The Hogga Blog

Season's Greetings

2012-01-05T13:38:00.000Z

And a very merry Yuletide to you all - as well as my wishes for a peaceful, prosperous and thoughtful 2012. We're back from a holiday in Port Alfred where the lovely beaches were uncrowded and the kids got to set up their own ecosystems in tidal pools (of course these were gone the next day to the bafflement of Lily and the relief of the dozens of captured hermit crabs and starfish). Henry was more concerned with running into the waves than any eco-research; with the water being fairly rough and given his brick-like swimming abilities, I was kept on the hop. All in all though it was a fabulous time.

One of the excursions we made was a little North of Port Alfred, to the Fish River lighthouse. Chivvied on by a very strong and chilly wind we took some quick pictures of this imposing Victorian edifice and the completely deserted beaches nearby and then fled back to our cottage to apply an insulating layer of KFC grease to our innards.

Another excursion was to the Big Pineapple at Bathurst – a hilariously kitsch structure once again subject to some gale force winds (as you can see I was clinging onto the kids at the top, 17 metres above the concrete).

Ice creams all round (or, in Harry’s case, all over) and then off to Grahamstown to marvel at the Victorian architecture I recalled vaguely, details having been blurred by alcohol when I was at Rhodes in the Eighties and the decades since then. The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. George was well worth a visit although Henry Alexander decided the acoustics were perfect for a clog dance cum ballet routine and needed to be chased down to ground behind the baptismal font and silenced.

We ended off with a night on a farm near Addo Elephant Park, and then the next day drove through the park on our way to PE Airport - seeing, strangely enough, quite a few elephant :) they survive surprisingly well on the low thorny scrub that grows near the coast there.

All in all a great and long overdue return to my old haunts in the Eastern Cape..

Davey's on the Road Again ....

2011-11-23T10:46:00.000Z

A track from Manfred Mann's Earth Band, an old favourite and very appropriate right now. I'm moving on from my current consulting role with SAP to take up a corporate OD and change role with one of the major mining houses here in Joahnnesburg. It's been an interesting 2-odd years back in South Africa with much travel (mostly to Nigeria); many conferences, lots of new friends and of course the growth and development of my beautiful children. It's hard to capture such eventful times in a few photos but here we go ....

Autumn in Africa

2011-06-27T09:54:00.001+01:00

It's been a while since I posted anything, I see. A very busy few months which have seen us moving into a newly purchased house, and sending Lily off to the vastly overpriced pre-school on our estate. She is now 4 going on 28 and developing a nice line in looks to keep her old Dad in his place ...

The new house is a lot larger than our Berkshire home, and the renovators we hired kept asking us if our furniture was still coming from the UK. We blushingly admitted that what they saw was the sum total of what we own, less some antiques we stored, and we're still working on how to fill an extra 200 sq. metres of space we never had before.

We took the kids to a fantastic zoo around 90km north of Pretoria - called Mystic Monkeys it is the first one I've seen with decent sized cages for the simian cousins. Lily and Henry found the apes very amusing, but were far more impressed with the tiger and white lion cubs they encountered.

Otherwise all well - we're adjusting to our second year back in Africa. Hellish expensive now, Johannesburg, but we are keeping our heads just enough above water to allow the occasional smile.

The glamorous side of international management consulting

2011-06-27T09:36:00.000+01:00

I thought I’d write a brief account of my week in Nigeria just to give some kind of indication what it is like to travel there on business. Not my first trip there of course, just the most recent. And not the worst either – this one was about average. I’ve done about a dozen such trips in the last year or so, all economy class because even though the total journey time can stretch to 14 hours or more, no one leg is 8 hours long so we don’t qualify for business class travel.....

To start off with, my Nigerian multiple entry visa expired on 11th May, which meant I was taking a risk with the hostile immigration officials in Lagos, by trying to gain entry for a week starting on 8th May. I thought I’d chance it and so booked the trip, even though they’re a bit touchy right now after the elections.

My shuttle driver got lost on the estate I live in, because their system has two addresses for me and he chose the old wrong one. That meant he eventually arrived about half an hour late for my pickup, which in itself was already arranged for a bit too close to the check-in time. After I growled at him for being late he got nervous and drove fast and erratically until I told him I’d rather be late than dead, whereafter he slowed down a bit.

Check-in for the SAA flight in Johannesburg was OK, although a sudden gate change at the last minute meant hundreds of people galloping a few hundred metres to the new gate. Once boarded, I realised with sinking heart it was the oldest plane in SAA’s aging fleet of Airbus 340-200s, which meant no individual movie screens but rather a rattling drop-down central monitor every 15 rows or so, with flickering pictures of Eddie Murphy in shades of purple and green. The plane was 99% full but mercifully the only empty seat was the one next to me so I managed some fitful dozing across the partially raised armrest. The food was the usual dire 1970’s SAA rubbish, with a salad composed entirely of large rough cut pieces of wilted green pepper, a main course of oily lamb stew over sloppy mashed potatoes and a pudding straight out of my boarding school decades ago. The Nigerian lady over the aisle from me kept trying to put her headphone lead across into the arm of my chair (hers wasn’t working) but was eventually repelled by my hostile glares. It was a single socket system so my double-socket noise cancelling headset didn’t work.

We landed an hour after the scheduled time with no explanation from the pilot, who just baldly informed us we were late. Frankly I was glad to just get there even if a bit slower than usual. The standard mad dash for the aircraft exit took place, with the cognoscenti shoving all and sundry out of their way in the rush to be first in the very very long immigration queue. If one is late in that race, one ends up being part of the “escalator follies” where the relentlessly-running steps deposit a stream of non-Nigerian passport holders into a small, finite space – providing much amusement to all as people crash into the end of the queue, drop briefcases or vault madly over the edge of the escalator to avoid the impact. The Nigerian immigration staff are usually somewhere between abrupt and openly hostile, and best not provoked.

I guess I was about 40th in the queue, which gave me enough time to read and internalise the cover story sent via text message to me by my driver waiting outside. When the immigration screening officer asked me what I was doing in Nigeria I said boldly “I have a meeting at the Presidency and I’d like to leave the country on 11th May” which was at least 50% true. I got a 2-week entry visa and scampered madly off to the baggage carousel, where I waited an hour for my luggage to arrive.

Once out into the hot steamy late evening in Lagos, I was glad to see my driver who shepherded me out into the dark and mosquito-riddled car park to find the car. On the way there I spotted a Nigerian policeman with the ubiquitous Kalashnikov on a sling - he must have been bored because as I passed him he body-checked me quite hard with his shoulder and then lifted the rifle and said “Do you like this?” “Yes” I replied “It’s an AKMS, folding butt parachute model, 7.62 intermediate,. Not bad even at 600 rounds a minute!” and walked away. Unusual behaviour even in Nigeria, but still it was even more proof that I can get into trouble anywhere without even trying... my driver was aghast at this unprovoked bit of bullying but I was in a eerie state of calm (or early dehydration) and forgot about it almost immediately. Not the first time I have been thumped by someone with an AK, anyway.

A long drive all the way into Ikoyi to my hotel, because the hotels close to the airport are too expensive for our project. Too late for dinner and, as usual, leaving for the next airport too early for breakfast although I did manage to steal some sausages from the buffet as they were laying it out. Driver slapping at mosquitoes in the car all the way while I frantically slathered myself with Tabard repellent, there are only so many trips you can safely take antimalarials and this wasn’t chosen to be one of them.

Monday morning and early to the MM2 domestic terminal, and luckily I am well briefed in what happens if you have booked a seat on Air Nigeria from South Africa and then you change your flight also from South Africa. You are depicted as a “no show” in the systems in Lagos and need to queue to have your ticket revalidated before queuing somewhere else to pay the “date change” fees and then queuing somewhere else again to check in. I eventually completed this process as they were closing the checkin and scuttled upstairs to board the flight.

The trip to Abuja was uneventful , although the 35-odd km from airport to hotel took over an hour thanks to some very bad traffic. They’ve been working on the road there for years now, with no real sign of getting close to completion. We eventually arrived at the Hawthorn suites, where we are compelled to stay while in Abuja, and I was given a room which was pretty standard, although only half the light bulbs were working. A quick freshen-up and then off to the client.

Dinner was room service (it’s too dangerous to wander round outside at night and the hotel is in the middle of nowhere anyway) and I ordered a steak which was a silly error. The rare grilled steak I was promised turned out to be an extremely tough and vastly overcooked piece of leather, served with an enormous mound of plain white rice (no gravy) and some stir fried cabbage. Should have gone with the local dishes, although I wanted at least one night’s sleep before smiting my colon with loads of chilli and meat.

Breakfast was the usual oily mix of strange foodstuffs, all liberally soused with chilli pepper. I chose some crumbly local bread to support the Nigerian scrambled eggs, chilli beef sausages and chilli chicken stew, then headed to the office.

The aircons were working this time, thank God, and the day was pleasant enough inside, although 36 degrees outside. I had lunch with the OCM team in the “Mama Cass” canteen, and attracted some strange looks for humming “California Dreaming” and then giggling helplessly. Lunch was, as ever, jolloff rice and chilli chicken, with some sauce from the chilli beef stew to moisten the rice. I could feel my tummy whimpering...

... and remembered my wife telling me last year just go to “Pret a Manger” to pick up something rather than eat all the spicy food ha ha. Nigeria is not like that. Anyway, time for some ghastly instant coffee with powdered milk (there’s no fresh milk in the whole country for some weird reason, and almost nobody drinks coffee either).

It’s now 12h00 on Friday and I will try and find another bottle of water somewhere to keep hydrated, it will be a very long and hot afternoon leaving here for the airport at 13h30, arriving in Lagos around 17h00 and taking off for SA at around 23h00 to arrive in Johannesburg at around 05h15 local time without having slept on the flight as usual. Then time to try and cheer my family up after they lost me halfway through Sunday and I arrive back grumpy and tired on a Saturday. And not tell them I am probably going to need to do this all over again soon, as we get closer to go-live.

Roll on Christmas

2010-12-01T08:17:00.002Z

Henry

It's 1 December in sunny Gauteng (actually cool and overcast today) and I am in sole charge of our Harry who turned 2 last week. Lily is in pre-school and Marcela has gone shopping with my Australian cousin Misty, who is visiting us this week. Work emails are coming through slowly, although there is still not the end of year lassitude I'd been bargaining on. One good thing is that it looks like I am done travelling for the year - apart, of course, from our Christmas sojourn to Maritzburg when we will join the Great Annual Gauteng Lemming stampede to the seaside. Still, work looms in Dubai, Istanbul, Abuja, Lagos and Addis early in the New Year and I am also looking at an internal project which will have time in Germany and the USA..

Lily checking if this was a real spider!

Our last trip to PMB was pretty good - Kim and I got to spend time together and the kids got to play with various of their cousins. Just up the road from where we were staying is Cordwalles School - which has a decent play area for kiddies although some of the decorations verge on the macabre, as can be seen..

We had a great and relaxing time and look forward to visiting our Natal relatives again soon. It's good to be there and no great challenge to put our watches back 20 years for the time difference :)

Otherwise we're all setting in pretty well. It has already been six months since I collected the family in Istanbul and brought them to our rented townhouse in Midrand. Lily and Henry are doing well, thriving on being able to play outdoors pretty much every day and I must say it's good to see them doing so. They get on well as siblings - although Lily tends to boss her little brother a bit there's very little fighting and he even sat still for her art class..

Before official cleanup

After cleanup for family photos

Voortrekkers en nuwelinge

2010-08-22T07:01:00.000+01:00

Last weekend after staggering back from my regular trip to Abuja via Lagos I thought I'd take the family to see the Voortrekker Monument (also known as the Pop-up Toaster) which is around ten miles north of us here.

Dad doing local culture immersion training with Lily and Henry

A surprisingly large block of granite, on the top of a hill and surrounded by gardens, the Monument was built way back in the Thirties to celebrate the Great Trek of Dutch folk a century before. The "Trekkers" left the Cape Colony to avoid British domination, and headed North. Some, including ancestors of ours, kept on heading north at the slightest hint of domination, interference or even the odd dirty look - an irascibility and antisocialness that had them settling remote and uninhabited parts of Rhodesia. Some of these proto-Hodgsons apparently pre-dated the explorations of Selous and Livingstone - the discovery of Victoria Falls by the latter was quite some years after one of the Swart or Erasmus family arrived there in transit.

Henry and I found a seat next to some garlic plants and relaxed in the winter sunshine. A little way down the hill the sound of The Last Post wafted into the air - the annual South African Defence Force remembrance day service was taking place at the Wall of Remembrance which, like the US one in Washington, lists the names of the fallen. My war dead are mostly in Rhodesia I guess, and anyway I hate memorial services and funerals so we stayed up the hill, avoided all the old folk wearing black blazers and medals and contented ourselves with watching the parade of bearded Afrikaners, camera-toting tourists and the odd local low-budget families like ourselves who couldn't find anything else kid-friendly to do on a Sunday in Gauteng.

Lily inside the 64-wagon laager

Mindful of the fact that I was heading for Istanbul on Tuesday, I resolved to make the most of our Sunday outing and allowed my pale European kids to get more sun than they were accustomed to in Newbury. Lily explored the flower gardens inside the ring of concrete ox-wagon bas-reliefs symbolic of the laager that defended the Volk from Zulu attacks at Blood River and Marcela ascended to the parapets, no doubt thinking how her ancestors would have found such a structure useful in repelling the marauding Turks that threatened Bessarabia regularly.

Antipodean autumn and Eastern Delights

2010-06-02T14:02:00.002+01:00

Getting chilly in the evenings, Johannesburg is. One of the biggest adjustments for Northern Hemisphere folk coming to South Africa must be the plummeting night-time temperatures in the middle months of the year. Houses are, by and large, not insulated well, never double-glazed and seldom heated to any meaningful degree so if it's minus 3 outside the chances are it's pretty cool inside.

Our new home has underfloor heating in most rooms, designed to take the edge off the bone chilling shock one gets when stepping out of bed onto a ceramic tiled floor. This is great in theory, although the miserly trip switch on our distribution board means running more than three of these at one time is not possible. Also in the master bedroom some of the heating panels don't work, making the morning dash to the loo a kind of Russian roulette across a chessboard of alternately warm and freezing tiles.

The family is adjusting OK after a pretty grim flight here from the near East last week. Overall it was a fairly new Airbus, reasonable seat pitch and a good line in food and little giveaways. Typical of a new and aspiring operation I guess, they have concentrated on being very friendly and smiling a lot while bombarding the customers with toiletries, food and drink. I'd personally rather that they had looked at the overall customer experience from booking to disembarking, and re-engineered that so we were not left crammed into a fetid waiting room without airconditioning or announcements over the causes of our delay; boarded eventually using the "stampede" method which meant that those carrying babies (like us) were too slow to be among the first hundred to so passengers on the plane; sat on the plane for three quarters of an hour watching an exceedingly strange selection of humanity stroll up and down the aisles chatting merrily (no explanation for the delay again, nor for the fact that this airline seems to use neither competence nor pulchritude as criteria in its stewardess selection); then an eventual very long taxi, punctuated by random hard braking and equally random loud, profound groaning noises from the undercarriage and thank Allah finally a takeoff at 01h00 instead of 23h00 - and a leisurely meal service with all main cabin lights on until 04h00.

