Dem bones dem bones....

Early Spring in Pietermaritzburg, a lovely mild day that almost cancels out the grime and squalour of the city centre where I am ensconced in the PostNet internet cafe. My orthopaedic surgeon is pleased with my progress after the double arthroscopy last week, and I am cautiously optimistic he may have temporarily alleviated some of the pain from my poor abused knees. All down to too much rugby as a kid and later at university I guess. Playing right wing (pure coincidence, that position, and nothing to do with my political standpoint) for sixteen years has played merry hell with the complicated set of ligaments, cartilages and tendons that occupy the middle of each leg. Of course being a fat bastard hasn't helped either. 5 weeks in Kuwait with no exercise and a diet of takeout curry has caused me to balloon like the Michelin Man. A far cry from my lean and mean 1979 self when Lee Waters and I were inducted into the Chaplin High School First XV.


The selfsame Waters is now a bearded and sun-leatherised resident of Brisbane. Wrinkly little bugger I must say, but still in superb physical nick for an elderly person. Perhaps gravity has less effect on midgets or something. In fact I daresay he is in much the same shape he was in twenty years ago whereas I am square and solid if not a little, er, comfortable shall we say. I saw Lee in January 2004 when I flew out there, incidentally meeting his wife's best friend who was a recently separated Australian woman with three kids. A complete disaster that was, and a lesson to us all. Never try to set your mates up with your wife's mates. And for us men, never try to date until at least two years have elapsed after your divorce. Oh well, I'm sure they will all eventually speak to me again some day.

But still, seeing my surgeon today (and a happy old Rhodesian bloke he is too, descendant of the famous "Matabele"Thompson who first wrung the concession from Lobengula) made me think how we mortgage our future health so easily, sacrificing it on the altar of work. I'm dead ready to downshift now to any profession that will pay my way and allow me to play sport every day. 20 years of international management and consulting have not made me noticeably happier or fitter and the few dollars I have made are all tied up in a house I seldom visit, in a country I find a little damp and grey for my liking. I don't mind the temperatures in the UK at all, but the absence of sunlight especially in December to February is a killer. And my funny little house is all tall and skinny, 5 bedrooms over three floors and nowhere near enough windows and garden for my liking.


But more of the Bracknell residence later, it is a tale well worth telling. I need to see if I can get into my work e-mail system from here and check what is happening back in Riyadh.

Early Morning Musical Chairs

There's no better way to get a sense of the cultural differences between groups than to share morning ablutions with them. I'm talking about having a poo here, you may wish to fasten your seatbelts and shoo away any young children and nervous maiden aunts.

This morning, engaged as I was in some silent contemplation in my favourite stall at the M Building, Kuwait Gulf Oil Company, I mused on the subtle yet distinct differences in elimination habits demonstrated in this cultural melting pot of a society. In parentheses here let me say if I am ever elected King or, in Kuwait, Amir, I will make sure that all public toilets are fitted with reading material and loud music, to distract us from the serious nature of the task and to overpower any inadvertent sounds we might make. Anyway, moving on, I was in my stall and flanked by (in adjacent stalls of course) a Kuwaiti and a Bangladeshi. The Bangladeshi was in the last, or heavy duty, stall which is a squat toilet, while the other two of us were in more Westernised surrounds, perched on a normal commode. Westernised if of course you ignore the handy high-pressure water hose on a clip next to the toilet, and the large waste basket for used toilet paper.

But to continue. From the deep, reverberating splooshing sounds on my right, my Bangladeshi colleague was experiencing some success as he (on all the auditory evidence) let fly from some considerable height into the hole in the floor. On my left the Kuwaiti had completed his brief enthronement and was directing jets of water at any body areas that, not to put too fine a point on it, needed cleaning just then. We three Kings of Orient also, for that moment, represented the exact national demographic balance between locals and expatriates, being two non-Kuwaitis to the one desert dweller.

Now I have seen squat toilets before and was not mazed nor confused by this nor by the logical, if alarming, sounds that issued from it. What did get me baffled though was how exactly one could achieve a sufficiently spotless fundament to make the day comfortable without in any way at all besmirching one's ankle length white robes - and all this, mind you, while controlling the hose with the left hand.

My conclusion is that this is why alcohol is banned here. The complexities of wearing an white dish-dash robe into the loo while pissed, performing one's ablutions in an alcoholic haze and then irrigating one's nethermost orifice with a high pressure hose aimed with one's less deft hand.... well doesn't bear thinking about really.

