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http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/en-EUMokoFeed10http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/http://data5.blog.de/design/preview/d4/3f84426b3afab407b48d96684cab6e_160x200.jpgGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/26/gone-4369484/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-26:/2008/06/26/gone-4369484/Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:38:05 +0200 <p><br><em><br>Fifty-one</em></p> <p>Five weeks after arriving back in Britain I turned around as I climbed the steps up to the Boeing 747 and I took one last look. After all, I didn’t plan on coming back for a while. I took a deep breath and it made me cough. The English bloke behind me started tut-tutting because I was holding them up and I just smiled at him - I was going home, and that was the finest feeling of them all. <br>As I got through the Boeing’s door I showed them my Boarding Card and the stewardess smiled at me the way they do and she said, row 42, down on the right. <br>And then she handed me the menu. </p> <p><em>to be continued...</em></p> <p> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/26/gone-4369484/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>menurow-42britainboeing-747http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/26/gone-4369484/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/25/gone-4364657/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-25:/2008/06/25/gone-4364657/Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:29:36 +0200 <p><br><em>Fifty</p> <p></em><br>While I was in London I went to see one of Jade’s friends. His nickname’s Multi on account of the fact that he once misplaced his car in a multi-storey car park for over four hours. He was banged up in stuffy old Brixton prison, and it happened like this. <br>He got in a fight with this bloke. About what I don’t know, it could even have been about nothing, and the police arrived and they split them up and arrested Multi. He’ll tell you it’s because he’s black. Either way, the police charged Multi-Storey with aggravated affray and he got taken to court and they brought the full weight of the law down upon him. One police officer gave evidence and said that Mr Multi had been wielding a knife and that he’d thrown it as hard as he could when the coppers turned up and that it went in the River Thames. Two other coppers swore on the Bible that Multi had a knife and was trying to use it. The other guy, he slipped through their fingers and they never got a good look at him, they said. Well, Multi said he didn’t have a knife, and I believe him because Jade told me he’s not like that. Anyway, the missing knife did it for him - he got sent down to reside at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, as they euphemistically call it. See, in Britain they’re really tough on people who carry weapons, and sometimes they’re just tough on people like Multi. <br>It always comes as something of a surprise to me that Brixton Prison is actually in the middle of Brixton. I know it shouldn’t be a shock, what with it being called Brixton Prison and all that, but my image of a prison is, I suppose, of Dartmoor Prison where it’s in the middle of a moor. <br>So I went visiting. I joined the queue of people waiting to go in. In truth it wasn’t much of a queue. It’s not like in the films where a crowd of young, slightly put-upon but often still sexy women with screaming, bawling children hanging on their coat tails are waiting to see their Dad, or middle-aged women in curlers are hanging out for a cup of tea and a fag while looking forward to a few words with their young Darryl. No, it’s altogether bleaker than that. Most people don’t get any visitors at all and this fine morning I was the only one going to see Multi. <br>“In my cell man, there’s this pane of glass missing.”<br>I looked at him across the table. “Well, it is bloody hot, mate. Maybe it’ll help keep the place cool.”<br>“Yeah, it gets hot as a fuckin’ Tube train man. Hot as that.”<br>“I know what you mean,” I said. <br>“But soon it’ll be winter.”<br>I hadn’t thought he’d be there that long but of course he would. Winter was going to come along soon enough. <br>“Look,” I said, “I’ll send you some money. Maybe someone can fix it for you.”<br>“No man, don’t send it. They’ll just nick the money. I know people here been sent money before and it never gets to them. Never.”<br>“Okay. What can I do?”<br>Multi looked around. I thought there’d be glass between us. The sort that’s so thick you can only hear muffled words. But this is Brixton Prison and they don’t have stuff like that. <br>“Me mum. She can get stuff to me in here.”<br>“How’s she do that then? Stick it in a cake or something?”<br>“Don’t be havin’ me man. Me mum has her ways.”<br>“Fair enough.”<br>“So maybe you can give something to her?”<br>“Maybe I can,” I said, “and maybe there’s something you can do for me.”<br>Multi snorted. “Yeah, man. Me banged up in here.”<br>I looked at him, “When you get out,” I said quietly. <br>“Okay,” he said when I’d told him. <br>He took a deep breath and let it out slow and I realised it was difficult for him to be in here. “So, how’s me Jade then?”<br>I laughed. “She’s really well. Getting browner and browner in the bloody sun.”<br>Multi looked at me and said quietly. “Turned out okay for both of you, didn’t it?”<br>I looked down at my hands on the table, took a deep breath and then looked up at him again.<br>“There’s some luck, there’s some other stuff. I don’t know half of what it is, and of course there’s finding Jade. That’s it really.” <br>He nodded and I said, leaning forward, “It’s hard to see you in here. It’s not good at all.”<br>He laughed. “Things’ll work out, man. They always do.”</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/25/gone-4364657/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>prisonmultibrixtonpolicehttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/25/gone-4364657/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/23/gone-4354285/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-23:/2008/06/23/gone-4354285/Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:45:55 +0200 <p><em>Forty-nine</em></p> <p>You know, so many people turned up at my mum's funeral it humbled me. I think my mum would have appreciated it very much and I think she would have liked to have been there in person. <br>I just never realised she had so many friends. <br>What I did realise as I stood there was that many questions remained unanswered, not least what had been going on in the Mr Kipling factory. I know my mum would have a chuckle if she realised I wanted to know about that. She would have laughed and said, “that’s my boy. That’s my first born”.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/23/gone-4354285/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>mummr-kiplingfuneralhttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/23/gone-4354285/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/23/gone-4349948/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-23:/2008/06/23/gone-4349948/Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:52:08 +0200 <p><em>Forty-eight</em></p> <p>What also soon became clear to me was that I’d got more relaxed living in Australia. In England it goes like this: one day, there I was driving along the M40 and as it comes up towards London you enter this gorge lined by chalk cliffs. It’s a steep upward slope and anything with more weight than an aluminium drinks can loses speed really quickly. So vans and trucks and buses should always be in the left-hand lane so you can go past them. Trouble is, in England they have this phenomenon known as White Van Man. White Van Man drives, well, a white van, and there are thousands of them on British roads. The thing is this, he has the equivalent of a Spitfire engine under the bonnet, or at least that’s what he thinks. These white vans can go at terrific speeds, especially on the motorway where they will tailgate you for miles and miles until you let them past so that they can warp-speed away into the distance. The only time you ever catch up with them is when they have an accident further up the road. So you see them again quite often. And there are White Van Man dopple-gangers spread right across Europe. In Germany they have VW Polo Man, in France there’s Renault Clio Man, in Spain it’s The SEAT Man, and in Italy, well they’re all just called Italians. <br>So, this White Van overtakes me just at the start of the steep hill and I’m thinking, why is he doing this because pretty soon he’s going to be...uh-oh and then he just pulls right in front of me, so close I can smell his aftershave (and it does not smell good, let me tell you) and I have to yank my steering wheel hard over and go past him because he has pulled up sharper than a crash dummy.<br>As I go past I shake my head at this particular fool - that’s all I do. Well, big mistake. The challenge is on. See, I’d been away too long. I’d forgotten that the worst thing you can do in England is make eye contact with a fellow road user. They see it as some kind of challenge. And bear in mind that I’d done nothing wrong. Anyway, I get to the top of the hill and the road levels out as it goes towards High Wycombe and Marlow and I look in the mirror and White Van Man is coming up behind me. Fast. I accelerate - you have to because if you wait for him he’ll just glue himself to your bumper and follow you home, even if you live in Marseilles. <br>By the time I’m up to 90 mph, which is about as fast as my diminutive hire car will go, he is still some way behind but he’s gaining. I put the pedal flat to the floor and the car does not leap forwards, the engine does not roar, the speedo does not show any upward movement. Anyhow, by now I am thinking about evasive action. An English friend of mine told me this same sort of thing happened to him once and eventually what he did was drive off the motorway and race into a housing estate and execute an elaborate and noisy handbrake turn in a quiet cul-de-sac. One minute he’d been casually driving home from work, the next he’s in a life or death situation. Pulling up, jumping out in the encroaching darkness, reaching into the boot of his car, waiting to see the lights of his pursuer’s ire, hefting a baseball bat in his hands. <br>"I didn’t know you played," I’d said, and he’d looked at me like I was simple. "Mate, everyone has a bat in the boot now." In my friend’s confrontation the other bloke took the hint and didn’t want to come out and play. I assume he’d left his own bat at home, otherwise no doubt they would have duelled there and then in Acacia Avenue, the click-clack of American baseball bats echoing in a sleepy Surrey backwater as night fell. I suppose the day will come, and probably it’s not that far off, when your British car tool kit will include a solid wooden baseball bat, nestling in there amongst the spanners, screwdrivers and wheel wrench. <br>My very own White Van Man was almost upon me but when I snatched a look in the mirror he’d gone. I panicked. He must be alongside me! I whipped my head around. He wasn’t. I looked over the other shoulder to see if he was creeping up on me from the nearside, or even hurtling along the hard shoulder. But he wasn’t there either. I breathed a sigh of relief. He’d obviously peeled away up the last off ramp, searching for other prey.<br>So you see, there’s little time to relax on a trip to Britain. Soon as you get there it’s all go. Except of course when you go to a funeral. </p> <p>to be continued...<br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/23/gone-4349948/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>white-van-manacacia-avenueitaliansfuneralfiathttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/23/gone-4349948/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/20/gone-4338942/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-20:/2008/06/20/gone-4338942/Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:38:00 +0200 <p><em>Forty-seven</em></p> <p>In some ways it’s easy to see why London has become like this, why there is this simmering anger. Take the buses. I did before I got myself a hire car and I tell you, they are hell on earth. Not because of the people who use them but because it was summer and they were like mobile cauldrons. Ironically the older buses, the traditional red double-decker Routemasters that you see plying the streets of truly central London, up Piccadilly and Regent Street and on to Oxford Circus and Oxford Street, are coolish even when the weather is stickily hot because you can open the windows along the sides and there’s the ever-open back end where the stairs go up. The newer buses, which have only their colour in common with the Routemasters, are shiny and clean and inside their seats are clothed in the brightest flecked material I have ever seen. These seat colours jostle and fight each other and I have to tell you they are not a pleasant sight first thing in the morning. I wondered if they came out of the packet like that or if someone had actually sat down and designed this horrendous colour scheme. If it’s the latter the perpetrators deserve to be tarred and veloured in garish multi-colours to within an inch of their lives until they promise never, ever to do anything like it again. <br>I got on the first new double-decker on a sweltering hot day and asked the driver if he could switch the air conditioning on. He looked at me. "You takin’ the piss, mate? This is London Transport, not bleeding Mercedes-Benz." Such is their witty repartee.<br>Suitably chastened I walked down the back of the bus and by the time I got there I was almost drowning in my own sweat. I flopped down on the back seat and it was hot to the touch. That’s not too surprising because underneath its padding you’ll find an engine the size of a small passenger car. In the winter this is fine. People perch there like a row of grey pigeons, all puffed up in their thick quilted jackets, each making the most of the fierce heat, each saying nothing, each savouring the intense warmth beaming up through their buttocks. But in the summer only a package tourist down from the Sun would want to go anywhere near this particular heat source. <br>On today’s modern London double-decker there are only a few side windows to be opened and they’re those ridiculous letterbox affairs that flap up. It beats me how anyone ever thought air could get in there, let alone how any of it could actually flow around the vehicle. Maybe they knew it wouldn’t work but just stuck them in there anyway, perhaps as some kind of cruel joke. Of course there are worse places to be, like upstairs where there are no opening windows at all. This is real pressure cooker stuff and I’m surprised not more people are carted off to intensive care suffering from heat stroke, gibbering in their delirium, "the windows, I saw no open windows...". Certainly if you’d had the gas turned off at home for non-payment of your bill this would be the ideal place to head for. Just slap your bacon and eggs on the inside of the front screen and they’d be done to a crisp in less than a minute. <br>I should say that at least regular bus travel gave me the chance to sample much more of the London bus drivers’ unique approach to customer relations. One day a woman came up to the open door of the bus and asked, "Can you tell me which bus I need to catch for Euston?" The driver didn’t look at her, just took a long and deep breath and said, "No" and we drove off. I saw her as we passed, her mouth suitably agape. <br>Another day the bus was almost empty and a tourist stood up. (I knew he was a visitor because he had his wallet in his back pocket where it was handily placed for any mugger to lift. Even a trainee pickpocket could have been away with it in the time it took his thieving fingers to touch the leather. What most worried me about this observation of mine was that I was beginning to think this way…). The tourist went to the door. The driver looked at him in the rear view mirror and as we approached the next stop he said, "If you want to get off mate you’ve got to press the button." The tourist watched as the bus stop went past. He looked at the driver who ignored him. Eventually he got off two stops up the road when someone else wearily got up and rang the bell for him. <br>There is air conditioning on London Underground trains. For the drivers. One day I ventured down to the Tube, taking the lift to the deep subterranean levels. As the doors parted I believed for a moment that I hadn’t paid enough attention at ground level and had mistakenly entered some exclusive underground sauna club, a place where businessmen could go to ease the stresses and strains of the daily grind. But no such luck, this was indeed the Underground, sizzling, humming with heat, a heat as big and as fierce as a pack of rabid animals. Imagine, I imagined, what it would be like on one of the dreaded trains itself what with the frequent and unexplained stops in the middle of tunnels and passengers who cannot even bring themselves to speak and their bodily odours all mixing and mingling. The thought of it all was enough to work me up into a sweat. I got back in the lift and returned to the world outside, being careful of course to look around before emerging into the sunlight. You do that in London, you are forever looking around, conscious of the youth who is walking perhaps a little too close to your heels or the young woman who brushes up against you on the Tube for just too long a moment. For all you know she may have been fishing for your wallet or your phone while she was making what you thought was bold sexual contact.