

Long Way Round to Rehab

By Lachlan Barker

With thanks to all those who helped along the way.

Copyright 2014 by Lachlan Barker

Smashwords Edition

Cover design by Clinton.

Contents

Chapter 1 – Sunset in South Java.

Chapter 2 – Dawn over Palembang.

Chapter 3 - Sumatra Sideways.

Chapter 4 - Stepping into Europe.

Chapter 5 - London and Thereabouts.

Chapter 6 - Control?! I had none at first, and less as the term went on.

Chapter 7 - Rolling Hell.

Chapter 8 - Rolling Further.

Chapter 9 - Everything's Bright, Then Everything's Grey

Chapter 10 - Glasgow's summer was on a Thursday.

About the Author

More Works by Lachlan Barker

Connect with Lachlan Barker

Read a preview of Lachlan's first fiction work, The Destruction of Lasseter's Road

Chapter 1 – Sunset in South Java.

In the end it was the ultimate change from the sublime to the ridiculous that destroyed what even emotional keel I had.

Just a week before these events take place I was camping on a beach at the southern end of the island of Java in Indo, with my friend Neil, and two beautiful Dutch nurses.

These nurses, Hanika and Marayka, seemed to have an aversion to clothing and spent the daylight hours topless.

We had met these two in a backpackers in the south Javan town of Banyuwangi and they had told us they were heading down to the south-western coast to a turtle beach with the hope of seeing baby turtles running.

They asked us if we would like to come and we said an emphatic 'Yes'.

Fully clothed they would have made a trappist monk start talking, so the idea of a couple of days with them in swim suits, or as events were to show, mostly out of them, was a no brainer.

Additionally, Neil and I were both biologists, he already worked with turtles in Australia, and so there was even a quasi-professional reason to go.

But make no mistake, it was the lure of the bikini that was all important.

We rented a truck, well, a motor vehicle that very loosely answered the term, and bounced our way down there.

There was no real accommodation in the area, but we were all fired up to sleep on the beach.

But as ever with travel in the third world, planning anything is at best a fifty per cent return on thought.

Firstly, none of us had tents.

Brilliant, eh?

But Neil and I in an attempt to be hairy-chested Australian macho men, who were fazed by nothing, said "We'll just sleep on the sand, we're in the tropics, how bad can it be?"

So we tied our boots to our packs, put the packs on and then, as Peter Mayle put it best, headed out "like two-legged snails".

We had no real destination in mind, so we headed up the beach looking for a) turtles, b) a nice spot to sleep and c) Hanika and Marayka's breasts to appear.

At one point we came across a small trickle of fresh water coming down the beach from the green undergrowth fringing the sand.

We stepped over and through it and continued on.

Eventually we found a spot we thought serviceable, threw down our packs and generally lazed about.

For the two women, lazing about meant divesting themselves of all but bikini bottoms and rolling around in the black sand.

For Neil and me, lazing about meant staring as if hypnotized at the breastual feast being paraded before us.

Then the sun began to set with its usual tropic speed and I just want to say this, a piece of philosophy I have developed over the years is: "You haven't lived till you've been slapped in the face, had a drink thrown over you and someone has said, 'who the fuck are you?!'"

All of which has happened to me, of course from my drinking days, but I would like to add this to it.

You haven't lived till you have seen two beautiful, topless Dutch nurses, rolling in black sand, on a beach in south Java, while the tropic sun sets over the western headland and the shadows grow long.

The natural setting itself was enough to start rhapsodic descriptions, but the beauty of these two girls even put that in the shade.

Anyway, just so you know, no romance developed.

Neil was ready to propose to Hanika, but they both had boyfriends and we had to content (?) ourselves with walking around bent double with sexual frustration and lying stomach down in the sand to keep the physical manifestations of our ardour hidden.

Night fell and thankfully Neil smoked so we used his lighter to start a fire.

From this point, though we didn't realise it at the time, it was all going downhill.

Firstly it was night and so the girls put their tops on, so that pleasure was now denied us.

Then we began to learn something about the tropical night, viz: it's cold, or it certainly was where we were.

Slowly as the evening moved on we pulled more and more clothing from our packs and put them on our increasingly chilly bodies.

Then we began to creep closer and closer to the fire.

THEN, we realised that we were running out of firewood, and this realisation was closely shadowed by the realisation that apart from having no tents, none of us had brought a flashlight.

Another stroke of brilliance.

We at first used Neil's lighter to try to find more driftwood, but that proved ineffectual, and further that lighter was now integral.

We had to conserve its fuel in case the little fire we did have went out and we needed to relight it.

FURTHER, to our outdoor ineptitude was a lack of paper to use as a fire starter.

All of us had toilet paper, but in Indonesia toilet paper is even more crucial to one's well-being than a working lighter.

What's more, using it as fire paper is very ineffective as it turned to ash in the blink of an eye.

So the night wore on and eventually we decided to get some sleep.

We lay, as I recall, with the two girls next to either side of the fire, with Neil on the windward side of Hanika, and myself on the leeward side of Marayka.

We huddled up as close as possible against the cold, and so cold was it that thoughts of sex had long gone from my mind at least, I can't speak for Neil, but am guessing he likewise was now only trying to stay warm.

But our efforts were to nought.

After an hour or so, Neil with his back to the wind realised it wasn't going to happen.

He sighed and gave up and went to his pack to have a cigarette.

This created a knock on effect.

Without his shielding presence Hanika was now fully exposed to the stiffish night wind and a short time later she gave up, stood up and went to her pack and began ferreting around to see if there was any other clothing she had missed to put on.

Then, without Hanika and Neil to shield it, the fire went out.

Thus, Marayka was now taking the brunt of the wind and so she lay there fitfully for a small while then she gave up.

I think I had drifted into a lightish doze, because I recall waking with a start due to the wind now full into my face.

I sat up and felt, rather than saw, the other three moving about in the pitch black night, and so I got up and we began discussing our predicament.

We faced the choice of sitting there all night freezing, or going somewhere else.

We vaguely considered moving into the undergrowth behind the beach, but if it was dark on the beach, clearly it was blacker than hell's midnight in there and so we scrubbed that idea.

Eventually we decided that the only sensible course of action was to walk back up the beach to the road where our truck had dropped us, then at least we would be out of the wind, and we might even be able to find a village on the road where we could spend the rest of the night.

So we put our packs on once more and then began a truly perilous walk back.

I say perilous for a few reasons.

The only passible light was a glimmer from the sliver thin moon, and the only area this lit was the ocean, and little enough of that.

The sand as I say was black, and so obviously no aid, and of course the undergrowth was even less help.

However, the oceans on the south western side of Indonesia have been famous through history for their ferocity, and this beach was no exception.

So we had to walk close enough to the water to be able to see, but not close enough to get caught up in it.

I might add, if you think that sounds like a small danger, later in this tale we will come to a beach resort in Sumatra that famously doesn't allow swimming.

The reason: you can't even walk into the ocean there.

So ferocious is the shore break that six-foot waves crash down from above head height while you stand watching.

And likewise this shore break was not to be trifled with.

Actually, now that I remember it, the sound of the ocean crash was more useful than the moon to find our way with.

So staggering slightly under the weight of our packs we picked our way through the Javan night toward the road and some semblance of safety.

Then we came to the little stream I mentioned on the outward journey.

Thankfully we saw its vague outline in the glimmer of the moon as we pitched up onto its shore.

We all stopped, more from fatigue than caution and tried to discern a crossing point.

It looked more or less the same as it had done in the day, though we all agreed it looked a little broader.

I decided to cross first, and with pack on I put my left leg into the middle of the stream and disappeared from view.

I have had some shocks in my life I can tell you, but that was one of the most severe.

The tide had changed while we were up the beach and the ankle deep trickle had changed too.

The retreating tide had combined with the little stream to scour out a two metre deep trench in the sand and with the weight of my pack, combined with the shocking, savage, unexpected cold of the water; put me a) underwater and b) into a catatonic shock.

Thankfully for me the currents and the morphology of the beach came to my aid.

Close by the point I took my plunge the stream curved sharply and I was flung up against the sand forming the outer wall of the bend.

Never, I mean, NEVER, have I been so thankful for my feet to register contact with something solid.

If the stream had been a little deeper, or if it ran in a straight line out to sea, you may not be reading this today.

But with desperate energy I scrabbled in the sand of the stream bank, found some traction and went up the wall of the stream, wresting collapsing sand out in big handfuls, until like a goanna going up a palm tree I shot over the lip of the stream and re-entered the view of my friends staring horrified into the dark.

The water glimmering on my shivering hide gave them a small glimpse of me.

Neil said, "Are you all right, man?"

I then replied with the stupidest overstatement since Stanley met Livingstone, "Yeah, I'm Ok, but the stream is really deep now."

We conferred across the metre wide stream and then in parallel headed back up beach till we got to the sand dunes at the head of the beach, here we could tell that the stream was once again shallow, and the other three crossed over and we went on.

At this remove of 21 years I can't recall the exact sequence of events, in retrospect I was still in mild shock.

What I do remember next is being on the back of an open backed truck, riding through the jungle in daylight.

Neil, Hanika, Marayka and I perched on our backpacks among the locals carrying chickens, rice, vegetables and various goods, who were headed for the local markets.

I was still damp and coated with sand and salt, but the day was as warm as the night had been frigid, and as we are about to see, that was as pleasant a ride as I had for some time.

But before we move on, I want to report something that was to change my life.

Whilst I was hung up on reporting Hanika and Marayka going about topless, I forgot to mention that as evening fell and we sat around the dieing camp fire, Marayka asked Neil and me some psychological questions.

They may not be found in any text book, but as events will show, I found them valuable beyond belief.

These were the questions:

What is your favourite animal?

What is your second favourite animal?

What is your favourite drink? (Alcoholic or non-, anything goes.)

Picture a box, made of anything with anything or nothing in it.

Describe the ocean in three words.

Disregarding the last answer, how would you travel across the ocean from one atoll to another? Fantasy rules here, you can go on a truffle bike, or fly in a gravity box, it doesn't matter.

Later on I will say what these questions and answers represent, it is a tool for finding out about yourself, and Boy, did I learn something.

So back to our open topped truck.

We headed from the isolated coast, back onto the central spine of Java, and reconnected with the main north-south tourist trail of Indonesia.

We than travelled north to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and man, that place is a maelstrom.

Smog like LA, traffic like you cannot believe and 24-7 freneticism that would have been hard to take if you had just come from another capital city, so for us, basically straight off the beach, it was like being thrown into a blender.

Among the things I remember of Jakarta was the bicak.

A bicak is a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi and I've always felt the Jamar Islamia never needed bombs; it only had to get all the hated western tourists in the country into one of these devices and send it out into Jakarta's perpetual peak hour traffic and job done.

Neil and I got in one of these death bringers for the journey to our backpackers.

They were/are built for Indonesians and so Neil and I, and our backpacks, filled the rear and left us with little or no room to manoeuvre.

The drive chain to the back wheels was exposed beneath us and ran perilously close to our socks and we spent the journey in perpetual dread of a) our socks getting caught in the chain and our legs ripped off, and b) the other vehicles on the road ripping our head and shoulders off.

I have a picture, still burned in my brain twenty years later of a truck tyre moving menacingly toward my face as I sat trapped, unable to move.

In the end it was so close that if I could have moved my arms I could have undone the wheel nuts with ease from where I sat.

The exhaust fumes of our vehicle and the traffic in general made our heads light and when we eventually pitched up at the backpackers, we got out and fell to the ground and kissed it like the pope arriving in a new country, so thankful were we to be alive.

With nerves jangling we checked in.

That backpackers was an interior analogue of the city itself.

Overpriced, overcrowded.

Not fun.

After a shower we went to have dinner with Hanika and Marayka.

And if there was any slight chance of dalliance, it was snuffed out then and there, for Marayka's boyfriend, Pieter, had flown out to join her.

He was currently doing his national service as a submariner in the Dutch navy, and was on two weeks leave.

He was everything I wished to be, young, handsome, fit and in bed with Marayka every night.

However, he was a lovely man, and we had a nice evening.

Later on we said good bye to the three Dutch travellers, they were heading for a different part of the island, and retired to our stuffy dorm for what was becoming the norm, not a very good night's sleep.

The next morning we examined our guide book sand maps and figured out what to do.

I was very happy as there was an English language book store and so was the first port of call.

I was then, maybe still am, a horrendous cheapskate, and so went there and browsed every shelf of the place, examining stock and comparing prices, without purchase, I was going to make that decision at my leisure.

That night we went to the movies, and the next morning we had a conference and made a decision that would change my life.

Over coffee, Neil pointed out that so far in Jakarta we had shopped in an English Language bookstore, had dinner at a nice restaurant, gone to the movies and sat in rush hour traffic.

"We might as well be back in Sydney", he said.

I heartily agreed and so we decided to go to Padang, a coastal resort a long way from Jakarta.

So far the rhythm of our trip had been to stay in one place for three days, then travel for a day.

A day's travel in Indonesia then, probably still, could be 50 kilometres, or 500, mostly the former.

This had been sustainable and we had had a generally good, if not overly, relaxing time.

Why we made this decision I cannot now recall, but I think it was largely due to the unpleasantness of Jakarta.

There were plenty of nice beach resorts close by, but we somehow thought that the further we got from Jakarta, the nicer things would be.

Anyway, the internet maps give the laughably optimistic time for the journey to the mid-west coast of Sumatra where Padang sat centrally as the capital of the region as 26 hours.

If only.

So we made the decision and went to bed planning to check out and move on the next day.

Morning came and we packed our gear for the trip.

I was ready earlier then Neil and was ready to go while he was still smoking his first fag of the day.

So I said, "Ok, I'll take my gear and walk around to the bookstore to buy something for the trip.

When you're checked out, come and join me there.

If I buy something and am ready to leave I'll walk back and meet you on the way, then we'll head to the bus station, how's that sound?"

He said, "Ok", and I headed off.

Like everything else in Jakarta, walking was not pleasant.

I had my whole pack on and within metres of leaving Neil's table I had sweat rolling down my body.

The smog caught my throat, and my shoulders already felt the bite of my straps.

The book store was about a kilometre away and when I arrived I felt like I had beaten Tenzing to the top of Everest.

I had pretty much made up my mind what I was going to buy.

It had to be a long book, as I wasn't sure when I would next find a bookstore, and it had to keep me engaged, or I knew I would throw it aside in boredom.

So I purchased Lord of the Rings.

I had already read it twice, but knew it could stand a third pass-through.

I carried my book and bag out to the footpath and looked down the road for Neil.

No sign.

I waited a few minutes, and then with a long-suffering sigh, hoisted my pack and began the walk back to find him.

I got all the way back to discover him still at the desk of the backpackers arguing over some sundry expenses.

I was exasperated, but he was doing the right thing, haggling is a way of life in Indo, and you want to pay a fair price, but not be regularly ripped off.

Not that the money matters to us phenomenally rich westerners, but even the Indonesians gave you greater respect if you haggled to a mutually acceptable middling price.

That over we loaded up and headed for the bus station.

Another kilometre walk in the smog and heat.

We got there and tracked down a bus going to the ferry port of Cilegon on the northern coast of Java.

Our vehicle was a standard Indonesian eight-seater mini bus.

I say eight-seater, though I am not sure if these vehicles ever travelled with eight people in them; 30 was common, 40 not unknown.

Additionally, there are no timetables in Indonesia, you simply get on the bus, and when there are so many people on board that the driver can't reach the gear stick without asking someone to move, you go.

And go we did.

Another characteristic of these trips is that any westerners sit up front, with, as it happened, full nerve jangling view of the carnage to follow.

I should say, Neil and I aren't giants, but best described as medium large westerners.

Both being just over 180cm (just under six feet tall) and weighing in at 90k (190lbs).

I mention this because the only place we would fit in these mini-buses was on the front bench seat next to the driver.

20 odd Indonesians of smaller stature were crammed in the rear.

The journey to Cilegon took about three hours and the first hour of that was through Jakarta.

I thought we were going to die a few times and already my eyebrows were becoming permanently fixed to my hairline.

In my massive, massive naiveté, I thought once we get onto the highway through the countryside, things will calm down, surely?

Wrong again, Lachlan.

We eventually left the outskirts of the capital and my eyebrows began to return to their more customary position above my eyelids when we passed our first fatal accident of the morning.

Glass everywhere, two bent and savagely twisted vehicles.

I don't know for sure if someone died, but there was blood on the roadway and knowing the Indonesian predilection for overcrowding any vehicle, it was almost certain.

My eyebrows once again took off like the space shuttle and we watched with the standard appalled fascination as we inched through the traffic around the accident.

That passed we returned to cruising speed and continued northwards.

At the time I was enjoying learning Bahasa, the official language of the archipelago.

I had some "See-Spot-Run" level primers and it was something I genuinely enjoyed.

I was reading from one of these in a vain attempt not to watch the road, when Neil, who likewise wished to learn a little bit, asked me, "How do you say, 'What is your name?'".

I replied, "Siapa nama anda", and the bus driver, naturally thinking we were addressing him, replied, "Rambo".

Like absorbed spectators at a tennis match, our eyes swivelled in unison to look at him.

Rambo??

I don't know to this day if Rambo is a common name in Indonesia, or if he took it, or was given it, for the Sylvester Stallone movies, but as we were to learn over the next two hours, it was almost certainly the latter.

If he had been born in first world, he would have been dedicated driver of V-8 gruntmeister vehicles.

I guess we were lucky that his minibus was hopelessly underpowered, but then that created problems of its own.

I'll just digress to say that many have written about the traffic and driving in the third world, but none better than P.J.O'Rourke in his book "Holidays In Hell".

His story, "Third World Driving Tips" is best remembered for its description of driving maniacally up hills, down mountains, through walls and over people.

I'll just put in this little extract for those of you who wish to read it.

"When to honk your horn in the third world.

When starting the car.

When stopping the car.

When someone is coming.

When no one is coming.

And at all other times."

So with my eyebrows already starting to go over the top of my head and return under my chin we entered the mountains and we became unwilling close up spectators to Rambo's overtaking technique.

What he did was this, you drove the accelerator venomously into the floor and spurred the minibus up to its max speed of 90k.

When you came upon another vehicle and decided to overtake you pressed both feet onto the speed pedal with even greater force and moved out into the oncoming traffic lane.

Then you encouraged the passengers to throw anything not essential out of the window to gain that extra few clicks.

Then you inched your way up to the overtaken vehicle and raced them for the next few kilometres trying frantically to get ahead.

If another car came in the other direction, you either gave up and slipped back in behind the vehicle you were trying to get beyond, if another vehicle had not come up and was filling the space behind already, or you gritted your teeth and continued to go for it.

Rambo, apparently living up to his name, almost never gave up.

With a full panoramic view of this Neil and I became suddenly religious and began praying for the first time in years.

We went through three or four of these heart-stopping overtakes and were already commending our souls to god when we rounded a corner and nearly added to the carnage of the second fatal accident of the morning.

Another cluster of mangled vehicles, another swathe of broken glass.

Rambo in a split second moved both his feet from the accelerator to the brake and we came to a shuddering halt within metres of the last car in the queue trying to get around the accident.

I didn't wear underpants at the time, but was beginning to heartily long for a pair.

Once again we inched through and moved back up to travel speed.

The next hour was a copy of the first two with the requisite fatal accident to buoy(?) our spirits.

Eventually we pulled into Cilegon and Rambo dropped us at the ferry port.

Once again we emerged from an Indonesian hired vehicle and fell to the Earth and gave thanks for our deliverance from death.

The next step of the journey was a ferry ride across the Sunda Strait.

We were really, really looking forward to this as the first relaxing piece of travel we had undertaken.

However I now had a new problem.

It might have been the dip into the stream on the beach in Java, combined with the stress of the recent travel, compounded by the smog of Jakarta, but I was developing a really sore throat.

I negotiated the tickets for the ferry, noticing I was already starting to sound croaky, and feeling the flames beginning to lick around the back of my mouth.

There were three classes on the ferry, first, second and third.

I couldn't quite understand the differences using my smattering of Bahasa.

But we eventually plumped for first, figuring after our ride with Rambo we needed the most luxury possible, and so tickets in hand we boarded the ferry.

If I had been smart, I would have quickly found a pharmacy and bought some throat lozenges, but I didn't, and have rarely regretted a decision more.

On the ferry it turned out that first class differed from second only in that first class was inside with an appalling Asian smash-up movie to watch, while second was upstairs and outside.

So we decided to sit outside and enjoy the calming waters and lovely sea air of Sunda while we unwound.

However, it was not to be.

For on this ferry ride we were to be afflicted, if that's the word, by a new phenomenon that would become an increasing part of our lives as we moved further away from the touristed areas.

In short, Neil and I were now (very) minor celebrities.

In the more rural areas tourists were less known and the locals would stare fascinated at us.

Neil, being blonde, particularly attracted attention.

And this first exhibited on the upstairs outside deck of the ferry.

We put our packs down and we enjoying the view when we became aware of an increasing crowd of locals, mainly young men, gathering around us.

They weren't rude, they were genuinely interested in us, and asked us the standard questions of the travellers.

"Where are you from?", "Australia", we would reply.

"Where are you going?", "Padang".

"Where have you come from?", "Jakarta".

The problem for me was, they all smoked.

So the beautiful night air was not sampled by me, only the vapours of twenty or so clove cigarettes, heating my already chainsaw painful throat.

At first I tried to answer their polite questions but it quickly became clear that my throat wasn't up to it.

Additionally, the crowd was a revolving number and once someone had asked their questions they would leave and another polite young man would come up and want to practise their English with us.

So I gave up trying to answer and left it to Neil.

However, the smoke continued to fill my airways, and my relaxing ride across the strait was not to be.

Eventually we arrived at the Sumatran side and pulled into the port of Bakauheni.

We disembarked and were wondering what to do.

Night had fallen and we needed somewhere to stay.

We couldn't find anyone obvious to ask, but it was clear that Bakauheni was a ferry port and nothing else.

We then noticed that everyone else from the ferry was marching in line toward a large car park and boarding buses.

We decided to join them, figuring that the buses were going to the nearest town and we did not want to be left hanging around the ferry terminal all night.

Unlike Rambo's death machine, these were genuine tourist coaches, 36 seaters, or thereabouts, and as I hauled my flaming throat on board I hoped for a safe comfortable ride.

However, it was not to be.

36 seats there may have been, but as ever on an Indonesian bus, this meant ninety people would be crammed in there.

When I took my seat I then discovered that the original seats had been removed and replaced with smaller seats and these were closer together.

There were two nice young Indonesians between me and the window, seated so that my left buttock stuck out into the aisle.

My knees were not just touching the seat back in front, but were positioned as though they were trying to scour out a hole in it.

So with my knees nearly touching my chin, my bum hanging out, my elbow regularly stopping my travelling companion from breathing and my throat aflame we began out journey.

If I wasn't uncomfortable enough, I quickly realised that I had ANOTHER problem.

As a young man I was a keen cricketer and played for hours on Saturday afternoon wearing cricket boots that were designed by someone who had never heard the term "orthopaedic".

The soles were sliver thin and eight spikes emerged to grip the turf as I ran about.

My home town in country NSW was undergoing prolonged drought and the fields on which I played were hard as concrete.

Thus, after some hours on my feet in these unsuitable shoes, my lower back would start to complain.

Not a sharp pain, but a dull, uncomfortable throbbing feeling of unease.

Of course I had not been playing cricket before boarding this bus, but something, possibly sitting awkwardly on the steel deck of the ferry had set off my lower back discomfort.

When playing cricket, I could always stretch, hop or run on the spot, or do things to ease this problem, but now, locked into my seat by the seat back in front and the two travellers next to me, I couldn't do anything.

I tried to shift my position, but that only aggravated my companions and didn't help my back at all.

Within twenty minutes I was gritting my teeth from the twin pains of my throat and lower back.

Within an hour I was ready to convert to Islam if that would get rid of the pain.

Adding to my already unmanageable discomfort was we didn't know where we were going, and thus didn't know how long it would be.

I've been able to use the internet mapping tools as I write this to figure that out, which was: the journey took 90 minutes from the ferry port to the regional capital of Bandur Lampung.

I can assure you that time dilation was in effect and if I had learned I was on that bus in screaming discomfort for twelve hours, I would have believed it.

Eventually, thankfully, mercifully, lights began to appear through the windows of the bus and we entered Bandur Lampung.

We pulled into the bus station and quite frankly if we had rolled up at a sulphurous pit with red flame emerging around a sign that said 'Hell', I would still have got off that bus.

The above description of the Christian netherworld is however almost prescient, as we were about to discover.

As we stood in the bus terminal, with me going into a frenetic stretching routine to ease my back, a young man came up to us and began talking in Bahasa, I brought my mind to bear on him and eventually realised that he was offering to lead us to some accommodation.

We were very thankful.

We still didn't even know what town we were in, and the thought of getting out the guide book and trying to find somewhere on our own was not to be borne, and so we loaded up and followed our guide to the hotel.

Well I say hotel, but military barracks would be closer, a prison more accurate yet.

We were still, just marginally, on the tourist trail, but we quickly realised why this hotel sent people to the bus station to get custom, if you saw it with your own eyes, you wouldn't stay there believe me.

However it was dark and we weren't able to discern what awaited us inside, and as stated we were in no position to argue.

We entered the lobby and began a dialogue with the young man behind the desk.

This tête-à-tête was another first, as he was the first hotel staff member we met who spoke no English at all.

Not a word.

My fractured Bahasa wasn't up to it, and though we both knew what we wanted, a room, we didn't have the spoken word tools to achieve it.

We both fell silent and then the young man had an idea, he waved his arms a bit in a, "Wait-here-for-a-moment-gesture", and left the room.

He returned ten minutes later with another man, and he spoke enough English to get everyone sorted out.

He translated the check-in card for us, and Neil and I filled ours in.

Then, with much thanking and some tipping in rupiah, the English speaker left, and our desk clerk led us to our room.

As soon as we opened the door, I realised I had ANOTHER problem.

Heat.

Another digression, so bear with me.

When at primary school I went on an excursion of some of the historical points of interest in our area, well, interesting to someone, but not any primary school student.

Anyway, one was a jail at the historical village of Hartley in the Blue Mountains.

It wasn't a full prison, more a pair of holding cells for the Hartley courthouse, which at the time, the early nineteenth century, was the entire structure of the law in the area.

These cells were concrete with the requisite steel bars on the windows and a plate steel roof.

We visited in summer, and the heat inside these places was truly hell-like.

Winter was no better, Hartley, in the mountains regularly records winter temperatures below zero and for any unfortunate spending a night there, winter or summer, death was a real option.

It was as if they had been built to provide torture more than just containment.

And so when Neil and I stepped into our room that night, I was immediately transported back to those cells behind the Hartley courthouse.

If I were to learn that our room had been designed by the same architect I would not have batted an eyelid.

The floor was concrete, and the "beds" were raised biers of concrete with a single sheet on them.

The walls and roof were corrugated iron.

Bandur was in on the coast, but we were far from any sea breeze here and we once more began sweating great rivulets.

With sinking heart I threw my pack on my "bed" and then we had a conference.

Neil wanted some food, but with my throat, and the remnants of my back pain still in force, I was not up for anything but being recumbent for the next ten hours.

So while he headed out to find some food, I laid out my things and began planning for sleep.

Even I who claim to be a writer can't hope to adequately describe the heat in that room, suffice it to say that it the slightest movement, breathing for instance, induced great waves of sweat to roll down my body.

With a sigh I got my rubber roll mat, laid it out on my "bed" then sat on it, ferreting in my bag for this and that.

Whilst I was doing that, I became aware I had ANOTHER problem.

Mosquitoes.

I slapped one on my arm and was aghast at the inch long swathe of blood it left.

These were tropical mosquitoes I might add, they were the size of house bricks and had stingers that could go through the corrugated iron walls of the room, or so it seemed to me.

I slapped the back of my hand, and realised I had killed two, covering my hand with blood, but then to my horror, four or five moved in to take their place.

Needless to say a quick ferret in my pack told me I was out of mozzie repellent.

But I did have a mozzie net.

So I quickly unpacked it and found to my delight, the one "luxury" appointment of my room.

A rusty nail stuck out of the tin above my head.

I was able to get my mozzie net fixed to this, and then lay it out around my sleeping area.

With alacrity I got under it and was happier for about a millisecond, till I realised I had ANOTHER problem.

Airflow.

This may be hard to believe, and I understand, I really couldn't believe it myself, but the mozzie net, thin and diaphanous though it was stopped what little cooling air there was moving about my body.

I crouched under it and considered my problem.

Eventually I lifted the tiniest, tiniest segment of the net and poked my nose out like a polar bear cub emerging from its snow den for the first time.

The mosquitoes were ready and whined down to intercept.

I took as big a noseful of air as I my long-suffering throat could stand and retreated back inside.

And so it went for the next little time, nose out, breathe, net down with a slam.

I readied my self for bed and then realised, of course, that I needed the toilet.

With a sigh of resignation and then a few deep breaths for courage, I lifted the net, emerged like a racehorse when the gates fling back and stampeded down the corridor.

I urinated into the hole in the floor that is the standard Indonesian toilet.

(The luxury ones have footprints painted next to them, showing you where to squat.)

Then as I made my way back to my room, I realised I had ANOTHER problem.

Smell.

I'll just regress here for a moment.

Remember I said that I had a few mental images of Jakarta burned forever into my brain?

One was the wheel nuts of a truck looming as I sat in the back of the bicak, well the other was scatological.

Not far from our backpackers was a full-scale, five-star modern skyscraper, with revolving doors, air-conditioning, bronze marble steps leading up to it, the lot.

It was the head office of the Negara (Country, or Rural) Bank of Indonesia, and was a centre of commerce and the hub for movements of millions of rupiah.

That's fine, but what I most remember, and always will, was that these bronze marble steps arched an open sewer and a young boy was defecating into the open drain beneath from one of these steps.

Bank workers in their suits passed by without breaking stride, and the young boy waved to passers by in the least self-conscious manner imaginable.

To me that will always stand as the image that best summed Indonesia at the time.

Horrendous wealth, cheek-by-jowl with enormous poverty.

Thus, after a short time you became inured to the open sewers and public defecation, and the smell dimmed to a dull background olfactory roar.

However, this toilet in my concrete hotel in Bandur was as fearful as they came, and as I leapt, rather than walked out of there, I was longing for my room(!) and a diminution of the smell.

I was to be sorely, sorely disappointed.

Now that I noticed it, the smell didn't diminish one iota as I repaired to my cell.

In fact, if anything, it was worse, or at the least, just as bad.

I, with great reluctance, followed my nose around the room while beating off the squadrons of mozzies and found, to my horror, that the sewer ran directly past our room, I could see it through the gap between the bottom of the tin wall and the concrete floor.

I'm guessing it had been dry in Bandur for a while, as the sewer contained raw, randomly scattered pieces of shit, and feculent pools of raw sewage.

Of course if it was the rainy season, that would have been worse, I guess, the sewer would have had liquid to move the stuff on, but that would have risen up and entered our room under the tin walls.

And now that I was aware of it, the choking sewer smell was raking my throat and sending that into new paroxysms of pain.

So I got under my mozzie net, got into the most comfortable position that my back would allow, grabbed my mozzie net and made my nasal lunges for breathable air, and waited for Neil to get back.

As I waited, I realised I had ANOTHER problem.

Noise.

I had had a lot on my mind so far, so the noise hadn't really impinged, but now that I lay there taking my shallow breaths I heard the murmur of voices from the room next door.

It wasn't loud and I was just thinking that things were pretty quiet, all things considered for an Indonesian town, when it all changed.

The door opened and suddenly the murmur became a full-scale party.

Glasses clinked, bottles were opened, cigarettes were lit and, from the sounds of it, raucous jokes were being told.

In the recording industry it is a well known trick for accentuating a singer with a weak voice to record them in a bathroom or some other hard walled room.

Something just like the room I was in.

The room next door was exactly the same and it worked a treat to accentuate the voices.

What's more, with the traditional Indonesian overcrowding, there seemed to be thirty people next door.

I began doing what I would do for longish periods that night, staring at the ceiling and begging for death.

The next morning we would see the denizens of the party next door and counted nine people.

Turned out it was six oil rig workers, off the rig for their week long break onshore and ready to party, and three prostitutes.

The three women were the voices I first heard quietly murmuring, but as the bottles were drained there shrieks of laughter joined those of the rig workers to create a real hubbub.

Then Neil returned and announced, "I could die in next few days."

"Why is that?" I replied.

"The only food I could find was one of those street carts set up next to a sewer with flies all over it and bats with their wings cut off, bleeding out."

I should say this was a common practise for food animals.

Because refrigeration was largely unknown, particularly in the poorer areas, a food vendor would cut the throat of an animal and let it slowly die to allow the body's natural immune system to preserve it for some valued hours till it was ready to be thrown in the pan.

Well that was all I really needed.

So far Neil had been a great strength to me, in my pained state, if he went down with illness we would really be in trouble.

And so the long night began.

I don't know how much I slept that night, but it was certainly not longer than a half hour at a time.

If I drifted off and rolled onto my dorsal surface my back would hurt and wake me up.

If I slept a half hour under the net, my lungs would cry out, and I would have to wake and muzzily grab a few nosefuls of air.

If neither of these things occurred, the noise next door would reach a crescendo, and we would jerk awake on our concrete beds.

The smell raged on and the mozzies massed at the fringes of our beds.

Finally dawn came and we emerged from our cell to face our NEXT problem.

Geography.

We had by now at least learned what town we were in, Bandur Lampur, but weren't quite sure how to move onward to Padang.

Padang was sufficiently far away to have no direct connection, and so we had to come up with a town midway, and hope to get a connection to that.

We consulted our maps and came up with the town of Bengkulu.

On the coast nicely midway, and just the job.

We lunged our gear onto our wracked bodies and went to the bus station.

Now we faced ANOTHER problem.

Confusion.

We quartered about and found a bus that said "Bengkulu" on the front in the destination window.

Great.

I went up to the front of the bus and asked the driver of he was going to Bengkulu, "Yes", he replied.

Double great, we would soon be moving again.

I went to confer with Neil and said, "OK, this is the one, the driver says he is going to Bengkulu".

Neil raised his eyebrows and said, "Well I just spoke with the ticket guy and he says they're not."

Just to clarify, most of the larger buses in Indonesia, and a few of the small ones on popular routes, have two staffers.

The driver and a "conductor" who haggles with passengers over fares, takes the money and runs things on board.

Impasse.

My driver versus Neil's conductor, who was telling the truth?

I turned toward the bus, which already had twenty or so passengers on board and said "Does this bus go to Bengkulu?"

"Yes", said some.

"NO", said others.

Nuts.

We repaired to the shade, sat on our packs and conferred.

Neil, who I should say was more phlegmatic than me and considerably more adventurous, wanted to just get on and see where we ended up.

I, increasingly strung out, somehow wanted things to go smoothly and mentally demanded to know where we were going before we boarded.

I really, really, didn't want to wind up in the middle of zarking nowhere in another hotel like last night.

So we bickered in the shade and whilst doing so had our problem solved for us.

The bus driver started his engine and the bus pulled out of the station.

We then further conferred.

There was really no point staying here if even buses with the place we want to go written on them can't help us, so what are we going to do?

Neil consulted his guide book and came up with an answer.

Train.

There was a station in town and since trains ran on rails, there was no way we could go wrong.

We grabbed a taxi across town to the train station and discovered, or course, that the daily train for Bengkulu had just left.

Our options were therefore, return to our hotel and come back tomorrow.

You know what I thought of that plan.

Or catch a different line north.

In retrospect, one plan we didn't consider was to go back to Bandur, find a nice hotel on the coastal side of town, enjoy a night's rest then catch the Bengkulu train in the morning.

Why? I can only think we were sleep deprived and not thinking clearly, or, we were a just a pair of idiots.

I think also somehow the goal of Padang had become like some trophy, some major feat of third world travel to be achieved and then spoken about in tourist bars to the boredom of all others.

Anyway, our choices were; the Bengkulu train which was well touristed as it ran along the southern coast of Sumatra and was considered beautifully relaxing.

The other option, to Palembang, ran across the mountainous central spine of Sumatra, and though picturesque in its own way, was well off the beaten track, and, I had no doubt, contained more places to stay like the prison of the night before.

At least we had plenty of time to make up our minds, this Palembang train didn't leave for some hours.

We once again retired to a quiet(?) corner of an Indonesian transport hub and considered our options.

And there we will leave it for this chapter, with Neil and I sitting on our backpacks in the corner of Bandur Lampung station.

And I can already hear you say, this is third world travel, why has there been no mention of galloping diarrhea?

Well it's coming, believe me.
Chapter 2 – Dawn over Palembang.

When we left things in the first chapter Neil and I were sitting on our backpacks in Bandur Lumpang station, on the southern tip of Sumatra, considering our options.

If we'd been thinking clearly, we would have gone back into Bandur, stayed overnight at a nice beachside hotel, breakfasted well and then gone to the station in time to catch the lovely coastal train via Bengkulu to Padang, our shimmering, glittering oceanside goal, halfway up the Indian ocean side of Sumatra, Indonesia's northern most island.

But as you already discerned, clear thinking is not something easily achieved when travelling in Indonesia.

If it's not the noise, if it's not the horrendously crowded buses, if it's not nights spent squatting over a hole in the concrete floor adding your faecal load to the rudimentary Indonesian sewage system, then it's any one of a thousand other impediments to tranquil thoughts.

So we discussed things and more because we were already there in the station we made the bad decision to catch the night train to Palembang.

This was an inland train, with no coastal views, but I think we just wanted to be on the move.

So we bought our tickets and retired to the corner of the station to wait.

I had thankfully bought a single volume set of all three "Lord of the Rings" books, so got it out and began reading.

Neil had "A Passage to India", and likewise began perusing its contents.

I was still feeling pretty rocky from the night spent in the prison-like hotel of the night before, and Neil wasn't too hot either, but we had all day to wait, and he had the toilet nearby, so time passed reasonably smoothly.

Actually, it was an unlooked for benefit of that all afternoon wait.

I couldn't remember the last time I had simply sat and read for hours before.

Bandur was still in touch with, if not fully on, the tourist trail and so we did catch the eye of the odd local.

They would come over to practise their English and ask the standard questions.

"Where are you going?" Padang.

"Where have you come from?" Jakarta.

Where are you from?" Australia.

And so the afternoon passed.

Around four things began to happen.

More staff appeared and began to do various tasks.

Passengers appeared and began stacking their luggage around and about.

Then a train pulled into the station.

With the best Bahasa I could manage, I that this was our train, so we found our carriage and boarded.

Backpacks up onto the overhead rack, books out.

We sat and waited.

We were looking forward to this, it was our first train.

So far most of our travel had been by road, crammed into the front seat of death-defying, eight-seater minibuses, then a ferry ride across the Sunda Strait that had been anything but relaxing, so a nice soothing train ride over the mountainous spine of Sumatra would be just what the doctor ordered.

Well that idea lasted for about three seconds.

Unlike the minibuses, whose seat booking system could best be described as anarchic and could really be simplified down to "can-another-square-millimetre-of-human-be-put-anywhere?", the train was more expensive and so to start with wasn't as crowded.

We found our assigned seats and sat in them, another first as it was the only time I could remember in Indonesia where a seat was only occupied by one person.

Eventually, diesel smoke blew and the train lumbered out of the station.

The rhythm picked up and the clickety-clack we all know so well began to soothe our ruptured souls.

But if the train wasn't overcrowded, it had an anarchy of its own.

Although the passengers all had assigned seats they quickly began to bestrew themselves about the cabin.

On the floor, on the luggage rack, you name it.

I was a little bit mystified, the most comfortable places on the train were the padded seats, but the other passengers took the first opportunity to sit or lie on something hard.

Oh, well, perhaps it was just the mind set of the country that had spent a generation under the despotic rule of Soekhano, that they now couldn't handle comfort, deeming themselves unworthy.

And I'd like to add that if my tone so far has been patronising toward the Indonesians, that is accurate, I was a very dysfunctional person with my western superior mind, but as we are about to see, Sumatra was to change that, and set me on a path to greater compassion.

But all that is ahead, for now, I watched as at least five separate card schools started up on the floor of the train.

It is well known that Asians love to gamble, and here on the floor of the night train to Palembang, that was writ large.

I watched with patronised amusement, but then as ever with this trip, a problem occurred.

The Indonesian in front of me got off his seat and sat on the floor with his legs sticking out into the aisle.

He rested on his arms splayed back behind him and in the two first fingers of his right hand was a clove cigarette.

The smoke from this was sucked, in beautifully efficient fashion, under the seat in front of me, up past my face and out the window which I had partially open to enjoy(?) the night air.

My throat was a little better and had improved from the rusty chainsaw stage, but was still crackly and this acrid smoke, now set it off again.

I wanted to say to this guy, could you put your cigarette in your other hand, but my Bahasa wasn't up to it, and anyway, now that I looked around, as usual every single person in that carriage, including Neil, was smoking.

With a sigh I resigned myself to my fate and opened the window a little further.

This however, had little or no effect, and soon after I closed it down to a small aperture again.

And I'll tell you why.

One of the best physics lessons I ever saw, was not at college, but occurred on the school bus one afternoon on my way home from Kelso High.

An older tougher boy, and I can assure you, nearly everyone was tougher and cooler than me, named John Markwick was sitting about halfway along the bus and smoking a cigarette.

He finished his fag and threw the butt out the window.

Due to Bernoulli's principle the butt travelled down the outside of the bus, level with the smaller upper windows and re-entered via an open window near the rear and hit another older boy, Greg Cole on the side of the neck.

We were all a little astonished, but there you go, physics rules.

And so on this train, everyone who finished a fag, threw the butt out the window, and if it was bad enough taking in the smoke, I deffo didn't want to take a full butt down the windpipe at train velocity while craning my neck out to get some fresh air.

The conductor began to circulate, and for about half a millisecond I thought he would tell everyone to get up off the floor, stop smoking and possibly to stop gambling as well, but far from that, he stopped and chatted with one group, accepted a cigarette, then stopped and played a few hands.

Neil didn't help by maintaining a perfectly serene and content demeanour, while I was going out of my tiny mind.

Including our last night in sweaty, smog ridden Jakarta, this had "third-night-without-sleep" written all over it.

So with throat scratching and eyes smarting I sat and tried to meditate in the smoke filled carriage as the train rattled on threw the night.

I'm guessing I must have gotten some sleep, but that was like the night before in the prison like hotel in Bandur, snatched here and there for five and ten minutes, jerking awake as the weight of my head grabbed at my neck ligaments.

The train stopped occasionally and the population of the carriage revolved, the only real sign of this was the numbers at the different card schools went up and down.

I'm guessing that most were regular travellers on this line, as they merged seamlessly with the game as if they had been playing since the train left Bandur.

But eventually the train rumbled down out of the hills into Palembang.

The card games disbanded, people picked up their baggage, chickens included, and disembarked.

Station staff scurried about doing end-of-journey tasks and the station at Palembang slowly emptied.

The passengers began to walk or ride buses into town, the staff completed their duties and returned to their various nooks, probably, to judge from the conductor's behaviour on the train, to finish their card games and slowly quiet, then silence fell.

Neil and I humped our backpacks down the train steps and stood on the concourse.

Dawn was breaking over the town and there is something indescribably beautiful in a palm tree dawn.

Additionally, it was the quietest moment I could recall since we had got off the plane at Kuta Beach in Bali, the start of our Indonesian jaunt.

Despite all my troubles and tribulations, I remember thinking that to see this dawn, in the metallic quiet of the Victorian era station in the mountains of Sumatra, made it all worthwhile.

So captivated was I by this that I turned to Neil, stretching beside me, to say words along these lines, when without warning liquid diahorrea burst forth, ran down the inside of my leg and pooled in my left sock and boot.

I should have known that Indonesia wouldn't provide beauty without a complication.

Too say I was gob smacked is to entirely understate the effect of this faecal visitation had on me.

I stared down at the last dribbles as they oozed over my sock top.

Neil, was rolling, then lighting a cigarette, and had no idea.

Eventually, I stopped staring down and began to think what to do about this.

I didn't want o move in case that spread my affliction around, and the last thing I wanted was to be standing on train platform in Sumatra with liquid dynamic lifter pooling in ever increasing circles around my feet.

So I turned to Neil, instead of something lyrical about the tropical mountain dawn, I instead had to say, "Neil, could you get some toilet paper please? I've just had an accident."

