Five weeks after arriving back in Britain I turned around as I climbed the steps up to the Boeing 747 and I took one last look. After all, I didn’t plan on coming back for a while. I took a deep breath and it made me cough. The English bloke behind me started tut-tutting because I was holding them up and I just smiled at him - I was going home, and that was the finest feeling of them all.
As I got through the Boeing’s door I showed them my Boarding Card and the stewardess smiled at me the way they do and she said, row 42, down on the right.
And then she handed me the menu.

to be continued...

While I was in London I went to see one of Jade’s friends. His nickname’s Multi on account of the fact that he once misplaced his car in a multi-storey car park for over four hours. He was banged up in stuffy old Brixton prison, and it happened like this.
He got in a fight with this bloke. About what I don’t know, it could even have been about nothing, and the police arrived and they split them up and arrested Multi. He’ll tell you it’s because he’s black. Either way, the police charged Multi-Storey with aggravated affray and he got taken to court and they brought the full weight of the law down upon him. One police officer gave evidence and said that Mr Multi had been wielding a knife and that he’d thrown it as hard as he could when the coppers turned up and that it went in the River Thames. Two other coppers swore on the Bible that Multi had a knife and was trying to use it. The other guy, he slipped through their fingers and they never got a good look at him, they said. Well, Multi said he didn’t have a knife, and I believe him because Jade told me he’s not like that. Anyway, the missing knife did it for him - he got sent down to reside at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, as they euphemistically call it. See, in Britain they’re really tough on people who carry weapons, and sometimes they’re just tough on people like Multi.
It always comes as something of a surprise to me that Brixton Prison is actually in the middle of Brixton. I know it shouldn’t be a shock, what with it being called Brixton Prison and all that, but my image of a prison is, I suppose, of Dartmoor Prison where it’s in the middle of a moor.
So I went visiting. I joined the queue of people waiting to go in. In truth it wasn’t much of a queue. It’s not like in the films where a crowd of young, slightly put-upon but often still sexy women with screaming, bawling children hanging on their coat tails are waiting to see their Dad, or middle-aged women in curlers are hanging out for a cup of tea and a fag while looking forward to a few words with their young Darryl. No, it’s altogether bleaker than that. Most people don’t get any visitors at all and this fine morning I was the only one going to see Multi.  
“In my cell man, there’s this pane of glass missing.”
I looked at him across the table. “Well, it is bloody hot, mate. Maybe it’ll help keep the place cool.”
“Yeah, it gets hot as a fuckin’ Tube train man. Hot as that.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“But soon it’ll be winter.”
I hadn’t thought he’d be there that long but of course he would. Winter was going to come along soon enough.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll send you some money. Maybe someone can fix it for you.”
“No man, don’t send it. They’ll just nick the money. I know people here been sent money before and it never gets to them. Never.”
“Okay. What can I do?”
Multi looked around. I thought there’d be glass between us. The sort that’s so thick you can only hear muffled words. But this is Brixton Prison and they don’t have stuff like that.
“Me mum. She can get stuff to me in here.”
“How’s she do that then? Stick it in a cake or something?”
“Don’t be havin’ me man. Me mum has her ways.”
“Fair enough.”
“So maybe you can give something to her?”
“Maybe I can,” I said, “and maybe there’s something you can do for me.”
Multi snorted. “Yeah, man. Me banged up in here.”
I looked at him, “When you get out,” I said quietly.
“Okay,” he said when I’d told him.
He took a deep breath and let it out slow and I realised it was difficult for him to be in here. “So, how’s me Jade then?”
I laughed. “She’s really well. Getting browner and browner in the bloody sun.”
Multi looked at me and said quietly. “Turned out okay for both of you, didn’t it?”
I looked down at my hands on the table, took a deep breath and then looked up at him again.
“There’s some luck, there’s some other stuff. I don’t know half of what it is, and of course there’s finding Jade. That’s it really.”
He nodded and I said, leaning forward, “It’s hard to see you in here. It’s not good at all.”
He laughed. “Things’ll work out, man. They always do.”

You know, so many people turned up at my mum's funeral it humbled me. I think my mum would have appreciated it very much and I think she would have liked to have been there in person.
I just never realised she had so many friends.
What I did realise as I stood there was that many questions remained unanswered, not least what had been going on in the Mr Kipling factory. I know my mum would have a chuckle if she realised I wanted to know about that. She would have laughed and said, “that’s my boy. That’s my first born”.

What also soon became clear to me was that I’d got more relaxed living in Australia. In England it goes like this: one day, there I was driving along the M40 and as it comes up towards London you enter this gorge lined by chalk cliffs. It’s a steep upward slope and anything with more weight than an aluminium drinks can loses speed really quickly. So vans and trucks and buses should always be in the left-hand lane so you can go past them. Trouble is, in England they have this phenomenon known as White Van Man. White Van Man drives, well, a white van, and there are thousands of them on British roads. The thing is this, he has the equivalent of a Spitfire engine under the bonnet, or at least that’s what he thinks. These white vans can go at terrific speeds, especially on the motorway where they will tailgate you for miles and miles until you let them past so that they can warp-speed away into the distance. The only time you ever catch up with them is when they have an accident further up the road. So you see them again quite often. And there are White Van Man dopple-gangers spread right across Europe. In Germany they have VW Polo Man, in France there’s Renault Clio Man, in Spain it’s The SEAT Man, and in Italy, well they’re all just called Italians.
So, this White Van overtakes me just at the start of the steep hill and I’m thinking, why is he doing this because pretty soon he’s going to be...uh-oh and then he just pulls right in front of me, so close I can smell his aftershave (and it does not smell good, let me tell you) and I have to yank my steering wheel hard over and go past him because he has pulled up sharper than a crash dummy.
