Bringing in the refugees (UKR3)

Very early in the morning, I dashed downstairs for a short notice trip out to the border. The day before I had been feeling a little deskbound until I received the word that seven Seamen were being extracted from Odessa and that they were now on the way to the border with Moldova.  The vessel was Russian owned but aside from the three most senior officers onboard, the seven crew members were Filipino and Indian. It was the ‘Odessa 7’ that I had to meet at the border. 

I set off from the hotel in a brand-new Mercedes Sprinter nine-seater van.  My driver, who I am calling Alexei Sale, because of his stunning resemblance in every way to the UK comedian (google him if you don’t know who he is) and he seemed like a decent guy.  Not only did Alexei look like him, but he also sounded like him and had the dead pan delivery of his namesake.  I was to test his sense of humour in the hours to follow with my numerous requests for quick comfort breaks – in my defence I’d had a few nervous cups of tea whilst waiting to leave.  

Leaving Bucharest, I was quite impressed with the Centro district of the city, which had the usual unbelievably expensive luxury shops, opened for 000.01% of the population and I saw a number of busy restaurants and bars that if I ever had the time, I wouldn’t mind checking out.  It’s minus three degrees now and everything is covered in a layer of fine snow. I loved the twinkly lights in the trees evoking a mini Champs Elysees feel and it really did look lovely.  The local boy racers were making the most of the icy roads and they’re drifting around the central roundabout at ridiculous speeds with the Police looking admiringly on. 

Alexei and I were sniffing each other out like two dogs circling each other to see how we are going to work together and I’m pleased to note that he grins and nods to my first (of many) “Eeeesss Naiiiice” Borat references. He then feels comfortable enough to start blaming Gypsies for all the countries current woes and I know he’s going full on Romanian Gypsy hater on me.  Hopefully, there’s no sneaky mankeeni wearing or manly wrestling contests going on at any stage of the trip.       

I had taken the opportunity to hurriedly empty the mini bar of snacks before I left and we munched along in a companionable silence for a while.   It’s going to be a 24-hour round trip at least and I’m beginning to feel like it might be an interesting trip.

I had brought one of the fantastic Marriott pillows with me and acquired a blanket from housekeeping and so it didn’t take too long for me to sneak down to the back of the van and stretch out.  By the time I had woken it was dawn, minus seven degrees and we were hurtling through the countryside towards the border with Moldova.  Alexei claimed that I snored (I probably did) throughout my recent eyelid inspection and I tried to make it up to him with a few more Borat gags.  He gave me such an Alexei Sayle side eye, that I had to ask him if he knew who he was.   He nodded, said ‘the young ones’ and that he’d lived in London for a couple of years.

We arrived at the Romanian/Moldova border in the very early hours and I reached for my outsized Australian passport stuffed with numerous visas and handed it over.  Alexei rolled his eyes at the look on the border guards face as he grimly thumbed through each page rotating the various stamps 180 degrees, all whilst making us stand outside in the biting wind.  Once through that checkpoint, we were at the Moldova side. I whipped out my skinny and rarely used UK passport and we breezed through formalities with a shouted ‘look out for the gypsies’ warning ringing in our ears.

An icy cold dawn in Moldova

Moldova is a small agricultural country and I’d like to say that it’s beautiful, but I cannot, but only because we were head down barreling towards the border and everything was a blur.  We passed through many quiet farming hamlets with people trudging towards their places of work down the frozen muddy roads. Eventually, we arrived at a field with several parked buses, half a dozen cars and people feverishly erecting tents.  We knew that our team across the border were four hours away at least, so we decided to get some shuteye.  This time Alexei snored. A lot.

The reception area was just opening and within an hour there were several hundred people right here

We awoke to a woman screaming just outside the bus and I could see one middle aged lady flailing her arms and clearly in extremis.  I asked Alexei what was going on and he listened for a moment before telling me that she’d lost her husband in the fighting two days before.  She had brought her two ‘boys’ 18 and 19 years old with her to the border in the hope that she could get them out.  He also told me that she would have known that the authorities would stop them and turn them back to fight, but that she had tried to get them out anyway.

