"What you want to do skip, is you go with your missus. You go in and have a few drinks and then you say you’re off and you get given two of them computer software packs as a present for coming along. Now, you go and put ‘em in the car and then you go back and you go up to another of those public relations chicks and you say, ‘ello, I forgot to take my software packs, and she smiles at you and gives you two more, ‘cos that’s her job, see? Then what you do is, the next day you call them up and you say, I was there last night and somehow you blokes forgot to give me and my colleague (that’s your missus, Big Kay) one of those software packs and so they apologise and they send you two more. That means you’ve got six altogether. Now, I’ve already got buyers for all six. What I’m saying to you mate is that you and your missus could get six too, and then I’ve got 12, and I flog ‘em and make you some money too. What d’ya reckon t’that?”
I met The Dipper at work. The big thing about him is his thick skin. Now, some people will tell you they have a thick skin but Dipper could have taken on a rhino in the Thick Skin Competition and won hands down.
“Well,” he told me one day, “me mates call me The Dipper on account of the fact if I see something I’ve gotta dip inside it and see if there’s anything worth ‘aving.” And then he laughed out loud, showing his gappy teeth.
The thing is, this bloke was into everything and anything. If there was money in it, he’d be involved. If he could see an angle, he’d take it. If he could just pick something up and sell it on, he’d be lifting it quicker than you could say, stop thief.
It soon became clear to everyone that they had to lock up all their belongings, otherwise The Dipper would have them. He’d even take empty CD cases. One day one of my colleagues put a note in an empty CD case. It said, “Dipper, why don’t you just take it?” and then he went home early. Dipper came sniffing around just before five o’clock and picked the case up and said to me, “What’s this?”
“CD case,” I said looking over my glasses at him for a moment before returning to my work. He grunted and then he turned it over and over and looked at it closely from every angle and then he opened it up and saw the note and frowned for a second. He looked like a big gorilla who knows he’s found something interesting in the jungle, but he’s not sure exactly what. The Dipper finished reading the note and he laughed out loud. “Will you take a look at this?” he said and as I turned around to look he let me read the note and then closed the CD, and still shaking his head at the humour of it all he pocketed the empty case in one smooth motion. “some people, they are so fuckin’ funny.”
Yes, I said.
One day, five new laptop computers went missing on the floor he worked on. Another day The Dipper was caught on a security camera carrying out a load of wooden shelves on his shoulder - the MD told The Dipper’s boss that he had to bring them back - and on another occasion he brought his car around to the front of the building and was seen easing some filing cabinets in.
Once, Jade and I went round to his house because he had a computer he wanted to sell. Dipper was there with the kid from next door - I guess he would have been about 13 - and both of them were sitting on the floor putting CDs in cases.  Jade said, “hey, those look like the latest Madonna CD.”
“Yer right. Not even out yet. Me young friend here’s been downloading off the Net and I got some CD cases for ‘im. We’ve got a rumble going on. Sell ‘em down the Organic Market on Sundays. Go like the clappers they do.” And then he playfully cuffed the boy around the head and said, ‘off you go now young fella, and don’t forget, I need that Nelly
Furtado tomorrow.”
Fagin would have been proud.
As Dipper was showing me the computer Jade looked around.
“Hey,” she said, “this chest of drawers looks familiar. Where have I seen these before?” And Dipper just smiled and said, “I had them out of that company, you remember the one we used to work for? Just backed the Falcon up, popped the boot and slipped them in there. Went in easy as- “
“Yeah”, I said quickly, “I think we’ve got it.”
Another time he told me this remarkable story. The sort of story you’d never dream of telling anyone. But he did...
Every year the company had a golf tournament organised by one of the staff. Anyone could play and The Dipper wanted to, not least because it was free and anything free was right up his darkened alleyway. Trouble was, The Dipper didn’t have a set of golf clubs, well not a full set. One day though he managed to solve the problem. I'll let him take over the telling of this one.
“So there I was up at the golf club. See I didn’t have a full set of clubs but I go up there and have a bit of a putt. There’s always someone I can get talking to who’ll give me some grog.
“On good days I can get three or four glasses without having to pay anything. That’s the sort of golf day I love, see. After I’d played I went out to the Falcon for the off and I was swaying about a bit on account of the grog I’d had, but anyway I found the motor alright and as I was walking up to it I sees this woman leaning her golf clubs on the back of her car and then she goes off and goes in the shop. I saw an opportunity here so I unlocks the Falcon’s boot remotely with me infra-red key thingy and then I scoops that woman’s clubs up on me way past and easy as you like slip ‘em into the Falcon, slap the boot closed and I’m away, clean as. See, then I went to the golf day and it were ripper mate. Shame them clubs weren’t my size, y’know, but I had a top day - plenty of free grog and all that.”
One day he said to me, “You know, my wife? She don’t like you.” And I said to him, “You know, I don’t like her either. I don’t like racists.”
And he said, without a hint of apparent humour, “Nah mate, she’s not racist. She just don’t like them blacks, that’s all.”
Well now, here’s a funny thing and really the point of this story. The Dipper has two kids and they’re young adults, one’s working and the other’s at university. He thinks he’s close to his kids but they’re not close to him - he’s just too embarrassing for them.
One day it’s his son’s birthday, his 18th, no less, and The Dipper is hosting a backyard barbeque and all is relatively blissful in the Dipper household. Or as Dipper himself would say - it were ripper, mate. The sun is shining, the sausages are sizzling, the steak is juicy, and the burgers are almost ready. Then there’s the sound of the front door bell - it plays Waltzing Matilda and sometimes Dipper will not open the door until it’s played right through because he just loves that tune - but this time The Dipper thinks it must be someone else coming to the party and so off he goes and opens the door.
And standing there on the doorstep is this young man, who, as it happens, is also 18, though it isn’t his birthday. He looks at The Dipper and Dipper looks at him and Dipper thinks he looks sort of familiar but he can’t place him immediately and he thinks he must have drunk more grog than he thought.
By now The Dipper’s wife is walking up towards the door too, asking him who is it and before Dipper can say anything and just as his wife gets to the door and looks past her hulk of a husband the young man on the doorstep says, “Dad. It’s me.” That’s not what gets The Dipper’s wife screaming hysterically; rather it’s the fact that the young man standing on her doorstep on her son’s 18th birthday is black. Very black indeed.
It turns out that The Dipper had an affair with a black woman and he never told his wife. Well, he wouldn’t, would he?

I was lying on the bed one day reading a book. In fact it was a mattress on the floor. It was hot outside but in the room it was cool and I was off work for the day. Probably I’d had one too many of those excellent Cooper’s Pale Ales the evening before (the green-labelled Pale is not as strong as the Sparkling Ale and it has a vanilla flavour and just a bit of bubbly-bite). Jade was outside somewhere, I think probably trying to work out why every time we washed anything in the washing machine it came out with loads of fluff attached to it. This was a continuing problem and one that Dare couldn’t seem to solve. Sometimes we’d see him in the local shopping mall, people around him sneezing uncontrollably as he trailed fluff behind him.
Most people in Australia have these great big top-loading washing machines which I thought had gone the way of the Chevrolet Corvette, Marilyn Munroe and politeness, but no, they are alive and whirring Down-Under. They use about twice as much water as a European front loader and they will eventually rip your clothes to pieces but then again you can get just about a whole year’s laundry in there in one go.  
Anyway, I was reading the book when I heard a rustling noise. I ignored it at first (don’t ask me why. When there’s a rustling noise in your bedroom you should always investigate immediately. This is something I’ve learned.) but ignore it I did until I heard it again. I was engrossed in the book (I wish I could remember which one it was but I’d be lying if I told you it was one of Stephen King’s, it probably was, but it might not have been) so I slowly turned my head to the left. And there it was. Staring me in the face. Inches away was the biggest bloody lizard I’d ever seen, in fact it was the only lizard I’d ever come face-to-face with in my life and it was staring right at me. As I shrieked out, “what the - !” it rolled it’s long tongue out and I screamed again and leapt off the mattress. Jade heard me and she ran into the room, took one look at the beast and turned tail and ran out screaming, her hands waving in the air. I quickly followed her outside, oblivious to the fact that I was naked, and joined her on top of the wall on the other side of the road.  If someone had been filming that day they’d have signed us up for some sporting event. I would have been taking part in the 2000 Nudist Games.
Jade turned to me and then screamed again. “You’ve got no clothes on!”
“I can’t go back in there,” I said, “the beast’ll kill me.”
“Get back in there now,” she said, “otherwise we’ll be bloody deported.”
I took a deep breath, jumped down off the wall, sprinted across the road, ran inside shouting out loud like there was a burglar in there - “You fucker!” - ran into the bedroom, scooped my jeans up off the chair and high-tailed it back out of there, screaming out obscenities as I went. I ran across the road and leapt up onto the wall again, jumping into my jeans as I went.
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I think we need some help.”
“Do you think it’s dangerous?,” she said.
I looked at her as if she was mad.
“It nearly bloody killed me!” I said.
“What exactly did it do?” she asked, her practical streak taking over.
I stared across the road at the house, my eyes slits in the sunlight. I said quietly, “It stuck its tongue out.”
She looked at me. “It stuck its tongue out?”
“It was bloody long. You should have seen it.”
“What colour was it?”
“His tongue?”
She nodded.
“I don’t know, blue, I think.”
“Blue! What’s that all about?”
I shrugged and looked back across the road. It was getting hot out here and my lily-livered English skin was feeling it.