He turned to me in surprise.

As I say, the whole event had caught me by surprise, so he obviously had no idea.

Even the smell, was no indicator, swallowed as all bad smells are by the background E coli count of Indonesia.

He turned and was about to speak, but I just pointed at my stained sock.

He got the message, moved away with his back pack and then had a quick search, found the paper, handed the roll to me, then stood back.

But having done that, I was now uncertain what to do next.

Undressing seemed the next step, and those who know me well will tell you that although most of my time at uni was spent undressing in public and displaying the broad, panoramic spectre of my arse to the world.

It was less well known that sober I was massively introverted and becoming voluntarily naked in the middle of a, thankfully, deserted train station was not overly desirable.

I asked Neil if he could see a toilet anywhere, he had a quick look, but none was obvious, but he did rouse a passer-by to my predicament and he, the passer-by, came over and began trying to communicate something to me.

Once again my Bahasa wasn't really up to it.

And quite frankly, I was hardly in the best physical or mental shape to bring my mind to bear on translation at this point.

But I did my best to focus, "Mandi?" he kept saying, pointing to me and repeating, in a questioning fashion, "Mandi?"

He said it a few more times, and slowly, a bell began tinkling at the back of my mind, 'where had I heard that expression before?' I thought to myself.

Then I remembered, a Balinese man had said it, when we were on the beach there.

He had said it, then gone into the ocean, and began to..., what had he done? THAT'S RIGHT!, he had washed himself in the waters of the Bali sea.

I realised what our friendly Palembangian, (if that's the word) was trying to tell/ask me, "Did I want to wash?"

"Yes", I said.

Now I saw that he had been making rubbing motions to along his arms and legs and realised he had been miming having a wash.

"Yes, yes", I repeated, "Mandi".

"Where?" I asked him in Bahasa, motioning around about me, "Where can I Mandi?"

He then led me to a horse trough.

There were still plenty of these about, whether they had been built for horses to drink out of, or were purpose built for humans to wash in, I do not know, but either way, it was my only option.

But as I looked into it, I began a desperate mental search for another, ANY, other option.

Foul trolls had built that thing with the clearly stated goal to spread diphtheria and cholera.

There was water in it, actually, I'm guessing once it had been water, pure, liquid, silver drops that had fallen from the pristine heavens onto the mountain redoubt of Palembang, but now I wasn't sure if it was water anymore.

Black it was, I could see my reflection clearly in it, oil looked like this.

But I really had no option.

I took off my foetid shorts, socks and boots.

I threw away my shorts and socks, but had to take my boots in and wash them as best I could.

I took my t-shirt off as well, it wasn't dirty from the accident, but since my nether regions were exposed I decided I might as well go the entire pig, and wash all of me.

Neil handed me some soap with extended fingers, if he had had surgical tongs he would have used them, and I did my best.

I didn't stay in there long, apart from the colour, the consistency was more like goulage than soup, and I was starting to believe that every drop of whatever lurked at the bottom of this horse trough was increasing my filth load, rather than removing it.

So with a rudimentary clean at best, I declared my Mandi over and got out of the horse trough.

I handed the soap to Neil, but he said "keep it" and so I stuck it in my backpack, got out some clean clothes, put them on and declared myself ready for the next hurdle.

Moving on from Palembang.

We were as ever uncertain and so cast about for some help and found it quickly.

A young boy, ten or twelve years old was passing by the station and we made ourselves sort of clear that we wanted to go north from town.

He grinned the mile-wide smile of happiness that he could help and led us away from the station.

Neil stayed conspicuously upwind of me, and I don't blame him.

The boy took my hand and we walked like lovers into town.

I should say, this was quite a common site in Indonesia, often fully grown males would walk like this, I was still quite homophobic and struggled whenever I saw it, but since our small guide seemed to know what we wanted and where to get it, I held on quite happily and we hiked into town.

Life was coming onto the streets in the traditional zero-to-a-hundred fashion of Indonesian cities and we were soon encompassed by the full throated roar of Palembang.

Eventually we arrived at a sort of green square and our young guide gestured toward a shop front.

It looked like all the others in the square, but we couldn't make out from the signs in Bahasa, what it traded in.

Then our young guide gestured that he had to go and left.

And so once again our travels came to a halt while we tried to figure out why he had brought us there.

While we debated a crowd gathered.

I have mentioned previously that we were becoming minor celebrities, particularly Neil with his blonde hair, and now we were well off the tourist trail we began to stand out like certain parts of a male canine's anatomy.

All the tourists with an ounce of sense and who had done the minorest bit of planning, took the coast train to Bengkulu, then on to Padang, but here in the mountainous heart of Sumatra, we were well away from all that, and in all probability the first tourists that had come there for some time.

So, while we debated, a crowd gathered and when I eventually deigned to notice the commoners, there were nearly a hundred Sumatrans sitting and standing around just staring at us and giggling behind their hands.

So I decided to make use of our notoriety and began to ask if anyone spoke English.

Soon an orderly queue had gathered, almost as if I had advertised a position as guide and translator, fixer, journos call it, and they were all hoping for the job.

But here again being off the tourist trail counted for us and against us.

Although there were many people here staring at us, not many spoke English better than my halting Bahasa.

I didn't help by saying "Padang?" over and over.

Palembang was nowhere near that city and wasn't connected to it by any transport link.

But we persevered and eventually we got someone who seemed to understand from my woefully inadequate mumblings what we wanted.

He then gave a great grin and waved his hands and led me by the hand to the shop that our young friend had earlier indicated.

I went in and realised what both friends had been trying to say.

It was a travel agent.

Hale-fucking-lulagh.

The young man behind the desk again didn't speak much English, but we got out our guide book and pointed to Padang, and he nodded and went into action.

He shuffled papers, looked up things and then began writing.

I didn't really know what he was doing, but did what we were doing a lot of these days, hoped for the best.

Eventually, he finished what he was doing and held out two slips of pinkish paper.

Tickets.

He then held out his hand in a world renowned gesture, obviously asking for money, and I said one of the few phrases of Bahasa that I was fluent at, "How much?"

But even then I'd like to provide a travel tip for others.

Learning the local language is a good thing to do, but it's no good knowing how to ask a question if you cannot understand the answer.

I'd been caught before like this, commonly when asking "where is the nearest backpackers?", only to have my interlocutor rattle of a stream of Bahasa that left me floundering after the third word.

I scratched my head, we did want the tickets, but was this a situation where we had to haggle?

If so we were in big trouble as my language skills, and Neil's less so, weren't up to it.

Or, was this a standard price, as our train and ferry tickets had been?

Either way, we needed a new, non-verbal solution.

I massaged my forehead and then did what I should have done in the first place, looked at the ticket.

I checked closely, but if the price was on it, it wasn't visible.

Impasse.

I then did have a good idea, I made a gesture toward the travel agent guy like I was asking for the bill in a restaurant, writing in the air with my left hand on my right palm.

He understood, got out a pen and wrote the price down.

Thankfully we fell on it and got our rupiah out and paid.

Then with much bowing and thank yous ("Terimah Kasi"), we backed out of his store.

Having done that we were now faced with a new problem, what were these tickets for?

They were almost certainly not for the train, as Palembang was the end of the mountain line, and the only trains out of town went back to Bandur.

We guessed they were for the bus, but if so where did we get that?

Luckily our crowd was still with us, so I showed the tickets to those in the front row and made what was becoming an incredibly useful, "Where?", sort of gesture.

The crowd members at the front read our tickets avidly and then made various, "come with us" gestures and we, and about twenty of our followers moved off.

As we walked I remember thinking that we only needed a couple of tumbling acrobats out front and some elephants in gold trim to mimic a procession as of some colonial governor of old arriving to take up his position as ruler of the savage land centred upon Palembang.

Thankfully the walk wasn't a long one, although as usual within an hour of dawn in that area, carrying a full backpack for three minutes led to the sort of sweating that would task even ten litres of Gatorade to replenish.

As we processed, shopkeepers and stallholders would ask the Indonesian members of our troupe what they were doing and they replied in the local tongue.

What they were actually saying of course we didn't know, but assumably something along the lines of "we are taking these lost giants where they want to go."

Eventually we arrived.

The bus station.

Well, that was a reasonable guess, but now we faced another hurdle.

Presumably our tickets were therefore for a bus, but which one?

Neil and I re-examined them and there was no 'Padang' on them, but it did say 'Jambi'.

Our followers gestured inside and then began to move off, we thanked them in Bahasa and then went inside.

I might add that another of my reprehensible character traits at the time was that I was a cheapskate.

And I should have handed out some rupiah to our jolly friends for their help.

But learning not to be tight with money was something else that I sadly wasn't to even begin learning for another twenty years.

Anyway, inside the bus station it was the usual anarchy, with the additional problem that no one even spoke rudimentary English.

We solved the problem by showing our tickets to anyone who would take an interest and were slowly gestured toward an empty part of the bus station.

This was a facer, why did they send us here?

We put down our backpacks and considered the problem.

Eventually Neil hit on the answer.

"Does it say what time this bus goes?"

I re-examined the ticket.

It didn't, but then no Indonesian bus, and certainly not one out here off the tourist trail, runs to a timed schedule, when it is crammed full, it goes.

But Neil had come up with the answer, our tickets were for a bus that didn't leave for some time, and presumably, when it did start to get organised, it would do so from this section of the bus station.

So we sat on our backpacks and waited.

Neil ate some food, but I wasn't hungry.

After my throat and now with incipient dysentery stalking my moves, food was the last thing I felt like.

A shower, ten beers and a long rest would have top of my list, but since they weren't on the menu, I dozed while I waited.

Not too long though, which was nice.

Eventually the area around us began to exhibit a quickening of tempo.

Locals came and gathered then a bus arrived and parked nearby.

There was no name on the front that I recall, but when the driver and his offsider got out and began animated conversations with the locals, I shouldered my way through and showed our tickets.

The driver nodded and said something incomprehensible to me, but it was clearly our bus.

I don't remember that particular bus trip, it was 25 years ago, the next thing I remember is being in Jambi, and so I'll move things along to there.

I've checked the mapping website and it lists the road journey from Palembang to Jambi as 4 ½ hours, which tallies with my memory in this way.

We certainly got off the train at dawn, I remember that well, and the horse trough aftermath (likewise, clearly, I'll never forget that!).

I remember the crowd around us in the square in the morning sunlight, so I'll conjecture we caught the bus at lunchtime or thereabouts, rode it for six hours and arrived in Jambi near or just after dusk.

This would fit because we stayed the night there.

I might add, I was kind of concerned all day as from the moment we got off the train, through the interaction with the travel agent, followed by the walk through town with our friends, then in the bus station, we didn't know where we were going.

We certainly weren't going to Padang.

We were basically hoping that wherever we were going, and however we did it, that we were moving closer to Padang in some form.

Rather like a bad pool player who moves their ball closer to the hole each shot, till eventually they can pot it.

So dusk, and Jambi.

I remember without having to look up the guide book, the description of that town as if I had read it yesterday.

"There's not much to be said for this pleasant riverine town, it's just there."

We had to take this as read as we couldn't see much as night was falling and we weren't there to sightsee, it was merely a stopover.

We likewise weren't in any mood to hotel hunt, and so allowed to most vigorous of the touts at the bus station to guide us to a nearby hotel and checked in.

So since we didn't do much in Jambi except stay overnight, I'll report something I read there.

If Jambi has any tourist activities at all it is mountain trekking.

And each trek company has a book that tourists can write down their thoughts about what they experienced and the best (possibly in history) was written by a group of Australians at the end of a five day hike.

They described "bad food, rain that knocked you flat, insects the size of tractors in your tent and a guide who wore an enraging smile for the whole five days having lunged his length into a blonde kraut trollop the night before we left."

Our hotel for the night was a nice rural domicile, not opulent, but clean and since it ran to three floors, well aerated.

I actually got a good night's sleep there, which was important because if you include our last night in Jakarta, tossing and turning in the sweaty backpackers there, it would have been my third night with little or no sleep, but even that was obliterated in the end because as we slept war was declared.

When I awoke it was to the sound of artillery going off everywhere in the traditional pre-skirmish barrage.

I arose from my bed as if one of those shells had landed under it and ran to the window.

But the vista wasn't as I expected, hundreds of Indonesians marching to and fro firing rifles and trying to overthrow the government.

The streets weren't red with blood of hated oppressors and slogans of revolution weren't being daubed on walls to urge the populace to revolt.

No.

It was raining.

Many before, and surely many after me, will try to describe rain in the tropics, but nothing can really portray the all-encompassing aural assault.

Our hotel was roofed with gal iron and of course was not insulated with pink bats for heat and noise suppression, and the rain in Jambi fell upon it and made a noise like Satan had given a drum kit to each of his demons and they had all come around to rehearse on the hotel roof.

I panicked.

Why?

Well again as I look back from a vantage of 20 years I realize now that I was becoming seriously unhinged.

If you read the first chapter of this tale, you may recall that just two nights ago I had a near death experience in which I nearly drowned off Java, I think the shock went deeper than I realized.

This was followed by virtually no sleep and two ailments, throat and digestive tract, destabilising what little equanimity I had left.

And I'll tell you this for nuthin'.

I DID NOT WANT TO BE TRAPPED FOR AN INDETERMINATE PERIOD IN JAMBI.

As I've written, I had nothing against the town, but I didn't want to be trapped in the middle of nowhere, with my stomach loosening and not being able to communicate with the doctor (if we could find one).

So I leapt to my pack, packed it in record time, raced out to get Neil, then stopped in my tracks.

He was sitting, smoking a fag, serenely looking out the window at the waterscape that had enveloped the town.

I, in a panicked tone, said "C"MON, WE"VE GOT TO GO!"

And I have to hand it to him, then and now, he has always been able to keep his cool, he turned to me and said, "Why?", then blew a slow stream of smoke out his nostrils.

I'll stop writing in capitals now as it is annoying for the reader, but take it from me, everything I said that morning was in a loud, racing, panicked tone.

"It's obviously going to flood, we've got to get out of town before the river rises, plus we don't know where to go to next, and we have to find the bus station, then we've got to buy our tickets...," I railed on for some while.

Neil, to his credit, saw what I would take 25 years to see, that I was panicking and becoming deranged, and so agreed to pack and we would head for the bus station and move on.

He then gave me one of his Lomotil's, a medicine for diahorrea, which was vital for another day being bounced around in the back of a bus, and helped me calm down by getting ready quickly.

He even forwent his breakfast as I recall, which only those who know him well will realize what a sacrifice this was.

Neil, had, possibly still has, the mightiest appetite that I've ever seen.

He has won two eating contests that I know of.

One was at a party late at night after it had begun to die down.

Much pot had been smoked and Andrew, another friend from uni, who witnessed it, described things for me.

"What they did", said Andrew, "was sit down in front of the fridge and had a bet on who could eat the most.

The rules were that they wouldn't shut the fridge door until there was no food left.

It was pathetic really, the young woman he was eating against was full after 20 minutes.

But Neil was still sitting there when I went to bed."

So forgoing his breakfast was something I appreciated.

Also, and literally, thanks be to the heavens above, the rain had stopped.

And as we made our way through the streets back to the point where our bus had dropped us the night before, steam rose from the streets and soon the sky was blue and we were sweating again.

Life in the tropics all right.

We then went through the usual rigmarole at the bus station but things were starting to go our way slightly.

From Jambi, although there was no direct connection, the name Padang, was not unknown.

So we paid our rupiah, got our tickets and took our seats in another bus.

And now, get ready, because you are about to read something that I strongly suspect has never been written before, and will possibly never be written again.

We boarded the bus, which we learned was taking us to the town of Solok, a mere hour from Padang.

The driver started her up and headed out onto another mountain road and soon we were switch backing our way over mountain passes along a narrow two lane mountain road.

This was another 18-seater, mid-size tourist coach, and so Neil and I were put on the back bench seat as the only place we would fit.

I was right in the middle and so had no seat back in front of me, and had to hold on to the seat backs on either side of the aisle, one in each hand.

And here it is.

The problem I had was that the bus wasn't crowded enough.

Never heard that before, huh?

I had too much room, and longed for ten or so Indonesians to be wedged in next to me to stop me sliding around on the slippery, sweat-soaked plastic seat.

Each time we began a climb I would be slid backward and each hillcrest saw the bus pitch forward and I would have to grab the seat backs hard and brace myself to stop me sliding down the aisle all the way to the front.

Additionally, I was already fully clenched in the buttock area as I couldn't imagine the embarrassment of having another "Palembang-station-incident" on the bus and having..., well you can see what I mean, I won't describe fully the outcome that would have followed from that.

And so the day wore on, we climbed, then we descended, we climbed, we descended.

This went on for hours.

Once again I've checked the mapping software, and it lists Jambi to Solok as four and a half hours.

I can assure you it seemed like forever we were traversing those hills.

But eventually we came to a flatter area and to the delight of my buttocks we began a smoothish run into Solok.

Then things began to go our way at last.

We arrived in Solok and debussed into another diesel-fume-soaked bus station.

We found that we were in the shadows of the post, and not only was the name Padang part of the talk here, but we had reconnected to the tourist trail and so many of the station staff spoke good English.

Not only that, but there was a bus to Padang every hour and the next one was leaving quite soon.

With a relief that I still list as among the greatest of my life we bought our tickets and boarded our last bus.

It was till early afternoon and the next thing I recall was riding through the streets of Padang in the sunlight.

Slowly the bus emptied at various stops and eventually the conductor fellow came back and said, "Dimana turun?" (Where do you want to get off?)

I replied, "Youth Hostel" in a questioning tone, he nodded and went back to speak to the bus driver.

Slowly the bus emptied and then we were the only ones on board.

Finally the bus pulled up outside a tourist hotel and the conductor gestured to us.

We thanked him and the driver, and got off.

I don't know if the bus was scheduled to stop there, probably not, like having no timetable, Indonesians buses have no set routes, and they had courteously driven us to the nearest suitable hotel.

The bus pulled away, and we went inside.

We checked in and having thrown our packs on the bed, went back out and walked the hundred or so metres to the ocean.

So Neil and I finally stood on the Indian Ocean coast of Sumatra and stared out to sea.

The mapping software listed our journey, all going well, as 26 hours.

It had taken us nearly four days (96 hours) and nearly did for me, physically and mentally.

But now new feelings were beginning to steal over me, like dimmest, reflected starlight revealing a shape in the night.

What was happening?

Well I'll start with a rather bizarre digression, which I hope will help show what was going on.

I have never watched a lot of Star Trek, indeed most of my interaction with the show has been through secondary spoof sources, sending up the essential ridiculous nature of the show.

A writer to Viz probably put it best when he wrote: "TOP TIP: Star trek captains.

Always do the last ditch, million-to-one shot idea to save the Enterprise first, as it is the only one that ever works."

But enlightenment can be found in the most unlikely places, even in Star Trek, and so here it is.

Whenever the crew of the Enterprise were in deep space and came under attack from the Stillettan Armour Fiends of Stitterax, the hostile aliens would begin to pound the Enterprise with their laser cannons and they crew would put up the deflector shields to reduce the damage of the bombardment.

Sooner, rather than later, the captain, Kirk, would radio down to Mr Scott in the engine room and say, "Mr Scott, stop all non-essentials and divert power to the deflector shields."

Scotty would then reply, "I'm giving you all I've got captain.

If you want more you'll have to stop the engines, or shut down life support."

Or something of that nature, then they would go on to do the last ditch thing, whatever it was, to reverse thrust fire or something, blow up the Armour Fiends, and move on through space.

Well, like that scenario from science fiction, that four day journey from Jakarta to Padang, threw up the same choice inside my head.

So taxing was the trip with sickness, tiredness and all the rest that eventually my emotional engine room sent the same signal back to the bridge, "Lachlan, we don't have enough energy to keep up your emotional shields.

You have to decide what you want to keep doing, either keep your emotional shields in place, or stop travelling and get some rest, you can't do both."

I had come to Indonesia from a very privileged, white bread, comfortable existence in Australia.

I don't know what I expected from Indonesia, but in retrospect, I wanted to maintain control, and mostly keep up my emotional deflector shields, so that I could present the image I wanted the world to see.

I wanted buses on timetable with set routes.

I wanted taxis to come as the second hand was ticking up to twelve.

I wanted access to 24-hour health care.

I wanted brilliantly lit, sparkling clean bathrooms with crystal clear fresh water taking my waste away to the latest high tech sewage treatment facilities.

I wanted people to speak English on demand.

I wanted everyone to put their cigarette out as courtesy to me because my throat was sore.

This list of wants could go on interminably.

So the question you naturally want to ask is, "Well, why did you go there?"

And that is a good question that I find it hard to answer even now, 20 years later.

I went to "go travelling".

But what does that mean?

I found the mechanics of travelling in the third world were nothing but painful, so the actual "travelling" part was something I detested.

I don't like sightseeing much, then as now, so I wasn't there to see the buildings or experience the culture.

While I was there I was to learn and come to understand the acronym that anyone more self-reflective than I would have told me that it was time to stop travelling, "NAFT".

Not.Another.Fucking.Temple.

I didn't surf then, and that is the major reason that most Australians go to Indonesia, so I wasn't doing that.

Thus, why was I there?

The original plan I'd made with Neil was to go to Indo and then across to Malaysia and the Asian mainland, up through Burma to India, across that and off to England, where I was to take up my newly minted teaching career.

But now as I stood in the dusk on the shores of the Indian ocean I realized more third world travelling was the last thing I wanted to do.

And so to the questions asked me by the two Dutch nurses at the beginning of this story.

Again, looking back it was the first time I came to understand that psychology, while not a hard science like chemistry and physics, was indeed real, and more real than I could imagine.

My parents' attitude to psychologists and psychiatrists was that they were all madder than the people they saw, and that only fools and weaklings go to counselling.

So I had come to a man's estate thinking I was a strong powerfully-minded individual who didn't need any help and knew everything.

So it was with some surprise that I found my first encounter with the invisible part of my own mind a disturbing experience.

So to recap, here are the questions and my answers, which even as I contemplate writing down for you all to see, I can hardly help but cry out in anguish at the pretentiousness and arrogance of my 27-year-old self.

What is your favourite animal? Taipan.

This animal represents how you interact with other people.

What is your second favourite animal? Dolphin.

This animal is how you would like to be seen by other people.

What is your favourite drink? (Cringe) I said the first cold beer you have after winning a rugby match.

This drink represents how you like sex.

Sadly, this shows I saw it as a prize, a conquest, something to be grabbed and consumed in riotous fashion.

Picture a box, what it is made of and what is inside it.

(Double, triple cringe), I said a shoe box with a pair of rugby boots in it.

Describe the ocean in three words.

I said "Big, scary, waves." This answer is how you see life.

Clearly, I saw life as pretty frightening, which was directly contraindicated by my answer to the last question, which was:

Describe how you would travel across the ocean from one island to another.

Money is no object, and the laws of physics need not apply.

I said, "I would like to windsurf in a straight line on a flat calm ocean."

Indicating that I wanted to travel through life with no hiccups or problems whatever.

These questions are unlikely to be found in any clinical psych text, I feel they would be described as potted psychology at best, but I found them stunningly, blisteringly, accurate.

The two questions related to rugby, embarrassing though it is for me to relate, were perhaps the most.

Before Neil and I had left Australia I had changed from my standard winter sporting fare of soccer to rugby, and had finally broken away from my mother's stern injunction that I wasn't allowed to play rugby because only uncouth yobbos played that and had taken up the game with a passion.

And indeed, I realized that I didn't want to see another temple, I wanted to get to London, open my shoebox, pull on my boots and start flying into tackles and running with an egg shaped ball under my arm on the green sward.

I think the only thing I can lay credit to on that dusk in Padang was recognizing my feelings and giving weight to them.

In retrospect it was the first time in my life that I had understood that my parents were wrong about something, psychology was important, and I did have feelings and desires, and it was time to start looking at them.

I didn't announce to Neil that our joint travelling was finished there on the beach at Padang, but it was coming.

I might add, Padang was already notorious as one of the few, possibly the only, beach resort on Earth, where swimming was banned.

When we went down to the ocean I had thought 'how bad could it be?'.

But as soon as we got there I understood why, the shore break, just ten metres from where Neil and I eventually came to a halt to watch, crashed down on the sand from three metres.

The sound and vibration of that murderous shore break was genuinely frightening to behold.

Contemplating that I had thought it would make the most perfect end to my story: "So after four days of travelling hell, we stood on the sand by an ocean you couldn't swim in.

Just fucking perfect."

Beautiful.

But then I changed my mind, that ending continues with my patronising attitude toward Indonesia and the Indonesians.

Now my ending for this stanza is; I'd like to think even better for describing what was occurring inside my head, and is: In the end, my journey was just beginning.
Chapter 3 - Sumatra Sideways.

I don't remember a lot of the top of Sumatra, the things I do remember come in patches, so I'll relate them where relevant.

I think the reason for this is that something I learned later in life during a Permaculture gardening course of all things.

To wit: we remember things better if we are in pain when we learn them.

Strange, but I believe, true.

The example given by my teacher was that of the Maori body and face tattoos.

These tattoos were traditionally carved into them while telling them things they really needed to know, when the salmon run, how to catch a moa etc.

And I think this is why my memory was kind of in and out for the next period.

The previous two chapters related to one nightmare trip, and I was able to put it all down on paper twenty years later with hardly a pause, largely I think because I was in some kind of pain for the whole of it.

So our arrival in Padang did signal a change in pressure, and therefore mental state, for me and Neil.

We relaxed by the beach and did the "we-are-now-off-the-road" things that backpackers have to do, washing clothes, finding the bar, things like that.

While there we met some other travellers, an Irish woman called Win, and two Americans, Gunther and John, both doctors who had studied at UCLA.

Win was a lovely person and filled a stereotype as she wasn't the most attractive woman.

However, I immediately liked her and looking back, am pleased that I didn't demonstrate the shallowness, which I saw on that Asia trail a lot, of only talking to attractive women.

Gunther was always being asked if he was German, and this was because he was the archetypal Teutonic look, blonde hair cut in a crew, a handlebar moustache and pale blue eyes.

However, he spoke with a classic California accent where he had lived since the age of two, when his Austrian parents had emigrated there.

John was likewise from California, but looked like an Englishman, for no reason I can lay down in words, but be assured that if he had pulled a grey suit and bowler hat out of his backpack he would have fitted in on the Bakerloo line as if he was born in Surrey.

I think the main reason I remember Win so well was that she was the first person I met, possibly ever, who listened during an argument and admitted when she was wrong.

Neil and I, certainly me, with our degrees fresh about our shoulders, thought we knew it all, and so this behaviour from Win was a revelation.

My inability to admit I was wrong stems largely from my childhood, were I would be beaten and screamed at if I made a mistake, and so this was part of my persona, to always be right, and if wrong, make sure that no one damn well knew it.

The five of us were discussing Asia in general and thus, almost inevitably, the topic of overpopulation came up.

Win was an Irish catholic and though not overly devout, still had the spurs of that religion's barbarous mind control jabbing her consciousness.

Gunther contended that the problems of overpopulation would never really be tackled till the catholic church was removed from influencing the world's politics.

Win countered that you can't just blame the catholic church, and Gunther agreed, but then added that, "not only overpopulation, but HIV could be tackled effectively if condoms were widely distributed without stigma throughout Asia and Africa".

Win said "Aren't they?"

And Gunther said "not really, because the catholic church has told everyone they can't use a condom."

Win said "surely that can't be true?"

Whereas Gunther went on to say, in a somewhat exasperated tone, "well the first bloody thing the pope said when he got off the plane in Ghana was 'Don't use condoms'".

To which Win said, "Oh, well, that's pretty clear.

I guess the [catholic] church does has a lot to answer for".

A simple thing, I'm sure you'd agree, but it was the first time I heard someone change their view during an argument when someone else presented a fact.

It was a lesson that I would sadly take another twenty years to absorb.

Having said that, I think also it was part of the process I mentioned at the tail of the last chapter where the trip was changing my mental state, to a less arrogant arsehole.

And the fact that I even noted Win's change of argumentative direction, shows part of the process.

Mind you no one likes to be wrong, and this was best demonstrated to me by an SBS show called 'Life Support'.

It was a simply superb send-up of those 'life style' shows and one of the characters on it was a well dodgy South African doctor called Rudy.

"Have you ever been embarrassed", said Rudy, "at a dinner party because someone else is better informed, and more articulate than you?

"Well here's the solution, sleep with his wife.

"Then next time it happens, you just wait till he's finished putting you down, then say, 'yeah, well I've slept with your wife.'

"Of course, considering the behaviour of most middle class couples on the dinner party circuit, there's some chance that he's slept with your wife, if this happens, sleep with his daughter as well, just to be sure."

Anyway, enough of that, none of us like to be wrong, and there are many reasons for that, but I still admire Win for being able to admit it.

We had a good time in Padang, we hung with John, Gunther and Win, recharged our batteries, and planned out next move.

My stomach and throat recovered (slowly), probably due to the fresh ocean air and not having to sleep next to an open sewer, and slowly the memory of the four days of hell getting there receded.

We, Neil, John, Gunther and I, decided to head for Medan on the East coast of Sumatra and catch a ferry to Malaysia.

This was a journey diagonally across the top of the island and somewhat to my surprise when I went to the mapping software it gave me this message:

"We could not calculate directions between Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia and Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia."

Why this should be so, I really can't say, but I strongly suspect that it's because we were now about to traverse the real backwoods of Indonesia and that's saying something.

So we boarded a bus and the headed for our first stop, Lake Toba.

This was one of the most beautiful places we stayed in our whole time in Sumatra.

Mt Toba is an (we fervently hoped) extinct volcano, and our accommodation was on a large island in the lake, which in itself formed a large puddle at the bottom of the caldera.

There was a jetty coming out from the deck below our room and we were able to watch the sun come up over the volcano rim from our beds.

It was everything we had come to Indonesia for.

Also I remember it was the cheapest place we stayed, something that called to my skinflint soul.

Our rooms were 1000 (A$0.10) rupiah a night, compared with the most expensive, 19,000 in Kuta Beach, Bali.

So I was happy again.

The next morning we then had one of the most enjoyable adventures of our whole stay.

We rented push bikes and circled the island.

The island we were staying on was about twenty k long and this fits with my memory as we rode all day around the circumference, approx 50 or 60 k.

And the thing I most remember is defying the laws of thermodynamics.

As the ride went on I got faster and faster.

At 28 I was reasonably fit, and with my illnesses receding I felt good for the first time in a long time.

Plus, I think it was some sort of tension release from twelve long weeks of doing nothing but being stressed over late or non-existent buses, which were overcrowded when they came, not understanding the language well, being ill, all of it was released in a day long ride of increasing euphoria.

There was only one road on the island and not a lot of traffic (another first for Indonesia) and we just rode.

With the green waters of the lake on one side, the spike of a mini-mountain on the other, we really felt we were flying over the surface of the lake.

My legs flew on the pedals and with each k that disappeared under my wheels I felt better and better.

But even then my inability to care about anyone else caused a problem.

John and Gunther had set off with us on the bike ride, but within a short period of time only Neil was within touching distance and it wasn't till later that evening that we found out what happened to Gunther and John.

From the start John's bike had been playing up, and after a few Ks one of the pedals began rattling then came off.

So he and Gunther, who had stayed with him, walked their bikes into a village and asked if there was anyone there who could fix it.

The villagers pointed them toward a little mechanic's workshop at the top of the village and they went in, showed the grease-stained man inside the errant pedal and asked if he could fix it.

He nodded and then began fiddling with the bike.

After a period John and Gunther realized that he didn't have a replacement pedal and was trying to fix the broken one back to the stem.

Then a further time later he began shaking his head and they realized he couldn't fix it.

So they went to push the bike outside and try to find somewhere else that may have a solution, but then the guy became somewhat agitated, grabbed the handlebars, and tried to stop John taking the bike away.

An argument ensued and eventually John and Gunther understood that although he hadn't been able to fix the bike, he still wanted to be paid for the time he had spent working on it.

That then led to an increasingly acrimonious exchange between the three of them and finally John wrested the bike from their erstwhile mechanic and began to walk away.

The mechanic then went back inside, grabbed a large machete and returned waving it threateningly at the two of them.

John and Gunther then did what they probably should have done in the first place, paid him some rupiah, and walked away.

Having said that it is difficult to know when to negotiate in the third world over money.

It is important not to pay too much, as respect in two directions is on the line, but likewise, don't pay to little, as that equally shows a lack of respect toward the vendor.

Anyway, with that sorted out, they still had a non-functioning bike, and Neil and I were by this time a long way away.

They asked around but couldn't find an answer, so in the end poor John had to push his bike back home the five or so Ks we had already ridden.

That night we caught up for dinner and heard their tale and were generally happy we were leaving the little island tomorrow.

Islands are by their nature insular, and none of us wanted the machete waving mechanic's relatives visiting us and asking for more cash.

So the next morning we caught the bus onward toward Medan.

Again my snapshot like memory is unclear how far we travelled each step of the journey, but I do remember Neil and I on mopeds, so I'll just broach that topic a little.

Whether we used them to go forward in our trip, or if we rented them to make some sort of circular day trip, I'm not sure, but I favour the latter, as by its very nature renting a moped means that you have to return it, so I think it was some sort of sidebar day trip.

I mention this because if life was dangerous enough on Indonesian roads when being driven around by a local bus driver, then riding a moped is another league up in nerve-wrack.

We were riding along and a group of local young men on their moped swooping over toward me.

I say group, because mopeds were a favoured method of travel across the archipelago, and like all Indonesian transport, it was overcrowded.

There were three guys on this particular one, but I have heard of more, up to the record, claimed to have been seen and photographed in Bang Kok Thailand, of 14 on one scooter.

I can't vouch personally for this, but can clearly recall whole families of five on board, sitting in relative comfort.

So these three guys moved in toward me and began gesticulating toward my plastic helmet, which I had looped over my shoulder.

I had done this because when I examined it when renting the bike I saw that it would be no Earthly use in an accident, and obscured my peripheral vision to boot, so was actually decreasing my safety.

So I hung it over my shoulder and set off.

But now these young men were trying to tell me something.

So I slowed down and metaphorically cupped my ear with my hand to understand.

The oldest, who was driving, and spoke quite good English eventually got through to me that it was illegal to ride a moped without a helmet.

This I thought pretty rich and wanted to yell back that I thought the authorities would be better off making it illegal to have 45 people in an eight-seater minibus, but riding along the trans-Sumatran highway at 50k, while yelling broken Bahasa at three young men on a moped is not the time to join the debating society.

So, I gave in and pulled my helmet from my shoulder and put it on.

The three young men then gave the usual Sumatran mile-wide smile because they were able to help an honoured guest in their country, accelerated to 90 and soon were lost in the traffic up ahead.

I rode up next to Neil and repeated what my mobile friends had told me and he put his helmet on as well and went kept moving.

And just to digress slightly.

A friend of mine Julian was a helicopter pilot who worked with various aid organisations throughout the pacific and he was telling me that New Guinea has similar laws, and similar plastic helmets.

One day he saw a guy riding along with an ice cream tub strapped over his head as a helmet.

In Julian's opinion it would have provided the same amount of protection as the horrible plastic helmets, and he was obeying the law.

So with helmets now firmly on, we did enjoy our ride that day, I think because once more because we were in the back blocks of Indo, the traffic was relatively light, and so near death experiences were limited to one an hour or so.

This was of course a severe stepdown in anxiety from being on the roads in the more crowded areas, around Jakarta particularly.

Ride over, we handed back our bikes and moved on in a bus.

Eventually we arrived in Medan and the next thing I remember is getting totally slaughtered in a dockside bar with an epileptic Dutchman and his German friend, whom we had met in our hotel.

I say epileptic, because he had the mannerisms of those taking Tegretol, the main epilepsy medicine, of continually, moving his head up and down as if trying to swallow something large, and opening and closing his eyes, particularly while deep in thought.

However, being deep in thought, for any of the four of us, soon became a less frequent issue as the Bintang went down.

Indonesia was a Dutch colony in colonial days, Jakarta was originally known as Batavia, and was the Asian headquarters of the first ever limited company, the Dutch East India company.

Thus, many Dutch things were taken to the colonies, and Heineken beer was one of them.

Heineken was rebadged to the local name 'Bintang'.

It means 'Star Beer' in Bahasa and this is appropriate because if you drink enough of it, and we did, you'll be seeing stars all right.

We had, to the best of my recollection, 6 large bottles in that bar over some hours and eventually staggered home to our bunks the worse for wear.

I think this equates to 18 middies of full strength beer, and it showed.

I mention this carousing because I think it lead to me sleep walking.

Sleep walking is a little understood thing and almost every example of it is worth relating for the sheer strangeness of the thing.

I remember a time when my mother and brother went down to Sydney to help our aunt move house.

Typically of my family, my brother was expected to work hard with no reward and criticized for everything he did.

They arrived at about noon on Saturday and went straight to work.

This labour of packing, loading, driving, unloading and returning then proceeded virtually non-stop over the next three days.

On the Tuesday night at about three am, my mother was in slumber when her bed lurched and she awoke to find my brother trying to lift it.

She said, "What are you doing David?"

And he replied, "You know I've got to move this bed."

Then he went back to trying to lift the bed, with my mother in it, bodily, on his own.

My mother realized he was sleep walking, so she got up and told him he could do it in the morning and shepherded him back to bed.

Another tale of the night travels happened to my friend Dave Smedley.

He was helping his dad to tear down the old garage and build a new, larger building on the site.

His friend who lived across the street from them was helping and they worked away on it for some weekends.

Then one night Dave was in bed when there a knock on the back door.

With a muttered, "what the hell?" he got up and went down to the door.

He opened it to find his friend from across the road standing there.

His friend said, "Oh, is Dave there?"

Dave at first thought he had smoked too much pot and had warped into the famous Cheech and Chong sketch, "Dave's not here, man", but then when his friend (whose eyes were open, but quite vacant) just stood there gaping, he twigged that his friend was sleep walking.

But the amazing thing was how he had got there.

Dave lived on a very hilly street, the road was the floor of the valley as it were, with all the houses set back from it, up extended and quite steep driveways.

His friend had got out of bed, walked down his driveway, across the road, up Dave's driveway which was a maze of reo, lumps of demolition debris, concrete mixers and god knows what, then picked his way across Dave's backyard, around the side of the house to find the back door in the dark.

He then knocked on it, and when Dave himself answered, asked if Dave was there.

Dave, like my mother before, shepherded his friend back through the maze, marvelling as he did so at his friend's somnambulant ability to not break his leg, and home into bed.

The next day Dave's friend had no recollection of the incident.

Now this night in Medan was the second time I had walked in my sleep.

The first, in my share house in Leichhardt in the inner west of Sydney, involved me getting up, walking down the hall, outside, scrabbling at the garage door, then coming back inside, down the hall, turning right instead of left and going to sleep again on the bed of my flatmate across the hall.

Thankfully, my flatmate, a nice gay woman, wasn't home that night as she would have been non-plussed, to say the least, at me coming in and getting in her bed without so much as a by-your-leave at two a.m.

I likewise had no recollection of this incident, with the exception of waking up in Sanda's bed, the entire events of the night before were related to me the next morning, by my other flatmate Sue, who slept at the front of the house near the garage door.

Again, very mysterious.

So back to Medan.

My mummy-like perambulations were related to me by Neil, who had stayed up to have a last cigarette before retiring.

I came out of our room, said Neil, stood near him and began running my hand through my hair.

Neil looked up at me and said, "Do you want something?"

I didn't reply.

Then I seemed to make a decision, reached down, grabbed Neil's water bottle, turned on my heel and went back inside.

I put his bottle on the floor next to my bunk, got in it and went back to sleep.

Neil came in, stared down at me for a moment, and then realized I must have been sleepwalking.

He got my bottle, filled it, put it where I could reach it, picked his up and went to bed.

The next morning he told me about the incident and we docketed it away under the Bermuda Triangle-like topic of sleepwalking and began to make preparations for our ferry ride.

I might add in closing the topic, that for the manyeth time that trip I was thankful Neil was there and I hadn't slept walked my way out onto the streets of Medan looking for a water bottle, god knows where I might have ended up, under a truck most likely.

So we packed up, heaved our gear on our backs, a process that I was by now coming to loathe, and made our way down to the ferry port.

Needless to say it was nothing like catching a ferry from Manly across to Circular Quay, with its, Sydney's, clearly labelled embarkation pathways.

The whole area was a vast, rambling, train, bus, ferry interchange with elements of a Clydeside shipyard thrown in.

We bought our tickets, finding the ticket office an achievement on its own, and then began a genuine trek down to the water's edge.

We walked around trains, some stationary, some moving gently.

We went up onto overhead gantry walks, looking for all the world like a giant's meccano set, we took off our packs and lurched under overhangs of various sorts, from shopfronts to fettlers workshops.

One would normally think that finding a ferry is easy as you obviously just go down to the water's edge and there it is, but as described, even finding something as large as the Malacca Straits wasn't easy.

Eventually we got there and went into the waiting area till we were allowed to board.

I do remember thinking that an odd thing about the area was that this was an international border, the entering and leaving point for Indonesia, and security was non-existent.

But further thought on the topic reminded me that this kind of fitted as well, as no one wants to get into Indonesia, secretly or otherwise, they only want to leave it, and since the ferries out of Medan only go one place, Malaysia, I guessed that any border security would be at the other end.

Time came and we got on board and settled into our first comfortable transport for some time.

This was a modern, catamaran ferry, based on a design that came out of Tasmania, of all places, and was becoming the standard world wide.

Additionally, we were in first class, so sat indoors, upstairs and watched, alternatively, the ocean flying by outside, and a Charlie Sheen movie on the big screen at the front of the lounge.

What's more, I'm guessing due to cost, there were no locals in our lounge, and so I was spared clouds of clove cigarette smoke billowing about my head, racking my throat dry.

So it was a generally pleasant trip, but about half way across I was absently rubbing an itch on my left forearm when I realised that I had been rubbing it a lot that morning, I looked down and understood why, bed bugs.

Obviously the previous night in our Medan fleapit they had emerged from the mattress and made whoopee with my soft western skin.

I have never been bitten by bed bugs before (or since) so I don't know the form, but these ones were like every other bug in the third world, super bugs.

The way they had worked was to bite me, then move on a body length, approx 2mm, then bite again.

The bite number varied, I'm guessing in some places they were full, and in others I had moved in my sleep, displacing them from their banquet.

I examined my arm and discovered that the bites I had been scratching ran around my forearm, under my elbow and resurfaced trekking in orderly fashion across my bicep.

Nuts.

I got up and went into the gloriously luxurious toilet, and took off my shirt.

Under the harsh glare of the fluoros I could see how comprehensively I had been bitten.

The tracks ran everywhere, even as I know saw, down from my hairline, across my nose, around my cheek and down to my neck.

I looked like a zombie freshly sewn together by an Igor–like character in a Transylvanian castle.

I went back to our seat and questioned Neil about two things, "did he know that my face looked like a recently produced baseball?", and "did we have any calamine-lotion-like unguent in the medi stores?"

The answer was "no" to both, though I did see him grinning slightly for the rest of the trip, so knowing his sense of humour (warped), I strongly suspected that he was enjoying my fall from any semblance of

handsomeness.

However, despite my resemblance to a fright night character, the bites weren't overly itchy and we continued our waterborne passage across the Straits, until Malaysia, and the Asian continent proper hove into view.

We docked and got our things together and made our way into a new country.

The port was called Sitiawan, and from the start we knew we were in a place where things were done differently.

To start with we didn't have to bribe our way in, as we had had to do when we touched down in Bali at the start of this trip.

Malaysia is more developed, but a lot more boring than Indonesia.

The country as a whole didn't make much of an impression on me, for a few reasons.

Firstly, we only spent three days there, and secondly, as stated, I was already in London playing rugby in my mind.

So really Malaysia was just another place to get through on our way to Singapore and a flight to Europe.

Even the capital Kuala Lumpur I have no memory of, though we certainly passed through it.

Indeed the best memories of KL I have are some digital photos taken by my friend Russell when he visited twenty years later, so that gives you some idea of the low key nature of the place.

Think of it as a tropical Canberra, boring and you only go there if you really have to.

The things I do remember though were worth it.

Not far from Sitiawan was a tropical insect zoo, it sounds flesh-crawlingly creepy, and it is, but as Neil and I were both in that field of study we went for a look.