Sure enough, they had taken her boys off to fight and she was understandably beside herself.  She had plenty of kind people wanting to help her and the ICRC (Red Cross) people quickly put her into an ambulance and drove off.  Before we collected our people, we saw another two similar incidents, with small, confused children standing around whilst their Mums completely lost their minds.  Thankfully for all, they were quickly helped and led away.

In the three hours we had been napping, a small, tented city had been erected behind us.  It had a proper field hospital, canteen, showers and toilets, as well as rows of very smart looking inflatable tents.  The inflatable tents were especially impressive as they are double walled and therefore easier to keep warm, but I still wouldn’t want to have to sleep in them for any length of time.

Alexei had just begun an ‘I was stabbed by Gypsy’ story when my bladder forced me to get out from under my blanket.  I’d been hydrating myself in the previous days to make up for my dehydration during the flights to get here and that was severely testing my bladder control.  By this time, things were becoming critical and so I excused myself and trotted over to the row of original primitive thunderboxes that had been put there in the early hours.  They were predictably horrific, but needs must and the poor buggers arriving needed the new clean facilities more than I did.  

We got a call that our people were just approaching the border point some 4km down the road and even though the refugees were being bused from the border, it wasn’t cut and dried that they’d be able to get through in short order, so we talked our way past the Police barricades, we parked up and closed in on the relatively clear crossing point.  I say relatively clear, because there was quite a queue on the other side, just not on ours.  As ‘cash is king’ during these situations, I had a large amount of money to hand over to a contact who brought the group to us, but they had to turn around and drop the evacuees in order to get back to Odessa before the curfew forced them to sleep in their van by the side of the road in questionable safety.  I ended up bringing the cash back to much ribbing from my colleagues but it went down successfully the next day.

Our people walked across the border with their bags and we were able to load them in the van.  I’m still trying not to show faces, but this hopefully gives you an idea of our pick up.

Cold and hungry – but safe.

They were tired and compliant in the way that people who know they have no control over their destiny are, but after a good meal in a warm restaurant nearby, we hightailed it back to Bucharest. 

This was only one of the constant 24 hour runs to and from various border crossing points, but this one was mine, it was 27 hours long and it’s going to stay with me for a while.

The Ukraine evacuations (UKR2)

(Not in Ukraine – they are actually just down the road from our house, but the sunflower is Ukraine’s national flower and I like the picture)

Well, things are certainly happening here in the Balkans. I mentioned that I am down here to help evacuate and relocate the families of our clients staff. but it’s not just one client, there are many and of course, there are many, many families.

To be clear here, I am not in the Ukraine, I am currently in Bucharest, very safe and in a nice hotel. As I was reminded recently (thanks Jan), I am not as young or as fast as I once was, so the running around is best left to those who can. That fact was made clear by the recently banged up finger (previous post). It’s almost healed now but I don’t have full movement yet. Twenty years ago of course, I would have stupidly shrugged it off, slapped a band aid on it and picked up my suitcase. Hang on, that’s exactly what I did…

The Russians have opened a huge can of worms here by invading the Ukraine and whilst the likely outcome of all this is sadly obvious, it’s not preordained and I suspect that they have been surprised about the level of resistance they are meeting. All men between 18 and 60 (Military Aged Males or MAM’s) have been called up and many of their families have refused to leave their men. I can totally understand that, but like anyone who watches the news, we are seeing shocked and dazed kids with haunted looking mothers. It’s cold here, very cold at night and snowing intermittently throughout and all this is such a tragedy. The Mums have the pinched hyper vigilant look of people who just don’t know what is going to become of them, their kids and the menfolk they leave behind. I have a number of photographs that would show you what its like, but to post them feels obscene.

My company has people in most of the surrounding countries and we have set up safehouses close to the Ukrainian border. Our teams are collecting people from inside the Ukraine and plucking the families away and getting them to the reception teams either side of the border as soon as they can. As I mentioned, some people refuse to leave the country, which is their choice and we’re running an invacuation program for them. Yes, invacuation is a real word and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin – we get them out of immediate danger to a safer part of their country and put them up in temporary accommodation.

The temporary accommodation is usually not what you’d book yourself and we’re using a church in one city.