My increasingly acerbic comments to the stewardesses about the light were met with complete incomprehension. We had two sporadically hysterical, vomiting or hopelessly sobbing infants trying to sleep under a tent fashioned of airline blankets wedged between the seat backs of the enormous Afrikaans couple in front of us (dislodged regularly by their bibulous and elephantine romancing, which looked like colliding icebergs) and the seat fronts of the happy Brazilian soccer fans behind us who sang gently and greeted Harry every time he popped his tear stained pink face up for a look. A helluva way to spend nine hours - and I was so glad to be in good old Oliver Tambo Airport I nearly danced - well, if my legs had not been sciatically numbed from sitting on the arm rest of the airplane seat for hours as the only way to let both kids lie down simultaneously I might have indulged in a happy waddle.

Now to settle in to our new life and hope I am not transferred again inside of the next year. My poor wife is exhausted to the point of death with having lived in 6 different places since January 2006 and that, coupled with my very high Life Insurance cover in this job means telling her we are moving to Jeddah or Walldorf may be the last thing I ever do.

Back in the Motherland

2010-03-29T10:43:00.000+01:00

Unusually enough for a many-generation African, this is the first blog I am actually writing and publishing from the Dark Continent. It’s March 2010, late summer in Johannesburg and still quite sultry on occasion (as indeed I myself am, in a dim light..). I’m in a pretty decent office park in the Northern suburbs – a place called Woodmead – and luckily enough given the ferociously congested traffic on the motorways, live in an adjacent community so my daily commute is around 15 minutes. When the family arrives I’ll add quite a bit onto the commute but gain the safety of living in a secure estate in Midrand.

It is indeed strange and yet familiar to be back in Mother Africa after an absence of almost ten years. Some of my ancestors first got here in the early 1700’s although their sun-resistant Afrikaans genes have been diluted by later infusions of Celtic and Saxon blood, giving me my delicate pink complexion, suspiciously ginger beard and lack of tolerance for the sharp ultraviolet here. Perceptibly sharper than in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia I can tell you, although not reaching the levels of lethality of Brisbane where “burn time” is around a dozen minutes.

So what’s changed since my last major visit in 2006? Bearing in mind I was a little distracted back then, introducing my new fiancée to my family without, or so I thought anyway, revealing the true reason for her strange attacks of morning nausea and habit of wearing very large shawls and wraps about her upper body. As it transpired, pretty much all of them knew we had a baby on the way but thought it funny to say nothing.

Anyway back then I think there was far more pessimism in the country than there is now, and of course the Joburg airport was a complete nightmare back then. We were decanted onto the tarmac at around 06h00 of a Highveld winter’s morning and then left standing without a shuttle bus for about 20 minutes, during which time Marcela went an interesting shade of blue and I finally realized (much too late, as usual) that she was wearing a little summer dress for her first trip to Africa.. she never expected it to be close to freezing and with a stiff wind blowing..

This time the airport is much better, if still a bit shy on travelators, bookshops and so on. The scenery is still verdant and lush, although when my poor wife arrives we will be in winter again and back to brown and dusty and dry. Every single major road is stitched with roadworks, cones, piles of earth, haphazardly parked heavy equipment and, at the intersections, hilariously un-synchronised traffic co-ordinators from some private organization I suspect. Internet speeds are better, although the country is still well before the tipping point where sufficient connectivity forces a boom in e-commerce and, hopefully, an improvement in website design (most of the commercial sites are truly dire examples of “brochureware” with very limited search and online purchasing technologies, I have already been guilty of firing off irascible emails to estate agents and second hand car sales sites that look like they were designed by primary school kids).

Politics is still, along with crime, probably the dominant source of local news although I hope the World Cup will temporarily alleviate that. I’d love to be able to get politicians doing stuff to improve service delivery instead of grandstanding, scoring cheap points off each other and generally enriching themselves. That of course applies to everywhere I’ve lived, Zimbabwe, the UK, South Africa, Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – absolute power corrupts absolutely. I reckon politicians should get a low base salary during their term in office, and at the end their constituents should vote for their bonus and severance payment based on actual work done not rhetoric.

Mild headache, I must remember to drink a lot more water than in the UK. Could also be a result of the six inoculations yesterday as preparation for next week’s trip to Abuja and Lagos. The cheerful little SRN, unbowed by either her forty years experience or by the sight of me with my shirt off and no sports bra, used 4 needles in total and was emphatic that she’d like to have given me more immunizations but accepted that I was settling for the bare minimum. Of course I have to take antimalarials too, the new ones which cost almost a UK fiver a tablet.
It’s good to be back. Strange, scary, very different to the last decade or so – but still good.

White Christmas and Chilly New Year

2010-01-03T09:36:00.010Z

Unusually for the South of England, we've had some

snow in December.. and our little back yard and shed looks like an Alpine scene. As I write this on 3rd January, the snow has all gone but I see a few more flakes fell overnight and have stayed on the ground thanks to the very low temperatures.

This same back yard and shed may well be owned by a new family in the months ahead.. a paucity of decent work in the Uk and a longing for sunlight has had me interviewing for roles in India and South Africa. I am still looking locally as well, but this week will bring a final decision one way or the other.

Christmas was a quiet but happy family affair up in Shropshire with our relatives there. Icy but clear conditions and thick snow made it our first true White Christmas in ages. Henry is walking pretty well now and climbing like a chimpanzee; we've had to increase the child-proofing heights around the house. I came downstairs the other day to find him sitting in the middle of our dining room table eating an apple he'd nicked from the centre display.

Lily is enjoying pre-school; she's the youngest there by quite a bit although as tall as most of the kids already. They're not teaching her much academic though, more concentrating on social skills, so it's up to us to get her reading and writing in the 2 years before she goes to primary school.

I guess everyone will be quite relieved once the career decisions are made; it's been a strange year in the UK and I am pretty sure that next year will also be up and down. The famous "dead cat bounce" or "W shaped recovery" means (I predict) that a brief rally in the New Year will be followed by more difficult times, a bitterly contested election and higher taxes all round.

So it may well be a good decision to move to somewhere a little less affected by the credit crunch - and sunshine won't hurt either. We will be very sorry to leave our house in Berkshire if that's what the eventual decision is, but it would be nice for the kids to be able to play outside a bit more. With Henry having passed his first birthday and Lily being almost 3, we need them to get out, get muddy and get their vitamin D from the sun instead of from a bottle.

How Nice to be in Provence...

2009-07-21T20:07:00.006+01:00

A rented villa in Grasse, which is a few miles inland from Cannes and a little bit West of Nice, and the Kims and kids arriving from South Africa.. what a wonderful holiday. Marcela's friend Rodica was fantastic and arranged the villa, spent a fortune on Henry's christening and generally treated us like royalty.

Shivering in the snow

2009-02-20T05:53:00.008Z

What a cold snap we've just had in Berkshire - cascades of snow, sleet, hail and that most English of phenomena, black ice. This is ice that lurks on the road but, in place of being white and easily visible (as all decent ice should be) it is a swart and shadowy film of slipperiness on the equally dark tarmac. Tricky stuff, and the small patch I hit while turning out of the little close we live in was lethal enough to send my large 4x4 sliding gently across the road to fetch up against the kerb with a very expensive crunch. Some interesting damage to the steering and suspension arms, and a salutary lesson that having 4 powered wheels does not help on snow and ice unless you also have studded tyres.

Never mind, Lily enjoyed it. She's a little dynamo now, and difficult to catch if she's in elusive mode, but she really enjoys being outdoors. Hopefully her Dad will soon get a real life somewhere sunny, instead of working hunched over a laptop all day and going home to a post-war semi in a damp country.

As Lily grows, the resemblance to Marcela becomes more pronounced. I'm grateful she didn't look like me, girls should be more delicate than that. Henry on the other hand is already a chunky little bloke, full of smiles and generally as happy as a clam except when he needs food or changing. They were both near as dammit 10 pounds at birth but I suspect will end up physically quite differently constructed.

Three months to go (from mid-March) until our summer holiday when we look forward to hosting some of our African family and spending weeks frolicking in the sun in England and France...

Once more unto the breech

2008-12-02T08:53:00.004Z

No, not Hogga finally losing the grammar drummed into him by cousin and English teacher Guy Cary (another descendant of HF Cary), but an attempt at a pun combining Prince Harry a.k.a. Henry V, his famous speech from the play and the position our new arrival adopted for much of his pre-natal sojourn in Mummy's tummy. OK OK, weak, I know, but it's early on a freezing wet morning here in Birmingham..

Welcome to Henry Alexander Hodgson

2008-12-02T08:26:00.012Z

And now, at last, I can reveal the world's worst kept secret! On 25th November my wife was delivered of a baby boy at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. In direct contrast to the arrival of Lily Beatrice, this time the pregnancy was uneventful and the birth was fraught. As I write this, Marcela and Henry are still incarcerated in the hospital after a week but that's mostly down to delays in processing blood tests and I am instructed by my darling wife to effect a jailbreak later today no matter what the medics say.

Henry Alexander is named Henry in honour of Henry Francis Cary, his many times great-grandfather who was born on 6th December 1772 and who later wrote the definitive translation of Dante's Inferno. H.F. Cary is buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey. When Henry grows up he can choose to be known as Henry, Harry (as is the English custom), Alexander or Alex. Or he can go with tradition and be called "Hogga" like I was.

So what can I tell you? The little mite was not so little - 9 pounds 14 at birth. This is 2 ounces less than Lily's birth weight but I suspect Harry is taller and thinner. Lily has shown little interest in her brother thus far during her visits to the hospital, apart from giving him a few prods and exclaiming "It's a baby!". She then proceeded to reprogram the TV console and partially dismantle the adjustable bedframe, displaying her engineering genetic inheritance from Marcela.

Thank God Granny from Moldova is here, looking after our precious and precocious first born... what with Marcela in Oxford and me spending long days on a contract in Birmingham, we'd have been in right trouble without someone keeping the home fire burning in Newbury.

Anyhoo I better do some work, more news will be posted later.

Sunshine and Sea in Cyprus

2008-10-09T16:20:00.006+01:00

In an attempt to stock up on sunshine before the long dark winter months, we took ourselves off to the coast in Cyprus in late August. I managed to rent us a decent villa in the "Aphrodite Hills" resort and we used that as a base of expeditions to Paphos, Pissouri (where we met up with an old friend from Norfolk), Larnaca and the Troodos Mountains. All familiar territory, of course, from my days working for an American hardware company whose regional head office is in Nicosia.

The weather was warm but nowhere as hot as I'd expected - early thirties - and we managed to get slightly tanned without overdoing it. Lily was captivated by the villa's private swimming pool and we struggled to get her out of there for her naps, or for our trips to the sea.

Cyrpus is nice, very dry, very expensive and worth a visit but probably not worth buying a holiday home in. Although that's the perspective of a family with a baby - I guess if you're a couple with no kids or older kids you could do a lot worse. Certainly Jackie and Daryle go there every year, and their villa is a short walk from Pissouri's central plaza with great restaurants for outdoor sampling of the ubiquitous "meze" - dozens and dozens of different starter-type dishes, washed down with Keo beer.

All in all a good break - although our little madam got a bit overheated in the airport on the way back and threw the world's most spectacular tantrum. Still, the cathartic effect of that made her sleep all the way back to Gatwick so the trauma was I suppose worth it. She's generally a very good baby, cute and full of laughs, so we're happy to put up with the very occasional lapses.

Zimbos in West Berkshire

2008-07-17T17:54:00.015+01:00

After all the frantic renovation activity and the atrocious weather of late March, compounded with the start of a West Midlands consulting contract that gave me a choice between staying away all week or spending 4 hours a day commuting, it was a relief when Craig and family arrived and the weather eased up a little. We drove up to Shropshire to see some relatives there, hosted some cousins for an al fresco meal on our back patio (although it was too cool to have a proper braai in the adjacent little brick-built pub which was a major contributory factor in purchasing this place) and generally had as good a time as we could in changeable weather.

It was great to see my African family meeting my ex-African now English family after a gap of some years, and I hope the more sunburned ones got a sense that it is quite possible to have a good life here in the UK.

Lots of Southern Africans are terrified of the unknown world outside their borders, and have been told tales of woe by the returning masses of carers, waitrons, supply teachers and the like who have suffered at the bottom of the economic ladder here, lived in squalid communes in bad parts of London, dealt with disturbed and feral inner-city schoolkids or incontinent old folk, earned low wages and generally had a bad time of it. Well there is a little more to life in the UK than that - but you have to do your homework before coming over, live somewhere other than Greater London and work as a professional.

I am not optimistic, however, that any of my immediate family will ever move to the UK. For various reasons they seem wedded to their various parts of Africa - I do understand the attraction of the dark continent, it is just as much part of my heritage and ancestry as theirs, but to me it is a simple equation. I believe that conditions in SA will never get better than they are currently, and for me they are currently unacceptable. I also believe that the inevitable battle for decreasing resources by members of an increasing population will make the future for my children very difficult.

Also, frankly, having lived in Europe since 2001 has given me a taste for other things that generally just don't exist back in Africa - dependable infrastructure, good health and education services, centuries of art and culture, cheap travel, great libraries and a huge array of community services, support groups and the like.

I miss the sunshine, my family and, funnily enough, the Afrikaans language. So here's the deal - if I win the Euromillions I'll move all the extended family to Italy and we can have sunshine and togetherness - and I'll play some Tolla van der Merwe comedy CD's now and then...

Springtime and renovations

2008-07-17T17:20:00.014+01:00

I say Springtime - well sadly in the UK this year that has been more a technical term used by Druids than an actual experience. My long-lost and long-suffering family from Zimbabwe were planning a visit in a month or two, our house was still in dire need of loads of renovation and outside, instead of blue skies and flowers busting out all over we had somewhat more Arctic conditions. These pictures were taken in our front garden in late March....

... and as you can see there was a bit of a difference between local conditions and those prevailing in Harare where brother Craig and his family somehow manage to survive against all odds (and against all reason too, if you ask me).

My plans for taking the little ones somewhere jolly for a bit of outdoor fun looked in serious danger - and of course as mentioned in the previous post, the inside of our new house in West Berkshire was a war zone of builder's rubble too.

When we bought this little semi-detached post-war place it was in spite of the interior decor and not because of it; previous owners had demonstrated bizarre tastes in plaster, Artex, artificial stone, MDF and all the 1970's and 1980's lapses in judgement we have come to know and hate here in the UK.

For example the large living room had been partially sectioned off by a bizarre circular arch which led into a sort of snug, in the rear of which crouched a gas fire in amidst a horrible pile of moulded plaster, brickwork and stone that effectively cut a metre off the room space.

Space, incidentally, that we desperately need. Not only am I a packrat of note when it comes to books, papers and photographs, but having a child with a Hogga-like attention span means we need a plethora of toys to keep her amused.

Now as already established in earlier postings, my DIY abilities are small to non-existent; I have been known to pick up injuries reading the B&Q catalogue. So what we needed was the strong right arm of my brother in law Gabi - and to prove that his dexter forelimb is indeed as sturdy as advertised I proffer this picture of our living room after he had finished swinging his hammer.

Well done Gabi and many thanks!!

D.I.Y. and the Hogga family

2008-04-15T09:19:00.007+01:00

Has it really been that long since I wrote an entry for my blog? The creeping apathy of my readership (who can no longer be relied on to prompt me in my writing) and my own complicated life (I have adopted a punishing schedule of commuting so as to avoid the hard work of renovating our house in Berkshire, cunningly leaving all the labour to my poor long-suffering wife) means that weeks and months slip by without any news of the Hogga household.