As I go past I shake my head at this particular fool - that’s all I do. Well, big mistake. The challenge is on. See, I’d been away too long. I’d forgotten that the worst thing you can do in England is make eye contact with a fellow road user. They see it as some kind of challenge. And bear in mind that I’d done nothing wrong. Anyway, I get to the top of the hill and the road levels out as it goes towards High Wycombe and Marlow and I look in the mirror and White Van Man is coming up behind me. Fast. I accelerate - you have to because if you wait for him he’ll just glue himself to your bumper and follow you home, even if you live in Marseilles.
By the time I’m up to 90 mph, which is about as fast as my diminutive hire car will go, he is still some way behind but he’s gaining. I put the pedal flat to the floor and the car does not leap forwards, the engine does not roar, the speedo does not show any upward movement. Anyhow, by now I am thinking about evasive action. An English friend of mine told me this same sort of thing happened to him once and eventually what he did was drive off the motorway and race into a housing estate and execute an elaborate and noisy handbrake turn in a quiet cul-de-sac. One minute he’d been casually driving home from work, the next he’s in a life or death situation. Pulling up, jumping out in the encroaching darkness, reaching into the boot of his car, waiting to see the lights of his pursuer’s ire, hefting a baseball bat in his hands.
"I didn’t know you played," I’d said, and he’d looked at me like I was simple. "Mate, everyone has a bat in the boot now." In my friend’s confrontation the other bloke took the hint and didn’t want to come out and play. I assume he’d left his own bat at home, otherwise no doubt they would have duelled there and then in Acacia Avenue, the click-clack of American baseball bats echoing in a sleepy Surrey backwater as night fell. I suppose the day will come, and probably it’s not that far off, when your British car tool kit will include a solid wooden baseball bat, nestling in there amongst the spanners, screwdrivers and wheel wrench.
My very own White Van Man was almost upon me but when I snatched a look in the mirror he’d gone. I panicked. He must be alongside me! I whipped my head around. He wasn’t. I looked over the other shoulder to see if he was creeping up on me from the nearside, or even hurtling along the hard shoulder. But he wasn’t there either. I breathed a sigh of relief. He’d obviously peeled away up the last off ramp, searching for other prey.
So you see, there’s little time to relax on a trip to Britain. Soon as you get there it’s all go. Except of course when you go to a funeral.

In some ways it’s easy to see why London has become like this, why there is this simmering anger. Take the buses. I did before I got myself a hire car and I tell you, they are hell on earth. Not because of the people who use them but because it was summer and they were like mobile cauldrons. Ironically the older buses, the traditional red double-decker Routemasters that you see plying the streets of truly central London, up Piccadilly and Regent Street and on to Oxford Circus and Oxford Street, are coolish even when the weather is stickily hot because you can open the windows along the sides and there’s the ever-open back end where the stairs go up. The newer buses, which have only their colour in common with the Routemasters, are shiny and clean and inside their seats are clothed in the brightest flecked material I have ever seen. These seat colours jostle and fight each other and I have to tell you they are not a pleasant sight first thing in the morning. I wondered if they came out of the packet like that or if someone had actually sat down and designed this horrendous colour scheme. If it’s the latter the perpetrators deserve to be tarred and veloured in garish multi-colours to within an inch of their lives until they promise never, ever to do anything like it again.
I got on the first new double-decker on a sweltering hot day and asked the driver if he could switch the air conditioning on. He looked at me. "You takin’ the piss, mate? This is London Transport, not bleeding Mercedes-Benz." Such is their witty repartee.
Suitably chastened I walked down the back of the bus and by the time I got there I was almost drowning in my own sweat. I flopped down on the back seat and it was hot to the touch. That’s not too surprising because underneath its padding you’ll find an engine the size of a small passenger car. In the winter this is fine. People perch there like a row of grey pigeons, all puffed up in their thick quilted jackets, each making the most of the fierce heat, each saying nothing, each savouring the intense warmth beaming up through their buttocks. But in the summer only a package tourist down from the Sun would want to go anywhere near this particular heat source.
On today’s modern London double-decker there are only a few side windows to be opened and they’re those ridiculous letterbox affairs that flap up. It beats me how anyone ever thought air could get in there, let alone how any of it could actually flow around the vehicle. Maybe they knew it wouldn’t work but just stuck them in there anyway, perhaps as some kind of cruel joke. Of course there are worse places to be, like upstairs where there are no opening windows at all. This is real pressure cooker stuff and I’m surprised not more people are carted off to intensive care suffering from heat stroke, gibbering in their delirium, "the windows, I saw no open windows...". Certainly if you’d had the gas turned off at home for non-payment of your bill this would be the ideal place to head for. Just slap your bacon and eggs on the inside of the front screen and they’d be done to a crisp in less than a minute.
I should say that at least regular bus travel gave me the chance to sample much more of the London bus drivers’ unique approach to customer relations. One day a woman came up to the open door of the bus and asked, "Can you tell me which bus I need to catch for Euston?" The driver didn’t look at her, just took a long and deep breath and said, "No" and we drove off. I saw her as we passed, her mouth suitably agape.
Another day the bus was almost empty and a tourist stood up. (I knew he was a visitor because he had his wallet in his back pocket where it was handily placed for any mugger to lift. Even a trainee pickpocket could have been away with it in the time it took his thieving fingers to touch the leather. What most worried me about this observation of mine was that I was beginning to think this way…). The tourist went to the door. The driver looked at him in the rear view mirror and as we approached the next stop he said, "If you want to get off mate you’ve got to press the button." The tourist watched as the bus stop went past. He looked at the driver who ignored him. Eventually he got off two stops up the road when someone else wearily got up and rang the bell for him.