The sun in Australia is not like the sun in Europe. When it’s really hot in Europe the sun bears down with dull hammer-weight. In Australia the sun is like a lance. It’s sharp and can cut you just like that. While you’ve got a couple of hours to play with in Europe before you look like a lobster, in Australia it takes about 20 minutes before your scalp is red and peeling and you’re thinking about calling an ambulance.
Once - and you only ever do this once - we went to the beach, slapped the sunscreen all over except for one vital area - my feet. They turned bright red and throbbed so much and so brightly that a light plane tried to land on the beach. Not only that, they swelled up to twice their normal size. I drove from the beach direct to the chemist, every gearchange, foot pressing the clutch, making me cry out in pain. I told him what the problem was and he said, “Mate, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last. But I’ve gotta tell you, you’ll never do it again...”. He gave me a big tube of aloe vera. This is about as useful as throwing paraffin on a fire.
The following day was a Monday and I had to ease the big red feet inside a pair of shoes that suddenly appeared to be five sizes too small. This was the most indescribable pain. So indescribable, of course I can’t describe it. But trust me, it hurt a lot. I spent the whole day at work tiptoeing around like a burglar in a French farce, much to the amusement of my fellow workers. It lasted for about a week and by then I could execute just about any ballet step you ever saw, including a passable pirouette. Then of course my feet started to shed skin like I was a snake. The chemist was right - you only do it once.  
Meanwhile, back on the wall it was getting very hot indeed.  A Ford Falcon quietly pulled up at the curb just up the road. We both looked at it.
“Go and ask him about the beast,” said Jade nodding towards the driver.
I jumped down and jogged to his window. I had no shoes on and no top, just my jeans, and my eyes must have looked kind of wild. In western countries the driver would have seen me coming, quickly wound his window up, locked his doors and called the police on his mobile phone. This bloke was Australian, so I looked normal to him.
“G’day mate, how’s it goin’?” he asked.
I leaned on his windowsill and said, “We’ve got a bloody big lizard in the house. I don’t know what to do.”
He looked away from me at Jade on the wall and squinted his eyes, then he followed her gaze across the road to the house and without taking his eyes off the open door he said through lips that barely moved, “What colour’s its tongue, mate?”
I grunted and slapped the top of the window ledge.
“You’re the second person’s asked me that.”
He looked back at me. “See mate, if it’s got a blue tongue it’s a blue-tongued lizard, and those blokes’re protected, see. Now, if it’s got a green tongue that’s another thing.”
“So, if it’s got a green tongue what’s that mean?”
“Phuh! I dunno mate. Everyone asks what colour the lizard’s tongue is. Always have done. Since I was a nipper.”
“Great,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “thing is this, if it’s a Blue-Tongue it aint gonna kill ya. Get a towel or something and sling it over it and then grab hold of it and chuck it out. Be careful though.”
“Why?”
“It can give ya a nasty bloody bite and then we’d have to call the ambo and that’ll cost ya.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t dangerous?”
“Well, it aint gonna kill ya, but it’ll bite hard if it’s roused. Anyway, best of luck with it,” he said as he turned the ignition key.
“Can you give me a hand with it.”?
He drew in a slow breath until his lungs expanded so much I thought they’d explode.
“I would mate, only I don’t like the little bastards. One grabbed me toe once and wouldn’t let it go. Had to go to the hospital and have surgery. Still can’t walk right.”
My toes curled up almost under my feet and I started to lightly dance on the spot. He looked at me and glanced down out of the window at my feet before putting the car in Drive, nodding at me, then moving quietly away from the kerbside. He turned at the end of the cul-de-sac and drove off.
I hopped, skipped and jumped back to Jade.
“What the hell are you doing dancing all over the place?”
“Look I think it’s dangerous. He said it could bite.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to have to go in.”
“You’re either brave or mad.”
“Look, we can’t stay out here all afternoon,” I said.
I crossed the road and as I was going she shouted after me - “what shall I tell your mother?”
“Funny!” I shouted back and then entered the darkened house.
I listened hard. I could hear nothing aside from the whirr of the air conditioners. Then I thought I heard a rustling noise in the hallway. I looked and couldn’t see much. It was dark in the house after the searing sunlight and it took my eyes long seconds to get used to the gloom. I heard a noise and looked down and there it was, standing only two inches from my toes! The toes it could bite! With it’s blue tongue! No, it would lick with its tongue, but you know what I mean. So, the lizard was looking up at me with its mouth open and its tongue flickered out and Jesus, it was blue! It looked like the bastard was smiling at me. All of this information entered my brain at the same time as the scream came out my mouth. It was a scream that I thought must belong to someone else and that made me scream even louder. The beast reared up on its rear legs and spat at me, it’s tongue reaching for my toes. I jumped up high in the air like one of those hopping African tribesmen and before I came back down again the beast had skeedaggled out of the open door. Jade, alerted by my screams was running up the path as the lizard ran out. She ran screaming towards the house, her eyes wide and looking at the lizard as it ran towards her. They passed on the pathway, both looking at each other and then he jumped onto the nature strip and ran behind a tree.
Jade and I clutched each other tight as drowning sailors.  
“It’s all over,” I said as our hearts raced against each other. A motorbike came up the road. It stopped and Dare got off like he imagined Bruce Willis would. I could almost hear the theme from Pulp Fiction as he strode across the road. Dare used to have a car but he used to leave the windows open. I said to him one day, “why’d you do that, leave them open?” And he looked at me and laughed and said, “Y’know, I’m making it easier for them car thieves, mate.” Of course he was only joking but that night they nicked his car, them car thieves. The police eventually arrived and the copper said, “d’you leave the doors unlocked mate, or the windows down.” Dare just looked at him. “That’d be it then,” said the copper before pocketing his notebook and getting back in his patrol car and closing the door.
“Do you think I’ll see it again?” asked Dare.
“Not unless we find it, mate,” said the copper as he fired his engine.
“Oh right then,” said Dare hopefully.
“What I’d do mate, if you follow me, is I’d go out and buy another car soon as you like.”
“Oh”, said Dare, and so he bought the bike.
“Hey blokes. You okay?” he said to us now.
“We’ve just had a bloody lucky escape,” I said.
He looked at us, his eyes widening behind his glasses until they both looked big as full moons. One eye looked left up the road. I was never sure what he was actually seeing, but it must have been hellish confusing for him.
“Jeez, that’s good. So Jadey aint having a nipper then? Bonza!”
We both looked at him and disentangled ourselves.
“No,” I said, “we just had this big lizard in here.”
“Yeah? A lizard, ya say. What colour was its tongue?”
Jade went AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR!
“Jesus , Jadey, scared you didn’t it? Anyhow, did it have a short stumpy-tail?”
We both looked at him. Only one of his eyes looked back.
“Thought so. See, that’d be Bluey. Me grandad used to feed him every day. Sometimes I forget to leave something out for ‘im. I guess he was in here looking for tucker. You give him anything? He loves mozzies and once I saw him catch a moth with his tongue, but I leave him some cucumber usually. He can’t get enough of it. Loves licking me toes too. Really loves that. Yeah, thinks it’s bonza.”

Every name is shortened in Australia. People’s names, organizations’ names, even the names of objects. So, the Fire Brigade are called Fire-ies, the Ambulance people are Amboes, lottery is Lotto, the Returned Servicemens’ League is even shortened twice, firstly to RSL, secondly to Ahhh-Reee, going out for a quick cigarette is a Smoko, Kindergarten is Kindy, garbage men are Garbos, my name’s shortened to Kay (and if I live her long enough I’ve no doubt it’ll eventually just become, Kuh), and Derek was called Dare.
When Dare was a nipper, as he put it, he slept in a top bunk in the same room as his brother. Sometimes in the middle of the night Dare’d roll over and fall out of his bunk and crash down on to the floor. This was maybe a six-foot drop. His dad would hear the thump and come into the boys’ room and pick Dare up and put him back in the bunk. The thing is this, never once did the youngster wake up. I think that says a lot about him.
When Dare became an adult we found ourselves sharing his house. Now, Dare is Australian and he bangs doors. This is an interesting thing about folks Down-Under. We soon discovered they are not quiet people. Not only do Australians bang every door they can - including kitchen cabinet doors, car doors, wardrobe doors, front doors, back doors, side doors, rabbit hutch doors, petrol flaps on the car, glovebox lids, paint tin lids and women’s makeup compacts, in fact you name it, if there’s a door or a lid of any kind it’ll be slammed and banged - but they also get up at the crack of dawn and that’s when they start banging around. I think it’s some kind of competition, with points awarded for who can bang the most doors the loudest and most often, and the earlier in the morning the better – there’d be bonus points for that. I think it is a compo, as they would call it here, which runs across the length and breadth of this great land, and I am not sure it has a finish date.
We’ve been to most parts of the country now and I tell you, noise is being made everywhere. It’s fortunate there are only 20 million people in a place the size of Europe. If there were, say, 250 million, the rest of the world would be covering its ears. And out of all the noise-mongers nationwide I reckon Dare and Miranda were definitely competition front runners, up there right along with the very best of them.
Each and every day Dare blundered around like an elephant, banging into walls, slamming the doors, talking really loud. That’s another thing they do - they talk really loud. It’s actually shouting but because there’s no real aggressive inflexion it comes across as really loud talking. But I’m telling you, IT IS SHOUTING!