It was really quite amazing, butterflies the size of ham sandwiches in all colours of the rainbow filled the avery, and leaf litter scuttlers like small off road vehicles tickered-tickered about on the ground and we spent a morning there quite fascinated.

However the main event in that place was the scorpion pit.

Inside this were many hundred large black scorpions going about their business.

As we looked in at them I was truly, truly thankful that it seemed the only thing the gods of travel hadn't visited upon us so far on this trip was one of these in the bed.

Their stingers were frightening just to look at from some metres away, and their claws made one involuntarily cross your legs against the thought of a double grab at your funzone in the night.

But even that was put in the shade by a truly amazing feat performed by a local Malaysian woman some years after we were there.

She lived in the scorpion pit for a month.

She did it to show that they weren't as bad as they were perceived.

This is true, as their bite, while gruesomely painful, is not lethal, and since they were part of the eco-system, this brave woman went in their to show them in their better light, and to try to stop the wholesale scorpion killing that went on any time one of them was encountered in the wild.

The footage of her time in there was quite amazing.

She has to shake her sheets out before she went to bed, then hope not to roll over on top of one of them after she went to sleep, as they moved back in as soon as the sheets had settled.

When it was time to cook, she had to open the cupboard doors carefully, remove any scorpions that were in her pots, or nesting in her bags of rice.

Once that was done she then had to be careful that a scorpion didn't wander into her saucepan, or she would be eating them as well.

All in all it was an amazing thing to do and she got to the end of the month without too many bites.

I, then and now, admire her courage, I couldn't have done it.

The next morning we left Sitiawan and headed south toward KL and then Singapore, and on the way visited the only other place I remember from Malaysia, the Cameron Highlands.

I think this region sticks in my mind because it was a cooler, temperate, mountain region, that for all the world resembled Hampstead Heath in London, or perhaps the mountains of Yorkshire or Scotland.

To find it nestled within easy driving distance of the equator was quite a disjunct.

The region is famous for its tea, and most of the tea drunk in that part of the world comes from there.

I still retain in my mind after all these years the rows of tea following the contours of the rolling hills, in ruler-like fashion, like a vineyard in France.

Also, I think the chilly crisp breeze flowing over the highland was the first we had felt in nearly three months, so this also aided in making the place stand out.

And adding to the beauty were the extensive roses.

I'll slip in a quick horticulture lesson here.

If you visit any vineyard in France or California, you will find at the end of each row of vines a rose bush.

This is done so that the farmer can see if any insects that may attack the vines are present, as they go for the rose bush, with its coloured petals, first.

And so it seemed that the founders of the tea plantations of the Cameron Highlands had followed the same plan, and there were rose bushes all over the place.

Thus the crisp mountain breeze came to you redolent with the scent of tea and roses.

It was an intoxicating experience.

Finally, I think that the process of mental change that had started on the road to Padang, then noticed fully on the beach there, was continuing apace, and I was for the first time starting to appreciate beautiful things, and not be embarrassed about saying it.

Just to put that into context, later on in this trip I was walking with Neil and another friend from Sydney, Misha, in the hills of Scotland in the Autumn.

The trees were in their full glory of colour change, with yellows, russets, auburns, reds and browns filling the vision with true beauty.

I was brought to speak, and said: "You know guys, I'm not a poof or nuthin', but these trees are really beautiful."

So apologies to any gay readers of either sex.

I put that in to highlight that although on the way to higher mental things, I still retained the vestiges of my Australian yobboness, and couldn't even use the word "beautiful" without a qualifier protecting my manliness.

So we enjoyed our day on the roof of Malaysia.

At the end of the day we boarded our bus and headed back to the backpackers, thence on the road to Singapore.

Many have travelled that road throughout history, Singapore holds the most strategic position in all of Asia, at the oceanic cross roads of the exotic East, and so had over time developed into a major entity.

It was once part of Malaysia, but soon became so rich in its own right, that the burghers of the town began to resent paying tax to the poorer Malaysia and so succeeded and became an independent country, like Monte Carlo, Moldova or San Marino.

Despite all this economic muscle, it is a really boring place.

It is infamous for flogging, with a reinforced riding crop, anyone convicted, or even accused of, graffitiing a wall.

You cannot spit out chewing gum on the street without incurring a heavy fine, and littering will get you executed.

However, despite the heavy-handed crime control, there were obviously backhanders going toward the inspectors of cheap accommodation, because whoever set up where we stayed should have been prosecuted.

Our accommodation was in a three story terrace and the sleeping arrangements were a new one on us.

Each floor was carpeted with mattresses, you checked in at the front desk and then went in search of a mattress that didn't have a backpack on it.

Once you found one, you put your backpack on it and that was your bed.

There were something like forty single mattresses per floor and no, or at best a vanishingly narrow gap, between them.

So walking in and out involved tip-toeing along, trying not to walk on someone else's bed as you went.

This was hard enough in daylight, but at night it was a nightmare.

Since usually a third of those staying had some sort of dysentery, your sleep would be interrupted by one of your floormates, sprinting for the toilet at three a.m and to hell with who they trod on.

However, we were learning to take most things in our stride now, so we found a couple of mattresses near each other, threw down our backpacks and then went out to see a bit of Singapore.

We visited the zoo and saw the only Polar Bear on the equator, wondering then as now, at the phenomenal cost in energy to keep the enclosure down at arctic temperatures.

We then toured the town a bit, but there wasn't much to see, as Singapore is largely just a big industrial port.

We then went out with a contact I had gained from my lecturer at teachers college, Mike.

He told me to get in touch with a Singaporean student, now a qualified teacher, who rejoiced under the name Len.

This was his real, Asian, name, and was a happy coincidence for him when he went to study in an English speaking country, as his name would transpose easily.

I mention this, because there have been some really unfortunate names.

The medal winning student in the Veterinary faculty one year was the unfortunately titled Coq Liq Kew, which when announced at the award ceremony was done Anglo style as "Liq Kew, Coq".

I also read in a book about the same area, it was a novel, so I can't attest to the authenticity, but a chinese character in this book was called "Fuk Yu".

So Len did all right compared to those.

Now if you follow this story through the upcoming chapters to the British Isles you will learn a lot about hot curries, but I was about to get my first lesson there in Singapore.

Indonesia does have a lot of hot food, Rendang curries are probably the best known, but I don't recall eating anything that was particularly noteworthy in the heat stakes.

But all that was about to change, Len took us to a large food court, presented us with a small keychain that said "Singapore" on it, and then helped us to order.

Neil's order as usual involved a number of dishes, and the working of overtime by half the kitchen staff, but I was not sure what to order, so Len got me a black bean and curd laksa, which he was having himself.

Well!

While he ate it with enjoyment and talked about his new career as a respected professional teacher, with frequent mentions of Mike's great tutelage, I stuck my spoon in the dish, and had my first mouthful.

I turned purple and small wisps of steam began to come from my ears and cheeks.

Mother of fucking god.

I looked at Len, but his lovely olive skin was largely unchanged.

I looked doubtfully at my bowl, whilst throwing every container of water on the table, including the flower pot, down my throat.

I quickly began wondering if I had by some chance been given a bowl of nitric acid.

So the meal continued with Neil and Len talking easily, and me making the odd croaked announcement between throwing liquid down my throat.

I finished the bowl (eventually), and then we said "good bye" to Len and headed back to our floor dwelling accommodation, with me trailing a small cloud of steam behind me.

On the way, partly because of my newly installed internal combustion, and partly because it is an iconic Singapore thing to do, I asked Neil if he wanted to stop in at "The Raffles" for a beer.

The Raffles is short hand for The Sir Stamford Raffles Hotel, the priciest place in Singapore, named for the Englishman who founded most if its modern day infrastructure.

He agreed and we stepped into the cheapest part of it we could find.

I grabbed my beer like a drowning seafarer grabbing a life jacket for two reasons.

One, I was still burning inside, and two, it was time to tell Neil that my trip was over and I wanted to leave him and head for London.

To reiterate briefly, the original plan was to "do" Indonesia, then Malaysia and Singapore, then travel back up the west coast through Burma to India.

But of course, now I was in no mood, or condition, to face this, so I told Neil that it was time for me to go to Europe.

He nodded, then said, "It nothing I've done, is it?"

"No", I replied, "really it comes back to those psych questions Marayka asked us in Java, you remember them?"

He nodded, and I went on, "Well my answers mostly concerned rugby, so I think I want to just head off to London and get settled, find a club and get on with it."

He nodded again, then said, "Yeah, I understand, parts of this trip have been hard haven't they?".

I nodded in turn, with some vehemence, then we ordered another beer, drank it, then headed back to our terrace.

The next day Neil began getting ready to move off on his own.

He was going to head up the East coast of Malaysia to a turtle sanctuary called Terrenganu, and meet up with a scientist he had worked with on the Great Barrier Reef.

He made his arrangements for this, while I started making mine to fly to Europe.

We met back at the terrace that night, and he informed me that he was off on the morrow.

The next day I walked with him to the bus station and saw him off, with the upmost relief that I wasn't boarding another Asian bus, then walked back into town.

I had three more days till my flight would leave, and was kind of at a loose end.

But even so I was somewhat surprised when I sat on a bench overlooking a little park and burst into tears.

If I was a commercial author I would end things here on a suitable dramatic point, and leave the reader (hopefully) gagging for the next chapter to find out what was going on, but I'm not, and probably never will be, an author at all, but a chronic bullshit artist who saw fit to inflict his choleric moaning upon the internet.

So I'll go into now, what was happening?

Well, as far as I can tell on looking back there were immediate and life long factors at play.

In the immediate, I had nothing to do, and nowhere to go, in fact the reason I sat on the bench in the first place was to figure out what to do next.

Neil's bus had pulled away at ten or thereabouts, now it was near eleven and I had, as stated above, three more days to hang around Singapore, we had been to the zoo and there were no real tourist activities to do in that city, so I was like Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhikers Guide, "severely stuck for something to do".

So I sat on my bench and thought it through.

My backpackers was for sleeping only, and not much of that with the nocturnal comings and goings of various toilet-bound others.

There was no common room with a table tennis table or even a TV to watch, so there was no point in going there.

If I had been an alcoholic, as I would become later in life, I probably would have found the cheapest bar in town and sat in there drinking for the next 72 hours, but I wasn't, so that was out.

And as the minutes passed on that bench, I became sadder and sadder, then the tears started, and looking back I feel that the reason for this torrent was that it was the first time in my life I was alone.

Much later I would read a tremendous book by Stephanie Dowrick called "Intimacy and Solitude" and finally come to understand that there was a difference between being alone and being lonely.

But on that bench I was both.

And I'll just fill in the background to illustrate this.

I lived with my parents in the forced labour camp of the family home from birth to the age of twenty.

I finally escaped and moved to Sydney and went to Uni, this filling my life, both mentally and geographically, for the next three years.

From the hallowed halls of academia, I then moved to Canada and was met there by my friend from soccer days, Darin.

He helped me settle in, I quickly got a job with Greenpeace, then in short order a good friend, Sean, and a girlfriend, Deb.

Deb is a wonderful woman, we became closer and then married.

We came back and lived in Sydney together for the next 18 months, and my life was full with my work with Greenpeace, my soccer with Sydney U, and home life with Deb.

Then my terminal immaturity and dysfunctionality brought our marriage to an end.

Deb went back to Canada, and I moved into a share house in Leicchardt, in Sydney's inner west, with Gav, Sue and Sanda, and enrolled again at Uni to do my teaching diploma.

This likewise filled my time and I had no moments for reflection and then when that finished I teamed up with Neil and we set off for adventure in Asia.

Thus, with his departure, I was alone for the first time in 27 years.

And all those feelings of loss and grief for the childhood brutally stole from me by my parents, grief also for the way I treated Deb combined in that one moment on a bench in Singapore.

I was alone, I was desolate, there was no one to come and help me.

In a weird way this was a trauma and a help, since there was no one around who knew me, I could cry without being labelled a sissy, which is what had been beaten into me as a child at both home and school.

I cried for some time, I've no idea how long, but eventually I must have come to an end, then I got up and went back to the backpackers.

Whilst there I met two female travellers, a Swiss and a German, and they were, like me, waiting for a flight, and so I began to do things with them.

I sadly now can't even remember their names, which is a pity as they were saviours in my life in that time.

All unknowing, by simply giving me someone to do things with, my sadness lifted and I began to feel better.

We went in a cable car up somewhere.

We went to the "beach", a hideous grey-yellow strip of greasy sand next to the main shipping channel, and we talked.

With their help I got through the time till my flight was due.

And so that's where my Asian experience ended, but the journey inside my head was just getting moving, whatever was happening, I was shedding the carapace of arrogant arsehole and that's got to be a good thing.

Next stop Frankfurt, Germany, of all places, as greater change from Asia as one could wish.

Chapter 4 - Stepping into Europe.

My final morning in Asia came and it was time to say 'good bye'.

My eyes were opened there certainly, and I was changing as a person, but I wasn't unhappy to see the back of it.

I took myself around to Changi airport in Singapore and checked in.

I was flying Alitalia, and even this European organisation seemed to be suffering from a form of disorganisation, acquired by osmosis from the Asian continent.

Back then I was a fervent anti-smoker, which would be another learning process for me, as later in life I would be a just as staunchly pro-smoking.

I took it up full time in my thirties as a protest against my mother, who was dead against it, as she was an asthmatic.

But even this protest lacked any logic as she had been dead ten years at that point in my life.

Which was another lesson, looking back, in not being to fervent about anything, because we all grow and change through our lives, and the feverish declamations of our youth, for and against things, come back to haunt us in later life.

Anyway, I mention this because I checked in and asked for a non-smoking seat, but I think the check-in clerk only heard the "smoking" part, because when I finally sat down I was right in the middle of the smokers, so much so that I felt that I was back inside an Indonesian transport vehicle.

I might add, some younger readers, if there are any, may not know that there was a time when you could smoke on a plane.

And just to digress (as ever) on the topic, I remember watching a movie about life in Australia during the second world war and one scene was set in a movie theatre, and as I watched I was struck by something weird, it took me a few moments to get it, but then I realized what it was.

The whole theatre was clouded in smoke, and as I watched a middle-aged man lit up his pipe where he sat watching the screen.

It was odd to see it.

Of course, some fires and deaths later, smoking was banned in theatres and those of my generation never attended a movie theatre in which smoking was allowed.

And similarly smoking on planes was allowed then, and the cabin was divided into smoking and the laughably titled 'non-smoking' areas.

I say laughably because, of course, it's all the same air and within a short space of time the whole cabin was full of clouds of rapidly staling smoke.

The situation was highlighted best to me by the story of a friend from Melbourne.

She was first generation Australian of European ancestry, and one Christmas her family flew home to spend the holiday season with their relatives in Macedonia.

There were seven of them, mum, dad and five kids, but only dad smoked.

When they checked in, the father decided to sit in non-smoking with his family, and if needed to walk down to the smoking section during the flight.

The plane took off, and a short time after the aircraft had reached cruising altitude, the man sitting across the aisle from the father lit up a fag and began smoking it.

The father thought that the check in had gone wrong, and they were in the smoking section, and so thought 'to hell with it', and lit up a fag.

To his consternation, a flight attendant came down and told him he couldn't smoke as he was in the non-smoking section.

He stared at the man across the aisle, a mere half metre away, pointed at him and said, "but he's smoking."

To which the flight attendant replied: "Yes.

He's in the smoking section."

Anyway, my aircraft ascended out of Asia and everyone around me began smoking.

My throat was better by now, but even so, it was annoying, as I'd asked the check-in clerk not to be there.

So I once again gritted my teeth and stuck out another journey in less than salubrious surroundings.

We flew direct to Rome and there I had to transfer to my flight to Frankfurt.

I had to cross Rome airport and I remember seeing the security police standing around with sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders.

It was quite threatening, and a reminder that I was travelling in the terrorist age.

Of course, this was pre-9/11, but even then Europe had enough trouble with terrorism to be going on with.

There was the Bahder-Meinhof, Black September movement, and in Italy, the Italian Red Brigade.

I trekked across the airport and made my way to my next flight, a short hop across Europe.

The flight came and went, and I was then standing next to the luggage carousel in Frankfurt airport waiting for my backpack.

The crowd around me thinned out as each person picked up their bags, until I was the only one left.

Eventually the carousel stopped moving, without producing my backpack, and I realized that the check-in clerk back in Singapore had not only put me in the wrong seat assignment, but had mis-tagged my bag as well.

Well, I assumed that's what had happened, certainly my backpack wasn't here.

With a sigh I left the carousel area and went in search of the Alitalia booth.

I found it and explained to the young woman seated there what had happened.

She picked up the phone and dialled and spoke in Italian to someone down the wire.

She put the phone down and said, "OK, Mr Barker, I've located your backpack, it's in Rome."

Then she halted.

I waited for her to continue, but she didn't seemed inclined to go on, so I prompted her, "I see.

So how do we get it here?"

She replied, "it will have to come on our next flight from Rome.

That will be in four hours, at 2pm."

'Oh fucking great', I said to myself.

"OK, so I just come back then and pick it up?", I asked her.

She nodded and I said "thanks", then turned away.

Thankfully I had my carry on luggage with me, including a book, so I found a lounge area, sat down and began the long wait.

I might add I was pretty annoyed because I had planned well before I even left Australia to avoid this eventuality, said planning stemming from something my friend Bob, whom I lived with in Vancouver, had told me.

Bob said that his guidebook had given him a good tip which was, pack everything you need for a trip, Bob was going to Spain for a couple of weeks vacation, then pick up what you've packed and walk around the block.

Then when you get home with your arms now longer by four inches and your shoulders on fire, take half of what you packed out and put more money in your wallet.

An invaluable tip.

I had followed this and had taken a backpack about the size of a basketball for my travels across Asia.

So small was it that I had wanted to take it onto the plane in Singapore as carry-on luggage, but the desk clerk had added to his sins by telling me that it was too big, and so I had checked it into the luggage hold.

Thus, I was now sitting in Frankfurt airport waiting four hours for a pack which I could have stowed neatly enough in the overhead baggage compartment.

Finally two o'clock came around and I went back to check the luggage carousel.

Since I had now entered German territory, this involved some tortuous explaining to the German official who was supervising the area, but he checked that I had my passport and once I explained what had happened he let me through to wait for my bag.

I might add, once again, this was pre-9/11, I'm not sure how things would have worked out if it had been afterward for this reason.

One of the security precepts put in place was that no bag can fly unless its owner is on the aircraft.

So no doubt I would have had to fly back to Rome, pick up my bag and then fly back to Germany, but thankfully I was spared that.

However!

The carousel began moving and I joined the passengers from the two o'clock flight waiting for bags.

And the same thing happened.

Soon everyone had picked up their bags and left, and I was once more alone staring at the carousel.

I went back to the Alitalia booth and once again explained my predicament to the woman.

She (again) picked up the phone and rang through.

Another brief conversation, then: "Ok, I've checked with Rome and your bag wasn't put on the aircraft."

Once again she stopped speaking, this was one chick who really needed a refresher course on customer service.

So I prompted her again, "So what happens now?"

"I've told them to be certain to get it on the next flight."

"Great", I replied, "When does that get here?"

I had a mental picture of four more hours in the 'port, but it was worse than that.

"Tomorrow morning at 10am."

I stared at her in consternation.

"Tomorrow?! So what do I do now?"

I might add that, then as now, I looked like I'd slept in the street, I was till in my travel-stained Asia overland clothes, and so she strongly suspected, and she was right, that I didn't know how to assert myself.

A penniless, filthy backpacker she could handle.

So she said to me, "Find yourself a backpackers for the night and check in, then come back tomorrow with the receipt and we will reimburse you."

I think she would have put anyone else up in an airport hotel, but she had quickly sized up my appallingly filthy state and didn't want to put any of the hotel cleaners through having to clean anywhere I sat down.

I can't remember how I found my backpackers, but anyway, I located one about an hour away from the airport and headed down there.

Frankfurt is part of a large twin city conurbation comprising Frankfurt and Mainz.

My backpackers was on the western skirt of Mainz and it was quite pleasant and peaceful.

The month was September, which is shoulder holiday period in Europe, August being peak, and the backpackers was half full at best.

I checked in and threw my book (my only luggage apart from my passport pouch, which hung round my neck) on the bed, then went outside and sat at a picnic table on the lawn.

I contemplated for a while and then began wondering what was different, and it was this: there was no one else there.

I even looked around to try to get some perspective, but I was indeed alone on the lawn of a backpackers on the outer edge of Mainz.

Gradually it dawned on me why this was strange, and it was that all my time in Asia whenever a tourist went anywhere in public, they would be immediately surrounded by locals trying to sell them something.

But here I looked like everybody else, and decidedly poorer than most, and so as a commercial opportunity I was null and void.

And of course, having just spent three months in Asia begging to be left alone, now that I had achieved it, I was now lonely.

So I decided to go to the supermarket.

I had taken out travel insurance, and the woman at the Alitalia desk had said I could buy essentials and submit that receipt to the insurance company to be reimbursed, so I figured that even my cheapskatedness could handle a bit of shopping.

I went down to the supermarket and got out my German-English dictionary and spent a quite enjoyable time translating product names and figuring out what to purchase.

I got some shampoo, razors, and soap, mainly for anyone who had to stand near me, than for myself, then having made my first purchase in Deustch Marks, went back to the back packers.

I went to the shower and scraped some of the filth from my person, then went back to my room.

In there was a young German who had just checked in, I said "hello" to him and we began chatting.

He was the first example of how almost all Europeans spoke three languages minimum.

He replied in fluent English and I learned a bit about him as he readied his stuff on, and around, his bed.

His name was Heinz and he was from Bremerhaven in the north of Germany, on the shores of the North sea.

He had come down to Frankfurt to go to uni in the fall term, and was in the backpackers until he found some permanent accommodation.

As we talked, in his excellent English, with my occasional German word thrown in, it dawned on me that I was enjoying this conversation immensely, and from that it was short leap to realizing that it was my first real conversation in nearly two days.

The only other thing that vaguely gestured toward human interaction had been the kinda tense conversation with the woman at the Alitalia desk back at the airport.

So we talked, then Heinz said, "Would you like to get some dinner?"

I replied "Yes, but do you know anywhere cheap?"

He nodded and so we stepped out into the German evening and ate at a cheap restaurant and had one beer.

I remember this, only having one, because Heinz was going to study Theology and so, apart from his natural Germanic strictness, his ensuing holy orders wouldn't consider it appropriate to get fully tanked.

However, one beer in Germany does mean a tankard of foaming ale that you could fit your whole head in, so one beer was definitely enough.

We headed back to the backpackers and got an earlyish night on our bunks.

The next morning I was up early, said how nice it had been to meet him, and good luck at Uni to Heinz, then checked out and headed back to the airport.

I spoke to the new official on duty near the luggage area, showed my passport and explained what I was doing, he noted down my passport number, then let me through.

And so for the third time in 24-hours I stood by the luggage carousel and waited.

To my considerable delight my backpack finally appeared through the hanging strips and I was reunited with my stuff.

That wasn't hard.

Now time to move on, my ultimate destination was England, but I had flown to Germany to see a friend from teachers college, Alvian, who was doing some post work to his PhD at the university in Bonn.

Alvian was a quite a marvel.

He had a doctorate in Physics, and so was clearly a smart cookie, but what made him even smarter, in my opinion, was that he had bothered to go to teachers college to learn how to teach physics as well.

I'm sure you all can think of one, or many, teachers, that were brilliant in their subject area, but had no classroom control, or ability to relay esoteric concepts.

Alvian had recognized this and had taken steps to make himself a good teacher, not just a brilliant physicist.

So I travelled to Bonn, a distance of about two hours, by train, and got my first feel of the German train system.

It was fast, efficient, clean, sorry for the stereotyping, but there you go.

I arrived in Bonn, and went around to the uni and tracked Alvian down.

Here was at the, wait for it, Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik der Universität Bonn, in english, the Particle Physics department.

And I'll just digress briefly to mention something I saw on one of those 'bloop and blunder' shows on TV.

It was an English TV crew and the news of the holes in our ozone layer had just broken, so they were walking around in a park during summer asking people about it, they went up to a young man who was reading with his shirt off and said, "Excuse me, would you be surprised to learn that you are sunbaking under a large hole in the ozone layer?"

And he replied, "not really, I'm a particle physicist", which stopped that crew in their tracks.

Anyway, even for physics, particle physics is well known as being very complex and difficult, only triple-A+ students can cope with it, and not only had Alvian graduated in it, his marks were so good that he had been granted this study in Germany.

I enquired at the desk at the front of the building and they sent me down to a seminar room, I knocked and went inside and there was Alvian and some of the other students and staff discussing the boundaries of the universe.

And here I was to once again marvel at the Germanic gift for languages and courtesy to outsiders.

They were discussing things in German, but quickly Alvian put up his hand and said he couldn't understand, and so they all switched over to English and continued with hardly a pause.

I'm sure you understand this, most of us reading and writing this couldn't understand HSC Physics, but these people not only were adept in this hardest of subjects, but could understand it in their second language.

I listened for a while, but it all passed over my head, then eventually the seminar broke up and Alvian took me over to his accommodations, where I was allowed to stay for my time in Bonn.

This was a great score, I can't actually remember how I achieved it, but not only did I have somewhere to stay, but I was allowed to eat at the student cafeteria, three square meals a day for 2 DM each.

It really called to my cheapskate soul, I can tell you.

And it was here at the University of Bonn that I met Alvian's friend, a young German named Martin, who lived across the hall from Alvian.

As I've already alluded to above, most Europeans speak three languages, almost as a birthright, but Martin was way ahead of the curve.

He was a graduate languages student, with honours at that, and spoke six languages with assured fluency.

They were his native German, plus English, Spanish, French, Dutch and Russian.

Some time later when I called him up from London, he told me he was heading to Helsinki to learn Finnish, well known as one of the hardest of European languages.

I asked him during the call "How do you say 'hello' in Finnish?", and his reply sounded like a car horn honking.

I might add, Martin also burned for good my stereotypical view that Germans had no sense of humour.

When I met him he was reading Garfield the Cat in German, and laughing at this laziest of cat's lukewarm reception of Mondays.

He became my German teacher and by the time I left Germany I could converse with halting but reasonably effective speech.

I might add, he told me to read Garfield as a great introduction to German, and this was good advice.

The pictures helped me translate, with the help of my dictionary, what was going on and I really enjoyed learning with Martin and Garfield.

However, it did limit things a bit, and I was forever after ordering lasagne in German restaurants.

I spent about a week with Alvian and Martin in Bonn, and we had a generally good time, though Bonn was limited in its distractions, as it had been the capital of West Germany for many years, and like our capital, Canberra, it was pretty boring really.

However we did spend one night drinking at a riverside bar.

We, or perhaps, just I, got slaughtered, but apart from that the river was the Rhein, and it was great experience to be on the banks of this most iconic of German watercourses.

I might add, that this evening I foolishly, or perhaps, just thoughtlessly, broached the subject of Nazi Germany.

Martin and his friends did discuss it with me and I learned a couple of interesting facts.

One was that there are more Nazis in France than Germany, and two, Germans of Martin's generation are prepared to fight to the end to "see that it never happens again".

All too soon however it was time to hit the road, and begin the next phase of my journey to England, and here I rode with the Mitfahr-Zentrale.

This is the hitchhiker's network and typically of Germany, even "thumb riding" is officially organized.

You go into the office in whichever town you are in and put your name down in the 'passenger' section, with your desired destination.

The drivers state where they are going and you then hook up, with the driver getting company and fuel money, and the passenger getting a ride cheaply.

I put my name down for London and a few days later I got a call from a German business man who was going through to the West Coast of Ireland where he had a holiday home.

We arranged a departure time and place and I showed up backpack at the ready.

He was at first another stereotype, large, somewhat overweight, red-faced, and he drove a black Mercedes 500SE, and my first thoughts were is he really going to Argentina to hide out with the other Nazis?

But thankfully I was wrong, and got another good lesson in not believing stereotypes.

Peter was his name and he was a charming man and a good driver, you have to be when you go everywhere at 200+ k an hour.

We set off and on the way picked up another Mitfahr-Zentrale passenger, a Belgian girl called Angelique, who was going to Dublin.

I had bought a newspaper to practise my German on the way, and I should say, this was the only time in my life that I have read anything at the 'National Enquirer' level of baseness.

I bought this tabloid because it was the only paper with child-like text that I could understand.

Peter endeared himself to me by looking at the paper I had bought and raising his eyebrows, "why are you buying that?", he said.

"It's the only one I could half-understand", I replied, "I thought I would practise as we drove."

He nodded, then said, "OK, but promise me that once you can speak German you will never buy that rag again."

I nodded my agreement and once I'd deciphered the front page, I understood what he meant.

It made the Daily Telegraph look like a learned organ for philosophy societies.

So we set off and I had my first experience of the Autobahn.

Peter put his foot down and we soared along at near 200k.

This was my first real experience of European travelling and it was an oddity for me, used to the vast tracts of my homeland, to cross a country in an hour.

In fact we were in four countries in one day, Germany, Belgium, France and finally, England.

I remember distinctly that I had hardly deciphered the first few pages of my newspaper when I looked out the window and the signs were saying Bruxelles (Brussels) and I realized that we had left Germany and were sailing across Belgium.

Then hardly with a blink, the signs were in French, and we were at the ferry terminal in Calais.

I remember telling Peter and the Belgian girl that you can drive for fourteen hours in Queensland for instance and still be in the same state, let alone country, to which they both shook their heads in wonder.

To give you a comparison.

In Queensland, Brisbane to Cooktown is 2,000k, or 22 hours driving, this is about the same distance from Calais, France's northernmost city to the very southern tip of Spain, Gibraltar.

We queued with the other cars then drove on board and then I went out on the deck to catch my first glimpse of the land of my ancestors.

Well, that's what I planned to do, but when I got to the door to the outside area of the upper forward deck, I encountered a problem that would dog me for the next two years, it was raining.

And I'll just digress to use the work of an author I like, David Lodge, who describes it best.

One of his characters is an academic at Birmingham University, and he gets offered a year's sabbatical at a uni in California.

He goes over there and has the time of his life, as indeed anyone who gets out of Birmingham for any reason would.

The weather is great, the pay is higher, the food plentiful and well-cooked.

So much so that in the end he doesn't want to go home, but finally reality prevails and eventually he and his wife stand on the deck of the QE2 as it docks at Southampton, and Lodge writes: "Phillip looked at the approaching docks emerging from the grey smudge of Southampton and realized he had caught a case of the sniffles, which would last for the next ten years."

And so it was that my hoped for glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover was not to be as a low lying bank of grey cloud, from which emerged a depressing mizzle, blocked my view.

I stared for a while, but knew I wouldn't see anything, so went back into the cab and passed the rest of journey in conversation with Angelique and Peter.

Eventually we arrived and went back down to the car deck and drove down the ramp on to English soil.

I had a few hiccups at the Immigration post, as most Australians arriving in London come via air through Heathrow, and the cockney who was staffing the station wasn't used to one such as me arriving in the back seat of a black Mercedes.

But I sorted it out and then we were away into the heartland of Britain.

It was late evening now and Peter said, "Where shall I drop you off?"

Well, I wasn't exactly sure, the capital is just too diffuse a place to simply be dropped off in "London".

However I had another contact given me by my teacher's college lecturer Mike King, and so I decided to head for her residence, which was at Epsom, in the commuter belt on the South-West side of London.

My plan was to ring a woman who had never heard of me, tell her I had just arrived in Britain and ask if I could come and stay the night.

Clearly my arrogance and willingness to ask other people to provide for me was still resident in my psyche, but as it turned out, my plan was foiled, as she wasn't home.

Peter wanted to keep moving toward Ireland, he still had a ten hours or so of driving to go, including another ferry crossing, so didn't want to hang about while I made up my leisurely mind.

So we had an in car conference and I decided that the simplest thing to do was to catch a train into London and find a place to stay the night.

I am thankful that I hadn't read it at that stage of my life, but Bill Bryson in one of his travel books was saying that when he arrived in England for the first time he had to spend his first night sleeping on a bus bench not far from the ferry terminal in Dover.

I certainly didn't want to repeat that, so got Peter to drop me at the station at Epsom and I said a sad goodbye to Peter and Angelique as they drove off in their warm, dry car.

Then with a sigh, I humped my pack on my back and walked onto the platform.

To say I was depressed barely hints at the scale of my desolation.

It was dark now, and raining.

Although it was September (first month of Autumn), the rain and dark made it quite chilly.

I couldn't find a ticket office, so just sat and waited for a train to come along.

Eventually one did, and I got on board.

I sat in the corner and contemplating the dark depressing view, wondering where I would stay the night.

Finding somewhere to stay is hard enough, but at night, in the rain, it takes on a whole new dimension of difficulty.

Eventually a train staffer came down the corridor wearing a large machine on his front, like a metal child in a front holder.

He asked me where I was going, I said London, and he replied, "Well, this train is going to Waterloo, so I'll ticket you there."

"OK", I said.

He clicked at his machine and a ticket emerged.

I took it and he walked off.

It wasn't till after he had left that it occurred to me to ask him if he knew somewhere cheap I could stay, but I put that thought aside with the thought that he would probably return ere long to check for new passengers.

However, I then had a piece of luck that all travellers dream of.

We stopped at another darkened station and the door to my carriage opened and a young woman got on.

She sat near me and then eyeing my backpack, and my genuinely deplorable condition began a conversation, "where are you from?"

"Australia", I replied.

"You?", I said, "local?"

"Yes, I live in Surbiton with my sister and brother-in-law".

We got chatting and slowly it emerged that she, her sister and brother-in law, had a goal in life.

A goal that had emerged to the exclusion of all others: they wanted to emigrate to Australia.

So we talked about this, not that I knew much about it, due to my insular life, but I told her what I could.

And as the conversation flowed we got around to where I was going.

Well that was still a question, but I answered as best I could and we discussed a few options.

Then, as we approached her stop, she seemed to come to a decision and she asked if I would like to spend the night at their house.

Did I!

I accepted so fast that she was still speaking the last words of her offer before my acceptance reached her ears.

Talk about darkness to light in a split second.

Surbiton loomed up outside the window and I got off with her, and we walked the ten minutes or so to her home.

We then went through the process of entering an English home, which I would become heartily sick of as the year went by, involving removing all wet clothes in the garage or laundry, then entering the house.

I met her sister and brother-in-law, he rose in my estimation immediately by hearing that I was Australian, then going straight to the fridge, getting beer out, and handing me one.

We then had a lovely meal, with more beers.

We discussed options for Australian emigration, I agreed to help where I could.

They told me travel trips for Britain (Take more money), and eventually I went to sleep on a mattress in their spare room, listening happily to rain outside, rather than scrunched up on a bus bench trying to keep my various limbs out of it.

Morning came and I said my goodbyes to this most hospitable group and made my way back to Surbiton station.

I bought my ticket and eventually, many long kilometres through Asia with long-haul flights in between, I stood on the Strand.

I had made it to London.

So, first things first, how to get out of the place?

Later on this would become an overriding obsession, but on this first morning I had more immediate reasons.

The most important contact I had from home was a biochemistry student, Mike Balmer.

Mike was English and had spent a year studying at Sydney U, and I played with him at the soccer club.

He was now back home and I had sent my large bag with my "England" clothes in it, to his place in Church Stretton, in Shropshire.

So my first task was to get out there and pick up my bag.

So I caught the tube around to Paddington and then the train to Church Stretton.

Church Stretton was a lovely place and I was given accommodation with Mike's girlfriend's mother, who ran a small sweet shop in the high street.

I threw my gear down in the spare room and not long after Mike came in from his place just outside the village and we repaired to the local pub.

It was a weekday, and not long after noon, but my arrival gave us an excuse to drink early.

We had a few pints, then I took my suitcase, which Mike had brought in with him, back to the shop and I took it upstairs to unload.

I then spent a couple of very happy days there.

I washed my clothes, I drank pints in the pub with Mike, we walked on the Longmynd, a large hill outside Church Stretton, famous for ramblers, and then time came to return to London.

Among the valuable things Mike and his family did for me was a place to stay in London.

Mike's brother-in-law, Don, had a share house in South East London, and Mike teed it up for me to stay there.

Looking back I can't believe how lucky I was in that early period, first the fortuitous girl on the train, now Mike's family had a place, seemingly ready made for me in the capital.

So I said my goodbyes to Mike and his family and hefting my backpack and suitcase and headed for London.

I arrived at Paddington, then tubed around the circle to Charing Cross.

I emerged from the tube stop and took the surface train to Don's house in Lewisham.

This was a minor coincidence as that was the last place I had lived in Sydney.

I got off at Lewisham station and walked through the grey streets to the address I had been given, opened the door and let myself in.

Don was an accountant and lived with two mates from work, Matt and Pete.

He had warned me that he (Don) wouldn't be home for a while and the first person I would meet would most likely be Matt, and so it was.

It was a little disturbing for Matt, as I don't think Don had been able to get through to tell him that I would be ensconced, and as it happened I was watching the TV in the living room when I heard the sound of a key scraping in the lock.

The door opened and I yelled out from the living room, "Matt".

There was a silence, then he answered, "Er, Yes?"

Obviously he had heard my Australian accent and knew it wasn't anyone he thought should be in the house.

So I got up and went out into the hall to allay his fears.

"UH, hi, My name's Lock, I just got here from Australia, and Don said it would be Ok to stay for a few days."

He replied, "Oh, Ok, great, want some tea?"

Yet another English person who had broken the mould of my stereotyping by being accommodating within seconds.

We repaired to the kitchen and while Matt made some tea we talked and figured out how things were going to work.

We went back into the living room and began watching the soccer highlights and checking the scores of other weekend games.

After a lifetime of being considered effeminate in Australia because I played soccer, it was great to be in a land where it was the main game.

We watched happily together and eventually I went up to the room I had been allotted to unpack and prepare for tomorrow when I would go out and sign up with a teaching agency to get some work.

I began pulling my clothes out and got a set of teaching clothes ready to put in the washing machine downstairs.

I emptied the various pockets and as I did I came across an object that I would soon I would sadly wish was useable, it was a train ticket from home and it said "Lewisham to Bondi, one way, $2.50".

Chapter 5 - London and Thereabouts.

It was when I fell asleep standing up that I first understood how hectic London was.

I was coming home from work one afternoon and as I waited for the pedestrian light to change I leant against a handy wall.

Some minutes..., actually, I don't know how long later, but the roar of released traffic woke me.

The scene had changed in millimetric detail, different cars, other people, and I realised that so tired was I that I had dozed against the wall.

And if I was, then it was no surprise really.

Not only was I living in London, but I was teaching now at one of the hardest schools I have ever experienced.

But all that is ahead.

When we left things I had moved into the terraced house of my friend Don in Lewisham, south east London, and was staring longingly at a Sydney Cityrail ticket I had found in my pocket, which promised to take to Bondi for $2.50.

With a sigh I put it away and went about my preparations for getting a job as a teacher in the metropolis.

To do this I had to sign up with a firm called Timeplan.

This was an agency responsible for finding substitute teachers to prop up the ailing English education system.

You can imagine the sorts of schools that needed the services of Timeplan, obviously any school that an UK teacher wouldn't touch with a four hundred foot pole.

Even the name, Timeplan, is redolent of a prison sentence, and that is largely what they handed out.

However, I had ended my Asian travels early, and so when I contacted Timeplan they said that the new term doesn't start for another three weeks, and so to get back to them closer to the time, and they will set me up with a placement.

I was a bit anxious about this, as I was already learning what it cost to live in London, and I would have preferred to get going straight away.

But it wasn't to be, so I put down the phone and contemplated other options.

When Matt came home from work I asked him what he thought, and he said "Why not try a pub? They always need more workers."

What he didn't add, and as I was about to find out, was that Britain then, maybe still, has no minimum wage, and that's why pubs always need more people.

However, since my preferred work as masseur to the Swedish nude silicon implanted volleyball team was unlikely, at least in the near term, I went out to try a few hostelries in the local area.

Over a long time in the country I came to understand that there are only three things that the English do well.

One is TV shows, the next is the post office, and finally pubs.

However, almost typically of me, the first pub I tried, had to be about the worst in Britain.

I can't remember what it was called, or if it even had a name above the door, but it was a few blocks from my digs, on the way into Lewisham high street.

It's not surprising that I didn't know its name, as my recollection was that at first I wasn't sure it was a pub at all.

I opened the door timidly and thought I was in someone's living room.

The carpet was filthy, barely visible in fact, and there was a motley assortment of broken down furniture spread about with various middle-aged men, lounging about, beer guts on tables, drinking pints out of filthy glassware.

One of these barely mobile wrecks turned toward me and said, well, I can't remember exactly, but it certainly wasn't "How can I be of assistance, sir?"

I think he said, "What do you want?", which was something else I was to learn later, that this passed for the very pinnacle of English customer service.

I responded, after some serious thought about whether I wanted to work in such a place, "Do you have any work going?"

To which he gave a deep laugh, gestured at his customers and said, "Nah, sorry, mate, most of this lot just help themselves."

But he was a kindly soul, and was prepared to help me, he continued on, "If you want some work, go down to the town and try The Plough, they have lots of stuff going on."

I thanked him for his help and then left with alacrity before the hordes of insect life that I was sure infested the place transferred their attention to me.

I headed down to Lewisham and there on the corner of the high street was The Plough, and it was vastly different establishment.

The sign that announced its name was a vast neon thing, with a "ye olde" horse and plough drawn floridly across it.

It looked more like an alien spaceship that had chosen the dark streets of Lewisham to land, than an olde world English pub, but I could see it was a bright and glitzy place, for the young things to strut their stuff in.

So I entered with a bit more confidence than previously, walked up to the bar and spoke with a large man who was serving behind the counter.

G'day", I said, "Would you guys have any work going?"

Without missing a beat he replied, "Yeah, interviews tomorrow at two o'clock.

Just come in then."

I rocked back slightly, talk about good timing.

I quizzed him a little further, turned out that they had run an ad in the local paper that week, announcing interviews in person at the pub on the morrow, and I had lucked in.

So I thanked the barman, and left.

I returned the next day at the appointed time and took my seat at one of the tables in the bar.

Soon another large man, and as I was to learn, getting larger with every meal, came in and sat down at another table.

He took out a pad and pen, then looked about, his eye fell on me, the only one there, and he said, "you here for the job?".

I nodded and he gestured me over.

I'll just digress here to discuss a movie with Steve McQueen, Papillion.

Steve plays a man convicted of murder in Paris and is sentenced to life on Devil's Island, the aptly named, horrendously brutal prison camp off the coast of French Guiana.

As the prisoners are marched into camp to begin their servitude they are given a perfunctory medical test by the camp doctor.

As Steve's turn comes he steps up and says, "Is there any way to fail this test?"

And somewhat like that, was my interview at the pub.

I can't recall in detail what was said, but it was along the lines of "Do you know what that is?" (He pointed to a pint.)

I said "Yes".

Then he asked, "Have you worked in a pub before?"

I replied "Yes" to that as well, and that was it, he concluded the 'interview', and told me to give my name and phone number to the large man I had spoken to the day before.

He turned out to be the assistant manager, name of Simon.

I did so, then Simon brought out a roster of sorts, and told me to come in on the coming Saturday for my first shift.

I left the pub well satisfied and had some unique thoughts, viz: if everything was this easy, my life in Britain would be a breeze.

So I spent the rest of the week doing some tourist things, Trafalgar Square, the Catty Sark, and savouring London, the city that had stood at the heart of the empire that had ultimately spawned me in a far flung corner of it.

But then I did something that was to lead to one of the most painful nights of my life.

Don, who had found me my digs in his house, had returned from Shropshire, and with his return the football team that he (Don), Matt, up until then my only flatmate, and Pete, our other roomie, still away, played for (Kent University Old Boys) was reactivated for the coming season.

With players still away, Don asked me to fill in and I happily obliged.

The game was due for Saturday afternoon, some hours before my shift in the pub was to start, so I had plenty of time to play and get back.

So I bought some boots and went out and had a kickabout with the lads.

It went Ok, but about an hour in there was in incident in our penalty area.

Don was keeping goal, and a high ball came over, I was just going to jump up and head it away, when Don called, "'Keeper!"

This means he wanted to catch the ball.

I hunkered down slightly and left him to it, Don though, with his eyes focussed on the ball didn't see me in his path, and as he leapt to catch it, his knee came up and collected me full force on the right side of my rib cage.