There is air conditioning on London Underground trains. For the drivers. One day I ventured down to the Tube, taking the lift to the deep subterranean levels. As the doors parted I believed for a moment that I hadn’t paid enough attention at ground level and had mistakenly entered some exclusive underground sauna club, a place where businessmen could go to ease the stresses and strains of the daily grind. But no such luck, this was indeed the Underground, sizzling, humming with heat, a heat as big and as fierce as a pack of rabid animals. Imagine, I imagined, what it would be like on one of the dreaded trains itself what with the frequent and unexplained stops in the middle of tunnels and passengers who cannot even bring themselves to speak and their bodily odours all mixing and mingling. The thought of it all was enough to work me up into a sweat. I got back in the lift and returned to the world outside, being careful of course to look around before emerging into the sunlight. You do that in London, you are forever looking around, conscious of the youth who is walking perhaps a little too close to your heels or the young woman who brushes up against you on the Tube for just too long a moment. For all you know she may have been fishing for your wallet or your phone while she was making what you thought was bold sexual contact.

While I was in London people told me not to toot my horn at anyone if I drove through Brixton. I wondered what they were talking about. They said I could get shot. Only five years before I used to go there all the time. Brixton has always been at the cultural sharp edge. Back in the early 1900s the suburb’s Electric Avenue was so called because it was the very first street in London to get electric lights. Over time Brixton became a mainly black cultural centre as immigrants from Africa and the West Indies settled there, and during the 1980s it became a flash point as some particularly nasty riots tore the area apart when locals rebelled against what they felt were the injustices routinely meted out to them by the white majority and the local police. The soul-searching that followed - and the barrow loads of cash too - helped Brixton get back on its feet, and it boomed. Even Madonna came to strut her stuff at Brixton’s renowned Academy nightspot. Another tangible result of the renaissance following the riots was a great cinema - the beautifully renovated art deco Ritzy. When I lived in London I’d be seen down there two or three times a week, eyes glued to the screen and afterwards I’d stroll to the Tube, all safe and sound. And now people were telling me not to toot anyone because I could get shot. What a crying shame.   
When I went back there in 2001, young men on the streets of Brixton regularly sported guns and most made little pretence about hiding them. When the police arrived to try and arrest these gun-toters they were routinely stoned by gangs of locals who resented what they saw as heavy-handed intrusion into their community - that’s heavy-handed police, not gun-toters, you understand.  
Brixton is just one of many London boroughs that have seen an alarming increase in street muggings and violent attacks, a trend which is also apparent in the rest of Lambeth and in neighbouring Hackney, as evidenced by signs attached to lamp posts warning pedestrians to be on their guard against pick-pockets. And even the most genteel of suburbs cannot escape the blight. One of the worst hit is Richmond-on-Thames, home to the likes of Prince Michael of Kent, Mick Jagger and a slew of well-paid television types. Indeed, such is the spread of the help-yourself crime wave that I often felt like a stranger, a timid, wary stranger, right there in my own city. A city that felt, well, dangerous, to me.
One day I drove along London’s Embankment towards prosperous Chelsea where homes regularly sell for over a million pounds and I saw one of those large yellow police boards asking passers-by for information about ‘incidents’. This one told the brief and sorry tale of a man who’d been approached, robbed and then thrown into the Thames far below the roadway.
Another day I was sitting in crawling traffic through Peckham and as I passed an alleyway I saw another board. This particular short story was about someone who’d been murdered just two days before. He didn’t have an especially outrageous name - something like Billy Blake - but the sign said he’d also been known as The Crucial Kid and he’d been a local drugs dealer. He was 14 when he’d been killed - you’d have thought that was barely enough time to develop yourself a criminal master mind, let alone know how to use it.  

I spent most of the interminable flight to Britain composing a letter to Amnesty International asking if there was anything they could do about the barbarity of long-distance airline travel, and in particular if they could arouse international sympathy for myself and all my fellow passengers who were being tortured hour after hour in seats with so little legroom. And sometimes, I added in capital letters, THEY TURN THE OXYGEN LEVEL SO LOW I THINK WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!  The final crunch came when we were making our approach into London. I should have been looking out of the window absorbing the sights of my hometown. But I couldn’t because I was locked in an argument with a steward and stewardess about why I hadn’t got the Full English Breakfast.
"Where is my Full Monty?"
The stewardess looked at me and then crouched down so quick I thought maybe we’d hit some turbulence. She put her heavily made-up face close to mine, gave me that special tight smile only air hostesses can do and hissed, "You take your clothes off and so help me God I’ll have you arrested," and then she straightened up and smiled in that oh so special way and said, "Now sir, we can offer you a frittata."
"I don’t drink alcohol this time in the morning."
"Well," said the steward as he flung out hard bread rolls fast as bullets, "there are no more English Breakfasts. Okay?"
"But it’s on the menu you handed out when we took off a week ago."
"But you’re sitting in row 42."
"So?"
"So, you’re in the middle and we start at the front," (he swept his arms here like he was showing me the exit door. I swear that if you met them on the street and asked for directions they would move their arms in this slow sweep as they directed you to take the nearest exit over there), "and we start at the back, and by the time we get to where you’re sitting there are no more Full English Breakfasts. Sir."
"So, they pay more to sit at the back, do they?"
"No, but like I say-"
"But I want my Full Monty and I want it now!"
"Well you can’t have one."
And then we glided in and touched down with the most perfect landing I’ve ever experienced. The bloke next to me leaned over, smiled like Jack Nicholson and said, "Looks like the guy up front got his bacon and eggs."
Down on the ground it all seemed disturbingly familiar. Five years away and nothing had changed. Surely it should have done? Shabby Heathrow transit corridors, a copper shouting at me to turn my mobile phone off, the customs officer bored and tired, just waving me through, and the cold early morning air making me cough. It had been five years since I’d breathed this air shared by 11 million other Londoners. A polite little cough seemed the least I could do to trumpet my arrival.
