Back in town

I spent the last 7 weeks going back to the future. I come from a work background based in field acquisition of seismic data, and so after the spectacular failure of my last project it was good in a way to get back to the basics back to where I came from and believe me riding a Chinese boat off the cost of Tanzania was a long way back to the past. Yet it was also therapeutic in that it reminded me of how my skills have developed and how far I have come in the last few years. The conditions were basic the equipment was basic and the communications were very basic which is why this has not been updated for a while.

Its amazing how conditioned we are to having instant communications. The internet connection, and there was only one on the boat, was a dial up through satellite, at 115 kByte/sec which is if you have not ll forgotten very very very very slooooooooww.

Still life goes on. Having restricted news coverage was a first for a long time as well. It was interesting to see how quickly Lebanon went from the front pages. Reading news every second or third day makes you realize how much of a hot house the media really is.

The classic was the North Korean nuclear test. Has anyone really looked at the seismograph responses, it looks like a chemical explosion to me but instead of that the world goes off the rails, possible what the Dear Leader wanted?? Could it be that we have similar situation to Iraq at the end of Saddam's rule where no one would tell him that he did not have chemical and nuclear options, I thinks so.

The travels to and from East Africa were interesting. I flew out the day after the new restrictions were bought in at Heathrow which was not fun, standing in the car park for three hours, waiting in the lounge for 5 hours, missing the connection in Nairobi so wait in the lounge for another 6 hours, resulting in a 9 hour flight taking close to 24 hours. On the way back coming out of Mombassa the flight I was on was cancelled, they just did not bother to tell anyone, so sitting in the airport for 4 hours then having a three hour wait in Nairobi.

Mombassa was a revelation what great place to have a holiday, forget the big game parks, the food and the coast is just brilliant. The infrastructure is clapped out and the corruption pretty rampant but if you are on a holiday and contributing directly into the local economy what the hell.

Looking at what will happen next now. Procrastinating over reports and phone calls and generally having the wind down I really need.

Life can be good.

Better days two

My wife and I, well my wife really does the work, breed pedigree dogs as a hobby, you certainly cannot make money out of it if you have a speck of humanity in you. We specifically breed Rhodesian Ridgebacks, which is a South African dog bred as a combine hound and general dog about town.

At the moment we have five bitches, one dog, a bitch puppy and a litter of 8 pups. You would think that was overkill but actually we have five the others are staying with us for one reason or the other.

They are such nice dogs to be around, very aloof with visitors, very very smart and occasionally very very cheeky.

The others went out for their morning walk and the you bitch was left here with me, she is to young to be running free in the woods. I was watching the news when she came up to me wagging her whole body with a plastic bag in her mouth, looking really proud.

It took me a few seconds to work it all out, one of her treats was in the bag and she could not figure out how to get to it without chewing the bag as well. So bring it to the human and let him sort the mess out. The mere fact that she had stolen the bag from somewhere she was not supposed to be had nothing to do with it. Her good looks and general puppiness would get her out of that little problem.

Who is the owner here I sometimes wonder.

Better days

When you are traveling nothing is quite as tempting as home. When you are home the life style sometimes feels like a straight jacket and you wonder where the next bit of travel will take you. Its a conundrum that continues I guess until you give up the travel. Which is worse, sitting in a foreign room by yourself when the day has been rough and you really just want to talk to someone but the call home will make you feel worse and if you go out you will;
1 Get drunk and feel even worse tomorrow,
2 Finish up talking inane ideas with some hooker or kindred sole, sometimes it is hard to sort the two out, and feeling bad the next morning.

Travel is not for the weak willed, those who cannot take the pressure end up on drugs of some kind, usually as alcoholics.

This is not meant to scare people, those for whom travel is the annual vacation, but to point out that the world is a big place and it can be fun but it can also hurt. This whole thing today is meandering out of control, I meant to write a few lines about something else and ended up here.

I love the concept of traveling, you cannot do it for all these years and not love it, I remember early on sitting with a bunch of guys and one of the older ones said, "if you have not stopped traveling after 3 years you never will" and how right he was. There was one other mantra that I think I came up with and that is "you are a virgin in every new country that you go to" that was when sex basically was my reason for existing.

Travel has been good to me. I was lucky to start out at a time when it was becoming easier but not common. I have been privileged to go to places and see things that you simple cannot do now, climbing the hill of the Acropolis, driving to Persepolis, climbing the cave temples in Ipoh, sleeping on the beach in Penang, getting riotously drunk in villages in Greece, meeting matadors in Madrid, and Bilbao and Valencia, Walking into villages in Burma that had not seen a white man since the second world war, walking along paths in Papua New Guinea and knowing that you are the first white man to go there, sleeping out on the shores of Lake Titicaca, partying till there was no tomorrow in Calli and then starting again.

I have seen brutal military regimes from Argentina, watched an attempted coup in Bolivia, seen the dreadful effects of the American colour wars, seen and listen to a thermal inversion crystallize the water vapor directly to ice, its like thousands of little wind chimes, I have urinated into both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at the same time, its a little brook near Bampf that divides and flows to both.

I have drunk with fishermen from Indonesia to Peru from Australia to Norway. I have seen the pack ice at the northern extremity of the earth and the bergs off the coast of Antartica.