Truth be told, it didn't hurt at the time as I was running hot from the game, so I rubbed it a few times and then went on with the match.

Afterward we showered and headed back to Lewisham and as each minute from the game passed, the pain in my ribs increased.

It was my first experience of rib damage, and I can assure you it is acute.

You can't really understand unless you've had it yourself, but the essential problem is one of movement.

If you break a bone in your arm or leg, you go to the hospital and it's set in a cast.

Once that is done, the pains tops because the bone is immobilised.

However, ribs cannot be immobilised, and each breath causes you pain.

And so by the time my shift at the pub was due to start I was having to walk like a man with a crystal goblet balanced precariously on the top of my head.

I got to the pub and took my place behind the bar.

I met, very briefly, some of the other staff, but then quickly the Saturday night rush began and I had no more time to think.

However, I strongly suspect I am even today minorly remembered in that pub due to the strange way I was behaving on that first night.

The rush meant I had to move around the bar with as much speed as I could muster, and the pain was a constant hot beat on my right side.

Thus, a customer would come up to the bar, I would go to serve them, and they would shout their order through the roar.

Then the pain would hit and my face would become the grimmest of skull-like death grimaces as I rode the pain.

So the customers began to think I was angry at them, as if they had deeply offended me by simply asking for 'three pints of lager'.

However, I got through my shift then wended my way back to the house and tumbled into my long looked for bed.

It goes without saying that the next morning I was in considerable pain.

That night's sleep, being jerked awake whenever my ribs sang out was another in the long line of nights of disturbed sleep I had been having since Asia, and I really needed one of those lifts they use at the hospital to save nurses' backs to get out of bed.

However I managed it and as the week went by the pain receded.

Thursday came and I went back for my next stint, Thursday through Saturday, at the pub.

The most salient point of those three nights was when Saturday came and Millwall was playing at home.

Millwall was the local professional team, and match over and the fans poured into the Plough.

So just a bit about soccer supporters in Britain, and, as I was to learn, thankfully much later, Millwall supporters in particular.

Due mainly to the fact that Britain is a rotten place to live, certainly in the cities.

The only real social option is going to the pub.

The other great outlet is watching your local soccer team, and these two pastimes collide on Saturday evening after the game.

Often the rage and frustration of every day life spills over into angry feelings at the game, particularly when, as ever, your team loses because the referee was biased.

Various teams' supporters claim that they are the toughest, but in the end, the title goes to Millwall.

And they, god help me, were my local team.

Anyway, the pub filled up with Millwall supporters, already well-oiled from the game, and the testosterone level of the pub filled to overflowing.

One of the other barman was a Millwall supporter himself, a nice lad, and as the White-shirted soccer fans began to arrive, he came over to me and said, "If this kicks off while I'm out there collecting glasses, will you come to help?"

I was a little taken aback, but while not ever welcoming a fight, wasn't prepared to see my barman friend set upon, so I said I would.

However, things passed off peacefully enough, I think Millwall had won, which always helps, and even these barely sentient dregs of 'souff landin' knew not to destroy their own pub.

But later on, Mike, my friend from Shropshire, was telling me a few stories, which I'm glad I didn't know on that Saturday night.

Millwall fans are known as 'bushwackers'.

The reason is because their home ground at the time was the aptly named Cold Blow Lane ground in New Cross, just a few stations up the line from Lewisham, and the ground is a long way, ten blocks or so, from New Cross station.

So supporters from the away team have to leave the station and make their way, as of some intrepid African explorer of old, through the back streets of New Cross to the ground.

The Millwall supporters would therefore hide in the back yards of the tenement houses and when they saw some opposition fans coming, they would jump out and attack, or 'buskwhack' them.

Mike himself experienced this unnerving process.

He was from Liverpool, but due to uni in the south and moving around a bit as a boy, hadn't a full scouse accent.

However some of his friends did and one day they went to see Liverpool play Millwall at Cold Blow, and after the game they were walking home when they chanced upon some Millwall supporters.

One of these said to Mike's friend, "What's the time mate?"

He didn't have any requirement for same, he simply wanted someone from Mike's group to answer, then he would hear the Liverpool accent and they would attack.

Mike, with his non-descript accent answered, but this didn't satisfy them, and eventually one of his mates said something, I can't recall what, but that was enough.

The Millwall supporters attacked, and one of them brought out a Stanley knife and slashed Mike's friend down his back from shoulder-blade to hip.

Blood gushed and Mike and his friends had to gather up their injured pal and race him to the nearest hospital where he received nearly a hundred stitches.

So as you can see, I'm bloody glad I didn't know that story that night in the pub.

A fist fight I could acquit myself reasonably well, but clearly some of these soccer fans would have had weapons on them and if it had kicked off, blood would have certainly flowed.

Anyway, the night passed peacefully and on Tuesday of the next week, I went in to pick up my pay, and here things turned comical.

I got my pay packet, in cash, inside an envelope with the various tax and other deductions on the front.

I opened it and there was 14 quid in there.

I held the envelope upside down and checked it against the light while shaking it to see where the rest had got to.

But no, that was it.

I kind of cringe here, but I went up to Simon the assistant manager, and said, " there's been a mistake with my pay, I think?"

Simon said, "Oh, sorry, what's the problem?"

"Ah, there seems to be some missing."

Simon took my envelope and examined the arithmetic on the front, then he turned to me and said, "No, this is right, I think the problem is because you're a foreigner, you have to pay a higher tax rate."

He then showed me the form from the tax department which they use to work out the pays, and sadly he was right.

I thanked him for his time and then walked home.

As I ambled my thoughts were a little tumultuous, but not overly confused.

I wasn't going back there again.

14 quid for four nights work, sod that for a game of soldiers.

To put it into context, my monthly rail pass cost ₤32, so if I kept that up I'd have to work a month of weekends in the pub just to catch the train.

I can't remember if I called back and said I was quitting, or if I just never showed up again, but I think it was the latter.

Anyway, it didn't really matter because the new school year was finally upon us, and that meant I could finally start work as a teacher.

As I was to learn, my pay as a teacher was to be ₤350, of which I would get to keep ₤250, for five days work, or ₤9 an hour, the pub barely registering above ₤3 an hour.

So for financial reasons I was desperate for the school year to start, and as I think back to that time, me and a few other penniless southern hemisphere teachers must have been the only people the length and breadth of the British Isles who actually wanted school to start.

Certainly, as ever, the kids didn't.

And I'll just digress here to take in a Ginger Meggs cartoon that sums things up nicely.

For those who don't remember, Ginger Meggs was an animated strip that appeared in the Herald every Sunday.

The main character was a red-headed scamp who hated school.

The comic I was thinking of went like this.

Ginger comes running up to his boon companion, Benny, during the school holidays, out of breath and with momentous news.

"Benny, Benny!", he shouts.

Benny replies, "What is it Ginge?"

And Ginger goes "I just went down to the school to break the windows of the staff room, and I discovered that THE TEACHERS ARE ON HOLIDAYS TOO!!!!"

Ginger thought teachers only lived to persecute him, and the idea that they had holidays was just out of his comprehension.

And as I was about to discover, it was even money who out of the students and teachers at my first school hated the end of the holidays more.

The school was called Eastlea Community School and was situated in West Ham, down the end of the central line in the very heart of East London.

Few geographic areas of London, or the entire UK for that matter, were as financially strapped.

I was walking into the Lion's den all right.

But more of that in the future.

My first task was to physically get there, and being London, where even moving six blocks was a major logistic exercise, crossing the river and going down east, was not easy.

I got up at six, showered, shaved and got dressed in my teaching clothes.

I got my rain gear, which would not have disgraced Edmund Hilary's expedition to the top of Everest, clad myself in it, then walked out the door.

A light drizzle fell upon me on this grey (Is there any other kind?) London morn.

I walked ten minutes down to the main road, Loampit Vale, and began my first wait of the journey.

Eventually a bus came and I got on it.

Once on board, I went to take my outer layer of rain gear off, so as not to wet the other passengers.

However, so crowded was the bus, that I realised that taking of my raincoat would shed droplets all over those near me, and so abandoned the idea and stood dripping in the aisle.

Ten minutes later the bus had inched it's way down to New Cross station, so I disembarked and went down to the platform.

New Cross was a terminus, and so I was able to get on the empty train and wait for it to leave.

Eventually it did, and I travelled five stops north to Whitechapel station.

There I changed train for the Central line tube.

I caught that down to the East end, twenty minutes or so, and got off at West Ham.

Then I walked ten minutes to the school.

The whole trip took an hour, but the constant changing, meant there was no real time to relax.

I mention this, because if there was no time to relax on the journey, there was deffo not a shaved second to relax once I entered the school grounds.

Eastlea was populated by students who just didn't care, and teachers who, while dedicated, had long ago run out of the energy needed to keep a lid on the place.

Some of the households that fed students into the school had three generations of unemployed living there.

Grandad had worked on the docks, but any maritime facility on the Thames had long since closed down, and he had finished his working life on the dole.

Then dad and mom had entered the work force, with no real industry to sustain them, and had therefore in their turn, spent most of their working life at home watching Oprah.

And now the next generation was at Eastlea school, and none of them valued education at all.

Many students views of being unemployed were distorted by their parents' activities, to the student, being unemployed simply meant that you got up when you liked, watched TV all day, then went down the boozer on dole day.

What a great life!

So with this attitude from most of the students, from day one life in the classroom was hard.

And I might add, as logic dictates, what sort of school needs a substitute teacher on opening day? A school that is so shitty that no local teacher would go anywhere near it.

The only thing the students, well, certainly the boys, cared about was soccer, either playing it, or watching their local team, West Ham, when they could afford a ticket.

Their only goal in life was to be a professional soccer player, and thus education was seen as a complete waste of time, time they could have spent more usefully on the soccer pitch.

Indeed once I'd settled in I learned that the only, ultimate sanction on their behaviour was to see the P.E teacher, Grant, and ban them from playing soccer for the school team.

So on my first day started by attending a meeting of all the staff, then we broke into groups and were given our home room classes, (I was allocated a year 8 group), then we broke further into our subjects areas, and I was given my classes for the term by the head of science.

I had one class in each year, seven through eleven.

And the battle of wills between me and my various groups began.

First up was home room and I entered my room to mark the roll, and was confronted by all the students sitting on the desks, with their feet on the chairs.

Stifling a muttered paraphrasing of Basil Fawlty, ("Don't you people even know how to use furniture?"), I told them all to sit in a chair, they did so grudgingly, and I marked the roll.

This request, "everyone in a chair, please" then became a perpetual refrain with my home room group, they sat on the desks as a form of protest, and were still doing it a term (ten weeks) later.

That done, I then went across to my science lab, and began sorting out my actual teaching for the term.

My year eight science were first up, and as I watched them cavort in the corridor outside my room, my heart sank.

Cavort is a ludicrously jocular term for the behaviour that was going on.

I might add, there were three classrooms in that corridor, and each class had a year eight class outside it.

So there were some 80-90 students all corralled in there, and the behaviour was a cross between a Tyson fight, World Championship Wrestling, one of those reality TV shows and Cirque de Soleil.

I remember standing there looking at them all and thinking, "How in god's name am I gonna control this lot?"

So I got out my machete and hacked my way through the thicket to the door of my lab, then told them to line up and stop talking.

Well I might as well have said "everybody give me ten quid", that would have been equally likely to have been successful.

After a few moments I gave up on that idea, and decided to just get them into the room, and where I would only have my class to deal with.

So I unlocked the door and told them to go in.

NB: Every door at Eastlea Community School, from the tuckshop to the little hutch where the garbage bins were stored were locked with triple strength titanium locks, such was the need for security.

NBB: While I was there, a very enterprising thief broke into the computer room and stole all the RAM chips from the school computers.

This was a brilliant crime as the thirty or so chips fitted easily into the thief's pockets, left no trace of ransacking as the plastic coat of the computer was put back in place and were worth twenty quid each.

So I unlocked the door, and felt as some dam building engineer must have upon opening the sluice gates for the first time.

Like a pacific ocean tsunami, my class burst through the door.

They scattered immediately into the age old seating patterns, tough boys up the back, with the prettiest girls near them, while the nerds and well-behaved students found a place closer to the front.

Once they had done this they began to climb on the desks and sit with their feet on the lab stools.

So my first job (again) was to get everyone in a chair.

Once this was done, and I more or less got them to stop talking (Talking? Forget that, they were yelling like they were trying to reach China without a microphone).

I took the roll.

Never in the history of humanity, with the possible exception of the forged Hitler diaries, has there been a document with less veracity than that roll.

To explain: I had already learned a few tricks in my short teaching career, and most important of these was never to ask any student their name unless you already knew it.

A common way to do this was to look at the name on the exercise book on their desk, then ask.

If they gave a name at variance to that on the book you knew if this student was a troublemaker, or at least a smartarse.

But this morning in the East end of London, even this was denied me, because I came across something new to me.

None of these students carried bags, and none had books.

This was a facer.

So I did something that no teacher should ever do, particularly on the first day of school.

I left the classroom to confer with the head of science, a nice young woman named Rebecca.

And just another tip here for new teachers.

One way you can tell if your school is badly behaved is if the staff are generally young.

Young teachers indicate that anyone who has done a bit of time has taken one look at the place and moved on to more peaceful pastures.

Rebecca was in her early thirties and had just had her first child, so to be already the head of science at a relatively young age was a pretty good indicator of a bad school.

I raced up to her office, and in a somewhat panicky tone said, "None of these students have books or pens, what do I do?"

She replied, "Oh, you have to give them to them each lesson, then get them back at the end.

Else they take them away and throw them out."

My eyebrows went up, this was new.

"Why do they throw them out?", I asked her.

"Well, if they throw them away, they can come in next time and say that they have lost their book, so can't do any work."

'OH, great', I thought to myself.

"So where do I get the books to give them?"

She turned to her desk and opened a draw, "They're in the supply room."

She gave me the requisite key and then told me where this room was.

I raced down there, got thirty or so books, and a matching amount of pens, then raced back to my classroom.

Somewhat to my surprise it wasn't on fire, and so I gave out the books and then asked the students to put their name on the front.

Even then, this (to me) seemingly innocuous instruction raised problems.

Most of the class did so, but already some of the tougher kids had learned a few tricks of their own.

Toward the back two boys sat, and even now, just writing their names down here brings back storms of rushing hormones throughout my endocrine system.

Billy Moore and Billy Williams were their names.

They shouldn't have been in a classroom, prison maybe, or perhaps a zoo.

Both sat defiantly on their stools and when I got around to them gave me the same line, "I can't read or write."

This was difficult, if this were genuinely the case, then I couldn't make a big deal of it.

So I made an annotation next to their names on the roll and moved on.

Later I was to discover that of course they could read and write fine, but had already discovered, in one year, that if they said they couldn't, they could sit around the classroom and do nothing for their whole school careers.

My recollection is that for that first lesson all I achieved was to get the students who orbited within good behaviour bounds to write their names on their books.

Then came the noise that would soon signal blessed relief for me, the bell announcing the end of the lesson.

I grabbed their books and pens like a man doing a trolley dash round Safeway, and they left with no semblance of order.

I went and sat at my teacher's bench with relief.

What I needed, after only 50 minutes of teaching was a six month stress leave of absence on a beach in Acapulco, but just as I was wondering if I could get some sleep in the little storeroom adjoining the lab, a riot started outside, and I checked my timetable and with a lurching, sinking heart realised that my next class was here.

It was 9.50am and already I was exhausted as if I hadn't slept for a year.

This class was my year 11 group, there were only 15 of them (there were thirty in the first class), but they came with a whole new set of problems.

Before I go into that, a quick bit of housekeeping on school structure.

In Australia students study in junior school till year ten when they do the School Certificate, then they may leave if they choose.

Those students who choose to stay, go on to years 11 and 12, and do the Higher School Certificate, or HSC.

In England, junior school goes up to year 11, the students then do the GCSE, General School Certificate of Education.

Those who are uni bound go to a different institution, a senior school or college and do their 'A' levels.

So this year 11 group was 'studying' (Ha!) for the GCSE.

Well that's what they were supposed to be doing but again, the lack of care for education was writ large.

They stampeded into the room, punching and kicking each other and the furniture, ignored me, and then scattered themselves around the room like they were lounging at roman feast.

I stared open-mouthed in consternation, what was I going to do here?

My year eight group had been riotous, but at least I was bigger than them, this lot were every bit as rambunctious, and two, at least, were taller than me, and I'm not small.

I draw a veil over that fifty minutes, not because I ma trying to keep anything hidden, but simply because I had no recollection of the entire lesson.

But it was chaotic I do know that.

The reason I can say this with certainty is that as soon as that lesson was over, it was time for morning recess, playlunch as it was called ever-so-whimsically when I was at primary school.

Here that adjournment had nothing to do with 'play', it was simply a chance to get the fighting done without any teachers stopping it.

I left my room and went back to Rebecca.

"Who's head of year 11?", I asked without preamble.

"Nigel", she replied.

"Which department is he?"

"English", she responded.

I left without a word and hot-footed it across the play..., sorry, the fightground, to another building, then up the stairs to the English staffroom.

I entered like an action hero, swinging through the door like a more than agile monkey, one arm gripping the door post, my body airborne in haste.

The various staff members were at their desks, coffee on desk, "Nigel?", I asked.

I black-bearded man of mid forties turned to me, "Yes?".

I skidded to a halt in front of his desk, and began, again, without preamble.

I'd been in the school less than two hours and already I knew not to waste time with chit-chat, things had to be done urgently of classrooms would burn.

"I've just had year 11 science, and I can't control them, can you help me with that?"

Nigel replied, "Who was in that group?"

I cast my mind back, "Um, a few of them, but Steve Garrad and John Wellcombe, are the two that concern me."

As soon as I said these names, the other staff members began chuckling to themselves.

I stared somewhat wildly about me, this was no laughing matter, to me anyway.

However Nigel knew what he was about, he nodded and said, "Yes, those two can be difficult."

He went on reassuringly, "What I can do if you like is get them to come to me for your next four lessons, then if they behave they can return on a sheet."

I let out a sigh of relief.

Firstly, I was spared them for the rest of the week, they would sit in Nigel's room with work to go with instead of coming to science and secondly, a 'sheet' meant that I would have Nigel monitoring their behaviour remotely.

A 'sheet' refers to a Behaviour Sheet.

Any troublesome student carried this with them to each class, and the teacher of that class fills it in, grading their behaviour for that lesson.

At the end of the designated sheet-carrying period, usually a week or a fortnight, the head of year, in this case Nigel, checks their marks and if the student's marks are say, seven out of ten for the period, or whatever is previously agreed with the child's parents, then the student is off the sheet and goes back into class as a normal student.

It sounds pretty pathetic when written here, but it actually works quite well, with the student often becoming quite keen to get good marks.

The trouble is that it doesn't work for real hard cases, as I was to discover, but Nigel seemed confident that it would work for these two students.

I might add, did you notice that second student's name, Wellcombe? It is pronounced as 'welcome', but I can assure his presence in my classroom was anything but.

With my time spent with Nigel during that recess, and of immense value it was for sure, but I came out with no time to have a coffee myself, I looked at my watch and saw it was already 11.15, end of recess, and so I raced back across the Fightclub, as I was already starting to think of the playground, just in time to welcome my third class of the morning, year seven.

This was a blessed relief, all classes should be year sevens.

My oft repeated aphorism is that all school students should be shipped off to forced labour camps for years 8 through 11, and I stick by that.

These years sevens were, firstly, all smaller than me, and to my unholy surprise and relief, some in the class were intelligent students who actually wanted to do some work.

Being late back from my unscheduled meeting with Nigel, I hadn't got their books out, so once again had to race off to get the supply room key off Rebecca.

I went down once more and got their books, handed them out, and spent the only enjoyable thirty minutes of the day with them.

They left and it was lunchtime.

I went across to the little shop run by a motherly cockney woman and had a meal.

I wolfed it down quite quickly and then raced back to the science block.

I re-checked my timetable and saw, with a kind of unknowing horror, that my next group was year ten.

I was already learning that the lesson straight after lunch was the worst for behaviour.

The kids have spent lunch time eating shit food like crisps and drinking coke and worse, energy drinks.

Then they play soccer and fight for the rest of the time.

Then when they are as high as kites, the bell rings and they are sent back into the prison of school for the next lesson.

At Eastlea, the school day was two lessons in the morning, then recess, then third period, then lunch, then fourth period, finally fifth, then it was time to go home.

Thus, at the end of any period which had a break following, you could keep the kids in, and this was a sanction that worked, as they were missing their break.

But since first period and fourth were 'only' followed by another lesson, you couldn't keep kids in as they were only missing another class, plus you usually had a class of your own, and thus couldn't deal with them at that time anyway.

So fourth period, straight after lunch, became an unholy triptych of stress for any teacher, new or otherwise, at Eastlea.

If you were lucky, your best behaved classes would be scheduled for this post-prandial lesson, but on this first day I was well out of luck.

Year ten came in and a bloody rodeo it was an' all.

Once again I paraphrase Basil Fawlty by saying at the end of that lesson I was sorely tempted to go out and see if the roof was still on.

They left and once more the shouting in the corridor grew to a deafening level and year nine arrived.

Another shouting match came and went and finally, blessedly, my first day at Eastlea came to a close.

I checked my timetable for the next day, then packed up and repeated my five step journey in reverse until I stepped across the door at Lewisham near 5.30pm.

I felt that I had lived a thousand life times in that day.

To say I was exhausted barely hints at the total dissolution of body and mind I was undergoing.

My flatmates Don, Matt and Pete got home a little later, usually about seven pm, so I had the house to myself.

I went in and sat on the couch, I switched on the TV and turned to the highlights show and began watching a soccer match.

I thought about making a cup of tea but even that pick me up would have been hopelessly underpowered, mainlining cocaine would have been about the only thing that could have changed my energy depletion.

The next thing I knew was Don's facing leaning over me and his hand gently shaking me by the shoulder.

I had dozed off sitting upright on the couch into a dreamless sleep that had lasted a solid hour and had not even been relieved by the sounds of the lads coming home, opening the door and coming inside.

They later told me that they saw the top of my head over the back of the couch apparently watching the soccer highlights, and had spoken to me for a minute or two, while they moved about the place, until noticing that I wasn't responding, had come round to the front of the couch and seen I was out like a light.

NB: Some time later they said that this silence was the most sensible reply they ever got out of me.

And so my first day at Eastlea Community School ended, not with a bang or a whimper, but with an exhausted sleep that couldn't have been beaten by general anaesthetic.

I went about the evening, making dinner, eating it, watching more soccer, then we all went off to bed around ten.

As I fell asleep, the nightmares came to me like fast moving storms boiling over the horizon.

And the worst nightmare of all?

I had to go back there tomorrow.

Chapter 6 - Control?! I had none at first, and less as the term went on.

So I traversed London on the next morning for my second day at Eastlea Community School.

To say I was trepidatious barely hints at the levels of fear burgeoning in my breast.

My first day had been anything but successful, five classes, four of them out of control, with only year seven being considered vaguely human.

Also, I had checked my timetable for the day yesterday evening before leaving and a large D&R had been stamped on my afternoon for this, my second, day, and so tired had I been that the full realisation hadn't hit me until I went about my desk that morning.

As a casual teacher, I was simply given the timetable of the teacher that I had replaced, or shoehorned in to best fit the school's requirements.

Thus, 0.8 of my teaching load was science and 0.2 was D&R, what's D&R?

It's a 'Yes, Minister-esque' renaming of woodwork and metal work, and it stands for Design and Realisation.

And, apart from the hopelessly optimistic name, this subject was a problem for safety reasons.

High school teaching is of course divided into subjects, and each subject has its challenges for the teacher.

Maths for instance, is the hardest in one way, as it is the subject that most students struggle with and so boredom is endemic and boredom in class is invariably followed by misbehaviour.

However, the easy part of maths is that it requires little preparation for the teacher.

Back then, the maths teacher would simply show up to class and assign a page out of the textbook for the class then assist as they got on with it.

Of course things have changed now with the computer age, and a friend who teaches maths currently, was telling me that most of his time now is not spent on the intricacies of calculus of the vagaries of trigonometry, but how to download and install bits of software required for maths teaching packages from the internet.

But then, as I say, maths prep was relatively easy.

Science is the opposite of this, as the only thing kids care about is doing an experiment, and the amount of preparation a science teacher has to do to do an experiment is massive, and if you want to do say three experiments in one day then the work you and the laboratory assistant have to do is large, intricate and a constant battle with your own anxieties if you have forgotten anything.

Then, further to this, the only thing kids want to do is light the Bunsen burners, so even if the experiment doesn't call for the burners, the kids will moan that they cannot use them.

And of course, once lit, the kids, well boys mainly, then take about four milliseconds to start burning each other's books, clothing and body parts.

So a science class using the Bunsen burners takes teacher anxiety out of the normal range into the stratosphere.

But then even science with its gas lit danger is as nothing compared to the most stressful and dangerous teaching of all, woodwork and metalwork, D&R, Industrial Arts, whatever you want to call it.

A room full of out of control kids with hammers, chisels, nails, screws, and of course the power tools, like the drill press, the power saw and the electric lathe, is a clear and present danger to give teachers blood pressure that goes off the graph.

And I had both these subjects on my timetable.

What's more, the classes I taught D&R to were two year eight classes, including my own previously mentioned out of control science lot.

What's even MORE, Thursday afternoon I had those year same eights for D&R, then we all crossed the school together and I took them into my lab for science.

So I had a class that I would have been happy to not see for one minute, for the entire afternoon.

However that was all ahead, and so I went about my Tuesday morning as best I could.

Then lunch came and as I have previously mentioned the first lesson after lunch is the worst for any teacher in any subject, and so I entered the industrial arts block to take my first D&R class.

I checked with the head of Industrial Arts, as a casual teacher it wasn't up to me to set the lesson, and he gave me the plans for the year eights to build a wooden money box shaped like an animal, amusingly designed so that if you inserted a coin the ears of the animal wiggled.

He showed me an elephant money box built to these plans.

And I did enjoy seeing the large ears of the elephant gyrate gently as he inserted a ten p piece.

I then showed my massive naïveté and inexperience by saying, "Is that enough work to keep them going for the term?" (I had been booked by Timeplan for a ten week term.)

He then raised his eyebrows and looked at me with surprise, then asked, "How long have been here?"

"This is my second day", I replied.

He nodded knowingly and responded, "OK, well if anyone finishes this project, come back to me and I'll give you something else for them to make."

I have to say, I got the point immediately, judging by their output in the one science lesson I had taken them for, if any year 8 student made an ear wiggling elephant it would be a first, possibly in the history of the school.

So I took the plans and went into the room and showed my year eights what we would be doing.

And just to digress to describe my naïveté again, which I might add, all new teachers have to a varying degree, but mine was large.

My first ever school was Bourke High School in outback NSW.

I went there for ten weeks to save up to fund my trip to Asia and Europe.

Whilst there I became friends with the other, almost uniformly young, teachers there, including a nice young industrial arts teacher, Oatsy.

One Saturday he was heading to Dubbo, the nearest large town to do some general shopping and make one specific purchase.

I had to get back to Sydney for the weekend for a friend's wedding and got a ride with him to the airport in Dubbo.

As we drove I asked him what he was going to buy, and he said, "A computer table.

One of those with the shelves above it, and the sliding tray for the keyboard to go on."

And, showing my ignorance, I said, "Oh, why don't you get the kids to make you one in class?"

Oatsy gave me an exasperated, if-one-more-person-asks-me-that-look and replied, "Well considering I asked my year ten class to make a stool, and none of them have finished a year later, in fact Bugsy..., (This was a student who was well known for misbehaviour and never doing any work), all Bugsy has got is a piece of wood with his name on it, and that is still sitting on the window ledge in the workshop.

The only work he has done in three terms is write his name on a piece of wood."

Oatsy continued, "So I'm only going to get a computer table if I buy one."

So this morning in London, I added the head of department's knowing look to Oatsy's answer, and knew that I would not be overburdened by students finishing their projects and beating their way to my door asking for more work to be going on with.

And so it proved, but if they weren't planning to do much, if any, work, they were planning to get their hands on every dangerous bloody tool they could get their hands on.

So most of my time in the industrial arts section was spent more like a prison warder than anything, with counting of all the tools in the room my most important task of the day, a single chisel missing for instance meant that a corner store in the district would be held up with it later in the week.

Thankfully, the technical assistant for the industrial arts block was a nice man and very switched on.

He was a cockney in his fifties, by the name of Terry, and he had presided over the various classrooms there for twenty odd years.

He would assist me by always keeping an eye on the room when I was teaching, and if he saw a student up to no good, would bring it to my attention in subtle fashion, nodding in his head in the direction of the misbehaviour for instance, and that meant I was able to nip most incipient trouble in the bud.

However, even with such help, I became fatigued to levels I had never thought possible.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I felt I needed six months off after my first class, but as the weeks went by, teaching a full load with both science and industrial arts, my energy levels down to a place I wouldn't have thought possible.

And as mentioned previously in this narrative, a hellish journey in Sumatra had so depleted my energy levels that it began to change my character, stripping away my emotional shields and, thankfully, my arrogance.

Well I can assure you, teaching at Eastlea continued, and accelerated the process.

Everything about that job was designed to make a new teacher feel small and incompetent.

The kids had no other real position than teachers were the enemy, to be attacked, belittled and laughed at.

With my less than well adjusted childhood, I quickly began to become depressed and anxious to levels that I could not believe.

My journeys across London in the mornings became overlaid with dread, and my reverse journeys in the evening correspondingly full of joy.

So it was no coincidence really that I started mental health treatment for the first time in my life whilst teaching in that war zone.

And that only happened by accident.

I had hurt my ankle playing rugby and had gone to my local GP's surgery to have it looked at.

While I was in the waiting room I saw a sign behind the receptionist's desk saying, 'Stress Counselling – See Sandy through reception.'

Sandy it turned out was the practice manager, and I was stressed out, believe me, so I enquired and the receptionist buzzed through to Sandy and she came out to speak with me.

She was an attractive middle-aged English woman, and she came up and offered me her hand, I shook it and she said, "I believe you're interested in some stress counselling? Is that correct?"

"Yes", I replied, "I am not sure if I need it, but thought I would enquire."

She nodded, then said, "what work do you do?"

"I'm a teacher", I replied.

And that was all it took.

She booked me in then and there with not a further word.

In fact, if I'd asked for rapid removal under sedative load to Colney Hatch she would have organised that no questions asked.

I have to say, the reason I only went by accident was due to the repressive nature of my parents regime.

As slave owners of old had carefully organised it so that none of the slaves got an education, or could even read or write, thus stopping anyone getting any ideas above their station, freedom for instance, likewise my parents, my father in particular, had made it clear that only fools and weaklings go to counselling.

What's more, my brothers and I had it "so much easier" than my parents, as they never stopped reminding us, and so there was no reason ever for us to complain since we had food, clothing and a house to live in.

The odd beating to within an inch of dying was therefore considered a just price to pay for these material comforts.

Indeed, it wasn't till thirty years after I had left high school that I learned through a girlfriend who had come up to visit me in my coastal resort town home, that we had a school counsellor when I was at high school.

I didn't know of this counsellor's existence, and even if had got wind of it, I would not have been allowed to go as my father would have forbade it.

So here was stress counselling and boy, as it turned out, did I need it.

I had no idea what form it was to take, I had a mental picture of some sort of yogic deep breathing session and listening to gentle music, but it was more than that.

Turned out it was full on one-to-one psycho-analysis, and though I won't go into it too deeply ('cos it's boring, rather than confidential), it was the biggest and most effective step I took along the road to understanding my arrogance and heavy drinking.

In Sandy's warm office, in the suburbs of South-East London, I finally came to understand that my childhood wasn't normal, and that my parents had a lot to answer for.

I retrospect, if not for this lucky accident and Sandy's careful ministrations, my mental state, which was bad, would have continued downhill, until I was in a padded cell claiming I was Jesus and telling people to repent before the rapture came.

And so the weeks went by I taught Monday through Friday at Eastlea, then played rugby with Beckenham in the Kent league on Saturday.

My first game with the 'Becks was probably the most memorable, not for my play, which was appalling, but for the idiosyncratic nature of the field we played that game on.

Britain is avery crowded place, every piece of land has something, either a house, or more likely these days a road or a car park on it.

The first match I played was in a small town not far from Tonbridge about an hour to the south of Beckenham in south London, and due to the 'thousand-year crowding' of the area, the only place left to put a rugby field was on the top of a hill outside town.

And even then, about two thirds of the field was on the eastern side of the hill, with the quarter line being on the brow of the hill.

I was playing full back, and as such was at the back of my team, waiting for any kicks to come spiralling down, which I would catch and punt back.

Well that's how a normal full back does it, but on this field, where I stood behind the quarter line was below the hill brow, and so once play passed into the other half, I couldn't see anyone else.

I was standing, therefore, on a peaceful green hillside, all alone, when one of our forwards, Mick, called to me from the other side of the hill, "LOCK, COMING TO YOU!"

I perked up and then over the brow of the hill came the ball, spiralling down from a kick, and then, a few seconds later, the opposition forwards, intent on jumping all over me in cleated boots.

I judged the trajectory of the ball, backpedalled till I caught it, then hoofed it back over all the other players and down the other side of the hill.

And so that most irregular of first halves went, I would patrol the brow of the hill and then race back to catch the ball, before charging up to as close to the brow of the hill as I could before sending the ball back down the other side.

The second half I was on patrol on the downhill side, and so got to see the ball coming and most of the game.

Saturday night I would go out with the rugby boys and we would get loaded in typical rugby fashion.

I would love to be able to report that things improved in my classroom, but sadly it was not to be.

The problems of that school were endemic and were completely out of the control of a single teacher.

The socio-economic issues of the suburb from which Eastlea drew its pupils were of such magnitude, that me in my little classroom had as much chance of holding back the waves of bad behaviour as a single bricklayer would have had of damming up the mouth of the Amazon.

The best I achieved, if that, was to maintain a sort of thin blue line sort of control in which I at least made sure that the no room I was teaching in burnt down.

In retrospect I should have just rung up Timeplan and said "enough, I want another placement", but I still had some sort of protestant work ethic thing, or perhaps, noble-young-idealistic-teacher-fighting-the-hordes-of-ignorance thing going on and so I stuck it out.

I stayed three terms as I recall and that was a near record for that school, in hindsight I wouldn't have been surprised to show up at the start of third term to find the Timeplan boss on site ready to award me a gold watch for long service.

After I left I learned that a number of other supply teachers, as they are labelled in Britain, casual teachers in Australia, had shown either less stoicism, or greater shrewdness, than me and had left without completing a single day, walking, if not running full tilt, for the next train out of West Ham as soon as the lunch bell rang.

I remember one day walking across the playground one day when a school book landed nearby like a baked apple hitting the kitchen floor.

'What the fuck?,' I said internally, then looked upward to find out the source of the missile.

As I did, another book took flight and came down and landed not far from the first.

Then as my eyes and ears focussed in on the window that two books had most likely come, I heard a riot going on and realised that Ms Agbiaka was taking my year eights.

"Poor Yethoudi", I thought, then collected the two books and went into the building, up the stairs and into her room.

I didn't need to knock as she wouldn't have heard.

Yethoudi Agbiaka, was, I think, Nigerian, she was certainly African, and heavily pregnant.

She taught French and is a lovely woman, yet fate had played her a rotten hand and sent her to Eastlea.

It speaks volumes for the chaotic nature of that school that Yethoudi came from Nigeria with all it's internal political, religious and terrorist strife, and yet Eastlea was too tough for her.

She was a good teacher of the subject, but had no classroom control.

I'm not being patronising in saying that, as I had none either, and therefore was already an expert in gauging levels of discipline.

I went up to Yethoudi and noticed that she was in tears, "Graham, stop that!", she was yelling at a student as I walked in, "ROSS, SIT DOWN", she yelled at another.

I came and stood next to her and she gratefully took the opportunity to talk to an adult, "Yes, Lachlan, can I help you?", she said over the roar as of an approaching Tsunami.

"Hey Yethoudi", I responded in a matching constrained yell, "I found these books in the playground.

So I thought I would bring them back."

"Thank you", she said, taking the books from me.

She then looked as if she wanted to continue the conversation with me, but already events were moving and she had to return to getting her class into a vague semblance of control.

I felt for her, I really did.

English was her second language, I might add, and so trying to control an Eastlea year eight class while grappling for the right words is definitely in the 'most difficult endeavour' realm.

So I left her to her tears and yelling and went back to my lab to prepare for my own next onslaught.

Soon after Yethoudi was to give birth and she took the opportunity to leave Eastlea forever.

I am sure you would all join me in saying that this was the right decision.

I understand that heavy stress during pregnancy can have terrible effects on an unborn child and even cause an abortion, and I was kind of surprised she didn't leave much earlier.

Imagine coping with morning sickness while having to teach at Eastlea, it doesn't bear thinking about.

Another incident I recall vividly would have had any race relation board struggling to decide who was in the wrong.

Apart from teaching your own classes there are many other calls on a teacher's time.

Playground duty, staff meetings, lunch room duty and so forth are all part of your duties.

At Eastlea, one of these tasks, which was not actually that unpleasant, was supervising the detention room.

This was an unused classroom near the deputy principal's office.

If you were the duty teacher you sat in there at the desk, usually going on with some of your own work, and any child behaving badly in their class would be sent down to the detention room with a note explaining why they were there.

You would log them in, then keep them there till the end of the lesson, then report their presence to their head of year, then at the end of the lesson, they would rejoin their class.

Additionally, any student late to school, had to first go to the detention room and report their arrival to the teacher there.

You, as duty teacher, would note their name and arrival time in your report, and likewise report that to the head of year and relevant deputy at the end of the hour.

So one morning I was doing duty in that room when a female student walked in and came up to my desk.

"Toni Bennett", she said.

Then went to turn away and sit down.

I nodded, then was writing her name on the late roll when a bell tinkled in my memory.

I didn't teach her myself, but my friend Samantha did.

Sam taught P.E/Health and Science, and this girl, Toni, was in her year ten science class.

She was a real hard case and had brought Sam to tears one at least one occasion.

However, this was the first time I had met her, and I began to smell a rat about a false name.

You see, as Toni was a contender for the worst student that Sam taught, one student vying for the title in my class was her younger sister, Treeza (sic) Bennett.

But here's the thing, Treeza was afro-Caribbean, whilst this student, Toni, was Caucasian.

It speaks volumes for my middle class white breadedness, that I had never encountered a mixed race family before, but my first thought was that this girl reporting her name as "Toni Bennett" was giving a false name.

So then began an argument twixt me and her over her real name.

It was completely ridiculous and I was in the wrong, and what's more I couldn't come out and say what was causing my suspicion, which would have been, "How can you be Toni Bennett, your younger sister is black and you're white."

Thankfully I didn't say that, or the word would have got out that I was a racist and been sacked on the spot.

And just to clarify, if needed.

Among the socio-economic problems of that school, the Bennett family was an iconic case.

There were four Bennett girls at Eastlea, all half sisters.

The mother had four children with three different fathers, one Afro-Caribbean, two Caucasian.

The mother apparently spent most of her time in the pub, or drinking at home, and so the eldest, Toni, found herself in loco-parentis for the other girls.

Since, as I have written above, Toni herself was a hard case, and difficult to deal with, it boded badly for the future of the other three, younger girls.

Treeza would be expelled while I was teaching there.

She was never even approximately in control and directed at me, and I'm sure other teachers, expletive laden cursing that was hard to believe could come from a thirteen year old.

It was also well spoken of at Eastlea, and it was the most perfect irony you could imagine, that the most famous Bennett sisters of all were in Jane Austen's book Pride and Prejudice.

Those Bennetts, were of course the ultimate in gentility, whilst the ones at Eastlea were at the other end of the evolutionary scale I can tell you.

It would have made for the ultimate, but very school specific, exam question of all, 'Compare and contrast the life aspirations of the Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice with those at Eastlea School'.

Looking back from this remove, twenty years after I left Eastlea, I now see that society failed the Bennett family very badly, an adequately funded health service would have been able to assist the mother to achieve a less alcoholic life-style, and be of some help to her daughters in school.

But I was teaching in Britain under the John Major Tory government, which in itself was essentially the last echo of the Thatcher government, and help for the unfortunate was the least thing on either government's agenda.

The upshot of the Bennett sister's appalling home life was that inexperienced teachers like myself and Samantha suffered the verbal, and sometimes physical, blows in the classroom, with the effect of Sam and Yethoudi winding up in tears, while myself and the other male teachers began drinking heavily.

So enough of the sociology lesson, was there anything good about Eastlea?

Not really, certainly nothing in the classroom.

The thing I most enjoyed was playing soccer with the other male teachers on Friday afternoon.

Each week the PE teacher would organise a match and we would play in the fading light of the autumn dusk.

Our strip was full West Ham United of claret and blue, and once again it was great to be playing the round ball code in a country where it was the main game.

I was learning about the darkness of the English winter, and this was best exemplified by a match we played one afternoon toward the end of the Autumn term.

Very late in the game, with the full time whistle due any second and the score tied at two-all, I happened across the ball near the half way line, a quick glance told me the 'keeper was off his line, and so I laid into the ball with my left foot.

The ball sailed away and disappeared into the gloom over the 'keepers head.

We had no nets, only the steel goal posts and no one could see what had happened.

I felt from the trajectory that it had gone in and we had won, but the 'ref called to the 'keeper asking if it had gone in the goal, he, sensibly enough, replied that "he couldn't tell, but he didn't think so."

So then we all conferred on the half way line and realised that if we were now in the position of people shooting at goal and no one knowing of a goal had been scored, then it was too bloody dark and it was time to go to the pub.

Elsewhere, I was learning another fact of teaching life, which was, the worse the school, the better the friendship among teachers.

At a much lower level, these bonds were very like those of soldiers who went into combat together, and very similar to those formed by police on the beat.

Although I first encountered it at Eastlea, the lesson would coalesce into solid form after a term at my next school, so I'll go into it more then.

How did I move on?

Well like going to counselling, it was a happy accident.

I began at Eastlea in the autumn term and taught through the, both literal and metaphoric, enveloping darkness through to the end of the winter term in December.

Then Timeplan held an Xmas party at their offices in north London, which Sam and I, and all the other supply teachers attended.

Whilst at the party I was talking to a consultant who was dealing with my area of east London.

I hadn't set out to complain, although those of you who have read my witterings in various places, will probably find that hard to believe, but in our conversation, I mentioned that I was now going to counselling.

Like all recent converts I was full of zeal about how great counselling was, and how much I was benefiting from the process.

The consultant took this to mean that I wanted out of Eastlea, which was true, not just of me, but anyone who taught there, supply or permanent, but I hadn't really mean that at that time.

So we partied on that evening and January came around and it was time to get back to work.

I did one more term at Eastlea, but then just had to pull the pin, my exhaustion, both mental and physical was complete, and I had had enough.

So I told Timeplan and thanks to my conversation on the night of the Christmas party, got some great news.

"I'm glad you called", said the consultant, "I've been searching around and I've found a 'nice' school for you, it's just up the road from Eastlea, but it's a school full of well-behaved girls".

I was more thankful than I could say.

Just the fact that there were no boys was enough for me.

I recall reading some education research done at the time, which showed that boys do better in a co-ed environment and girls do better in an all female environment.

That certainly fitted with my memory of Eastlea, though some of the girls were dead set bitches spawned in the foundries of hell, by far and away the biggest problems for me were the boys.

The boys spent their time screaming and fighting, throwing books, bunking off, and misbehaving in ways that rewrote the form book, and all, I now see to impress the girls.

I might add, since I mentioned it, teachers at Eastlea were in an invidious position as regarding bunking off (leaving the school grounds without permission), we were supposed to stop it if we saw it, but I, as far as certain students were concerned, actively encouraged it.

A year eight class without either Billy Moore or Billy Williams was a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Anyway, I got the address and phone number of my new school, spoke with the deputy in charge of supply teachers and timetabling, then headed out to start on the Monday of the next week.

The school was called Sarah Bonnell Girls School, and was situated in Deanery Road, Stratford, east London.

I mention its suburb because it was to become eternally confusing when I told people where I taught, most thinking I was in the town of Shakespeare, though nothing could be further from the truth.

The great bard was from Stratford-upon-Avon a beautiful rural seat on the Avon river near Birmingham in the midlands.