When you get out in the London streets you realise just how hectic the pace of life can be. Of course it’s partly down to the number of people. In London and its suburbs you’re mixing it with all those hustling, bustling, shouldering, barging people. It’s not like Sydney where you’ll often bump into a familiar friendly face down on George or Pitt Street. In London there are so many people you are well and truly alone.
And of course things had changed. It was just that the changes weren’t that obvious at first.
Now there’s a two pound coin, Channel Five, a Labour Government, interactive TV, whatever that is, and tens of thousands of European and Middle Eastern refugees. And then there’s an oh-so-slow 40 mph speed limit on the flyover going into London at the end of the M4. When I was 21 and sharing a place with Deak, The Prince of Darkness, I used to whiz along here as fast as I could, all flash in my road-test cars, hugging the bend as I zipped past the swish new computer company buildings. Today there are no more computer company buildings. In fast-moving, ever-changing London they’ve all gone bust or been absorbed, or replaced by swish new global pharmaceutical conglomerates whose brand names are so long you can’t read them comfortably, even at 40 mph.
As I was meandering along I had plenty of time to wonder what the new-found British preoccupation with speed - or rather lack of speed - was all about.  
In the UK there are now at least twice as many speed cameras as in any other country in Europe. There’s actually a good reason for this mushrooming of the inquisitive lens and it’s not what you think - it’s got hardly anything to do with the stated UK government intention to keep speed down in order to cut accidents. (This is a stupid fallacy in any case. Figures released by the UK’s Department of Transport revealed that in fact only 4.5 per cent of crashes are due to excess speed). When I was last living in Blighty five years before there had been enough speed cameras to record every journey, even those taken by pedal bike, but now the cameras are so numerous and so technically advanced they can tell you the name on the bike’s frame and even the make of bicycle clips you’re wearing.
Now, if speed isn’t actually to blame for the bulk of accidents, why so many cameras? The answer’s depressingly simple really, it’s because the police forces who erect them get to keep the money from any fines they are able to grab from the offending and photographed motorist. Mind you, there are still some laughs to be had out of all of this. Police in Kent sent a speeding motorist a photo of his good self breaking the speed limit along with a demand for payment of the fine. He being a bit of a joker sent them a photograph of his own - of a bundle of money. Not to be outdone, the coppers sent a picture of a pair of handcuffs. The speedster got the hint and paid up.
That aside there is little to laugh about. All the time you feel you’re being watched, which of course you are. There are some good reasons for this - namely pick-pocketing and muggings. You always had to be careful in old London town, even in Roman times I reckon it was a bit risky, but now you need SAS training to spot all of the dodgy geezers and ensure you avoid having your wallet lifted or mobile phone snatched.
If you’re a mugger in London, the best trick, apparently, is to grab someone’s mobile phone and then sell it on quick as you can. This means young working professionals are being targeted by the muggers, rather than the old or vulnerable, though presumably they’ll still get a tap too if the mugger thinks it’s worthwhile. So, you’re working for some big corporate, and this is London so you’re smartly dressed, which sort of alerts the mugger, and you come out of the Underground, phone glued to your ear, nattering to a mate or colleague and they pounce, hitting you to the ground, nicking the phone and running. Newspaper articles regularly detail this crime and there was even one paper with a regular table that told you where that week’s mugging hotspots were. I think you can even phone a special number and get the latest info - well, you can if you’ve still got your phone. They’ll also tell you how to find out what your mobile’s serial number is. Apparently without this you can’t actually get the phone cancelled and the muggers know this and phone away at your expense and to their heart’s content.
While I was in London someone told me how she’d just that day seen a man beaten on the Wandsworth Road. This is the busy main road linking Vauxhall with the trendy suburbs of Wandsworth, Battersea and Clapham. Just a stone’s throw from the multi-billion pound MI5 building, as it happens. Early on this particular evening, before it had even got dark, three kids attacked an Asian man, punching him, battering him to the ground. When a bus stopped they ran off but not before they’d stolen the bloke’s wallet and turned him into a hospital case. Someone else told me how a couple of months ago she’d been waiting in the bus queue with another woman and an old man. A youth walked up, stuck a hand calm as you please into the old man’s jacket and came out with his wallet and ran off. It only took a few seconds. The old man couldn’t believe it. "I’m being robbed!" he shouted, as much in disbelief as in concern for his lost belongings. But at least the mugger didn’t shoot him...
And this is the thing. I’d wondered why almost all of the police officers I saw were wearing black flak jackets over their white summer shirts, especially in the sticky summer heat. Well, in today’s London if they’re to stand an evens chance of reaching the end of a shift without being wounded - or worse - they have to wear the bulky protection simply because this largely unarmed police force is constantly having to face guns on the streets, guns in the clubs, even guns in the schools. It used to be a pair or Nikes or the latest Adidas trainers that sparked fights in the playground. Now it’s about who’s got the smoothest, most powerful gun. It’s about controlling your patch, and never mind that some of these gun toters are only 13 and 14. Kids in London know that you can certainly get rich quick - you just need the inclination and the right tools for the job. First off you have to go and get a gun, then point that gun at someone and take their drugs off them. That’s cheaper and less risky than trying to import the hard stuff into the country yourself.
Just before I arrived there was a US-style drive-by-shooting outside a city nightclub. What bothered the police was not so much that someone could drive by and start indiscriminately shooting, though clearly that was a worry in itself, rather it was that some of the club-goers who were leaving at the time took out their own guns and started firing back.

And then, all of a sudden I had to go home. We’d been living in Australia for five years. Five years! The time just flies on by when you’re busy reinventing yourself. Still, I thought of England as home. Strange thing was, I’d never once felt homesick even though I was as far away as you could get.