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/20/gone-4338942/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>the-tubelondon-busesair-conditioningmuggerslondon-undergroundhttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/20/gone-4338942/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/19/gone-4334737/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-19:/2008/06/19/gone-4334737/Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:55:22 +0200 <p><em>Forty-six</em></p> <p>While I was in London people told me not to toot my horn at anyone if I drove through Brixton. I wondered what they were talking about. They said I could get shot. Only five years before I used to go there all the time. Brixton has always been at the cultural sharp edge. Back in the early 1900s the suburb’s Electric Avenue was so called because it was the very first street in London to get electric lights. Over time Brixton became a mainly black cultural centre as immigrants from Africa and the West Indies settled there, and during the 1980s it became a flash point as some particularly nasty riots tore the area apart when locals rebelled against what they felt were the injustices routinely meted out to them by the white majority and the local police. The soul-searching that followed - and the barrow loads of cash too - helped Brixton get back on its feet, and it boomed. Even Madonna came to strut her stuff at Brixton’s renowned Academy nightspot. Another tangible result of the renaissance following the riots was a great cinema - the beautifully renovated art deco Ritzy. When I lived in London I’d be seen down there two or three times a week, eyes glued to the screen and afterwards I’d stroll to the Tube, all safe and sound. And now people were telling me not to toot anyone because I could get shot. What a crying shame. <br>When I went back there in 2001, young men on the streets of Brixton regularly sported guns and most made little pretence about hiding them. When the police arrived to try and arrest these gun-toters they were routinely stoned by gangs of locals who resented what they saw as heavy-handed intrusion into their community - that’s heavy-handed police, not gun-toters, you understand. <br>Brixton is just one of many London boroughs that have seen an alarming increase in street muggings and violent attacks, a trend which is also apparent in the rest of Lambeth and in neighbouring Hackney, as evidenced by signs attached to lamp posts warning pedestrians to be on their guard against pick-pockets. And even the most genteel of suburbs cannot escape the blight. One of the worst hit is Richmond-on-Thames, home to the likes of Prince Michael of Kent, Mick Jagger and a slew of well-paid television types. Indeed, such is the spread of the help-yourself crime wave that I often felt like a stranger, a timid, wary stranger, right there in my own city. A city that felt, well, dangerous, to me. <br>One day I drove along London’s Embankment towards prosperous Chelsea where homes regularly sell for over a million pounds and I saw one of those large yellow police boards asking passers-by for information about ‘incidents’. This one told the brief and sorry tale of a man who’d been approached, robbed and then thrown into the Thames far below the roadway.<br>Another day I was sitting in crawling traffic through Peckham and as I passed an alleyway I saw another board. This particular short story was about someone who’d been murdered just two days before. He didn’t have an especially outrageous name - something like Billy Blake - but the sign said he’d also been known as The Crucial Kid and he’d been a local drugs dealer. He was 14 when he’d been killed - you’d have thought that was barely enough time to develop yourself a criminal master mind, let alone know how to use it. </p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/19/gone-4334737/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>peckhamriver-thamescrucial-kidbrixtongunshttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/19/gone-4334737/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/18/gone-4329954/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-18:/2008/06/18/gone-4329954/Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:23:14 +0200 <p><em>Forty-five</em></p> <p>I spent most of the interminable flight to Britain composing a letter to Amnesty International asking if there was anything they could do about the barbarity of long-distance airline travel, and in particular if they could arouse international sympathy for myself and all my fellow passengers who were being tortured hour after hour in seats with so little legroom. And sometimes, I added in capital letters, THEY TURN THE OXYGEN LEVEL SO LOW I THINK WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE! The final crunch came when we were making our approach into London. I should have been looking out of the window absorbing the sights of my hometown. But I couldn’t because I was locked in an argument with a steward and stewardess about why I hadn’t got the Full English Breakfast. <br>"Where is my Full Monty?" <br>The stewardess looked at me and then crouched down so quick I thought maybe we’d hit some turbulence. She put her heavily made-up face close to mine, gave me that special tight smile only air hostesses can do and hissed, "You take your clothes off and so help me God I’ll have you arrested," and then she straightened up and smiled in that oh so special way and said, "Now sir, we can offer you a frittata." <br>"I don’t drink alcohol this time in the morning." <br>"Well," said the steward as he flung out hard bread rolls fast as bullets, "there are no more English Breakfasts. Okay?"<br>"But it’s on the menu you handed out when we took off a week ago."<br>"But you’re sitting in row 42."<br>"So?"<br>"So, you’re in the middle and we start at the front," (he swept his arms here like he was showing me the exit door. I swear that if you met them on the street and asked for directions they would move their arms in this slow sweep as they directed you to take the nearest exit over there), "and we start at the back, and by the time we get to where you’re sitting there are no more Full English Breakfasts. Sir."<br>"So, they pay more to sit at the back, do they?"<br>"No, but like I say-"<br>"But I want my Full Monty and I want it now!"<br>"Well you can’t have one."<br>And then we glided in and touched down with the most perfect landing I’ve ever experienced. The bloke next to me leaned over, smiled like Jack Nicholson and said, "Looks like the guy up front got his bacon and eggs."<br>Down on the ground it all seemed disturbingly familiar. Five years away and nothing had changed. Surely it should have done? Shabby Heathrow transit corridors, a copper shouting at me to turn my mobile phone off, the customs officer bored and tired, just waving me through, and the cold early morning air making me cough. It had been five years since I’d breathed this air shared by 11 million other Londoners. A polite little cough seemed the least I could do to trumpet my arrival.<br>When you get out in the London streets you realise just how hectic the pace of life can be. Of course it’s partly down to the number of people. In London and its suburbs you’re mixing it with all those hustling, bustling, shouldering, barging people. It’s not like Sydney where you’ll often bump into a familiar friendly face down on George or Pitt Street. In London there are so many people you are well and truly alone. <br>And of course things had changed. It was just that the changes weren’t that obvious at first. <br>Now there’s a two pound coin, Channel Five, a Labour Government, interactive TV, whatever that is, and tens of thousands of European and Middle Eastern refugees. And then there’s an oh-so-slow 40 mph speed limit on the flyover going into London at the end of the M4. When I was 21 and sharing a place with Deak, The Prince of Darkness, I used to whiz along here as fast as I could, all flash in my road-test cars, hugging the bend as I zipped past the swish new computer company buildings. Today there are no more computer company buildings. In fast-moving, ever-changing London they’ve all gone bust or been absorbed, or replaced by swish new global pharmaceutical conglomerates whose brand names are so long you can’t read them comfortably, even at 40 mph.<br>As I was meandering along I had plenty of time to wonder what the new-found British preoccupation with speed - or rather lack of speed - was all about. <br>In the UK there are now at least twice as many speed cameras as in any other country in Europe. There’s actually a good reason for this mushrooming of the inquisitive lens and it’s not what you think - it’s got hardly anything to do with the stated UK government intention to keep speed down in order to cut accidents. (This is a stupid fallacy in any case. Figures released by the UK’s Department of Transport revealed that in fact only 4.5 per cent of crashes are due to excess speed). When I was last living in Blighty five years before there had been enough speed cameras to record every journey, even those taken by pedal bike, but now the cameras are so numerous and so technically advanced they can tell you the name on the bike’s frame and even the make of bicycle clips you’re wearing.<br>Now, if speed isn’t actually to blame for the bulk of accidents, why so many cameras? The answer’s depressingly simple really, it’s because the police forces who erect them get to keep the money from any fines they are able to grab from the offending and photographed motorist. Mind you, there are still some laughs to be had out of all of this. Police in Kent sent a speeding motorist a photo of his good self breaking the speed limit along with a demand for payment of the fine. He being a bit of a joker sent them a photograph of his own - of a bundle of money. Not to be outdone, the coppers sent a picture of a pair of handcuffs. The speedster got the hint and paid up. <br>That aside there is little to laugh about. All the time you feel you’re being watched, which of course you are. There are some good reasons for this - namely pick-pocketing and muggings. You always had to be careful in old London town, even in Roman times I reckon it was a bit risky, but now you need SAS training to spot all of the dodgy geezers and ensure you avoid having your wallet lifted or mobile phone snatched. <br>If you’re a mugger in London, the best trick, apparently, is to grab someone’s mobile phone and then sell it on quick as you can. This means young working professionals are being targeted by the muggers, rather than the old or vulnerable, though presumably they’ll still get a tap too if the mugger thinks it’s worthwhile. So, you’re working for some big corporate, and this is London so you’re smartly dressed, which sort of alerts the mugger, and you come out of the Underground, phone glued to your ear, nattering to a mate or colleague and they pounce, hitting you to the ground, nicking the phone and running. Newspaper articles regularly detail this crime and there was even one paper with a regular table that told you where that week’s mugging hotspots were. I think you can even phone a special number and get the latest info - well, you can if you’ve still got your phone. They’ll also tell you how to find out what your mobile’s serial number is. Apparently without this you can’t actually get the phone cancelled and the muggers know this and phone away at your expense and to their heart’s content. <br>While I was in London someone told me how she’d just that day seen a man beaten on the Wandsworth Road. This is the busy main road linking Vauxhall with the trendy suburbs of Wandsworth, Battersea and Clapham. Just a stone’s throw from the multi-billion pound MI5 building, as it happens. Early on this particular evening, before it had even got dark, three kids attacked an Asian man, punching him, battering him to the ground. When a bus stopped they ran off but not before they’d stolen the bloke’s wallet and turned him into a hospital case. Someone else told me how a couple of months ago she’d been waiting in the bus queue with another woman and an old man. A youth walked up, stuck a hand calm as you please into the old man’s jacket and came out with his wallet and ran off. It only took a few seconds. The old man couldn’t believe it. "I’m being robbed!" he shouted, as much in disbelief as in concern for his lost belongings. But at least the mugger didn’t shoot him... <br>And this is the thing. I’d wondered why almost all of the police officers I saw were wearing black flak jackets over their white summer shirts, especially in the sticky summer heat. Well, in today’s London if they’re to stand an evens chance of reaching the end of a shift without being wounded - or worse - they have to wear the bulky protection simply because this largely unarmed police force is constantly having to face guns on the streets, guns in the clubs, even guns in the schools. It used to be a pair or Nikes or the latest Adidas trainers that sparked fights in the playground. Now it’s about who’s got the smoothest, most powerful gun. It’s about controlling your patch, and never mind that some of these gun toters are only 13 and 14. Kids in London know that you can certainly get rich quick - you just need the inclination and the right tools for the job. First off you have to go and get a gun, then point that gun at someone and take their drugs off them. That’s cheaper and less risky than trying to import the hard stuff into the country yourself. <br>Just before I arrived there was a US-style drive-by-shooting outside a city nightclub. What bothered the police was not so much that someone could drive by and start indiscriminately shooting, though clearly that was a worry in itself, rather it was that some of the club-goers who were leaving at the time took out their own guns and started firing back.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/18/gone-4329954/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>mobile-phonesmuggersdrive-by-shootingromespeed-camerasblightyhttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/18/gone-4329954/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/16/gone-4324987/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-16:/2008/06/16/gone-4324987/Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:21:56 +0200 <p><br><em>Forty-four...</em></p> <p>And then, all of a sudden I had to go home. We’d been living in Australia for five years. Five years! The time just flies on by when you’re busy reinventing yourself. Still, I thought of England as home. Strange thing was, I’d never once felt homesick even though I was as far away as you could get. <br>As I put the phone down though I wondered how I’d feel when I went back. Then I got to thinking about all that time I’d spent trying to write those damned books, all that time being proud even as I went to the brink of living out on the streets, all that time thinking about what I wanted to do and striving to do it. I think that none of this had been good, and that’s why I never felt homesick - it was a relief to be away from it all, from the pressure, the strain, the depression. But sometimes you have to go back and when Tom told me that the cancer had almost gone but then it had come back stronger and fitter and marched on in my mum’s body until she just couldn’t take it any more I sat and I thought. I sat thinking about all the time I’d spent by myself when perhaps I could have spent some of it with my family, spent some of it with my mother. You know, I think that you never believe your parents will die. Of course you know they will but most people never focus in on it, don’t spend all their time thinking about it, which I suppose is how it should be. But one minute your parents are healthy and fit and doing stuff and the next minute something like this can happen and they change down a gear, the brakes go on and suddenly, before you know it, they are barely the people you’ve known all your life. <br>I managed to get through to my mum on the phone in the hospital and she said she didn’t know where she was. She sounded just like my granny before she died. I mean that she had a Yorkshire accent. My mum hadn’t had a Yorkshire accent in all the time I’d known her, which of course was all my life, though I guess she must have had a twang when I was little because I was born in Middlesbrough when she was 21. She taught in a tough inner city Middlesbrough school and she was an only child and I think she must have been lonely when she was a kid, though she never said she was. I just guessed. She told me one day, with more than a trace of bitterness that there had been lots of things she’d wanted to do. I was too embarrassed by this uncharacteristic outburst to ask exactly what those things had been and instead I just said, “well, you should have done them then”. <br>Since I’ve grown up a bit I’ve had things like that said to me and boy does it sting. In the depths of my own personal despair someone in Britain once said to me, “you know, I don’t think you’ll be able to pull yourself out of this.” Bollocks, I said to myself at the time. I spat the word in my head. Sometimes you just have to take your problems and you just have to say bollocks to them. I wished my mother had said bollocks to a few things. She might have had a bit more fun if she had, rather than bottling it all up inside like she did. Look, it’s just a personal thing, but I reckon you live longer if you let go a bit. I’ve bottled stuff up and I’ve let things go and letting go is the way. I think if you do that then you’ll live a whole lot longer and I intend to live for, well, forever actually, so let go, have a shout, move some stuff around. Live longer. <br>When I got her on the phone in that hospital she said, “I’m leaving you -” and then her voice trembled and I thought, God, here I am on the other side of the bloody world and she’s on the phone and she just so happens to be dying at this very moment, and then she got control of her voice again and continued, “- leaving you some money.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. <br>I talked to Tom and told him I’d fix a flight but it was Easter and everything was closed so we had to wait until the Tuesday. On Tuesday I got a flight booked for later that week, it was the best I could do, but early the next evening the phone rang and I answered it and my sister was there and she told me mum had died. My first thought was, oh God, that’s really going to give Tom something to complain about. Of course I was right, but this time you couldn’t blame him. Really you couldn’t. <br>One day, mum had told me that a friend of her’s had revealed some damning evidence about the way Mr Kipling cakes were made and that as a result she would never buy them or eat them again. I asked her what she knew and she said it was so terrible that she couldn’t tell me. I wish I’d quizzed her because now there’s no way I’m ever going to find out what the story was, and of course it also means I’ll never eat a Mr Kipling cake again, which is a shame because I always rather liked them.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/16/gone-4324987/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>mr-kiplingcakestomhttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/16/gone-4324987/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/15/gone-4320426/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-15:/2008/06/15/gone-4320426/Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:37:27 +0200 <p><br><em>Forty-three</em></p> <p>As often seems to happen, one door closes and another one opens. Trouble was, The Dipper was on the other side of this particular wood veneered entranceway, and he was beckoning me in like Fagin. <br>“Mate, got a new job. They want an editor-in-chief sort of thingy and I thought it’d be right up your darkened alley, he-he. Come on over and have a coffee and I’ll introduce you to the team. Hey, can you pick up some fags for me on the way over? Couple of packs should do it, no hang on, see if you can handle four.”