What's more, another confusion about this school was that I would often say that I taught in a Muslim girl's school, with some surprise on the part of the listener that a young, single male teacher would be employed, so I'll just clarify.

Sarah Bonnell was not a Muslim girl's school, but Stratford, at the time, was a largely Muslim suburb.

Most ethnic groups in a new land tend to enclave, and Stratford had become home to large number of emigrants from Gujarat.

Gujarat is a region of India in the north-west of that vast country and borders Muslim Pakistan, thus a large number of the girls that came to the school were from there, and thus, I would estimate, 80% of the students of Sarah Bonnell school were Muslim.

They came to school wearing the full outfit, with the exception of the face covering, certainly their hair was covered.

To say they looked alike is accurate, and so marking the roll was a problematic exercise.

What's more the name Patel predominated and some classes had multiples of the same name.

Poonam Patel was one name I remember, I had one class with four of them in it.

However, this was a minor thing, and Sarah Bonnell proved a heavenly place for me after beastly Eastlea.

There were issues though, the first being that my standards, set at Eastlea, had to undergo some major readjustment for my new well behaved school.

This was first brought to my attention when I was teaching a year nine class in the first week.

I had forgotten something and seeing the girls were getting on with my work, decided to nip back to the staffroom and get the extra materials I needed.

I dashed in and began ferreting through a file cabinet, when another, permanent teacher, noticed me and said, "Aren't you teaching 9.2E?", she said.

I turned from the cabinet and nodded and the teacher said, "I wouldn't leave them alone if I were you, there was fight in that class last week."

I was a little surprised, but nodded and returned to the class room as quickly as I could.

Upon my return I looked at the class full of girls all writing in their books and conversing with each other and shook my head at the warning I had received.

To see the thirty blue-clad girls all going on with their work was a sight for my sore eyes, and I wondered if the teacher who had warned me about the fight was losing it.

The issue was of course that at Eastlea, even one student doing some work was a major victory, but here thirty students doing their work was the norm and so, smaller infractions received greater attention.

I couldn't help wondering if the 'fight' had been one girl dropping her ruler on the floor and tripping over another student's feet when she went to pick it up.

However, this warning did presage a problem that I was going to have as the weeks went on, not with the students I might add, but with the teachers in rooms nearby.

Most lessons I would put the work on the board, then assist the girls when and where needed.

The girls would then quite happily get on with their work, and take the opportunity to carry on intense conversations as they did so.

These conversations revolved around, as far as I could tell, make up, musicians, TV shows and boys.

At first I thought that meant they were not doing any work, but as is famously known, girls, unlike boys, can walk and chew gum, and as I checked each students work I found that they were all doing what was required, whilst still devoting half of their mind to what Mumtaz said to Darren at the train station on Saturday.

Coming as I did from Eastlea where the classroom not burning down was considered a successful lesson, this work and talk I found perfectly acceptable and so let the girls get on with it.

The first friction point came later that week.

I was teaching maths, the class were doing their work and gabbing on as usual, and I was seated at the bench at the front of the class helping a student with a calculus problem.

Then a shadow fell across us and I looked up to discover that another teacher was standing over us, she said, "Is everything Ok, Mr Barker?" (Teachers of course use surnames when students are present).

I looked up in surprise and said, "Yes, far as I know.

Is something wrong?"

To which she said, "Well, I could hear your class down at the end of the hall, and I thought there was no teacher in the room."

I looked across the room taking in the students.

They were doing their work while talking with each other.

The volume was loud, but still nothing like an Eastlea class, but I understood what the other teacher meant.

So I said, "Oh, Ok, I'll get them to quiet down."

So I said to the girls, "could everyone please talk a bit quieter, please?"

The girls glanced at me, nodded briefly then went back to discussing who should be kicked off the reality TV show next, more quietly.

But this did highlight graphically to me the differences between the two schools.

Here at Sarah Bonnell my class had been labelled out-of-control noisy, at Eastlea I would have been awarded an MBE for getting thirty students to do some work.

So my time at Sarah Bonnell passed, I tried to keep the volume down, but so thankful was I for any students to be doing some work, that I mostly let it ride, and copped the occasional walk-in from another teacher asking me if I could keep the volume of the girls down.

In one class, the head of Science walked in and with a simple, "Sorry, Lachlan", shut the door of my room so she could concentrate in the staffroom.

But in general life at Sarah Bonnell was one sweet song, I taught maths and science and the girls had not only heard of calculus and photosynthesis, but even expressed some interest in these topics.

So I was a little unprepared when I sat down at my desk during my free period one day and saw there was a letter for me.

It didn't have a stamp, and simply said, "Mr Barker", on the front.

'That's odd', I thought to myself, 'who would be writing to me here?'

So I opened the envelope and discovered it was a love note from one of the girls.

It was not overtly sexual, more flowery than anything else, but it neatly opened the Pandora's box of being a young male teacher in an all girl's school.

There were seven of us as I recall, Myself, Craig, Bryan, John, Viv, Robyn and Gregor.

John, Viv, Robyn and Gregor were married or in a relationship, and so Bryan, from New Zealand, and Craig and I from Australia copped the brunt.

Most of these girls were Muslim and many had quite a repressed life, and so for many of them the only single men they met were teachers at school and thus Bryan, Craig and I, copped the brunt of this attention, and this lead to all sorts of weird and wild thoughts going on in the girls' heads, and found expression in these love notes.

Thankfully the head of science was in the staffroom when I opened the envelope, and so was able to ask her advice, "June", I said, turning toward her, "could you have a look at this for me?"

She turned toward me and I got up and took the letter over to her.

She scanned it and said, "Looks like it has started, Lachlan.

What you best do is every time you get one of these, show it to me or another senior staff member."

"Why's that?", I asked her.

"It's for your own protection, it's best of you disclose all these notes as you don't want it to look like you have been keeping any secret, with the obvious implication that you were in any way involved with a girl here at school."

I nodded, this was good advice, I was glad that she had been present when I opened the letter, otherwise I think I would have just thrown it in the bin, or tossed it in my in tray.

Either course could have had bad consequences for me if there was any friction with the girl's family, if they had discovered their daughter was writing love notes to a teacher at school.

June then went on, "Just the other week, Barb (a deputy principal at the school) got a note from a girl saying the Viv had raped a girl in the toilets."

I reared back, shocked, flowery love notes were one thing, but this opened up a whole new line of consternation.

"Really?" I said, with some vehemence, "What on Earth was that about?"

June replied, "It's an old trick, whenever a girl wants to get back at a male teacher, they do something like that."

I might add, June asked me about that first note and who it was from, but the name meant nothing to me, I checked my rolls and discovered that the name, Shamrana, didn't appear on any of my class lists, so I had apparently attracted the attention of some girl outside my sphere of influence.

I nodded again, "Thanks June, I had no idea.

Do you mind keeping any of my letters?"

She said "no", and so as the weeks went by, I would hand over my weekly, or thereabouts, missives from some girl or other.

However if I was in for one letter a week, Craig nearly had to get an internal post office branch in his staffroom to cope with the load.

I taught science and maths, and so was not overly popular with the girls due to the eternal unpopularity of these nerdly subjects.

However, Craig taught music, and this much more desired topic, in combination with Craig's fresh-faced good looks, opened the doors of postal love note hell.

I don't know the actual number, but ten a day, a DAY!, is the figure that springs to mind.

I do remember that one day he returned to his staffroom after a longer than usual absence to find twenty or so of these things piled haphazardly around his desk.

However, with June's assistance I dealt with my notes by simply giving them to her, which she would peruse briefly then toss in the bin for me, and in retrospect when you consider that my biggest problems were the girls talking while they worked and writing notes expressing their attraction for me, then it shows I had no real problems at Sarah Bonnell.

So that is probably why the inter-staff friction therefore stood out a bit more clearly for me.

As stated briefly above, the worse a school is, the stronger the bonds that seem to form between the teachers.

This had been true at Bourke, and also, definitely, true at Eastlea.

But at Sarah Bonnell, with no real discipline issues from the girls, the permanent staff would take the opportunity to get at each other.

And this was highlighted in most ludicrous fashion by the printing of Daphne's schedule in the school's daily info sheet.

The daily info sheet was a single sheet of double sided paper that was printed each day and handed out to the staff.

Any students who were away for any reason were noted on there, school events, like concerts, or excursions were put on it, plus other extraneous messages required for the running of the school.

Most teachers grabbed for this sheet like an actor did the newspapers the morning after a show they were in began, mostly in the hope of finding that the students they detested were away today.

This practise was much more evident at Eastlea where the absence of Billy Moore, for instance, for a day was like an early Christmas present.

Anyway, toward the end of the term, Daphne, who was the head of a year, nine, I think, was having trouble with teachers just coming to see her whenever they had a problem with one of her charges.

She had put out a request for teachers to make an appointment, but this hadn't been overly successful, and so she had prevailed on the principal to allow her to print her schedule for the remaining weeks of term in a daily sheet, so that the rest of us knew when they could go and see her.

I thought this was a perfectly reasonable way to handle things, but I was in the minority.

The other heads of year hit the roof, you would think world war three had been declared.

"Why is Daphne's schedule more important than mine?", screamed one at a staff meeting.

"Would you like your schedule printed as well?", replied the principal.

"Yes I bloody would", said that teacher.

"Well then mine should go in as well", remonstrated a third.

"Well why don't we print everybody's then?", said the principal, desperately seeking to diffuse the situation.

"You can't do that, there won't be room on the sheet for anything else", pointed out Shirley, the tremendously efficient Senior Admin staffer.

And so the argument raged, over, as another female supply teacher pointed out with much sense, a single piece of paper.

I'm sure you get the point, this ridiculous argument would never have occurred at Eastlea, as everyone over there was simply happy to escape the school each day with their person intact and no limbs broken.

However, all good things come to an end, and after a couple of terms at Sarah Bonnell, the teacher I had been filling in for was due to return, so I had to leave this little have of good behaviour and once more make my way back and forth across London, finding, then teaching in schools that rewrote the definition of out of control.
Chapter 7 - Rolling Hell.

However, before I go into more teaching stories, there is the topic of my first summer holiday in Europe.

I got this so wrong, but then I don't know how many times I am going to write this in my various writings, we would all do things differently if we had a time machine.

I had taught at Eastlea for three terms and then moved across the universe to Sarah Bonnell, but even with my short term of relaxed teaching at Sarah Bonnell, I was still suffering the after effects of Eastlea, and desperately needed some down time.

So what did I do?

I got in a Kombi van with four others and drove across Europe in the sweltering summer heat for two months and nearly did my head in fully.

But all that's ahead.

It all started with a phone call from my friend Peter Lewis.

Peter was a geography teacher with whom I had gone into the trenches at Eastlea.

I picked up the phone and Peter, with that oh-so-Eastlea habit of not mucking around, said, "Hey Lock, do you want to go to Europe this summer in a van?"

I, like many of us, never think things through, and so said "yes", we made a further few arrangements to meet and get it organised, and then rang off.

'Great', I thought to myself, 'Europe in the summer, that'll be relaxing'.

Boy, was I in for a shock.

We then began scanning the classifieds in the Southern Cross, a newspaper in London put out for visitors like us from the southern hemisphere.

We eventually tracked down a van which seemed suitable and then I went with Peter and his girlfriend, Sylvana across London to have a look at it.

It seemed OK, not that any of us had much mechanical nouse, and so we made arrangements to have it looked at by a mechanic, then left.

The nice young Dutch couple that were selling it needed it in the intervening period to move into their new house and so we agreed that once moved in they would call.

We then faced the issue of which mechanic to get to appraise the beast for us.

I had grown up on the TV show Minder and the snaky wiles of Terry's boss, Arthur Daley, the ultimate used car salesman, and so was trepidatious to say the least.

I can't recall from this remove how we found this mechanic, but we did, and, when a few days later the call came from them, went across to the Dutch couple's address, got the van and then did my first driving in London.

IT was manic.

My friend Sean from Canada once told me that "80% of people think they are above average drivers".

And Ben Elton put it well when he wrote, "You never hear a guy come into the pub and say that he caused an accident on the way here because he's not a very good driver and also he couldn't get it up last night."

And those two quotes are relevant because the driving that was going on was helter-skelter at the minimum, with seemingly everyone behind the wheel convinced they were the only driver on the road who knew how to do it.

I thought I was a good driver, and could handle anything having driven tractors and four-wheel drives on the farm, and had driven in Sydney.

But when I look back on it, I realise that I hadn't driven a car for a long time.

While still in Sydney I had been a student at teacher's college, and so couldn't afford a car.

Then I had been in Asia where I had been driven, nearly mad, as well as around by the locals in their rattling death machines.

So this trip across London to the mechanic's was my first drive in nearly 18 months, and it showed.

What's more, of course this was my first time in a Kombi, and this one in particular, so the trip was fraught with many hazards to start with.

Then there was the traffic.

Oh, my god, does London have traffic.

Previous to this my worst experience of traffic was in LA.

LA has traffic jams at two in the morning, the morning peak hour is in reality the morning peak four hours.

And now I was finding that London was similar.

To put in into context, England and Scotland form an island the size of Victoria, Australia, but while the population of Victoria is a decidedly well-spread six million, sixty million people stand, and drive in 34 million cars, in England and Scotland.

And like all ancient cities, built for foot traffic and at most a coach and horses, the streets of London were in no way built for modern traffic.

Recently a friend told me that modern Londoners who own a car spend an average of seven days, 168 hours, a year looking for a parking space.

Ben Elton in his book, Gridlock, and Michael Palin, in his TV show, Carsick, have shown that Britain is overfull of cars, and I can assure you, that trip across London, if I didn't believe there were too many cars in Britain, I certainly did after.

I navigated onto a main road and began traversing the southern edge of London.

I got into the middle lane and was doing about 80k, with the speed limit being 100.

I decided to just stick to this plan till I got near the mechanics workshop, when a truck driver pulled up on my left, the inner, slower lane, and screeched at me for going too slowly in the middle lane.

I was too shaken already by the nightmare traffic to do more than look at him, and then, thankfully, he gave me a two-fingered salute and then spurted off at a greater speed.

I continued my nerve-jangling way and eventually got to the suburb I required and thankfully left the main road, (The south circular for those with knowledge of London), and joined the local traffic.

And for about three milliseconds I was able to relax.

But then I encountered the problems of driving in the suburbs of London.

I had left a road where I had been yelled at for going to slow, and now I was in traffic where I wanted to yell at someone because it was not fast enough.

There were cars parked on both sides of the road and to say the local throughways were barely adequate to handle four cars wide was an understatement.

So nearly demolishing the wing mirrors of parked cars on my left, and the oncoming traffic nearly doing the same to my van, on my right, I inched my way through to the mechanic's workshop.

To say I got out of the car with relief was another understatement, I felt like I had just completed some arduous polar trek and had planted my flag at the pole.

I went into the office and spoke to the coverall-wearing man behind the desk, "Hi, er, My name's Lachlan, I spoke to Garry?" I paused, and the man nodded indicating he was Garry, so I went on, "We called about getting our van checked?"

He nodded again, then came out from behind the desk and led me out into the yard and we surveyed the van.

He didn't start laughing, which I judged a good sign, and additionally didn't add, "And you say this thing moved?", which was mechanic's short-hand for this is gonna cost you a heap of money.

He nodded again and asked me for the keys, then he got in, wiggled up and down a bit in the driver's seat, then started the engine.

He then got out and came around to the back of the vehicle and stared for a moment at the exhaust.

Then he crouched down, pulled a rag from his pocket, and put his covered hand over the exhaust pipe.

After a few seconds the engine began to heave, and he took his hand off the exhaust.

Then he went back and turned off the engine and turned to me.

"Yeah, she's fine, you could probably use new rear shocks though."

I was a little taken aback, I thought the checking would be a bit more extensive than that, but then I wasn't a mechanic, and so had to take him for his word.

"Oh, right", I said, then asked a question that no Londoner can do without, "How much will that cost?"

"Aw, I could do it for ya' for fifty quid."

I said "great" and we went into the office and made the arrangements and then I left, thankfully carless, for the nearest tube station to go home.

A week or so later Garry called back to say that the van was ready and I could come and pick it up.

So I got Craig, the handsome music teacher from Sarah Bonnell, he of the ten-love-notes-a-day fame, who was also coming on the trip and we trained across London to Garry's workshop.

We walked in and Garry was once again behind the desk, he looked up and nodded, then said, "Come for your van, huh? OK, I'll just print out your bill."

He went to his computer and hit a few keys and then an invoice appeared from his printer.

He tore it off and then gave it to us, and there in the total column was ₤300.

I stared at it in consternation.

All of us going on the trip were teachers and so were relatively well off by English earning standards, but I had previously told those going on the trip that we would only be up for fifty quid for the shocks.

I looked searchingly at Garry, "I thought you said it would be fifty?"

He looked searchingly at me, "Oh, sorry, no, fifty for the labour, parts cost two fifty."

"Oh", I said, "well, um, I've, er, we, only brought fifty quid cash."

"Oh", he said in return.

I was uncertain how to go on, but thankfully Craig took over, "Can we go to a bank machine? Is there one nearby? I've got that much in my account, so I can cover it."

I looked at Craig gratefully, thank god here was there.

I should say that this was in 1992, and EFTPOS wasn't widespread at the time, it certainly didn't exist in mechanic's workshops in the suburbs where the Arthur-Daley-esque cry of "less VAT for cash" was heard incessantly.

VAT is the English version of GST in Australia, a common scam was to pay cash to avoid it.

Most repairs were therefore paid in cash so the mechanic didn't have to declare the full, if any of the amount, on his tax.

So Garry gave us directions to the high street and Craig and I went down there, got the money out and then returned.

We paid up and Garry added graciously, "Sorry about the fright", and then with Craig at the wheel we drove away in our van.

We parked it at Craig's place in the suburbs and then went around to Peter and Sylvana's place near Earl's Court.

Yes, that's where they lived, talk about Australian stereotypes.

It was a curious living place, but then not if you were a Londoner, for they lived in a bay window.

London is a very crowded place.

The roads, as stated, just sort of grew in an organic octopus-like way across time and space, and the houses were much the same.

Peter and Sylvana lived at the front of a three story house that over the years had been slowly compartmentalised into smaller and smaller living places.

I myself was living in a similar place in north London and my room was so small that I had to walk sideways to get past my bed.

Peter and Sylvana had lucked into the plum spot, at the front of the house.

They lived in one room about the size of a car, with guests sitting on the ledge of the bay window.

There was a tiny, sorry, microscopic, kitchenette, and their bed filled up the rest of the floor space.

The fifth of us, Renee, was also there and so, in its way it was good training for the months to come, with all five of us jammed into a space about the size of our van.

We had some curry and made our plans.

We set a leaving date, sorted out where we were with money, then went our separate ways to our various accommodations.

And so finally the day came, we were out of the claustrophobia of London and on our way south the ferry at Dover.

We bought our tickets and then drove on board.

We stood on the rails and watched the channel flow by, until the horn sounded and we all scurried below to our cars.

We drove off the ferry and suddenly, schizophrenically, we were in France.

Like most, we had some adjustment-nausea.

First we had driven on to the ferry on the left, not we had to leave the terminal on the right.

That done, we joined the south flowing traffic for Paris.

Many have described French drivers, but I think it was best put by Peter Wherret in his car show, Torque, said Wherret: "You only have to look at traffic on the Champs-Elysees to know that not only did the French invent motor racing, they're still at it."

We were the slowest vehicle on that motorway to Paris by a wide margin.

The other drivers flew by us as blurs, the speed limit was listed as 130kph, but this was seemingly only used by the other drivers as a speed to enter petrol stations.

However, it was big wide freeway and we were able to pootle along quite happily in the slow lane.

We entered Paris and using our guide book found a campground.

We then set up and it was time to explore a bit.

But here already I began to come up against my "know why your going, before you go there" philosophy.

I didn't like sight seeing, still don't, I seem to more prefer doing things than just looking at things.

Actually, as we are to see, if I had any real awareness, I would have driven or flown straight to Benidorm and got drunk every day till my money ran out, but that was all ahead as well.

So we took ourselves to the place all visitors go first, the Eiffel Tower.

Up we went, observed the view, and this was indeed fine.

Then we came down and went to the Louvre, and it was here that I was to first observe that most recurrent part of European summer holidays, queues.

The line stretched out of the entrance and around the block, possibly finally ending in the outer suburbs of Paris.

I wanted no part of that, so while Sylvana, Renee and Peter, joined the line, Craig and I went off on our own to see a different exhibition.

I might add, I have never had any interest in art, due to a horrendous, dragon of an arts-and-crafts teacher I had in primary school, Mrs Ashelford.

She did everything possible to destroy a young child's love of that subject.

She played favourites, which no teacher should ever do, it's bad enough when it happens by accident, it's deplorable when it's done on purpose and everyone in the class knows who the favourites are.

She criticised everything I did, which I think is likewise reprehensible for art, maths you have to criticise and show the student when they have the wrong answer, otherwise they won't learn.

But art in primary school should be an expression of wonder at the amazing world that the child is exploring.

Mrs Ashelford would abuse you forcibly if she couldn't recognise what you had drawn.

So I became scared to do anything.

I might add, when I was very young my brother showed me something I thought quite amazing, how to draw a landscape.

With a series of overlapping triangles he made mountains, then in the middle he put overlapping semi-circles to make hills, and a few sinuous wriggles in the foreground made streams creeping out of the hills.

Once coloured, green for the hills, blue streams and white and grey for the mountains, it looked genuinely like a landscape painting done by a real artist.

So with this technique, I was now able to do art and not be screamed at by Mrs Ashelford.

However, talk about when you're on a good thing stick to it, I then did that every time I was asked to do art.

While it kept me out of trouble with the dragon, I then began to come adrift when the teacher would ask us to do something different, like a portrait.

In second class, me aged seven, a, thankfully, softer voiced teacher, said, "Lachlan, whenever we do drawing, you always do the same thing, mountains, hills and streams.

Why not put something different in? Like a cow eating the grass or something?"

Well, I tried, I couldn't of course tell this gentler teacher that my always-the-same-drawings were yet another defence mechanism to prevent the dreaded Mrs Ashelford screaming at me, but I put in a cow, and I'll never forget this teacher's expression when I showed it to her, I know she wanted to say, "I thought you were going to draw a cow? What the fuck is that!"

But to her credit, she recognised that I had tried, and the odd four-legged object cropping the grass by one of my streams, was an attempt at least.

In the end my attitude to Art was best demonstrated by two TV shows, Futurama and Absolutely Fabulous.

In Futurama, one of the characters, Dr Zoidberg, gets $300 Earth dollars as part of a global stimulus package, and decided to spend it on something classy, art.

He goes into a gallery in New New York, walks in, pulls out his money and says to the attendant, "One art, please".

Jennifer Saunders in 'Ab Fab', plays the fabulously wealthy Edina.

She is advised by her accountant to get some artworks for her office and home, so she goes down to an exclusive art gallery in Bond St.

The concierge comes to attend her, and says, "Good morning, madam, may I be of assistance?"

To which Edina replies: "I want some art."

The concierge, replies, in a decidedly bemused fashion, "I'm sorry?"

And Edina says, "I want art.

I just want to buy some art."

"Oh well, we have some stunning pieces on display at the moment, would you care to browse?"

Edina nods and walks up to a collection of coat hangers on strings.

She turns to the concierge and says, "Is this Art?"

He says, "Yes, this is a stunning thought piece by radical German edge artist Horsten Klanmp".

And Edina says, "That'll do."

So she buys it and has it brought to her house and installed.

Then her friend Patsy comes over to visit, sees the installation and says, "Is this the art?"

Edina says, "Yes, what do you think of it?"

Patsy stares for a moment and says, "I'm not sure, how much did it cost?"

"₤100,000"

To which Patsy replies, "Oh, well it's fabulous then."

Anyway, back to Paris.

Craig and I left the other three and went across town to see the Monet exhibition.

At least I think it was Monet, it was whoever did the painting with the lilies floating on the water.

This was actually a good move, not because either of us had much interest in art, but because there was no one else there.

We walked the largely silent, and gloriously air-conditioned halls, perused the art in a bemused fashion, then returned to the campground.

The others had seen the Mona Lisa and thought it only "OK", mainly because it is quite a small picture and the room is always, always crowded, so they looked for a little while over the bobbing heads, and then left.

Now that I think about it, there must be other art works in the Louvre, but only genuine art lovers would know what they were.

We continued our sightseeing, we saw the palace of Versailles, I remember that, we took out second mortgages to eat, I remember that for sure, then after three days, we decided we had seen enough of Paris and began to go south.

But before we leave the French capital I'll just say the thing I remember most is Jim Morrison's grave, which Craig and I went to see one afternoon in Pere Lachaise cemetery.

A lot of famous people are buried there, Chopin, for one, but no one knows where his grave is, the most "popular" grave, I can't think of a better way to put it, is that of Jim.

The circumstances of Jim's death are still clouded, with those that were with him at the time, still under suspicion from hard core fans, but in essence he died of a drug overdose, heroin combined with heavy drinking.

Anyway, his grave was a tremendously moving experience for me, and was worth the trip to Europe for that alone.

I do not wish to compare myself with Jim's greatness in any way, but at a very low level I have always felt myself a very Jim Morrison-esque character.

Well read, intelligent, creative, but massively, massively, self-destructive.

On at least four nights of heavy drinking I can think of, I nearly died.

Twice in near car accidents, once when I unforgivably drove drunk, I came out the next morning and saw that my passenger-side front wheel was flat and shredded, with white dust on the wall, and realised that I'd driven into a gutter last night, and had no recollection of it.

Once I got in a car with someone as drunk as me, and we nearly went over a cliff.

Once from alcohol poisoning, in which I luckily vomited for twelve hours and survived (Keith Moon, the drummer of The Who, was not so lucky, choking on his vomit after passing out), and once when I nearly drowned, having gone surfing when nearly too drunk to stand.

So I have a great affinity with Jim, and I guess I am lucky in the end that I received competent mental health treatment and am alive today.

To see that small, square stone in the ground, with simply 'James Morrison, 1943-1971' and a small Greek inscription, the meaning of which is still unclear, but most think it says something like: 'by my own daemon', was, as I say, massively sad.

Anyway, time to hit the road, and head for Spain.

It is hard to piece things together form this remove, it was 20 years ago, but most of the middle of France is a blank to me.

The next concrete thing I remember in the timeline of the journey is Bordeaux in the south, but somewhere in the middle of France, before we reached the capital of claret country, we had our first mechanical trouble.

Peter was driving and we came around a corner, and I, in the passenger seat, noticed him swing wide, he looked down with concern at the wheel and he had just started to say "I think there's something wrong with the steering", when we heard the telltale thump-thump-thump, of a shredded tyre.

We pulled over on this small, and thankfully little trafficked, road in the middle of rural France and surveyed the problem.

We got out the spare tyre and went about putting it on, when something Garry, the mechanic back in London had said came back to me.

As I've written quite extensively, I am, and always have been a cheapskate, and when Garry had given us the bill for ₤300, I had said to him, "could we have bought the parts and done it ourselves?" (A hopelessly, wildly, lunatically optimistic opinion of my mechanical skills, I might add.)

He had shaken his head and replied, "Well, I don't think so.

What's more when we went to put the shocks on, there was something wrong with the wheel nuts, and it took three of us an hour, and with the use of a makeshift extended spanner to get the damn things off, you would never have done that on your own."

And as I looked at the vehicle on the side of the road, I was glad to my cheapskate heart that we had had the shocks done In London, because even with that pre-treatment, just getting the wheel nuts off took every bit of combined strength Peter, Craig and I had.

But then with the wheel off we rolled the spare around and discovered our next problem, it was too big.

If the three still inflated wheels were thirty centimetres in diameter, the spare was forty.

However, we were exceptionally lucky because the new larger tyre had the same sized hub, so the stems fitted the holes, and after a bit of monkeying around we got the enlarged tyre under the wheel arch and in place.

We tightened the nuts and then set off, slanted off centre like a ship with no rudder lurching drunkenly into the harbour mouth, and began looking desperately for a village large enough to have petrol station and a mechanic.

Fortunately we found one, and he came out of his workshop, wiping his blackened hands on an even blacker rag.

He surveyed the wheel and then nodded, Garry fashion, then addressed us in French.

This was a problem as none of us spoke it, I had passable tourist Spanish, Craig had a bit of Italian, but the best French any of us had was of the "pen of my aunt is in the garden" variety.

In retrospect, the first person we should have booked for our trip to Europe was a language teacher, but there you go.

Anyway, we all stood there for a moment, and then our French mechanic friend, I'm guessing used to this sort of thing in the summer, took over.

He got went over to the wheel we had changed, front passenger side, and made a cutting motion with his hand, then he lead us around to the matching tyre on the other side, and made the same motion.

Then he lead us to the rear of the vehicle, pointed at the rear wheels and made a thumbs up motion, then he went back to the front and help up two fingers.

I suddenly grasped what he meant, I took a closer look at the front tyres, compared them with those on the rear, and guessed his meaning.

I turned to my friends and said in English, "I think, I've figured it out, he's saying that we need to replace both front tyres as they're shot, but the rear ones are Ok."

I then showed my friends the treads on the rear tyres and compared them with those on the front.

Once pointed out it was quite obvious, so we all nodded our heads in agreement and I spoke to our mechanic friend, I held up two fingers and pointed to the front tyres.

He nodded and with sign language we all agreed we needed two tyres, and then passed to the recurrent question of European travel, "How Much?", I said to the mechanic.

He got my meaning, but unable to pass on the information, he went back inside and got out his tyre catalogue.

He brought it back out, thumbing through the pages, then found the page for Volkswagen, ran his finger down the list and pointed at a certain tyre, the price was in francs, but Renee had a personal organiser with an exchange rate app on it, and we saw the price in pounds, it seemed reasonable, so we agreed the price.

Our mechanic friend went back inside, got to new tyres, brought them out, did the job and then we were ready to roll again.

With much thanking in French, "merky buckets (Merci Beaucoup)", we drove away from his little workshop and headed south again.

Do you know what 'circulation difficile' means?

I do.

Now.

We were heading south-west from Paris, toward Spain, and thus the next major town on our route was Bordeaux.

We perfectly disorganised our arrival in Bordeaux for the afternoon peak hour, and as we began to skirt the city's western arm this phrase was written on the electronic sign.

It was novel for a couple of reasons, it was actually the first time I had seen one of these traffic indicator signs, most famously represented in the Steve Martin movie, LA Story, and secondly, it was my first acquaintance with this French phrase.

Renee punched it into her little personal organiser's translation app, and the response came back, 'movement difficult'.

Of course by the time she had done that, we could have all told her what it meant.

The traffic was moving like treacle, and I think the reason it was so annoying for us was that we had already driven six hours that day.

No one likes being in traffic, but there is something about heavy traffic at the end of your driving day that makes it worse.

These days I live in a coastal resort town on NSW's north coast, and we have the same issue here.

Before they put in the new super-duper roundabout and change system on the highway out of town, tourists used to report taking six hours to get from Ballina to Byron Bay, since this is a distance of 44k, that's a long time.

And if you have already driven from Sydney, ten hours or so, then six hours in traffic when you have already done ten at the wheel is enough to cause gunfire.

Additionally, we weren't even going to Bordeaux, but all the roads in the area were laid down by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago, and so every road in the area lead, if not to Rome, certainly to Bordeaux, and so we were stuck with it.

We inched along on the commuter expressway in the evening sun.

We sweated in our shorts, Craig, who was driving, developed RSI of the ankle from changing gear from first to second and back a hundred times an hour.

But eventually we got around the rim and were able to launch off the road to the south-west and the Spanish border.

However, the extra time we had spent in the traffic had brought dusk upon us, and so we had to go through the already loathed process of finding a campground in a strange city, in a foreign country, where none of us spoke the language.

'Ou eh le camping?' (Where is a campground?) was an expression we were already becoming familiar with, as we said it leaning out of the driving window.

However we found one, set up camp, already becoming tedious, bought some of the cheapest claret we could find, had dinner and few drinks, then hit the ground for sleep.

The next morning we were up early and made it to the Spanish border.

We were entering the north-eastern corner of Spain, known as 'wet Spain'.

Most of us have a picture of Spain being a vast brown, sun-baked plain, consisting largely of dirt, and that is generally true, but up here, where the coast of Europe makes a sharp turn run out of France for Spain and the bay of Biscay, the land is lush and green, as of an Ireland in the south.

It was actually raining as we crossed the border and headed for the county capital San Sebastian.

San Sebastian is a beautiful place, or perhaps, better put, I is a standard large city on a beautiful coast.

As we entered we passed two middle-aged people on a biking tour of Europe (I guessed), they had all their possessions in four panniers each on the front and backs of their bikes.

Anyway, they were riding into town in the rain, they were covered in mud, dripping wet, and neither of them had a smile on their face.

I mention them because tempers were starting to fray in the van, but looking at them we realised we were well off.

However, I then perpetrated a bit of cowardice that would lead to some more shortened tempers.

I had navigated this day from our campground of the night before outside Bordeaux, through the Spanish border, to our current location, the outskirts of San Sebastian.

But at this point, I was feeling pretty tired, so I said, "I need a bit of rest, can someone else take over the navigating?"

One of the others said "yes", and so I handed over the map and lay back on my seat and let my eyes close.

It was cowardice because we were all tired, we'd been on the road for a week or so now, and also I spoke the best Spanish, which of course our map was written in, so in retrospect I should have kept navigating into the campground.

Anyway, I was lying back and slowly dozing off, when I heard the others trying to find out where we were on the map.

We passed a sign which said 'cambio de sentido', and I heard Peter say, "cambio de sentido, let's see if we can find that on the map."

In my dozing state, the phrase rang a bell, the arguments went on among my companions, and so I came awake again and grabbed my Spanish-English dictionary.

I looked it up, and it meant, literally, 'change of direction', or in this context, 'detour'.

With a sigh, realising that if we were looking for a road called 'cambio de sentido' on the map we were going to be lost for a long time, I woke fully and agreed to take over the navigating again.

I got my dictionary, looked at the street names and got us to a campground not far away.

And since we're on the topic of mixing up street names in a foreign language, I'll just tell you a story told to me by my German friend, Martin the language expert.

Martin was asked to teach an English automotive engineer German, as the engineer was being sent to work on placement at the car company's main plant outside Stuttgart.

However, as Martin told me, this fellow was one of those who just find Languages a closed book.

Marin studied with him intensively for six weeks, but at the end of that period, said Martin, he was still struggling with the 'ein bier, bitte' level of German.

Anyway, he sent him on his way to do the best he could, and the Englishman caught his flight to Stuttgart and booked into a hotel.

He then went outside and read the name of the street his hotel was on, then took a cab into town and had dinner.

Dinner over, he came outside and flagged a cab to take him back to the hotel.

When the cabbie asked him where to, the Englishman said his street name, 'Eingang Strasse'.

The cabbie looked at him askance, as 'eingang strasse' means 'one way street'.

However the story became a testament to German efficiency and helpfulness.

With the passenger not knowing where his hotel was or even what it was called, he drove him around to the police station.

Inside the cabbie told the desk sergeant his passenger's story, then the sergeant asked the Englishman how long approximately his cab ride to the restaurant had been, conferred with the cabbie on where he had picked him up, then looked at the map and conjectured approximately where his hotel was, then the sergeant rang the hotels in the area until he found the right one, and was able to send the engineer home safe.

Back in San Sebastian we found our campground, set up the tent and the interior of the van for sleeping, then went to get some Spanish money.

This is a complicated enough procedure when dealing with a human, but we tried to do it through a bank machine.

Thus, I put my English bank card in and then tapped in my pin.

That went fine, but then of course the menu commands came up in Spanish.

So I took out my dictionary again and began to frantically look up the commands on the menu and then pressing the requisite buttons.

A queue formed behind us.

After some frantic shuttle finance, read machine, read dictionary, press button, I got through to receiving my pesetas

I tucked them into my money pouch and then Craig wanted to get some money.

So we went through the same process.

The people in the queue began to get restive, to put it mildly, and I began to hear the phrase, 'English bastards' far too often for my comfort.

However, we got through that, but then with Peter, Renee and Sylvana wanting money as well, we decided to take a break before we got lynched.

So we let the locals through and once the line had cleared, then went through the process for the other three.

I should add, Australians are unknown in Europe, and so anyone of pale northern skin speaking English and causing a delay, is invariably labelled English, usually with an expletive prefix.

That done we spent a nice three days in San Sebastian, relaxing after the rigours of crossing France in two days, then once more lit out for the south.

Once we were not very far south of San Sebastian, the green disappeared and we were in Spain proper.

And man, it was hot.

Our van was dark coloured, and the drive down to Madrid had the same feel I have read of people having who have driven the Nullabor.

A flat, seemingly endless brown plain stretched out, seemingly eternally in front of us, while behind the same view rescinded with glacial pace.

We stopped for meals in roadside villages that leant new meaning to the term dusty.

I remember one lunch where I ate something that might as well have been advertised as 'eggs with dust', as that was all I could remember tasting.

However, eventually we made the outskirts of Madrid and joined the next set of city bound slow-moving traffic in the unbearable summer heat.

What's more, our map of Madrid was less than adequate.

For some reason we had a decent map of San Sebastian and its environs, but our only guide to the streets of Madrid was one page of our guide book, the species of which Bill Bryson, acerbically, and accurately, said should be called 'Let's Go Get Another Guide Book'.

Also, if the heat of the central Spanish plain had been bad, at least we had been moving at 80k an hour, and gaining some breeze from it, but now in the traffic of central Madrid, we were down to a crawl, and all of us inside the van were suffering.

On top of that, Kombis are air-, rather than, water-cooled, and so our van was beginning to show signs of strain.

I was having trouble changing gears, and I was noticing a distinct loss of power.

However, I put it down to the heat and the traffic and tried not to think about it.

But we got there, using our inadequate guide book map and our near expiring van.

The campground was not the coolly, shaded, riverbank, idyll that I had begun longing for in the traffic, but instead of piece of urban ground, dry, windswept and dusty.

But anything was better than moving another centimetre in the vehicle.

So we debussed, set up our camp, a task that was already becoming onerous, and then went up to the kiosk and had a Cerveza (Beer, for the uninitiated).

I've had a lot of beer in my time, as you all know well know, but I can assure you that beer was one of the top ten.

So at the top of page twelve we come neatly to the end of the chapter, and since I can't honestly remember what we did in Madrid, I have no recollection of seeing any sights, so instead I'll tell you the story of the woman with the suitcase.

The Madrid Cityrail station that those in the campground used was across a fairly major suburban road, four lanes at least, and to get to it, you had to use an overhead walkway.

This walkway was about six or seven metres above the road, and the steps up and down were quite the workout.

The next morning when we went into town there was woman, an attractive youngish, middle-aged type standing at the bottom of the stairs with a large suitcase.

She obviously needed help, and as the five of us approached, Craig stopped and asked her if she wanted help carrying the case up the stairs and down the other side.

She appraised us for a moment or two, then said, "No, Thank You", in Spanish.

We thought this a bit odd, so I added, "Are you sure, we are going to the station."

But she demurred again, and with a repeated "No, thank you", waved us on our way.

So off we went and went into Madrid and looked about.

When we came home that evening, she was gone, so we figured naturally enough that she had got some help with her case, and caught the train, though why our help was not required, we couldn't begin to speculate on.

The next morning came and we headed for the station, and she was back, standing at the base of the stairs with her bag.

This morning I was with only Craig, and we once again asked her if she needed help, once again she said "no".

So we went off once more, that evening she was gone.

But the next morning she was back, so with curiosity finally getting the better of me, I asked at the campground kiosk about her.

She was a prostitute.

Turns out prostitution is illegal, and heavily frowned upon in catholic Spain, so this woman had come up with an ingenious solution, she lurked at the base of the stairs with her bag, and then when a single male came along, and offered to help, she accepted and used this to get some custom.

As far as I could tell she didn't want our help on either morning, because we weren't rich.

I had been wearing the same shorts for a week now, and it showed, while Craig, had looked cleaner, but was still clearly a penniless backpacker.

And as I came through on my second pass of editing, I re-read that bit about the woman with the suitcase, and it reminded me of something else I saw in Madrid, that was even less wholesome.

At Martin's direction, I had begun reading comic books in tandem with my language dictionaries, to learn, at least how to read the languages, and in Madrid I needed some fresh comic books.

So I found a bookstore in the heart of town and went in and asked about Garfield comics.

I was directed to the comic section I went browsing along the section looking for the characteristic ginger and black stripes of Garfield, when I saw a comic book with an oddly contorted human couple on the cover.

I took a closer look and realised it was a hard core pornographic comic.

It was such an appalling thing to be on display in a section, comic books, devoted mostly to children.

I opened it and looked inside, and simply couldn't believe my eyes, inside women with breasts like nose cones of Polaris missiles and men with muscles like Schwarzenegger engaged in the most explicit acts.

I was frankly shaken.

So I put it down, found some much more wholesome comic books of Garfield, Tintin, and some Calvin and Hobbes, made my purchases and left.

But as I write I am once more driven to the remarkable lack of logic that goes with a country heavily dominated by religion.

The greatest woman in biblical history, Mary Magdalene, was a prostitute, yet in Spain prostitution is illegal, so much so that a practitioner had to lurk by a road overpass with a suitcase as an excuse, while just twenty blocks away, hard core pornography is sold in the comic book section of bookstores.

So I guess that's all for Madrid, a city of a thousand years of culture, and all I remember are XXX comic books and the prostitute with a suitcase that was big enough to hide in if the cops came along.

Perhaps that's where she got the idea in the first place.

Next time we move onto the southern Spanish coast around Barcelona, then back across the south of France and onward for the Brindisi ferry to Greece.
Chapter 8 - Rolling Further.

So with Madrid done, it was time for the coast.

We headed south-east toward Valencia on the Mediterranean coast, the van was moving well again, and so I put aside my thoughts of mechanical failure that first appeared in the Madrid traffic and rolled on.

The coast was really (I see now) what we had come for, and the sea breezes, when we finally came within their sphere of influence, were worth every kilometre we had driven to experience them.

Valencia is famous for its oranges, and indeed the site of those beautiful dark green swathes on the red Earth of the coast made everyone feel better.

We had been in the van, and each others close proximity now for two weeks, and even if you are travelling with St Francis of Assisi and the Dalai Llama, arguments and bickering will still occur.

St Francis would always be wanting to stop at every church and have a pray, while you would no doubt get annoyed with the Llama for never getting annoyed about anything.

So the coast was a great change for us.

We hit Valencia and after a few nights there we headed back up the coast toward Barcelona.

And here, in Barcelona, we hit a campground that was run by Fascisti left over from General Franco's regime.

It says something about this narrative that famous sights don't figure prominently, that is largely due to my lack of interest in them.

In the end I am writing down what I remember, and if it is still in my mind twenty years later, then I figure it's worth reporting.

So.

The first thing I remember about Barcelona was that it was the first place I had a long, complex, to me anyway, conversation in Spanish.

We were in the van driving around with our less than adequate guide book, trying to find the campground.

Eventually, we came across two young Spanish mothers out for a stroll, each pushing a pram with baby on board.

I pulled up next to them and leaned out the driver's window.

"Buenos Dias", I said, in my flawed Castilian accent, "Hay una camping poor aqua?" (Is there a campground nearby?).

One of the young women replied, "Yes", and she pointed to a chainlink fence next to the road, "that is the campground, inside that fence, but to enter it in your van, you have to go back up the road to the lights, turn right, and it is about one kilometre down on your left."

I was very pleased as I understood her response pretty well.

I sought some clarification, and then we thanked the young women and did a u-turn and went on our way.

It was very satisfying to be able to make some small steps in a foreign language.

And I might add, I was already learning that learning a foreign language has many tricky bits, but in any language, grammar is the toughest.

Vocabulary is relatively easy, this word means 'car', this word means 'campground' etc, but when those words come clothed in and around with verb and adjective structure, it can hide the noun completely and you are left all at sea.

German for instance is like this, many say that it is the easiest language to learn as it is logical, but this is a fallacy, German has its hard bits, I can tell you, commonly, by its use of compound words.

The noun in German is placed in the middle of the word, then a whole series of 'un-, 'ab-', 'noch-', 'ge-' and other bits are welded onto the front and back of the word till the learner doesn't know where they're at.