As I put the phone down though I wondered how I’d feel when I went back. Then I got to thinking about all that time I’d spent trying to write those damned books, all that time being proud even as I went to the brink of living out on the streets, all that time thinking about what I wanted to do and striving to do it. I think that none of this had been good, and that’s why I never felt homesick - it was a relief to be away from it all, from the pressure, the strain, the depression. But sometimes you have to go back and when Tom told me that the cancer had almost gone but then it had come back stronger and fitter and marched on in my mum’s body until she just couldn’t take it any more I sat and I thought. I sat thinking about all the time I’d spent by myself when perhaps I could have spent some of it with my family, spent some of it with my mother. You know, I think that you never believe your parents will die. Of course you know they will but most people never focus in on it, don’t spend all their time thinking about it, which I suppose is how it should be. But one minute your parents are healthy and fit and doing stuff and the next minute something like this can happen and they change down a gear, the brakes go on and suddenly, before you know it, they are barely the people you’ve known all your life.  
I managed to get through to my mum on the phone in the hospital and she said she didn’t know where she was. She sounded just like my granny before she died. I mean that she had a Yorkshire accent. My mum hadn’t had a Yorkshire accent in all the time I’d known her, which of course was all my life, though I guess she must have had a twang when I was little because I was born in Middlesbrough when she was 21. She taught in a tough inner city Middlesbrough school and she was an only child and I think she must have been lonely when she was a kid, though she never said she was. I just guessed. She told me one day, with more than a trace of bitterness that there had been lots of things she’d wanted to do. I was too embarrassed by this uncharacteristic outburst to ask exactly what those things had been and instead I just said, “well, you should have done them then”.
Since I’ve grown up a bit I’ve had things like that said to me and boy does it sting. In the depths of my own personal despair someone in Britain once said to me, “you know, I don’t think you’ll be able to pull yourself out of this.” Bollocks, I said to myself at the time. I spat the word in my head. Sometimes you just have to take your problems and you just have to say bollocks to them. I wished my mother had said bollocks to a few things. She might have had a bit more fun if she had, rather than bottling it all up inside like she did. Look, it’s just a personal thing, but I reckon you live longer if you let go a bit. I’ve bottled stuff up and I’ve let things go and letting go is the way. I think if you do that then you’ll live a whole lot longer and I intend to live for, well, forever actually, so let go, have a shout, move some stuff around. Live longer.
When I got her on the phone in that hospital she said, “I’m leaving you -” and then her voice trembled and I thought, God, here I am on the other side of the bloody world and she’s on the phone and she just so happens to be dying at this very moment, and then she got control of her voice again and continued, “- leaving you some money.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
I talked to Tom and told him I’d fix a flight but it was Easter and everything was closed so we had to wait until the Tuesday. On Tuesday I got a flight booked for later that week, it was the best I could do, but early the next evening the phone rang and I answered it and my sister was there and she told me mum had died. My first thought was, oh God, that’s really going to give Tom something to complain about. Of course I was right, but this time you couldn’t blame him. Really you couldn’t.
One day, mum had told me that a friend of her’s had revealed some damning evidence about the way Mr Kipling cakes were made and that as a result she would never buy them or eat them again. I asked her what she knew and she said it was so terrible that she couldn’t tell me. I wish I’d quizzed her because now there’s no way I’m ever going to find out what the story was, and of course it also means I’ll never eat a Mr Kipling cake again, which is a shame because I always rather liked them.

As often seems to happen, one door closes and another one opens. Trouble was, The Dipper was on the other side of this particular wood veneered entranceway, and he was beckoning me in like Fagin.
“Mate, got a new job. They want an editor-in-chief sort of thingy and I thought it’d be right up your darkened alley, he-he. Come on over and have a coffee and I’ll introduce you to the team. Hey, can you pick up some fags for me on the way over? Couple of packs should do it, no hang on, see if you can handle four.”
So began my next job. Over the doorway they should have had a sign: Dysfunctional Family-Owned Company would have about done it.
The first mistake they made was putting nephew Kent in charge.
Kent drank alcohol like his life depended on it, fancied himself as a ladies man, a salesman (which, sadly for the company, he wasn’t), and he reckoned he could party Paris Hilton under the table any day of the week, which was probably true.
On a business trip to Brisbane he took the new salesman out on the town and ended up roaming the streets singing and sucking the life out of bottles of FourX until the police arrived and told them it was illegal to drink alcohol on the streets. “We don’t fuckin’ care,” bleared Kent, “we’re from Sydney.” And then he ran off up the road, with a copper in hot pursuit.
The young salesman spent the night banged up in a cell while Kent, powered by booze, somehow managed to evade capture and slept it off in a park.
During the night someone took his mobile phone and wallet and by all accounts had a right old time spending the loot, maxing up his credit cards and using his mobile to call all the relatives they could find worldwide.
One time I went with him to a conference in Hong Kong and he insisted on going to what he called the Titty Bar. I said, “I thought you’d never been to Hong Kong before?” He leered at me, “Mate, they have a Titty Bar everywhere.” Needless to say I made my excuses and retired for the night.
The following morning he staggered into the restaurant for breakfast, stood swaying, sweating in the doorway, hair spiky on his head, bloodshot eyes staring around the room as if he wondered not only how he’d got there, but also who he was.
We were there for a week, and one other night we went out for a meal in a dodgy part of the city (“much more fun down here, skipper,” he told me, but not looking at me as he leered at beautiful, haughty, red-silk-dressed Chinese girls passing by). Hee put his new credit card behind the bar, much to the amusement of the locals who, it later turned out, bought a new engine for a Hong Kong harbour junk by using his copious credit.
In fact, I think before we left the establishment they were bolting it in.

At the dysfunctional family company there was nothing entered into with more gay abandon than partying and dressing up. If they'd put as much effort into the business itself we'd all have been Lear jet owners and I'd have had a house on the bay at Biarritz.