Dare had trained and qualified as a lawyer and he even took a few cases before he realised it wasn’t for him. Dare worked in corporate law and it soon dawned on him that he didn’t much like the idea of working for a big company that used every filthy trick in the book to try and win their cases against the little man. So Dare chucked it all in and, as you do, he opened a tobacco kiosk on Manly promenade. I don’t think he ever saw the supreme irony in this - the fact that he railed against the big corporates but now here he was peddling their drugs. Anyway, another thing was, a tobacco kiosk would have been fine in 1952 when every man, woman and their dog smoked, but at the relatively enlightened beginning of the 21st century, well, it just aint that profitable any more. The tobacco kiosk has gone the same way as police boxes, bus conductors and people who actually answer the phone when you call any company you care to name. But Dare was undeterred by the passing of similar icons of our age - for him the tobacco kiosk was where it was at. Indeed, I think he believed it was the very future of tobacco retailing.
Perhaps the other thing working against Dare was Manly itself. Manly is one of those big surf beaches (Manly got its name thanks to the ubiquitous Captain Cook who was sailing by one fine summer’s day when he noticed an athletic aborigine chap standing proud - as it were - on the headland. The good captain reportedly said, “Oh my, that dark chap is so manly”. Well, you have to remember, Cookie had been away from his wife for the best part of a year, so perhaps it’s understandable how he could have been so taken - as it were - with such a vision of masculinity). Anyway, the point is this, on Australian surf beaches you don’t find that many heavy smokers, on account of the fact that your tobacco tends to get soggy when you’re out on a board in the water all day.
Dare’s tobacco kiosk was small and cylindrical. In fact it was so small only Dare and just
about a customer and a half could be together in it at the same time. As long as nobody made any quick, sudden moves all was fine. Dare told me once that he was always on the look-out for really fat smokers because if they came in most of his stock got swept off the shelves by their chubby backsides. So there it was, a small, inviting, round blue cubicle of the sort that yobs in Britain would pick up and hurl into the sea, usually with the cigarette bloke still inside. In Australia there are not that many yobs and even if there were they wouldn’t be interested in picking up something like this - it would just be too much effort for them, man.
Dare’s house used to belong to his grandfather. This is the thing in Australia. Dare lived in this house that was worth maybe a million dollars and he just had this little tobacco kiosk which earned him perhaps $80 a week before tax, (though of course he didn’t pay any tax because most of his financial transactions were in cash). Loads of people are like this in Australia, they live in these great houses and they seemingly don’t have more than a dollar or two to rub together. The other thing here though is that you can never really be sure if someone has money or not. In Britain people with money swan around in some big bastard of a car, they only buy clothes with other people’s names on them and they’ll talk in a posh, affected accent. (I’ve never understood this names on clothes business. How come if you want to advertise something you have to pay loads of money to do it and yet Calvin Klein or Dolce e Gabbana can stick their names on your clothes, charge you more than you’d pay for equivalent clothes without the name and then have you parade around all day advertising their product! It’s bonkers).
Many people in Australia have barrow loads of the folding stuff but it doesn’t stop them dressing in jeans with holes in them and going out to the shops wearing their flip-flops or, as they call them here, their thongs. Okay, your rich older guy in Australia is much like your rich older guy anywhere - he might well buy a Porsche and wear some snazzy sunglasses so he can drive around and imagine the young girls are all smiling at him (actually they are smiling and as soon as he’s gone past they may well double up laughing out loud at his sorry, orange-skinned self) but most rich Australians don’t flaunt it. If they did then other Australians’d soon cut them down to size. This is good because it means there’s not a lot of pretension. After being brought up in stuffy, snooty Britain the lack of pretension in Australia is something I’ll never tire of, that I can tell you.
But let’s get back to Dare. Dare is typical of a certain type of Aussie bloke. I suppose you’d call him a real salt-of-the-earth Aussie, always willing to help his mates, always willing to sip a cold one, or a frosty, as he would call it. Dare says things like, bonza mate! and fair dinkum and when I told him what sounded to him like a tall story he said, “No! You’re having a lend of me, mate”.
There was one other thing about Dare - he thought he was Bruce Willis. And more than that, he thought he was Bruce Willis as the boxer in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Dare had Bruce’s close-cropped hair and he had a motorbike, though his wasn’t a powerful beast like Bruce’s. In truth it was little more than a moped, even though he’d had it fitted with those Hells Angel style handlebars, the ones you have to reach up to grasp. Dare tried to look at you like Bruce, but Dare had thick glasses and one of his eyes looked out sideways at something else, so he didn’t have the sharp flinty, squinty, stare that Bruce had in Pulp Fiction. Dare just had the squint.
Dare loved to drink and Dare loved to eat and he was going out with this woman Miranda who loved to drink and who loved to eat too – it was a match made in heaven. Most evenings Dare would drink eight bottles of Coopers Sparkling Ale. This stuff is explosive. Coopers is an Adelaide brewery, which is still family-owned, and this family makes really good beer. The Sparkling Ale has a big red label on it which is appropriate because we all know red is for danger. As far as I’m concerned, it should also have a flashing blue light and a siren on top. I just love the stuff but it really is strong and I can’t drink more than a bottle without having a close-faced encounter with the floor. The other thing is, it has what Coopers calls, ‘a residue of yeast during maturation which gives a cloudy appearance that enhances the flavour’. It’s only a personal theory, and clearly I’m no doctor, but I reckon the yeast goes on working in your system like some kind of small organic brewery. I believe it enhances the alcohol and then fizzes it around your body like an express train. And the driver is honking the horn for all he’s worth.
Well, Dare drank Cooper’s Sparkling like he had shares in the company. Jade and I started calling the Cooper’s Sparkling Ale, DSP for Dare’s Sleeping Potion on account of the fact that once he’d had a case or two he just dropped off like he was dead.
Both Dare and Miranda loved Pulp Fiction. Well, to say they loved it is barely doing justice to their obsession. The only person who can have been more intimate with the film is Quentin himself.
Dare and Miranda’s typical Friday evening consisted of eight Cooper’s Sparkling Ales each, a whole chicken chopped into pieces and fried with plenty of olive oil and garlic, plus vegetables, potatoes boiled and then fried, followed by a treacle pudding with cream, washed down with a couple more Coopers. While they did all this they’d clatter and bang and whack things down in the kitchen and slam doors because when you’re in the noise compo you need to make as much noise as you can, as often as you can.
Once the food had been eaten (and the crockery banged down in the sink, and the knives and forks clattered on the draining board) they’d flop down in front of the TV and from our room we’d hear the strains of Pulp Fiction. I have to say I soon became so familiar with the music and the script, that even from the safety of our room I could tell you when Bruce Willis was about to get on his motorbike. I could even mouth along to the script, playing the parts of Bruce, John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and I could sashay about like Urma Thurman. Sometimes while Jade lay on the bed reading a book I’d play John Travolta’s part so it seemed like he was there in the room (well, that’s what I thought...). I think there must have been something about Travolta and me - back in my younger days I’d attempted the same sort of thing with Grease but unfortunately I never quite had the rhythm. I look back now and just remember this skinny kid jerking around in front of a mirror - that was me, not Travolta you understand.  
Sadly the other scene that I remember from Pulp Fiction, at least aurally (that’s your ears...) is the one where the blokes are having to endure a bit of argy-bargy from behind. Whenever I think of Dare now I think of anal sex, which is unfortunate to say the least.
Anyway, about three quarters of the way through the film, Dare and Miranda would both pass out. Thinking about it, this is probably why they played Pulp Fiction so much, they’d never made it to the end before falling into a drunken stupor. The point was this, once the video finished the TV would hiss and crackle with white noise at such volume that I’d have to get up out of bed and go and see what the hell was going on. The first time this happened I walked into the lounge and stopped dead in my tracks.
Dare was sitting on the floor, his head propped against the seat of the sofa and his legs spread out on the carpet. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open. He didn’t seem to be breathing. Miranda was in the middle of the carpet, flat on her back, legs spread wide either side of the TV, and arms spread out from her sides.  If Bruce had stepped out of the TV he could have had her right there and then. Her head was at the sort of angle that I thought was only possible with the benefit of a broken neck. I stared down at her and couldn’t see if she was breathing either.
I thought a madman had got in while the film was on and killed Dare and Miranda. We hadn’t heard it happening because the TV’s volume was turned up so high.
I went over to Dare and got down on my hands and knees beside him and got my face up close to his to see if there was any breath at all. All of a sudden his eyes sprang open and he said, “A Royale, a Royale with cheese, it’s just a fuckin’ Big Mac!”, and then he saw me and screamed and brought his fist up off the floor and punched me in the eye. Jesus it hurt. Then he flopped back against the sofa and went back to sleep. I groaned and got shakily to my feet clutching a hand over my eye and went and turned the TV off. On the way out I kicked Dare hard in the thigh and he just grunted and mumbled, “huh, medieval on your arse”, which I believe is another line from Pulp Fiction. Miranda hadn’t moved and she could have been dead for all I knew but I figured I didn’t want another punch in the eye or a kick in the groin, so I just left it at that. If she was dead, that was just tough.
I went back into the bedroom and Jade looked up from her book and said, “Jesus, what happened!?”
“Bruce whacked me,” I said, flopping down on the bed.
“Serves you right,” she said returning to her book “you taking the piss out of Travolta like that.” I looked at her sideways. With my one good eye.
Of course Miranda wasn’t dead, and here’s the bloody annoying thing, the day following a bout with a treacle tart, Pulp Fiction and Cooper’s Sparkling Ale, Dare was bright as a penny. You’d have thought it was someone else that’d been lying dead on the lounge floor. Miranda was never around the morning after a Pulp Fiction evening, and I’d bet a case of Cooper’s Sparkling Ale that she didn’t cope so well. In fact, I’d be surprised if she could recall her name for at least two hours after she was up and moving.