<br>So began my next job. Over the doorway they should have had a sign: Dysfunctional Family-Owned Company would have about done it.<br>The first mistake they made was putting nephew Kent in charge. <br>Kent drank alcohol like his life depended on it, fancied himself as a ladies man, a salesman (which, sadly for the company, he wasn’t), and he reckoned he could party Paris Hilton under the table any day of the week, which was probably true.<br>On a business trip to Brisbane he took the new salesman out on the town and ended up roaming the streets singing and sucking the life out of bottles of FourX until the police arrived and told them it was illegal to drink alcohol on the streets. “We don’t fuckin’ care,” bleared Kent, “we’re from Sydney.” And then he ran off up the road, with a copper in hot pursuit.<br>The young salesman spent the night banged up in a cell while Kent, powered by booze, somehow managed to evade capture and slept it off in a park.<br>During the night someone took his mobile phone and wallet and by all accounts had a right old time spending the loot, maxing up his credit cards and using his mobile to call all the relatives they could find worldwide.<br>One time I went with him to a conference in Hong Kong and he insisted on going to what he called the Titty Bar. I said, “I thought you’d never been to Hong Kong before?” He leered at me, “Mate, they have a Titty Bar everywhere.” Needless to say I made my excuses and retired for the night.<br>The following morning he staggered into the restaurant for breakfast, stood swaying, sweating in the doorway, hair spiky on his head, bloodshot eyes staring around the room as if he wondered not only how he’d got there, but also who he was.<br>We were there for a week, and one other night we went out for a meal in a dodgy part of the city (“much more fun down here, skipper,” he told me, but not looking at me as he leered at beautiful, haughty, red-silk-dressed Chinese girls passing by). Hee put his new credit card behind the bar, much to the amusement of the locals who, it later turned out, bought a new engine for a Hong Kong harbour junk by using his copious credit.<br>In fact, I think before we left the establishment they were bolting it in. </p> <p>At the dysfunctional family company there was nothing entered into with more gay abandon than partying and dressing up. If they'd put as much effort into the business itself we'd all have been Lear jet owners and I'd have had a house on the bay at Biarritz.<br>As it was, come Melbourne Cup Day, (which for my non-Aussie readers is similar to the UK's Grand National, and we get a day off work) we were all summoned out into the garden just before lunch and each handed colourful horses' tails which we had to pin to our backsides. A track was painted into the grass by old man Jones whose only job appeared to be organising the painting of tracks, the signs which went up when we went off-site on cross-country pursuits, and ensuring the water fountain bottle was only changed once a month ("whether we've run out of water or not, young sir...").<br>The owner's wife - a chain-smoking harridan with a wharfy's roughneck voice - bellowed at us as we ran to, "move yer arses, go on yer bludgers!" while waving and cracking a stock whip which caused old man Jones to clutch his chest in what I thought to be as fine an imitation of a man who was about to have a heart attack as I've ever seen.<br>As I was galloping around the track one year, my tail flailing out behind me, the harridan trying to flick my backside with her vicious whip and Kent staggering across the track in front of us resplendent in a clown's outfit, clutching a Crown lager, going, "neigh, neigh, horsy, hey, watch out there fella!") I wondered what were the hidden benefits of working here.<br>The final crunch came at Christmas. The orders came down from the wife, it's fancy dress and this is what you will wear.<br>They got me to dress up as a famous Aborigine boxer. No I can't remember his name but it was someone back in the 1920s, (so there's your quiz for today), complete with red satin shorts, boxing boots, big red shiny boxing gloves and my lily white skin blacked up by old man Jones so I looked like a Black-and-White-Minstrel.<br>Each of the staff was ordered to board a public bus to the venue, the idea being that the omnibus's patrons would try to guess, with much glee, it was supposed by the management, exactly who we were.<br>I stepped aboard and tried to punch my ticket in the machine - no mean feat when you're trapped inside a pair of boxing gloves - but eventually managed it, turned around to walk to a seat and realised by the faces looking at me with the kind of silence you only hear before something momentous is likely to happen to you, also going to their Christmas party, was the Waramilijaratu aborigine clan - every last single one of them.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/15/gone-4320426/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/15/gone-4320426/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/12/gone-4308635/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-12:/2008/06/12/gone-4308635/Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:35:11 +0200 <p><em>Forty-two</em></p> <p>And what a bunch they’d hired. <br>There was the American girl who’d never worked for a real company in her life. She’d come out of some Ivy-League university and then gone to work for one of the big consultancy firms. She came from money, she employed her own publicist and so regularly appeared in the newspapers, lauded as an international marathon runner, a top violin player and an unofficial ambassador to all young Americans who might visit Australia. She spoke fluent French and had an MBA from Harvard. But the Internet venture was her first outing in the real world and it must have been a strange place for her - all these people who lived in a world where you actually had to make something. She had that false American bonhomie and insisted on calling me Kingster as in, “Hiya, Kingster, how’s it hanging you big cordiba.” I have to be honest, most of the time I had no idea what she was talking about. <br>One morning I went into the office kitchen where she was fixing herself a bowl of green leaves (for a time I thought she owned a pet rabbit which dwelled in secrecy in her office, but actually the rabbit food was for her goodself) and I asked her how she was getting on with her new boyfriend. She frowned and looked at the leaves and then looked at me and went hummph, and then started to stir the leaves and then looked at me sideways and said, “ya know Kingster, he is giving some good cognitive responses to my alliterations, so yeah I guess he is in a truly responsive mode and willing to be clustered into a relationship. But only of sorts, and to be honest it will be some prescient person who can truly unlock his spiritual belongings and bring that baggage home right where it belongs.”<br>No, I’ve no idea either.<br>Then there was The Cowboy, so called because he was always cutting corners and riding roughshod over everyone. He also wasn’t very good at his job, but it was easy for him to disguise this fact because, well, no one actually knew what his job was. Basically he went to meetings. One day I bumped into someone who’d worked with him previously at a big corporate and he told me they didn’t know what The Cowboy’s job was there either. “He just went to loads of meetings,” said this bloke looking at his shoes as if he were embarrassed that someone could get away with this for so long. <br>I was in numerous meetings with The Cowboy and when something came up someone was unhappy with, his face took on the pained screwed-up look of a man sitting in the privacy of his own toilet attempting to sort out a particularly stubborn case of constipation. Then all of a sudden he would thump the desk and shout out things like, “it’s easy for you to be coming at me like this but have you checked the HTML code!? Of course you haven’t! Before you come at me again in this shit-house manner I’d really like you to be aware of the damage this is inflicting on my team!”<br>Bonkers. <br>They had this other guy who’d worked as an accountant since leaving university. And he’d worked for the same company, so that was like 18 years with the same bunch of accountants. Now, he thought he was at the cutting edge of things, what with suddenly working in this Internet company. One day he even came into work without a tie.<br>One morning I was walking up the stairs and he said to me, “Hey there, we’re the risk takers.” I looked at him and said, “what, you with your Volvo?” He didn’t think that was funny at all. Come to think of it, he didn’t think very much was funny. That’s what you get for being an accountant - sorry but that’s the truth of it. What always strikes me as funny about accountants is that they think they can do other things besides adding columns of figures up (I understand some of them can even subtract and divide too).<br>My question is, how come whenever a company bites the dust they get a bunch of accountants in and all of a sudden they are experts at running an airline or an insurance company or an Internet start-up company? I just don’t understand it. It’s like me saying, I have been a driver of cars since I was 17 so I think they should put me in charge of a major soup manufacturer. Actually that would make more sense than an accountant trying to run a business. One day he said, “You know, I took all of the company’s magazines to the swimming baths this Saturday and as my kids were swimming I had a bit of a look and I can tell you, those blue boxes are going to have to go and I don’t like the look of this story on page four and...”. Meanwhile I understand the pool attendant was giving his four year old. You know, I didn’t do all the training I did, and get all of the experience I’ve got to be told by an accountant how to make a magazine look good. Do I tell them how to add up, or how to design a balance sheet? No, and I bloody well don’t want to because you know what, I’ve got some imagination and it can be used for better things than cooking someone’s books, which is certainly something they are expert at. I know this because I watch the news every day. <br>One week I took a couple of days off and when I came back they’d put together a document outlining where the company would be five years down the track. Now, everyone has the right to be positive but this accountant bloke had said in his document that in five years time the company would have revenues of five billion dollars. When I came back and saw this I rushed up to his office and said, “There seems to be a mistake on the document. Is it too late to get all the copies back!?”<br>He looked startled and grabbed the document and started feverishly leafing through it until he found the right page. Then he let a held breath out and said, “No,” and relaxing into his chair he added, “it’s all correct.”<br>“No”, I said insistently, slapping the document with my hand, “it says five billion dollars. Surely it should be five million?”<br>He looked at me and smiled. “You have to be positive.”<br>All well and good, but at that stage we had not brought in a single cent. How could we make five billion dollars (that’s 5000 million dollars - I just have to write it down, it is such a stupid number) within five years when we didn’t even have a product that worked?<br>Interestingly, the accountant previously worked as a partner in a company that should be no stranger to us all - it’s the one that did the accounts for America’s Enron and Australia’s HIH Insurance. Now, doesn’t it all begin to make some sense? Not much maybe, but some. <br>There was Doctor Optimist. The good doctor had had a chequered career. He’d worked in the UK for some years as a journalist, and then decided to set-up his own business. That didn’t last long and soon he was out looking for a new job. Eventually he ended up going back to Australia where he managed to get a senior position with a large publishing company, mainly because there wasn’t anyone else available with the required expertise. Whether he had the expertise himself is a moot point and as I got to know him better I realised he was certainly an expert at one thing - office politics. He rose up through the ranks until he was second only to the managing director. His rise was accomplished by surrounding himself with yes men and women, all of whom were none too bright but who protected him completely on account of his patronage. Now, when the Doctor saw the bright lights of the Internet you just couldn’t stop him getting all excited, and it wasn’t long before he was churning out some of the best phrases I’d heard. Aside from his favourite; “let’s take this off-line”, (translation: let’s talk about this after the meeting) he also flagrantly used, “outside the triangle”, was extremely regular with “let’s corral that and move on”, and absolutely loved to death, “the hypothesis dictates a crucial information flow of functionality”. Personally I best liked, “I’ll be working remotely today” which meant he’d be at home with his feet up watching Foxtel.<br>Doctor Optimist would go out and sell concepts to people. That’s all they were of course, <br>concepts. None of the stuff he promised could be delivered and this soon became patently obvious to all concerned as it, well, wasn’t delivered. But he was an optimist, you understand, so he believed...something. I’m not sure what it was. And I’m not really sure he knew either... <br>The office manager. Every company seems to have one unfortunately, and we definitely had one. Well, you never would have thought there could be that much paperwork in the world, and I always thought it a bit ironic, what with us being a cutting-edge Internet company that there was so much paperwork floating about. I kid you not, when we wanted to throw anything out we had to fill in a form itemising the objects to be heaved! For example, other paperwork that we no longer needed. I think if the form you had to fill in with the details about chucked items eventually got thrown out too there would be a form for that also, but I was never sure if that would be the first form or another sub-form...This is what you get when you let an accountant take his tie off. <br>They also had this young fat boy called The Web Master. Working on that basis, it seemed to me that I should be called The Wisdom Master, on account of my age, or that the mailman should be called The Deliverer and the person who handed out the damned forms should be called The Forms Giver. <br>What was The Web Master’s role? Well, obviously his job entailed trawling through Internet porn sites. That’s what he spent most of his day doing, so I assume that’s what his role was. Actually that’s a bit unfair because he also looked up Subaru WRX sites too and for one whole week I noticed he was checking out skiing venues. Obviously there was plenty to The Web Master’s role, but what exactly it was I never discovered, partly because I couldn’t understand anything he said. It was all technical gobbledegook to me. When The Web Master sent me emails I had to get one of the 10 Chinese technology blokes to decipher them and even then we couldn’t always get to the bottom of his messages and work out what it meant. <br>The Chinese were interesting. Within a week of them arriving the Aussies secretly started calling them The Boat People. I know, the lack of imagination worried me too and it should have rung a few warning bells. After all, how could you hope to launch a new super-duper company with innovative new ideas and mould-breaking new business practices that would change the very way everyone did business, when the best nickname you could come up with for a group of Chinese blokes was, The Boat People? Anyway, Australians being Australians they tended to give the Chinese guys a wide berth. I’ve always found with any Chinese people that if you make the effort to talk to them they quickly warm to you, even the ones why look like they’ve been sucking on an under-ripe lychee. <br>Personally, I liked the Chinese blokes because they always helped me out when I needed technical assistance, which was only about 48 times a day. The Chief Technology Officer was this Chinese bloke called Barry and he was really quite something. Because I got on with him and his guys they’d always help me out but with others who were difficult with Barry and his boys there was a game to be played. First thing was, they’d pretend that they didn’t understand. This took the form of tightly squinting their eyes and slow side-to-side rocking of their heads. So tightly squinted were their eyes on occasion it was hard to actually see their eyes at all. This became pretty disconcerting, especially when eight of them all did it at the same time. You could get dizzy. Get them and the constipated looking Cowboy in the same room at the same time and it was a dreadful thing to behold. Eventually of course - once the Chinese guys were on the verge of cracking up and laughing their heads off - Barry would lean back in his chair, clasp his hands across his belly and say, “Oh, I see now. Now you are explaining it clearly, I see your problem.” Then he would spring forward in his chair and launch into machine-gun Chinese and his guys would all start shouting too. Much later, when Barry left the company he told me that usually they were discussing the American girl’s cleavage or what they were going to be having for dinner, or whether it was better to cook rice the traditional way or by using a rice cooker. Just for the record, the rice cooker got their vote. <br>Anyway, when the Chinese shouting stopped - brought to a halt by Barry raising his hand quickly, stopping it in mid-air so it quivered like an arrow - he would come out with stuff from the TV series Kung Fu. Literally lines from the series. It had been off TV so long he reckoned there was little chance anyone in the office would remember it, at least not in detail. So, he’d say, “when there is symmetry there will be power”, or “the wind will bring confusion in the forest and until it passes the mouse waits. Then he will pounce.” Usually this worked and after one meeting I saw Cowboy outside, face scrunched up in constipation as he watched the tops of the trees to see which way the wind was blowing and listening hard for a mouse who might suddenly leap out and surprise him. <br>Now, this new company started off very well, by which I mean we all got paid massive salaries (even now, seven years later, I’ve never earned that much a year again) but as the business progressed it was clear to me and many others that this was far from a definite go-er. Right from the start I’d had this uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach and I soon realised it had nothing to do with what I was eating, it was to do with what these people were feeding me. See, the American girl started to bring