All in all, life proceeds. Our house is proving to be a bit of a DIY challenge (and sadly I am DIY-challenged at the best of times); luckily Marcela’s brother Gabi and some of his construction industry mates from London have been helping. Gabi went through the living room with a great deal of energy and a regrettably small hammer (we forgot to buy him a sledgehammer) and demolished the arches, faux stone cladding, quasi-Moorish plasterwork and just plain Artex stupidities and follies that a previous owner had inflicted on the house. Once his arms had stopped trembling and his ears had stopped ringing, he then supervised the Ukrainian and Polish plasterers as they went about their meticulous work downstairs and upstairs in the master bedroom. Here too a regrettable series of interior design choices by previous owners have had to be undone including the removal of a whole host of late Seventies built-in cupboards, cabinets, sliding mirror-door thingies and the like.

Lily is growing fast, speaking some words of Romanian and English and a whole lot of her own language which strangely seems to have a logic and syntax all of its own. I wonder if anyone has ever made a study of baby language? (apart from Chomsky of course). It is hilarious to get “told off” by her when she’s in a bit of a strop.

The weather has been atrocious and our next blog posting will contain pictures of the blizzard we experienced two weekends back. We’re now pretty much decided we need to live somewhere sunny – Marcela would prefer Italy (as being culturally close to her Roman ancestors) and frankly I don’t mind given that both Zimbabwe and South Africa are the basket cases us Afro-pessimists always suspected they’d become. Oz is just too, well, Australian to be frank – and not a lot in the way of culture (apart from the yoghurt), as well as having lethal ultraviolet and not much HR consulting for me to work in. New Zealand is too damp and too rural, France and Spain are full of English people and Cyprus is too dry. The Middle East is too darn hot and also not easy to buy a few acres in. Suggestions gratefully received – in the mean time we’re saving as best we can now that diesel is £1.22 a litre in the motorway service stations and a decent organic chicken costs over a tenner..

Ex Berkshire semper aliquid novi

2008-01-21T09:12:00.000Z

The dawn of another year – and by all indications a year of change and movement. Not that this would be unusual for the Hogga household, to be sure. But certainly the harbingers and omens of more white water ahead are already popping up.

I guess I may have triggered these off by growing a festive beard. This is a nasty ginger affliction that appears whenever I get a week off from work and don’t have to go out in public much – and judging by the look on Lily’s face it is a good thing I shaved it off for New Year.

Lily herself, as is the way with babies, is developing at an incredible pace. Leaps and bounds, you might say, given that she took her first steps on Christmas day in front of the family gathering at Ashford Bowdler in Shropshire.

By New Year’s Eve she had to be retrieved from halfway up the staircase at Luke and Claire’s house in Norfolk and by her birthday on 19th January she was already deriving much amusement from stealing items from me and running away.

She’s a great kid, happy and alert – and not too grizzly apart from the bouts of teething that all kids get. Exhausting though, and I have no idea how Marcela survives being with her all day while I loll around at work.

Otherwise it has been a pretty dismal winter here in West Berkshire – dark and damp – and I must confess to scanning the intranet for jobs somewhere more inclined to sunshine. The temperatures are tolerable enough – we had only one cold snap of -5 degrees and today it’s 12 – but the dark gloom is what gets me. My equatorial upbringing has accustomed me to days that are pretty much the same length all year round, and to try and drive to work in the dark and then keep working a couple of hours after sunset is just profoundly disturbing. I end up semi-hibernating, gorging on carbohydrates and uninclined to any exertion… ah well, maybe the Hoggas will be lucky enough to find some work in the Middle East or Oz.. I’ve taken to smiling nicely at the company representatives from our more far-flung regions in the hope that they’ll take me home with them.. still, as long as the work allows me to spend time with baby Hogga then I'm fine..

Merry Christmas

2007-12-21T13:35:00.000Z

Season's greetings to you all, my distant friends, from a chilly Newbury where the ducks are walking across the ornamental waterways at work, little webby feet sliding helplessly on the ice. A thin and transparent layer of ice, to be sure, but enough to bear the weight of a duck anyway and that's quite something for Berkshire. It's Friday 21 December and I am off work for a week or so, coming back to the office on 2 January and straight back into a whirlwind of organisation design and the associated change management. Lily Beatrice (seen here looking a bit pensive after we made her wear a silly festive bonnet) is well and flourishing and certain to wow the family up in Shropshire where we're spending Christmas Day.

So no long holiday for the Hogga family this Yuletide - after spending weeks in Moldova in the summer we'll have to wait until Spring '08 (Easter-ish) for our next break. As usual I am dreaming of weeks driving around Africa and visiting all and sundry, but realistically that would be cruel and unusual punishment for a little baby girl (and probably her mother too) so at the moment plans are still uncrystallised. We definitely need some bright sun though, and anywhere from Cyprus to Arizona to Perth will do.. offers and loans gratefully accepted.

Anyway dear readers, have a good one and I'll be posting the photos of our day soon.

Frisky baby

2007-10-03T06:27:00.001+01:00

The last month or two on a more solid diet of pureed veg has given our Lily an enormous fund of energy.... and a sizeable contribution to the greenhouse effect. As I write this, at half time in the NZ-France game, she is alternately dozing and then yelling while poor Marcela tries her best to calm the poor mite.

Baby Hogga in Chisinau

2007-08-01T11:06:00.001+01:00

Amazing how fast kids grow. Just six months ago she was a dark haired, dark-eyed little minx, showing every sign of developing into a raven-haired Latina beauty - and now the eyes have turned green, the hair is showing suspicious traces of blonde and even, believe it or not, red. Hodgson genes again - I hope she missed out on the ones that contribute to body weight ha ha.

We're now living in a rented house in West Berkshire, have started the process of buying a new place and I am settling into a new role with a global Telecomms company. Still high-pressure of course, but I can often work 8 to 5 and then be at home 15 minutes later which is an incredible change and gives me time to play with Lily and try help Marcela with the enormous workload involved in childrearing and keeping the house in order.

These pictures were taken on our recent trip to Chisinau in Moldova - about which more later.

...and Mom's pretty cute too!

2007-06-02T11:35:00.000+01:00

Just to reinforce that Lily's good looks are not from the Hodgson side of the family (as if I need to!!), here are a couple of snaps of our wedding. This one is at the reception where Marcela patiently listened to my jokes (good practice for the years ahead).

We had the most amazing (and non-traditional) chocolate cake, provided by the restaurant where we'd booked out the top floor. They're great - special thanks to Annelie who runs a tight ship - and we can recommend them to anyone looking for a place to eat in Norwich. Tatler's restaurant.

This is Marcela in the bridal car - with her Mom and Lily in the background.

A 1936 Rolls Royce took us to the registry office in Norwich - thereby taking away attention from the somewhat antique nature of the groom ha ha.

All in all a great day, and it was amazing to have friends and family there from the UK and South Africa.

My brother Kim was there too, not allowed a speaking part but given complete control of the flower arrangement which kept him out of mischief for hours....

Cute as a Button

2007-05-23T12:36:00.000+01:00

I guess I may be a little biased - but Lily Beatrice has got to be the cutest baby in the universe. Of course my brother Craig and his wife Irma will dispute this, they having been blessed with the arrival of baby Jonathan (Jonty) Scott Hodgson on Monday 21st in Harare. In order to settle the dispute I have included some recent photos of our little 4-month old treasure at our home in Norwich. These should, I think, put the issue beyond doubt. There is no way a little, probably ginger, baked bean up in Zimbabwe can be as heart-warmingly fudge-icecream kinda lovely.

Still, the Hodgson tribe increases. 11 grandchildren for Mom by now, and Kim and I are under some pressure to match the awesome fecundity of our younger brothers. For my part it is of course a little soon to even be thinking of that - we're still learning how to cope with the new addition. Marcela is on her own with the baby a lot now, thanks to the extensive travelling I have to do in my consulting work, and it is (as many of you will know) a 24/7 responsibility with no time off.

Workwise I am still engaged with a post-merger integration project - the two companies are headquartered one in Essen, Germany and the other in Los Angeles - and racking up the frequent flyer miles and Sheraton hotel points. Not as much fun as it sounds, dear readers, I'd trade my pension for the chance to spend some time working within a short drive of where I live.

Norfolk has had a pretty soggy Spring thus far, some bright days this week though but as usual fading to grey dampness and 13 degrees by the weekend. I'll be watching the rugby and babysitting while Marcela heads for town and civilisation for the first time in weeks.

** interrupted in my musings here by a knock on the door of my little office in Germany - the delightful old gentleman who is enriching his retirement by working here as a tea person (and wheeling in the lunches for the corporate big shots down the corridor) has sneaked me some lasagna from the serving dishes. Wunderbar. God's way of rewarding me for only having fruit for lunch today in an attempt to lose weight. I figure if I wash the pasta down with Coke Zero they should cancel each other out**

Perhaps I should look on eBay for some gym equipment - gyms in Norwich only open at 06h30 which is the time I am usually somewhere over the North Sea on my way to Amsterdam and the gym at the Sheraton is abysmal. I guess we could set up some equipment in the conservatory - better complete the home-made window blinds first though, Norfolk people are often shy little fen-dwellers and would be terrified at seeing the faces I pull while I try excavate the few remaining muscles in my body from the sedimentary layers of blubber in which they are embedded.

Generally the Hogga clan is doing OK. The usual traumas, debates and crises that any family has but all in all the year has been OK so far after the pretty poor 2006. These blog posts excite comments from only a few of my original readers, of course old Rhodesians are not the most computer literate folk in the world so I'm guessing they need to have a personal note from me each time I update... still and all it's a lovely Spring day in Germany, the lasagna is finished and I can get back to the intricacies of storing various documents in our virtual repository for the global project team..

99th percentile

2007-04-03T17:53:00.000+01:00

As you might expect, baby Lily is on the top of the graph for both height and weight. 99th percentile, to be precise. At 9 weeks she's 7kg (15.4 pounds) and 65cm (2 feet 2 inches) which means she could well end up a little larger than the NHS calculations of her end height. These, involving dad's height plus mom's height divided by two and then subtracting 7 cm, indicate she should be 170cm tall, just like her mom. I doubt it...

She's a bonny baby anyway, good tempered, cute as anything when she's rested and fed and I must admit I'm pondering how I can arrange a lifestyle when I am at home most nights instead of (like today) sitting in a hotel in the middle of Germany.

Ah well, at least I am able to put bread on the table for the family. We have a lovely little cottage in a pretty town and the only way things could be better is if I had my African family closer to me. And a 9 to 5 job.

Otherwise all is well and we're happy if a little tired. Much credit to Marcela's mom who has shouldered an enormous portion of the work including the dreaded 2 a.m. feed, allowing her wimpy son-in-law to get his 6 hours sleep (11 pm to 5 am) most nights. She goes back to Moldova soon and I think we're in for a steep learning curve.

Easter approaches and we're invited to lunch with some friends who live on a farm just outside Norwich. I hope you all have a great break and get to see your families.

To sleep, perchance to dream...

2007-02-06T16:33:00.000Z

I have long been notorious for early rising and for not needing more than about 6 hours sleep a night - well now, dear readers, I can tell you that the 6 hours has to be unbroken. The advent of the little mite, Lily Beatrice, and her habit of getting snackish at frequent intervals in the small hours of the morning means that I am getting to bed at the customary 23h30 or midnight, waking every hour or ninety minutes and then rolling out of bed, zombie-like, at 06h00. All this after starting, as can be seen from the picture adjacent, with a fierce sleep debt anyway. I got back from Germany the Wednesday night the induction process started, slept very little (although admittedly more than Marcela did) until the eventual C section on the Friday morning, spent much of the weekend at the hospital and on the Monday when I had to collect the little item (in a Health and Safety approved car seat, no carrying baby in one's arms allowed), I was pretty shattered. Tuesday morning and off to Germany again on the redeye (this often means the 06h50 from Stansted so an 03h00 shower and breakfast before the 85 mile drive to the airport).

I know that the ladies amongst my extensive readership will be tossing their heads in disgust already, delicate hands crumpling their petit point as they become enraged at my whinings. "Think of poor Marcela" they cry. Well yeah, but I don't get to sleep during the day you see. Although many who have watched me work would be taxed to spot a difference. Still, I am a tired puppy right now I must admit. But all worth it, of course, for the tender moments when she sleeps on my chest and for the hilarious moments like today when she sneezed while Granny was changing her nappy. Hilarious for me at least, the Valsalva-like manoeuver of sneezing with her whole body meant her internal presssure increased sharply, squeezing out a mustard yellow spray which I must say Granny took in good grace.

So all in all a very interesting time. Lily grows apace - she gained 300g since birth (in 2 weeks, that is) and according to our rough measurements she is now 4,8kg and 55cm tall. A ways to go to match her dad - she lacks 130cm and er, shall we say over 100kg, but still I think she'll be a bonny lass.

Lily Beatrice

2007-01-28T07:43:00.000Z

One of the primary questions I have had to deal with from my family is, of course, why the name Lily? I've given them all so much grief over the (in some cases) weird names of their kids that I was bound to come under intense scrutiny. Thank God the baby was a girl is all I can say, I was really struggling for a decent boy's name.

Lily is named after her three times great aunt, Lily Hodgson, born in Millom in the Lake District in 1890. As mentioned previously, the Hodgson family were miners - with my late Dad being the 5th generation to earn his living that way. So Lily's dad, Ralph, after being born in Grassington in Yorkshire where his dad Joseph was a miner, moved to the mines in and around Millom. Ralph's son (and Lily's brother) George moved to Rhodesia where he lived out the rest of his life in mining, as did his son Ralph (my grandad). Sadly I have not yet been able to trace Lily's current family - mainly due to the pompous and fussy bureaucracy in England which states that the ten-yearly census data must be kept from the public eye for 100 years - so the most recent information I can access is from 1901.

Anyway she's a cute kid and pretty well behaved too (inasmuch as I can tell, having so little experience). I am very conscious of what an old dad I will be when she's a fractious teenager and so am building a store of devastating anecdotes about her infancy as ammunition for later arguments. For example, when troubled by a bubble of midsection gas, she contorts her face into the most amazing grimaces, goes a plummy red colour and then, at the climatic moment, lifts one eyebrow and expels a thunderclap. Marcela has demonstrated that she cannot lift one eyebrow and, by means of this somewhat meagre defence material, claims that the entire performance is thus genetically derived from the Hodgson clan (notorious eyebrow lifters and occasional farters).

Another endearing habit she has is of sleeping with her left hand to her ear as though on the mobile phone. Once again I am minded to see this as a simple quirk of nature related to her prior somewhat cramped quarters inside her Mom, but there may also be grounds for taking this as an early warning of expenses to come.

Sunday morning and I guess I better go to the gym. Being wakened several times during the night, albeit ever so gently by the small sounds of baby feeding, reduces me to a strangely zombified state. Perhaps some brisk exercise will help dispel the cobwebs - in any event I need to go to sleep early tonight as I am getting up at 03h00 on Monday to head for the airport. Norwich is a lovely city but so damn remote and I need to be in Germany for an early workshop.

The Hoglet has landed

2007-01-19T22:23:00.000Z

... and Dad wins £5 from Mom!! Lily Beatrice Hodgson arrived by (eventual) C-Section at around 01h30 on 19th January, weighing in at 4,5kg or pretty much 10 pounds. My two special ladies are both still in hospital so your prayers are appreciated - I hope to retrieve them next week and bring them home to our little cottage in Norwich. She's a dark Latin beauty like her mother, but with the bulk and muscle of a true Hodgson already. I hope to provide more photos soon but frankly I'm so knackered I can't keep my eyes open... and I can only guess how Marcela feels after the string of mishaps and problem all through the pregnancy. Anyway, dear readers, say hello to a very determined young lady who is already showing a distinct personality.