“Excuse me sir. Would you like a woman?”
I looked at the young girl and smiled just like I did every evening and I said, “No thanks, I’ve already got one.” and continued on my way.
Welcome to Sydney’s Kings Cross where prostitutes line the street, dodgy characters hang about in doorways, and desperate, beady-eyed men cruise the streets in V8-engined Holden Commodores and Ford Falcons, one arm hanging out the window, massive sunglasses covering half their faces, a leer on their lips. And that’s only the police.  
The main street through Kings Cross is not very long - you can drive it even at a crawl (which is what most blokes do...) within five minutes - but in those few hundred metres there’s enough vice to keep many a pervert contented. Of course, people live in Kings Cross too (locally it’s known as The Cross) and they’re not all prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, car thieves, spruikers (these are the chaps who try and get your attention as you walk past their dubiously named clubs, who try and entice you inside), con artists, low-lifes and the dodgily wealthy. There was also me and Jade.
What happened was, Jade and I landed in Sydney with not a clue where to stay. We approached the Customs desk and the Customs officer looked at me, looked at my passport and then looked at the immigration form I’d filled in and looked at me again and said, “Have you got a criminal record?”
I looked at him. “I didn’t know you still needed one.”
They have a small back room at the Customs hall. You don’t want to go there. Personally I was puzzled as to why they thought a criminal record might possibly have been stuck up my arse, but there you are, they’re the professionals and certainly the effort they put into the search made me think they must be on to something big.
Once I was out we went over to the accommodation bureau. Jade walked, I shuffled. I think it was about a week before I could sit down again properly.
The accommodation bureau people fixed us up at the Gazebo Hotel in Kings Cross.
The Gazebo is a fine looking hotel - in a 1960s kind of a way - (and if you get to see that excellent film, Dirty Deeds, you can see the Gazebo exactly as it would have been in 1969) though now that’s all gone. But the building is still there, even if it’s now home to multi-million dollar apartments rather than hotel rooms.
When we were there it was a reasonably modern hotel with a decent view over the city. It was fine for a couple of nights because although it was relatively expensive we knew no different and we were just glad to be in a hotel and not on a plane. There’s a picture of me the first night and I look like a criminal who hasn’t slept for a week.
It took me a good two hours to unwind and while Jade slept the sleep of the dead I gazed out the window at what was to become our new home - though we didn’t know it then. As I watched the August sky suddenly darken I could hear cranes clanking out there and jack hammers jackhammering, or whatever they do. This was to be a feature of our lives here, this constant building, and this constant noise as Sydney moved steadily towards the 2000 Olympic Games.  
The next day we went for a walk, strolling along, oblivious to the fact that this was really a pretty dicey area. Of course, coming from London we were pretty careful anyway and there were certainly plenty of people to be careful about, I can tell you.
The history of Kings Cross is a colourful one for sure but basically it all revolves around crime. In this small patch there have been no end of unsolved murders, disappearances, shootings, knifings, scarrings, and all other manner of nastiness. If you offended someone here and they wanted to take you out there was always Sydney Harbour - one of the world’s three deepest, and the keeper of many secrets. It’s said that numerous locals are down there, still wearing their concrete boots, the fishes their only companions.
There used to be this copper, let’s use a false name and call him Kelly (because, you know, I like living...). He worked Kings Cross, it would have been back in the 1960s, and like a good number of his colleagues he didn’t believe in what the Americans might call due process. Kelly just didn’t trust the law to take the right action. He decided it would be better if some of the criminals he came across - the really nasty ones, you understand - never made it to court. What was the point he would say as he held his police service revolver to their heads and looked away and pulled the trigger, when all they’re going to do is let you out so you can do it all over again. He was never arrested, never even cautioned about his behaviour, and he retired, as police officers often do, to the north coast where he lived out his sunset years with a nice view of the sea. Now, it’s very difficult to find anyone in King’s Cross who disagrees with Kelly’s approach. That’s the way it is.
The police in Sydney have been investigated more often than the criminals. This is the thing though - lots of them are criminals. In the late-1990s they brought this policeman in from the Met in Britain – Peter Ryan – to head the New South Wales police. Some said they chose a Pom because they couldn’t find anyone here who they could trust to do the job. Certainly there’s a rough and ready approach to lots of things in Australia and the police are a big part of it.
Back in the 1970s in particular crime was rife and some of it was down to the police. Members of the Robbery Squad, for example, routinely went out on crimes - that’s committing them, not stopping them. More recently, during the last decade, officers at some local stations in Sydney were encouraging the drugs trade. They’re on film doing it. They arrested drug sellers but instead of charging the dealers with crimes that would have seen them taken off the streets and imprisoned, they let them go with a warning, but only on the understanding that the drug sellers paid them thousands of dollars a week. Of course, to do this the drug dealer had to work much harder, which meant selling more drugs on the streets. So these coppers were building the drug trade. What hope was there? Some say, what hope is there, because no-one can feel confident it’s not still going on.
Other times the crimes the police investigated would be brutal beatings, or perhaps a kid had got killed. If the coppers knew who it was but couldn’t prove it they’d go to one of the stashes of weapons they’d purloined off criminals over the years. You know, tainted weapons, weapons with a history already, and they’d plant these on the people they suspected and next thing you knew they’d be in jail.
Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get back to where we were. In Kings Cross today you can get just about anything - I’m talking about the food now. There are loads of restaurants - not all of them pleasant it should be said - and there are lots of sidewalk counter take-aways where you can get pizza and pasta, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Thai food, and sometimes you can have all that wide and varied choice at each and every counter.
There are also lots of press photographers cruising around because lots of well known and wealthy people go to Kings Cross for, ahem, entertainment. Usually this involves consuming copious amounts of alcohol, hooking up with a hooker, despite the fact that you have a wife or steady girlfriend back at home, and then getting into some kind of punch-up, usually with a chap of South Sea island build, or to put it another way, you tangle with a big fucker of a bouncer who asks you to leave just once and you, foolish because the drink has made you that way, give him some drunken abuse. The end result is a picture in the paper of your imbiber looking glassy-eyed, arm draped around a scantily clad girl who is clearly an entertainer of sorts and certainly not Mr Glassy-Eyed’s girlfriend or wife, and there will also be a rivulet of drying blood down one side of his face or a closed eye where the South Sea island bouncer clocked him one, ‘just as a warning’. This edifying sight will be shown in all its glory in the following day’s newspaper, usually just before Glassy-Eyed is due to fly out on some rugby or cricket tour. Good stuff. The thing is, these sports blokes can do no wrong because they are the crème de la crème – these are Aussie sports stars. Their transgressions are soon forgotten, well, as long as they’re winning matches.
After a few days at The Gazebo we checked out and moved to a motel, which was not too bad, and much cheaper. It was run by this Iranian guy and his son, who we soon named FatSo. FatSo drove a Mercedes-Benz, which I think had once belonged to Adolf Hitler. It was one of those super-big 1960s bullet-proof Benzs, which don’t fit in any garage anywhere in the world but apparently could slot into a car parking space in The Wolf’s Lair in Bavaria without so much as a squeak. The car was so heavy that everywhere it went it damaged the roads and every time FatSo went out in it so much fuel was used the folks up in Queensland had to go without petrol for a week or so.
These Iranians had adopted the Australian way in so many things, not least that they preferred cash and would write all of their incoming room payments – those in cash at any rate - in pencil in a ledger they kept under the desk. Either they were concerned about the number of used plastic pens littering the environment or they intended to rub the pencil entries out and alter them before sending the ledger to the taxman. I don’t know, but it seemed like a strange way to do business, even to my relatively unbusinesslike eye.
I spent many a long hour talking to FatSo, sitting out on the back porch gazing over the city, often sipping a beer with him. In his laboured Iranian accent he told me all there was to know about Ossies, as he called them. “Ossies, they not like to work. They lazy buggers. That’s Ossies. We work hard, we have this place. Very well liked in community.” I think that was wishful thinking. Barely a day went by without some new graffiti being added to the copious metal of his Merc or spray-painted on the motel walls. Usually it was along the lines of, “ Lazy Iranans (they couldn’t spell very well, these Ossies) take all our jobs” which struck me as a bit bizarre, if they were so lazy how come they could pick up someone else’s job? I never figured that one out.
I’d often find FatSo down in the underground car park, most of which his ludicrously big car took up, trying to get the latest slurs off the coachwork, muttering in Iranian under his breath about Ossies.
People who’ve visited Australia but who don’t live here will generally tell you it’s a pretty racist country, but Australians just can’t believe that. The truth is a question of what’s acceptable. It’s not seen as derogatory to call an English person a Pom, though in fairness that’s usually coupled with Bloody Pom, or Fuckin’ Poms, or Pommy Bastards. Most Australians don’t see this as racist behaviour, though clearly it is. They also don’t have much of a problem with the copious use of the word Wog, their derogatory term not for black people - of which in any case there are so few in Australia - but rather for those of Italian, Greek or even Lebanese extraction. Again, the word has been used so much even some Italians sometimes call themselves Wogs.
Of course, if you choose to live in Australia there’s not much you can do about it. If you complain about anything, say anything at all about their country which they don’t like their standard retort is, “well, if you don’t bloody well like it, why don’t you go back to...(fill in the country here of your choice)”. Surely there’s room to fix things that aren’t right? It’s not healthy to leave bad things as they are. Every society has to grow and to adapt to the bigger world out there, so to get annoyed when people point out things that are clearly wrong is sad really. But there you go. This is where we were and this is where we were planning to stay, well, at least for a little while, so we kept quiet, which is not a good thing to do, but sometimes you have to...
