ice-Cream War’ where Captain Cobb (of the Duke of Connaught’s Own West Kents, reluctantly attached to the 69^th Palancottah Light Infantry) is bayoneted in the abdomen by an Askari in the Kaiser’s employ and then resting the book on my chest while I considered my own similar experience of nineteen years ago.  Clearly, such memories have become, over the intervening years, powerfully soporific for the next thing I knew, it was well past dawn and no members of my family or the ‘uninvited’ guests were to be seen. 

Now this suited me fine… because I was knackered. 

A tea and a coffee later (the uninvited guests, having risen earlier and no doubt quickly realizing I was still unconscious and unable to police them, had polished off everything edible in the fridge depriving me of a more substantial breakfast), I staggered out across the sand of my soon to be lawn under the weight of 250 square metres of rolled up shade netting with the avowed intent of nailing as much of it as required to the completed framework of Stalag Luft III.  Quickly concluding there was no way I was going to be able to achieve this on my own, I lit up and sitting comfortably on the roll, choked a cigarette down; I didn’t even have the energy to go and look for Dominic so was content to play the waiting game.  Looking furtively in the wrong direction, he eventually scurried into view attempting a right flanker through the trees from the shop to the cottage and rather than avoiding me, he ran slap bang into me.

‘Morning, Daddy,’ he offered morosely, ‘do you want some help?’

As a matter of fact, I did.  All the help I could get but one look at his face and I knew he wasn’t up for yet another day of hard labour beneath unrelenting sun; he was supposed to be on holiday, perhaps I was taking this father son bonding a bit too far.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘you have a choice: help me get this shade netting up and this damn chicken run finished or,’ I paused and looked at his crestfallen features (if his shoulders had slumped any further, I would have had difficulty distinguishing them from his knees), ‘or,’ I continued, ‘we could spend a day on the beach with your brother.’

‘Let’s get it over and done with, Dad,’ he decided.

Well, that settled it.  ‘Get your swimming togs!’ I said and hurried off to find Alex.  ‘Alex!  ALEX!’ I called.  No answer.  ‘Alex! Do you want to go to the beach?’ I called again. ‘Yes please, Daddy!’ he replied immediately appearing from under the house where he had been playing.  He was filthy.

‘Get him hosed down and into a fresh set of clothes,’ I instructed Dominic, ‘and pack a spare set in a rucksack so he can get changed after swimming!’ I called after his retreating back.

Ten minutes later we were in the Jeep heading for the beach, the dogs loping effortlessly alongside.  Try as I might, I cannot stop the dogs doing this.  It irritates the shit out of me and it irritates Rico when I turn up to his restaurant with dogs in tow.  So we did not go to Rico’s.  Instead, I turned north and headed for a place I wasn’t even sure was open.  But I knew the guards and they would let us play in the massive swimming pool on the beach this sometimes open, sometimes shut and always under new management restaurant had to offer.

The restaurant was open and, even more of a surprise, had the same manager who introduced himself to me as the new incumbent nearly a year ago, the very charming, fluent English speaking Sr. Cipriano.

‘Are you still making ice cream?’ he asked me as we settled down to a cup of his excellent coffee.

‘You have tried my ice cream?’  I was a little surprised; I had never seen him at the shop.

‘It is the nicest ice cream I have ever tasted,’ he replied, ‘every time I filled the car up I would stop at your place and have some but I notice you aren’t selling it anymore.’

This was true.  Not the best ice cream in the world bit (I reckon he can’t have travelled much so was limited in the old gelato department) but that I had stopped making it.

‘It has been dead over Christmas and New Year,’ I told him, ‘so it wasn’t worth me making it, we just weren’t selling it quickly enough and you can only keep it so long.’

He nodded his head in sympathy.  ‘It was dead for me too,’ he admitted, ‘but I am full every weekend now.’

‘Well that’s good!’ I said and I meant it.  I had been worried just how quiet a period I had expected to be busy had been.  Clearly I hadn’t yet worked out the market so it was reassuring to learn what I thought would be longer quiet periods were, in fact, the busy season.

‘Do you do A La Carte at the weekend?’ I asked him.

Not on Sunday’s apparently.  Sundays he did a buffet offering an impressive range of fruits of the sea prepared in a variety of mouthwatering ways all for $60 a head.  Realizing the place was open and obviously under good management, I had sensed an opportunity and was now delicately blueprinting the client before setting him up for the closing question.

‘The last manager here, the muscle bound Portuguese guy…’ Cipriano nodded to indicate he knew who I was referring to, ‘…complained he did not have enough freezers to hold stock for the restaurant?’