Waiting for Godot

2007-01-14T12:16:00.000Z

Still no sign of the Hogga sprogga as of Sunday 14th, little bugger ruining his (or her) dad's reputation for punctuality. An induction is planned for midweek, and if all goes according to plan then I'll leap off the plane from Dusseldorf, drive back to Norwich after 2 days high pressure consulting and pause only to collect Marcela before heading to the hospital. It looks to be a long week.

Anyway so far so good - work is interesting, doing a project recovery for a major client in Germany. The weird thing is that it is quicker for me to fly from Norwich to Amsterdam to Dusseldorf than it is to go by train from Norwich to my office in SW London (that's the building I am pictured standing outside - in the same office park as my cousin Grant, by some rare coincidence). I wonder how many years of my life I've spent in transit, both literally and figuratively. Germany will be the 21st country I have worked on assignment in and the 31st I have visited. Still, it's long overdue for the Hogga to visit the land of some of his forefathers - as mentioned in other blog pages, my dad's mum's family originate from Germany although they left it for South Africa in 1700 (Erasmus) and 1713 (Swart).

More news soon, I have a £5 bet that it's a girl while Marcela, bolstered by a lot of anecdotal evidence about the shape and size of her pregnant tummy, is convinced it's a boy. My bet is backed by a peculiar vision I had of the kid, a little sharp-nosed princess with black hair and eyes, while listening to its heartbeat around month 7.

Christmas and all that

2006-12-26T23:17:00.000Z

And so to more about the joys of Christmas in Norfolk. The main players in our Nativity drama were Marcela - in surprisingly good fettle considering the trials and tribulations she has been through, and also considering she is about 2 weeks from giving birth; Elena (her mother) who is a remarkably cheerful and industrious lady, dropping everything in Chisinau to come to our rescue when I was in Zimbabwe and Marcela became unable to get down the stairs in our little house in Norwich; my two much-travelled cats Emma (short for Emmeline Pankhurst, a suffragette and noted feminist) and Chifupe (Shona for "shortarse") who've been with me all round the world the last 15 years or more - and of course yours truly, Shane Hodgson - father-to-be.

An eclectic bunch of guests for Christmas dinner, for sure. Back in Moldova Marcela's dad was fortunately able to spend the day with relatives while my merry bunch of siblings congregated (as they do almost every year) in Pietermaritzburg. Mom, three brothers and spouses and a total of nine and a half grandkids (Craig and Irma are busy gestating their fourth, must be something in the Harare water). Mom is as happy as a puppy with two tails - by May she'll have 11 grandchildren and all the attendant bragging rights that gives.

We sadly missed the chance to spend the day with those of our cousins now resident in England - but I managed to persuade an online South African foodstuffs shop to dispatch a hamper of SA products up to the tiny village in Shropshire where the cousins were lunching with an uncle and aunt, so hopefully the biltong, peppermint crisps and suchlike made up for our absence.

Boxing day was spent in a sort of post-turkey haze, watching those of my DVD's that have Romanian subtitles (strangely, all the Michael Caine ones) and occasionally taking a look at how SA were doing in the cricket (very badly indeed). Tomorrow it's back to a variety of admin. tasks involved in preparing for the project in Germany, and puzzling over the incredible variety of baby names in common use. Not knowing the gender of our baby Hogga yet is kinda quaint and unusual in the modern day, but it does of course mean I need to find and negotiate the use of both boy and girl names. And I just know that a phalanx of brothers, still smarting over comments I have made over the years about kids names, are waiting to chastise me no matter what names we choose....

In Memoriam - Arthur Robert "Bob" Hodgson

2006-12-03T08:34:00.000Z

This is just a short post to notify friends and family that my father, Bob Hodgson, died suddenly on 24th November. He was 65. I have just come back from burying him in Harare, Zimbabwe, where he had been based since his farm was stolen by the Mugabe Government. The stress of trying to survive amongst the criminal venality, incompetence and filth of that God-cursed pack of thieves wore him out; the exertions of his latest mining project, which he hoped would save his descendants from having to live hand-to-mouth amongst enemies, finally killed him.

He leaves an enormous void and four grieving sons. We'll miss his energy, humour and sheer presence as well as the love and pride he showed in us all. He never quit.

Go well Dad.

"Season of Mists...

2006-11-18T22:48:00.000Z

(This blog was started on 18 November and interrupted by a trip back to Zimbabwe for my Dad's funeral, so will combine Autumn's arrival and Christmas)

... and mellow fruitfulness", as the man said. After a much delayed start, autumn has at last arrived in this little corner of East Anglia. Crispy cool, clear days and nights, interspersed with patches of rain and wind, and leaves everywhere. Global warming or just a normal variation in seasonal temperatures - I dunno, but it sure has been getting warmer (or at least, milder) here.

Our little corner of the road looks out onto some wonderfully coloured trees in autumn and I shall be very sorry to move out of this house. It does, however, seem inevitable given the murderous commute to SW London where my new job is located. 3 hours and a bit, station to station. Having said that, however, I guess a lot depends on where the projects are located that will be occupying my time. As I said to my new boss the other day, there's no sense in me moving out of Norwich if my project work is outside the UK. The three major places my skills could usefully be deployed right now (if it were not for the imminent arrival of baby Hogga) are Trinidad, Germany and Finland. We'll see how the New Year shapes up before making any major decisions. I must admit my current inclination is towards jacking this all in and sitting somewhere sunny for a couple of years - probably too much bad news all at once and too little daylight...

Anyway I put in some surreptitious work on decorating the house for Christmas. Marcela is generally bedbound right now, having some hip girdle pain from the imminent birth and associated hormones - and in fact is also confined to a wheelchair when not in bed, thanks to a DVT which necessitates me injecting her with heparin every night... so she was all unawares of the shenanigans her Mom and I got up to, quietly bringing in a 2,25m Christmas tree and decorating it - and more. Some creative cooking and we had a great Christmas lunch - the turkey came out well even if I say so myself. I just treat them like big chickens essentially, and ignore all the technical bollocks talked by the Poms.

Too warm for a fire, sadly, even though I laid in some traditional logs for our little open grate fireplace. It's about 7 degrees outside which is warm for mid winter. Anyway it was a wonderful fusion meal with English turkey, Moldovan puddings and South African sparkling wine, followed by Zimbabwean tea. A little quiet now and then, when we remembered distant family, but of course we called them and cheered ourselves up.

So here's hoping you all had a great time too - and are ready to face the New Year. God knows what it will bring, I hope it starts well with a healthy baby and trouble-free delivery (looking like 5th Jan now, I think they will induce to put Marcela out of her misery). Later in the year I think it will be time to re-evaluate and see how close I am to my ideal work life balance. Greetings to all, with love from the Hogga family in Norfolk.

The Hogga Sprogga

2006-09-02T08:14:00.000+01:00

It's been an interesting year so far I must admit. Entirely in keeping with my preferred approach of getting all my major stressors out the way at once, the month of April saw me buying a house, being made redundant and, as it turns out, demonstrating at long last a degree of fertility. Yes indeed, dear readers, there is a mini-me on the way. A Hogga Sprogga - or hoglet - has survived some early scary incidents and now appears to have settled down and be growing nicely in time for a mid-January arrival, God willing. Marcela is happy, glowing and thriving and we've decided to get engaged too. Marriage will sadly have to wait while we unravel a mare's nest of bureaucracy around a Zimbabwean passport-holding UK permanent resident wanting to marry a Romanian-passport holder here on a business visa. And relocate out of this one-employer town to somewhere I can find a meaningful career and afford baby clothes..

So. Wow. A new way of life looms. Long overdue, of course, and at my advanced age the poor wee mite will be more likely to be pushing me round in a wheelchair than me pushing him/her in a pram, what with my buggered knees and all, but still fantastic news. And you may have gathered we have no idea what gender it will be - and don't really want to know. Too much information and not enough magic and surprise makes the world a poorer place.

I'm not an expert on this but I gather it will be a little while before the kid can read well enough to get a job and suchlike - even so I am already stocking up on books and things and recently I spent a happy hour re-reading the Beatrix Potter stuff. Some of the starring animals are of dubious character, with larcenous mice, overdressed frogs and a hedgehog that looks positively gin-soaked and raddled, but all in all good stuff and I shall be reading it to both baby and mother. Along with excerpts from some decent thinkers like Feyerabend, Polyani and others of course. But no local news - I fear for the poor child's sanity if it finds out its father left sunny Zimbabwe to avoid a megalomaniac head of state who continually favoured cronies, circumvented the democratic process and ignored domestic misery in favour of strutting the world stage like a shabby bantam rooster - and has wound up in the gloomy UK watching Tony Blair do the same and compounding the error by kissing up to George Bush. Plus ca change and all that.

Still, old Blighty is a good place. The Poms have many strange habits and customs and in some ways are just as alien to me as the Saudis were - but I can tell you that a Friday evening spent in the lounge of a Victorian cottage eating Maltesers and watching Jonathan Ross is a very nice way to pass the time. If it were only a little more sunny more often, and if I could afford some acreage and persuade more of my family to join me, I'd be quite happy to stay here forever. At least Hogga Junior will be born here and be British by birth - probably the best start in life I can arrange. It means he or she will not have to spend years and years working in chaotic countries and saving volatile currencies just to try find some stability, as I did. And with careful time management, the kid will start work around when I retire and am needing some extra income....

Back in Disneyland

2006-07-21T18:41:00.000+01:00

Apologies to those of you in South Africa who put a candle in your windows and sat up o' nights, waiting for a visit from the Hogga. Especially my old mate Peter in Durban, who came the closest of all to that rare treat - but for some unanswered e-mails we might well have shared a whisky or two. Next time for sure... anyway it was a whirlwind visit, prompted mostly by a job interview in Johannesburg and the need to supervise my unruly family, providing magisterial advice and helping them refresh their golf skills. And, incidentally, a good opportunity to introduce a new friend to my crazy relatives. She survived well I must say, although I had to watch her closely at Howick Falls when I am sure the notion of a swift leap and an end to the interminable Hodgson family discussions on immigration must have crossed her mind.

Not that the discussions were anything unusual of course. I have been annoying my family with this topic for almost a decade now and in fact have pretty much given up on trying to persuade them - but this time the advent of Dad and his gold mine at the end of the rainbow in Mozambique sparked a lot more debate. He has the endearing habit of multiplying theoretical gold ounces by the latest gold price and then delivering the total in a basso profundo voice ..."hundreds of millions of dollars"..., missing the point that the aforementioned ounces are still way underground and need a few millions to extract them. I was narrowly prevented from shoving him into the Falls by the presence of too many witnesses and the possibility that he may be right this time.

Still it was a good trip. Apart, that is, from the torture we suffered at the hands of the bunch of palookas running Joburg airport. Cunningly named "Equity" or something similar, they mainly seem to consist of a bunch of overall-clad victims of the bite of the tsetse fly, drifting somnolently around and occasionally shrieking to each other in various forms of vernacular. Our ordeal started on landing, when we had to sit in the plane for 20 minutes while some idiot, no doubt confused by the arrival of SAA on schedule, looked high and low for the aircraft steps. When these finally arrived, allowing us to escape the plane and the miserable 31 inch seat pitch that SAA crams passengers into, we stood on the tarmac in a huddle, whipped by an icy Highveld winter's wind and 5 degree temperatures, while the clowns on the ground went into shock at the realisation that we also needed a bus to get us across the airport to the terminal buildings. Another long delay and mild hypothermia, and then we had the unmitigated joy of standing for an hour and a half in the baggage carousel area waiting for our luggage, while goons drove little tractors around and hurled our suitcases about with malicious glee.

My European guest was still in shock when we finally escaped the airport, beating back the mass of touts, taxi drivers, mendicants and general layabouts that infest it, leaping into our rented Toyota and arriving on the R24 on a Friday morning when all the homicidal maniacs were obviously on their day out in their cars. A blizzard of hooting, tailgating and fist shaking Joburglars behind us, we arrived in Rivonia to check into our B&B and have a long overdue shower.

By the time I had nipped up to the Pick 'n Pay in Rivonia for some supplies, returned aghast at the deterioration in the suburb in the last few years and headed off to Joburg central for my job interview, we were almost ready to head back to London. Two hours in Friday rush hour traffic after the interview didn't help I must say and I decided to decline the job offer despite it being very good by SA standards.

Thank God that Natal was experiencing a beautiful winter. The South Coast was great, the Berg was awesome and we decided that I need to construct a lifestyle that will allow me to work in the First World and have extended holidays in SA. Three months a year will be perfect to spend with family back there, but I guess I have been in the UK too long now to go back to being a second class citizen amidst such chaos. I like the safety and structure in England, although the weather can be toxic. So consulting here in good old Blighty it is then, with extended trips to the Kingdom of the Zulu to see the beautiful Berg again - unless of course Dad really strikes it lucky and we become the next Oppenheimer family...

Force Majeure

2006-05-30T21:42:00.000+01:00

-
Sometimes, just when we think we have it all buttoned down, we get a timely reminder from God that we're not actually in charge of the universe. Or, as the poet would have it, our best laid plans "gang aft agley". So no sooner did I book a one-tonne van in order to go back to Bracknell and collect the first load of my furniture for the new house in Norwich than my boss called me in and told me that, as a result of the restructure and downsizing of the HR Department, my services were no longer required. Actually it was just two days before the planned trip that the poor dear had the lousy task of handing me my pink slip.

Hmmmm. The second time in the UK this has happened - the last being my only other job here when in November 2003 I had the dubious distinction of becoming redundant and divorced in the same month. Ah well - I always favour getting all the stressors out of the way in one lump, rather than stringing them out into an annus horribilis...

Can't say I am entirely broken hearted though. I will be sad to leave this pretty little (albeit only one-employer) town, and there are undoubtedly some people I will miss a whole lot - the aforementioned boss being one of them, and the members of the "Secret Circle" (you all know who you are) as well - but, on reflection, I guess it is a good time to find out if I am better suited to a different kind of place, and maybe even a different line of work entirely. I think it's time for me to be me - as eccentric, loud, chirpy and irreverent as that may be - and so either I work for myself or I find a like-minded bunch to work with. Also, in almost two decades of doing this kind of HR programme stuff, I feel I may be in danger of getting stale. Perhaps I can focus on another of my qualifications instead of the well-worn psychology and HR ones. No, not microbiology - but business strategy I think.... I am after all the only salaried wonk in the family for many generations (the white sheep of the family actually) and sooner or later the entrepreneurial genes must be expressed.

So - "Davey's on the Road Again" is my theme song for sure. I am here a few months longer to see out my contractual obligations and after that will hopefully have enough saved cash to relocate myself back closer to London. Or even further afield, as it transpires. I have one or two somewhat more Southerly options - indeed, one might call them Antipodean. Of course, my own circumstances have changed a little and now I also need to persuade a lady friend of the virtues of such distant climes - and for obvious reasons (having got this persuading lark all horribly wrong the first time I tried it) I am taking things slowly here. I've long been in the habit of curing problems with a judicious dose of geography and I need to be certain that the next move is a sensible one and not a knee-jerk reaction. My usual habit of shotgunning my cv. around has resulted in (alliteratively speaking) a nibble from New York, a jolt from Johannesburg, a tickle from Tasmania and a couple of solid lumps from London. Oh, and a jiggle from Jordan although I ruled that one out pretty quickly. I miss the hoummus and moutabel but not that much..