As it was, come Melbourne Cup Day, (which for my non-Aussie readers is similar to the UK's Grand National, and we get a day off work) we were all summoned out into the garden just before lunch and each handed colourful horses' tails which we had to pin to our backsides. A track was painted into the grass by old man Jones whose only job appeared to be organising the painting of tracks, the signs which went up when we went off-site on cross-country pursuits, and ensuring the water fountain bottle was only changed once a month ("whether we've run out of water or not, young sir...").
The owner's wife - a chain-smoking harridan with a wharfy's roughneck voice - bellowed at us as we ran to, "move yer arses, go on yer bludgers!" while waving and cracking a stock whip which caused old man Jones to clutch his chest in what I thought to be as fine an imitation of a man who was about to have a heart attack as I've ever seen.
As I was galloping around the track one year, my tail flailing out behind me, the harridan trying to flick my backside with her vicious whip and Kent staggering across the track in front of us resplendent in a clown's outfit, clutching a Crown lager, going, "neigh, neigh, horsy, hey, watch out there fella!") I wondered what were the hidden benefits of working here.
The final crunch came at Christmas. The orders came down from the wife, it's fancy dress and this is what you will wear.
They got me to dress up as a famous Aborigine boxer. No I can't remember his name but it was someone back in the 1920s, (so there's your quiz for today), complete with red satin shorts, boxing boots, big red shiny boxing gloves and my lily white skin blacked up by old man Jones so I looked like a Black-and-White-Minstrel.
Each of the staff was ordered to board a public bus to the venue, the idea being that the omnibus's patrons would try to guess, with much glee, it was supposed by the management, exactly who we were.
I stepped aboard and tried to punch my ticket in the machine - no mean feat when you're trapped inside a pair of boxing gloves - but eventually managed it, turned around to walk to a seat and realised by the faces looking at me with the kind of silence you only hear before something momentous is likely to happen to you, also going to their Christmas party, was the Waramilijaratu aborigine clan - every last single one of them.

And what a bunch they’d hired.
There was the American girl who’d never worked for a real company in her life. She’d come out of some Ivy-League university and then gone to work for one of the big consultancy firms. She came from money, she employed her own publicist and so regularly appeared in the newspapers, lauded as an international marathon runner, a top violin player and an unofficial ambassador to all young Americans who might visit Australia. She spoke fluent French and had an MBA from Harvard. But the Internet venture was her first outing in the real world and it must have been a strange place for her - all these people who lived in a world where you actually had to make something. She had that false American bonhomie and insisted on calling me Kingster as in, “Hiya, Kingster, how’s it hanging you big cordiba.” I have to be honest, most of the time I had no idea what she was talking about.
One morning I went into the office kitchen where she was fixing herself a bowl of green leaves (for a time I thought she owned a pet rabbit which dwelled in secrecy in her office, but actually the rabbit food was for her goodself) and I asked her how she was getting on with her new boyfriend. She frowned and looked at the leaves and then looked at me and went hummph, and then started to stir the leaves and then looked at me sideways and said, “ya know Kingster, he is giving some good cognitive responses to my alliterations, so yeah I guess he is in a truly responsive mode and willing to be clustered into a relationship. But only of sorts, and to be honest it will be some prescient person who can truly unlock his spiritual belongings and bring that baggage home right where it belongs.”
No, I’ve no idea either.
Then there was The Cowboy, so called because he was always cutting corners and riding roughshod over everyone. He also wasn’t very good at his job, but it was easy for him to disguise this fact because, well, no one actually knew what his job was. Basically he went to meetings. One day I bumped into someone who’d worked with him previously at a big corporate and he told me they didn’t know what The Cowboy’s job was there either. “He just went to loads of meetings,” said this bloke looking at his shoes as if he were embarrassed that someone could get away with this for so long.
I was in numerous meetings with The Cowboy and when something came up someone was unhappy with, his face took on the pained screwed-up look of a man sitting in the privacy of his own toilet attempting to sort out a particularly stubborn case of constipation. Then all of a sudden he would thump the desk and shout out things like, “it’s easy for you to be coming at me like this but have you checked the HTML code!? Of course you haven’t! Before you come at me again in this shit-house manner I’d really like you to be aware of the damage this is inflicting on my team!”
Bonkers.
They had this other guy who’d worked as an accountant since leaving university. And he’d worked for the same company, so that was like 18 years with the same bunch of accountants. Now, he thought he was at the cutting edge of things, what with suddenly working in this Internet company. One day he even came into work without a tie.
One morning I was walking up the stairs and he said to me, “Hey there, we’re the risk takers.” I looked at him and said, “what, you with your Volvo?” He didn’t think that was funny at all. Come to think of it, he didn’t think very much was funny. That’s what you get for being an accountant - sorry but that’s the truth of it. What always strikes me as funny about accountants is that they think they can do other things besides adding columns of figures up (I understand some of them can even subtract and divide too).
My question is, how come whenever a company bites the dust they get a bunch of accountants in and all of a sudden they are experts at running an airline or an insurance company or an Internet start-up company? I just don’t understand it. It’s like me saying, I have been a driver of cars since I was 17 so I think they should put me in charge of a major soup manufacturer. Actually that would make more sense than an accountant trying to run a business. One day he said, “You know, I took all of the company’s magazines to the swimming baths this Saturday and as my kids were swimming I had a bit of a look and I can tell you, those blue boxes are going to have to go and I don’t like the look of this story on page four and...”. Meanwhile I understand the pool attendant was giving his four year old. You know, I didn’t do all the training I did, and get all of the experience I’ve got to be told by an accountant how to make a magazine look good. Do I tell them how to add up, or how to design a balance sheet? No, and I bloody well don’t want to because you know what, I’ve got some imagination and it can be used for better things than cooking someone’s books, which is certainly something they are expert at. I know this because I watch the news every day.  
One week I took a couple of days off and when I came back they’d put together a document outlining where the company would be five years down the track. Now, everyone has the right to be positive but this accountant bloke had said in his document that in five years time the company would have revenues of five billion dollars. When I came back and saw this I rushed up to his office and said, “There seems to be a mistake on the document. Is it too late to get all the copies back!?”