And then it happened. Within two weeks I had a job! I started work as Managing Editor at a publishing company in Crows Nest. The day they phoned me and let me know we were ready to fly back to the UK. We even had our bags packed and by the door. They called and said they’d managed to change our visa to a business visa. Jade and I had a bit of a chat about it, which went something like this:
“So, what do you think?’
“Well, do you like it here?”
“It’s okay. Might be fun for a while.”
“Yeah, that’s what I reckon.”
So?”
“So, yeah, let’s give it a try for a few months at least.”
“Okay.”
And really that was that. We had a new home and all we had to do was find somewhere more permanent to live.

So here’s the thing, why did we travel to the other side of the world on Olympic Airways? Well, it was cheap. And we soon found out why...
As we took off from Heathrow the emergency door we were sitting next to flexed. At first I thought it was just my eyesight adjusting to the change in air pressure. Sadly, it wasn’t. When I looked more closely I could see the edges had been amateurishly sealed with what looked like Polyfilla, only the flexible one, which I suppose was good because it just moved rather than cracked right open.
The draught from this ill-fitting door was fearsome and by the time we reached cruising height my teeth were chattering and I believed I had severe frostbite. I knew then why the old woman on my left was wearing a thick woollen coat, hat and gloves and clutched a hot-water bottle. Or maybe it was a parachute. Either way she was a seasoned Olympic Airways traveller, of that there was no doubt.
The airhostess sits facing you on take-off, sitting on a little jump seat. If she works for Olympic Airways she readjusts and reapplies her make-up in the time between strapping herself in, taking off and levelling out. Then she gets up, gives you a tight smile which says, “now I have to serve these people who have paid for the very cheapest trip across the world,” and then she goes away and is not seen again for the duration of the flight. Even if you push the hostess button neither she nor any of her friends will come and see you. At first I thought the button wasn’t working but then I saw that everybody else was pushing theirs too and they got the same lack of response.
Eventually people drifted to the galley and got their own meals and drinks while the hostesses looked on with derision, smoking their American cigarettes through perfectly made-up lips and impatiently brushing stray wisps of ash from their immaculate uniforms. These Greek women were in their mid-50s, wore lots of make-up, had massive amounts of oil black hair piled on their heads and uniform jackets pinched in so tight at the waist it looked like they were all endowed with absolutely massive breasts. I assume now, having travelled with Olympic, that the jackets concealed big lifejackets, not big breasts.
As the plane climbed, thick brown gunk began to drip out of the overhead lights cluster a couple of rows in front of me. Hydraulic fluid, I thought, and then realised that I had no idea what hydraulic fluid was or why it should be anything to worry about in any case.
The brown gunk dropped down onto the perfectly white jacket of an English colonial type who was going to Corfu. He bellowed so loud that no hostess would dare go near - or maybe they just couldn’t be bothered to get up - and eventually a uniformed man strode down the steeply sloping floor clutching a torch. He shone the torch at the lights cluster. I don’t know why he did this because it was perfectly light in the plane. “Nothing to worry about,” he grunted.
“I’d say there is!” said Corky Colonial, “look at my suit. I demand to see the Captain!”
“I am the Captain.”
This worried me because, I mean call me old fashioned, but shouldn’t the captain be up front flying this apartment block with wings?
“We will have it cleaned for you,” said the Captain and then he shone his little torch out of the window and frowned. Was he wondering where we were? Or checking the wings for cracks? Neither of these thoughts filled me with great confidence. Anyway, that was that. After he strode off we neither saw nor heard from him again.
The other thing about Olympic is that they have a policy on hand luggage - you can bring on as much as you want.
The old woman who sat next to me had 15 plastic bags. I counted them as she wedged them under the seat in front of her. In the struggle to get every one of them under the seat she found another package, which she picked up, turned over and over and looked at in a puzzled way. I pretended to be asleep. Eventually she turned to the bloke sitting nearest her in the adjacent row of seats and asked, “Is this yours.” He looked at her. “That’s your lifejacket,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, and looked around for somewhere to put it. She shrugged and then wedged it into one of her own plastic bags and pushed it under her seat. Presumably it is now in a drawer in a house in Thessalonica, which is where it will stay, possibly for generations.
When she dies her family will have no idea how come she came to be in possession of a Boeing 747 lifejacket, and presumably in the millennia to come it will turn up in some archaeological dig and be a constant mystery to generations of historians.

Later, we ate fish and chips and had a hot dog each and walked along the promenade and decided to stay the night. There was no soap in the room and we got sand in the bed. But we didn’t mind.
The following day we went to McDonald’s for breakfast and Jade said, “What are you going to do when college finishes?”
“You mean university,” I said through a mouth of hash browns.
“Yeah, right. So, what you going to do then?”
“I was thinking we could go away somewhere for a while.”
“With what?”
“I’ve got some money now. Not a lot but I’ve got some. Besides,” I said looking outside at the dull grey sky, “I could do with a bit of a change.”
“Yeah,” she said, “me too. I’ve always fancied somewhere really hot and really far away.”
“We came to Littlehampton.”
“Uh-huh. No, I mean really far away.”
“Like Clacton?”
“Funny,” she said, arms on the table and looking at me closely, “I was thinking of somewhere much further. Much warmer.” She smiled and took a sip of coffee.

to be continued...

During the next few months I settled into a routine of teaching black kids journalism, going out with Jade in secret and writing chapters about cars for Clarence’s motoring encyclopaedia. I went to the Asda car park in Essex once a week where I handed over new words in exchange for more assignments and I got some cheques for the work I’d already done. What with the money from teaching - which was not a lot, but better than nothing - coupled with the money from Clarence, I was beginning to get some of my confidence back and actually felt like I’d turned a corner.  In truth, it was more of a slight bend, but at least everything was beginning to feel a whole lot better.
One weekend Jade and I went to Littlehampton for the day. We sat on the pebble beach and watched the dirty brown water crashing in, shushing among the pebbles, hissing out. We moved what felt like two tonnes of the small round stones to dig a hollow where we sheltered from the worst of the gusts scything off the North Sea.
We settled and she looked at the sea and her long black hair was blowing about her face and she said into the snatching wind, “I have a story to tell you,” and I imagined the words reaching Toulouse by midday. We huddled closer and in our small private world out there in the whispering pebbles she began.
“When I was 17, still at school, I got a job in a bookies. Just on the front desk, helping punters relieve themselves of their money. But it was fun. I met some real characters. One day, this young man comes in to the shop. It’s maybe five to five. Just before closing. It’s empty. Just me and my nails. The manager out back, doing whatever he did all day. I don’t know. I looked up and all I saw, I swear all I saw, was a black hole. The end of a gun barrel. Pointing in my face. I’ll never forget it. “Give me the money,” he said. “Do it now.” I didn’t hesitate. We’d always been told if this happened, don’t be a hero. Just hand it over. I was shaking and I felt sick. I shovelled money into a black plastic bin bag he handed over the counter. The manager didn’t make an appearance. He never made an appearance. When I’d put all the notes in the bag I looked up at the gunman. I passed it over the counter. He had a nice smile. He could afford to smile. There must have been 20 grand in there. At least. There were no CCTVs then, nothing to show what he looked like. But I wouldn’t forget. He just walked out. I watched him go. Then I started shaking. Uncontrollably. I could have been killed. The manager walked out to lock up. When he saw me I collapsed in a heap on the floor. He knew we’d been robbed. Told me it was the same thing as before. Same thing as in Holborn where he’d managed the other shop. “Did he have a limp?” he asked, helping me up. “No,” I said, “he had a gun.”
“Jesus,” I said, “that must have been terrifying.”
She leaned closer, buffeted by the gale. “That’s not the half of it. Three weeks later I’m out clubbing. Up town, top ranking, as we used to say. I’m with some friends. And then I see him. He sees me and starts to come across and I start shaking. But he smiles. He has a nice smile. I just stare at him and he leans close because of the music and shouts, “I know you from somewhere.”
“Yeah,” I say, “last time I saw you, you stuck a fucking gun in my face.”
It dawns on him then and he says, “Aw, sorry. It’s just my job, you know. Want a drink?”
“I haven’t got any money,” I say drily.
He shrugs. “Me neither. Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a mo”. And then he’s gone. I thought, it would be sensible to leave. But I didn’t. Ten minutes later he’s shouldering back through the crowd.
“Hey, I just did the shoe shop down the road. Let’s go somewhere quiet and get a drink.” So we did.
In an all-night café he apologised. He explained this was his business. It was what he did to earn a living. How he made money.
Turned out the police were always following him. They suspected him but didn’t have enough. All the money he made he put in his daughter’s account. She had a different name to him, the mother’s name. They were separated, but okay, and he saw the kid several times a week. And usually at weekends. The police suspected he was doing the robberies. But they couldn’t prove it because they had no idea where the cash could be going.
He’d do bookies because at that time hardly any of them had cameras. Also, they all had a policy of handing money over, no questions asked, if someone came in armed.
“Funny that,” I said to him, “I work at Gala, the bingo hall, and they don’t have cameras either. Loads of money sloshing around there, specially at weekends.”
He smiled that nice smile and said, “ Let me make it up to you.”
I looked in her jet black eyes, the hair wisping her face, her lips full and pale pink. The wind, or maybe it was something else, making me shiver a bit. I said hoarsely, “I have a gun.”