Dreams and Dreaming: or, Every Boy's Book of Farming

A couple of minutes before three in the afternoon on a Wednesday - in the Ahmadi Oil Fields in Kuwait this means rush hour soon. Knocking off time in the oil sector here is three, and Wednesday is of course the end of the working week so any minute now the roads will be filled with floods of Chevy Caprices (managers) and Toyota Camrys (supervisors). The somnolent sub-continent expatriates from the saffron part of the world will tidy up and leave on their rattling buses sans air conditioning, unless you count the missing windows and holes in the bodywork. As to the fate of the retained management consultants, including yours truly, we hope to be out of here before nightfall.

So tomorrow I'll sneak into the local company office, avoiding the local partner and his dozy rows of "work on weekends to please the boss" poor, wan and lifeless consultants. All I need do is seize my air tickets from a certain desk and run for the lifts.

Air tickets? Glad you asked. Finally, insh'allah, I am out of here on Saturday evening wallowing in the luxury of Emirates Business Class. To Dubai firstly, I shall raise my glass of water as we pass over Riyadh because I have deliberately avoided going there first (security alerts and the chance of various lurking people handing me more work). Then early on Sunday morning off to Johannesburg (and I shall raise my middle finger as we pass over the shattered remains of my home country, soiled as she is with the filthy finger stains of Mugabe and his forty thieves)... yes dear readers, I'm going to South Africa.

Briefly mind you, a long overdue arthroscopy and the grim memory of bad dental surgery in Saudi that cost me three teeth earlier this year have combined to make me think I'd be better having it done closer to relatives and priests. But still, a couple of weeks lying round my brother Kim's house and monopolising his TV sports channels will be pure heaven. And I may get the chance to be driven out to Mooi River, some 7okm from Pietermaritzburg, to look at some land that Brett might want to sell me.

You'll be able to see it in the background of this picture. In the hills overlooking a large dam, green and pleasant and about 500 acres in size. Of course I have absolutely no idea how I might earn a living in a quiet rural area, but that's a detail for later. For a long time I've dreamed of my own space, water, trees, sun and green mellowness. It's true that the first iteration of the dream had a gorgeous wife at my side, smiling proudly as I planted my first chickens or milked a rutabaga or whatever it is that farmers do. She'd have produced a passel of little kids that I could teach to fish, and I'd have become ever more laconic and lantern jawed, straw in my mouth as I whipped the herds of broccoli into shape. Times change, however, and there have been some forced edits to the dream. The wife became increasingly rodentine and eventually decamped with a Pom, preferring the gentility of suburban Frimley to the wilds of Natal or Tasmania; my early researches into farming have indicated that it is a back breaking profession with huge risk and minimal reward, and many of the major components of this life seem to be vegetable-based which is worrying considering I have a severe case of Chernobyl thumb (the ability to kill anything including a weed while trying to feed and nurture it).

Some dreams are meant to remain that way perhaps. Then again, I remember the words of a bloke called Charles, who runs Nando's Chicken in the UK " Follow your passion, not your pension". Don't always play safe. I have already invested everything of value I ever had in the pursuit of a new way of life, so it would be a bitter blow to give up now and retreat back into the corporate womb.

So an interesting time indeed. My knees freshly coated with ibuprofen gel and wincing in anticipation, my butt parked on a chair in the flat in Sharq, I'm slowly starting to pack for Pietermaritzburg. And what adventures await me there!!

Taj Apartments, Sharq, Kuwait City August 2005

Back in the coolth again, not so hot outside after all - a mere 47 degrees today, positively glacial. Three nice sci-fi books scored from the aptly named Kuwait Bookstore - a bit of a rarity in a country where the overpaid inhabitants exist only for takeout food, muscle cars and mobile phones. I've often wondered what it would have been like to be the idle son of a rich and generous Dad - and I guess being Saudi or Kuwaiti kind of resembles that. A harsh viewpoint maybe, but I am a bit tetchy after being scared witless by the way they drive. If you've ever seen a skinny kid in a white robe, wispy beard on his cheeks and cellphone in one hand, left foot on the dashboard of a 3-ton GMC Suburban and driving six feet behind your rear fender at a hundred miles an hour then you'll know true fear. Or, and I am sorry to say this, even worse if you share the motorway with a Kuwaiti woman driver.

I am not sure if it is a cultural artefact of life in this strangely conservative part of the world, perhaps the women are not allowed to be alone in a car with a male driving instructor or something similar that prevents them from having the faintest bit of road sense when they start driving , but I have seldom seen such hare-brained manouevres as the dear ladies in black can pull. In Saudi of course women are not allowed to drive - I'd put that down to the unbelievable and hostile suspicion with which any married Saudi regards single males and thought it was yet another Wahabi sect rule - maybe, however, one of the rule makers had recently bitten his beard off in a fit of anxiety caused by being tailgated by a 4 foot midget in head to toe robes with a tiny vision slit, nominally in control of a Landcruiser full of gymnastic kids tumbling from front to back on a sort of human waterfall. The poor dears simply never seem to make use of the slightest discipline on the kids, and also have no ability to judge distances or speeds - and of course I am the only person on the 40 motorway between the First and 8th Ring Roads (a good 50km of 4-lane highway) that ever uses indicators. I wonder if the locals think my brake lights have an intermittent short circuit...