in all these, well bollocks is the word for it actually, but she referred to them as systems. The idea here was that your sales people made X number of calls a day and out of that number of calls a predetermined percentage of them (I know, I know, but try and stay with it...) would turn into X number of visits to potential clients, and out of that X number of visits there would be X number of successful sales and that would determine what the sales person had to get each week in revenue. <br>Now, as anyone who has ever stepped out into the big wide world knows, it just doesn’t work like that. Of the X number of calls you make some will just be a complete waste of <br>time, of the X number of visits you make X number will be a partial waste of time, and of the X number of visits there will be a percentage of successful calls, but it’s impossible to know how many, simply because you are dealing with humans. You’ve got about as much chance of cracking this type of X-nonsense as you have of winning the bloody lottery jackpot (I know this because I have tried both). Of course, you can imagine the way the sales people viewed this stuff - they either started to look for other jobs or they went off for the afternoon and played a game of golf with their mates. Games of golf were not factored into the X-factor, but of course they should have been because more successful work gets done out there than anywhere else (well, unless you’re Don and his brother in which case the only visible work that comes out of a golf game is a spot of vehicle panel-beating in Bondi. Oh yeah, there’s The Dipper too. He spends most of his work time on the golf course and no work is getting done). <br>Thinking back on it now it’s amazing that it lasted quite as long as it did. The first warning signs came when we couldn’t make anything technical work properly at all. None of the websites we put up ever did the jobs they were supposed to, and of course advertisers soon got wise to that. As nothing got delivered the management eventually realised that this simply wasn’t going to work, or as they said, “we’re proceeding in an downward southerly direction and that is not in keeping with our philosophy of organic growth and profit-generating potential”. So, they started what they called “restructuring”. Now, why don’t people ever really tell you what they mean? Most of us would prefer it if they said, “well look here old chap, we’re in a spot of serious doo-doo here and if we’re to have a chance in hell of surviving for a bit longer, we need...well, we need to get rid of a few people.” <br>But of course they never say that - they just Restructure. And companies think they are being clever with this Restructure business. The accountant calls you in and says, “Now, let’s discuss the Restructure”, and already a fine film of sweat is forming on his upper lip and it has nothing to do with the heating system. And then he gets up at the whiteboard and draws what looks like Hitler’s battle plan for Poland. “Now, Derek moves here and Stuart pushes into this position and Graham is going to be Head of Ops for Asia and this is where I sit.” And then you realise that at no stage has your name been either brought up or drawn on the whiteboard and you think, any moment now he’s going to tell me that he wants me to head the entire operation and the keys to the Jag are already on my desk. But it doesn’t happen like that, well it never does in my experience, and you’re left asking him, “so, pray tell me, how do I fit into the new structure?” and the accountant looks at the white board, momentarily speechless as if he’s forgotten you existed and have somehow been left out of the Restructure in some kind of oversight that actually has nothing to do with him and then he blurts out, “Oh yes, well we thought you’d like to go into E-Planning,” or some other such bollocks. “Oh yes,” you say, “and how does that affect my package?” And he looks at you and sits down and says, “well, as the job description is changing (which incidentally is news to you) the annual salary will change to reflect this change.” Now, let’s get one thing clear here folks - this does not mean your pay is going up. Oh no, not at all, no sirree. It’s going to go southerly, it’s going to go way down, so low it’s going to be worth even less than the company’s shares which in themselves have slunk lower than a first rate limbo dancer. <br>Of course, eventually they all lost their jobs. Me? I decided to bail out there and then. I wasn’t going to take a 30 per cent pay cut. <br>I imagine Mr Accountant often stops and leans on his garden spade and asks himself if it really was so wise to have taken his tie off at all, as he wonders whether to plant carrots or swede in that patch next year. <br>The Office Manager gave herself a letter to say she was made redundant, the Web Master probably hasn’t noticed his job has ceased, he’s still too busy, his eyes greedily hoovering up new porn sites from around the world wide web.<br>The Dipper, I happen to know, is still out on the golf course, with someone else’s clubs of course.<br>The Cowboy is still shouting the odds in some meeting or other in some other corporate which is just about to fold. <br>The American girl managed to get engaged to one of the partners in the venture capital company that funded the whole sorry affair and she went back with him to America. It was one way of getting a free flight home, and once she was safely back in the US she broke the engagement off. I think that in truth her reasoning went something like this: “An exit strategy from the Internet space would dictate a route that matched performance related KPIs with a plan that combines a relationship, or supposed relationship, in order to vacate said space in a timely manner. This we have done. Now, let's lock and load phase two. Frankly, once out of the Internet parameters and back on terra firma Stateside, the outlined relationship can be placed in abeyance. But I'll get Trevor to run the numbers and see if that is cognisant with my current philosophy on this. Are you comfortable with the paradigm?”<br>Meanwhile, Doctor Optimist also, “vacated the Internet space” or as he would no doubt have said, “I’m going to be working off-line”. <br>What I also discovered afterwards was that the CEO was on a salary of $500,000 and the accountant was on $400,000. No wonder the company never made any money...<br>And the final word on this episode should go to someone I don’t even know who I was in a lift with. As I was leaving the building, she said to her friends, “I’ll be really glad when this Internet thing is all over.” Everyone laughed. <br>Well, you have to.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/12/gone-4308635/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>well-that-blewhttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/12/gone-4308635/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/12/title-4304173/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-12:/2008/06/12/title-4304173/Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:50:43 +0200 <p><br> <em>Forty-one</em></p> <p>Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.<br> This bloke I used to work for called me up. Jade and I were driving along in the car down to Jervis Bay for a holiday and it was Christmas so the weather was scorching hot. Jade was driving and I had the window open and the baking air smelt like roasting chestnuts. I had one arm out the window and the scenery was rushing by and the wildlife were all making a racket and the other hand held the phone to my ear and I heard him say that he’d like to talk to me about a job in a new dotcom company he was going to be working for. Yes, yes, laugh your head off, why don’t you. Look, I’m the first to admit that whenever the Internet was mentioned I’d always follow it with the word, bollocks. At the time, and this was back in 2000, it amazed me just how many people could believe that this clunky bloody system that never seemed to work properly could take the place of newspapers and magazines. I mean, I’m not going to take my computer to bed with me, prop myself up on a pillow and scroll through the bloody pages, am I? <br> But you have to also remember what it was like at the time. Against my expectations loads of people were making a mint out of this Internet malarky and here I was listening to this bloke on the phone promising me stock options and bonuses and a really good salary. He actually said to me, “you could become a very rich man”. That’s the sort of thing I like to hear.<br> Now, also bear in mind that at this time I was working for Pete the yoghurt eater who was not exactly what you would call the Baron de Rothschild of publishing, if you follow. Add to that Jade’s comment, “how come you spend more time with the Sheriff than you do with me...do you want to talk about it?”, and it was getting blindingly obvious that a move was called for.<br> The other weird thing was this - ever since we’d come to Australia I was convinced that everything had happened for a reason. I mean, think about it. I hate flying, so why would I ever choose to go on the longest flight that’s possible, to a country I’ve never had any desire to visit (after all, I’d seen <em>Neighbours</em>)? And then since we’d landed it hadn’t been easy and there were loads of times when we almost got a foot back on the airline’s steps. And if you look at all of the nutcases we’d come across you’d have to question what the hell was going on. But always at the last minute something happened and we were rescued. Every time we had a setback something positive happened and that always made us realise that one thing would always lead to another. Clearly we were on a trip of some kind. What the ultimate destination would be was anyone’s guess (in fact, I still don’t know where I’m going...). So, it was with all this in mind that I met with the bloke who’d phoned me and after another chat with him I decided to embark on a new career - dotcom millionaire. Well, that was down the track a bit, but that was my new career objective, and a fine one too, if I might say so. <br> First off I had to go on a course to learn all about the Internet. The first thing the new company did was bring in some children with names like Dazzle and Bazzle and Wazzle, Deck and Geck and Heck - and these were just their first names. When they walked in someone called security fearing that some dodgy street people had somehow got into the building looking for petty cash, but no, they really did dress like that every day and they really were the faces of the future (well, that’s what they told us). Some of them had been flown in especially from America. Personally I thought they were too young to fly without an adult accompanying them, but obviously the rules had been relaxed for Internet supremos.<br> These children used bizarre phrases like, “hey, let’s take this aspect of the discussion off-line, bloke”, (Translation: let’s discuss it after the meeting, mate) and, “throw me a curved ball, why don’t ya”. They laughed out loud, they really did, when we went through the process by which a magazine reached the newsstand. “It takes how long, man?!” they guffawed, “you mean like it’s made out of old dead trees, man?!!”, and “Jesus, you mean you actually, like, still use a camera and some film to take pictures, man? That’s some serious downloading, bloke!!”<br> Each day at Internet School began with what I believe they call in the entertainment industry, a warm-up. This consisted of a different foolish task each day, which supposedly helped bond the group, whatever that means. Dancing around at 6.30 one morning in a pitiable imitation of a Morris Dancer until each one of us was knocked out leaving one sadly embarrassed dancer as the winner (no, you got no prize, taking part was apparently prize enough) I began to ask myself why I’d spent all that time training to be a journalist when actually all you needed to do to become rich was take Olde English dancing lessons.<br> Dancing aside, I think The Pig was really my finest hour. One day the children asked each one of us to draw a pig. Now, I just can’t draw, that’s just the way it is. I can’t paint, I can’t act and I can’t speak Chinese. Those aside I’ll give just about anything else a bash, but draw? I don’t think so. So, my pig was a simple beast. One dimensional, side on, facing to the right, built of sticks. Now, as it turns out, everyone else’s pig faced left. Mine was a stick pig, theirs were mostly small works of art with expressions, real ears and snouts and feet that looked like they could go somewhere. However, my pig had a long squiggly tail that I’d put loads of feeling into, mainly because I couldn’t draw a proper pig if a herd of mightily tusked boars were chasing me across a bumpy turnip field. It only seemed right that the tail should have some feeling in it. Their pigtails were mostly straight, like car radio aerials. Please! The grandad kept pigs and I never saw a pointy tail like that, well not on a live pig anyway.<br> Of course, this being Internet School the drawings were analysed and our characters brought right out into the open. Well, apparently the fact that my pig faced right meant I was expressive and imaginative. This was not seen as good news. If there’s one thing they don’t want in dotcom land it’s imaginative people. Now, you might not believe that, you might point to all of the whackos who’ve come up with Internet-based businesses that were turning over trillions of dollars and say, surely those guys had imagination? Maybe - but I think they just had ideas, like I might think it would be good to go to Mars and have a look around. I’ve no idea how to get there, or even how to build the rocket to take me there, but I have the idea and in the days of the Internet madness that was how it was. It was no good telling the budding Mars tripper that actually there was rather more to getting red dust on your shoes than merely imagining it. That’s how these people worked. Imagine and it will be built, well, if you give us millions of dollars.<br> You also have to remember this was a time when new dotcom millionaires were appearing every day of the week, when every day saw the launch of the next big thing, the next big site, the next big idea. It was a time when there was talk - serious talk it should be remembered - that all of the old established bricks and mortar businesses would fade away, virtually at the speed of light as the high tech warriors marched to a different beat. As we now know, it certainly was a very different beat. It was a beating of epic proportions. It was a march to oblivion for most of these new companies and they took something else with them, the investors’ millions. We shouldn’t forget that because there was much talk about the many millions simply being swallowed up, but one way or another that money belonged to people who’d worked hard for it and frankly I can think of better things to have spent it on.<br> It does sound simply crazy now and I can’t believe how I took it all in, but I guess it must be like when Adolf got up there and told the Germans about the future according to him. It was so big, so skilfully done, so convincing that the grumbling feeling in your stomach was simply not listened to. Next thing you knew, you were in Poland.<br> Anyway, the people whose pigs faced left were ideal for dotcom land because their pigs faced the ‘right’ way. It meant they were logical people, people who were able to make quick decisions (they didn’t mention whether those decisions were likely to be right or wrong, but never mind, a decision is a decision) and they had their personal lives well sorted. The exclamation mark pigtail meant these were people going somewhere (and now we all know where they were headed. It’s called the dole queue...) and the well-drawn feet meant they were going to make their mark in the world and be remembered (right on that one too). My squiggly tail, on the other hand, meant I was sexually promiscuous. You know that pleased me more than anything. Of course it wasn’t true, but it gave me a glow for a while and a few glances from the girls. No, I don’t think they were admiring, but at least they looked.<br> During those interminable six weeks I’d had to tell four truths and one lie (that was easy, I told them I wouldn’t always be bald because in fact my hair had started to grow again), I’d had to play-act with other people in the team to see who was most stellar, whatever that means, and another day I’d been asked to share with the group my feelings on philanthropy.<br> One day at Internet School I rashly asked what would happen when the dotcom bubble burst and suddenly I thought I’d gone deaf, the silence around the polished oblong table was so loud it actually seemed to have a sound.<br> “When it bursts. If it bursts,” spluttered one of them eventually, an accountant by trade, “we will be in an ideal position.”<br> “Why’s that then?” I asked.<br> He smiled at me coldly like I was a dear, dear pupil who was nevertheless a bit short on the grey matter.<br> “Because we know our idea will work.”<br> “Oh right,” I said, “that’s okay then. But what exactly is the idea?”<br> They all stared at me and with hindsight I think that’s when I should have seriously started looking around for another job.