It might not look much but it’s a temporary home for many

We, or another agency sets them up and they have basic life support (food, water and beds) and not much else. Obviously, their employers will help in the medium term to long term and they do, but there’s a fair bit of expectation management that needs to be done when evacuating affluent individuals as opposed to real people.

The folks I have just been working with are a case in point. They are a luxury goods company and as you can imagine, there’s a lot of money in luxury goods and a lot of the people in that game are aristocratic, rich or influential, or just think they are. Think of the snotty shop assistants in the movie ‘Pretty Woman’ who are mean to Julia Roberts character. They are used to certain standard of living and level of deference from people they deem to be less than themselves.

The clients had been advised to begin evacuations three weeks ago, when tensions were mounting and the intelligence services noted the mobilization of the Russians. They hadn’t really done anything to prepare, other than talk to us, which actually is a pretty good start. Ivan of course, had no shortage of time to plan for their invasion and he’s an expert proponent of their military doctrine called Maskirovka. This literally means ‘masking’ and what they did is mask their intentions with military exercises near the border, large troop movements coupled with denials from the very top that anything untoward was going on -‘nothing to see here’….

The West was not fooled, but they didn’t mobilise for fear that they’d escalate the situation. It’s a bit like sleight of hand, with the magician distracting your attention with what they are saying and doing with one hand and the opposite hand performs the trick. Of course, when the sun is shining and no one’s shooting at you, no one wants to leave their nice warm apartment and it’s easy to become complacent.

When you evacuate a group, you always try to ‘stage’ people at a central location to make the lift easier but obviously, if you have groups with children, as we did, you try having those with kids get together the day before so as to avoid curfews and fighting on the streets. There was no way that the families (remember, Mums, kids and elderly relations, no MAM’s) could get themselves out on the streets under these conditions so we’d make arrangements to pick them up from their homes. Single females, we’d try to get them to co locate, if the conditions were safe enough and at that stage, moving around was tense, but relatively safe. This lot refused to co locate, probably thinking that the others home was not fancy enough.

We’d arranged for 8 seater mini buses to make the lift, but the word went around that all mini buses and vans were being stopped and searched, for fear that men would be trying to escape their call up. Our service provider substituted cars for the mini buses and one wasn’t up to scratch for one of our princesses. She refused to get in the car (a repurposed taxi), demanded a Mercedes, with more room for her luggage and guess what, she got left behind.

As with any war, there are profiteers and in this one, a lift with security costs at least USD100, 000. Our client has probably spent the best part of a Million dollars getting its people to safety, but they can well afford it.

Another poor lady, who we were expecting bring a small dog with her got in the car with her dog, but also a baby. It wasn’t her baby, but her sister had begged her to take the child out with her as she decided to stay with her husband.

Imagine that goodbye.

We got them out to the Slovakian border.

We had managed to get one of the three groups to a city called Lviv, almost 600 kms to the West of Kyiv where we thought that we had accommodation confirmed for a overnight break in the journey to the border, but with 200, 000 refugees coming in, someone had gazumped us and a fistful of cash beat our promise to pay… Some quick thinking resulted in sharing a hostel room with another group, but as I explained earlier, if you’re expecting anything more than basic life support, you’re out of luck.

My basic life support – no mate left behind! Note: it has its own survival bag.

One of our Princesses took one look at the room, with 15 beds in it and refused to stay there. She insisted on a “five star hotel” which of course, existed in that city, but they were all booked several times over. She slept in the car.

Of course, there are exceptions to all of my awful generalisations and we got a Mother (Olga*), son and their small dog Sam, out of Odessa in southern Ukraine. Clearly, her husband/partner had been called up and she’d sensibly decided to get to a safe country – in this case, Poland. We knew she was traveling as a small family unit so we were doubly careful to try and make a frightening experience as calm as possible. We were also concerned about the dog, in terms of how big it was, but we needn’t have worried.

*not her real name

Sam was clearly a handbag dog.

Olga and her little family were brought to the Romanian border by our team and handed over to another driver. The girls in our office were so excited after seeing the picture of Sam, that they were waiting in the hotel lobby when they arrived at our hotel. Olga was clearly bewildered at the sight of three very excited foreigners jumping up and down at the sight of them, but she quickly smiled and we even managed to momentarily distract her ten year old from his screen. (a word to the wise, if you are ever evacuated, bring screens and batteries for any and all children).