So I'm taking it gently through the summer - leaving here and rejoining the world of commerce around October. I've planned some interesting divertissements as well - more on those much later. The big decisions are around whether I dare return to corporate life, or whether I should rather opt for private or boutique consultancy.

Time for bed - a long trip in to London today to see a technology company and a nostalgia-fueled overdose on Nando's chicken have combined to render me somewhat somnolent. And I better get this place a bit more into shape before the arrival of a guest tomorrow evening. G'night...

Riyadh Retrospective

2006-05-04T10:26:00.000+01:00

It seems like a lifetime ago that I was living and working in Saudi Arabia and yet it's only last September that I left.

An amazing experience, to be in the heart of one of the most conservative Moslem societies in the world. I lived in Riyadh, a city of some 4 million people, and worked in the Kingdom Centre which is an astounding 300 metre tower owned by Prince Al-Walid bin Talal. He's about Number 12 on the Forbes list, and a rare character himself.

His bio is on http://www.meib.org/articles/0209_med1.htm and I recall one evening at a South African get-together in Seder Village (the compound I stayed in) when two stunning, tall South African air hostesses walked in. They worked for him - one of many little quirks he has that annoy the, er, Hell out of the Grand Mufti of Islam and others. Hiring a female pilot for his private jet. Advocating political reforms. Anyway he's very popular among the youth in Riyadh.

But returning to the Kingdom Centre, or Al Mamlaka as it is known in Arabic. It's built on top of a large, luxurious shopping mall with all the big name brands from Saks to Debenhams.

Cool, clean, wafts of perfume here and there (the Saudis, like other Arabs, are big on their perfumes which in turn are big on notes of sandalwood, rose, myrrh, frankincense and others, quite different to Western tastes.) And with a great food court too - and my favourite takeaway ever, serving Iranian shwarmas which I ate in large quantities and so frequently that they knew my order off by heart.

What an amazing building it is though. Arab architecture can be breathtaking in its scope and novelty - and the Kingdom tower is no exception. At night it is spotlit and the top bathed in light of changing colours, and in the day it gleams against the Saudi sky. But best of all is at dusk, when it is quite surreal.

Apparently the unique shape, with an aperture at the top, is meant to resemble a veiled Saudi woman. Who knows. I only saw Prince Walid once and he was surrounded by a scrum of bodyguards and photographers - and amazingly, followed by a whistling and ululating bunch of Saudi girls all dressed in their anonymising black robes and veils. Like Robbie Williams being chased by penguins. I was in the food court in the Al-Faisaliah tower having a late night breakfast (during Ramadan, the first meal after sundown is called "iftar" or breakfast, and I was running late that day) when this hullabaloo happened and as the only Caucasian around I must admit I had a little spasm of "new to Saudi" nervousness.

Still, I do have some fond memories of the place and the people I met. Some great friends who I sincerely hope I'll see again one day, amazing architecture, fantastic food, strange customs, homicidal traffic, petrol at less than 10 pence a litre, enormously hot summers but very agreeable winters... perhaps if it had been easier to have a social life in Riyadh I'd have stayed. And if there had been even the remotest possibility of achieving what I wanted to at work.

Being single in Saudi presents its own cluster of problems. Dating as we know it is illegal - single men are treated like rabid dogs there and isolated from any contact with women. In fact going out for dinner is in itself a unique experience because singletons or groups of men are separated into their own space, and separated from families by walls and curtains. Add to that prohibitions against alcohol, pork and wearing shorts for men and you can see how an Antipodean boy would feel a little out of place there.

Perhaps if I had been able to entice someone to live in my little bungalow on the compound. Seder Village is one of the oldest compounds in Riyadh, a former American military base I suspect given the rows of square houses of a few basic types. I had a two-bedroom little place in "Red Bricks" street although most of the compound staff referred to it as Block Nineteen Unit 5, which is more accurate perhaps but less likely to make pale, nervous Westerners feel at home. For this little place I paid about $1400 a month including utilities which was quite steep I thought.

At least it had a little private garden. In fact that is I suspect the reason why so many Southern Africans liked to live there. Seder is in one of the poorest suburbs of Riyadh, known locally as "taliban country" and a good 20km from the city centre, but almost all the other compounds have communal gardens only and no private space where you can sit outside and have a barbecue.

Looking down "Red Bricks" street you can see the compound wall at the back. Seder had around 300-odd dwellings, ranging from tiny bachelor flats which were basically bedsits, to large 5 bedroom villas. It was well maintained, if quite old, and teams of amazingly heat-resistant Filipino gardeners in green overalls, masked against the dust, would wander around trimming hedges and tending the pebble-and-shrub streetside gardens. The private front gardens needed to be maintained at my own effort or own cost and frankly given the Saudi penchant for working late and my habit of getting up very early, I spent almost no time in the garden at all.

Getting into the city was an adventure every day - driving a tiny battered Mazda on the "wrong" side of the road through dense and chaotic traffic composed mostly of enormous American gas guzzlers like Hummers, GMC Yukons and the like. Before I accepted the role, I was assured by the local office that my tiny car allowance was enough for me to buy a decent car. Once I arrived in Riyadh I realised what arrant bullshit that was - firstly, I couldn't buy a car or even open a local bank account before receiving my residence permit ("Iqama") which takes a year, secondly I coudln't get financing before having held a Saudi bank account for two years (and see point one here to understand the full complication) and finally in any case the money my employers had allocated for a car was so completely inadequate as to be laughable. The cherry on the cake was when they offered to rent me one of the company pool vehicles (the aforementioned little Mazda) for a cost of 50% more than they had allocated me as a car allowance.

Having said all that, I am still proud of myself for learning to drive on the right in such a mini-mobile in the worst traffic in the Middle East. My numberplate reads (if you look with English eyes) what appears to be the numbers 790 and then some squiggles. Of course our numbering system in the West (which, weirdly enough, is the old Arabic system ) uses those symbols for 790 - whereas in the Arabic system (which they adopted from the Hindi system) those symbols mean "695". Confusing, innit? In fact there are only two symbols that have the same numeric value in both Western and new Arabic numbering - 9 and 1. Gives a whole new meaning to 9/11 doesn't it?

Hogga's perfect Easter - surrounded by broads.

2006-04-17T15:13:00.000+01:00

Norfolk Broads that is. The medieval digging for peat in this area has left ditches and sunken areas which have filled with water; these are interlinked by the major rivers and canals around, forming a space of reed-fringed waterways that extends through Norfolk in a North-South band passing a few miles to the East of Norwich. And from April through to September these waterways are liberally covered with a great profusion of boats. Families hire the boats - often large cabin cruisers - and chug slowly around, stopping here and there to visit local villages and, more importantly, local pubs.

It's a strange old week at work right now. School holidays of course - so many people have taken off for sunnier climates leave anyway. The weather in Norfolk is still a little cool for what is essentially spring - in fact last week someone was taking bets on us having a White Easter - and so I decided that I'd not take any extra leave. More likely mid-year when I'll head to SA for a visit. Nevertheless there still remained a few days to fill with something unusual, so we headed for a little town called Acle and hopped aboard the "Pearl Horizon 2", which is a 32-foot cruiser with a breakneck top speed of around 7 knots (and that is too fast for the Broads, where speed cops patrol in little rubber duck Zephyrs).

My cruising companion helped me with the tricky task of mooring stern-on in a vast wallowing tub of aboat with absolutely no rearward visibility - and as you can see I did a passable job, albeit with much salty nautical language and indeed some military oaths not often heard in these parts. Here we are moored in Ranworth Broad, a little offshoot of the river Bure between Acle and Horning. Lots of bird life, including a confused looking black swan in between loads of white ones. No mammals spotted except of course the familiar squat and tattooed forms of Homo Touristensis.

One amazing thing here in Norfolk is the large amount of hippies, gypsies, fen people and general Woodstock refugees that pop out of the reeds and marshes on bank holidays. Men wearing earrings, gold rings on most fingers, greying ponytails and a mix of denim and camouflage. Of course it is my considered belief that anyone who has been obliged to wear camouflage for a living will never be able to wear it as a fashion statement. Nevertheless, we seem to have a strange subculture here that I've not seen anywhere else in England.

Still, a nice time was had by all. A couple of beaut sunsets, some relaxed cruising and lots of bacon and eggs. So much so, in fact, that I am obliged to once again endure the rigours of the Atkins Diet lest I become unable to fit through the door of my new cottage. Hopefully the present uneasiness and general state of worry in our restructuring HR department will soon be over and we can all get back to working and, in my case, waddling to and from the gym.

Lipid Mosaic

2006-04-08T10:47:00.000+01:00

Ha ha so somewhere out there in the land of my readers is a secret virus anorak... wanting to know about the attachment of the virus to the cell indeed. Well Ok Mici, let's see what I can do.

I suppose firstly we need to look at the structure of a flu virus (from the Orthomyxovirus family, name derived from the Greek word myxa meaning mucus), and the structure of a normal cell. Of course any mammalian cell with a nucleus will do, or even avian cells. Nucleated - that's the key.

So - let's start with the structure of a cell with a nucleus. And what keeps the nucleus and associated little organelles from spilling into the street is a membrane holding it all together. For ease of understanding how this membrane looks, we can use the now somewhat outdated Singer Nicholson model of a double layer of lipids (fat molecules if you prefer) with islands of protein floating around randomly in this little fatty sea. More bookish anoraks are referred to http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw051223-3.htm where the latest thinking is contained.

The virus however, is slightly different. We already know that the influenza virus has a spiky coat (and just to complicate things the viral genome or set of instructions for making more influenza viruses is split into 8 pieces, and all of these need to be present at once for infection to occur). But never mind all that Dan Brown stuff, let's focus on the way the little bugger gets into the cell.

Mr. Flu is a spiky little bugger, as I will remind you, and looks rather like this http://www-ermm.cbcu.cam.ac.uk/01003465h.htm or like this -

and also with a bilayered membrane (lipid envelope) surrounding it. The lipids in this bilayer are probably nicked from the previous host cell's membrane (imagine the little baby viruses bursting through the cell walls like that creature in Alien exiting the chest of a hapless crew member - and becoming coated with a layer of fatty slime in the process) but the protein bits are all viral. Not that the cell bursts, you understand - in this particular kind of flu infection and because of the way the viruses leave the cell by "budding" through the membrane, cell integrity is maintained. Viruses that don't need the lipid coat feel quite free to burst the cell as they leave, and can cause spectacular damage.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. First the virus must attach to the surface of the cell membrane. This is unaffected by temperature, but strongly sensitive to pH (occurring best at neutral pH), implying some sort of electrostatic binding between the amino groups on the virus protein spikes and the acidic phospholipids of the cell membrane. In fact, as is common with many viruses, the binding occurs with something called sialic acid (also known as 5-N-acetyl neuraminic acid and I just know that many of you will be spotting the link to the viral spike neuraminidase already..).

So the virus kinda drifts up against a cell - attracted by electrostatic forces to the appropriate sites on the cell membrane where exactly the right bits lock together. Haemagglutinin (thus named because it can cause clumping or agglutination of red blood cells, a useful trick for a virus to have) locks onto the correct receptor site of sialic acid and then, perhaps assisted by our old friend neuraminidase here although evidence is sketchy, the cell's membrane becomes a little more flexible and the virus slips through by a process called endocytosis. That means the whole virus enters the cell, not just the RNA instructions (some other viruses operate in this second way, injecting their replicating code into the cell while leaving their capsule outside). But the important point is that the fatty cell membrane becomes more easily penetrated and the virus sinks into it and then through into the cell.

In some cases the flu virus may, for reasons best known to itself, decide not to infect the cell after attachment. This is when the neuraminidase spikes come in useful - neuraminidase as mentioned before is an enzyme and has the specific function of cleaving neuraminic acid, so the virus can then disengage and drift off again. Usually, however, the process unfolds normally, virus enters cell, the little packages of RNA instruct the cell to stop making its own proteins and start making the building blocks of more viruses, the blocks drift together and assemble into finished examples of Orthomyxoviridae, loosen the cell membrane from the inside now with judicious applications of neuraminidase and then pop out through this Singer Nicholson lipid mosaic membrane that started the whole rambling blog entry...

Sheesh. It's been a long time since Microbiology III (23 years to be precise) and I must admit to needing to refresh my knowledge a little. Useful sites include http://www-ermm.cbcu.cam.ac.uk/01003465h.htm and
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/100/25/14610

I didn't go into any detail on which body locations have cells with more or less receptors for different kinds of H spikes - but you're welcome to check that out yourselves. Of course different species will have different receptor concentrations so infection may occur by inhalation, ingestion or other methods depending on where in the body the cells are with the most amount of the right receptors for that kind of virus...

Have fun and try not to cuddle any chickens

Bird Flu in England

2006-04-07T08:14:00.000+01:00

"werl, not really a problem for me izzit? I mean this bird flu stuff. Why? Cos I'm a bloke, of course."

Watching the TV as I sweated away on an exercise cycle in the gym this morning, it struck me how dumbed down the news in the UK really is. And how patronising are the various "experts" called on to explain that there really is no danger. I guess they're forgetting the last epidemic, five short years ago, when a variety of similar experts and boneheaded bureaucrats laid waste to vast areas of the country and burned much of the national herd trying to combat the spread of another virus amongst animals.

The influenza virus is a sneaky little bugger. It has a protein coat with spikes on - two kinds of spike actually. The one kind, haemagglutinin (abbreviated to H) has 16 variants of which three have been seen in cases of human infection so far (H1, H2 and H3) and the rest have been implicated in animal infections.

The other protein, neuraminidase (I suppose technically it's an enzyme, ending in -ase as it does) has 9 variants, of which two have thus far been seen in human infections (N1 and N2) and the rest in animal infections.

So there are hundreds of different possible variations in the "spike pattern" on the virus coat. If it's a H1N1 pattern then there is a fair chance it can infect a human, and so on. In fact there is a relatively high level of residual immunity in the world population to some of these variants, due to repeated infections.

Each time a virus infects a cell, it essentially commandeers that cell's assembly line for making useful proteins and converts it over to making more viruses. These are eventually released (often by rupturing the cell) and bumble off to infect other cells. As with any rush production line, the replicating process can, over time, cause some slight changes in the nature of the spikes even though broadly they still remain the same kinds of H and N as they were. Some people believe this is due to the malign nature of the virus, ascribing a level of cunning to it, while others look at it as typical of any knock-off factory in Asia with a high tolerance for defects in its mass production.

This slight alteration in the pattern on the protein coat of the virus (called antigenic drift, which is the slow change in the spikes which make them become slightly different "strains" of 'flu and allow them to sneak past the very literal-minded antibodies guarding our systems, kind of like Peter Sellers disguising himself with a false nose in the "Pink Panther" movies) is why we sometimes have only partial immunity to a strain of the disease.

A more fundamental change in the spikes (antigenic shift) can also happen. This is when, with a snap and a crackle (like a hedgehog rolling into a ball) a new set of spikes appear, new H and N proteins that the human body does not recognise at all and consequently is not immune to. Sometimes this is associated with interspecies transmission of the virus - and that's what we're worrying about here.