He looked startled and grabbed the document and started feverishly leafing through it until he found the right page. Then he let a held breath out and said, “No,” and relaxing into his chair he added, “it’s all correct.”
“No”, I said insistently, slapping the document with my hand, “it says five billion dollars. Surely it should be five million?”
He looked at me and smiled. “You have to be positive.”
All well and good, but at that stage we had not brought in a single cent. How could we make five billion dollars (that’s 5000 million dollars - I just have to write it down, it is such a stupid number) within five years when we didn’t even have a product that worked?
Interestingly, the accountant previously worked as a partner in a company that should be no stranger to us all - it’s the one that did the accounts for America’s Enron and Australia’s HIH Insurance. Now, doesn’t it all begin to make some sense? Not much maybe, but some.   
There was Doctor Optimist. The good doctor had had a chequered career. He’d worked in the UK for some years as a journalist, and then decided to set-up his own business. That didn’t last long and soon he was out looking for a new job. Eventually he ended up going back to Australia where he managed to get a senior position with a large publishing company, mainly because there wasn’t anyone else available with the required expertise. Whether he had the expertise himself is a moot point and as I got to know him better I realised he was certainly an expert at one thing - office politics. He rose up through the ranks until he was second only to the managing director. His rise was accomplished by surrounding himself with yes men and women, all of whom were none too bright but who protected him completely on account of his patronage. Now, when the Doctor saw the bright lights of the Internet you just couldn’t stop him getting all excited, and it wasn’t long before he was churning out some of the best phrases I’d heard. Aside from his favourite;  “let’s take this off-line”, (translation: let’s talk about this after the meeting) he also flagrantly used, “outside the triangle”, was extremely regular with  “let’s corral that and move on”, and absolutely loved to death, “the hypothesis dictates a crucial information flow of functionality”. Personally I best liked, “I’ll be working remotely today” which meant he’d be at home with his feet up watching Foxtel.
Doctor Optimist would go out and sell concepts to people. That’s all they were of course,
concepts. None of the stuff he promised could be delivered and this soon became patently obvious to all concerned as it, well, wasn’t delivered. But he was an optimist, you understand, so he believed...something. I’m not sure what it was. And I’m not really sure he knew either...
The office manager. Every company seems to have one unfortunately, and we definitely had one. Well, you never would have thought there could be that much paperwork in the world, and I always thought it a bit ironic, what with us being a cutting-edge Internet company that there was so much paperwork floating about. I kid you not, when we wanted to throw anything out we had to fill in a form itemising the objects to be heaved! For example, other paperwork that we no longer needed. I think if the form you had to fill in with the details about chucked items eventually got thrown out too there would be a form for that also, but I was never sure if that would be the first form or another sub-form...This is what you get when you let an accountant take his tie off.
They also had this young fat boy called The Web Master. Working on that basis, it seemed to me that I should be called The Wisdom Master, on account of my age, or that the mailman should be called The Deliverer and the person who handed out the damned forms should be called The Forms Giver.
What was The Web Master’s role? Well, obviously his job entailed trawling through Internet porn sites. That’s what he spent most of his day doing, so I assume that’s what his role was. Actually that’s a bit unfair because he also looked up Subaru WRX sites too and for one whole week I noticed he was checking out skiing venues. Obviously there was plenty to The Web Master’s role, but what exactly it was I never discovered, partly because I couldn’t understand anything he said. It was all technical gobbledegook to me. When The Web Master sent me emails I had to get one of the 10 Chinese technology blokes to decipher them and even then we couldn’t always get to the bottom of his messages and work out what it meant.
The Chinese were interesting. Within a week of them arriving the Aussies secretly started calling them The Boat People. I know, the lack of imagination worried me too and it should have rung a few warning bells. After all, how could you hope to launch a new super-duper company with innovative new ideas and mould-breaking new business practices that would change the very way everyone did business, when the best nickname you could come up with for a group of Chinese blokes was, The Boat People? Anyway, Australians being Australians they tended to give the Chinese guys a wide berth. I’ve always found with any Chinese people that if you make the effort to talk to them they quickly warm to you, even the ones why look like they’ve been sucking on an under-ripe lychee.
Personally, I liked the Chinese blokes because they always helped me out when I needed technical assistance, which was only about 48 times a day. The Chief Technology Officer was this Chinese bloke called Barry and he was really quite something. Because I got on with him and his guys they’d always help me out but with others who were difficult with Barry and his boys there was a game to be played. First thing was, they’d pretend that they didn’t understand. This took the form of tightly squinting their eyes and slow side-to-side rocking of their heads. So tightly squinted were their eyes on occasion it was hard to actually see their eyes at all. This became pretty disconcerting, especially when eight of them all did it at the same time. You could get dizzy. Get them and the constipated looking Cowboy in the same room at the same time and it was a dreadful thing to behold. Eventually of course - once the Chinese guys were on the verge of cracking up and laughing their heads off - Barry would lean back in his chair, clasp his hands across his belly and say, “Oh, I see now. Now you are explaining it clearly, I see your problem.” Then he would spring forward in his chair and launch into machine-gun Chinese and his guys would all start shouting too. Much later, when Barry left the company he told me that usually they were discussing the American girl’s cleavage or what they were going to be having for dinner, or whether it was better to cook rice the traditional way or by using a rice cooker. Just for the record, the rice cooker got their vote.
Anyway, when the Chinese shouting stopped - brought to a halt by Barry raising his hand quickly, stopping it in mid-air so it quivered like an arrow - he would come out with stuff from the TV series Kung Fu. Literally lines from the series. It had been off TV so long he reckoned there was little chance anyone in the office would remember it, at least not in detail. So, he’d say, “when there is symmetry there will be power”, or “the wind will bring confusion in the forest and until it passes the mouse waits. Then he will pounce.” Usually this worked and after one meeting I saw Cowboy outside, face scrunched up in constipation as he watched the tops of the trees to see which way the wind was blowing and listening hard for a mouse who might suddenly leap out and surprise him.       