Plus Spanish and French have the famous gender prelates, and so in French, a chair is male and a table is female, figure that out.

And, just before this turns into some 'English is the best language' rant, from what I understand, one of the hardest things about English is that so many words mean different things, throwing the learner off even at the vocabulary level.

'Set', for instance, can be 'the glue has set', a 'set of blocks', 'the sun had set' and 'I am going to set up my computer'.

So all of the languages of Europe have their issues, but the point is there is something very satisfying about making progress in any skill.

So we made our way back to the lights, turned left and pulled up at the campground.

We paid, went in and set up, then decided to have swim in the campground pool.

And here Craig and I discovered where the Nazis that had escaped Germany at the end of World War two had got to.

The pool attendants, in their white terry-towelling clothing, seemed to have a beef against the world and everyone in it.

For a start, I walked up to the pool wearing my shorts and t-shirt, and jumped in.

Lovely.

Then before I had finished shaking my head dog-like to get the water out of my eyes, one of the attendants blew a whistle and said to me, "You can't wear clothing in the pool", then he gestured to my t-shirt.

I looked at him a little askance, wearing a t-shirt in the pool is a common way to avoid sunburn.

At first I thought he was kidding around, it seemed so ridiculous, but he kept gesturing and so I paddled over to the side, got out and put my t-shirt on the grass next to the pool.

To be fair to him though, I had been planning to use the chlorinated pool to give my travel stained t-shirt its first wash since I'd left England, and considering the state of the thing, the life guard's actions were probably justified.

So shirtless, I went back to the pool and dived in.

The whistle went again and the life guard pointed at me again, and said, "No diving from the side of the pool."

WTF? I said under my breath, then the life guard came over closer to me and admonished me further, he repeated his injunction and made it clear that if you wanted to dive, you had to do it off the diving board.

So Craig and I nodded and then began to swim a few lengths.

Astoundingly, the whistle went again and I looked up to see the life guard once more pointing at us, and this time he was indicating that if we wanted to swim lengths we had to go over to the other side of the pool and do it.

Turns out we were swimming in the shallower side and this was supposed to be only for parents and young children.

Anyway, we continued our swimming and then, mischievously, began to push the envelope in every direction to see exactly just what was and wasn't allowed.

Turns out pretty much anything except floating on your back quietly is against the rules, and even then you have to do it in the right area of the pool.

Crag went to the diving board and jumped in.

AGAINST THE RULES!

Diving only from the diving board please.

I splashed Craig with a sweeping motion of my hand.

AGAINST THE RULES!.

No excess splashing please.

And so it went.

Eventually we had had enough, we'd heard that whistle more than a particularly transgressive soccer player during a tight match and so now it was time to get out.

So we dried off and went into Barcelona to look around, I saw the main square of town which was interesting to me because of a story told to me by my flat mate in Vancouver, Bob.

He had gone Spain for his vacation and had been in Barcelona for John Baptiste day.

John the Baptist is the patron saint of Barcelona, and so his birthday is widely celebrated.

The focus of this celebration is the main square and this square is packed with locals who take champagne and fireworks.

Said Bob, "midnight came around everyone was fully loaded with champagne and already things were getting out of hand.

Then they all began letting off their fireworks.

You've no idea how bloody dangerous it is being jammed into an outdoor area, shoulder-to-shoulder, when a sky rocket suddenly goes off next to your ear.

I was lucky to get out of there with all my limbs."

So we went down to the main square and looked around.

It was all too easy to picture the carnage of that night.

Apart from the fireworks damaging you when they go up, they've also got to come down sometime, so there is a double jeopardy on this night.

We returned from town on the bus and we got off on the main road, not far from where we had had our conversation with the two young women that morning.

Thus, we were driving distance from the entrance to the park.

I should add, this was the mother of all campgrounds, certainly in terms of size, I would estimate that it was a square kilometre, and so where Craig and I now stood was something like a two kilometre walk around two sides of the park to get to the entrance.

I looked at Craig, then at the walk ahead of us, and said, "Sod that, let's climb over the fence, and save some walking,."

Craig demurred, he was always more sensible than I, and said, "Do you think we should, won't that be against the rules?"

To which I replied, "almost certainly, considering the pool this morning, but I'm doing it anyway."

So I walked through the scrubby bushes up to the fence.

I was standing there examining it, planning my assault, when a rattling, scraping sound caught my ear.

I turned my head, and there, twenty metres away, but closing the distance rapidly was a Rottweiler guard dog bearing down on me with its mouth agape with menace.

The scraping sound was coming from the dog's lead which was attached to a metal pipe laid lengthwise down the fence, the dog moving up and down to stop people like me doing exactly what I was planning.

I gave a falsetto yelp and leapt backwards and then sprinted the few metres it took to take me out f the dog's bite zone and stood panting in fear next to Craig.

"I think we had better walk around to the entrance", I said, in another understatement of cosmic magnitude.

So we set off and now that we knew to look, saw that there was a dog tied to the ground pipe apparatus every hundred metres guarding the entire perimeter of the campground.

So I didn't climb in, but did wonder why on Earth the campground needed such ferocious security.

In the end, it was no doubt just a throwback to the third Reich, where the staff of the campground had learned their trade.

We spent a few more days in the internment camp, and then it was time to return to France.

So we packed up and headed up the coast toward the French border.

And it was on this leg of the journey, that the gear changing stickiness that I had noted in Madrid hit home for real.

We were moving along the highway of the Spanish coast this morning, and already it was hot, very hot.

Then the highway veered inland to avoid some coastal hills, and here, cut off from the cooling sea breezes, our clutch melted.

I was driving and I changed up from first to second, then into third, then finally into fourth, however our speed didn't increase, the needle stayed stuck on forty kilometres an hour.

I stamped on the accelerator and this had no effect, so I tried changing down again in case it was a power issue, but our speed did not increase.

The queue of cars behind us began to build up, and eventually when there were nearly fifty vehicles, full of irascible Spanish and French drivers behind us honking their horns and telling us in no uncertain terms to get off the road, I pulled over.

I explained to the gang, what was happening, then got out and had a look under the vehicle.

I couldn't see anything obvious (I had thought we may have picked up a bit of metal or something that was interfering with the gear shaft), but nothing was visible.

However, stopping the engine had compounded our problem because when I restarted and tried to get the van going, I discovered that now we didn't even have first gear.

Whatever had happened had happened because of the heat, and stopping had allowed whatever had melted to set solid, jamming the clutch and gear cogs into immobility.

So we stood on the side of a highway in Spain and contemplated our options.

Thankfully Peter and Sylvana had been given some invaluable advice back in London and had joined an organisation called National Breakdown.

This was a Europe wide towing service, wherever you broke down across the continent, National Breakdown would organise a tow to the nearest repair point.

However, good as this service was, you still had to phone them, and this was the days before mobile phones were widespread.

So we had another conference and it was decided that since I had the best Spanish I would walk/hitch along the highway to a phone booth, and organise a tow truck.

So I set out and I have to say, quite enjoyed my walk.

I was away from the crowded interior of the van for the first time since we had left London and it was refreshingly liberating.

But then the heat began to take over and I realised I couldn't keep this up forever.

So it was fortuitous that the universe sent help.

I walked along and came to a paddock where a farmer was ploughing the field with a tractor.

I went up the fence around his field and when he came around again, waved vigorously and caught the farmer's eye.

He noticed me, pulled his plough out of the ground and drove over to where I stood.

He was a quite amazing looking man.

He was Spanish, as I was to learn from our conversation, but he had blonde hair.

I guessed he had a northern European parent, or grandparent, either way, he jumped down off his tractor and asked me what I wanted, I said in the best Spanish I could that our car had broken down and did he know where I could find a phone to call a tow truck?

He nodded and then launched into a series of direction, I couldn't follow it precisely, but gleaned the gist.

So I thanked him and then continued on down the highway in the direction he had pointed.

He had told me there was a petrol station about three k down the road, and I could call from there.

I didn't particularly fancy three more ks, but when you know your destination, it does make it easier.

However, as it happens, I didn't have to walk all the way, I was meandering along when a change in the traffic noise caught my ear.

The noise of the passing cars was replaced by the deeper rumble of a diesel engine and I turned around to see my farmer friend in his tractor.

He pulled up next to me and waved to get on board.

"Terrific", I thought, "this'll speed things up".

So with me perched on the wheel guard we drove along the shoulder of the highway until we reached the petrol station.

I jumped down and thanked my Spanish farmer friend volubly.

He nodded and said 'no problem' or words to that effect, then parked his tractor and went into the petrol station restaurant and bought himself a coffee.

What a marvellous gesture of help.

So I went inside and went up to the counter, a young woman came to serve me and I told her my story of auto failure and then she took over.

"Grua?", she said questioningly.

I dived into my Spanish-English dictionary and looked it up, 'Grua'-'Tow truck'.

"SI, si", I said with my head nodding.

She picked up a phone next to her mounted on the wall, and made a call.

She spoke briefly with someone at the other end.

She hung up and then turned back to me, nodded and said something, which largely passed over my head, but I caught the word 'grua' in it, she was indicating the tow truck was on its way.

I then asked her how long it would take, and she said 'ahora, ahora', (Now, immediately).

Talk about helpful service.

I began to feel I could start to forgive these Spaniards for the Spanish Armada.

So I made my way back outside the coffee shop are and then a thought struck me, was the truck coming here? Or was I in for another walk?

But then that was quickly solved because I realised I hadn't told her where we were broken down, and then the truck itself showed up.

It pulled onto the forecourt of the petrol station and the driver looked around saw me, gestured at the towing apparatus on the back of the truck and looked questioningly at me.

I nodded, jumped up and got in the cab with him.

We roared off down the highway till we came to the van, then he winched the vehicle on board, we all got in and headed down to the nearby town of San Carlos De la Rapita.

We sent the tow truck driver on the way with a National breakdown payment number, then entered the mechanic's workshop he had towed us to.

Needless to say, because our van was German, the parts needed had to come from somewhere else, Barcelona probably, or maybe even Germany.

Either way, we were in for a few days stay.

However, this was a godsend in its way, and further reinforcement of the Buddhist ideal that 'nothing is good or bad, it just is'.

Carlos, as we locals came to call it, was a resort town on the Mediterranean, and so we found a hotel and stayed on the coast for, in retrospect, exactly what we had come to Spain for.

The first morning was spent with me in conversation with the owner of the garage while they tried to explain what was wrong.

Despite my progress in Spanish, this was well over my head, but with perseverance we communicated in the end.

Turns out that somewhere in the past some nameless cowboy had replaced the clutch plate with a plastic one.

No doubt parts were short, and this had worked fine in the northern latitudes where it was cool, but once we began traversing the stinging hot Spanish plain the plate had begun to deform in the heat, and that final morning on the highway it had folded up completely.

So with much nodding the owner, the mechanic and I talked and they got through to me that they could fix it but we would have to wait for a few parts.

I nodded and went back to the hotel to report.

That done we settled in and enjoyed a bit of real Spain.

We slept in, went to the coffee shop and had breakfast.

We lounged on the beach and by the hotel's bathtub-sized pool, at night we had dinner in the seafood restaurants of the town, and generally got some real vacation time.

Eventually our parts arrived and the owner sent a message to the hotel and we went down to the mechanic's workshop.

The owner told us the van was fixed, then pointed at me and told me to get in.

We set on for a test drive, and scurried about the cobblestoned streets of the town with the owner at the wheel, changing gears repeatedly and constantly talking to me, clearly indicating that the clutch was fixed.

We drove back to the workshop and got out.

We paid up, handed over a six pack of beer as a tip and then went on our way.

Sometimes it takes a melted clutch plate to make you stop on life's highway and smell the flowers.

So we moved up along the coast and re-entered France.

We were going roughly to Italy, Sylvana had relatives there, and to get there we had to return along the Mediterranean coast of France.

The next major town was Cannes, but we took a detour that many do and stopped in at the small fishing village of Saint-Tropez.

St Tropez is famous of course as the winter hang of the mega-rich, Bridget Bardot lives there apparently, or did, and this description, mega-rich, was accurate to the extreme.

I'll never forget pulling up in our dusty, travel-battered kombi and emerging like five people who had come to fix the drains.

All around us the beautiful people flowed.

The shops contained goods, clothing most prominently, that you needed a second mortgage even to try on.

I remember a stunningly beautiful French woman in designer clothing, with designer makeup, sporting designer hair and leading a designer dog on a designer lead.

She walked along till she noticed us, then made a wide detour around us so that none of the poverty of our clothing would brush against hers.

And it was crowded, boy was it crowded.

St Tropez has a resident population of 5,000, but each year attracts 5 million tourists.

This makes it a difficult place to live if you're a local, additionally due to the morphology of the coast, the only entrance and exits are a single two lane road.

So traffic jams are not just common, but incessant.

And to give you some idea of the scale of the crowding consider these nerdly figures.

Cape Cod in Massachusetts, US, has a population of 250,000, and attracts six million tourists a year.

Byron Bay in Australia, has a population of 10,000, and attracts 2 million tourists a year.

So those comparisons show that there is nothing like St Tropez for tourist crowding, with approximately 1,000 tourists for each resident jam packing the place annually.

That being the case, we didn't stay long.

Peter bought a pair of shorts, not so much because he was out of leg wear, but to say he had bought something in St Tropez.

We didn't eat there, but simply gawked for a moment and then got back in the van and got the hell out.

I had been hoping to see Bridget Bardot, preferably topless, but even if she had appeared on the footpath in front of me I wouldn't have seen a square centimetre of her skin as the paparazzi would have got their first and blocked the view.

They inhabit that town like swarms of killer bees, and it is a reasonable rule of travel planning to be anywhere the paparazzi are not.

So we moved on.

We stopped at Cannes and had a swim and had our first encounter with the French police.

However it wasn't overly problematic as they simply asked us to move our van from the red zone in which we had parked it.

We did so and they with nodding and a merky bucket watched as we went on our way.

I mention this because these Cannes police were the epitomy of politeness compared with one I was about to meet just up the coast in Monte Carlo.

Like St Tropez, Monte Carlo is a famous proving ground of the hyper-rich and the police there are more of a Praetorian guard than any other.

Just quickly some more stats.

Monte Carlo has a population of 15,000 and they inhabit an area of 0.61 k2, an area smaller than our campground in Barcelona.

However, this town, city, country, protectorate, or whatever, is stunningly beautiful, and there is more money per capita in this small little pocket of France than anywhere on Earth with the possible exception of Brunei.

I mention this because I think the police there have been given orders to give anyone poor a hard time.

And so it was that while there I nearly got arrested, then deported, for sitting on a wall.

Craig and I had gone out to sightsee and we had climbed the stony paths up into the hills to look out over the town and to the shores of the beautiful, blue Mediterranean.

We got to a lookout point and found our view obscured (slightly) by a chest high wall.

Now the sign on the wall said, quite clearly, "No Sitting on Wall", in five languages, but that was just a red rag to my bull.

And in similar vein to my attempt on the north wall of the campground in Barcelona, I went over, hoisted myself up, and sat on the wall.

Lovely, the view was so much better, without the wall obscuring the lower half of the view I looked down through my dangling legs at the houses below and the ocean further afield.

I was just congratulating myself on my cleverness when a French voice barked behind me, I turned my head saw two policemen in the light blue shirts of the Monte Carlo police.

They spoke again and gestured, clearly, for me to get of the wall.

I did so, then they spoke to me in French, I gestured that I didn't understand, and they switched to English.

Faultlessly, one of them said, "Can't you read? The sign says 'no sitting on the wall'".

I really had no answer for that, and was about to make a smartarse comment when the cop took over and began handling the smartarse part of the conversation quite nicely.

"You know what I hate about you English" he began.

I was about to say 'I'm Australian', but quickly realised that was unlikely to help.

So remained silent, and he continued, "You come over here in your filthy clothes, you sleep on the beach, you get drunk and vomit all over the place and you get into fights with the other tourists and cause a lot of trouble for me and the other police."

This was obviously a practised rant, and most of my life I have had pretty good relationships with the coppers, starting with the much loved Sergeant Crick in my home town, but this was as close as I have ever come to obstructing a policemen in the course of his duties, to wit, punching the arrogant arsehole in the face.

I was starting to lose my temper, I can tell you, I didn't like being called English (no Australian does), and the reason I was filthy was because every damn spare cent I had went on paying astronomical Europe summer prices, Monte Carlo being the pinnacle of those.

And I was just going to launch into my little fiscal discourse when he said, "Give me your passport, I am going to check you out."

What may have happened next we'll never know, because thankfully at that point Craig brought his level head to the issue.

"Just give him your passport, we don't want any trouble with these guys."

He may have gone on to say, "And I'm not going to wait around to bail you out of the clink", but I could tell he was thinking it.

However, I saw sense, got my passport out of my chest bag, and handed it over.

The copper took it with disdainful fingers, if he had had some surgical rubber gloves he would have put them on I'm sure, then he went over to an area of the viewing deck away from us and spoke into his radio.

He was there for a few minutes, then he came back and grudgingly returned my passport.

Then with a final admonition to 'follow all the rules' while we were in Monte Carlo, he waved us away.

He was only doing his job, but I was still fuming that evening at the perceived injustice of the world.

Of course, looking back I should think myself lucky, because what this policeman was really watching out for was English football supporters, who famously make infinite amounts of trouble for the hard working police of Europe, and in the end it was probably only hen he saw my passport and realised I was Australian and not English, that he didn't arrest me on the spot.

That night we went down to the famous casino of Monte Carlo.

Sorry, let me put that more accurately, we went down and stood outside the famous casino and looked at the pretty lights and the pretty people walking in.

I have never seen so many glittering people, and so many glittering, shimmering performance vehicles parked in one spot before.

A Mercedes would have been decidedly low rent here.

Lamborghinis sat next to Ferraris, Ferraris jostled with Zondas, those Zondas made way for Bugattis, Bugattis were parked next to Beamers and Rolls-Royces stood aloofly nearby.

I would estimate that the street outside the casino had ten million dollars worth of cars in it.

How much was being flung around inside doesn't bear thinking about.

Even the taxicabs in Monaco are BMW minimum.

Come to think of it, it was somewhat surprising that there wasn't a roadblock outside of town monitoring the vehicles trying to get in and telling us point blank that our battered Kombi was not welcome.

So having seen the sights of the Principality of Monte Carlo, and paid the prices therein, we moved on.

But before I do, I would just point out, that what you have read so far has kind of glossed over the mental strain of what we had put ourselves through.

We were all 'over' this constant road life in the van.

If we'd had a particular destination it may have been different, as we would have been able to sustain ourselves with the completion of each kilometre toward said goal, but we didn't, we were just travelling around and it was wearing thin for all of us.

I was the worst behaved I might add, impatient, tight with money, unwilling to compromise, but there was no denying we all, already, needed a break from our holiday.

And hasn't that line been written thousands of time throughout human history?

So when we were in Avignon in the south of France, Craig and I went to the shops to get some supplies and I told him I was over this, and he agreed, he to had had enough as well, and so we decided to leave the van and head for Greece.

I had always wanted to go there ever since reading Gerald Durrell's enchanting books of his life on Corfu when he was young, and Craig's sister had married a Greek man and they now lived together in Kalamata in southern Greece, so we would leave the van, and go there.

So on our return from the shops, we told the others of our plan, and they agreed, with some relief, that it was good idea, I know they were happy to see the back of me at the very least, and we got out the maps and made a plan.

Next stop, Milan.

Sylvana's relatives lived not far from there and Craig and I could get a train south from the central concourse at Milan station.

So we moved on across the southern coastal fringe of France and entered Italy.

And just because it has always amused me, let me tell you something my brother told me once that sums Europe up pretty well.

He heard this from German friend he worked with.

Heaven in Europe is when the Swiss are the organizers, the Germans are the engineers, the French are the cooks, the Italians are the entertainers and the English are the police.

That's heaven, right?

Hell in Europe is when the Germans are the police, the English are the cooks, the French are the Engineers, the Italians are the organisers and the Swiss are the entertainers.

All tied in with the stereotypical views of these various races.

However, I want to say that I actually found Italy far from disorganised, and quite nice to drive around in.

This was mainly because we didn't go to any of the heavy tourist areas, the Leaning Tower, the Vatican and so forth.

All Craig and I did in Italy was get driven to Milan on the famous Autostrada (Expressway) and a smooth ride it was too.

However, my cheapskatedness nearly denied us that in the end.

All the Autostrada have tolls and due to difficulty of doing the exchange rates from Francs to Lira, even with Renee's nifty little machine, we couldn't work out what the tolls were with any certainty.

The last thing we wanted was to come to a toll gate and be advised we owed a Monte Carlo-level of money for using the road.

So we took a B-road toward Milan.

This was a lovely drive, but we were in the foothills of the Alps here just north of Genoa, and every ten metres we went toward Milan was accompanied by a hundred metres of snaking turns.

Then we would encounter a speed limited village.

Out speed would drop from sixty to fifty and we would nudge our way through the tiny mountain settlement back to the open road.

After an hour of this, we reconferenced and decided that lovely as it was, if we kept this up we would spend infinitely more on petrol than tolls, so it was time to open her up on the Autostrada.

So we did so, we lurched down out of the hills and took the on ramp for the Milan Expressway.

We came to the toll booth and the little sign popped up showing we owed 3,000 lira for our trip.

The Italian lira is defunct now, replaced by the Euro, but from my research I have been able to glean that this meant we owed three Australian dollars for the toll.

Even we could afford that.

So we paid up, floored the pedal and set off for Milan.

Milan is a wonderful place, and is often considered the true capital of Italy, but we didn't see much of it, with our plan set, and the blue waters of Greece beckoning we just wanted out of the van, out of the country and out into the world of Greece.

We stayed our last night in the van nearby in Bergamo, then the next day the others dropped us onto the staggeringly beautiful forecourt of Mila station and we said our good byes.

They headed off and we went inside.

Italians are justly famous for their style and flair, so it the look the guy selling tickets gave me probably shouldn't have surprised me.

I was wearing shorts and t-shirt that hadn't been washed in three weeks, I was unshaven, and my backpack looked like it had recently been pulled from some swamp and should have been studied by archaeologists, rather than being in actual use.

I walked up to the counter and asked him, actually now that I think about it, showed him where I wanted to go.

Craig had a little Italian, but that was not really up to the conversational exchange and so we took out our guide books and drew with a finger our proposed route.

From Milan, we wished to go down the spine of Italy to Brindisi, then take the ferry across to Greece.

He nodded, and then said something in Italian, I looked at Craig, but he hadn't been able to understand, and so we looked back at the ticket guy and shrugged.

The ticket guy looked me up and down again, and gave a world weary sigh, then he pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down the fare, L66,000, or A$33 each.

Lovely, we nodded our heads, held up two fingers and he wrote out two tickets.

We then went through the mill of trying to read the timetable on the wall.

We were lucky here because our train terminated in Brindisi, thus the word Brindisi was prominently displayed.

If , for instance, you are going to a small town on a main line, you will commonly find that it is not even referred to.

So we found our train, got our platform number and went over there.

Our train was waiting and we got on board.

We found the most empty compartment (there were no seat assignments), stowed our luggage and then waited for the train to leave.

Eventually it did and we had the novel experience of seeing a bit of Europe without driving.

As the train left the suburbs of Milan we were able to see the Italian countryside in all its summer glory.

It was joyously relaxing.

But then dusk came down and with the view no longer available we tried to get some sleep.

I say tried, because as usual we had the cheapest seats, and without seat assignments, people just got on and sat wherever they could wedge themselves in.

About an hour after dusk fell I had an interesting little language moment.

A woman got on and looked into our compartment and said "Et tu occupado?", meaning, "are you full up?"

We eventually answered "No", so she came in and took the last available seat next to me.

I mention that because the first part of her utterance was in Latin, the ' et tu' bit.

You may recall this being used by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, as in 'Et tu brute?', referring to the moment when Brutus dug in the knife.

It makes sense that Italian of all languages would be the one to have Latin bits used in the modern day, but even so I found it minorly interesting.

What was less interesting, positively annoying in fact, was the woman's presence next to me.

I had previously been able to slump over a bit and been relatively comfortable, but with her here now, I now had to sit upright all the way to Brindisi (she was going to the end of the trip as well).

And so the night passed.

It took twelve hours or thereabouts, but eventually we pitched up at the ferry port of Brindisi and bought our last Italian transport tickets.

We boarded the ferry and soon we were making our way across the Adriatic.

The Adriatic is a small part of the Med, between Greece and Italy, similar to the Tasman being part of the Pacific.

This was my first experience of the Mediterranean, and it is such a different world to the seas that surround Australia.

It is so calm it is hard to believe some times.

It is nicknamed 'the pond', and you can see why.

It is more like walking across your living room through blue shag carpet than being at sea.

It redefines flat.

The only disturbance was the wake of the ship's propeller.

However, it was just what the doctor ordered after our month or so of crowded roads and tourist soaked hot spots.

The journey takes nine hours and we caught up on some of the sleep we had missed during our crowded train ride of the night before.

Finally the coast of Corfu began to line the western horizon and then we docked at Kerkyra, the capital of Corfu.

Gerald Durrell and his family are long gone of course, they lived here in the nineteen thirties, and the ravages of tourism, Craig and I included, have taken over, but even so, there is still enough of the natural charm to be going on with.

Craig had been here before, and there was the same guy he had stayed with standing on the dock looking for customers, Craig pointed him out and said his stay with this guy had been Ok, so we didn't quibble, paid up and got in his minibus.

He drove us across the island to his hotel and we checked in.

Backpack down, we then went straight to the beach and took a dip.

While I was standing there chest deep in the still, everclear water, thinking I have finally made it to the site of one of my favourite books when I became aware that I was not alone.

An attractive English woman came up and said, "Hey there, Where are you from?", I answered, "Australia, but currently I'm teaching in London."

I was about to ask her the same question when I saw through the glass-like water that she was stark naked.

I knew I was going to like it here.
Chapter 9 - Everything's Bright, Then Everything's Grey

And I did enjoy Greece, and not solely because I spent every morning waist deep in the Adriatic conversing with naked women.

It was a lot to do with the people, they are chaotic, anarchic, lovers of good food and drink, and this national character cemented my love of the place.

Craig and I were staying at a small village on the western coast of Corfu, called Pelakas.

The man who had picked us up at the ferry port had a lovely little hotel and our stay there was great.

Each day we would sleep till nine or ten, have breakfast on the deck overlooking the ocean, then, with toast and coffee consumed, we would head down to the sea for a swim.

As stated at the end of the last chapter, the beaches across the southern coasts of the Med are clothing optional.

So just going for a swim was something of an experience.

I was still too prudish to go naked, which may come as a surprise to those who knew me at uni.

Then, it only took three beers after soccer and my daks would be off, and I would be displaying my massive rear end for all to see, those unfortunates who did then racing to the bathrooms to vomit.

However, here in Greece we went swimming at ten in the morning, sober, and so our boardies stayed on.

The water was as clear as glass, and of an even, invigorating temperature.

Also, due to the enervating calmness of the Mediterranean in summer, many didn't lie on the beach sunbaking, but stood stomach deep in the water and had their conversations there.

There was a range of nationalities there, from Australian through Zambian, with all the continents in between.

So it was a genuine holiday.

On looking back it really comes as no surprise that this was where the holiday began as all we had done previously had been drive on crowded roads and set up tents on stony, gravel-strewn ground, like we were drivers for the army or something.

Anyway in Greece I began to finally relax.

All the tension of London and schools like Eastlea, compounded by weeks on the road, finally began to unknot and I was able to sleep smoothly and enjoy the sun.

We didn't drink a lot, perhaps surprisingly, my full-blown alcoholism was still in the future (thankfully), and where we were staying wasn't the full-on party vibe of Benidorm, Mallorca and the others.

Also, our hotel was a little way down the coast from the real partying capital of our area, the Pink Palace.

The Pink Palace is basically a frat house for American college students.

Every summer the place fills up with those who can afford the trip and frat boys and sorority sisters pile in and party like there is no tomorrow.

So the bulk of those who just wish to get on the juice heavily tend to go there, thankfully, so we were spared their intrusion.

Indeed, the second morning there I had an in-Ocean conference with two nice young American guys, who had come over to stay at the Pink Palace, but after a week, couldn't take it anymore and so had come down the coast a bit for a more relaxed holiday.

When we weren't in the ocean talking, we rode mopeds around the island.

Mostly I went with a group that included Craig, an English lad, whose name escapes me, a young Australian man, and a young Greek-Australian woman, Anna.

I was navigating and I can tell you getting around in Greece is not as simple as reading the map.

In fact, I'll digress slightly further.

As usual I had started studying Greek via comic books, and the ones I had to peruse were Tintin comics in Greek.

I had my Greek-English dictionary, but the problem with Greek, unlike German, Spanish and French, is that Greek uses its own letters, so before you can translate a word, you have to first translate any Greek letters in the word.

So the village were staying at Pelakas, is spelled in Greek, πέλεκας, if you look closely you can glean the meaning, 'P' is 'Π' pronounced 'pie', as in the symbol used in your high school maths classes, next is 'έ', epsilon, or 'E', and so on.

Thus, studying my Tintin comics had a double layer of translation required, and similarly, riding along on our mopeds, we would come to a junction with signposts pointing in various directions and I would have to get out my dictionary, translate the letters, then find the town on the map, then figure out if we wanted to go there.

However, it wasn't a major hurdle, and we enjoyed our riding.

It did have its hair-raising moments though.

While we were on holidays the locals weren't, and so tended to get a little impatient with put-putting, two-wheeled tourists filling the road.

Add to this the Greek love of not following rules and you have a recipe for traffic chaos.

I remember us coming around a corner in the highway and finding a truck bearing down on us on our side of the road.

We then all swerved with the precision of the Holden Hell Driving team into the middle of the road to avoid the oncoming truck, when a car that had been behind us chose this moment to overtake us and the oncoming truck.

It shot by, we threaded through between the two vehicles, and then without a formal signal, all pulled over to the side of the road to begin learning how to breathe again and check our shorts for involuntary bowel movements.

Some nights when I dream I still see the sides of those two vehicles passing us at speed in opposite directions.

Additionally, some of the villages of Corfu predate the motor vehicle by a thousand years, and so the roads are less than accommodating.

One morning I was riding on my own and I came along the 'highway', a two-lane affair that was as somewhat pitted with potholes, when I decided to pull into an upcoming village and get some food.

The highway swung wide to avoid the town (I was about to find out why), and I took a small slip road off to the left into the settlement.

At first my road was two lanes and there was a solid yellow line marking the edge of the road, I followed this yellow line on my moped and the road got steadily narrower.

First it dropped down to one lane, then this lane became less than a car width, then less than a motorcycle width, then less than a donkey's girth.

However the yellow line continued solid on my right and so I knew I was on the 'main' road, so kept going.

Then the 'road', with its indicating solid yellow line, vanished into a solid wall.

What was really going on was that thee road disappeared through a gap between two houses.

The corners of the houses were offset slightly and so the gap shut out the light of the sun, and so it appeared the road just terminated flat against the wall.

I had an eye-widening moment, fearing a crash coming up, so I frantically braked down to walking pace, saw with relief the gap with the yellow line disappearing through it, and rode through.

If I had extended my elbows a la a flamboyant chicken dancer I would have touched a house on either side.

Then I was through and into the market place of the village, the yellow line continued and I opened the throttle and moved off.

I did want to find some local equivalent of the RTA and ask if they had ever thought of a 'Road Narrows in Lunatic Fashion' sign for the entrance to the village, but put it down to Greece and the Greeks.

I bought my food in the market place, got back on my moped and rode on out of town, keeping, now, a careful eye on the yellow lane marking line to see where it disappeared to next.

I might add, I've read that many cities founded in antiquity are the same, Rome is a good example.

Romans park anywhere, on, or in anything.

It is famously said that if you are sitting alone at a Roman restaurant, you are well advised not to go to the bathroom, leaving your table unattended, as upon your return you will find a car parked where you had previously been dining.

So Craig and I passed a week on the western shores of Corfu in very pleasant fashion.

Then it was time to move on to stay with Craig's sister in the southern peninsula region of Kalamata, of olive grove fame.

Craig's sister had married a Greek man, and they had set up home down there, and so off we went to see them.

I should say, I can't actually recall being invited, but then I have never been particularly good at picking up social signals, but Craig was leaving, and so I went too.

We caught a bus back to Kerkyra, then the ferry to the mainland, a bus to Athens and then another to Kalamata.

The bus put us off some distance from our destination and so we walked the last few Ks.

Craig's sister, Anne, had married a Greek man, Paniotti, and he had built the house they lived in on the seashore outside the town of Kalamata.

It was another incredibly beautiful place and we settled in nicely.

Anne spoke fluent Greek, but she did enjoy having the two of us there to converse with in her native language.

Paniotti spoke broken, heavily-accented English, but still joined in.

I showed him my Tintin comics in Greek and he gave me a look of wonder and disbelief that I thought I could learn this way, but I soldiered on.

I should add that Greek, due to the letter difficulty, is a language that is better learnt conversationally, and now I was getting some practise in that area of language learning as well.

Mind you, it is well known that Melbourne is the second largest Greek city by population, so if I had been serious I would have spent a few months down there, but there you go.

I got back into exercise in Kalamata and each morning I would put my swimmers on and walk around the bay, three or four ks, and then swim back in straight line, about 1500 metres.

There is nothing like the Mediterranean for feeling like you have the world's largest swimming pool at your disposal.

There were no, or very few boats in the bay, and precious few people, no currents and so it was an enjoyable swim.

We ate at home on the deck and conversed over red wine.

I remember one conversation that nearly lead to divorce though, and it stemmed from the 'Man in the Moon'.

When I was a boy growing up under the clear skies of the Southern hemisphere, I read in my, mostly, Northern hemisphere books of the 'Man in the Moon'.

Apparently, the crater pattern on the moon's surface looks different in each hemisphere.

So I had never quite understood what the Man in the Moon was, until that night on the deck in Kalamata.

We ate our meal, and then Craig pushed his plate away, leaned back and stretched.

As he raised his head he stopped, fixed in place, then said, "Hey, I just saw the man in the moon."

The rest of us looked up, and I, likewise for the first time, saw what he meant.

The crater pattern does indeed lay out like there's a face on the moon.

It really does look like a man hiding inside the moon, and looking out through the surface at the Earth.

Anne, Craig and I marvelled for a moment, making, "Oh, I see" type noises, but then Paniotti, said, "I can't see it, what do you mean?"

So Craig then tried to point out to him what we were looking at, but he just couldn't see it.

It was something like those computer images, made up of many cross-hatching lines and colours, and if you look through, into or past, you get to see the hidden image.

Well, try as we might, Paniotti just couldn't see it.

We pointed, we drew diagrams, but it did no good.

We then got up and went to wash up, leaving Paniotti outside staring at the moon, but it seems to be one of those things that you only notice, like Craig did, by accident.

Eventually it was time for bed, but Paniotti had trouble sleeping, worrying about not being able to see the man in the moon.

Thankfully, the moon began to wane the next night and so we were spared further friction-inducing searching for the damn thing, but I was glad I saw it.

And it just goes to show, friction in marriage can occur for a multitude of reasons, but that was the first and only time I saw the Man in the moon causing it.

So a week passed on the dusty, sunlit shores of Kalamata.

My skin was brown again (skin cancer was still not really taken seriously), I had regained some fitness due to daily swimming of 1500m, and the knots of tension were finally eased.

Then one morning about a week after we had arrived, Craig said "Let me show you the Venetian fort".

I nodded, though this was a little unusual, but twigged immediately; I was about to get the tap on the shoulder, it was time for me to go.

In my arrogance, I had thought I would just be able to plonk myself on Crag's relatives and stay there till term began again back in England.

But of course, Craig hadn't extended such an invite.

I of course, should have known this, and left under my own cognizance in graceful fashion, but even at the age of 28, I still had a lot to learn about behaving.

So we walked along the shores of the bay to the fort.

This was an enormous, stone edifice, from the days when the mighty Venetian empire had ruled the Levant.

Once there and we had looked around a bit, Craig, in very well modulated tones, made it clear that I couldn't stay for the whole summer, freeloading off his relatives.

To my (minor) credit, I got the point without going off in a huff, my normal practise, when confronted with something I didn't think fair.

Back home I made much thanks to Anne and Paniotti and the next day got my pack on and headed with Craig into the village to catch the bus to Athens.

We shook hands in the little square and then I boarded, and took the trip up to the capital.

It had been a wonderful stay, all across Greece, and I was thankful for it.

However, now I had to contend with Athens, and boy, is that place frenetic.

I had a few days till my flight and so I checked into a backpackers, fretted over the price, in my usual cheapskate way, and then went out to see the main sights.

It really was something to see, the Parthenon, and Piraeus, names that came back to me from my lessons in Ancient History at high school.

Australia, you see, has a mere two hundred years of white history, so a building that is a hundred and fifty years old, gets us all gooey.

But here in Europe, you would regularly encounter a building that was over a thousand years old, and often still occupied, and this was quite amazing to see.

I might add, for those who are contemplating it, the Parthenon is guarded by Doberman Pinchers, as I discovered when I tried to sneak in at dawn one day, and I repeated my frantic back-pedalling leap to safety that I had had to employ at the campground in Barcelona.

At least the Parthenon deserves guarding by attack dogs, I still don't know why the campground had security that wouldn't have disgraced Fort Knox.

Eventually my flight day came around, and I left my backpackers and headed to the main park in Ommonia Square to wait for the airport bus.

I had some hours to wait and so tossed my pack down and got out my book.

I was lying there reading in a genuine sylvan glade, when world war three broke out around the corner.

Explosions went off, people were screaming, horns honked, the end of the world was nigher than I had ever felt it.

I sat bolt upright, wondering what on Earth was going on, so I put my book on my pack and then went to have a look.

I walked through the trees cautiously, then emerged from a copse to discover it wasn't a riot, but a political rally.

Gerald Durrell once wrote during his time in Cameroon in west Africa that "three Africans together can make more noise than an equivalent number of any other race on Earth".

Well this may be true, but I would happily bet on the Greeks giving the Africans a run for their money.

The Greeks do like to make a bit noise, and here it was writ large.

At first I thought that they must be planning a march on parliament to impeach the PM with extreme prejudice, when it dawned on me that they hundred or so people assembled were SUPPORTING the politician on the podium.

He spoke, the crowd yelled, more fireworks went off, more horns of passing traffic honked.

I breathed sigh of relief that there wasn't going to be trouble, then went back to my pack, lay down again, and wondered what would be the harvest if I happened across a political rally where the locals were AGAINST the person in question.

Buildings would burn, I was sure.

Then time came and I caught my bus for the airport.

I remember when younger watching some terrorist-hijacking-on-a-plane movie, and it turned out that the terrorists on board had got their weapons on board at Athens airport, and one of the captives on the aircraft said, "Oh, well, no surprises there, you could carry a bazooka on at Athens."

Well, once I got there I saw what they meant.

Again I was early, having nothing better to do, and so once I checked the flight board and saw that my plane to London wasn't for some hours yet, I went out the front to a grassy, pine-treed area, to read my book till check-in time.

I was doing so when I looked up from my book and saw that Athens airport consisted of a tin shed on a tarmac area.

It looked for all the world like one of those crop dusting places in outback Australia, or indeed like the working base of Crocodile Dundee in the movie.

From where I sat I could see what the movie character had meant about security.

I could have got up from where I sat, walked around the back of the shed, put a weapon or bomb in the baggage on the little truck that was sitting there waiting and then boarded through the metal detector no questions asked.

It's all changed now of course, in the lee of the 9/11 attacks, but then, in 1992, Athens airport was about as secure as a sieve.

Subsequently, I checked my watch and saw it was time to check in.

I entered the shed, got in the queue, checked my bags in, then headed back out to the grassy area to wait the next two hours.

That done, I boarded, and once again fell foul of the ludicrous smoking section delineation of the aircraft cabin.

The smoking section was rows one to five, then in a burst of bad planning, sat unaccompanied children, in rows six to eight, and I was behind them in row nine.

So, the smokers lit up with pleasure, then the smoke began to irritate the kiddies and they began to cry and bawl in unison.

And so I sat in row nine for the three hours it took to get to Heathrow with a look of crazed mania covering my face as the kids gave frantic voice against the tobacco smoke.

I eventually emerged from Heathrow, ears ringing, in the September of 1993.

Quicker, rather than gradually, the relaxed demeanour I had gained in Greece faded to be replaced by the classic, tension-knotted face of a Londoner.

I tubed across London to my grim, rabbit-warren converted house in the northern suburbs, stepped sideways into my tiny room, put my pack down and began removing clothing to wash.

As I went about my domestics, I began planning for the upcoming school year, and made a realisation that it was time for somewhere new.

To background that, the previous year I had taught mostly at beastly Eastlea, and lovely Sarah Bonnell, but in the final term leading up to the summer holidays, I had criss-crossed London doing a day here, a day there at various schools around the place.

One of these was Holloway Boys in north London.

Those who know London, know all about Holloway, it is the site of a notoriously grim women's prison, and the suburb surrounding it, seemed to take on the character of the place.

Thus, I was truly and utterly shocked to discover that there was a school in London, THAT WAS WORSE THAN EASTLEA!!!!!

Holloway was a boys' school, so I didn't have even the minor calming effect that girls can have on boys, and so my one day there lasted longer than it had taken to build some of the buildings I had so recently visited in Europe.

Every lesson was a constant, battle to keep a minor semblance of control.

I felt like a lonely lighthouse standing on a rock in the ocean, fighting to keep my light above the raging seas of misbehaviour.

So as I went to the laundrette, that day off the plane, I made a decision.

Enough of London, I would go teach in Birmingham.

I didn't really know what I expected, but I had heard that Birmingham was a much slower paced place than London, and so hoped that the schools there would be less pressurised.

So I got through to Timeplan, told them of my decision, and got a contact for a teaching agency in Birmingham, and off I went.

And so to digress in my usual meandering way.

Later in life than these events I would finally attend Alcoholic's Anonymous and Narcotic's Anonymous, to try and get some control over my substance abuse issues.

Now anyone with a problem like this, particularly alcohol, fights and scratches and claws not to go.

The perversely convoluted logic is that 'if I don't go to AA, then I'm not an alcoholic'.

And a common tactic employed by alcoholics is to do a 'geographic', change town, go somewhere no one knows you, and where you don't know anyone else.

This stems from the idea that 'I can't give up drinking here, I've got all my drinking mates, and my favoured local pub.

I'll never give up here, it would be too embarrassing, all too hard'.

And so the geographic is done.

The tactic rarely works, for now the alcoholic is in a new town where they don't know anyone, and now they are bone-crunchingly lonely, so what do they do?

They go down to the pub to meet some people in their new town.

I mention this, because what I did therefore in the autumn of my second year in Britain, was the worst geographic one can do.

Holidays in beautiful, anarchic, sunlit Greece to Birmingham, the worst city in western Europe.

Birmingham is not even a city really, it is a large conurbation scattered around the midlands, and as such, doesn't have a genuine geographic centre, as London does with Piccadilly, or Sydney does with the harbour.

So it is a characterless place.

I think it is best described by an author I like, David Lodge.

Lodge was an academic at Birmingham Uni, and wrote many successful books, most centred on Birmingham.

In one, one of his Birmingham characters, Phillip Swallow, goes on sabbatical to California and while there is talking with a Californian at a party.

The Californian says, "I hear that Birmingham is really crap, is that right."

Stung to defend his home town, Swallow replies, "No, no, it just a large city, with all the usual advantages and disadvantages."

"Oh", says the Californian, "what are the advantages?"

And Swallow can't think of any.

He stumbles around for a moment or two, searching inside his head, and eventually says, "Well, it easy to get to the New forest to go hiking."

Then he stops and realises that if the biggest advantage of the town is that it's easy to get out of, then that's not a saying much for the town itself.

So you get the picture about Birmingham.

So a week or so later I gathered my belongings and caught the train up there and almost immediately found that it was the right decision, despite what I have written above about the place.

Firstly, I found somewhere nice to live, and here my friendship with Neil once again came to my aid.

In my time in the UK I stayed with each and all of his relatives, now it became clear that not even his out-laws were safe.

Neil's cousin Jane lived in Birmingham, where also lived her on-again, off-again boyfriend , Paul.

Jane saw me coming and subtly got across to me that I couldn't stay with her, but inferred I might stay with Paul.

So I rang him and asked that classic backpacker question, "do you mind if I doss with you till I find somewhere to live?"

