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...