‘I have all new freezers,’ said Cipriano proudly, confirming the problem had been solved.

‘Can I look at your menu, please?’  I asked him, ‘plenty of people stop by the shop on their way to Rico’s who are only going there because they think you are closed,’ I added, throwing him a bone.  What I really wanted to know was what he was getting away with charging his clients.  I scanned the menu and did a quick mental calculation.  A meal for two with a couple of drinks would run out at $140.  If they stayed the afternoon to swim in the pool and have a few more drinks, there’d be no change out of $200.  I had done my profit and loss calculation based on fifty bucks a head.  It is always good to balance your projected costs against a conservative estimate of income so I was very pleased.

‘No desserts?’ I commented.

‘My Chef is brilliant but he isn’t too hot on desserts,’ admitted Cipriano.  I knew his chef.  He had poached the only decent chef Rico had ever employed by the simple expedient of offering the man a huge pay rise.  Samuel’s lobster curries were divine but, it was true, his desserts were shit.  To be fair, if allowed to concentrate just on desserts, he would probably have excelled in that department as well but to expect one man to do everything, and in a small kitchen to boot was probably asking a bit much.

‘What you need,’ I said, ‘are desserts ready-to-eat’ and before he had time to properly consider that remark I asked him, ‘how much would you charge for a portion of ice cream, say two scoops?’

By that stage we had been joined by someone who, judging from his intense interest in the conversation I suspected was Cipriano’s head waiter, a suspicion confirmed only seconds later.

‘Five dollars,’ said Sr. C.

‘Eight dollars,’ corrected the interloper, ‘four dollars a ball, more if we fruit it up.’

‘This is my head waiter,’ said Cipriano introducing me to him.  I smiled sweetly.  I was selling my ice cream at one dollar for the equivalent of two scoops (or balls).

Then the penny started to drop for Mr. C.

‘How much did you pay for your machine, Sr. Tomas?’

‘Fourteen thousand dollars with the spares and maintenance pack,’ I lied easily, more than doubling the actual cost, ‘mine is a commercial grade machine.’  I could see he was a bit disappointed. 

‘But,’ I continued, ‘there is no point you lashing out on an expensive machine like that only to watch it rust away in the salt air like your big espresso machine.’  I had noticed our coffee being made with a domestic espresso machine rather than the no doubt very expensive but idle Italian 3 cup espresso machine he had behind the bar counter.

‘How about I make you up trays of individual ice cream desserts in a variety of flavours with different toppings and deliver them to you every week before the weekend?’

They liked the sound of that but I still had to plant in their minds an idea of quantity and price so needed to make the deal as sweet as my desserts were going to be.

‘We could start off gently with only 100 desserts per week until word of mouth causes demand to soar and,’ again giving them little time to digest that, ‘rather than serving them in nasty plastic throw away containers, I could prepare them in elegant glass bowls ready for the table which, with every new delivery, I could collect, sterilize and reuse saving you endless amounts of bother.  You’d get them at four dollars and sell them at eight dollars a pop,’ I added casually, almost as an afterthought.  Before it went quiet over the holiday season and I was selling them quickly enough for the mix not to spoil, I was making a profit at a dollar a portion.  Four dollars a portion was for me a very sweet proposition.

So the day had not been wasted after all.  I was bloody chuffed as I made my way to the pool to join the boys.  We splashed and we played.  Alex, who is only five, remember, swam two lengths of the pool to prove he did not need to wear his buoyancy jacket any more.  Dominic had several attempts at beating my record for mushroom floating, managing to hold his breath each time for over a minute in a futile effort to beat my wholly fictitious record of three minutes.  Then Dominic reminded me how I had taught him when he was just a little boy like Alex to stand upright on my shoulders, arms held out to the sides like a circus acrobat so I taught Alex to do the same, his fear of falling mitigated by the presence of water promising a soft landing.  Of course, Dominic, now a big lad as tall as me and a lot heavier than he was all those years ago fancied a go and I was carefree enough to crouch down, let him stand on my shoulders and then try to jerk upright.

It felt as if someone had stuck a rapier in one ear and out the other.  Dominic spilled into the water and I floated there face down, gargling pool water unable to move.  Dominic pulled me to the side.  Just getting out was agony.  Getting into the car was even worse.  Dominic hurried off to pay the bill and then drove us all home.

I had just made it back into the lounge and was perched stiff backed awkwardly on the edge of a dining chair when Marcia arrived home.

‘Daddy’s hurt his back,’ Dominic informed her.

There was little sympathy forthcoming.

‘You wanted to do everything in the garden by yourself,’ she tut-tutted, ‘I did warn you…’