The birds dying of Avian Flu at the moment are contracting an H5N1 strain of the virus. Traditionally this is not a concern for humans, unless of course you are a poultry farmer and see your livelihood expiring in small sneezing lumps of feathers around you, but for some strange reason it seems that humans are occasionally able to contract this strain of H5N1 from birds, although mercifully as yet the virus expires with the patient and is not transmitted onwards to another human.

If, however, the H5N1 virus undergoes an antigenic shift as a result of its travels from bird to human, and then becomes a different strain that can cause infection from human to human, why then dear readers we are in deep doo-doo. Because already if a human catches H5N1 avian 'flu, they often die. And all that is saving us right now is that the little bugger of a virus has not yet worked out how to reconfigure its spikes so as to pass from person to person.

So no real point in rushing off to your doctor for a 'flu vaccination (unless you're in the traditional "at risk" category of elderly or infirm and want to avoiud catching normal 'flu). Why? Well, the H5N1 variant that is transmissible from human to human does not yet exist, and so it is not yet possible to get some in a syringe and inject it into chicken eggs (strangely enough that is how we make vaccines, and I am sure I'd be laughed at if I pointed out a correlation between this method of growing viruses to be later killed and made into vaccines and the rise of bird to human transmision of viruses).

So then, all you ever wanted to know about flu. Not complicated. But sadly enough, too many big words for Sky News and so all we get is more and more impossibly-coiffed presenters asking dumb questions of nerdy scientists. And a blanket reassurance that we have more chance of winning the lottery than of catching bird flu. Tell you what, though, someone does win the lottery quite often. And if that winning ability was able to be spread from human to human, why we'd be millionaires quite soon in this overcrowded little island.

See ya.

Woodwork class 1974

2006-03-26T23:15:00.000+01:00

Don't I wish I had paid more attention to the instructions of my Form Two woodwork teacher, Mr. Pingstone. Known to us as "Chisel", his acerbic wit, axe-shaped face and ability to wield a set square as an offensive weapon caused in me a permanent phobic reaction to all forms of manual labour. Especially that class of activity, so popular in England, known as "D.I.Y.". Because, now that I am in the final stages of purchasing an 1890's Victorian terraced house in Norwich, I find myself faced with a bewildering array of tasks that need doing before the house is habitable.

The magpie habits of the previous owner, and the weak sphincter control of her charming dog Ruffles, as well as a general lack of maintenance over the last quarter century or so mean that once all the pictures, crucifixes, ornamental plates, mirrors and the like are removed from the plastered walls and the Rorschach-stained carpets are prised from the floorboards, I will be left with a whole lot of renovation to do.

The fireplaces need to be unblocked, the kitchen, utility room and downstairs bathroom need to be retiled, in fact the kitchen needs to be completely replaced, various walls need painting, ceilings need skimming (and this has to be done carefully otherwise the ancient lath and plaster will come tumbling down), woodworm need to be admonished, rising damp needs to be averted, a positively dangerous light fitting in the hallway needs to be raised another foot on its pendant chain (the current owner is somewhat wizened and bowed by years and manages to scoot undamaged underneath the dangling ironmongery - which, needless to say, has caught me between the eyes more than once already on my inspection visits). Oh and a whole lot more besides.

As to the back garden, it does have a lovely rosemary bush - if not much else. The garage is not in great nick, and also has an asbestos roof which will require people in space suits to remove (English Health and Safety laws, somewhat bemusing to those of us who grew up on an asbestos mine in Rhodesia).

Ah well, at least the little conservatory will be a perfect place for my Rhodesian teak bar counter. I can set up a small pub, decorate it with militaria (and I'm planning to acquire some new stuff, more on that later) and invite friends round to sample Southern African wines and beers.

Should be fun. Once, that is, I have flattened my meagre savings paying other people to do the work needed. If only I'd paid more attention in class.

Facts, legless lizards and anoraks

2006-03-05T19:59:00.000Z

It occurred to me last week that I am a bit of an anorak when it comes to certain facts. This is not a new discovery - in fact the confidential report on me when I completed the combat medic's course in 1980 in Rhodesia said " A cheerful, enthusiastic and capable medic - if a trifle pedantic". Being described as a pedant at the age of 18 does not bode well for one's forties... how did I get to read this report you ask? I burgled the Sergeant-Major's safe and read it is how - we started out with about 130 people on the 4-month course and some 22 of us passed (the rest being returned to unit or put onto a more junior course). I came third overall - (top national serviceman though, with regular soldiers filling the top two places) and I wanted to know where I had gone wrong.

So what caused this moment of anorakish revelation? Well, last week I was on a management breakaway in a lovely little seaside North Norfolk town called Holkham and as usual was exercising my storytelling and drama queen abilities for the delight and edification of my colleagues. I recounted the story of finding a slow worm, or legless lizard, in the Swinley Forest near Bracknell and was met with a barrage of denial and cries of "Nonsense" from my colleagues. They of course neither knew nor cared whether such a creature existed, but were merely winding me up and bringing a welcome end to my apparently inexhaustible store of anecdotes. What amazed me was the way I reacted to being told I was talking rubbish.

Just for the record, of course, I was right. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildfacts/factfiles/281.shtml will bear me out as will these following pictures, although they are not clear enough to reveal the distinguishing characteristic of the little herpetiform creature - its eyelids. Which doubtless the wee creature had tightly shut when I picked it up, my then wife having executed a vertical leap of some three feet on seeing it cross the path by her feet as we walked. An interesting set of natural phenomena ensued that day; firstly the appearance of the aforementioned Anguis fragilis, secondly the astounding leap executed in defiance of her somewhat squat and simian physiology by the former Mrs. Hodgson and thirdly the presence of mind that had me seizing the little wriggler by what would have been the nape of its neck, if it had a neck, because I realised it was not an adder and thus non-venomous in the context of English snake lore.

All of which is mildly interesting, but not the point of this discourse. I guess for a very long time I have depended on my knowledge of facts as being my unique differentiator. Given that I have always been in a newly-created role during my work life, and usually as a specialist in one or other discipline, a head full of arcane knowledge has been my foundation and the one point of stability in a very chaotic career. So how profoundly (and hilariously) discombobulated I became on having such a simple point of fact challenged by my colleagues. Thanks friends - a valuable bit of insight gained. And when you arise shrieking from your conference accommodation beds next time, having discovered one or another reptile amongst your duvets, I know you will take it in good spirit.

And more rewriting history

2006-02-15T07:07:00.000Z

In typical fashion, and in line with my belief that "nothing succeeds like excess", I also bought a couple of wardrobes from the 1890's, and an exercise in logistics they have proved too. Firstly, when the shipment of all the old furniture arrived at my home in Bracknell, it was delivered by a tiny little old man in a 3-ton truck. He looked like an ex-jockey and, when he had handed me the waybill which indicated the total mass of goods shipped to me being almost 600kg, we both stared at his equally diminutive trolley and sighed in anticipation of a hard day's work. It occurred to me then that perhaps my love for old African furniture was not matched with any similar amount of common sense - especially as far as English houses are concerned.

These wardrobes are 2m 25cm tall - and the ceilings in the Bracknell Lego block house are 2m 30 .. suffice to say they had to be reassembled inside the rooms in the house. Where they loom over the occupants. And probably creak late at night. Mind you, having just watched the first of the Narnia Chronicles, I am all in favour of owning an access gate to a new and more magical world so I think I will have them dismantled and then "re-mantled" in the new Norwich house.

Who knows, maybe one night I'll disappear into a strange and beautiful land ruled by a savage psychopath and his evil trolls, a land where all normal rules have been suspended and where the broad mass of the population live in abject subjugation. Or maybe I'll use my wardrobe to visit Narnia instead of Zimbabwe.

It is a serendipity of note that the differently-sized niches in the new house (those on either side of the chimney breast in lounge, dining room and two of the bedrooms) are exactly the right shape and volume to hold my various cupboards. In truth, this was one of the deciding factors in buying the new Victorian terrace in Norwich. And to continue the strange synchronicities that happen in my life, the new house was built in the same year my family headed up to Rhodesia - 1891. And about 10 years before my Mom's dad was born in Lancashire.

Anyway I can hear the rain beating against the windows and it's 07h21 - time to head for work and another busy day trying to join up the myriad unconnnected bits of people interventions into a smooth programme. A bit early to be planning holidays but I am already looking at pictures of Perth beaches and sighing. Maybe in the middle of the year I'll head South, see family in Sa and then hop over to Oz for some exploring.

Retro-engineering

2006-01-27T13:54:00.000Z

What does one do when one's family leaves no form of inheritance? Create it oneself, that's what.

As previously mentioned, some of my forebears moved up North from the Pietersburg / Potgietersrus area of South Africa into the new and unnamed country that soon became Rhodesia. That would have been in the late 1800's and doubtless they would have had some fascinating items of furniture, books, firearms and the like that they could leave to their descendants, were they not such schmucks. As fate would have it, all my Dad inherited from his Dad was a hat, a Bible and a belt (the trouser-holding-up kind, not a clip round the ear) and all I inherited from the same source was a rifle for killing elephant. Dad still has his heirlooms, whereas I have long since sold mine to an uncle on the grounds that I am incapable of shooting elephant and anyway as a student at the time needed the money for medicinal purposes (Grahamstown's cold weather being made tolerable by regular tots of sherry).

From my Mom's side of the family I inherited a small sum of money - well old man Girdlestone had 16 grandchildren from his 6 daughters so in retrospect it was a healthy estate he left, just somewhat diluted by numbers of inheritors. Looking at my parents (and long may they continue to prosper) I am likely to inherit nothing, especially not antiques with family connections.

But the Hogga is nothing if not resourceful and so on receipt of my first bonus and sales commission in England - healthy ones too, nearly bankrupting the little mickey mouse company I was working for - I went online to a delightful site called www.yesterdaysdreams.co.za . This is a South African antique dealer located in the little Free State town of Bethlehem (Jesus wasn't born in this one because they couldn't find three Wise Men or a virgin) and it has an absolute treasure trove of stuff. I bought two enormous wardrobes, some cabinets and the like and had them all shipped to England.

These were not random selections, mind you. They all had to be genuine antiques from a particular period in South Africa's history - from approximately 1880 to 1900 - so that they could conceivably have been the ones my family took with them on their long trek North. To complete the illusion I also sought out a whole collection of similar-aged local books, explorer's journals from the late 1800's and so on - and stocked the one cabinet with these.

So now as far as anyone knows I have my great-great-grandmother's bookcase and other items of furniture. The perfect inheritance to one day pass on. Ah, if onl;y I had kids... well heck I can't think of everything!!!

Glory days

2006-01-21T20:45:00.000Z

Hogga winning Intervarsity Long Jump

OK, a little contrived perhaps, and obviously written to suit this 1982 picture, but still I thought that each life has its golden moments when everything is working in harmony. In martial arts it is known as "flow" and in the three years I studied with Kyoshi Chiba in Zimbabwe I achieved it a couple of times. Like the perfect golf shot in a round of hacking and slicing, it is that few seconds of being in perfect synchrony that brings one back for the next round.

I enjoyed studying martial arts I must say. Not that I was particularly good at it, being constructed more on the lines of a sumo wrestler than of Bruce Lee. Fortunately the style I selected, Shorin Ryu Shorinkan, is a power style with close, compact stances. See more at http://www.shorin-ryu.co.za/nakazato.htm which will give the biography of the Master of the style. A diminutive and wily Oriental by all accounts, yet I have seen a video of him in his seventies sending a fourth-dan Caucasian twice his size flying through the air with a well-executed nudge from his shoulder.

Another way of looking at it is perhaps to think of living in the moment. Not quite carpe diem, because that implies a view that the next day might be your last, but more an absorption in the "now" that transcends all else. It is indeed rare, especially for an easily-distracted type like me, but I remember the nights I worked in the Casualty department of Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo when the flow of bleeding Matabele (they have a merry habit of walloping each other with sticks and stones of a payday evening) was continuous and my suturing work was precise and quick. One time I recall putting in something like 27 hours continuous work and only realising I was tired when I fell over.

In Norwich we have the few remnants of the anchoress cell of Dame Julian of Norwich - http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/julianbio.htm - a genuine English mystic who was confined in a cell (voluntarily of course, that's what being an anchorite or anchoress is all about) adjoining the church of Saint Julian. Hence the name she took. She wrote what is believed to be the first book published by a woman - "Revelations of Divine Love" in around 1393 - and is famous for her devotion, focus and optimisn ("All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" is one of her sayings).

Now I'm not suggesting that my dear readers wall themselves up in a cell, leaving only a small aperture for the ingress of food and the egress of unmentionable substances, but I do think that we sometimes miss the point of life in our relentless scramble to collect more toys than anyone else. I have been as guilty as any, if not as successful, but I am now wondering how different things might have been if I had collected people rather than things. Invested in relationships instead of property. Not being morbid, folks, just musing a little on how easy it is to pursue the material and neglect all the other components of life.

As Douglas Adams wrote

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

Ah well, enough introspection for this year. I'm off to the gym and then it's back to the office to earn some more pieces of paper. At least the work is engaging, challenging and complex and that is great for my grasshopper mind. And I have a cunning plan for some community involvement that will allow me to socialise and do real "boy stuff". More later.

Roots - the true version

2006-01-14T20:18:00.000Z

Missing things African in general and Afrikaans in particular... there is something particularly satisfying about swearing in the language and even in normal conversation it is wonderfully colourful. Which is strange because I grew up in a completely English-speaking household, and at school studied French and Latin. I suppose it is partly the enforced immersion in Afrikaans that results from a couple of years in the military there, and partly because, genetically at least, I am one quarter Afrikaans. My paternal grandmother was baptised Annie Jozina Isabella Swart - and the Swart name arrived in Africa from Germany in the first couple of years of the 18th century.

The other quarters are, as previously mentioned, all English. Norfolk, Yorkshire and Berkshire I think. How strange that I lived a few miles from Windsor for several years and am now less than 30 miles from Kelling in Norfolk, both towns figuring prominently in my ancestry. The Girdlestones, my mom's ancestors, all seem to come from the same small cluster of towns in North Norfolk - Kelling, Holt, Wells next the Sea and so on. I've actually been on a visit to Kelling and seen the gravestones of my forefathers dating back to the 1600's - the oldest one found was one Zurishaddai Girdlestone, Lord of the Manor in those parts and curiously buried some distance from the church itself.
My irreverent speculations about this, and about his Semitic name (Zurishaddai means "Rock of the Lord") were dismissed by Mom - rightly too, as subsequent investigation has pointed out. I am guessing that old Zurishaddai was a Puritan of sorts, perhaps an adherent of the Westminster Confession of 1646 and maybe named because his parents followed an earlier Confession. An unusual name anyway, and one that crops up every few generations in the Girdlestone line.

The church at Kelling is small and simple, around 900 years old I guess , and from around 1780 to 1880 a Girdlestone was the Rector. As Girdlestones held the "Right of Avowson" there in that time, they would have appointed one of their own younger sons as Rector. A strange gap between the last of them in 1881 and my grandad being born on the other side of the country (Formby, near Liverpool) in 1901 - and an even stranger hiatus before he popped up in Rhodesia in the 1920's. There to marry Violet Isabella Cary (daughter of an early Pioneer), become Mayor and Alderman, raise six daughters and eventually be buried in what is now a howling wasteland of vagrants and vandals in Masvingo. Strange how when he died (1978) it was decided by his widow that he should not have a conventional upright gravestone but a flat one so it would not be knocked over by the locals. It remains relatively intact where many of the others in that little cemetery have been smashed. In fact all the Girdlestone graves I have seen have been a single flat slab - perhaps it's the only way to be sure that the irrepressible and larger than life old rascals stay down...