She looked at me and said, “I’ll bet you do.”

Every morning before class I’d pop into Andy’s Cafe and have tea and a bacon and egg.
Andy’s didn’t look much from the outside, just a great big plate glass window in a bright blue badly painted frame and a door with a cheap plastic Open/Closed sign. There were metal mesh covers for the window and door at night. In the morning they were clattered back so you could see right inside.
Andy’s is still there and it’s still got the lino-tiled floor, stark painted white walls, Formica-topped tables and black plastic chairs. You order at the counter which is just a closed bench topped with grey metal, a water boiler on one side, the till underneath. Behind the counter there’s a big grill and fryer against one wall, while from out back you can hear the regular thump-clunk of the opened and closed industrial refrigerator where they keep the bacon and the eggs. You could also order beefburger and chips or pie and chips out of the fridge too. You could have just about anything at Andy’s, as long as it was with chips.
At eight in the morning I’d push through the door of Andy’s Café, the open/closed sign clattering against the glass, and Andy would look up and see me and grab a clean white mug for my tea and chuck it and I’d watch it spinning ceramically in the air and then he’d catch it and before it touched the counter he’d be pouring strong tea.
Everyone would be reading their newspapers, some of them would nod to me, some would just look, some just wouldn’t.
There’d be the men from BT, often as not talking about football or some girl with massive breasts they’d passed in their van yesterday, wondering aloud if they’d see a bigger pair out somewhere today; I think they had some kind of sweepstakes going on it. There was the local postman who’d have all the post cards out on the table, leafing through them, laughing at some, snorting at others, sometimes shaking his head at something written on the back from Corfu or Malaga. He’d read the choice ones out loud and we’d all laugh or groan at those words from afar. I had this idea of sending a fictitious one about a postman who reads everyone else’s postcards, just so he’d come in one day and read it out, but I never got around to it. There were early rising hang-dog students smoking roll-ups or Silk Cuts, their heads often resting on their folded arms on the table, cigarette smoke curling from their fists, and near the back, almost hidden in the fug, there’d be some dodgy geezers, because in London there’s always something dodgy going on in the corner at the back of the room. Oh, and there was always a man with a dog. And not necessarily the same man, or the same dog, as it happens, but always at least one man and his dog.
And when I sat down with that mug of strong, steaming tea in front of me and stuck my hands around it to warm them and heard the sizzle of the fryer and pushed the mug to one side, took my Guardian and unfolded it, smelling the ink, feeling the humming traffic go by windows opaque with steamy condensation, the bacon and eggs came and the plate slapped down on the Formica, well I always smiled because it was the best place to be.
On one bitterly cold but sunny day as I sat by the window reading the paper, some colour caught my eye and I saw her across the Wandsworth Road, a crowded highway of traffic, milling people on the pavement. Now I’ve been with Jade I’ve got used to people looking at her. Staring, actually. Sometimes it’s mad, they just can’t look away and then they walk into things. Kids do it, girls do it, women do it, and so do men. The men you can understand but I think the rest of them look at her simply because she’s exotic.
On that day she had her long black hair braided and beaded and the multi-coloured beads danced and flickered in the winter sun and the traffic just seemed to stop.
Of course I’d seen her in the classes because she was one of my students but I hadn’t really talked to her much. Some days she wasn’t in class and when she was she pretty much kept to herself.
She came in the café, colourful beads tapping against one another, nodded to Andy and sat opposite me, framed by the window, the traffic buzzing outside.
“What’s the business with the chauffeur?” she asked as her coffee arrived. She fished in a breast pocket of her cream blouse and brought out a bent Silk Cut and laid it on the Formica top.
I looked at her as she spooned sugar into her tea and stirred it.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
She seemed to consider this, then took the mug in both hands, blew the steam off, took a sip, swallowed, put the mug back down, picked up the Silk Cut, straightened its crumple by running her long red nails along its length, slipped her hand inside the blouse pocket again, came out with a small silver Zippo, flicked the lid, spun the wheel, lit it. She took a deep breath which made the end momentarily red as her nails, held the smoke for a second or two and then blew it out in a stream through pink lips that made a shape like a big heart. She turned her head and spat the rest of the smoke away then turned back to me with her big brown eyes and said quietly, “Neither of us have a class ‘til nine. That’s almost an hour. Tell me everything.”
And so I did.

I stood listening to the roar of traffic, clutching my coat tight to me as I shivered in the evening cold of a car park whose floodlights stained the world yellow.
In the daytime this acre and a half was full of cars belonging to people who shopped at Asda but at this time of night it was deserted. A keen wind shuffled through the small shrubs surrounding the car park and just the noise of their rattly branches made me shiver. I’d been waiting only about 10 minutes but it seemed like an age. To me, everything I hated about today’s world was here. The tangle of busy, fast roads, the circling swathes of concrete and tarmac, those searing floodlights, the car park bays, the small yellow shrubs, the glass and metal green and cream Asda with its locked trolleys, and the fact that it was all in Essex.
I leaned against the Lotus because it was still warm. I heard the approaching car before I saw its lights. There was a bump and a crash and I knew he’d mounted a kerb somewhere out on the sliproad. Clarence was coming.
When I’d left the car magazine they’d replaced me with Clarence. That wasn’t his real name but it’s what everyone called him on account of the fact that he was cross-eyed. Though to be honest saying he was cross-eyed hardly did his affliction justice. His eyes were everywhere. They were like twins who weren’t talking to each other. The nickname came from Clarence the lion in the TV series Daktari. Now, if you’re not familiar with Daktari I can tell you that it was a truly forgettable program about a group of safari people out in darkest Africa. Every week something dire happened but of course every week the team managed to sort it out. All in all Daktari was your standard TV fare but it was made watchable thanks to Clarence, the lovable cross-eyed lion. I think also there was a blonde in tight khaki shorts, but that might just be my imagination.
My Clarence came around the corner and his car lights raked the shrubs. He mounted one of the shrub beds and crashed straight through the foliage, the car bouncing down onto the tarmac and heading straight for me. I felt like a rabbit trapped in the headlights. I snapped out of it as he crashed the gears. I went and stood at the back of the Lotus. I remembered wondering what I’d say to Clarissa, her car all scraped down the side, but at the last minute the car swerved sideways and stopped. Clarence opened the door and hopped out, tripping on the seat belt as he came, executing a near perfect parachute roll on the ground before popping up right in front of me. Neither of his eyes was looking my way - one looked left and the other was swivelling around like a spotlight after fighter planes.
“Hello skipper, how you doing?” I resisted the desire to ask if he was talking to me. He started looking off to the right then, off towards Asda I thought, but I was sort of used to it, him talking to you but looking somewhere else. At least that’s what it always seemed like. Sometimes Clarence’s eyes swivelled seemingly of their own accord, staring at objects that were way off. People who met him for the first time were always fooled. Often when he started talking people would look off to the left or right, wondering who he was chatting to. On one occasion I introduced him to someone at the Motor Show up in Birmingham and the man he was talking to eventually got fed up and said, “If you can’t look at me when you’re talking to me then fuck off!”
Well, he had to; it was impossible to look the bloke in the eye, any eye.
Another time, some bloke in a pub punched him, in the eye that seemed to be staring right down into his girlfriend’s cleavage. I doubt it was, I think it was just an unlucky swivel.
Driving with Clarence was always an experience. Quite how he managed to get a job as a motoring journalist, I never knew.
Once, we were in Sweden on a three-day press trip driving some new Saab Turbo. Clarence was at the wheel. I’d held my breath several times as he got the tyres on my side of the car bouncing up and down on the very edge of the road. I could clearly see the long drop below studded with sharp-branched fir trees. Eventually we got out of the mountains and I breathed more easily and Clarence opened the Saab up a bit, getting the turbocharger whistling. We were on an arrow straight stretch of road, coming up behind a slower moving car. I looked down at the map on my lap, working out where we needed to turn off next and when I glanced up we were close to the car in front. On the other side of the road coming towards us was a truck, but it was way off, so far off you could only just make it out. Well, I could...
Clarence indicated, gritted his teeth and pulled out. He looked over at me, but actually I’m not sure that he did, if you know what I mean, and then we were on the other side of the road. There was so much room we could have stayed out there a week. Half way past the other car Clarence started huffing and puffing and I thought he was going to have a seizure. Suddenly he stamped on the brake pedal and I groaned and strained against the seat belt. The car we were overtaking shot back past us on the inside, the driver staring at us wide-eyed, wondering what the hell we were doing.
“Jesus,” said Clarence as we tucked back in behind the car, “that was bloody close.” Then he turned his head towards me, but his eyes were still looking out the windscreen and he said, “you okay?”
I forgot myself and said, “You talking to me?” then I shook my head and said, “what’s with the sudden change of mind?”
“Skipper,” said Clarence in exasperation, “that truck. Could have killed us. Surprised I didn’t see it sooner.”
“The truck?” I said.
“The truck, King.”
“What truck’s that then?”
We sat in silence for maybe a minute, following the slower car. When the truck eventually came past in a sudden blast of air, Clarence screamed and looked at me, startled. Well, I think he did.
Anyway, it just so happened that Clarence had been asked to compile a motoring book, a sort of motoring encyclopaedia, and obviously he couldn’t do it all by himself so he’d got in touch with a few other motoring journalists he knew and asked them to give him a hand. I was one of them and because Clarence was so short of time it meant that each time I wrote more words I had to meet up with him and hand them over. (He lived way out in Essex and I was still at Clarissa’s in Surrey, so this Asda car park was about halfway between the two places, and remember back then there was no email, so it was post it or meet up).