Paul, foolishly, said "yes", and so I took my meagre belongings around to his house in King's Heath, Birmingham.

As always, my question had been heard by Paul as 'I will only be there for a week or so', but the meaning for me was, 'once I am rusted onto your couch, you will need dynamite to get me out.'

However, I'd like to think it wasn't that bad, we were still friends once I moved out (three months later), so it can't have been all bad.

Paul is a wonderful guy, and was very patient with me.

He was currently "off-again" with Jane, and so his front room was free for me to sleep in on the fold out couch.

Paul had that dry sense of humour that I like, and was also a big soccer fan, so most evenings we would convene on his couch and watch a soccer match.

And I'll put this story in to demonstrate his wit, and just hope, as so often an author has to do, that it comes across in print.

We were watching a pre-season trial match one evening between the, at the time, two biggest soccer teams on Earth, A.C Milan, of Italy, and Barcelona, of Spain.

The Italian team were very dominant pumped in four goals before half time.

Just after the fourth goal was scored the TV showed the assistant manager of Barcelona whispering something in the ear of the manager.

Paul turned to me and said, "Do you think he just said 'we better tighten up at the back?'"

And I'll add one further incident to show that though Birmingham may have been known as a pretty rotten place, the people there couldn't have been more helpful.

I lost my wallet one afternoon.

It had fallen from my pocket as I walked down to Paul's place from the bus stop.

Later that night when I noticed it, I began a frantic search through the house and my belongings, but couldn't find it.

I asked Paul for advice, and he said, "Try the cops.

Sometimes people hand wallets in."

I looked at him sceptically, there was fifty quid in there, so I didn't think it likely, but I had nothing to lose.

So I called up the local nick and asked, and to my surprise the WPC who answered said, "Yes, we have had one wallet handed in, can you describe it?"

I did so, and it turned out it was indeed my wallet.

Additionally, the fifty was still in it.

I had thought it a long shot, but even then Paul and I had discussed that the best I could hope for was for someone to find it, take the money out, then give it to the cops.

But no, the whole lot was there.

So I went around to the police station, got my wallet, with enormous relief, and also got the name of the person who had handed it in.

Turned out it was a neighbour about ten doors up from Paul, and he had gone out of his way to walk around to the police and hand it in.

Man, I was thankful.

So I went around to thank him, he wasn't home, but his wife was there, she told me his favourite tipple, when asked, and I went around to the bottlo and bought him some John Smith's Bitter with the fifty I still owned in thanks.

However if the adults on Birmingham were helpfulness personified, the kids at the school I was placed at were less so.

With my lodgings sorted I had made contact with the teaching agency and they sent me down to Ninestiles School in south east Birmingham.

I thought I was going in to start teaching, but up here things were done differently.

I went up to the desk and fished the scrap of paper from my pocket with the details given me by the agency on it.

"Hi", I said to the woman at the counter, "I'd like to see Allan Hollins, please."

Hollins was the deputy in charge of casual teachers and recruitment generally.

She nodded and went to her phone, she spoke for a moment and then turned back to me and said, "he can see you now", and so then gave me directions to his office.

I went down there, trying to put aside uncomfortable memories of my own childhood, when I was sent on the long march to the deputy's office.

I knocked and the door was opened by the man himself.

He asked me to take a seat, then sat himself down at his desk and then said, "So Lachlan, tell me about your best and worst lesson."

I was stunned.

I was being interviewed!

In London interviews didn't exist, or if they did, they consisted of, "Are you prepared to go in there and teach those monsters?"

And if you misguidedly said "yes", then you got the job.

Here in Birmingham they had time to interview for jobs.

I must have acquitted myself reasonably well during the interview though, because later that afternoon the teaching agency called and said Ninestiles wanted me to start on Monday.

Great, I even had the weekend to enjoy myself.

And for the record, my best lesson was the spaghetti tower, in which you give the students a pack of spaghetti and some non-toxic glue or blue tack, and they make a building out of it.

The winner is the model that uses the least spaghetti and holds the most weight.

My worst lesson was every single one I taught at Eastlea.

My original premise that Birmingham students were less of a problem than London, was generally true, but there were certainly some fire crackers amongst them.

But overarching all of that was that I was already finished as a teacher.

I had been teaching for less than two years and was already unable to find the energy reserves that this most demanding of jobs requires.

My personal energy, depleted by the trip across Asia, had been reduced, drastically, tyrannically, by Eastlea School.

Those same energy levels had been increased minorly by teaching at Sarah Bonnell with its well-behaved girls, and further, on a personal level, by my two weeks in sunlit Greece, but really, only ten years sitting in a wheelchair looking at the ducks on a pond could hope to restore the damage done by teaching in east London.

I no longer prepared good lessons, I simply found some problems on a worksheet, photocopied them and handed them out and then stood at the back of the room making sure no one misbehaved.

It is a terrible attitude for a teacher to take and in its way, not providing stimulating lessons creates the misbehaviour that I was always complaining about.

So I did the least worst teaching that I could get away with and once again mainly was satisfied if the roof was still on the classroom when I went home in the evening.

So therefore The Note, when it came, caught me by surprise.

My year nine science class at Ninestiles was as out of control as every year nine in the history of education and I had a lot of trouble with them.

I was constantly fighting for control, a process not helped by my less than enthusiastic teaching, and so had sent one kid, Kevin, to the authorities on more than one occasion.

I mention this because one morning I herded them into the lab as usual and the only well-behaved kid in the class, possibly in all of year nine, Brian, came up and gave me a note.

It was from their home room teacher, Ms.

Pounder.

The note said, "Mr Barker, could I see you at recess, please.

EP" (Elizabeth Pounder)

"Fucking bollocks", I said internally, "what have I done now?"

You see I was sure I had done something wrong in my attempts to get this class under control and so this note no doubt presaged some carpeting from the aforementioned Ms Pounder.

So I grumped my way through morning school, wondering what I was in trouble for, and building myself up into a state of righteous indignation.

"Yeah, well", I prepared in my head, "they were completely out of control when I took them over, so don't complain now when I have to ride them like a rodeo bronc" I said to myself many times as the morning wore on.

I wasn't going to be told by this Ms Pounder, no way.

Then recess came (finally) and wanting to get it over with I dismissed my class and headed around to Ms Pounder's maths room.

I stepped though the door and saw she was helping a student with their work after class, something I should have done occasionally I might add, and so walked up and rudely interrupted.

I can't remember what I said exactly, but it was along the lines of "yeah, whaddaya want?" in a rude tone of voice.

She looked up from her work, and said, "Oh, Mr Barker, um, look, er, sorry, I'm held up a bit here, could we do this at lunch time?"

I sighed rudely, and said, "yeah, whatever", and left.

Then I had to get through middle school with this still hanging over my head, but did so with my customary bad grace and then returned to the maths department for round two.

This time she had been able to get rid of her students on time and so I walked up to where she was sitting at her desk, marking some work.

Once again with terrible rudeness, I got started without preamble, "OK, I'm here, whaddaya want?"

I mention my rudeness because it added further to her stress, she put down the book she was marking and then with a stammering tone, haltingly said, "Oh, er, Mr Barker, er, um, I was wondering, um, I, er, that is, er, I" and here she finished in a blurting rush, "I think you're quite attractive, and I wondered if you would like to go out to dinner tonight?"

Poor Liz, she was asking me on a date and I had been the epitomy of rudeness.

Now I have taken some hits in my time, on the rugby field I have had entire opposing forward packs slam me down and ruck over me.

On the soccer pitch I have broken both ankles, my right foot, both wrists, the ring fingers of each hand and had my right ankle telescoped out of its socket by a heavy tackle leading, ultimately to the need for a reconstruction.

In the surf I had been javelined into the sand bar by five foot waves bearing hundreds of tonnes of water down upon me, but none of those hit me as hard as Liz's question that lunchtime.

Firstly, I couldn't believe anyone could find me attractive, a product of eternal low self-esteem, and secondly, Liz should really have been on the runway at Milan, not teaching maths in Birmingham, and so this was a double shock.

However, one thing teaching does teach the teacher is to think on your feet, and so I, as quickly as I could, backpedalled, remodulated my tone, and then answered in as halting fashion as she had spoken before.

"OH, er, uh", I paused to finger my brow, "Uh, yeah, uh, er, uh, sure, um, yeah, er, that would be good."

Then like all running backs, I handed off the ball and got the hell out of there before I blew the whole deal.

We made arrangements to meet in my local in King's Heath that evening, and I went on my way.

Darkness into light, I had not only escaped a telling off for treating my year nine's badly I had got a date as well.

Things were looking up.

So I got though the afternoon's school in a mentally opposite fashion to how I had spent the morning and then headed home to Paul's.

I then went around to the local to meet Liz and discovered that I had been unaware that I had nearly got involved in ticklishly difficult romantic situation of a completely other nature.

The science department at Ninestiles had two laboratory attendants, Hazel and a young Indian woman, Indira.

Indira had asked me out once for lunch, and we had gone across to a little restaurant near the school.

As we ate, she told me that she was engaged to me married to an Indian engineer who lived on the other side of Birmingham.

It was mostly an arranged marriage, said Indira, and she wasn't overly happy about it, she was more or less seeing how it went.

She then asked me about myself, and seemed to dwell on it when I told her I was recently divorced.

Then lunch over we returned to school and I didn't think too much more about it.

However, that night in the King's Head, as my local was called, Liz informed me what was really going on that day at lunch.

Turns out that Indira had told her family she wasn't to happy with the arranged marriage, and 'was there a way out?'

Her parents had said that if she found a suitable man, a professional man, with a working visa for the UK, she could dump the engineer and sign up with him.

And hard on the heels of that conversation yours truly dropped out of the travelsphere into her orbit.

'Just the job', thought Indira.

Indira had been a shade too diffident to come out and ask me, and I, in my usual obtuse manner, had been completely unable to read the signals.

Had we had a single extra glass of red that day at lunch I could be living in Birmingham or Mumbai as part of an extended Indian family now.

But we didn't and I'm not, so instead I began a relationship with Ms Pounder of the maths department.

This was complex, as she was currently breaking up with her de facto partner, also called Paul.

Their break up was amicable, genuinely so, but it did complicate things a little, as we couldn't go round to Liz's place, because she didn't want to rub Paul's nose in it by bringing her new boyfriend around while he was home, and I was still dossing on the couch at 'my' Paul's place.

How things may have gone who knows, but 'my' Paul then solved the problem by telling me it was time to move on.

I should have realised, but then, as now, was ill-equipped to notice depression in others.

I said earlier that Paul was 'off again' at the time with Jane, and what I hadn't known was that she had dumped him, (this time), and so he had really wanted the house to himself to lick his wounds in private.

Thus, after three months in the place he finally lowered the boom, and asked me in as gentle a fashion as possible, to find my own place.

So I looked at the little posters on the rack in the corner store and found a residence around the corner with a room going.

I went and had a talk with the leasee, and was offered the room.

I went back to Paul's, folded up his couch for the last time, then he drove me and my increasingly threadbare belongings round to the new place, and I moved in.

The place I moved into would never be photographed in the 'fine living' section of Vogue, but for twenty quid a week it was a dry room, and in Birmingham, that's as much as a share houser can ask for..

I moved in with a nice young woman from Newcastle (Newcastle England that is), Kristi, and for the first time in my life I watched soap operas.

I mention this because it became our, Kristi and my's, thing.

We would watch those ridiculous shows and take the piss out of it unmercifully.

For instance, Eastenders, is a soap set in the east of London where I had been teaching, and details the lives of those who live there in grinding poverty.

Yet, and here Kristi and I would yell at the TV, the characters in the show were always in the pub drinking Heineken.

"Where do they get the money?" Kristi would say.

"God only knows, but none of them have a job", I would rejoinder.

And so our evenings were spent happily in the company of those most appalling of shows.

I might add, Birmingham has an almost celestial ability to sink the mood and fortunes of those who live there, and this was evidenced by the soap operas of the day.

Britain at the time had four major soaps.

Eastenders from London, Coronation Street from Manchester, Brookside Close from Liverpool and Crossroads from Birmingham.

They were all as bad as each other, but Crossroads was the only one cancelled due to lack of interest.

However, now with my own room, I could see Liz somewhere apart from in the pub, and this allowed us to have a relatively normal time.

And so for the rest of that winter I continued to teach (badly) at Ninestiles and go out with the statuesque Ms Pounder.

In retrospect I had once again found happiness in a most unlooked for place, in this case, Birmingham.

But as ever in my life, I had not been able to recognise that I had everything I needed, and took to the road again.

It was the writing bug that caused this upheaval.

Not satisfied with staying with each of Neil's relatives, and then his in-laws, I was now going to presume upon the friendship by using a friend-of-a-friend, twice removed, to further my writing career.

I had got wind of a possible contact with BBC radio in Scotland, and as I already knew teaching wasn't for me, or perhaps the idea of still being a teacher in twenty years gave me the cold heaves, I headed north to once again "Try To Be A Writer".

So I'll close the Birmingham chapter with this anecdote.

I seem to exert an entropic force upon everything I use and own.

My clothes become dilapidated and are regularly refused by the op shop when I try to donate, my car is invariably patched up with duct tape and I am constantly redrilling bits of my residence to repair damage done.

Well my room in Kristi's house was nice, upstairs, and looked over the 'view', the alleys and backyards of King's Heath.

However, the door was less than robust.

When I moved in only the lower hinge was still functional, and after a mere week, it came away as well.

So from then on I couldn't close the door in a regulation fashion, but had to pick it up by the handle and upper edge and kind of place it in the jamb, leaning slightly outward at the base to stop it falling inward.

One afternoon I was in my room marking some work from school.

I had "put" the door closed to keep the noise of the tele in the living room out, when unbeknownst to me, Liz came around to surprise me.

She said 'hello' to Kristi at the front door and Kristi directed her upstairs to my room.

She arrived at my door, knocked twice and upon the second tap the door fell inward across my bed, knocked over my little bed side table and smashed my little clock radio.

For a few seconds Liz and I regarded each other, she at the door, me at my little desk, with mirrored looks of astonishment, then I said the only thing I could say, "Come in".

She entered and we fixed things up.

I mention this because it is the first and only time that a woman has smashed down a door to get into my bedroom, though I have hoped for it far more often in my life.
Chapter 10 - Glasgow's summer was on a Thursday.

Glasgow turned out to be my last city on this trip, and wonderful it was too.

The town gets a bad rap all over, indeed, when I would return from my regular holidays there, my friends in London would express some surprise that I had made it back alive.

However, I found it a quite beautiful place and full of wonderful people, Neil's family mainly, but also their friends and anyone remotely connected to them, whom I squeezed unmercifully for all I get.

I arrived there in the northern summer and almost immediately came into conflict with the locals about what summer was.

I'll background that by paraphrasing a joke told by the great singer songwriter Harry Chapin, most famous for the song 'Cats in the Cradle'.

Harry wrote a song about a dead-or-alive hole of a town in upstate New York, Watertown, and, said Harry, "I spent a week there one afternoon".

Likewise, as the summer wore on, I became increasingly mystified by the residents of Clydeside saying "what a great summer we are having".

For me with my Australian upbringing, a summer it was not, in fact, Harry's line about Watertown comes into service and I can say, "Glasgow, I enjoyed the summer there one Thursday afternoon."

For that's about as long as it lasted.

Billy Connolly, probably Glasgow's most famous alumnus put it like this, "When I go on holidays somewhere hot, I have to sunbake for a week to go white.

The rest of the year I am a blue person".

However, Glasgow's residents are inured to the cold and are grateful, certainly more than I was, by even getting one Thursday afternoon of sun and happy to call that a summer.

I'd gone up there because I had been given the most tenuous possible contact, with a producer at BBC radio, and was hoping to further, scratch that, start, my writing career.

To say this was risky move as far as money went is as true as saying that hoping to make your living with the written word is risky period.

However, I was still a young man then, with a lot of my arrogance still in place, and I guess, full of the optimism of youth.

My move to Glasgow was risky because due to the vagaries of the schooling system in the UK, I wasn't allowed to teach in Scotland, as I had in England, and as such my main source of income was denied me.

However, casting those doubts aside, I went and almost immediately things began to go wrong.

My contact at the BBC was the..., now let me get this right.

My contact at the BBC was named Jude.

Jude was the friend of a lovely Scottish woman called Nicola, who was a friend of Paul, who let me stay at his house in Birmingham.

Paul was the ex-boyfriend of my travel companion Neil's cousin Jane.

All clear?

Well anyway, it just goes to show that no one in the British Isles was safe from my depredations, if I was coming to a town in which you lived, you could be certain that sooner rather than later I would be on your doorstep asking for food, drink and/or accommodation.

However, off I went.

When I first teed up this possible writing connection Jude produced a morning radio show for a guy called Eddie Mair, a jocular disc-jock.

He did things like deliberately tell the wrong time in the morning and got a kick out of hearing horns blow all over the city as suddenly thousands of commuters realized they were an hour late for work.

However, close upon my arrival in Glasgow, Eddie had been offered a new job at the BBC in London, the English capital being the World Cup final of broadcasting, and had headed south to take this up.

So Jude was now producing a morning show with a female presenter, Annie.

She was fantastic, but a completely different style to Eddie, and so Jude had to give me the uncomfortable news that my comedy snippets were not really suitable, and so no employment would ensue.

But despite this downer, I shrugged it off and did my best.

I had a reasonable cushion of cash stored up from my teaching in Birmingham, and three months left on my visa, so I wasn't too worried.

I at first had planned in my freeloading, cheapskate way to just dump myself on either; Neil's cousin Johnny, Neil's aunt and uncle, Bill and Margaret, or Nicola, or even Jude herself, but they quickly got it across to me that this wasn't on, and so I looked for a flat.

I found one quite quickly, and it was a simply beautiful top floor place in the university suburb of Hillhead.

I cannot recall now how I found this place, but it was certainly through my connections with Neil's family.

Either way, I went round and discovered that for the first and only time in my life, I was welcomed in to live somewhere.

The flat was owned by a couple who were separated, and upon the separation they had both wanted out of the flat and so had leased it the three young female students at the university.

These students loved the place, and so wanted to keep it over the summer, ensuring they didn't have to try to find a place to live at the start of the new university year the following Autumn.

Thus, they wanted someone to take on one of the four bedrooms just for the summer.

Since I wanted a place just for the summer, this suited both sides of the argument perfectly, and so I took my backpack around there, threw it on the bed and I was moved in.

The three students, Emily, Kate and Briony, were wonderful women, and very mature, more so than I, and we had a wonderful summer together.

Additionally the flat was one of the nicest places I have ever lived.

The terraced houses of Hillhead are made of a most beautiful red stone and were commonly four floors with a flat on each level of the building.

We were on the top floor and my room alone was big enough to jog around, which I did a little of for my cardio training.

(200 laps of the room was a kilometre)

So with things sorted on the home front it was time to find some work, and here I began to branch away from teaching.

I had got it into my mind that if I wanted to be a writer I had best get some work as a journalist, which is the commonest path into writing that I know of.

And here, with the Jude job off the books, I once again presumed upon my connections to get me a job.

So with complete lack of shame, and complete denial of my abilities, I asked Nicola if her father could get me some work on The Daily Record, Glasgow's biggest newspaper, he being the managing editor there.

'How hard could it be?' I thought to myself.

I knew how to spell, I could speak English, I can do this.

So Nicola's father, Noel, got me a shift as a sub-editor on the Record and I, for the first time in my life, learned what pressure was.

Writing is hard, it's hard enough if you're writing on a Sunday afternoon with nothing to interrupt you till tea time.

But of course, writing for newspapers is definitely the opposite.

All blatts have to be produced against a deadline, often many deadlines.

When I submitted an article to the Independent newspaper in London soon after this time, I very naively said to the editor who answered the phone, "What time's your deadline, so I know when to get it in?"

She replied, "Well, we have seven deadlines a day, so get it in before two pm and I'll have a look."

Seven?!

For those interested, rolling deadlines often match the number of editions a day, seven is heavy, well it was at the time, in this modern era of the 24-hour news cycle, there are often 48 deadlines a day, with the computer's buffers being flushed every thirty minutes, with each new piece going up live at this time, an thus internet news organs can be said to have 48 deadlines a day.

However, the Record back then only had one deadline, which was about ten at night.

This was due largely to the small size of Scotland, so the newspapers could be printed at ten pm and be in Inverness and other far flung Scottish towns at dawn the next day.

To compare, one of the subs I worked with in Glasgow was telling me that he spent some time on the main Newspaper in Perth, Western Australia, on the Westralian.

Do to the staggering enormity of the state, their first daily deadline was ten in the morning, a full twelve hours before the Record's ten p.m.

I asked him why and he said that since the furthest outreach of the Westralian was the small towns on the Timor Sea, 3,000 kilometres away, they had to print in the morning so the trucks had time to deliver the paper to the shops at dawn the next day, 18 hours after printing.

However, for me, a totally raw newbie to the field there was still pressure at the Record, if a spelling mistake got through, that was a sackable offence, particularly if the story was legally sensitive.

I might add, the name that gives all print journos the cold sweats is Tucker.

You can check it a thousand times at pre-print stage, but it only takes a small blot of ink halfway up the stem of the 'T' to turn that name into a bad swear word, and papers get sued for stuff like that.

But even the fairly obvious search through a story for a spelling mistake paled into comparison to the stress of fitting a story into the space provided by the production editor.

If a story ran over by 100 words, you couldn't just cut off the last hundred words, you had to pick your way through the story, excising it word by word, without losing the thread of the story.

This was hard enough, but if ten pm was approaching you had to do it with the chief sub yelling from his desk to 'hurry the fuck up'.

I only did three shifts there, but I aged a hundred years during each.

However, I did learn a lot in that compressed time.

I learned what makes a good headline, it has to be short, punchy and above all make the reader want to read the story.

I learned how to use the (then) state of the art desk top publishing software, Quark Xpress, and above all I learned, for the first time in my life, that here there was no fallback position, if you made a mistake, and that mistake was serious enough, you got the sack, and don't bother applying to the tribunal for unfair dismissal, the private sector dismisses any of that, as of a moose shaking off a midge with its tail.

Sadly though I also learned that most journalistic of habits, drinking heavily.

The best way I can describe it is that it compares to my time at uni, or perhaps like that of finishing your exams at the end of high school, known as the HSC in Australia, the SATs in North America or the 'A' levels in the UK.

In general, once you had finished your last exam, and therefore finished school forever, you raced from the exam room and went to some form of celebration, called 'Schoolies' here in Australia, and began partying like there was no tomorrow.

Heavy drinking was the main theme of these celebrations, and it usually also involved going to night clubs and generally getting on the razzle-dazzle for the first, legal time in your life.

Uni was somewhat the same.

When I went, we had three nine week terms a year, from week seven to the end of week nine and then for the two week exam period, all you did was go to uni, then home to your desk and study.

So the end of your last exam gave rise to an incredible feeling of release, and I and my drinking student friends would head to the bar and get on the juice heavily till the next term came around.

I mention all that because each day on a newspaper is like a little version of the end of exams.

Once ten p.m came around and the paper has been put to bed (as it's known) you unkink your neck and head out of the newspaper building to the nearest pub and start loading booze into yourself till you can't stand upright.

Thankfully, the pubs in Glasgow, and across the UK, shut at 11 pm, so there was only an hour's drinking available, but we put that time to good use I can tell you.

All the stress of getting that story to fit in the space, then with a good headline and definitely no spelling mistakes, created a great pressure upon us all, and so the drinking helped you loosen up so you could get to sleep.

So although journalism gave me a grounding in writing for a living, it gave me something else, a real alcohol problem.

What's more, there a few things that are done well in the British Isles, and pubs is definitely one.

Near where I lived in Hillhead was a little alley, and is common in this most compressed of countries, there were not one, but two, pubs, of high standard.

One was the Ubiquitous Chip and the other was Jinty McGinty's.

And so with these comforting alcoholic harbours of my way home, I found that I was drawn in there far more than was good for me.

However, maybe because I only did three shifts at the Record, alcohol wouldn't get its hooks into me really badly for some time to come, but there was no denying that my ultimate entry into rehab back home in Australia had its genesis there in the pubs of Glasgow.

However, when not drinking in the pubs, I enjoyed Glasgow for all it was worth.

Among Neil's cousins was Johnny, and he is a wonderful man, with the ability to overlook my hopeless colonial brashness and became a good friend.

Johnny is gay and as such came with all the things that gay men can bring to a friendship, mainly sawing the rough edges off me with his smooth wit and charm.

We would most commonly eat lunch at a place called Pierre Victoire's.

This was a good restaurant, but cheap, not a common nexus in the UK.

Pierre had turned his mind to the problem of there being no middle ground for restaurants in Glasgow.

If you wanted cheap you went to the fish and chip shop, The Blue Lagoon was the cheapest of these, and the food was so bad that Johnny couldn't even walk past it without wanting to retch.

If you wanted good food you went to a restaurant where you had to mortgage your first born to get a table.

So Pierre saw the hole in the market and created a place where you could get a good two course meal for a fiver.

One quid got you fish and chips at The Blue Lagoon, twenty quid bought you lunch at the Reniston, so a fiver meal was good middle-range value.

So I would call Johnny at his brokerage house and he would answer in his dry, languid, oh-so-lovely accent with a "arrhh, L-aw-c-k-y, and what may I do for you?"

I would suggest simply, "Pierre's?", he would acquiesce, and we would arrange a time.

If I learned some real bad habits from the newspaper, I learned some good ones from Johnny, how to behave in civilised company mainly.

AKA: "We-e-e-ll, L-aw-cky, one does not go around punching homosexuals in the face for no apparent reason".

Also: "You see, L-aw-c-k-y, not all homosexuals have AIDS".

And so forth, in retrospect, we had a kind of "My Fair Lady" thing going on, and though I wasn't going to be presented to a ball of attended by nobility at the end of the social season, everyone who ever knew me afterward can thank Johnny for improving my attitude and behaviour.

Those lunches were great and I remember Johnny making me laugh due to his confusion over my email address.

Back then, in the early nineties, the internet, and by extension, email, had still not got a real hold over our lives, and as such I was the only one Johnny knew who had an email address.

When I told him my address was Hurricane_Charlie@hotmail.com, he evinced surprise, and said something along the lines of 'does it have pictures?'

I looked at him in confusion and then we clarified the issue, he thought the salient part of my email address was 'HOT MALE', and as such was planning to go home and get hold of this 'HotMale' website and have a look at the panoply of pictures of well-built men, scantily clad.

But on the work front, with the newspaper not really working out, I had been hoping to dazzle them with my brilliance and be taken on full-time, but the reverse actually happened, they saw me for the incompetent I was, and so I began to cast further afield for journalism work, and this lead me to Possilpark.

Possilpark was, at the time, possibly still, Glasgow's most rundown neighbourhood and drugs were the cause and effect.

If you have seen the movie 'Trainspotting', you will know what I'm talking about.

Trainspotting was set in Edinburgh, but could just as easily been filmed in Possilpark.

The Glasgow city authorities though, to their credit, had set out to improve things in Possil, and had created a group called Urban Aid.

Urban Aid did a lot for the fortunes of Possil, and one of those things was to give the residents a sense of image, and so they set up a free newspaper.

Since all I wanted was experience, not overly needing payment, I rang the paper and asked If I could do some work for them, sorry, him.

Turns out the entire staff of the paper, while I worked for it, numbered two, the editor, Brant, and me.

Once again the 'interview', if it can even be called that, was brief.

I'll never forget it, and repeat it here.

Ring, ring.

Brant: "Hello, Possilpark Recorder."

Me: "Ah, yeah, er, G'day, I was wondering if I could write some stories for your newspaper? I'm trying to get some experience."

Brant: (stunned silence) "Sure, can you come out this morning?"

Me: "Sure".

I got directions and headed out.

Turned out that Brant had tried to get others, journalism students at the local TAFE college for one, interested in helping out, but faced the twin hurdles of not being able to pay them, and having to get a local, who knew the fearsome reputation of Possilpark, to come out there, none had, and so my call had caught him off guard.

Someone wanting to help out for free, that was a new one on him.

The offices of Brant's news organ were a single room above a squat in Possil, it was so different to the glittering marble-stepped tower that the Record was housed in.

I knocked on the door and a voice said "come in".

Brant was reclining in his chair, with his feet on the desk, smoking the next in a long line of chain-smoked cigarettes and drinking an instant coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

Under his chair, the floor of his office was littered already with something like thirty of forty of these cups littering the floor.

There were four ashtrays visible on his desk, all choked with butts, there may have been more hidden under the various files and sundry bits of paper that covered his workspace like a snow shower, but only four were visible to me.

He said, "Lachlan?"

I dropped into Scots, and journo, laconic, and said "Yes.

Brant?"

He nodded, then said, "what do you want to write?"

I was a little taken aback.

Already in my short time in journalism I knew that direction was normally the other way, with the editor telling you what to write, and usually, how to write it, so this threw me for a second.

But I had been thinking about it and so replied, "I see that Motherwell are playing here this season, at Partick's ground, so I thought I'd do a piece on that."

He nodded, and said, "Ok, when you gonna do it?"

I replied, "Go out tomorrow.

Story Friday, that Ok?"

He nodded and said, "Pictures?" (Meaning, would I take my own pictures.)

I said "no, you got any photographers?"

He nodded and ferreted in a draw, he drew out a card and handed it to me, "this guy's pretty good", said, "he will do it for exposure." (meaning he would do the job to get his pictures in the newspaper, without being paid, much as I was working).

So I took the card, nodded thanks and good bye in the one motion, then left the office.

He was my kind of editor, to the point, and so laid back his shoulder blades had pressure marks on them.

And just to explain, soccer is a religion in Scotland, and so any story on the topic will generally fly in any newspaper.

Glasgow has three teams, two major and one minor.

Rangers and Celtic are the big two, whilst Glasgow's third team, Partick Thistle, are definitely minor league.

Motherwell were a biggish club, located in a town about an hour's train ride from Glasgow, and their ground was being renovated, so for the coming season they would be playing their home games at Partick's ground, near Possilpark, so a story on this temporary move I felt would fly.

So that evening I called the photographer, Alex, and the next day we met at Queen St station and headed out to Motherwell.

While he took pics on the weed engulfed terraces of the ground, I interviewed the club secretary in his office.

Then we returned to town, and I typed up my story on my flatmate's computer, then took it out to Brant on the Friday.

The paper came out on Wednesday of the next week and I don't think anyone in the history of that paper has ever waited for the newspaper truck to pull up with more bated breath.

I was there, and when the newsagent had cut open the batch, I grabbed a copy with all the desperation of an actor waiting to read the reviews of a movie they were starring in.

I wish more than anything that I had kept a copy of that, but as a traveller I had limited storage and so I haven't, but here is the gist.

To say Brant had a sense of humour, or perhaps fully understood the need to not take yourself too seriously, is understating it a bit, for the back page of the Recorder had, in 26-point banner headlines: "Read about Motherwell's Move to Partick, by our Antipodean Correspondent, Lachlan Barker, in the Lanarkshire Outback".

It was the only time I have ever been in the headlines.

I did a bit more work for the Recorder, but never got a headline like that again, and enjoyed working for Brant a lot.

The biggest hurdle, I was to find, was that he was forever burning holes in articles by dropping ash from his cigarettes wherever he went.

If I'd had the money I would have laminated anything I handed in as fire protection.

And my quest for experience rather than pay did work, as it was through Brant and the Possil Recorder that I got my next freelance gig, with the Big Issue magazine.

The Big Issue is a magazine produced for, and by, homeless people in the UK, and is has now spread to many countries around the world.

It was another brilliant scheme to aid those less fortunate.

The magazine idea was conceived so the homeless person had something to sell instead of just begging for money.

They would be given the mags in blocks of a hundred, and they would sell them for a pound each on the street corners of Glasgow.

It worked well and allowed the homeless to move up the dignity stakes.

As Possilpark had many homeless residents (if that's the right way to describe someone with no home), there was a good connection between Brant and the Big Issue's editor, Melvin.

Brant passed this contact on to me, knowing my desire for experience, and I rang Mel to discuss doing some writing.

Mel is a wonderful man, and a triumph of the human spirit.

He had been a homeless alcoholic, and his face reflected this.

His right ear was perpetually bent forward, a scar of some distant fall, his nose was crooked and one of his eyebrows was riven by a jagged scar.

But somehow, someway, in the distant past, he had overcome his alcoholism and had at first sold the Big Issue on a corner in Glasgow, and then had risen to the post of Editor.

And I'll just make mention of this point.

Later in my life I would be homeless myself, on the streets of Brisbane and the Gold Coast in Australia, mostly due to alcoholism, and that is tough, but I can assure you that in my brief time at the Big Issue in Glasgow, showed me that there is nothing as tough as being homeless on the streets of Glasgow.

I have already commented on the weather, and I had a lovely warm home to protect me from that.

The idea of being on the streets during a Glasgow winter, doesn't bear thinking about.

So it was another good lesson for a white, middle-class boy like myself.

So I went in to meet Mel.

He was full of generous spirit upon meeting me, and said, "Brant tells me you want to do some writing, that correct?"

I nodded and said, "Yes, anything but being a teacher."

He nodded at that and then sent me off to do a story on the carnival.

The travelling carnival of the British isles is an iconic thing.

Merry-go-rounds, Ferris Wheels, candy floss and the like, staffed by gypsies and other itinerants.

However, at this point in history the carnival was rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

With so many other distractions available to even those on the lower rungs of the money ladder, the carnival was on hard times, and the one currently in Glasgow, could have been, as Mel told me, the last one ever to appear, and so he asked me to go out and do a story on it, more for posterity than anything else.

He hooked me up with a photographer, Rick, and we headed down there that afternoon.

Rick haled from Maine in the north eastern United States, and was a brilliant photographer.

His pictures that day of the bright lights of the carnival, were what 'sold' the story.

Like me, he was constantly asked the question, "what the fuck are you doing here?" (Unspoken: In this shithole, Glasgow.)

So Rick and I compared notes and we both had our reasons, I was here due to a failed attempt to write for the BBC, and Rick was married to a Scotswoman from the area.

Rick told me that he had developed an answer to the "why are you here?" question, which was, "It's not so bad, really, it's only the first 25 years that are the worst."

So we went down to the carnival and while Rick snapped, I interviewed the carnival's owner.

It really was quite a depressing scene.

There were few patrons, and those that were there seemed to be playing a sort of one penny poker machine that may have yielded a five pound maximum jackpot.

Apart from that the rides stood largely empty and as James, the carnival owner told me, "most don't come anymore 'cos of the weather.

So we are packing up and heading for the south of Europe.

This is the last time we will play here."

So Mel was right, Rick and I had indeed covered the last carnival in Glasgow.

But that story, of the Glasgow Carnival, was the last I did in Scotland, for the pull of home had begun to sound ever more powerfully, and one reason was, believe it or not, soap operas.

In the evenings when not drawn inexorably into the Chip or Jinty's I would go home and watch TV with the three girls.

And, as with Kristi in Birmingham, we watched soap operas.

This stemmed not so much from me desiring these shows, but because Emily, Kate and Briony, loved the Australian ones, Neighbours and Home and Away.

At first I watched them with a sneering derision and passed on aggravating remarks like, "How can you watch this rubbish?"

But as the summer passed I began to be drawn in, as I had with Kristi in Birmingham, and began watching with avidity, and the four of us would point out plot holes in the story with great enjoyment.

But as I watched I realized there was more going on that simple enjoyment of deriding the shows, and it took a while to figure it out.

It was that I was starting to miss Australia, with its sunny skies and waving palm trees.

Neighbours is set In Melbourne, and this showed through clear and crisp, but Home and Away is shot on the northern Sydney suburb of Palm Beach and even though this is in Australia's biggest population centre, Palm Beach itself could be Anybeach, Australia, and as such the sand, the ocean, and the palms began to calling to me in my overcast northern redoubt.

Additionally to this visual stimulus was a chronic problem that I haven't mentioned before, as I didn't want to spend a full three-quarters of this book complaining.

But here it is.

When I first got to London, nearly two years before this juncture, I had started playing rugby and very much enjoyed it.

However, after about six weeks I began to notice that I was having trouble changing pace, I couldn't move suddenly into a sprint.

Those who played with me before, will immediately yell, how could you tell? As I had always been a slow runner, but this was different, and it was an issue with my left hip.

It wasn't an injury, it wasn't even a pain at first, it was nothing I could put my finger on.

But some six weeks after I began playing in London I found, one Sunday morning, that I could hardly get out of bed, due to the pain now burning through my lower girdle and not because of the twenty pints I had consumed after the game.

Anyway, I went to my local GP about it, but that began a two year long exercise in frustration.

I saw every health professional even vaguely connected with sports injuries, Orthopaedic surgeons, physiotherapists, remedial massagers, chiropractors and osteopaths, you name it, I would have seen a faith healer if they could offer me hope, but none could.

The upshot was that the pain, untreated, got worse, and I was unable to complete even one rugby season, and now hadn't played any sport for nearly 18 months.

So now in the summer of my second year, I was feeling the frustration of a sporty person, who couldn't play, and didn't have an idea when they might be back on the field.

So in a last ditch attempt to sort the damn thing out I saw a Scottish Physio and she gave me the most valuable advice I was to get, which was: "I think you should go home, Australia is one of the most advanced places on Earth for sports medicine."

Aside: this is surprisingly true, the first knee reconstruction was done in Australia in 1971, many years ahead of the world.

So with my work visa coming to an end, and with my mental state at such a low ebb that I was watching Home and Away of my own volition, I took her advice and made plans for home.

I thanked Brant and Mel for the opportunities that they had both provided, which had indeed got my journalism career going, then packed my backpack for the last time and headed south.

My first stop was to Birmingham to say good bye to Liz, when I had left for Glasgow, I had as usual just upped and left when it suited me, having no thought for other people's feelings, and so I went back to try to clarify just where we were at.

This hardly helped, as upon seeing her, I wanted to stay and be with her again, but then my hip/lower back needed to be sorted out for a stable mental state, and so I had to go.

With tearful farewells on both Liz and my part, I left her and went south and once more crossed the M-25 freeway that signals the boundary of London, and made my way to my temporary lodgings that I had arranged from Glasgow.

This was with Nicola, at her London flat.

Although she was from Glasgow, at this time she was working with the Daily Mirror in London, and so it was only fitting that I would once more, in my final stay in the UK, presume upon my contacts to provide me with free accommodation.

I mention this because I'll tell you something about Nicola, that girl can drink.

When I got to London I called her at work and told her I was here, she said, "OK, I'll be finished work soon, and we are going for a drink, why don't you meet us there and then we'll go home from the pub."

I said, "Fine", got the name of the pub, and then made my way via a bookstore to the pub in question.

There then followed one of the drunkest nights of my life.

Nicola is Scottish, and so shifts it a bit, what's more she works in newspapers, which overlays it, and what's more we were with seemingly the entire staff on the Daily Mirror in London and so the drinking was in the extreme range.

Pints came, and came and came.

I began to fall behind, but everytime I looked up Nicola and newspaper cronies were either downing a pint with effortless verve, or at the bar ordering another round.

Finally closing time came at 11pm, and I thought surely we are headed home now, but I was wrong, we did that most english of things and went around to the curry house.

This is a popular custom as it is a well known trick for going on drinking.

So then the riot continued and we ate curry and drank more.

Nicola is five foot five, but seemed to have the classic hollow legs.

Finally at about two in the morning, the party began to break up and we went outside onto the footpath and all began to break off into little groups and get minicabs for our trip home.

I joined Nicola in one and we went back to her flat.

With drunken stumbling together we got out her spare bed, and worked it into a vaguely useable form and I tumbled into it and slept the sleep of the drunk.

I got up late the next day, ten or eleven am, to discover a note from Nicola, "gone to work, see you tonight."

With stunned admiration, I realized that she had, after last night's carousing, got up near seven and got herself to work at the regulation hour.

This woman should be wearing her underpants outside her clothes and sport a cape like the other superheroes.

I, meanwhile, tottered into the living room and watched daytime TV.

Then around two pm, I got in the bath and enjoyed a leisurely soak, and these totally recumbent activities were all I could take on this day.

Then around four pm, I was back in the living room watching Countdown, a popular game show, when the phone rang.

I picked it up and said "hello", it was Nicola, she said, "I just thought I would call, we're going out again tonight, do you want to meet us at the Coal Hole?" (The Hole being a pub on the Strand, not far from her flat.)

I was stunned, I'd have thought after last night she was ringing to say she was going to hospital, not the pub, but this was an iron woman if ever there was one.

So I agreed kind of cautiously, saying, "er, it won't be a late one will it?"

I didn't think I could take it, physically or mentally.

To which she replied blithely, "oh, no, I've just got to meet some PR types and that's always done over a drink, so that shouldn't take to long."

So I agreed and began getting myself together for this.

Then long story short, it all happened again.

So while I had spent the day merely lying in the bath, or on the couch, Nicola had done a full day's work and was now ready to get on the razzle again.

I arrived at the pub to discover some of the people who had been present the night before were there again and they greeted me like an old friend, and the pints began flowing.

Once again we rolled home at around two in the morning and this night I gave thanks it was my last one in London.

The next day was Saturday and thus Nicola stood on her doorstep to see me off.

I thanked her for her hospitality and then waved and took my backpack for its last outing across London.

I tubed around to Heathrow and checked in for my flight.

Like everything else I did on that trip, and in life generally, I had taken the cheapest option and got the cheapest flight I could out of Britain.

It was with Philippine Airlines, I think I can mention the name of the carrier, but as I do, I just have to hope that their legal representatives never read this.

Not that anything I am going to write is untrue, but its not great PR for the airline is all.

To start with, when I took my seat, I was adjusting it back and forth and noticed that the crest stamped into the metal of the chair's arm rest said "Singapore Airlines".

So I quickly understood what happened to those old aircraft that a reputable airline feels are no longer useable (or even safe, I might add), they are sold to less affluent airlines like Philippines Airlines.

So we took off.

As this was a cheap flight out of Britain, there were quite a lot of young Australians on it, and we had all gravitated together in the check in lounge by some sort of southern hemispheric magnetic osmosis, and so when we took our seats, we were all grouped together.

This was a good thing as I had someone to pray with when the turbulence started.

The first leg of the flight was to Bahrain in the gulf, for refuelling only, then onto Manila in the Philippines, where we would have a thirty-six hour stopover before moving onto the last leg, to Australia.

The first two legs did however pass relatively smoothly, and I was able to put most of the fears I had about being in a second hand aircraft to bed.

We stopped in the gulf, but didn't leave the plane, and then finally, sixteen hours flying time after we had left Heathrow, touched down in Manila.

I was back in Asia, and back in the tropics.

Due to the extended nature of this stop, we were all debussed and taken to various hotels around the town to sleep, and generally recover before we moved on.

The hotels were luxurious I might add, I was actually staying at the Hilton with some of the other young people on the flight.

The bus from the airport did however remind us how bad traffic can be, Manila is among the bottom five worst cities on Earth for traffic, possibly the worst.

London, as I have written, has appalling traffic, but as I sat in the bus that afternoon, I realized that at in London it is usually cold, so you can sit in the contained atmosphere of your car with the windows closed.

But here in Manila, you had the oppressive Manila smog and tropical fug bearing down on you like a giant's hand.

It was so hot on the bus that the windows had to be kept open and so you got the full panoply of the city's pollution, and the noise to boot.

Eventually, after some two hours in traffic to make a thirty K journey, we got to our various hotels and checked in.

The tour guide on the bus had tried to get us all interested in a sightseeing tour of the city, as an alternative to going to bed, but had few takers, worn out as we were.

However, in a burst of illogicality, I did want to go out and get on the juice that evening.

My burgeoning alcoholism was at play now, and while not wanting to see the museums and the art galleries, I did want a few cold beers.

So I gathered together a few of the crowd from the plane and we set out for dinner and drinks.

We asked at the reception of the hotel and they told us not to go walking around the city at night, as we would be mugged as surely as the sun would rise tomorrow, so the staffer suggested we head to the "Ramada complex", where we could drink and socialise safely.

We were about to learn though that there were two purposes of this advice.

Firstly, it was to keep us safe, but the second strand of the advice was much less nice.

For when we got to the complex, we discovered that while it was safe for western tourists, it was also the place where young Asian women were sold for sex.

The complex itself was a truly awful place, a three metre high chain link fence surrounded it, making it look like a prison camp, which indeed it was for the young women in there.