Anyway it's 07h00 and time to get ready for work. Living a mere 15 minute amble from the office is one of the biggest pleasures in being here - and my new house is probably only 5 minutes further out and on the other side of the city centre. The "Golden Triangle" that suburb is called - and once the deal is concluded I'll tell you all. How the Hogga came to be living in a Victorian end-terrace house. Where I plan to store all my books. And how I survived the inevitable DIY work needed to prepare the place after years of being inhabited by a dear old lady and her equally dear (if somewhat incontinent) dog Ruffles.

"Let it Snow, Let it Snow!!"

2005-12-29T19:42:00.000Z

Serves me right for singing in the car the other day. I was househunting again, somewhere to the North of the city, and all in a Yuletide mood and, in addition, in relatively good voice. So having exhausted the carols I moved on to other seasonal oldies - and no sooner had I finished demolishing the high notes at the end of "Let it Snow" when stap me vitals if it flipping well didn't start snowing. And continued snowing. And then snowed some more. Then it cleared up briefly, just in time for some more snow. And sleet. Which is rain that was too lazy to become snow and just sort of froze in a sullen way.

The little humpbacked bridge I cross on the way to work was a sandwich of ice between pavements of snow. The river I live next to is also a strange chilly grey colour, dusted with snow. My duplex is behind the big tree in the picture.

It is very strange and not a little risky walking on these pavements.

Narrow streets mean the buses are whizzing by one's shoulder sometimes with inches to spare. Walking is more like skating, and even my sturdy Sishika shoes (made by brother Brett) are not able to grip properly. Their well-treaded rubber soles do, however, allow me to build up massive static as I walk on the carpets in my office - and I am learning how to "accidentally" discharge this into unsuspecting co-workers..

The little open piece of ground adjacent to my duplex is also a snowdrift. The old man with the dachshund that walks there daily is taking a seasonal break Just as well really, a short dog and tall snow is the kind of sight that brings tears to the eyes. And a localised wince a bit lower down. The swans seem to have gone into hiding as well - and the word is that we can expect a whole lot more snow on Friday. I suspect my New Year will be seen in from the deck out front here, with a jug of wine, maybe a big box of fireworks and an attractive friend. We can giggle and fire rockets at the spire of the cathedral.

I wish you all a fantastic 2006.

Yuletide in East Anglia

2005-12-13T13:18:00.000Z

Judging by some of the more peevish messages I have received recently, it is time for another edition of the Hogga Blog. Ah well, my readers are my life so once more to the keyboard. And this time it is a somewhat grimy old keyboard at my temporary workstation in the open plan office of my new employer. The first time I have worked in open plan, actually, and in a department composed mostly of female HR consultants.

Yes folks, the Hogga has moved again - this time to the lovely little cathedral city of Norwich. Another first is that I am living within a short walk of the office - well, renting to be more precise while I look for a place to buy. Time to shake the dust of Bracknell from my feet (and leave that strange Lego block house full of immigrant lodgers and bad memories, too many photographs and even now, stray ginger hairs on my old jackets).

This is indeed a pretty place to live. Surrounded by a maze of little country lanes and villages, close to the sea and even closer to the Norfolk Broads which is a sort of wetland and network of canals and lakes. A mix of very old and new, and strangely enough a part fo the world from which some of the Hogga ancestors rose. My maternal grandfather was descended from a very old and very small (in numbers at least) North Norfolk family about which more at a later stage. So a sort of homecoming, although I don't want to place that much significance on what is essentially a lifestyle career move.

My new duplex is on the river Wensum and has views of the cathedral spires. An impressive place and with some amazing interior decoration including the face of the secretive "Green Man" peeping out of some leaves, a hint of the pagan past perhaps. For more on the Green man mythology checkout http://www.btinternet.com/~breinton.morris/WhoistheGreenMan.htm an.htm

Interesting walking to work (and dangerous too at times, I come barreling out of my warm little duplex and get halfway down the street before realising that the pavements are icy; my Fred Astaire routine is now quite athletic and only stops when I hit the even more treacherous cobbles in Elm Hill Street and am required to adopt a hunched and geriatric shuffle). Such a large amount of light coloured eyes here - all shades of green, blue and grey with the occasional flash of topaz and amber. Of course many people are bundled up in dark coats against the occasional chill so it's like snorkeling in Lake Malawi - monochrome and then flashes of colour as the cichlids swim past.

Another way to spend spare time here is looking for a house to buy. Three broad categories I guess; country cottage, suburban house or city apartment. I've looked at all three and bugger me if I can make a decision. I suspect it'll be the suburbs again - it is a compromise between the constriction of a small apartment and the space and isolation of a 1700's cottage in the Broads. I've seen some lovely old cottages but my DIY skills are notoriously limited - and I think those kind of things are projects for couples anyway. Not that I'm wimping out - just that I would find it difficult to summon the enthusiasm to work alone on the place after a full week at the office.

Ah well, back to the office and more induction meetings. It is a complex and complicated role I have accepted here, managing HR programmes in a large company with tens of thousands of employees and a propensity for "Ready Fire Aim" kind of project generation. Christmas will be with a clutch of African cousins now doing very well over here, New Year probably nowhere in particular. Greetings of the Season to you all.

Revenge of the Nerds Part 1

2005-11-11T17:53:00.000Z

Well I suppose I asked for it, allowing all and sundry to make comments on my blog. I guess I was hoping for mild criticism, enthusiastic support, offers of matrimony and perhaps a small publishing deal. Sadly your Hogga has been chastised, taken to task and generally slagged off by some anonymous and grudge-laden berk posing under the pseudonym of "candy". Not chosen in line with his/her/its innate sweet nature, this nom de guerre, that much is plain.

And a good day for me to respond in kind to this disputatious contumely. It is the 11th of November - a cool and drizzly autumn day in London, a day on which I am a little more sombre than usual in remembrance of friends and relatives dead in wars (it being Armistice Day), in remembrance of times past and good things gone (it being the 40th anniversary of Rhodesia's UDI) and in wistful memory of my departed love (it being what would have been my 10th wedding anniversary). So all in all a perfect juxtaposition of moods, a suitable mind frame from which to answer this overblown, misspelled, turgid and mean-spirited attack from a stranger. A stranger, mind you, who seems to have supplemented their usual diet of bile ducts and gall stones with a somewhat faulty copy of Roget's Thesarus. I can picture her now (and I am assuming the nominally feminine gender for reasons explained later), crouched in her lair and surrounded by a miasma of disappointments, rejections and menopause remedies, tapping out this spiteful little missive with two talons on a battered and spittle-flecked keyboard.

Whatever it is that sets off these online bag ladies, I have no idea. Were it my dating profile then I could understand it a little better. I have indeed had very similar letters from other thwarted denizens of the social underworld, attacking my desire to marry someone from vaguely the same ethnic, religious, educational and economic group as myself. Nothing more filled with wattle-shaking fury than a woman ignored or not even shortlisted, never mind scorned. I kid you not, I get angry messages from people who describe themselves as "late forties, incomplete secondary education, large frame, atheist, heavy smoker, not interested in sport, unemployed, sharing a council house, never married, five children" who are seriously annoyed that I don't want to date them.

In fact the more I think of it the more it seems to me that I have seen this similar prose style before. This kind of gasping emesis, whole hordes of big words cobbled together in no particular order and concealing a real and nasty hatred of anyone a little different. Ha ha, what a plonkerette. I think it is a rejected date who has followed the link to my blog from the dating site.

Well then let's see her off, skirts held high and bounding over the brambles. So, "candy" dear, I am sorry but I regret we are not suited. I know how much you really like me, deep down, and any other man would be happy to share a kennel with someone of your undoubted charms, but sadly I am a weak and needy individual who must lean on a slim, attractive, gentle, kind, educated, Christian, Caucasian woman with a nice nature. And apart from your unknown ethnic roots I have no doubt that you don't qualify on all the rest. So , with respect, please go bother someone else and leave me to my admittedly egocentric musings on this blog. After all, that's what blogs are for.

Would you buy a used car from this man?

2005-10-17T21:52:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in old Blighty

2005-10-03T20:25:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

Internet dating and genetics

2005-09-19T11:12:00.000+01:00

One of the strange experiences I have had over the last two years is arranging dates over the internet. Now the Hogga is a resourceful and technologically savvy bloke, and also (if truth be told) somewhat shy about propositioning strange ladies in the pubs. And my frame, while sturdy and square, is not designed to look seductive in body-hugging disco clothing while my dancing has been likened to badly controlled epilepsy. So I took to online romance as a workable alternative.

Now this is indeed a strange thing. Being an impulsive wally, and somewhat peeved at the departure of my wife with a Pom (an insult to all colonials), I wallpapered the Web with my love cv. Specifying clearly (and later more stridently after a deluge of letters from Senegal and Uganda) that I am looking for a Caucasian and younger lady to start a family etc etc. And of course coming up with a list of physical criteria.

And thereby lies the rub. It is possible to set up a structured search for absolutely any kind of person. So for example a younger, short, attractive, childless, Christian redhead with blue eyes could be the search terms used (although I don't dare use those ones after what happened the last time, sadly I ended up marrying her!). Now in statistical terms this is known as restriction of range, and casts doubts on the validity of any generalisations made about women based on this sample. And in fairness to the aforementioned Celtic midgets, my previous long term relationships (LTR's in the dating jargon) have been with women who differ substantially from each other. Looks, intellect, temperament - each was almost the opposite of the others. There is, in short, no ideal Mrs. Hogga - although those who know me well may suggest such traits as tolerance, patience, hypersexuality and a serious interest in travel. I do have some general considerations about race and religion, and the usual wishful male requirements for someone attractive who adores me, but as stated there is no real type or look that appeals to me above others. Apart from a lingering redheadophilia (which I plan to cure by visiting the London Zoo and making ook ook noises at the orangoutangs) I am a tabula rasa, a blank slate waiting for the right author.

So a word to all my many readers - scour the list of your friends and acquaintances and if you can think of anyone who might fit, then drop me a line. If you are Lee Waters in Australia, ignore this instruction and I am very sorry about what happened with your wife's best friend. In mitigation I was coming off almost a year of celibacy and the summer sun in Brisbane played merry hell with my inhibitions.

But seriously, what a noble project! I think I have an evolutionary duty to spread my genes and if you can locate a willing, Caucasian, Celtic looking lady to take on the solemn task of incubating a new brood of Hoggas, posterity will thank you. As will I - being single is not as much fun as advertised...

Off to a job interview now, better put on my work face.

Back to the Autobiography

2005-09-10T12:10:00.000+01:00

It occurs to me I may have inadvertently left a lot of my audience hanging. In some cases that is no more than the kind of sentence a competent court could impose, but still I feel a sense of responsibility towards my readers. What with digressions into Kuwait climatology, elimination habits of the Middle and Near East and my patchy career, I have neglected my original story about the life of the young Hogga.

Those of you who have been paying attention will recall I departed from the Hogga biography while still a tender fourteen year old in my 'O' level year at Fort Victoria High School. "Fourteen?" I hear you exclaim. Yes indeed. As I mentioned earlier, Mashaba Primary School was a sort of catch all for kids of the local mine employees and contractors and my ability to read without moving my lips soon brought me to the attention of the teachers. As did my intense curiosity and sense of mischief. I am still not sure if I was moved ahead a year because I was bright or because I was naughty. Anyway, the nett result was that I was 11 on entering Fort Vic High School in 1973, 14 in Form 4 and a mere stripling of 16 when I hit Chaplin High to complete my A levels (and incidentally to escape the wrath of a senior policeman in Fort Victoria, whose daughter and I had been unjustly accused of lewd behaviour while we were both boarders in Les Sharp House - I left at the end of the year but she was expelled immediately).

Chaplin was a bit of a disaster actually. More of the same turgid teaching of science and very little to actually fit me for social competence. In their defence they did at least realise that a diet of physics, chemistry, maths and biology would lack certain trace elements so we were also required to do "General Studies" (usually rudimentary overviews of native languages, basic music or the like) and "Use of English". I was still a miscreant, prone to sneaking out the school hostel and playing table soccer down in the "black" part of Gwelo, smoking, and generally being a nuisance in class. And hopeless at pure maths too. My inability to master calculus, and my penchant for bursting into song in class or mimicking the "Attack of the Man Eating Desk" with full body motions, screams and sound effects were a sore test of the patience of our chainsmoking maths master, Mike Neale (affectionately known as Duck for his weird walk). He was marvellously patient - unlike the ratbag chemistry teacher who developed a fermenting hatred of me from the first day. And in my callow and careless way I saw to it that he was kept well supplied with grievances - a decison which came back to haunt me in 1979 when the selfsame weasel was able to blackball me from receiving school athletics colours, the M level French prize and the A level Chemistry prize, all of which I had earned. Oh how we laughed in our cruel childish way when his wife left him for a Shona gentleman.

Strange how school days have such a profound influence on us, an influence that lingers years later. In fact I went fishing at Chirundu with my dad in 1981 once I got out the Air Force, and this same nameless and wifeless geezer was apparently somewhere close by but I was deliberately not told for fear I'd do him a mischief.

One of the funniest events (one of many, of course) was my ceremonial departure from Chaplin after completing my A levels in 1978. I had just turned 17, was off on an overseas holiday and full of rejoicing at finally leaving the stultifying, khaki-clad environment of a Rhodesian school. I guess smoking in the dining hall and burning my school tie on the steps of the Beit Hall were a little excessive, but as far as I was concerned I was off to the military the next year and cared not a jot what the teachers thought. A sad day indeed when I was rejected for military service for being too young. My Dad, bless his authoritarian hide, decided that what I really needed was to return to school to improve my admittedly putrid A level results. Ah, the shame of it. Creeping back to Chaplin (and we had to pull some strings with the Ministry to allow that), into the tender care of a new neo-Nazi housemaster with a nanoscopic sense of humour and a wicked right arm and under final warning of expulsion from Day One. A sad year for the Hogga, only mitigated by my romantic life livening up and by the advent of some new blood into Chaplin from Plumtree, Guinea Fowl and Que Que High Schools. But more of that later, I need to scan some photos when I get back to Bracknell.

Alea iacta est

2005-09-01T16:28:00.000+01:00

The die is cast - returning to Kim's house in Maritzburg after a few beers with Franek Raciborski and Brian Hewitt (old Fort Vic High School mates) I fired off a polite resignation letter to my boss and the HR Director back in Riyadh. It has been interesting and instructive living in one of the most conservative countries in the world but it finally occurred to me that my limited expertise in attracting women centres on my sparkling wit after a few drinks - and being somewhere that beer and dating are both illegal meant the chances of finding the next Mrs. Hogga were vanishingly small. Also the surgeon's acerbic comments on the state of my knees in particular and my health in general have hastened the move to a less stressful lifestyle.

So where to now? Well, as I sit in the smoking lounge in Joburg Airport (a little known fact is that they have free internet connections) the plan is to see out the month of September in Riyadh then head back to the UK and spend October doing some rehab on my knees. I may return to the Gulf and Levant regions for November and December to work on the internal EY rollout of PeopleSoft financials, but as a contractor. January onwards I think I'll be back in the UK doing contract work and relishing the free availability of alcohol and pig products. And by July 2006 I should be a loyal subject of HM the Queen of England, duly kitted out with British passport and the ability to legally cause havoc anywhere in the EU. Then, in true Hogga fashion, with a house and residency in the UK all sorted, I will probably go somewhere else like Oz or back to SA.

