Would you buy a used car from this man?

It has been an interesting time, going for interviews. In my usual fashion I have applied for pretty much anything going, and as a consequence have had some rather strange interviews where neither the interviewing panel nor I have much idea what we're doing there.

A case in point was a somewhat random application I fired off to a certain business school in the Midlands. They were looking for a Professor of HR and I was in one of those frames of mind when downshifting to a life of bearded, pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed academia seemed attractive. I could write erudite papers, twinkle in an avuncular fashion at the pretty students and have elegant dinner parties at my house where the guests, overawed by my extensive collection of travel memorabilia and replete with my home-cooked curry, would be too polite to interrupt my anecdotes. Seemed perfect. The appropriate "Thinker" pose would be adopted as per this photograph.

Of course arriving in the crime-infested and graffiti-freckled city after hours on a clotted motorway, cursing my way through a bewildering series of one way streets and multiple roundabouts to eventually find a parking garage, storing the nasty rented Vauxhall Meriva and emerging blinking into a torrential downpour while trying to read a vague map of the campus was all a serious dose of reality that spoiled the rosy hue I had seen the job advertisement through. I found the place after a long and hasty walk, and sat sweating in the office they provided wondering if I will ever get used to the English habit of sealing all their buildings and then pumping them full of fetid and superheated air. It was not that cold outside, some 15 degrees Celsius I guess, which I find quite tolerable in a light shirt. But the Poms wear Arctic gear, anoraks, beanies, gloves and all kinds of wrappings and then huddle together in buildings with the central heating on. Funny - the buildings are considerably warmer than the air conditioned offices I was working in when I lived in Riyadh, despite it being 47 degrees outside.

So to the interviews, several of them - and what a revelation. I met what would be my immediate subordinates - the senior lecturers and professors - and a slippery bunch of venomous tree-weasels they were too. Your intrepid Hogga realised immediately that there were great depths of organisational politics below the shallow smiles - and realised shortly thereafter that I would rather spend the next year as chief turd wrangler at the Mumbai sewerage farm than work with this bunch. After an hour or so of their shrill whining about lack of resources, no time to do research and the like I was then confronted with the next layer of management - the lecturers. They were all, to a man, women. Being a chauvinist swine I immediately subjected them to the Hogga pulchritude survey and realised that a riper bunch of buffalo, spotted dogs and lesser ring-tailed buffoons had seldom if ever been assembled in such a small space. Not a bonkable amongst them - and I speak as a man recently returned from a year in the celibate Arabian peninsula.

After this jolly interlude I was required to make a presentation to a great variety of assorted folk, drawn from the two groups (or herds, or pods if you prefer) I had already met, plus some reinforcements from what must have been a cloth-cap wearing Trotskyite bunch of cupboard-fungi from the top part of the building. And at about this point I realised that the only sense in being there was if I could try to get up their noses without actually being objectionable. Have some fun rattling their cages. Shine a commercial spotlight on their labour unionist approach to HR management. Extract the urine, so to speak.

The afternoon passed in a blur of questions, livened only by my increasingly acerbic answers and the gasps of horror from the panel. One fashionably stubbled and denim attired champion of the working classes asked me what I thought about research into diversity and equal opportunities - obviously his subject area - and almost wept when I said it was all a load of bollocks and had no commercial value. The University HR Director spilled his tea when I said that my military experience would allow me to soon whip the lecturers into shape. All in all it was well worth video-taping I am sure.

I eventually escaped, staggered back to the parkade, paid ten quid to retrieve the renta-heap Vauxhall, strapped it about me and fled the town only to enter the M1 at approximately 16h30 on a Friday along with half of England. Home much later that evening, besmeared with takeaway chicken grease and red-eyed from avoiding millions of home-seeking Poms, orange traffic cones and yellow speedtrap cameras I dedicated myself to seeking a more commercial role and the hell with downshifting.