<br> I didn’t do that though and when we finished the course the serious business of actually starting a dotcom business began. </p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/12/title-4304173/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/12/title-4304173/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/11/gone-4299808/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-11:/2008/06/11/gone-4299808/Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:39:11 +0200 <p><br><em>Forty</em></p> <p>I’d started working for this small publishing company and they had an office in a big old block of offices. This particular office didn’t have any windows and when I turned up on my first day a girl who was all pale and anaemic and who didn’t introduce herself, just said to me in a sorrowful way, “Flowers die when they don’t get any sunlight.” <br>Great. <br>The guy who ran this company was a nut-case. (You know how some people attract nutters. Like, they come and sit next to you on the bus? Well, I’m a bit different. I always pick the nutters and then I go and work for them). Let’s call him Pete. Pete had the cleanest desk imaginable (you know what I always say, empty desk, empty mind, but then as Jade points out to me, I would say that because my desk resembles the local garbage tip two days after Christmas.) So, Pete had a computer and a tub of yoghurt on his desk. The yoghurt was always the same make, same flavour - actually it was unflavoured - and that was it. I never knew what he did all day, until eventually it occurred to me that what he did all day was sit in front of the computer in his little glass-partitioned office and eat a yoghurt. At 12.30 he spooned the yoghurt into his mouth, left his office briefly to wash the yoghurt container out and then went back into his office. <br>The people who worked for Pete were a motley bunch. Garth the sales manager had been there for 15 years (can you imagine, 15 years without seeing daylight all day, and in the winter months I guess he never saw a blue sky at all except when he went downstairs to have a smoko). <br>Garth was the consummate Aussie Bloke. He always wore high-waisted jeans and when I say high-waisted I am talking in contact with his armpits. Jade and I call these Pimpineenis. The name came from Jade’s mother who’d seen men wearing incredibly high-waisted trousers in Africa where apparently they are a source of much pride. The higher they come up, and preferably the waistband should be snug under the armpits, the greater esteem the wearer is held in in his community. That’s in Africa. <br>In Australia, Garth’s Pimpineenis definitely lowered his self-esteem in direct proportion to the height of the waistline, and also because they were made of what I can only describe as fake denim. The only label I ever saw warned the wearer to keep away from heat sources. That’s probably why Garth kept his cigarette in his mouth all the time. <br>Every day he travelled on the train from his home over an hour and a half away and every lunchtime he had a meat pie. He walked up to the corner shop and bought the pie, which I believe they began to gently heat for him sometime after 10.30, am. I think it’s fair to say that on the proceeds of that very regular purchase the shop owners had decided to put two daughters through college. Who said meat pies weren’t good for you?<br>Garth considered himself to be an indigenous Australian, though he didn’t know what the word meant. He dismissed aborigines as “those black bastards” but he’d never met one. He lived in a little house in a suburb near the sea and he had a daughter who he was presumably bringing up in the same way he’d been brought up. One can only hope that she has some renegade genes which will cause her to question life as it is taught her. I hope she can break away from Garth’s awful prejudices and ignorance and examine life fully and discover it has many beauties. We shall see. <br>Anyway, Garth spent all day on the phone - when he wasn’t having a smoko - trying to persuade people to buy an advertisement in the magazine. His sales patter went like this: “Hey, ya old bastard. When ya gonna fuckin’ put yer ‘and in yer pocket then? We’re waitin’ for yer to come on in the publication. Can’t hold it much longer - if yer know what I mean, yeah, that’s what I mean, heh, heh, heh - now cum on yer old bastard, when are yer gonna fuckin’ come in ere?”<br>His motivational speeches to his sales staff - one frightened looking young boy from the <br>bush - were not exactly inspirational. They went like this: “Now, I might not be a big bloke in terms of stature you understand but” - and here he would hitch the pimpeneenis so vigorously that his balls would momentarily separate and other staff members would suck in a sharp breath in unison - “I’ve got a dick like a fuckin’ rhino and if you don’t reach your fuckin’ target this fuckin’ week I’m going to take my dick and ram it up your fuckin’ arse.”<br>Now, sales staff retention was not high and as a publication we never made a lot of money. Personally I thought there was little mystery to this. <br>Then there was Tegan. Pale and anaemic, she was the girl who’d told me about the death of flowers. Tegan had what she called “a personal agenda” and she liked to pretend she was working for a large multi-national corporation. I think this pretence ran along the lines of the prisoner who knows there is little chance of escape. The only thing to do is imagine that actually things are not as bad as they seem. I believe this is what doctors call delusion, and I think it is treatable. <br>Tegan called her friends more often than she did any work and when she wasn’t calling them she was e-mailing them. She’d obviously told them she worked for Boeing Aircraft or Sony because she was always coming out with phrases like, “Yah, got a four o’clock and the whole board’s going to be there. Must dash”, or, “it’s merger time with the big boys at the big end of town and that’s where I am, so gotta go and shake some serious corporate butt baby. Catch yah. Ciao!” <br>Garth once growled, “She’s always talking to that fuckin’ Ciao geezer. Bet he’s a no fuckin’ good fuckin’ greasy Eye-Tie bastard.”<br>The designer was nicknamed Speedy because he wasn’t. Sometimes he’d just sit and stare at the computer screen for half an hour - and that was before he’d turned it on. His art was from what I’d call the Play School; it was big and colourful but totally meaningless to anyone over the age of five. <br>Some days Speedy didn’t turn up. Once I phoned him to ask where he was and I could hear the sound of roaring waves. He said, “Can’t come in today mate, surf’s up”. I said, “Speedy, we have a magazine to get finished – today.”<br>I heard a sharp exasperated intake of breath down the phone and then he said, “Mate, you’re not listening to me. Listen to this” and the phone was filled with the sound of roaring waves and then it went dead. <br>It took me a month to get rid of him. But he came in so seldom, I’m not sure he noticed.<br><strong>*</strong><strong>*</strong><br>One day I was walking across the road from the newspaper shop and a car pulled up outside the building. On the side in big letters it said, Sheriff. Now, if you’re English and Sheriff is mentioned you immediately think of Robin Hood and robbing the rich to give to the poor (why do they always say that like it’s some kind of clever plan? Obviously there wouldn’t be much point robbing the poor to pay the rich, the poor don’t have anything. I don’t know, it just seems like such an obvious thing, or is it just me?)<br>Anyway, if you’re English you think of the bad Sheriff of Nottingham, typically played most excellently by the sneering Alan Rickman. In Britain I don’t think Sheriffs exist any more but if they do they’re not much involved with robbers and all that stuff. I think these days they just open motorway extensions up North, or shopping centres in places like Basildon. <br>The Australian Sheriff though is another thing entirely, as I was soon to discover. For starters they wear what looks like a police uniform. On this particular day, this particular Australian Sheriff gets in the lift with me and I smile at him and I say, making conversation, “Not going to arrest me I hope!” <br>He didn’t answer, just looked at his clipboard and then looked back up with gimlet eyes and said, “Depends, mate, on what yer name is.”<br>I started to think - had I run any red lights? No, I couldn’t have, I didn’t have a car. Had I outstayed my visa and was the jet waiting, engines running, on the runway ready to take me straight back to Britain? Turns out it wasn’t that either. Anyway, I gave him my name and he looked at his pad again and he said, no, it’s not you and I breathed a sigh of relief as the lift doors opened. There were only two offices on our floor. He took a look at the plaque on the door of the other one, and then he followed me in. <br>Now, the yoghurt-eater was not there, he’d taken a couple of weeks holiday. So the Sheriff came into the office and I suppose I was, well, sort of in charge. As soon as he was in, all of the others flinched, all except Speedy who was staring at his screen like he expected a message to suddenly appear telling him what to do today (“surf is up, Speedy. Time to go.”).<br>“So,” said the Sheriff, who seemed to have grown at least six inches in height and towered over me, “who exactly is in charge here?”<br>I believe I heard the swish of air as everyone turned their heads to look at me.<br>“Not fuckin’ me mate,” said Garth.<br>“I suppose it would be me,” I said, which must have made him wonder why I didn’t own up before. An image of a gleaming pair of handcuffs kept flashing before my eyes. <br>“Well mate, I have a warrant here to seize goods to the value of $5000, due to an unpaid bill.”<br>I smiled then, the realisation that this had nothing much to do with me directly was a relief, I can tell you.<br>“Think it’s funny, do yer?”<br>Oh no, no, “ I said hastily, “just take whatever you want.” <br>He looked at me, frowning and said, “I’m not going to take anything yet. I’m just letting you know that if the bill is not paid in the next 14 days we’ll come back and take goods to that value.”<br>“No problem,” I said, seeing him to the door, and being handed the notice. <br>Of course, things went from bad to worse. When Pete came back and I told him the news he acted like he was surprised but as my days there unfolded it became clear that he was becoming a proficient tap-dancer in the money-excuses game. Basically he wasn’t paying any outside contractor anything and when they started to pester him with phone calls he switched his business - though business is rather too grand a word for what he was doing - to other suppliers. Of course there is a finite time you can continue to do this on account of the fact that not many people live in Australia, word gets around like a bushfire and sooner or later you’re going to run out of new companies to do business with. I just can’t understand how Pete could have continued with this ducking and diving game; it must have been incredibly stressful to him personally. I mean, why would you bring this down upon yourself? It also resulted in not a few people making the trip to the office to demand payment. On one occasion two big chaps clutching baseball bats turned up and marched straight into his room. They were not there to ask him if he wanted to come out and play, but they did leave with what looked suspiciously like a cheque. When they walked out Bert was smiling and that could mean only one thing - the cheque would bounce. <br>Bounce it did. The baseball players didn’t come back to the office but one night they surprised Pete as he was walking home, dragged him into an alleyway and let the bats do the talking. I think even now he’d still have a limp. <br>Next off, Pete stopped paying his staff, or at least he added an element of suspense into our weekly paydays because sometimes he would pay some of us, but not others. We also discovered that he hadn’t paid any taxes on our behalf, as he was obliged to do, so everybody began frantically searching for new jobs. <br>You know, I have a dream. I dream that one day I will have a job that lasts, a job that pays enough money to get a house to live in, a job that I enjoy. <br>All things considered, I thought it was about time I jumped into the dotcom world. Yes, the Internet beckoned. Now hang on, did I hear someone laugh?</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/11/gone-4299808/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/11/gone-4299808/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/09/gone-4290696/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-08:/2008/06/09/gone-4290696/Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:43:42 +0200 <p><em>Thirty-nine</em></p> <p>The big bust-up in Lesbo land came early that bleary Sunday morning as the car reversed at high speed out the driveway. The actual moving-out took place a week or so after that. This was an affair of epic proportions, involving The Bloke's brother who looked more like her than she did, if you follow. Anyway, this guy was big, mainly on account of his mammoth appetite for junk food which we believed sprang from his mammoth appetite for drugs. His heavy drugs use did not go unnoticed in our neighbourhood because he would imbibe and then roam the streets in the middle of the night shouting at the top of his voice, "No! Oh no! Come on!" It rather reminded me of Tingha actually, the roaming about making a noise bit, but it also reminded me of that Carry On actor, Kenneth Williams, though he didn't deliver it in the camp Kenneth style, it was more Billy Connolly. <br>One day Jade saw him walking up the street, stuffing his face with a massive loaf of bread. She said, "and he was walking accordingly", so from then he became known in our house simply as, Walking Accordingly. <br>When the lesbians moved out it was a business and a half. Much swearing of course, shouted recriminations, nasty stuff about their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, all of whom seemed to have had one or another big emotional problem or been involved in some ridiculous relationship. I didn't know, for example, that The Bloke's mother had once had an affair with a sailor from Papua New Guinea and had borne him three children, all of whom were now cigarette smugglers operating out of southeast Borneo. Truly, you live and learn. <br>Anyway, Walking Accordingly hired a truck to take his sister's stuff away. He'd had to hire one because, as you will remember, she couldn't drive, and on top of that she didn't have any money because the gym where she worked had closed down rather suddenly. Like she went to work one day and everyone was standing around outside and there was a note on the door that said, "Flown the country with all the money. Have a nice life". Actually I made up that bit about the note but apparently the owner did have a penchant for drugs that you inhale and he was also a major supplier of steroids, so I think that would have been the final straw for The Bloke because without her fix of roids she must have had visions of her body rapidly changing back to a woman's (one day I heard her out in the garden shouting out to her female lover, "I'm just a guy who's been put on this earth to make your world heavenly, baby!" She really was a terribly mixed up person).<br>So there they were moving all her stuff out of the lesbian apartment and this big argument developed between The Bloke and her brother. It was a battle royale and unlike The Bloke's lover, Walking Accordingly was just as big as his sister. <br>The Bloke was asking him for more money and so he went into one about, I already got that fuckin' truck for you, bitch, and she comes back with, "You are so like our fuckin' mother! You take so many drugs man you don't even know who the fuck you are no more! Next thing you'll be goin' out with some sailor, you fuckin' faggot!"<br>Now, I never understood this one. She was gay and yet she hated gay men? I think it was because she saw them as some kind of threat but I can't get my head around exactly what that threat might have been. <br>Anyway, Walking Accordingly, who in truth was usually pretty mild-mannered, yells out at the top of his voice, "You aint fuckin' listening to me!" and sticks his fist right through their front door. This was the start of one of the biggest fights we'd ever heard from next door. It was real championship stuff, real Ali and Foreman. I swear I saw the walls trembling as the two of them, brother and sister, but to all intents and purposes really two men, grunted and howled and groaned and swore and bounced each other off every available surface. We heard the crash of packing cartons and the smash of glass as they picked up half-packed items and threw them at each other. Sometimes there would be an almighty crash as one of them threw the other in amongst the boxes. Each time, they picked themselves up and entered the fray one more time. Eventually it sort of petered out - I think there was nothing left to throw or smash. They sort of shovelled all the remains of her belongings into the back of the truck and left, and just for good measure they stole one of the rubbish bins as they went. I tell you, it was one of the best days of our lives. <br>Meanwhile though, I had a few little problems of my own...</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/09/gone-4290696/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/09/gone-4290696/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/08/gone-4287941/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-08:/2008/06/08/gone-4287941/Sun, 08 Jun 2008 11:15:41 +0200 <p><em>Thirty-eight</em></p> <p>The idiots upstairs, next door to Doris, were drug dealers. These were possibly the most stupid people I've ever met. He was English, she was an Aussie girl and between them they had barely a brain cell to rub together. They had a V6 Holden Commodore which she'd chosen because she wanted something that most closely resembled the comfort she'd once experienced in a taxi...<br>Neither of them worked. Her daddy had bought them the apartment under the proviso that she paid for the annual insurance. Hardly onerous that, but she always forgot to pay it, so daddy had to pay that too. She told Jade she didn't have a mobile phone because she kept leaving them places, like in nightclubs, so she decided not to have one at all. The last mobile she had was lost in some dodgy club up in Kings Cross. The following month she got a bill for $8000, mainly due to many direct line calls to Colombia, well, and also the fact she’d not bothered to tell the mobile phone people she’d lost it. Of course, daddy paid that bill too. <br>Now, the English idiot, he had this little moped. It took him ages to get it started and sometimes it just didn’t happen and after half an hour he'd give up and slouch back indoors, dragging his thonged feet as he went. <br>Other times the machine would burst into life and he'd hop aboard and putter off down the drive, fighting for balance. He didn't always succeed and sometimes fell off on the front lawn before he even reached the road. When that happened he'd just untangle himself from the moped, abandon it and slouch on in again. Once we had both the moped and The Bloke's mangled pedal bike on the front lawn so it began to look like a secondhand bike lot. One day I caught an old woman standing there staring at it and she looked at the mess and said, "will the artist be taking commissions?"<br>When The Idiot did manage to get to the road and still remain on the moped he'd always be back within about 20 minutes so we figured he must have been dropping drugs off somewhere local. One day he came putt-putting out of the driveway as I was sitting outside in a car waiting for Jade to lock the flat up. I was doing some freelance motoring writing at the time so every week I had a different car and I guess he didn't recognise me. Anyway, we decided to follow him. I carefully kept my distance like I'd seen in the films (actually, unlike in the films - I did keep my distance. In Hollywood blockbusters the only person who wouldn't see someone following him is Stevie Wonder).<br>So, The Idiot goes off up the road and then he takes a right-hand turn and goes into Woolworths' car park. We follow him and he goes out the other side of Woolworths and we think, this is getting very exciting indeed. Then he starts looking around, side-to-side and glancing behind him. We hang right back. We reckon he must be looking to see if he's been followed.