We settled her into a very nice room and promised to come back in the morning so that we could all play with Sam. We did and had a mini photoshoot with the family before we sent her on her way to Poland with a representative of her company.

Things are changing almost by the hour out here and sadly it’s probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Back soon.

New wounds and travel into Ukraine (UKR1)

I haven’t posted much recently largely because I haven’t had much to say, but ‘times, they are a changing’ With a very concerning war in the Balkans and me feeling like the home guard, I made it known at work that I wasn’t feeling overemployed. That could be a dangerous thing, of course, as it could attract the award of the DCM (Don’t Come Monday), but my employer luckily took it as a show of willingness and promised that there would be something active for me to do in the near future.

Sticking my head up and over the proverbial parapet led to me joining a number of WhatsApp groups and I could see that my colleagues had recently bailed out of the Ukraine, just ahead of the shelling. They had been there to evacuate the local employees of a global client, but the employees had decided that they wanted to stay put. It was very clear however, that there were a whole lot of our clients whose people who did want to get out.

My part in all this started with a wonky door.  The dogs (and there have been a number lodging at the house recently) had discovered that there was a ‘sweet spot’ on the back door that when hit with the front paws at a full gallop, would swing open and they would have full access to the cat food bowls and any food item or tasty smelling shoe that we’d been daft enough to leave unattended.   Soft toys and kids socks had been savaged and I had dodged the entreaties of Mrs. Jerry to do something about it for long enough.

I examined the door and admired the nice stained-glass panel that somehow had survived the not so tender ministrations of our family and quickly ascertained that the root cause of the door problem was loose screws in the doorframe.  I have mentioned before that we live in an old house (by Australian standards) and most of the door hinges had been replaced several times over the years.  That meant that there were many screw holes that were no longer usable and the old standby of pushing a matchstick in the hole before screwing the hinge on just wasn’t cutting it anymore.  I purchased new hinges and set myself up in the tiled boot room to work on what was shaping up to be a really nice day.

I unscrewed the top screws and the bottom ones just pulled straight out. Sighing, I propped up the door against the wall and finding a clear area of wood in the frame, I marked out the new holes, drilling pilot holes and then fixing the hinge to the door and married up the new holes in the frame.  The smallest and naughtiest of the dogs made an end run around my legs and clipping the door, sent it slowly but inexorably falling towards me.   Somehow, I sensed it coming towards my head and almost at the same time as it crashed into me, my hand reflexively shot up to protect my skull and the glass sliced a large chunk out of my knuckle.  It bled spectacularly but aside from hurting like a bastard; didn’t seem too bad.  I roughly dressed the cut, finished the hanging of the door, mopped up the blood and went to check my email.

The head shaped dent in the glass

Like most people over the last two years, I have been working from home and apart from a couple of business trips domestically, work has been fairly pedestrian.  One email did catch my eye however and it was from Frank (yes, the Frank of the blue suit story) and Frank was in the Ukraine, preparing to evacuate any of our client’s local staff who needed to get out of dodge in the face of the Russian invasion.  Things were turning nasty and he gave me a heads up that I’d probably be getting a short notice movement order to get myself over to Eastern Europe.  Sure enough, there was message 30 minutes later telling me to get on the first plane to Poland.  For me, in reality that was going to be the following night, but it still didn’t give me a lot of time to sort out all the personal admin I needed to close out before I could get on a flight.

The next morning, my knuckle was throbbing but it had at least stopped bleeding and I launched myself into a list of jobs that needed to be done before I could leave with a clear conscience.  Of course, rushing through a list of jobs with #2 son as my trusty assistant isn’t sensible when you’ve got a wounded paw and it wasn’t long before I whacked the finger and burst the freshly healing scab.  This time, there was no staunching the bleeding and I got #2 son to drive me to the emergency room.    