I put my hand in my coat pocket and brought out a plain brown envelope. It was so cold in the Asda car park that I was wearing gloves. Clarence took it off me and then dipped back into the car and came out with his own plain brown envelope.
“Here’s a list, Skip, of the other cars I need you to write about. Can we meet up again in a couple of days time?” He handed me the envelope but it was off to my left, like he was giving it to someone standing beside me. I shook my head, and then reached out, arm straight from my shoulder, bent my wrist at a right angle and took it off him. I felt like I was in some jerky Michael Jackson dance.
“No problem,” I said, and stuffed the envelope in my jacket pocket. He stuck his hand out to shake and again it was off, nowhere near my hand but this time to the right. I clumsily shook his hand, actually more like a fist clasp than a handshake. When was he going to get someone to look at those eyes? It did occur to me though that if some expert had him in a chair and asked him to look into the light he’d probably start and say, “What light? Where?” Or, “I am looking into the light”.
“It’s funny aint it, Skipper? You in your coat and wearing them leather gloves and me in me swish road-test car. We look like a couple of drug dealers standing around doing something dodgy. What do you reckon the coppers would make of it?”
“I really don’t want to find out. Things are complicated enough as it is.”
“How’d you mean?”
I gave Clarence a run-down on the situation - still living at The House of Babes, teaching a class of students who all thought I was an undercover white South African spy, trying to make ends meet with this little bit of freelance work, no home, no regular income, no obvious goal in mind, standing here in the dark looking like a drugs dealer in an Asda car park in Essex.
Clarence sucked a whistling breath in through his teeth and looked at the ground, and then looked up at me - though his eyes were looking in opposite directions - and said, “I see what you mean.”
But somehow I don’t think he did.

to be continued...

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, well, sometimes it just gets better. Of course it had to, my life couldn’t keep going downhill faster than a truck without brakes - it just couldn’t.
One day I got a phone call from Tom. He was his usual cheerful self.
“Some chap called. Don’t know what it was about. Maybe nothing much. Maybe nothing at all. Who knows?”
“Well,” I said, exhaling a deep lungful of air along with my words, “maybe I’ll find out if you give me his name.”
Harrumph, he said down the line and as he fiddled with some paper he muttered, “suppose you want the number too?”
I called Tony Jones and discovered he was in charge of journalism at the evocatively named University of the South Bank. In Britain they went through this thing of renaming all the polytechnics universities. Mostly they did this because it sounded better. (I think if they did it today it would be called, ”refocusing and repositioning in the marketplace to achieve newly desired educational outcomes” but back in the mid-1980s when all this took place it was called, ‘renaming the polytechnics’). Trouble was, they were still polytechnics, which meant they were underfunded places where kids who thought they couldn’t get a job went so they’d have another year or two of not being out on the streets without a job.
The reason Tony Jones had called, in a roundabout way, was because one of my friends had suggested that I try some teaching. At first this struck me as pretty bizarre, considering I’d never done any teacher training at all but she said, “You know loads about journalism. And besides, you remember the teachers you had at school?”
I nodded.
“Well, what did they know?”
Anyway, here was Tony Jones on the phone telling me that as it happened one of their lecturers had suffered a heart attack and so he wouldn’t be starting the next term. Could I come and see him and he’d tell me what the job was all about?
I went along and by the time we’d chatted for half an hour it was clear that they needed someone in a hurry and I was there. It was agreed I would start the following Monday and I would teach practical journalism. This, I thought as I left, would be interesting, mainly on account of the fact that I’d never stood before a class of students, let alone shared my knowledge with them. It scared me stiff.
Back at The House of Babes I told Clarissa about the job and in her usual distracted manner she said, “Oh good. That’s good. Isn’t it? By the way, I need to take the car Monday.”
So, come Monday morning I clambered into the Range Rover with Henry and his chauffeur Robert. Henry clutched a can of Coke and drank it furiously all the way to the brewery, sucking the very life out of the can in his quest to slake a vicious hangover.
“Going to Lambeth, Mr King?” asked Robert. I nodded and in the back Henry looked up from his paper.
“Lambeth? Are you mad man?”
“Henry,” I said turning around in the front seat, “it’s a job. I need to work.”
“Robert’ll take you,” he said, then burped richly and said, “rrrrr, get out you bastard. Oooffff, that’s much better. Robert, Mr King’s going deep into bandit country. See he arrives safely, there’s a good chap.”
“Sir!” shouted Robert like the ex-SAS man he was and Henry jumped and spilt some Coke.
And then Robert took a corner at speed and we both bumped our heads on the side windows as the tyres screamed. “Jesus, man!” shouted Henry as he slid across the smooth leather seat and bumped into the door, his coke fizzing. 
So it was that I arrived at the newly renamed University of the South Bank in one of Britain’s poorest suburbs in a brand new glistening Range Rover driven by a mad ex-SAS trooper dressed in a chauffeur’s uniform. As we pulled to a stop a small crowd gathered and before I knew it Robert was at my door, opening it so I could step out like some visiting dignitary. Some of the onlookers hissed quietly as I walked through the small, silent crowd and felt like Sidney Poitier. Well, only they were black, and I was the lone white person, but I think you know what I mean.
As I walked through the university I realised there were no white people there at all. I entered the classroom and was introduced to a roomful of students by Jones. Unbeknown to me until that moment, the official title of the course was Journalism for Black and Asian Students.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been a racist. Tom saw to that. He might have had a temper and a half but he couldn’t stand the idea of racism. Interestingly, it was something he didn’t need to drum into any of us, we just grew up in a house where bigotry didn’t exist. There was never any negative comment at all about any other races, other people, no matter who they were. In fairness we never lived in any areas where there were any non-white people and I can honestly say that until I went to London I’d never so much as said hello to a black person - not because I didn’t want to, just because I’d never seen anyone within shouting distance who wasn’t white.
Until I stepped into that classroom, the only black person who’d ever had any connection with us was a man who helped Tom with a pushchair he was carrying up out of the London Tube. We’d gone to London for the day when I was just a nipper and the youngest must have been the pushchair rider and Tom was struggling with everything and I think the youngest was under his arm and the pushchair was heavy because it must have been made in about 1950 and in those days they were made out of industrial strength iron by the same men who made the Royal Navy, or so it seemed. It was heavy, so when the black guy grabbed one side of it and took some of the weight off Tom, he initially thought it was a theft attempt (I remember I saw a flicker cross his face) and the man didn’t say anything or even look at Tom, just picked up his side of the pushchair and helped Tom with it to the top of the steps. Now, if I was looking for a cheap laugh here I’d say, and then he ran off into the crowd, clutching the pushchair, never to be seen again. But he didn’t.
Anyway, I was running that single encounter with a black person through my mind, reassuring myself with the story as I stood petrified in front of a class of 45 black students who were all staring at me as Jones softly closed the door on his way out.
The atmosphere in the room was thick with something and I don’t know what it was, but let me tell you, it was thick.
“Where is Ronald?” asked a girl lounging at the front and everyone stared at me. Not a sound.
“Well,” I said slowly, “he’s had a heart attack.”
Well, I thought the air had been sucked out of the room.
“Ronald is dead, man!” shouted a young man at the front, his eyes rolling in his head like he was going to faint clean away, and everyone started wailing. One boy started thumping his desk and moaning and at the back of the room some kind of dance got underway.
“Hey!” I shouted, “Ronald is not dead. Ronald is recovering.”
The noise died down as suddenly as it had began, though one girl was still shuffling about at the back. Maybe she always did, I’m not sure.
“Man!” shouted the boy with the rolling eyes, “you scared us, man. You had us believe Ronald was dead. Why’d you do that man? Why’d you do that?”
They all shouted out their agreement and stared at me with naked hostility. “Man, why’d you do that?”, they kept shouting.
“Look” I said, putting my hands up to calm them, “I know Ronald means a lot to you-”
“Ronald is The Man,” said the girl at the front, “he a friend of Nelson’s.”
“Nelson?” I said frowning, “Willy Nelson? The singer?”
The room erupted, wailing started (and I suspect some gnashing of teeth too), they were all up out of their seats, shaking their fists at me, screaming and the girl at the front, her head to one side said, “Mandela, man, Nelson Mandela. Ronald is his friend, man.”
It turned out that Ronald was a journalist (and a damn good one too) and he had been with Mandela back in the days when they were still free to demonstrate against the apartheid government. Ronald had been part of the inner circle of the ANC that had organised a credible resistance movement. Ronald had been at the Sharpeville Massacre and had got himself shot, a bullet nicking his left arm.
He managed to get away from the carnage but was hunted by the South African police. With the help of friends he eventually left the country and found his way to Britain. In those days they’d let you stay if you were in danger and so Ronald got to teach at Lambeth College, as it was then, and a good deal of the reason why the course was so popular, indeed why it had managed to get off the ground in the first place, was due to Ronald’s persistence, tenacity and sheer presence.
When I finally got to meet Ron he looked like Morgan Freeman. He had a calmness about him. Think about that film, The Shawshank Redemption, and you’ve got it. One day I asked Ronald how he felt about escaping and Nelson getting caught and banged up inside Robben Island for all those years and Ron smiled like Morgan Freeman and said softly, “We all have our own private sufferings. The trick is not to let them become other people’s sufferings.”
No, I have no idea what he was talking about...

I knew this bloke Adam.
Back when I was training to be a journalist, so that would have been when I was 17. Adam was a fellow trainee and his dad was Foreign Correspondent for one of the big Fleet Street papers, so the family was based in Paris.