If there has been a problem it is that it has all gone past so quickly and no one told me that what I was doing, the life I was leading, was unusual. I never thought how lucky I was, I really thought that there were lots of us who did this. The result is a million memories cleansed by the brains filters and very few other images. One day I must sit down and write about it.

Back to the talking heads

I always thought that one talking head was about the same as another but I am starting to have second thoughts. The talking heads in Australia spout a line of inanity that is in inverse proportion squared to their knowledge of the subject but directly proportional to the existing populist view. Talking heads in the UK have a subtle variation in that the square is replaced by a .0000001 divisor on their knowledge but instead of populist they use the government view, which is a filtered version of the populist view. In the USA there is another change. Most of them have so little knowledge of what they are talking about and the second filter reflects the political views of the media they are talking through that they simple rely on words of more than two syllable's to confuse the issue further. More than two syllable's being beyond the comprehension of the average listener or viewer.

What bought this on. I was just watching Fox News, a misnomer if there ever was one, and I am a conservative, when they had a general talking head, military that is, who started on his little spin and was interrupted by the host and then came back with the opposite view to his original. Does left spin and right spin applied to the same subject by the same person produce wrist or finger spin?? That's a slightly smutty cricket allusion.

I remain concerned over Lebanon, who does not, but more that the media is starting to move its bias, at least here in the UK back to the Arabist line that the Foreign office always produces.

Hezbollah hides amongst the population and sends indiscriminate rockets onto civilian centers in Israel and the Israelis take the heat for over reacting.

Does anyone get the point that by allowing the fighting to go on in the middle east we are keeping our patch relatively calm. Thats very NIMBY I know but having lived with and talked to some of the crazy people I prefer it that way.

Traveling home

Spent the last two days in what must be one of the least enjoyable pursuits there is. Sitting in a thin aluminum and composite tube flying from one end of the earth to the other. I used to get excited about flying but been there done that, read the book got the T-Shirt and probable appeared in the film.

About 18 hours in the air broken by a couple of hours changing flights. One of the greater mysteries in life is how airlines know where we are sitting and seek to deliver our baggage in the most irritating manner they can.

Earlier this month I flew home for the first time in about six months. I upgraded to Club so that I could get through as fast as possible. One bag, my golf clubs, was delayed, the other bags with their priority stickers proudly intact were amongst the last moved. This time I was economy and was prepared to wait and what happens, the bags are in the hall before I can get there, and I was not delayed in immigration.

Travelling these periods, when you do three or four long hauls has un unexpected side effect. I after 30 plus years of flying cannot sleep on the big jets, put me on a helicopter or a light aircraft, even a small jet and I sleep very well. but not on the big boys, so I sit there and watch the inflight entertainment but that only updates monthly so if you use the same airline then after two long hauls you have seen pretty much all of it. I have done seven long hauls, flights over 6 hours, this month and there is nothing apart from a few bad films that I have not seen. Result, terminal boredom.

The next person that tells you they got through this much or that much work on a flight, please feel free to shoot them as they are officially out of control. I treat the time on a flight as downtime as no one can contact me unless I want. That bit of provacy is just so hard to achoeve these days.

Another day moving forward

One of those days when life throws you all sorts of curves to deal with. We had been worrying about the amount of money we would need to place as a bond for my mothers nursing home, figures as high as 400,000 dollars were quoted. The decision was limited either selling the family home or mortgaging it to the hilt.

The news was initially good in that it would only be 125,000 dollars but the sting was in the reasoning. Its not going to be long before she is almost permanently bed ridden and then the pension covers the costs.

You know that your parents are going to get old and die but getting to the reality is a lot harder to face up to. Dad died just over a year ago and I still have not fully accepted that now its my mother.

I think the fact that I have spent most of my life away from home and a good period of that out of contact with my parents, means that I deal with it and see it from a different point of view. It tends to be more abstract from my perspective I can deal with the hurt of losing them by pushing it beck to a time and a feeling when I was out of contact.

But life does catch up with you and eventually you have to deal with these feelings. I had always hoped that Mum would go first as Dad would have not lingered on but would have gone from a broken heart. Mum is much more the fighter. Being told by one of the support staff that her short term memory was going did not help.

Is this the Parkinsons taking its course or simple old age we are not sure. I pray that it is the latter as the former would be to cruel.

Tough personal day

Its a year since my father died, while I was on the other side of the world. There was so much I wanted to say and never did, in common with a lot of people I suppose, the issues yesterday were with my mother. I hate that I am getting into the same position with her. She has Parkinsons, not the type that dulls the mind the type that attacks the body. We had to move her from her home of 58 years to a hospital, after she had a fall, for 9 weeks and now into a nursing home. As a result she is losing control over her life and gets frustrated and I got the frustration on Sunday. Its so hard she wants me to come home and look after her, that's the way it was when she grew up, and I now have my own family half the world away and so cannot. It hurts when she lashes out and the day being the anniversary of dads death made it harder but being a son is like being a husband is like being a father. You have to take it and stand up.

Its kind of like the golf day when things take your mind off the rest of the world. Then back to the hotel and the rest of the world crashes back in.

Am I the only person in the world who understands that Hezbollah are the bad guys, hiding amongst the population and launching strikes on civilians but the UN obviously sees it through the same old corrupt lens. Corrupt in thought as well as morally and physically. I see Kofi Annan as a greedy man grasping at the last vestige's of influence has he no shame at all.