If I was there now, I would have turned on my heel and gone away somewhere less socially reprehensible, but we didn't want to start walking the streets looking for somewhere else for the reasons stated by the staffer above.

So we went in.

It really was an evil place and I'm sorry I patronised it.

We entered a bar and there on a centre stage looking like that which models go down to show off new clothes were about forty young Asian women in scant clothing moving sluggishly to gentle music, while a load of western men ogled them.

We ordered a round of beers and took a seat at a table.

The madam came over and asked, "You want?", gesturing at the women, but we shook our heads.

She nodded and moved on to other tables.

We stayed for some hours, we got there around eight, and I wanted to stay up till about midnight, so was "happy", I'm not sure of the right word, to just drink and "enjoy" the view.

Occasionally new westerners would come in and the madam would greet them with the same question.

Sometimes the men would say "yes", and the madam would then ask "which one?" gesturing to the girls on the stage.

The westerner would point to a girl who had taken his fancy and the madam would call the girl in question down and she would take her seat on the lap, or on a stool next to the tourist.

Then she would move into the role of waitress for the time the tourist was in the bar, getting him drinks and food or whatever he required.

It was beyond awful, and the only thing I can say to my credit is that I had no desire to take part in such a trade, and just had beers until I had seen enough.

At one point I convinced my companions to come with me to check out some of the other bars in the complex in the hope of not having to look at any of this, and they agreed.

We checked out all the other bars, five or six in number, but they were all the same; darkened rooms with a central stage on which Asian women, some as young as twelve, were bought and sold.

Eventually midnight came and I called it a night, we all left and headed back to our hotels to sleep though the remainder of the night before our flight the next day.

Finally, now as I write this in 2014, there are laws in place to stop this sort of carry on, 'sex tourism' laws they are called, and that is a good thing, but even then the overarching poverty of the country, in this case the Philippines, is the main causative factor, and so more foreign aid and education is what is needed to put a stop to it.

The morning came and a lot of ringing around rooms went on to make sure that our group had all got the call and didn't sleep through, then we assembled in the foyer and caught the bus back to the airport.

We boarded and again I checked my arm rest and sure enough there was another 'Singapore Airlines' stamp in the metal, and so we were flying in another second hand aircraft.

I tried to put this largely out of my mind, and was generally successful until we hit the Torres Strait.

This strait between New Guinea and Cape York is a brutally punishing channel.

All that water has to funnel from the Indian Ocean through the needle's eye gap between new Guinea and Cape York into the Pacific and so the watercourse is riven with savage rips and boat dunking whirlpools of real ferocity.

And the air above it reflects this and as we were leaving New Guinea airspace, the pilot came on the intercom and said, "Attention passengers and crew, we have some turbulence coming up, so please put your seatbelts on and do not leave our seat unless absolutely necessary."

I looked down at the Singapore Airlines stamp in the arm rest and then thought, "Oh well, I've been through turbulence before, it won't be that bad."

It was the last coherent, non-religious thought I had for some time.

Almost instantly upon the clicking sound of the pilot switching off the intercom after his announcement, the aircraft hit the turbulence and began bucketing around all over the sky like a particularly frisky bronco with rodeo season coming up.

One of the young Australians was sitting next to me, a young woman named Maureen, and I don't consciously recall doing it, but the next thing I knew I was holding her hand in a death grip that Buzz Lightyear would have considered overtight.

I gritted my teeth and rode it out.

Sometimes it was like the aircraft hit a brick wall floating at thirty thousand feet.

Other times it was like a giant aerial forklift had picked up the aircraft bodily and moved it to the other side of the equator.

It seemed like forever, but I think, in retrospect, that it only lasted ten minutes, but I don't really know.

Of course every thump, shift in flight, and bang, brought back to my mind the fact that we were in a second hand aircraft.

However, eventually it ended and the aircraft returned to smooth running.

I borrowed a Swiss army knife from the one of the cabin crew and removed my fingers, one by one, from Maureen's hand.

Then I went to the bathroom to check my underwear, but it was clear.

And so we flew down the Australian continent to Melbourne.

But if I was terrified during the turbulence, I was about to undergo a whole new world of fear.

We approached the airport in Melbourne, made our final approach, and then hit the tarmac with a solid thump.

There followed a small 'clink' noise above my head and the overhead compartment fell open and the oxygen mask fell into my lap.

To say I was startled barely hints at my consternation.

I stared frantically at the thing wondering if this meant that something had gone badly wrong and we were about to crash.

But quickly I noticed that Maureen's mask hadn't fallen, and none of the others above any of the other passengers had either.

I breathed a sigh of relief that we weren't about to make the six o'clock news as a fiery crash, and nearly required said oxygen mask to provide enough of the life giving gas.

But my surprise was not over.

With the aircraft still hurtling down the runway at near 200 kilometres an hour, a hand appeared over my shoulder, picked up the mask, placed it back into its slot above my head and shut the compartment.

It was one of the cabin crew, who had seen it fall, and got up without a thought, and put it back.

I stared at him, now this guy was Joe Cool.

He then noticed me staring and said, "Don't worry about it, it sometimes falls down like that."

Then he went back to his little fold down seat at the rear of the aircraft and sat back down.

I stared at him speechlessly.

While I admired his cool, the reason for my wide-eyed look was mainly because of the condition of the mask itself.

The rubber tube that would carry the life-giving gas in case of emergency was perished and tangled to the nth degree and the surface of the tubing was cracked and flaking.

If we did have trouble it was uncertain if I would die in the crash or by asphyxiation after.

If I had a sensible bone in my body I would have gathered my companions and got off the aircraft and flown the final leg home via an Australian domestic carrier.

But I didn't, I never have really.

I think it was mainly that I was so close to home, just an hour's flying time and so I just wanted to get home in Sydney, and this rattly, aircraft was the quickest way.

So I sat it out, passengers changed over at Tullamarine, and then we took off for Sydney.

We touched down and I got off the aircraft.

I had been away two and a half years, I had seen and learned a lot, about the world and myself, and I had become (I now see) an alcoholic.

It was never a big problem before, but as I stood in the queue at Sydney airport waiting to check through customs and immigration, I had a subconscious thought that I wouldn't recognise for some years, which was, "All right Lachlan, trip's over, time to get serious about life, no more fun."

Seems ridiculous, as I write it, but it is none the less what passed though my mind.

Sadly it led to me feeling that not only was my fun over, but my life as well, and so, albeit unconsciously, my drinking levels began to approach those of Dennis Rodman or Oliver Reed and my attempts to drink less and get help would lead me, eventually, into rehab.

But that, as the narrator would say at the end of each 'Hammy Hamster' episode, is another story.

### About the Author

Lachlan Barker is an author who lives in Byron Bay, Australia.  
When not complaining eternally to the internet he surfs, cycles or works as a gardener.  
He entered rehab for booze and pot in 2008 and hasn't looked back since.  
He has been on every continent except South America and Antarctica, and they're next.

More Works by Lachlan Barker

Long Way Round to Rehab

Year of the Rant. Part Two: The Winter of Our Discontent, Winter, 2013.

The Destruction of Lasseter's Road (first chapter preview)

Connect with Lachlan Barker

The Destruction of Lasseter's Road

It all started when Kellner at number 312 decided to blow up the stump that was blocking his driveway.

Kellner hated that stump.

It didn't stop him accessing his house, but merely from parking next to the verandah of his house, which was a problem as he repeatedly had to bring in his shopping in the pissing rain.

He could have had it removed when the tree guys were there, but Kellner was a cheapskate.

He didn't think he was, he thought he was merely prudent, but anyone else when asked would make comments like "he knows the value of a dollar", and "he would make $20 worth of effort to get back $10 owed."

When the tree guys charged him the exorbitant fee of $350 to cut down the tree, he asked aggrievedly "do you use gold chainsaws?!"

Then they'd had the outrageous audacity to quote him $2,000 to remove the stump.

Over his dead body.

So the tree company had cut down the tree, mulched the logs and left with the stump in place.

It was a big tree, and therefore now, a big stump.

It sat in the exact middle of the cul-de-sac end of his gravel driveway and was exactly in position to annoy him every time he came home.

He had tried his own hamfisted efforts with his rusty, never starting, always breaking down and always blunt chainsaw to remove bits of it from time to time, but he had never changed the bulk of the thing, and now he'd had enough.

Kellner couldn't have exactly told you why now was the time to do something about it, but it was almost certainly to do with his neighbour, Wills.

Kellner hated Wills, but then really, Kellner hated everybody.

Disliking the bulk of the human race seems to go hand-in-hand with being a cheapskate, why? Who knows, but Kellner certainly fitted the mold, maybe it was because it was only other humans who constantly cheated him out of money that was certainly his by right.

His work paid him less than he deserved.

The supermarket charged him more than the products were worth.

The government took more than their fair share in tax.

But Wills his neighbour didn't have any monetary interaction with Kellner at all.

No, Kellner hated Wills simply because of the noise.

Lasseter's road was a meandering suburban entity that wound away from the town and got quieter with every passing bend till you arrived at Kellner's driveway, the last dwelling, in the full blown countryside.

Thus Wills' constant habit of partying every weekend with backpacker chicks he met in town annoyed Kellner to the point of making his doctor think he was eating raw salt, nothing else could explain medically Kellner's blood pressure.

To be fair to Wills, he constantly invited Kellner to his parties, but Kellner never went, suspecting (quite rightly), that Wills only invited him to reduce the number of neighbours at home in bed, who would then complain about the noise.

And this decision to remove the stump, by fair means or foul, had been taken by Kellner in the week after a particularly noisy party.

Even then, Kellner probably could have handled the noise, but the accompanying annoyances were beyond the pale.

For instance: even if Wills had not invited him over, Kellner knew there was a party on because of the number of drunk and stoned backpackers who would get lost and turn up in Kellner's driveway and ask if "he knew where Wills lived?"

Whereupon Kellner would tell them "no", and they not understanding or simply full of drunken bonhomie would then say, "but you must know him, he's a great guy and there's a party on tonight, it must be around here somewhere?"

Kellner would then relent and whilst grinding his teeth give them approximate directions and let them get on with it.

He had for a while deliberately given them the wrong directions, but that had just led to innumerable camper vans driving up and down Lasseter's Road all night seeking the party as mariners had once sought the Flying Dutchmen.

So he suffered on the whole in ground tooth silence.

He had tried wearing his chainsaw earmuffs to bed, but this had had the counteracting effect of not hearing cars pulling up onto his forecourt and coming out on the morning to find he had been parked in by these party goers who had thought his parked car was a sign that this was party parking, they had then parked their van and wandered off through the trees to Wills house to party all night.

So all in all Kellner was not a happy, or even fully sane man when he began the process of obtaining explosives to remove the stump.

A saner person would have noticed for instance that the very house he wished to park closer to, was ipso facto, close enough to sustain damage.

But the stump by now had become the repository of all Kellner's frustrations.

Somehow it embodied everything that was wrong with the world, or at least the part thereof that Kellner inhabited.

And so he sat down at his computer to find out how to turn that small volume of hated wood into a large amount of smithereens in the shortest period of time.

Milliseconds ideally.

Wills was drunk.

Even he knew he shouldn't be drunk at two in the afternoon, but if he knew it internally, there was no way he would admit it publicly.

He had a job, sort of.

The sign on the side of his car said "builder", but he wasn't really, or perhaps more accurately, he was a builder who hardly worked anymore.

What he did do, when he could pull himself together to do anything, was supervise people who really knew what they were doing.

Even then the word supervise was a hopeless over-estimate of Wills' skills.

If he got a job for a new client, it was usually because an old client from the time when he did swing a hammer had passed his name on.

Then Wills would swing into action and beg other tradesmen in town to do the job.

Wills hated and loved those phone calls.

In the short period after the phone had been replaced in the cradle he would be filled with a joyous euphoria, he had work, he could afford more alcohol.

This feeling of well-being would last until the first problem arose in the build.

Then he would cross the divide into hating this job, the client, the tradesmen he had dragged on site, the building supply house, the labourers who worked for him, the architect, the council for placing countless footling regulations in the way of doing things and all because they kept him away from the bourbon bottle and the company of 18 year old backpacker chicks (his word) which he preyed upon.

He went to the fridge and poured himself another drink.

He was "not at work" this day, meaning he was supposed to be supervising the laying of a concrete slab at a build outside town, but had twisted the arm of the concretor to do it all without him and was now sitting on his deck getting a full alcohol glow on before the weekend's partying started six hours or so hence.

He had as usual invited his neighbours for the night's party, but as usual those miserable, police-calling gits would not attend.

He didn't really want them there anyway, but even Wills knew that he had to try to maintain some sort of political détente.

He wasn't sure if anyone could have him kicked out, or indeed if even the coppers could do anything when they showed up once a weekend to tell him to keep the noise down, but keeping some sort of peace seemed to a good idea.

Of course once 8pm rolled around Wills would be in the midst of bourbon-induced revelry and didn't care if the US Navy started shelling the place in a vain attempt to keep the noise down, he was drunk and was allowed to have a little fun wasn't he?

But then neither Wills nor Kellner could have foreseen that a single tree stump would not only see the end of Wills partying but the end of life as the residents of Lasseter's road knew it period.

O'Driscoll knew he had been doing this job too long.

He often tried to remember back to a time when he was a young policeman and to discern if his attitude to the job had been different.

He knew the job wasn't different, the things he'd hated then, he still hated now, but back then he seemed to have more patience.

O'Driscoll felt that this was ironic, and certainly paradoxical, in that young men were supposed to have less patience, but he felt that back then he had more time to take over things.

Why then was his fuse shortening on a daily, if not an hourly basis?

Like the slowly dispersing cracks in a concrete dam wall, he could feel a parallel corruption of his restraint.

The scenario he feared was if just one more drunk started arguing with him, then abusing him, in the course of his work, he would go off like the fourth of July.

Just one more drunk, just one more loud mouthed, habeas corpus quoting drunk could see him turn from a regular joe into something so incandescant, so full of nitric rage that not even a straight jacket could contain him.

Probably the thing that most enraged him these days was the "Why don't you go and arrest some axe-murderer?" line that he got from every single fucking drunk.

The drunks seemed to think that what they were doing, pissing on a shop front, fighting in the street, vandalising parked cars, then pissing on said car, jumping on bikes left chained to parking meters, and/or spitting on him, were somehow perfectly reasonable ways to behave.

His old cop buddies from the academy who worked in different locales would say make similar complaints, but then they would admit that at least in their towns the drunken crescendo occurred only Friday and Saturday nights.

O'Driscoll's town was a coastal resort with nearly two million visitors a year and the partying was 24-7, and thus there was no let up for O'Driscoll and his colleagues.

Even then, the tourists were in general the best behaved of the people he dealt with.

Handsome Aryan men from Germany, passionate French girls, Danish travellers.

There only offences were driving vehicles that were as roadworthy as a rowing boat.

When they partied at their accommodation they would shut it all down meticulously at 11pm and go quietly to bed.

No, the real troublemakers and regular abusers of O'Driscoll, were the locals and their sense of entitlement to do whatever they damn well liked and if someone complained that was too bad because they were locals.

With a sigh O'Driscoll realised it was time to go out on duty.

He got his car keys and drove out of the station.

It was Saturday at 6pm, he just prayed that tonight wouldn't be the night he cracked.

"Coastal Demolition, Brad speaking."

"Yes, I wonder if you can help me, I want to remove a stump from my driveway, can you guys help me with that?" Said Kellner.

"Possible, how big is it?" returned Brad.

"Well it's about, 1 metre across, maybe a metre and a half."

"OK, um, normally you'd get an excavator to do that, have you tried any of the tree companies?"

Kellner ground his teeth.

"Yes, I have, but the guys who cut it down wanted to charge me the earth to do it. Also, I don't think you could get a big enough machine down my driveway to dig it out. That's why I'm calling you guys, as far as I can see, the only way to get it out is to blow it up."

Brad, the voice on the end of the phone sighed internally.

He wished they'd never advertised they did explosive demolitions.

From the day his company had, they had been fielding a semi-regular series of calls from weirdoes who just wanted to blow something up.

He began the weeding out process, "Well ok, I'm happy to come and have a look, but the minimum price for any explosive related demolition is $5,000. Are you prepared for that?"

Kellner nearly dropped the phone, he cleaned out his phone ear with his little finger, "did you say $5,000?!" he responded.

Brad sighed internally once more, "Yes. Any demolition using explosives requires local council permit approval, insurance, the explosives and staff to execute. Plus nearby buildings, roads, pipes and trees have to be checked and shielded. Do you still want me to come out and check it out?"

"NO" yelled Kellner into the phone and slammed it down.

He paced about his kitchen fuming to himself.

He had a mental picture of a couple of hundred.

In his mind's eye he saw a demolition guy come out, place a stick or two of dynamite under the stump, open a beer, press the plunger and the job would be done.

Once again he had not counted on the local council placing a thicket of regulations around him doing what he wanted on his own property.

He wandered out to the front verandah and stared at the stump.

As he did he noticed that his "always on its last legs" car, was leaking again.

He went over and knelt under the front fender.

This time it was the radiator, a very small pool of green fluid was dripping on the ground.

The leak wasn't enough to worry him, his car had achieved an almost zen-like state of continuing to run despite the eternal lack of care he bestowed on it, he would just have to remember to fill it before he left.

He stood up, he went automatically to dust the gravel off his knees, and as he did so noticed that there were dark stains upon his skin.

Probably oil or diesel from leaks from other parts of his engine.

Then something clicked in his mind.

Diesel.

Where had he read something about that?

Something to do with diesel exploding, something to do with home made bombs.

"Home made" was an expression Kellner loved, it implied less money spent.

He went back inside and turned his computer on.

The party was in full swing and Wills was, as always, drunk.

Like the Inuit of Northern Canada who had twenty-two words for snow, correspondingly Wills had a range of words to describe his drunken feeling.

A mild glow described how he felt when drinking alone on his stoep at two in the afternoon.

Mildly jouyous described the period around five to six pm when he was "allowed" to drink, and the pace of his bourbon consumption would quicken.

"Pretty Happy" was when he began to forget what had happened.

And the ultimate was "totally fucking legless", which was literal, and described his immoderate progress around the party, groping women, saying things like "Do ya' drop 'em?" (Meaning the accosted female's underpants), and was a period of the night when his legs no longer functioned as decent ambulatory devices and so legless was accurate.

He also has the expressions "Shit faced", "Slaughtered", "hammered" to allow composite adjectives.

"Pretty happy, verging on shit-faced", for instance, allowed him finer gradations to his descriptions of the revelry.

Now it was ten pm and Wills was completely happy.

His younger workers who did the procuring for him had done a good job and his house and lawn was covered with 18 year old women.

The music blared, the lights resounded and his mood soared.

Clouds of marijuana smoke drifted on the breeze.

"What", thought Wills, "could be a finer lifestyle than this?"

A song he thought he recognised came on and he yelled, "TURN IT UP! I love this song."

The music soared forth and he realised it wasn't the song he thought it was.

No matter.

He moved onto the dance floor and sort of tried dancing with a couple of attractive young women.

In his drunken state he didn't notice them edging away.

They knew him too well.

It would have surprised Wills to learn that almost everyone at his house that night hate his guts.

The others at the party, all younger than Wills, only attended because he provided vast tubs of free alcohol.

He thought they attended because he was a great guy who despite the ongoing years still knew how to party.

Oh the self-deception of the middle aged.

He shimmied across to the ice tub and got himself another can of bourbon mixed with coke.

Kellner ground his teeth.

Another Saturday, another party at Wills's place.

He had already told two van loads of revellers that the party was next door and "couldn't they bloody hear it?"

They had responded as usual with the "can we park here?" question, as if everyone on Lasseter's road would be falling over themselves to provide convenience for those attending.

He told them to go back to the road and park at Wills, and they had backed lurchingly down his drive in the dark.

He knew he was in for another night of little sleep and ongoing, increasing frustration and hatred of his neighbour.

Among the real crosses for Kellner to bear was the issue of timing.

His job was with a road crew for the roads authority and was up at 5am each week day to join the crew.

And like all those with a regular early start he found it impossible these days to sleep in on the weekend.

He had tried, saying to himself, "c'mon it's the weekend, have a relax."

But he had always just ended up lying in bed with his eyes closed, until eventually, with a sigh he would roll over and start his day.

And of course this had become vastly worse with the advent of Wills next door.

Now it was Saturday night again and he faced his usual courses of action.

Like most, Kellner found his heart racing as he faced the confrontation of asking Wills to keep the noise down.

It was a paradoxical endeavour.

If he went over early-ish, say 9pm, Wills, full of bourbon-fuelled bonhomie would wrap his arm around Kellner's shoulder and ask if he wanted a drink.

Kellner would say 'no' and then ask him to turn the music down.

Wills would say 'yes', and drop the volume.

Kellner would go home and then wait out the next step.

Which was, an hour after Kellner had gone home, sometimes a minute, Wills would have completely forgotten the conversation and when next a song he liked came on would once again yell 'TURN IT UP', and so it would go for another Saturday night.

If he waited till midnight when the local council noise covenant came into force, Wills wouldn't even remember the conversation.

Then Kellner would ring the coppers and complain about the noise.

The police were very good and would do their best, but in this partying town, particularly in the summer, they had so many calls for noise abatement that they sometimes didn't get to Lasseter's road till three in the morning, by which time Kellner was a red-eyed wreck, dozing fitfully in his chair in the living room, knowing the futility of entering his bed, since the moment he did he would have to be up to tell someone to get out of his driveway, or know that simply the volume of the music would rattle his walls and make his bed dance in time.

So he continued his research into home made bombs on the internet, and with each passing second an unconscious desire to make Wills sorry burgeoned within him.

"You there Barry?", crackled the radio in O'Driscoll's car.

"Yes, June", he replied.

The dispatcher this evening was Constable June Holcroft, O'Driscoll got on well with her and they had a loose and definitely unspoken agreement that she wouldn't bother him if she could at all avoid it.

"It's that time, I'm afraid," said Holcroft.

O'Driscoll's heart sank.

Like most in this coastal party town he knew the time to the minute without looking at his watch.

When the pubs shut, when the nightclubs shut, when the bakery opened, when the first coffee shop opened, all provided him with time markers that helped him through his shift.

However, again like everyone else, he had trouble keeping track of the days.

"That time", from June meant that it was Saturday midnight and now the noise complaints would start coming in.

"It's not is it?", said O'Driscoll in a hopelessly optimistic attempt to change the time and day of the week.

"Sorry Barry, but it is. And first up is your favourite address."

"What again? Jesus does that guy ever stop."

"Well not this weekend, you on your way?"

"Sure June. I'll go now."

'Your favourite address meant Wills place on Lasseter's road.

O'Driscoll couldn't count the times he'd been there, but each visit was a carbon copy.

He cursed under his breath and started driving.

Kellner had decided not to go over and put his heart through the racing stress of trying to get Wills to turn his music down this night.

He wasn't sure himself why it stressed him so, but it was most likely to do with the fact that it never did any bloody good.

Some Saturdays Wills would turn down the music, but as ever Kellner wasn't able to relax, sitting in his living room waiting to hear if a song Wills liked came on and the music got sent up to heaven again, whilst Kellner gritted his teeth in his private hell.

Also, even when Wills did turn it down, usually only after the police came, the roar of the drunken conversation would easily fill the sound vacuum and once again Kellner would have to wait till the last reveller had gone to sleep, before he too could find some rest.

So this Saturday he had gone for the easier option of calling in his complaint to the police as soon as the noise covenant came in at midnight.

The police were very good about it, in that they now knew why Wills' neighbours called in at 12:01am, and responded as rapidly as the events in town would allow.

Thus it was Kellner's call, routed through Holcroft on the switch, that had set O'Driscoll on his way.

O'Driscoll parked his police car at the end of a long line of cars parked haphazardly on both edges of the road, indeed the gap in the middle was barely adequate for a single car to pass.

He locked the vehicle and began walking.

If he hadn't been here every Saturday for the larger part of his working life, he would have known where to go by the noise.

It was scandalous, he had no difficulty understanding the neighbours complaints.

He turned into the driveway and approached the house.

As ever possibly a hundred, maybe more people were thronging the joint.

He entered the exo-rings of partiers and began to shoulder his way through to the heart of the action.

If the noise was scandalous, so was the condition of Wills, O"Driscoll knew him well by now and was able to pick him out where he stood leering down the tops of two young women.

With a long practised skill he manoeuvred his way to the music centre and turned it off.

The onrushing silence, well comparative silence of only the voices echoing around the place continued.

Wills, vaguely sensing something was wrong, well different, to what had been happening previously, turned and saw the upright blue figure of O'Driscoll staring balefully at him.

"All right Tony, it's midnight and you know you've got to turn down the music", said O'Driscoll.

He then waited for the next part of the routine.

Wills walked, well lurched in an upright sort of stagger, over to speak with the sergeant.

He threw his arm around O'Driscoll's shoulder and said, "Aw, yeah, officer, real sorry about that, do you want a drink?"

O'Driscoll looked down at Wills' hand dangling below his shoulder.

"Take your hand off me", he said, in as calm a tone as he could muster.

Thoughts shambled around in the subterranean caverns of Wills mind.

He faced this regularly.

He had to impress the young women at the party with his mature(?) and strong dealing with the policeman.

He faced a difficult decision.

He wanted to get through the conversation without looking like he was backing down.

But also, he didn't want to antagonise O'Driscoll who had the power to write him a noise citation, and, he vaguely thought, the power to confiscate his music centre.

"Take your hand off me, " repeated O'Driscoll with about the same level of menace as a leopard stalking a gazelle.

Wills equivocated.

"Would you like a drink officer?", he said, allowing him to take his arm off the policeman's shoulder and rummaging in the ice tub and coming up with a beer.

"No", said O'Driscoll, "what I want is to not be called back here tonight because of noise, or any other complaints, do I make myself clear?"

Wills struggled to come up with an answer that gave him some face saving wriggle room.

"Oh, sure, there's no problem with that, you sure though you don't want to take a beer along with you when you go?", he said.

O'Driscoll, fed to the back teeth with dealing with this guy, just shook his head and turned and left.

He made his way through the now (slightly) subdued crowd and began the walk back to his car.

Wills turned back to the young women he had been 'talking' with to discover they had taken the opportunity to flee his advances and made for a part of the party that Wills wasn't.

Wills, waited till he heard a car start on the road and drive away, prayed that it was O'Driscoll's car and then yelled, "OK, PARTY ON!" and turned the music up to about half it's previous volume.

'That should impress everyone', he thought and began patrolling for more female company.

Kellner groaned.

He was able to follow the events of O'Driscoll's arrival at the party as if he had been listening in on a phone extension.

Some nights Wills had co-operated, this was one night when he didn't.

Even at half volume he would have described the music as blaring, throw in the conversation and it was as if O'Driscoll had not been there at all.

He had a vaguely defined feeling that it was somehow bad form to call the cops twice in one evening, his only hope now was that one or more of the other neighbours would complain.

He went into his bedroom and lay down and wondered what his quota of sleep would be this night.

As he lay there he heard a snippet of a Wills sentence, ".... Yair, I wasn't having that, I even offered him a beer, and he....."

'Some day', thought Kellner to himself, 'Some day'.

The noise continued and Kellner began his Saturday nightly activity of staring at the ceiling and waiting for exhaustion to overwhelm the sounds from Wills house.

The stump was no longer recognisable as such.

An ice sculpture now stood in Kellner's driveway, or perhaps a highly localised snowstorm had fluttered down in the night and formed itself into peaks and scallops on the woody surface.

It certainly looked quite beautiful to Kellner as he stood and admired his handiwork in the dawn light.

Like all cheapskates Kellner had kept everything he had ever owned in his life in a ramshackle shed made of stringybark logs, rusty gal and fencing wire.

He had once bought a cow which he was planning to milk, but quickly learned the lesson that so many diary producers have, that having even one cow gave one a morning and night chore that couldn't be ignored and tied you to the house, making holidays out of the question.

He likewise has had a brief enthusiasm for gardening and had layed out a garden in which he would grow veges, and save himself the exorbitant costs associated with purshace at the supermarket.

But likewise, he had found the work hard and by the time he brought in soil and fenced it off, the veges from the garden had actually cost more than those bought in town.

Thus his shed was full of the remnants of past ideas.

One such remnant was bags of fertiliser, and it was this product that now covered the top of the stump and trickled down around the sides onto the driveway.

Kellner had finally shuffled into a restless sleep around three am, but his body clock had snapped his eyes open with a click that almost audible at 5am.

A lifetime of rising for work at this hour had once again denied him a desperately needed sleep in.

He had tried.

He rolled and lay with his eyes shut, but after a mere ten minutes of this he had swung his legs out of bed and lumbered groggily to the kitchen to make coffee.

Once he had imbibed some mouthfuls he had decided that since he was up he may as well get on with the stump removal.

He wouldn't have really thought he was out for revenge, but he had to work Monday and this was the day he had set aside for the stump to go.

He finished his coffee and went out to the shed.

He shifted things around till he had located the fertiliser and began dragging the bags out to the stump, one by one he emptied their contents out until he was he had emtied all the bags.

His internet researches had not been clear about what volume of fertiliser was needed to create what sized explosion, but like the chinese inventors of gunpowder centuries before he decided to start big, as it was a big stump.

He had brought home a jerry can of diesel during the week, and now he emptied this onto the fertiliser and it, in more liquid form, splashed and trickled down and through the fertiliser, pooling around the seam of stump and gravel.

He once more stood back and admired his work.

Looked good, but would it work?

Soon find out.

The last piece of the apparatus was an electrical circuit to create ignition.

The diagrams he had looked at had all favoured a car battery with wires leading to the charge, but Kellner's only vcar battery was in his car, and he had carefully backed it up the driveway away from the ignition zone.

SO how could he set this off?

He went back inside for a coffee refill and thought about it.

He jiggled the cord to his electric jug to boil some water for a second round of coffee.

As you expect, his cord looked like Isaac Newton had used it for early physics experiments and it had to be jiggled into place create a circuit.

An idea formed in Kellner's mind.

He had had a problem with rats.

His television wouldn't turn on one night and he eventually discovered that starving rats had chewed through the power cord to the back of the TV.

As one would expect, he had taken the chewed cord and thrown it in the shed, he couldn't have imagined what it could ever be used for, but now his frugality would pay off.

He went out to the shed and ferreted about.

Under a rusted out ride on mower, but dangling over some besser blocks was the cord.

He wrestled it loose of it's impediments and took it back to the house.

He got some pliers out of his work room and then examined the cord.

He found the parts chewed by the rats and cut the cord off neatly there.

Then with some scissors he separated the two wires back about twenty centimetres from the cut, then stripping the plastic from the copper core.

Beautiful.

He plugged the cord in and flicked the switch.

Holding one wire with the rubber handled pliers he brought in closer to the other.

A spark crossed the circuit and every light in his house went out.

He had shorted the circuit.

He went around to the fusebox to flicked the fuses back on.

The hum of the fridge and light in the kitchen came on again.

Kellner was satisfied, he had the power.

He plugged the cord into a powerpoint in the front hall and carried it out to the stump.

He placed the two wire ends into the diesel-fertiliser mix and went back inside.

He bent down to the powerpoint, installed at ankle level in the hall, and flicked the switch.

Nothing happened.

In the part of his mind where no one else can go, in the inner mental sanctum where he could be honest with himself, he knew this would happen.

The reason, generally, that home made things are cheaper is because they don't work.

Or, they work once and then fall apart.

Or, they work, haphazardly, sometimes effectively, most often not.

Kellner sighed.

He walked down the hall and stood on his front porch looking at the mound of chemicals piled on and around his stump.

As he stood there in the quiet of the Sunday morning his befuddled mind slowly grappled with a seed of mystery deep inside.

True the explosion hadn't worked, but...

He turned and looked back down the hall toward his kitchen.

The light was on.

That was different, last time he'd tripped the fuses.

He turned back to the pile.

As he did so, he noticed that the morning wasn't as quiet as he'd previously thought.

Down at the very lowest level of his hearing a sound was seeping in.

Where had he heard that before?

At breakfast.

The faint noise was a snap, crackle, pop, as of a famous breakfast cereal when the milk is added.

He went out to the pile and looked at the point where the cord entered the mix.

The sound was clearer now, and there was a sizzling component.

Then Kellner noticed that at the epicentre of the noise, bubbles were emerging.

With an appalled fascination he watched as a bubble grew and popped, and was then replaced by another slightly larger one.

With a rush a terrifying realisation hit him.

Against all the odds, he had succeeded.

His home made reactor pile was approaching ignition point.

It was the last coherent thought he had, his endocrine system took over.

He turned and fled.

Through the house, out the back door and into his ramshackle shed.

He dove through the air and landed behind some straw bales bought to mulch his garden beds and crouched down and held his hands over his ears.

Less than a second later the air was rent by an almighty ka-whuffing sound, felt as much as heard, and the whole thing went up.

Kellner had hit the jackpot of home demolition.

Inside his shed he watched with a preternatural fear as the rusty gal walls at the back of the shed bulged outward and then sprang back with a clank that rivalled the sound of the explosion.

From the house he heard the tinkling of broken glass as every window on the front of the house disintegrated in a welter of shards.

The stump itself, lifted and tilted as if by a giant hand, then resettled down the driveway from the newly formed crater showing its previous lodgement.

The natural eucalypt oil in the wood, combined with the spark and latterly encrusted diesel caught and red flame began to lick around the stump as it settled, mud encrusted roots exposed, on the gravel.

Kellner was a not a religious man but prayed for the first time since childhood that he would come through this alive.

The percussive effects began to recede, replaced by the sounds of falling debris.

First the heavier chunks of wood, glass and gravel settled over the environs of his house, clunking,, clanking and thunking over gal roof and timber decking.

Then the lighter material began to fall and Kellner could hear the pitter-patter of a gentle eucalypt rain on the roof of his shed.

Eventually even this died out, and the quiet of Sunday morning returned to Lasseter's Road and the only sound Kellner could hear was a persistent ringing in his ears.

However, unbeknownst to Kellner, the effects of his explosion were really only just starting.

His attempts over the years to reduce the size of the stump with axe and chainsaw had made a series of cracks and fissures in the body of the stump.

Sometimes he cut down, sometimes he held the chainsaw parallel to the ground and thus a series of geometric shapes had been visible in the stump.

One of these, about the size of an adult human leg, had been separated from the stump and launched into the high atmosphere like an organic rocket.

Coated with diesel and dusted with fertiliser this chunk of timber sailed aloft trailing smoke and glowing red.

At the zenith of it parabola the chunk turned lazily, gravity took over and it began its descent.

As it speed increased the flames died down, but driven by the increasing rush of highly oxygenated air over its surface anew and demonic cherry red incandescence burgeoned.

Wills' septic tank was not in great condition.

Installed by the previous owner some twenty years ago, it had now succumbed to the heating and cooling cycles of the seasons and was cracked on all surfaces.

Wills had inspected it from time to time and often thought he should do something about sealing the cracks.

If the wind was strong in any direction it wasn't a great worry, but if the wind was light and drifting toward the house, then Wills's place was enveloped in a fairly foetid odour.

But then like most builder's jobs, paid or otherwise, Wills found it far easier to just say, "she'll be right" and go back to sit on his deck and drink bourbon.

And so when this most aerial piece of Kellner's stump arrived at terminal velocity from on high, the cover of the septic offered little or no resistance.

With a crack, then a groan, a section of the cover gave way and the still flaming chunk of wood entered and became as one with 25 years of well matured sewerage.

And there for a few seconds matters rested and the peace of this Lasseter's Rd dawn returned.

Wills, passed out drunk on the outdoor couch on his deck had started visibly from the first explosion at Kellner's place, but then unable to see the cause of the noise returned to his drunken sleep.

Which was a shame in its way as he would have been the first human to see a septic tank exploding.

At first the timber merged with the contents of the tank and a chemical battle ensued, with the moisture within at first threatening to douse the rocket red surface of the timber.

But the thing about septic tanks is that they gas off.

The smell that Wills had noticed over his tenancy was indeed a highly valuable commercial product, natural gas.

A bubble of this ignited, spread its exothermic message to other bubbles in the tank and the peace of Sunday was once again split by an almighty explosion.

The roof of the tank lifted with a lurch and the contents erupted skywards carrying, then splitting the roof of the tank into smaller pieces of concrete.

The cracks in the side of the tank gave forth geysers of raw sewage and the side walls likewise came down and the contents at the base of the tank decamped sideways in all directions.

The percussive wave of force travelled up the pipes connecting his tank with the house and all three of his toilets, two upstairs, one down, became a revolting mirror image of their function, spewing raw sewage out instead of in.

The toilets began to run and cascades of the muck formed rivulets, then creeks and finally small streams of sewage, flowing along the halls and down the stairs.

At the base of the stairs the various courses merged and an ankle deep pool of waste began to cover the living room carpet before flowing over the step, onto the deck and down the garden.

The flying sewage then began to retrace the path of the burning timber progenitor of this cataclysm and returned to Earth, covering the roof of Wills' house, the driveway, the garden and Wills himself.

Wills, insensible from twelve hours of bourbon drinking slept on.

Some time hence he would wake and know truly what hell was.

"Barry", crackled Holcroft's voice over the radio.

O'Driscoll stared at the thing in disbelief.

It was 7am Sunday morning, an hour after he should have clocked off.

There was no way, just no way, that Holcroft was thinking of sending him on a call.

Following the first call to Wills' place he had then dealt with the usual round of Saturday night calls to holiday makers and told them, one after the other, at one house after another, to turn the music down.

He had argued with drunks till his already threadbare tolerance had approached a point similar to the pile of explosive in Kellner's driveway.

With gritted teeth he tapped the 'respond' key on his car's mobile.

"June", said O'Driscoll, in ominously low tones, "I know, I just know you are not calling me to go on another call."

"I'm really sorry Barry", said Holcroft without preamble, "I really am, but you're the only mobile unit left and this is a recall."

O'Driscoll rolled his eyes.

A recall would indeed tie Holcroft's hands.

In an attempt to "simplify' dealing with late night complaints, the supervising officer had decreed that if at all possible, the same officer would return to a previously complained about address, as they already knew the situation, and it was thought this would aid in sorting things out.

As if, O'Driscoll had thought to himself many times, ANY administrative tweak would make dealing with irascible drunks any easier.

"All right", said O'Driscoll, "what is it."

"OK", said Holcroft, "I'll read you the exact words of the call that came in four minutes ago."

Holcroft cleared her throat, "There was a big party last night that went on till after 4am, then this morning there were two explosions at the party, now there is a really bad smell and I have had to close all my windows. Can you get someone to have a look up there."

June continued, "the call came from a Mrs Trail who lives at 264 Lasseter's road."

"Goddammit", said O'Driscoll. "OK, June, I'll go and see."

O'Driscoll pulled over, made a u-turn and headed out of town.

Driving the vehicle was less a policeman than a blue-clad incendiary device getting ready to detonate.

O'Driscoll noticed the smell some kilometres from Wills's place.

On this summer morning he had the windows down in an attempt to stay awake and in a far less successful attempt to provide some serenity to his fusing mind with a gentle rush of morning breeze.

With the first waft, he rolled up the window and found that the toxic odour was unstoppable.

He drove on attempting not to breathe.

He pulled up much closer to Wills's house than last night, the young things at the party, as always seemingly able to operate without sleep, had decamped for an early surf of just not to be there when the clean up started, and so the line of cars along the road was much reduced.

He pulled a t-shirt out of the boot of his car and with this providing minimal at best odour reduction, walked down Wills's driveway.

Within a few steps of doing this he stopped and stared.

A perfect circle of..., well, now that he attempted to form a sentence, he wasn't sure what the substance was, but continuing inside his head, he saw a perfect brown circle covering the lawn, driveway, deck and roof of Wills's house.

O'Driscoll had been on the force twenty years and like all beat coppers had a plenty of stories, some tear-squirtingly funny, others that still rankled.

He had seen fires, vomit covered driveway, blood strewn bar rooms, fights, accidents and wild parties, but even he had never seen anything like this.

Whatever THIS was.

O'Driscoll continued to stare and as he did a movement caught his eye.

On the couch, on the deck, a figure was struggling to stand.

The encrusted figure slowly, shakingly gained his feet and like O'Driscoll stared down the lawn.

O'Driscoll, still uncertain, knew one thing with clarity.

He wanted to be a long way from this odour as rapidly as possible.

"HEY!", he yelled.

The figure on the deck started visibly, then turned and saw O'Driscoll in the driveway.

He began a shaky ascent and as he slipped and slid his way till he stood before the sergeant.

O'Driscoll saw now that it was Wills, and realised from the flecks of toilet paper stuck to his surface among the brown goo what the substance coating every surface was.

O'Driscoll then said a line that would go down in the annals of police folk lore.

"So Mr Wills, how'd this happen?"

Wills stared.

He stared the stare of a man who had woken up with a chronic hangover covered in sewage.

He began to speak, but then realised he had nothing to say.

He didn't know how this had happened.

O'Driscoll waited a few moments and then continued, "Well, however it happened you better start cleaning it up."

This broke the walls of the little restraint Wills had.

"Clean it up! What are you fucking talking about, I didn't do this, I'm not cleaning it up."

"Oh, so you do know who did this?", O'Driscoll took out his notebook, "would you like to file a complaint against the perpetrators?"

Wills stared wildly around him.

He hadn't done this, couldn't this dumbass copper see that?

But then large chunks of the night before were lost to his memory.

Whatever had happened, and whoever had done it, Wills didn't know.

O'Driscoll waited once more.

"So Mr Wills, can I have a name please?"  
Wills shook his head.

O'Driscoll waited again then put his notebook away.

"OK, then I'll leave you to clean this up. Be aware that following the neighbours complaints you can be cited under the environmental health act if you do not abate the smell and leaking sewage. The maximum fine can be as high as $20,000 per breach, do you understand?"

Wills stared dumbly with bulging eyes at the policeman.

Sometimes there are no words, or more accurately, no language had developed adequate words to describe his immediate situation.

O'Driscoll gave it a few more beats to see if Wills would respond, and then turned on his heel and walked away.

He drove back to the station turned in his car, reported briefly that the explosions on Lasster's road were fireworks and it was simply a big clean up job up there.

Then drove home and went to bed.

Wills finally regained his deck, found the phone and began calling anyone whose number he had in his phone that had been at the party.

But those he could reach didn't answer the phone and when he went to leave a message he realised that asking anyone to come and help clean was unlikely to respond to a message saying "there's shit all over place, can you come and help clean it?"

So he then searched his house for some cleaning materials.

He began at the top of the house and began frantically trying to remove the sewage from his carpet.

Within thirty minutes he had cleared a space a metre square.

He estimated he had a week of cleaning to go.

And so Sunday continued on Lasseter's Road.

Kellner sat contentedly on his porch and watch the stump burn away, soon it would be small enough to hack up and remove completely from his driveway.

He would wheel barrow in some soil and stones from the boundary of his property and fill the crater.

Then he would be able to pull up to his house, then turn full circle and leave his driveway front on and not face the anxious reversing that had been his such a big part of his driving life before.

He had swept up the broken glass and would replace that as the weeks went by, costly it had to be said, but in general the overarching glow of having removed the stump, quietened his mind.

Additionally, having noticed the smell he had snuck through the trees and watched, hidden from view, O'Driscoll's interview with Wills.

His hearing was till imperfect, and he hadn't been able to audit their conversation, but the body language told him all he needed to know.

What's more the near square acre of faeces spread across Wills residence had provided him with a satisfaction he had never known before.

All Kellner's frustrations over all those times Wills had refused to turn the music down over all those Saturday nights was now gone, washed away on a tide of sewage.

He hadn't consciously set out to get revenge, but he had succeeded, all unlooked for, beyond his wildest dreams.

O'Driscoll slept well during a Sunday for the first time in as long as he could remember.

Most Sundays he struggled, with his mind continually churning over the arguments he had had with raving drunks through Saturday night.

But this day he drifted off to sleep with the image of Wills, covered in shit, facing multi-thousand dollar fines and having to clean the lot up on his own, with a raging hangover to boot.

Like Kellner, O'Driscoll had not set out to revenge himself on Wills, but he had been granted a privilege denied so many law enforcers, of seeing one of their tormentors completely reduced to mental and physical rubble.

None of the three men would have said they believed in karma before, but certainly Kellner and O'Driscoll did now.