Still, an interesting place and more liveable than Riyadh. The first trip I stayed in some nice Spanish style apartments in Salwa - at least they had a small gym and pool whereas now I am in a city block surrounded by building sites, feral pigeons and starving feral cats. The poor kitties are too scrawny to even trouble the piegons, and must live on insects or something. I finally cracked under the pressure last night and bought a tin of cat food for the one poor wee thing that cringes around the car park here. It is all eyes and ears and a tiny black-lipped mouth that made soundless hisses of defiance at me, but once I scooted the cat food foil container under the fence it was doing headstands in the stuff. And as luck would have it the owner of the building came out at that precise moment, and looked at me as though I was demented. Only in the affluent West would there be a program to capture, sterilise and release the cats - here they are part of the same unfeeling food chain that has Bangladeshis and Filipinos working in lethal environments for a pittance. A simple pyramid actually, with Kuwaitis at the top, Americans some distance below that and then a long hierarchy fading from pale to dark. Who'd be a swarthy Sri Lankan here... get run over by a Kuwaiti sheikha and on your hospital bed you'd be charged with damaging her car.

Time for yet another cup of tea with mint, and a rummage through the fridge to see what's for supper. Maybe I'll wander over to Mughal Mahal and get takeout curry.

Welcome to the Hogga Blog

A work in progress, this. These first lines being written from a rented (and mercifully, air conditioned) apartment in the Sharq suburb of Kuwait City. In high summer. I'm a tough African and thought that I had experienced fierce heat before - but this is something completely different. Dry heat and 52 degrees C the other day - and the next day high humidity and 43 which gave an effective "feels like" temperature of 57. Unbelievable.

Still I sense that many of you are already getting impatient. Shifting in your chairs and eying your watches. What, I seem to hear you asking, is the point of all this? And how did an African end up a few hundred kilometres from Iraq? So let me start unfolding my tale without delay.

It was a dark and stormy night - well dark anyway, back in 1961 on 28th June when I entered the world, in a tiny "Nursing Home" in a small town called Fort Victoria, in a country called Southern Rhodesia. Part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland at the time. The first child of Arthur Robert "Bob" Hodgson and Shirley May Girdlestone Hodgson. He was a 20 year old Diamond Driller and she was a couple of years older (I am legally forbidden to mention Mom's age in public) and a nurse.

I'll gloss over the political and social turmoil in the world at that time, perhaps providing some detail in another thread, but suffice to say that it was the same year mankind reached space. And I reject any allegations that it was the news of my birth that inspired the Russians to look for a way off the planet. I was living and thriving as a toddler in a small mining town called Mashaba - asbestos mines as it happens, probably not the best place for a kid to grow up but hey, what did we know back then? A child prodigy (in my words, an annoyingly precocious midget in the words of others and "piccanini Baas Mashupa" in the words of our long suffering cook). Of course it was not difficult to shine at Mashaba Primary School, where wearing shoes was a sign that one was marked for greatness. So I shot through the classes, skipping out some here and there - thanks to Mom I could already read well at the age of 5 and so had little patience for Playhour comics, preferring instead some well-reasoned debate on the Soviet expansionist tendencies.

In the background of course much was happening on the political front. The Federation did not long survive my birth (once again I reject any suggestions of causality) and it was soon after its collapse that Ian Smith's Government made the Unilateral Declaration of Independence that was to shape my next years. Many better men than I (including old Smithy himself) have documented those fateful times so I'll be content with saying that it was an unusual, amazing and unique place and time to grow up. I was schooled in the illegal Republic of Rhodesia, firstly in Mashaba Primary and Junior as I have said, and then in Fort Victoria Junior and High Schools some 25 miles away. Many of you reading this Blog will have first met me back in those days - the early and mid-Seventies when the terrorist war was just getting started and things looked good. As did I, mind you. A thin and attractive lad I was, gentle and intellectual. Of course the fashion then was to be muscular and brutish and so I never got the chance to test my extensive theoretical knowledge of anatomy on any of the local ladies. Sadly, now that it is fashionable to be androgynous and slim, I am muscular and brutish....

But more of that later. I guess it's time for me to brave the searing heat outside, moving in the particular slit-eyed crouching rush that contact-lens wearers use to walk in places where sandstorms and 125 F temperatures are common. Get into my rented car and see if I can reach the Sultan Supermarket without inadvertently leaving more rubber on the roads (I'm not used to driving a 3,5 litre monster sedan with neck-snapping acceleration). I'll see you all later...