Now, this new company started off very well, by which I mean we all got paid massive salaries (even now, seven years later, I’ve never earned that much a year again) but as the business progressed it was clear to me and many others that this was far from a definite go-er. Right from the start I’d had this uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach and I soon realised it had nothing to do with what I was eating, it was to do with what these people were feeding me. See, the American girl started to bring in all these, well bollocks is the word for it actually, but she referred to them as systems. The idea here was that your sales people made X number of calls a day and out of that number of calls a predetermined percentage of them (I know, I know, but try and stay with it...) would turn into X number of visits to potential clients, and out of that X number of visits there would be X number of successful sales and that would determine what the sales person had to get each week in revenue.
Now, as anyone who has ever stepped out into the big wide world knows, it just doesn’t work like that. Of the X number of calls you make some will just be a complete waste of
time, of the X number of visits you make X number will be a partial waste of time, and of the X number of visits there will be a percentage of successful calls, but it’s impossible to know how many, simply because you are dealing with humans. You’ve got about as much chance of cracking this type of X-nonsense as you have of winning the bloody lottery jackpot (I know this because I have tried both). Of course, you can imagine the way the sales people viewed this stuff - they either started to look for other jobs or they went off for the afternoon and played a game of golf with their mates. Games of golf were not factored into the X-factor, but of course they should have been because more successful work gets done out there than anywhere else (well, unless you’re Don and his brother in which case the only visible work that comes out of a golf game is a spot of vehicle panel-beating in Bondi. Oh yeah, there’s The Dipper too. He spends most of his work time on the golf course and no work is getting done).
Thinking back on it now it’s amazing that it lasted quite as long as it did. The first warning signs came when we couldn’t make anything technical work properly at all. None of the websites we put up ever did the jobs they were supposed to, and of course advertisers soon got wise to that. As nothing got delivered the management eventually realised that this simply wasn’t going to work, or as they said, “we’re proceeding in an downward southerly direction and that is not in keeping with our philosophy of organic growth and profit-generating potential”. So, they started what they called “restructuring”. Now, why don’t people ever really tell you what they mean? Most of us would prefer it if they said,  “well look here old chap, we’re in a spot of serious doo-doo here and if we’re to have a chance in hell of surviving for a bit longer, we need...well, we need to get rid of a few people.”
But of course they never say that - they just Restructure. And companies think they are being clever with this Restructure business. The accountant calls you in and says, “Now, let’s discuss the Restructure”, and already a fine film of sweat is forming on his upper lip and it has nothing to do with the heating system. And then he gets up at the whiteboard and draws what looks like Hitler’s battle plan for Poland. “Now, Derek moves here and Stuart pushes into this position and Graham is going to be Head of Ops for Asia and this is where I sit.” And then you realise that at no stage has your name been either brought up or drawn on the whiteboard and you think, any moment now he’s going to tell me that he wants me to head the entire operation and the keys to the Jag are already on my desk. But it doesn’t happen like that, well it never does in my experience, and you’re left asking him, “so, pray tell me, how do I fit into the new structure?” and the accountant looks at the white board, momentarily speechless as if he’s forgotten you existed and have somehow been left out of the Restructure in some kind of oversight that actually has nothing to do with him and then he blurts out, “Oh yes, well we thought you’d like to go into E-Planning,” or some other such bollocks. “Oh yes,” you say, “and how does that affect my package?” And he looks at you and sits down and says, “well, as the job description is changing (which incidentally is news to you) the annual salary will change to reflect this change.” Now, let’s get one thing clear here folks - this does not mean your pay is going up. Oh no, not at all, no sirree. It’s going to go southerly, it’s going to go way down, so low it’s going to be worth even less than the company’s shares which in themselves have slunk lower than a first rate limbo dancer.
Of course, eventually they all lost their jobs. Me? I decided to bail out there and then. I wasn’t going to take a 30 per cent pay cut.
I imagine Mr Accountant often stops and leans on his garden spade and asks himself if it really was so wise to have taken his tie off at all, as he wonders whether to plant carrots or swede in that patch next year.
The Office Manager gave herself a letter to say she was made redundant, the Web Master probably hasn’t noticed his job has ceased, he’s still too busy, his eyes greedily hoovering up new porn sites from around the world wide web.
The Dipper, I happen to know, is still out on the golf course, with someone else’s clubs of course.
The Cowboy is still shouting the odds in some meeting or other in some other corporate which is just about to fold.
The American girl managed to get engaged to one of the partners in the venture capital company that funded the whole sorry affair and she went back with him to America. It was one way of getting a free flight home, and once she was safely back in the US she broke the engagement off. I think that in truth her reasoning went something like this: “An exit strategy from the Internet space would dictate a route that matched performance related KPIs with a plan that combines a relationship, or supposed relationship, in order to vacate said space in a timely manner. This we have done.  Now, let's lock and load phase two. Frankly, once out of the Internet parameters and back on terra firma Stateside, the outlined relationship can be placed in abeyance. But I'll get Trevor to run the numbers and see if that is cognisant with my current philosophy on this. Are you comfortable with the paradigm?”
Meanwhile, Doctor Optimist also, “vacated the Internet space” or as he would no doubt have said, “I’m going to be working off-line”.
What I also discovered afterwards was that the CEO was on a salary of $500,000 and the accountant was on $400,000. No wonder the company never made any money...
And the final word on this episode should go to someone I don’t even know who I was in a lift with. As I was leaving the building, she said to her friends, “I’ll be really glad when this Internet thing is all over.” Everyone laughed.
Well, you have to.