<br>"He's checking, just in case the drugs squad are on to him," breathed Jade and I nodded tersely. <br>All of a sudden he jammed the brakes on and the little moped's back wheel bounced up and down as the brakes locked, then he let the brake off and swerved into someone's drive, fighting for balance. We drove slowly by and saw him falling off the bike into some rubbish bins. We couldn’t stop because he might have seen us, so we drove on. We were pleased though. The pursuit had begun. <br>From then on we took a keener interest in his comings and goings. We started by keeping a log because we knew that sooner or later the Drugs Squad were going to raid their flat and arrest them and then we would be prime witnesses in the ensuing trial. <br>Two days later the bike disappeared. We expected to see him driving a new Ferrari, bought on the proceeds of his illicit drugs dealing. But nothing turned up. <br>Another day or so passed and all was quiet, save for the lesbians who were throwing each other against the walls with increasing regularity, and Doris's visitors who were almost as energetic, though for much shorter periods - typically two and a half minutes by my Swiss watch. <br>Then one day Jade bumped into the drugs girl while she was putting the washing out and they got chatting and drugs-girl said, "He had to get rid of his bike. Business was not so good." Jade nodded, and she continued, "Used to be they wouldn't stop ringing, all hours, asking for all sorts of exotics, all sorts of extras and some of them just weren't available straight away, you know?"<br>"Well, they wouldn't be," said Jade, thinking of Columbian Marching Powder, whatever that is.<br>"And really that bike. It never went properly and if he was late they'd give him hell. Say they'd ordered it an hour ago, they would. They'd go mad sometimes, threaten him with physical violence. It just became too dangerous out there."<br> "Yeah," said Jade fishing, "we noticed he had to go out all hours."<br>The girl said, "Well, that's pizza delivery for you." <br>Okay, okay, we all make mistakes. Anyway, that was all well and dandy, but a month later they had a break-in and they didn't report it for three days and when they did the police came around with sniffer dogs and a helicopter hovered overhead and then they took them away and for a while at least the door banging ceased. Doris, on the other hand, kept her banging up, and so did the lesbians, although it seemed to us that the girls' relationship was well and truly on the rocks and we hoped, we prayed, that it could only be a matter of time before some relative quiet descended on the apartments. </p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/08/gone-4287941/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/08/gone-4287941/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/05/gone-4278607/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-05:/2008/06/05/gone-4278607/Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:45:39 +0200 <p><em><br>Thirty-seven<br></em></p> <p>As I've said, The garbos weren't the only nutters we shared a plot of land with...<br>One bright Sunday morning I staggered out of bed, woken by fiendish screams and shouts, coupled with the banging of fists on metal. I pulled the curtains aside. A heavily muscled woman was spreadeagled on the boot of a car reversing at high speed down the driveway. The Nissan bumped down onto the road and the slim girl at the wheel with the crew-cut hair slammed the brakes on. She seemed to be crying.<br>The fiend on the boot clutched the sides of the rear window, arms spread out wide, muscular legs beating against the metal of the bumper, feet trying to find some grip. Even in the sparse morning light - it was barely dawn - I could see the neck muscles standing out thick as cord, the massive biceps bigger than Popeye's after a tin or two of spinach. With a chirrup of badly worn tyres the car suddenly accelerated and despite the fiend's best efforts to hold on, her fingers popped loose one by one and as the car shot off she lost grip and rolled into the road. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding and then I quickly took in another as the fiend leapt up off the road, seemingly unhurt, and then like a scene from Terminator the legs began to pump, the arms rotated and she ran off up the road after the car, screaming, "You bitch! I'm coming after you. Be ready, be very ready. I'm fucking pumpin'!"<br>Let me introduce you to the lesbian neighbours. They were bodybuilders and they suffered from Roid Rage.<br>Now when we first moved in it was during the week, so I didn’t meet them because I was at work.<br>But one day I was standing there, slouching around I suppose, eating an apple and looking at the flowers in the garden as Jade hung the washing out. This short but very muscular bloke in tight running shorts and a tight vest comes striding into the garden. The close-cropped hair was bleached blonde and I held the apple inches from my open mouth as he advanced towards me and I realised he was a she. This was The Bloke, as we soon came to call her, to differentiate her from her girlfriend. <br>"How ya doing mate," she said and stood so close to me I could feel her intense heat. Her face was just inches from mine and her eyes gleamed unnaturally. She smiled insanely at me and said, "You wanna stand up straight, matey. Get some backbone in yer body. And look at yer belly! Jesus it's a bloody disgrace, mate!"<br>And then she slapped my stomach so hard it imploded and any apple that hadn't yet worked its way down into my stomach was ejected, splattering all over the clean tea towels hanging on the line. At the same time her other hand went to the back of my head where she smacked it hard against my skull. It was like being straightened on a rack (I've never actually been on a rack but this is how it would feel – I just know it). I'm sure something cracked deep inside my body. Anyhow I didn't eat an apple again for around a year.<br>We soon discovered that all was not well in the lesbian household. Regular as clockwork on Friday mornings, and usually before the sun rose, the arguments would start. And because they were both body builders they had the necessary strength required to pick each other up and throw their hard bodies against the walls. The arguments were loosely based around The Bloke's belief that she knew everything there was to know about every subject under the sun and that her girlfriend knew exactly the opposite. You know, nothing.<br>Now, The Bloke was actually very thick and knew just about nothing about anything. As a case in point, one day The Bloke tried to learn to drive, using the girlfriend’s car. She reversed at high speed, aiming for the entrance to the driveway, which went down the side of the apartments. She hit the wall and scorched a trail of bright paintwork right down the brickwork. She never slowed for a second, in fact I think she actually increased speed as she stared wide-eyed out of the side window, sparks flaring up in front of her heavily muscled square face. It looked like she thought someone else was driving. Anyhow, that was the end of learning to drive.<br>Then she bought a pedal bike, one of these really racy ones with 48 gears and a rack of plastic bottles in the front. I think she filled the bottles with some kind of drug cocktail - probably cocaine or something mixed with vodka - and then she just inserted a thin plastic tube into the bottle and snaked it up into an artery in her arm. She was off!<br>Once I saw her on the Pacific Highway. She overtook me and a whole line of other fast moving cars, her legs pumping so fast on the pedals they were a blur. She once got clocked by the police doing 80 in a 50 area, admittedly downhill, but the case never came to court. They thought the equipment must be faulty.<br>Of course it had to end in tears and one day I saw her limping towards her back door, the mangled bike bent across her shoulders like some modernistic Jean Paul Gaultier creation. One complete side of her body, from her ankle right on up her leg and including her hip and side, and even the side of her face, was rubbed bloody raw where she'd obviously come off at high speed. It looked like she'd slid for maybe half a kilometre.<br>"You alright?" I asked.<br>She fixed me with her glassy blue eyes and said, "Why'd ya wanna know. Something wrong with me? Something you can see? What’ya askin' me for Pommy?"<br>I smiled nervously and said no, everything was clearly fine and she looked at me like she was going to fix me later on and then she just threw the bike off her shoulders like it was a shawl and it crashed down on to the grass and she left it there and strode on into her flat. I tell you, she was sucking diesel.<br>Of course, the Lesbos were not the only weird ones in our block of five apartments - as I've said, they were all very bizarre. Take the woman who lived above us - many a visiting man apparently did. She was this small 40-ish Chinese woman called Doris (I still haven’t figured this out. Why do all Chinese people who live in the west have first names like Doris, Maud, Claude and Peter but their surnames are always something totally unpronounceable like Xzinhpxen or Wzakaou? This has always baffled me. One Chinese woman told me once her name was Shirley, only that was her English name. I asked her what her English surname was and she looked at me like I was bonkers.) Anyway, this Doris had different men around all times of the day and night and we thought, oh yes, we know what she's up to. One day I said, you have a lot of visitors at night and she said, yes, so many friends, and I said, okay, but what puzzles me is why you scream out in the middle of the night, "Oh God, I'm coming, I'm coming!" And she said, "Yes, that's when someone else arrives. I have to go let them in". Indeed.<br>Doris had also ripped up all of the carpets in her flat and she had a penchant for wearing high heels. In fact this, I assume, was more to do with the needs of the men who visited her than any desire of Doris's to wear high heels all hours of the day and night, but whatever the reason, it drove us mad this constant tattoo of spikes on the ceiling above us. She also got involved in persistent and ever increasing door slamming competitions with the idiots who lived next door to her. Sometimes these competitions would go on until three or four in the morning as they each tried to outdo each other in the door-banging decibel league. Jade said it didn't matter what time of the day or night it was, there was always some kind of banging going on up there. </p> <p><em>to be continued...</em></p> <p> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/05/gone-4278607/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/05/gone-4278607/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/04/gone-4265837/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-04:/2008/06/04/gone-4265837/Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:18:27 +0200 <p><br><em>Thirty-six</em></p> <p>Now, we’d been in Australia for a while and we decided that we needed to find somewhere more permanent to live. We could afford it because I was working and besides, Dare was driving us nuts. It was bad enough living with his banging-about self, let alone with Bruce Willis and the rest of the cast of Pulp Fiction. I swear, if he’d banged another door I was going to shoot him. And, you know what? I could have done that.<br>So, we looked around and eventually we found this nice little apartment, or unit as they are rather unromantically called here (unit always makes me think it’s some kind of prison block. “Mr Coultas? Yes, you’ll find him in Unit Four, Cell Block Eight”). <br>It was a block of only five, built about 1965 and it looked nice and peaceful. I hate to say it again, but it just shows how wrong you can be. <br>Every Tuesday, for example, the garbos came around about three in the morning – yes, that’s in the middle of the night, but what can you do.<br>I reckon not many of us are fans of the cacophony of revving diesel trucks, tipped and smashed bottles, and the clatter of dustbins being thrown back on the nature strip – except that is for the old couple who lived next door.<br>They were rubbish experts and in my expert opinion (I have a mate of a mate who knows a doctor) they were bonkers.<br>Now, they were both deaf, but just to make things even more difficult for themselves they’d stand at opposite ends of their unit and shout at each other. This is one of their typical exchanges:<br>Him: D’you know him!?<br>Her: Know who?<br>Him: That bloke!<br>Her: What bloke?<br>Him: That bloke up the road!<br>Her: What road?<br>Him: Eh? I’m talking about that bloke!<br>Her: I know.<br>Him: You know him!?<br>Her: Who?<br>Him: That bloke!<br>It never got much more exciting than that.<br>Mr Garbo always wore the same clothes; a shirt, tracksuit trousers and a cap. They were a colour even Paul Theroux couldn’t describe. All I can say is, they were dark.<br>The first time I saw him out and about he was doubled over half inside a big rubbish bin in the local shopping centre, foraging like a tramp. He was engrossed with pulling litter out of the bin and putting it into the plastic bags he carried. When he came back home after one of these regular trips he said to his wife, “Look! Look what I found! Plastic bags! Loads of ‘em! Just thrown away!”<br>Another day he came back and said, “Look! I found this on the bus! Just left there!”<br>“What is it?”<br>“Chinese! Chinese meal! Half eaten! Just left there! On the bus! I picked it up! It’s in a plastic bag! See that?! Couldn’t believe it! Just left there! Half eaten! Let’s wash the bag!”<br>That’s the thing - Mrs Garbo would wash all the plastic bags her husband brought home and then she’d hang them out to dry on the washing line. <br>We were not surrounded by the chimes of wind bells or the gentle cawing of the native Australian pigeon or the rousing call of the Kookaburra, no, we were in plastic bag hell.<br>When the wind gets inside 40 or 50 plastic bags hanging out to dry on the line boy oh boy do you hear them. It is a sound I will always remember. It is a sound that will haunt me.<br>Alongside the plastic bag line, Mr Garbo also brought home aluminium cans, once again rescued from rubbish bins far and wide. Every Monday he spent the entire evening outside the back door stomping on the cans, turning them into small pieces of flat aluminium. This too is not the most pleasant of noises, not when it goes on for eight hours.<br>Now, I’m all for recycling, don’t get me wrong, but we are talking obsession here, we are talking rubbish-itis, we are talking being utterly bonkers.<br>On Tuesday mornings there was something of a party atmosphere in the air, well at least in their unit there was.<br>“The garbos! They’re coming! Coming soon! Let’s help ‘em sort the rubbish! See if they got any o’them plastic bags we can wash!”<br>So, they got up even earlier on Tuesdays, usually around 3.30am. Now, call me old fashioned but I consider this to be the middle of the night.<br>They’d pace up and down outside the bedroom window, going up and down the driveway, looking up and down the road for the garbo men and their trucks, cocking their ears, trying to hear the diesel engine coming to them on the breeze, heralding the appearance of the men in waterproof dungarees. Mr Garbo talked loudly, excitedly.<br>“I think I hear them! They’re coming! Oh no! They’re not! Not yet! But they will!” And she would hiss, “Quiet!” And he goes, “Okay! Okay! If I’m quiet we’ll hear them before they arrive! Okay! Fine! Quiet! That’s what we’ll do! Keep quiet!”<br>Of course, by this time I’d be wide awake and ready to explode.<br>One Tuesday in the dead of night I looked out of the window - after all I wasn’t going to get any more sleep - and I saw Mr Garbo do a little jig and raise his baseball cap high in the air and whoop out loud. He’d caught a whiff of decay.<br>Then he saw the garbos coming in their green and white trucks. Mrs Garbo clasped her hands together and smiled insanely and then they both hugged each other and danced on the spot.<br>You’d have thought relief had arrived for Mafeking.<br>When the trucks finally pulled up I saw no evidence that the professional garbo men paid them any attention at all, but Mr and Mrs Garbo tried to direct operations, excitedly pointing out plastic bottles they’d crushed, plastic bags they’d washed and a mountain of aluminium that each week was sufficient to make a small Audi.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em></p> <p> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/04/gone-4265837/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>garbosaudigarbagealuminiumnuttersplastic-bagshttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/04/gone-4265837/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/03/gone-4261161/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-06-03:/2008/06/03/gone-4261161/Tue, 03 Jun 2008 05:33:11 +0200 <p><br><em>Thirty-five</em></p> <p>Don also worked at the publishing company. <br>He arrived in Australia 11 years ago. In London he was a gas fitter in Ponders End. In Australia he’s a magazine designer and fancies himself as a bit of a musician. You can do that in Australia. Work for the council in Bognor Regis, then come out here and become a brain surgeon - well, not exactly, but it’s easier to reinvent yourself. Partly that’s because people will give you a chance. In Britain if you come up with a good idea people snarl at you. They don’t like it. I don’t really know why, but I think it’s got something to do with the “mustn’t grumble” school of thought where you should always be happy with your lot. <br>In Australia you can go up to someone and say, “look, what I’m going to do is design a rocket and then build it and then blast off next month to Jupiter because I think there’s a bit of potential up there”, and the Aussie will say, “not a bad idea mate, I can see that working. Give it a go”, and they genuinely believe it. There’s none of this, “well, I told the chap that it was a damned fine idea, but frankly Biffo he’s never going to get it off the ground. Simply didn’t go to the right school, don’t you know?”