So you'll be pleased to know it seems I have landed a change management contract role. 6 months or so of really hard and complex work with a major bank, but it will insh'allah pay the way for me to live until the June citizenship deadline. And I'll be looking far more like the consulting pics taken in the Kuwait oil fields, except a little lighter (two crippled knees, 50 degree temperatures, 2 months of living on takeout food and no gym made me a fat bastard so this is the "before" picture of my new health kick). But anyway I guess it suits me more to be kicking ass and taking names on an enterprise restructuring project than trying to chair academic committees in a politically correct manner.

Back in old Blighty

At long last I am back in my house in England. Banished to the third floor, mind you, in a sort of writer's garret room, and wandering round looking for all my various books, compact discs and general bits of stuff that the lodgers here have carefully packed away. But still it is good to be back. Wogan on the radio weekdays, Jonathan Ross on Saturday mornings. 2 Meg broadband for 25 quid a month. Bacon. Curiously Strong Cheddar. Those wonderful English girls who often are, well generally from the collarbones up anyway, stunningly pretty. There is something about this climate that allows women to look twenty even when they are approaching forty. And blue eyes everywhere. If only they'd play some sport, get a bit of muscle. And stop piercing and tattooing themselves. Nothing more jarring than seeing a Saxon blonde with porcelain complexion and Windsor blue eyes, and with barbed wire tattooed around her arms and metal studs through her lips, tongue and, I daresay, other more Southerly regions. Grotesque.

So it's back to the chore of looking for a new job. And of course a new life partner. Significant other. De facto (the correct term if you're Australian, it is a legal way of allowing you to be partnered with pretty much anything warm blooded I suspect). Main squeeze. Goose, to quote Barry Hilton. In short, the next lucky lady to bear the Hodgson name as carried by thousands of sturdy North Easterners in England. OK, Geordies then. It has been a bit of a shock to discover that the origins of my family name are to be found "oop North". So far North in fact there is a recognised Hodgson clan in Scotland. Lost sheep stealers from Newcastle on Tyne, I suspect. Nevertheless a proud name it is, and I hope to see it carried on.

So now to the tricky business of winnowing through the millions of online dating profiles and job advertisements (and believe me I've woken in cold sweats at the thought of getting my response letters mixed up here). But that is a tale for another day because it has just occured to me, while filling in yet another damn job application, that many of my old Rhodesian contemporaries have no idea I did in fact end up in the military after all. Not once, but twice. You will doubtless recall, having committed these writings to memory as you should, that I was rejected in 1979 by the Rhodesian Army on the grounds of being too young. So I waved goodbye to my classmates as they went off to war - and 1979 was in terms of casualties at least, the worst year of the war - and I was reincarcerated in Chaplin High School. But, and here is the detail that many of my battle hardened mates will not be aware of, I volunteered to go into the army in January 1980. Air Force actually. As a combat medic. And that is a whole blog on its own, that year - the best twelvemonth of my life bar none. But it was years later in 1988 when I signed up again - this time as a permanent force officer in the South African Defence Force.
And it is this startling fact that will cause the Rhodesians among you to gasp in horror, methylated spirits bottles falling from your nerveless grasp. Because of all the places in the world for a born anarchist and anti-authoritarian to end up, the SADF is the least likely to tolerate my quirky humour and delightfully non-establishment ways. I am all a-tremble with painful memories in writing this, although funnily enough I am currently wearing a SADF t-shirt, the plain brown one that is great for gym use. It was a really strange time - and I've had a few. I wonder if I should actually make this one into a novella? The Top Secret project memoranda that I wrote but was not officially allowed to to read due to not having a security clearance; the counter-interrogation training for pilot cadets (and to this day I am nervous flying SAA or Emirates, where many of them ended up), the gay Major who thought he was a white witch; the Intelligence captain who supplied me with Russian vodka and caviar in Oshakati; the medic captain who had parachute wings and slept to attention... OK OK , a book it is. The secret life of Captain Hodgson. Should be fun.