To us other aspiring scribes, none of whom had ever been closer to France than a pub or two in Dover at that time, Adam was a touch exotic in that he spoke fluent French and had film star looks. He was also very funny indeed. Sadly he was a terrible trainee and he just couldn’t get anything right. When it was getting obvious they were going to boot him off the course he took a weekend off and went and visited his dad in France to seek his advice.
Adam had a close relationship with his father. For example, Adam had been going out with this French girl. Isabel was an animal in bed (Adam never specified what type of animal but when he told me the whole story I imagined that she was a member of the cat family, and I was soon proved to be correct...).
So, while he was living in France at home with his mum and dad he was going out with sexy Isabel. He was only 16 at the time and I think she was about 26, which must have seemed so old to him then, I know it did to me. Of course he was big for his age - in height I mean - and so he told her he was 25. Apparently she ummed and arred over going out with him because he was younger than her. Phew, what a shock she’d have got had she known the awful truth - that he was really just a schoolboy! A big one, but still a schoolboy.
Anyway, sometimes he’d stay over at Isabel’s. I mean he had to. He could hardly tell her he had to go home because his mum and dad were waiting up for him, what with him supposedly being 25 and all that.
Thankfully for him his mum and dad were pretty liberal, which was a bit weird because his dad wrote for just about the most right-wing newspaper in Britain (it truly is a strange world we live in). Adam told his parents that he was house-sitting with a friend of his who needed him to keep her company during the dark Parisian nights. For some reason I think they thought this was innocent enough - what with Adam being 16.
Now, on this particular occasion Adam comes back from Isabel’s in time for breakfast and him, his mum and his dad are sitting there and his dad is reading the newspaper so all Adam can see of him are the morning’s headlines.
His mum brings her son some milk and she says, “Adam, your shirt is all torn at the back and it looks like there’s blood on it too. Whatever can you have been doing?”
Adam’s mind went into overdrive as he poured the milk on his cornflakes. And then it came to him. “Yes. Last night I was playing with Isabel’s pussy.” His father’s newspaper came down slowly and he looked at his son over his half glasses, pursed his lips and gave him a couple of slow nods before hoisting the paper once again.
“That must be some fierce pussy,” said his mother noisily buttering a piece of toast. “Oh yes,” said Adam, “if you weren’t careful it would actually gobble you all up.”
Anyway, the point is this. Adam went to Paris for the weekend and asked his dad what he should do about the journalism course. They talked about it for a long time and Adam told his father everything. About all the mistakes he was making, about how it just wasn’t going the way he wanted it to go, about the tutors who just wouldn’t give him a chance and his dad thought about it for a long time and if he’d had a pipe, indeed if he’d been a pipe smoker, he would have puffed and puffed aromatic smoke into the air, and eventually he did say to Adam, “Have you ever considered turning to crime?”
I was thinking about Isabel’s pussy - well, to be more accurate, I was thinking about the story about Isabel’s pussy. Anyway, I was seriously wondering if crime might not be the answer to my predicament. It really had got down to that. I just couldn’t see my way out of this at all. So there I was sitting on my bed at Henry and Clarissa’s, the Lotus ticking cool in the garage below, thinking about this, and the house was all quiet and I put my hand in my jacket pocket and brought out The General’s gun, a Ruger Speed Six, and I looked at it all heavy and loaded and shiny and cool in my hand. And I wondered...

The General lived out Crawley way in a big modern house. After he’d left the car magazine he got a job as Editor of a fishing magazine called Fly. This is the thing most people don’t understand about journalists. If you can write and if you can learn to be an Editor then you can be Editor of just about anything. In my time I’ve run motoring magazines, electrical industry magazines and even a magazine about concrete. I once considered a job as Editor of a magazine called Abattoir Week but you know, even I have my limits.
The General was not only a good Editor he was also quite possibly the most pompous, most arrogant Englishman I’ve ever known. This is a good thing; good Editors have to have some character, and sometimes they are even nutters. This is how it should be.
Let’s face it, time was when mavericks, characters, personalities, you might even say eccentrics, enlivened the workplace, indeed enlivened the world, and not only that, they had creativity, they got things done, they invented things, they painted works of art that made us think, they wrote stories they weren't afraid to have aired. They spoke out, they argued, they shouted, they stamped their feet, they shook their fists, they used colourful language (swearing, I mean) and they made us laugh and they made us think.
Today, if you want to be a garbo and chuck people's rubbish in a truck you now have to do a personality test. If you want to work as a cleaner at an accountants in the city you have to be psycho-analysed before getting the job. I mean, honestly, what's that all about?
As it happens, I myself had to do one of those tests for a job I went for about a year ago. It was one of the newer on-line tests and because I'm absolutely crap at maths I got my friend George to come along and hop into the chair when the numbers bit came up. My logic was he must be good at adding up and stuff like that because he owns a fruit and veg shop so he’s constantly weighing and calculating the price of a bushel of bananas, or whatever they use these days in the grocery trade.
George jumped into the chair and looked at the screen and squinted and then looked at me and said, "There's no mention of plums or radish."
"Why would there be?" I asked, getting a bit nervous and wondering whether I too should have subjected George to a test before I handed him the controls of my future.
"How much do you want this job?" he asked me with a frown.
I looked at him. "You want another beer?"
George scratched his chin and said, "Yeah, might as well. Anyway, New Zealand is a fuck of a cold place. You don't want to go there."
Historically, to be argumentative meant to be intelligent, to be engaging in some sort of Socratic quest for the truth, to have a point of view meant you had something to say, something to contribute.
Today, there’s too much emphasis on employing people who aren’t likely to rock the boat. Well, you get what you pay for and if you’re a publisher and you take on some boring fart who’s going to do everything you want them to do then you’re going to get a boring fart magazine or web site. It’s just my opinion of course, but go on, try it out and see what happens.
Funny thing is, while I’d never say The General was one of my friends I respected him for being pompous, outspoken and a real character. Sometimes he made me laugh, even if sometimes I laughed out of embarrassment, but still, I laughed, and that’s always a good thing.
Workwise our paths had crossed several times and he was always one to tell you about the value of networking, so he always kept in touch. He was also one of those people who loved it when people went to him for advice. He’d sit back in his vast leather chair, hands clasped over his bulging stomach like he was some medieval cardinal considering a request from a supplicant. He’d think long and hard and stare at the ceiling for long periods in silence. Sometimes you thought he was about to say something because he’d bring his eyes down off the ceiling and look hard at you. But then the moment would pass and the eyes would roll back up again. This could go on for an hour or so before anything came of it.
Because I knew the General loved to dispense advice, I arranged to see him.
I turned up in the Lotus and he came out of his front door as I awkwardly clambered out of the car.
The Lotus is a chiropractor’s dream. Buy one and you will require his services until the day you die. It is quite simply one of those cars that are so difficult to get in and out of that you fear one day you will remain stuck inside. It would only take a small pulled muscle somewhere in your back to ensure that you were stuck helpless until someone came along with a pair of heavy duty cutting tools, a crane and a harness to hoike you out. When I say someone, I’m talking about the Fire Brigade. It’s definitely a task that would require professionals.
“So, I see you have acquired one of the infamous collector’s cars,”  The General said with dripping pomposity.
“Yes,” I said, massaging my lover back and attempting to stand straight again, which I eventually managed.
“Y’know they call them collector’s cars because -”
“I know,” I interrupted, “because you have to keep stopping to collect all the pieces that’ve fallen off. It’s an old joke.”
“Hurrumph,” said The General.
His house had the feel of a spotless, minimal military museum. You’d expect to turn a corner and see a Chieftain tank sitting there all alone in a white room. If you push him - well just gently nudge him actually - he’ll talk about his army days, telling you he was in some clandestine unit that operated behind enemy lines and that he can’t tell you much more than that or he’d have to kill you. He can’t tell you much more than that because there isn’t much more. In fact, there’s nothing at all. He was in the Territorial Army, the British Army reserve, where he went to play soldiers one weekend a month with a load of other middle-aged dreamers. He tells you he went to Sandhurst, but neglects to mention that it was not the army officer selection and training centre he visited. When he says he went to Sandhurst he means he went shopping at Marks & Spencers. Maybe Asda, I don’t know, but it was not the place where they turn out snobby officers, that’s for sure. I know because I checked and they had never heard of him.
Now, you could surmise that it was all part of the cloak and dagger clandestine stuff. “Some chap on the phone enquiring about The General.”
“Oh yes?” the other one would say softly, the one who looked like George Smiley, “well, tell him we’ve never heard of such a person. And one other thing Bill, put a trace on his phone and get Cartwright over there quick sharp in one of the Transit vans.”
They might have said all that, but more likely what they said was true, “sorry, can’t help you, never had a chap of that name here.”
Anyway, that’s his business, though one day it will probably come back to haunt him and one day he’ll probably have to admit that he only went to Sandhurst to buy underwear. Never mind, I didn’t go to visit him to blow his cover and I didn’t go to talk about fishing, or to discuss the merits of particular cars. No, The General had something that I wanted, something that I needed, and when I made my excuses and visited his toilet I went and got it. He’d shown it to me once, so I knew where to look.
A little later as I said my goodbyes and reassumed the Lotus position, The General slapped his hand twice on the roof and I smiled tightly at him and said, “Careful old chap.”
“Of course, sorry. Might damage something. See you soon Biffo.”
I have no idea where the Biffo thing came from. Must have been something to do with the army. That’s the Territorial Army, you understand.

to be continued...