<br>Don lived at Bondi. Now, just about everyone in the world has heard of Bondi Beach. It’s where most of the Brits wash-up when they land Down-Under. As it happens, Jade and I went there on our second day in Sydney and we took a long look at the small stretch of sand and then we looked at each other and one of us said, “is that it?” and then we went for a coffee. <br>The thing is this, how this beach got this world-famous name for itself, I don’t know. Undeniably there are a lot of attractive young things parading around but you can say that about any beach in Sydney. Bondi has got some good cafes but you can say that about any beach in Sydney. Bondi’s got some eccentric characters but...well you know where I’m headed. <br>Anyway, the other thing about Bondi is this - the tides are so dangerous that in the summer months when the beach and the water are full to bursting with holidaymakers, at least 80 people a day have to be rescued by the surf lifesavers or the lifeboats and in some cases they send a helicopter out too. Most of the rescuees are English, though sometimes a Japanese bloke also gets swept out. <br>Don often sits on the headland with his friends and they lay bets on which bobbing head is going to be next to be swept out to sea and eventually rescued. Apparently you can spend a good time doing this and if you take a picnic and some wine and pass the binoculars around then it’s even more fun and the day passes quite agreeably. <br>Don told me, one day he saw this group of English lads, they were from somewhere up north, and they’d obviously just arrived because they were still wearing their purple and white shell-suits and they were walking along and as they passed Don on the Bondi promenade he heard one of them say, “Let’s go and jump in the water then.” And another one said, “I don’t like the look of that there water, mate. It says don’t swim too.”<br>“What you are,” said Shell-Suit One, “is a fuckin’ poofter. Call yourself English! You’re kiddin’ me!” And then apparently he ran onto the beach, stripping off the shell-suit as he<br>went and launched himself into the foaming water. <br>Don said an oil tanker picked him up four hours later when he became a danger to shipping. <br>So, one weekend I go and see Don for a coffee. He lives in this house that he rents and he sub-lets rooms to other people. He has a studio on the top floor, which is the third floor, and he’s within walking distance of the beach so though you can’t see the water you can always smell the sea. He’s also near Bondi golf course. <br>The golf course is bounded on one side by the sea, so when you lose a ball that’s it. I guess some of them even hit English people being tugged out to sea by the rip-tide. If you were one of those being swept away I imagine that really would make your day complete. There you are drowning and then a bloody golf ball whacks you on the head. Super. <br>The other side of the golf course has a major road running up it. This is not the safest of places to be driving. I mean driving a vehicle of course, not a ball, because often<br>when Don and his brother play golf they have balls whizzing off the course and bouncing off passing vehicles. Don swears he only ever once got a hole in one when he hit a double-decker bus lumbering up the hill, had the ball bounce back, tip onto the green and go into the hole. Apparently people on the bus applauded.<br>Like many things in Australia the golf club is not the preserve of rich geezers - anybody can take part. Personally I’m not a golf fan. To me it’s just a game played by men with small balls. I only mention this because when I was a kid I used to live near a golf course in Leicestershire and it marked me for life. <br>One side of the course was bounded by a stretch of fields. I hear that the verdant pastures have been built on by some hideous company like Wimpy but in those days when I was about 11 or 12 it was the best place to be. You could walk through fields and fields and fields and in those days there were still hedges not wire fences. There were wooden stiles to get over and I remember oak trees roaring in the stiff wind. I remember fields that had nothing growing in them except lush green grass and daisies and buttercups you could hold under your chin where they glowed in the sunlight. There were lazy old cows and sometimes a bull. I used to pick up conkers and acorns and climb trees (and leave my bike near the road and nobody nicked it, because, well nobody did back then) and I’d look for golf balls because there were enough bad golfers for a good number of balls to be knocked over the hedges and into the deep grass of the fields. Once I found the small white balls I’d go and sell them to the Pro in his shop. It was easy money. The thing was though, this bloke was really unpleasant and if you went in his shop when there were golfers there he’d chuck you out, really start verbally abusing you, make you feel like nothing. At the time I never understood why he was so unpleasant but of course it all made sense years on - there he was buying golf balls off me and my mates which belonged to the bad golfers who came into his shop. These golfers were sold their own balls back as secondhand balls and unless they had their names on them - which of course some did - then they could never be sure these were their balls. This Pro was paying us kids a few bob to get these balls and then selling them back to their original owners for many more bobs. Anyway, I assume that what goes around and all that has happened to him. In the often neat way of these things, it’s perfectly possible that he could well have been on holiday to Australia, gone to Bondi, went out in the water, got swept out to sea and then got whacked on the head by one of Don’s errant balls. One can only hope. <br>So, phew, here we are, back at the beginning of this particular story, in Bondi. Don said to me, come and have a look out the window here, and I did and in the building next door, which is a block of smart apartments, there was this good looking girl playing a violin. She was two floors below so we were sort of looking down and across at her and we could see almost all the way into her apartment which was lit with sunlight. <br>“She is so good looking,” said Don quietly.<br>“What’s with the violin,” I asked. <br>He looked at me. “She plays it.”<br>She was strumming the violin like she knew what she was doing. It didn’t even sound bad. Snatches of the music floated up to us on a breeze from the sea, so it was like music with a sharp sea flavour - very strange.<br>“I’m going to marry that girl,” said Don and wondered if he’d been getting a bit too much of that sea air.<br>“What’s she think about that?” I asked just as quietly, watching her, listening to the music. I think it was a bit of Beethoven.<br>“Well,” said Don, also watching her, “I haven’t actually talked to her yet. On account of her boyfriend.”<br>“Oh,” I said, moving away from the window, “that’s going to be a bit tricky then.”<br>“I don’t think so”, he said, turning towards me and spreading his hands, palms up flat, “see she plays the violin and I’m -?” He waited for me. <br>“Well, you’re a gas fitter.”<br>“Mate! I am a musician! I make music! It is only a matter of time before our musical talents collide.”<br>“Hmm,” I said and turned to look out the window again and listen to some more music as the sea breeze inflated the room. <br>Two weeks later Don calls me up and says, “Come round. I want to show you something.”<br>I drive over there and go up to his studio and he has the TV wired up to the video player and he shows me this film of this girl from next door who, it turns out, is called Zady. In the video she’s sitting in Don’s room talking to Don about music. On the tape Don has this fan gently blowing in the room because it’s so warm and she’s wearing this filmy dress and the fan breeze is just playing with the edges of her dress, just gently flicking the material. Because she doesn’t know she’s being filmed it’s actually a whole lot more sexy than any other video I’ve ever seen – and that includes Don’s renowned porn collection, which is about the size of the contents of the British Library, and definitely a serious rival to the array owned by Mr Henry from the brewery.<br>“See, mate, I’m going to go out with that girl,” said Don as the tape came to an end. “She’s already interested in playing in my band.”<br>“On the violin?”<br>“Well, I’ve been having a think about putting a string section in the group.” <br>“What about the boyfriend?” <br>“I don’t think he’d be interested, He’s an architect.”<br>“No, I mean what are you going to do about him? She’s not going to go out with you while they’re still living together.” <br>“Well,” he says, “I hear them arguing all the time now, so way I see it, it’s only a matter of time.”<br>It was maybe three weeks later that Don called me at work. It was like a scene out of Seinfeld.<br>‘Hey,” he said, “guess what happened?”<br>“Tell me,” I said as I continued to tap on the keyboard. <br>“That girl, Zady.”<br>“Yeah.”<br>“She ran out on the street yesterday.”<br>“Yeah.” I said, still typing, only half listening to him.<br>“And she was screaming.”<br>My typing slowed.<br>“Really screaming -”<br>“Yes,” I said listening intently now, leaning back in my chair, the computer abandoned.<br>“The boyfriend’s dead!”<br>“Jesus,” I sprang forward in my chair and nearly head-butted the computer screen. “How’d that happen? He was only maybe, what, 35?”<br>“Thirty-two, as it happens. She came home and he was lying on the sofa and he was just dead. Had a dicky heart or something.”<br>“God.” I paused. And then I said, “So when you going out with her?”<br>“Friday.”<br>So, Zady started playing in Don’s heavy rock band, her violin fighting with Duggs on double bass and Monster on the drums. It was an interesting sound, but the more I listened to them the more confident I was that John Bon Jovi had a future. There was something a little frightening about Zady’s playing. Gone were the soft lilting chords that the sea breeze had brought up to us that day in Don’s flat and in their place was a savagery that seemed to come from another place entirely. Of course it was to be expected. When you’re in your mid-20s you don’t expect your 32-year-old boyfriend to lie down on the sofa one afternoon and die. Not when you’re out. Imagine the way things had been left, the words that hadn’t been said. What a terrible business. <br>Anyway, Zady and Don started going out. This had to be the worst thing to do. And, no of course, I didn’t tell him. Some things you just have to find out for yourself. <br>Not too surprisingly the relationship didn’t last and when it finished it upset Don a lot. He really thought he’d found his soulmate but when they broke up she said to him, “You know, I never fancied you.”<br>“What!?” said Don, “after all the things we did?”<br>“That,” she said, “was just sex.”<br>The truth was, she’d wanted a shoulder to cry on, just one, and Don’d wanted her, all of her, not just her shoulder. But it was a relationship with three people in it. And one of them was dead. How can you compete with a dead man? Well, you just can’t because he’s already had the last word.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/03/gone-4261161/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/06/03/gone-4261161/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/30/gone-4245439/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-30:/2008/05/30/gone-4245439/Fri, 30 May 2008 07:12:35 +0200 <p><br><em>Thirty-four</em></p> <p>"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?”<br>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.<br>“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.<br>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.<br>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?”<br>“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.” <br>Yes, I said.<br>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.<br>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.”<br>“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 <br>Furtado tomorrow.” <br>Fagin would have been proud. <br>As Dipper was showing me the computer Jade looked around. <br>“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- “<br>“Yeah”, I said quickly, “I think we’ve got it.”<br>Another time he told me this remarkable story. The sort of story you’d never dream of telling anyone. But he did...<br>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.<br>“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.<br>“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.”<br>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.”<br>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.”<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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?</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/30/gone-4245439/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/30/gone-4245439/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/29/gone-4240775/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-29:/2008/05/29/gone-4240775/Thu, 29 May 2008 03:46:42 +0200 <p><em><br>Thirty-three</em></p> <p>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.<br>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. <br>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. <br>Jade turned to me and then screamed again. “You’ve got no clothes on!”<br>“I can’t go back in there,” I said, “the beast’ll kill me.” <br>“Get back in there now,” she said, “otherwise we’ll be bloody deported.”<br>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. <br>“What are we going to do?”<br>“I don’t know,” I said, “I think we need some help.”<br>“Do you think it’s dangerous?,” she said.<br>I looked at her as if she was mad. <br>“It nearly bloody killed me!” I said.<br>“What exactly did it do?” she asked, her practical streak taking over.<br>I stared across the road at the house, my eyes slits in the sunlight. I said quietly, “It stuck its tongue out.”<br>She looked at me. “It stuck its tongue out?”<br>“It was bloody long. You should have seen it.”<br>“What colour was it?”<br>“His tongue?” <br>She nodded. <br>“I don’t know, blue, I think.”<br>“Blue! What’s that all about?”<br>I shrugged and looked back across the road. It was getting hot out here and my lily-livered English skin was feeling it. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>“Go and ask him about the beast,” said Jade nodding towards the driver. <br>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. <br>“G’day mate, how’s it goin’?” he asked.<br>I leaned on his windowsill and said, “We’ve got a bloody big lizard in the house. I don’t know what to do.”<br>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?”<br>I grunted and slapped the top of the window ledge. <br>“You’re the second person’s asked me that.”<br>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.”<br>“So, if it’s got a green tongue what’s that mean?”<br>“Phuh! I dunno mate. Everyone asks what colour the lizard’s tongue is. Always have done. Since I was a nipper.”<br>“Great,” I said. <br>“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.”<br>“Why?”<br>“It can give ya a nasty bloody bite and then we’d have to call the ambo and that’ll cost ya.”<br>“I thought you said it wasn’t dangerous?”<br>“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.<br>“Can you give me a hand with it.”?<br>He drew in a slow breath until his lungs expanded so much I thought they’d explode.<br>“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.”<br>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. <br>I hopped, skipped and jumped back to Jade.<br>“What the hell are you doing dancing all over the place?”<br>“Look I think it’s dangerous. He said it could bite.”<br>“What are we going to do?”<br>“I’m going to have to go in.”<br>“You’re either brave or mad.”<br>“Look, we can’t stay out here all afternoon,” I said. <br>I crossed the road and as I was going she shouted after me - “what shall I tell your mother?”<br>“Funny!” I shouted back and then entered the darkened house. <br>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. <br>Jade and I clutched each other tight as drowning sailors. <br>“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. <br>“Do you think I’ll see it again?” asked Dare.<br>“Not unless we find it, mate,” said the copper as he fired his engine.<br>“Oh right then,” said Dare hopefully.<br>“What I’d do mate, if you follow me, is I’d go out and buy another car soon as you like.”<br>“Oh”, said Dare, and so he bought the bike. <br>“Hey blokes. You okay?” he said to us now.<br>“We’ve just had a bloody lucky escape,” I said.<br>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. <br>“Jeez, that’s good. So Jadey aint having a nipper then? Bonza!”<br>We both looked at him and disentangled ourselves. <br>“No,” I said, “we just had this big lizard in here.”<br>“Yeah? A lizard, ya say. What colour was its tongue?”<br>Jade went AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR!<br>“Jesus , Jadey, scared you didn’t it? Anyhow, did it have a short stumpy-tail?”<br>We both looked at him. Only one of his eyes looked back.<br>“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.”</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/29/gone-4240775/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/29/gone-4240775/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/27/gone-4231808/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-27:/2008/05/27/gone-4231808/Tue, 27 May 2008 23:26:34 +0200 <p><br><em>Thirty-two</em></p> <p>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.<br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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! <br>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. <br>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. <br>Dare’s tobacco kiosk was small and cylindrical. In fact it was so small only Dare and just <br>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. <br>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). <br>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. <br>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”. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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.<br>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. <br>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. <br>I went back into the bedroom and Jade looked up from her book and said, “Jesus, what happened!?”<br>“Bruce whacked me,” I said, flopping down on the bed. <br>“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.<br>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.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/27/gone-4231808/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/27/gone-4231808/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/26/gone-4226387/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-26:/2008/05/26/gone-4226387/Mon, 26 May 2008 23:38:15 +0200 <p><br><em>Thirty-one</em></p> <p>“Excuse me sir. Would you like a woman?”<br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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?”<br>I looked at him. “I didn’t know you still needed one.”<br>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. <br>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.<br>The accommodation bureau people fixed us up at the Gazebo Hotel in Kings Cross. <br>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. <br>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.