It was good to be back with the family in South Africa. But (and those of you who are passionate Afro-optimists should skip this next paragraph), all the reasons I originally left SA are still very much there. The crime level is still horrific, most of the HR work available is restricted to non-white people and as far as I can tell the only culture in Natal was due to an overturned yoghurt tanker on the freeway a couple of days ago. Already the mutterings over land redistribution are getting louder and more strident; the new Deputy President of SA (replacing Jacob Zuma who was fired for corruption) is on record as saying SA can learn from the Zimbabwe methods and the streets are awash with litter and faeces thrown by striking municipal workers. If I won the Lotto I'd acquire some land in Oz and forcibly relocate my family, bribing them wherever necessary. But they are well settled there, and heavily invested too meaning a move will be a great trauma. Of course each brother has not only a wife and kids, but in-laws too and none of them will take kindly to losing their daughters.

So back to the desert it is. Dubai tonight, Kuwait tomorrow morning and (a curse on the inaccessibility of the Saudi capital to external flights) Riyadh tomorrow evening. Ah well, spare shirts in my bag and a load of books and I should survive. It will be interesting on Saturday morning when I return to the office for the first time since early July and see how my boss handles the resignation letter..

Dem bones dem bones....

2005-08-22T09:46:00.000+01:00

Early Spring in Pietermaritzburg, a lovely mild day that almost cancels out the grime and squalour of the city centre where I am ensconced in the PostNet internet cafe. My orthopaedic surgeon is pleased with my progress after the double arthroscopy last week, and I am cautiously optimistic he may have temporarily alleviated some of the pain from my poor abused knees. All down to too much rugby as a kid and later at university I guess. Playing right wing (pure coincidence, that position, and nothing to do with my political standpoint) for sixteen years has played merry hell with the complicated set of ligaments, cartilages and tendons that occupy the middle of each leg. Of course being a fat bastard hasn't helped either. 5 weeks in Kuwait with no exercise and a diet of takeout curry has caused me to balloon like the Michelin Man. A far cry from my lean and mean 1979 self when Lee Waters and I were inducted into the Chaplin High School First XV.

The selfsame Waters is now a bearded and sun-leatherised resident of Brisbane. Wrinkly little bugger I must say, but still in superb physical nick for an elderly person. Perhaps gravity has less effect on midgets or something. In fact I daresay he is in much the same shape he was in twenty years ago whereas I am square and solid if not a little, er, comfortable shall we say. I saw Lee in January 2004 when I flew out there, incidentally meeting his wife's best friend who was a recently separated Australian woman with three kids. A complete disaster that was, and a lesson to us all. Never try to set your mates up with your wife's mates. And for us men, never try to date until at least two years have elapsed after your divorce. Oh well, I'm sure they will all eventually speak to me again some day.

But still, seeing my surgeon today (and a happy old Rhodesian bloke he is too, descendant of the famous "Matabele"Thompson who first wrung the concession from Lobengula) made me think how we mortgage our future health so easily, sacrificing it on the altar of work. I'm dead ready to downshift now to any profession that will pay my way and allow me to play sport every day. 20 years of international management and consulting have not made me noticeably happier or fitter and the few dollars I have made are all tied up in a house I seldom visit, in a country I find a little damp and grey for my liking. I don't mind the temperatures in the UK at all, but the absence of sunlight especially in December to February is a killer. And my funny little house is all tall and skinny, 5 bedrooms over three floors and nowhere near enough windows and garden for my liking.

But more of the Bracknell residence later, it is a tale well worth telling. I need to see if I can get into my work e-mail system from here and check what is happening back in Riyadh.

Early Morning Musical Chairs

2005-08-13T07:30:00.000+01:00

There's no better way to get a sense of the cultural differences between groups than to share morning ablutions with them. I'm talking about having a poo here, you may wish to fasten your seatbelts and shoo away any young children and nervous maiden aunts.

This morning, engaged as I was in some silent contemplation in my favourite stall at the M Building, Kuwait Gulf Oil Company, I mused on the subtle yet distinct differences in elimination habits demonstrated in this cultural melting pot of a society. In parentheses here let me say if I am ever elected King or, in Kuwait, Amir, I will make sure that all public toilets are fitted with reading material and loud music, to distract us from the serious nature of the task and to overpower any inadvertent sounds we might make. Anyway, moving on, I was in my stall and flanked by (in adjacent stalls of course) a Kuwaiti and a Bangladeshi. The Bangladeshi was in the last, or heavy duty, stall which is a squat toilet, while the other two of us were in more Westernised surrounds, perched on a normal commode. Westernised if of course you ignore the handy high-pressure water hose on a clip next to the toilet, and the large waste basket for used toilet paper.

But to continue. From the deep, reverberating splooshing sounds on my right, my Bangladeshi colleague was experiencing some success as he (on all the auditory evidence) let fly from some considerable height into the hole in the floor. On my left the Kuwaiti had completed his brief enthronement and was directing jets of water at any body areas that, not to put too fine a point on it, needed cleaning just then. We three Kings of Orient also, for that moment, represented the exact national demographic balance between locals and expatriates, being two non-Kuwaitis to the one desert dweller.

Now I have seen squat toilets before and was not mazed nor confused by this nor by the logical, if alarming, sounds that issued from it. What did get me baffled though was how exactly one could achieve a sufficiently spotless fundament to make the day comfortable without in any way at all besmirching one's ankle length white robes - and all this, mind you, while controlling the hose with the left hand.

My conclusion is that this is why alcohol is banned here. The complexities of wearing an white dish-dash robe into the loo while pissed, performing one's ablutions in an alcoholic haze and then irrigating one's nethermost orifice with a high pressure hose aimed with one's less deft hand.... well doesn't bear thinking about really.

Dreams and Dreaming: or, Every Boy's Book of Farming

2005-08-10T12:58:00.000+01:00

A couple of minutes before three in the afternoon on a Wednesday - in the Ahmadi Oil Fields in Kuwait this means rush hour soon. Knocking off time in the oil sector here is three, and Wednesday is of course the end of the working week so any minute now the roads will be filled with floods of Chevy Caprices (managers) and Toyota Camrys (supervisors). The somnolent sub-continent expatriates from the saffron part of the world will tidy up and leave on their rattling buses sans air conditioning, unless you count the missing windows and holes in the bodywork. As to the fate of the retained management consultants, including yours truly, we hope to be out of here before nightfall.

So tomorrow I'll sneak into the local company office, avoiding the local partner and his dozy rows of "work on weekends to please the boss" poor, wan and lifeless consultants. All I need do is seize my air tickets from a certain desk and run for the lifts.

Air tickets? Glad you asked. Finally, insh'allah, I am out of here on Saturday evening wallowing in the luxury of Emirates Business Class. To Dubai firstly, I shall raise my glass of water as we pass over Riyadh because I have deliberately avoided going there first (security alerts and the chance of various lurking people handing me more work). Then early on Sunday morning off to Johannesburg (and I shall raise my middle finger as we pass over the shattered remains of my home country, soiled as she is with the filthy finger stains of Mugabe and his forty thieves)... yes dear readers, I'm going to South Africa.

Briefly mind you, a long overdue arthroscopy and the grim memory of bad dental surgery in Saudi that cost me three teeth earlier this year have combined to make me think I'd be better having it done closer to relatives and priests. But still, a couple of weeks lying round my brother Kim's house and monopolising his TV sports channels will be pure heaven. And I may get the chance to be driven out to Mooi River, some 7okm from Pietermaritzburg, to look at some land that Brett might want to sell me.

You'll be able to see it in the background of this picture. In the hills overlooking a large dam, green and pleasant and about 500 acres in size. Of course I have absolutely no idea how I might earn a living in a quiet rural area, but that's a detail for later. For a long time I've dreamed of my own space, water, trees, sun and green mellowness. It's true that the first iteration of the dream had a gorgeous wife at my side, smiling proudly as I planted my first chickens or milked a rutabaga or whatever it is that farmers do. She'd have produced a passel of little kids that I could teach to fish, and I'd have become ever more laconic and lantern jawed, straw in my mouth as I whipped the herds of broccoli into shape. Times change, however, and there have been some forced edits to the dream. The wife became increasingly rodentine and eventually decamped with a Pom, preferring the gentility of suburban Frimley to the wilds of Natal or Tasmania; my early researches into farming have indicated that it is a back breaking profession with huge risk and minimal reward, and many of the major components of this life seem to be vegetable-based which is worrying considering I have a severe case of Chernobyl thumb (the ability to kill anything including a weed while trying to feed and nurture it).

Some dreams are meant to remain that way perhaps. Then again, I remember the words of a bloke called Charles, who runs Nando's Chicken in the UK " Follow your passion, not your pension". Don't always play safe. I have already invested everything of value I ever had in the pursuit of a new way of life, so it would be a bitter blow to give up now and retreat back into the corporate womb.

So an interesting time indeed. My knees freshly coated with ibuprofen gel and wincing in anticipation, my butt parked on a chair in the flat in Sharq, I'm slowly starting to pack for Pietermaritzburg. And what adventures await me there!!

Taj Apartments, Sharq, Kuwait City August 2005

2005-08-04T13:31:00.000+01:00

Back in the coolth again, not so hot outside after all - a mere 47 degrees today, positively glacial. Three nice sci-fi books scored from the aptly named Kuwait Bookstore - a bit of a rarity in a country where the overpaid inhabitants exist only for takeout food, muscle cars and mobile phones. I've often wondered what it would have been like to be the idle son of a rich and generous Dad - and I guess being Saudi or Kuwaiti kind of resembles that. A harsh viewpoint maybe, but I am a bit tetchy after being scared witless by the way they drive. If you've ever seen a skinny kid in a white robe, wispy beard on his cheeks and cellphone in one hand, left foot on the dashboard of a 3-ton GMC Suburban and driving six feet behind your rear fender at a hundred miles an hour then you'll know true fear. Or, and I am sorry to say this, even worse if you share the motorway with a Kuwaiti woman driver.

I am not sure if it is a cultural artefact of life in this strangely conservative part of the world, perhaps the women are not allowed to be alone in a car with a male driving instructor or something similar that prevents them from having the faintest bit of road sense when they start driving , but I have seldom seen such hare-brained manouevres as the dear ladies in black can pull. In Saudi of course women are not allowed to drive - I'd put that down to the unbelievable and hostile suspicion with which any married Saudi regards single males and thought it was yet another Wahabi sect rule - maybe, however, one of the rule makers had recently bitten his beard off in a fit of anxiety caused by being tailgated by a 4 foot midget in head to toe robes with a tiny vision slit, nominally in control of a Landcruiser full of gymnastic kids tumbling from front to back on a sort of human waterfall. The poor dears simply never seem to make use of the slightest discipline on the kids, and also have no ability to judge distances or speeds - and of course I am the only person on the 40 motorway between the First and 8th Ring Roads (a good 50km of 4-lane highway) that ever uses indicators. I wonder if the locals think my brake lights have an intermittent short circuit...

Still, an interesting place and more liveable than Riyadh. The first trip I stayed in some nice Spanish style apartments in Salwa - at least they had a small gym and pool whereas now I am in a city block surrounded by building sites, feral pigeons and starving feral cats. The poor kitties are too scrawny to even trouble the piegons, and must live on insects or something. I finally cracked under the pressure last night and bought a tin of cat food for the one poor wee thing that cringes around the car park here. It is all eyes and ears and a tiny black-lipped mouth that made soundless hisses of defiance at me, but once I scooted the cat food foil container under the fence it was doing headstands in the stuff. And as luck would have it the owner of the building came out at that precise moment, and looked at me as though I was demented. Only in the affluent West would there be a program to capture, sterilise and release the cats - here they are part of the same unfeeling food chain that has Bangladeshis and Filipinos working in lethal environments for a pittance. A simple pyramid actually, with Kuwaitis at the top, Americans some distance below that and then a long hierarchy fading from pale to dark. Who'd be a swarthy Sri Lankan here... get run over by a Kuwaiti sheikha and on your hospital bed you'd be charged with damaging her car.

Time for yet another cup of tea with mint, and a rummage through the fridge to see what's for supper. Maybe I'll wander over to Mughal Mahal and get takeout curry.

Welcome to the Hogga Blog

2005-08-04T05:07:00.000+01:00

A work in progress, this. These first lines being written from a rented (and mercifully, air conditioned) apartment in the Sharq suburb of Kuwait City. In high summer. I'm a tough African and thought that I had experienced fierce heat before - but this is something completely different. Dry heat and 52 degrees C the other day - and the next day high humidity and 43 which gave an effective "feels like" temperature of 57. Unbelievable.

Still I sense that many of you are already getting impatient. Shifting in your chairs and eying your watches. What, I seem to hear you asking, is the point of all this? And how did an African end up a few hundred kilometres from Iraq? So let me start unfolding my tale without delay.

It was a dark and stormy night - well dark anyway, back in 1961 on 28th June when I entered the world, in a tiny "Nursing Home" in a small town called Fort Victoria, in a country called Southern Rhodesia. Part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland at the time. The first child of Arthur Robert "Bob" Hodgson and Shirley May Girdlestone Hodgson. He was a 20 year old Diamond Driller and she was a couple of years older (I am legally forbidden to mention Mom's age in public) and a nurse.

I'll gloss over the political and social turmoil in the world at that time, perhaps providing some detail in another thread, but suffice to say that it was the same year mankind reached space. And I reject any allegations that it was the news of my birth that inspired the Russians to look for a way off the planet. I was living and thriving as a toddler in a small mining town called Mashaba - asbestos mines as it happens, probably not the best place for a kid to grow up but hey, what did we know back then? A child prodigy (in my words, an annoyingly precocious midget in the words of others and "piccanini Baas Mashupa" in the words of our long suffering cook). Of course it was not difficult to shine at Mashaba Primary School, where wearing shoes was a sign that one was marked for greatness. So I shot through the classes, skipping out some here and there - thanks to Mom I could already read well at the age of 5 and so had little patience for Playhour comics, preferring instead some well-reasoned debate on the Soviet expansionist tendencies.

In the background of course much was happening on the political front. The Federation did not long survive my birth (once again I reject any suggestions of causality) and it was soon after its collapse that Ian Smith's Government made the Unilateral Declaration of Independence that was to shape my next years. Many better men than I (including old Smithy himself) have documented those fateful times so I'll be content with saying that it was an unusual, amazing and unique place and time to grow up. I was schooled in the illegal Republic of Rhodesia, firstly in Mashaba Primary and Junior as I have said, and then in Fort Victoria Junior and High Schools some 25 miles away. Many of you reading this Blog will have first met me back in those days - the early and mid-Seventies when the terrorist war was just getting started and things looked good. As did I, mind you. A thin and attractive lad I was, gentle and intellectual. Of course the fashion then was to be muscular and brutish and so I never got the chance to test my extensive theoretical knowledge of anatomy on any of the local ladies. Sadly, now that it is fashionable to be androgynous and slim, I am muscular and brutish....

But more of that later. I guess it's time for me to brave the searing heat outside, moving in the particular slit-eyed crouching rush that contact-lens wearers use to walk in places where sandstorms and 125 F temperatures are common. Get into my rented car and see if I can reach the Sultan Supermarket without inadvertently leaving more rubber on the roads (I'm not used to driving a 3,5 litre monster sedan with neck-snapping acceleration). I'll see you all later...