<br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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.<br>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. <br>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... <br>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:<br>“So, what do you think?’<br>“Well, do you like it here?”<br>“It’s okay. Might be fun for a while.”<br>“Yeah, that’s what I reckon.”<br>So?”<br>“So, yeah, let’s give it a try for a few months at least.”<br>“Okay.”<br>And really that was that. We had a new home and all we had to do was find somewhere more permanent to live.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/26/gone-4226387/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/26/gone-4226387/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/26/title-4221925/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-25:/2008/05/26/title-4221925/Mon, 26 May 2008 00:32:19 +0200 <p><br> <em>Thirty</em></p> <p>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...<br> 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.<br> 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.<br> 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.<br> 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.<br> 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.<br> 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.<br> “I’d say there is!” said Corky Colonial, “look at my suit. I demand to see the Captain!”<br> “I am the Captain.”<br> This worried me because, I mean call me old fashioned, but shouldn’t the captain be up front flying this apartment block with wings?<br> “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.<br> The other thing about Olympic is that they have a policy on hand luggage - you can bring on as much as you want.<br> 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.<br> “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.<br> 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.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/26/title-4221925/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/26/title-4221925/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/20/title-4200498/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-20:/2008/05/20/title-4200498/Tue, 20 May 2008 23:20:09 +0200 <p><em>Twenty-nine</em></p> <p>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.<br> The following day we went to McDonald’s for breakfast and Jade said, “What are you going to do when college finishes?”<br> “You mean university,” I said through a mouth of hash browns.<br> “Yeah, right. So, what you going to do then?”<br> “I was thinking we could go away somewhere for a while.”<br> “With what?”<br> “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.”<br> “Yeah,” she said, “me too. I’ve always fancied somewhere really hot and really far away.”<br> “We came to Littlehampton.”<br> “Uh-huh. No, I mean really far away.”<br> “Like Clacton?”<br> “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. </p> <p><em>to be continued...</em></p> <p> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/20/title-4200498/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/20/title-4200498/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/19/gone-4196072/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-19:/2008/05/19/gone-4196072/Mon, 19 May 2008 23:33:18 +0200 <p><br><em>Twenty-eight</em></p> <p>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.<br>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.<br>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. <br>“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.”<br>“Jesus,” I said, “that must have been terrifying.”<br>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.”<br>“Yeah,” I say, “last time I saw you, you stuck a fucking gun in my face.”<br>It dawns on him then and he says, “Aw, sorry. It’s just my job, you know. Want a drink?”<br>“I haven’t got any money,” I say drily.<br>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. <br>“Hey, I just did the shoe shop down the road. Let’s go somewhere quiet and get a drink.” So we did. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>“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.”<br>He smiled that nice smile and said, “ Let me make it up to you.” <br>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.”<br>She looked at me and said, “I’ll bet you do.”</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/19/gone-4196072/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/19/gone-4196072/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/18/gone-4191756/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-18:/2008/05/18/gone-4191756/Sun, 18 May 2008 23:36:21 +0200 <p><br><em>Twenty-seven</em></p> <p>Every morning before class I’d pop into Andy’s Cafe and have tea and a bacon and egg. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>Everyone would be reading their newspapers, some of them would nod to me, some would just look, some just wouldn’t. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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.<br>“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.<br>I looked at her as she spooned sugar into her tea and stirred it.<br>“It’s a long story,” I said.<br>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.”<br>And so I did. </p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/18/gone-4191756/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/18/gone-4191756/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/16/gone-4179988/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-16:/2008/05/16/gone-4179988/Fri, 16 May 2008 04:30:05 +0200 <p><em>Twenty-six</em></p> <p>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. <br>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. <br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>“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!” <br>Well, he had to; it was impossible to look the bloke in the eye, any eye. <br>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. <br>Driving with Clarence was always an experience. Quite how he managed to get a job as a motoring journalist, I never knew. <br>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...<br>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.<br>“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?” <br>I forgot myself and said, “You talking to me?” then I shook my head and said, “what’s with the sudden change of mind?”<br>“Skipper,” said Clarence in exasperation, “that truck. Could have killed us. Surprised I didn’t see it sooner.”<br>“The truck?” I said.<br>“The truck, King.”<br>“What truck’s that then?”<br>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. <br>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). <br>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. <br>“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.<br>“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”.<br>“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?”<br>“I really don’t want to find out. Things are complicated enough as it is.” <br>“How’d you mean?”<br>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.<br>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.”<br>But somehow I don’t think he did.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em></p> <p> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/16/gone-4179988/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>cross-eydeyessightclarencehttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/16/gone-4179988/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/15/gone-4175607/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-15:/2008/05/15/gone-4175607/Thu, 15 May 2008 01:34:44 +0200 <p><br><em>Twenty-five</em></p> <p>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. <br>One day I got a phone call from Tom. He was his usual cheerful self. <br>“Some chap called. Don’t know what it was about. Maybe nothing much. Maybe nothing at all. Who knows?”<br>“Well,” I said, exhaling a deep lungful of air along with my words, “maybe I’ll find out if you give me his name.”<br>Harrumph, he said down the line and as he fiddled with some paper he muttered, “suppose you want the number too?”<br>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.<br>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?”<br>I nodded.<br>“Well, what did they know?”<br>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?<br>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.<br>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.” <br>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.<br>“Going to Lambeth, Mr King?” asked Robert. I nodded and in the back Henry looked up from his paper. <br>“Lambeth? Are you mad man?”<br>“Henry,” I said turning around in the front seat, “it’s a job. I need to work.”<br>“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.”<br>“Sir!” shouted Robert like the ex-SAS man he was and Henry jumped and spilt some Coke. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>“Where is Ronald?” asked a girl lounging at the front and everyone stared at me. Not a sound.<br>“Well,” I said slowly, “he’s had a heart attack.”<br>Well, I thought the air had been sucked out of the room.<br>“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.<br>“Hey!” I shouted, “Ronald is not dead. Ronald is recovering.”<br>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.<br>“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?”<br>They all shouted out their agreement and stared at me with naked hostility. “Man, why’d you do that?”, they kept shouting.<br>“Look” I said, putting my hands up to calm them, “I know Ronald means a lot to you-”<br>“Ronald is The Man,” said the girl at the front, “he a friend of Nelson’s.”<br>“Nelson?” I said frowning, “Willy Nelson? The singer?”<br>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.”<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.”<br>No, I have no idea what he was talking about...</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/15/gone-4175607/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>teachingmorgan-freemanshawshank-redemptionstudentscrimenelson-mandelahttp://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/15/gone-4175607/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/05/gone-4131995/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-05:/2008/05/05/gone-4131995/Mon, 05 May 2008 04:53:20 +0200 <p><br><em>Twenty-four</em></p> <p>I knew this bloke Adam. <br>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.<br>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.<br>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...).<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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?”<br>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.<br>“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.”<br>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?”<br>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...</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/05/gone-4131995/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/05/gone-4131995/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/01/gone-4116892/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-05-01:/2008/05/01/gone-4116892/Thu, 01 May 2008 04:36:49 +0200 <p><br><em>Twenty-three</em></p> <p>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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?<br>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.<br>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."<br>"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.<br>"How much do you want this job?" he asked me with a frown.<br>I looked at him. "You want another beer?"<br>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."<br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>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. <br>Because I knew the General loved to dispense advice, I arranged to see him. <br>I turned up in the Lotus and he came out of his front door as I awkwardly clambered out of the car. <br>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. <br>“So, I see you have acquired one of the infamous collector’s cars,” The General said with dripping pomposity.<br>“Yes,” I said, massaging my lover back and attempting to stand straight again, which I eventually managed.<br>“Y’know they call them collector’s cars because -”<br>“I know,” I interrupted, “because you have to keep stopping to collect all the pieces that’ve fallen off. It’s an old joke.”<br>“Hurrumph,” said The General. <br>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. <br>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.”<br>“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.”<br>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.”<br>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.<br>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.”<br>“Of course, sorry. Might damage something. See you soon Biffo.”<br>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.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em></p> <p> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/01/gone-4116892/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/05/01/gone-4116892/#commentsGone...http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/04/30/gone-4112619/tag:kingcoultas.blog.co.uk,2008-04-30:/2008/04/30/gone-4112619/Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:05:54 +0200 <p><em>Twenty-two</em></p> <p>Money was the thing. I’d run out of it, and Mr Henry never would. Well, not unless people stopped drinking beer. <br>Living with Henry and Clarissa, I felt a bit like that bloke who went to live with those rich people in Brideshead Revisited. I was amazed and as amused as he was, (only I thought of myself as being a bit more outgoing than the boring young coot played by Jeremy Irons). <br>Of course it wasn’t long before I was driving the Lotus, usually because Clarissa wanted to go somewhere and didn’t want the chore of parking near the wine bar in Central London where she had regular meetings with her “wine adviser”. This bloke fancied her and she fancied him. But it never went anywhere further than a wine bar. They’d both get so pissed that only the fantasy was real. <br>Meanwhile Donkey Boy was angling to get his equipment tangled up with Sophia Loren’s while Jack tried to look like this wasn’t going to bother him, Henry being his boss and all that. Rude Jude dispensed liposuction and free sexual advice in equal proportion to anyone who came near, Julie was increasingly making the application of her lipstick into a sexual art form worthy of a one-woman show at some fringe theatre and Dawn showed everyone just what it meant to clean in a dirty manner. <br>Every weekend there was a party, and sometimes in the week too, and all of these people would be there, plus many of Julie’s girlfriends, all of whom were stunningly beautiful but who also had the distinction that if you added all their ages together I was still old enough to be at least their father. One of Henry’s business acquaintances visiting from Texas drawlingly said, “Henry, old man, you’re living in The House of Babes”. <br>Those weekends were bonkers. Imagine all the free drink you want, free cigarettes, as much food as you could eat and loads of women, some of them young enough to be my daughters and all of them experimenting with sexual lipstick and wearing as few clothes as possible. If the devil had a house on earth, this was it. Debauchery didn’t even begin to describe it. Everyone there had just a couple of things on their minds and they weren’t what the weather would be like tomorrow or whether United was going to win the cup. <br>Of course I started drinking far more than I’d ever drunk before and I took up smoking again, though this time instead of Embassy Regal which I’d smoked when I was 17 because they weren’t as cheap and nasty as Player’s No 6, (Regal were just cheap but a fine smoke nevertheless, if you’re looking for some guidance on which species of the weed to imbibe these would be, as they say in Australia, the go), I was now on Lucky Strikes because they tasted good and Henry got them for free from the brewery and I had no idea how much they cost. <br>Like just about everything else, the Lucky Strikes came each week on a big brewery truck. <br>So, there I was, no money, no obvious future, no place I could call my own, but living it up in The House of Babes, smoking for the first time in 12 years, drinking like I was the owner of a brewery, a new liver and a new pair of kidneys, and having a damn fine time just looking out for the truck every evening and flirting with girls. <br>As we drank we talked and as we ate we talked and laughed and said the most stupid things of course, and the more alcohol we drank the more stupid it all became. It was really funny at those events, or at least that’s what I thought, and the drink flowed and the cigarettes were smoked and the food was eaten. <br>Only, as even Emperor Nero must eventually have realised, there is only so much of this type of living you can take. I mean, every day I was waking up with a hangover and not just a nagging one either. The type that tells you your liver is going to seriously object any day soon and that perhaps one day you’re not going to wake up at all.<br>One night I ended up in bed with Kristy, who by then I was sure I’d actually seen in Topless Tenerife Tearaways, and I was giving her back a massage in the dark and I drunkenly asked her to roll over on to her back so I could get my drunken hands on those breasts of hers and there was a long silence and then she said, “I am on my back,” and before I could think I said, “So what happened to your breasts then?”, and she said, “you’ve been kneading them so fucking hard for the last half an hour I thought you were making bread. And you didn’t even know! Jesus H Christ!”<br>I had to do something. One winter’s morning after they’d all gone to work, I sat there in a cane chair on the patio, smoking a Lucky Strike, wrapped in my overcoat, collar up around my neck and wearing one of Henry’s fedoras (he had a collection of 44), watching the horses frolicking in the field, the iced grass crackling like newspaper under their hooves. I knew I had to get out of this place and stop smoking and stop drinking and stop living this false life and try and get some sense and proportion back into it all. And in one of my increasingly rare moments of lucidity and sobriety I remembered The General. And I smiled because suddenly I began to have the germ of an idea.</p> <p><em>to be continued...</em><br> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/04/30/gone-4112619/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://kingcoultas.blog.co.uk/2008/04/30/gone-4112619/#comments