My rough and ready first aid…

With only three hours to go before my taxi to the airport left the house, I decided to go to the private hospital in town and miss out on the usual two hours of being left in soak by the nurses at the public hospital to see if I was exhibiting drug seeking behaviour and so I paid my $230 examination fee.  After 45 minutes, I was taken into an examination room and my very rough dressing was removed.  ‘That’ll need some stitches then’ the nurse said.  No shit, I thought.  I was ushered back into the waiting room and told that I’d be seen soon.  I could count six people ahead of me and given that patience was eluding me that day, I got my money back from the hospital and I had my press-ganged chauffeur take me to the hardware store, where I bought some super glue.

Borne out of the hubris of the middle aged DIY’er, I glued the wound, slapped a plaster on it, kissed the family and hopped into the cab. The flight actually wasn’t bad, although I did end up doing babysitting duty for a very nice Scottish lady sitting next to me whose irascible toddler refused to stay asleep when she had to nap or nip to the loo, which seemed to be rather too often until I noticed she returned with an odour of hastily quaffed white wine each time.  I certainly couldn’t blame her, having left my own wife and kids to the kindness of strangers on planes many times over the years.  The kind hostess donated a few glasses of red as compensation and eventually, we got to Dubai.    

I switched on my phone and lo and behold, there was change of plan… I was to complete my Polish flights, reunite with my luggage, stop at the airport and then go straight to Romania, all without collecting 200 quid. 

There was however, the small matter of my now rapidly swelling and throbbing finger.  It was looking like an angry plum and it didn’t take long for me to convince the Filipina pharmacist near the departure gate that I probably needed some antibiotics. She agreed and I loaded up on the strongest they would sell me.

I had begun to feel a little bit lousy and after a bit of a hike across Dubai airport, I was getting cranky and was very ready to be in my seat, albeit one at the back of the plane and so it was a nasty surprise when the boarding pass for my carefully chosen aisle seat was torn up.  I was about to growl at the ground staff when I saw that a boarding pass of a different colour was being printed out.  Somehow, economy was overbooked and due only to my historical frequent flyer status, I was getting an upgrade. Wonders would never cease.

Mine, all mine…

When I landed in Bucharest, there was a mass scramble towards the automated gates that allowed people with the appropriate passports and Covid 19 clearances to get out of the airport quickly. I had thought that I did but oh no, I needed to join a distressingly long queue to obtain a local certificate. They were not impressed with my Rapid Antigen Test result that was processed at the airport in Oz, but thankfully, they accepted my proof of two vaccinations plus the booster icon on my phone.

It was -1 degree and snowing outside of the terminal but an Uber got me away from the airport with a minimum of fuss and into a very nice city centre hotel.

The very decorative (brutalist) city centre

Nodding off as I had dinner with the team that night, I began to wonder what the next few weeks had in store for us. I knew had to coordinate local fixers, drivers with vehicles and potentially tens of dozens of people, all trying to escape the fighting. I’ll let you know how I go!

The Fence – and its part in my downfall…

I live in an old house and it requires a lot of upkeep. I do a lot of that upkeep myself, but sometimes, when it’s important, or it would be particularly obvious if I stuffed it up, I prefer to pay a professional to do it. This is a tale of me trying to have someone do a job properly and then me ending up doing it anyway.

It might also be said that I have a thing for fencing, not in the ‘oooooohhhhh, I love fencing’ way, but more in the way of – ‘I need a decent fence’. I cannot abide the open plan style of housing where someone can wander all around your house without being picked up on the thermal cameras. triggering the motion sensitive lights, stepping on any of the pressure pads, stumbling over trip wires or initiating one of several cunningly concealed booby traps.

Just remember, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you…

Luckily, being an old farm, they didn’t want any animals wandering off, so it had stone walls for perimeter fencing most of the way around, but around the house, they obviously wanted something more decorative. There was a rickety waist high picket fence when we first bought the house and over the years I had repaired and replaced the pickets as they rotted, or falling branches knocked bits off.

The decorative, but rickety fence.

Eventually, I became fed up with the smallest dog leaping out through holes in the fence as the roots from the huge tree we had growing on the property line pushed the fence apart. We had the tree felled, which was an ordeal its itself, but all the time, I was trying to put off the day when the stump had to be removed and the fence had to be replaced. Of course, that day came and after weeks of grinding, chopping, burning and swearing, I gave up and paid the guy who felled the tree to come and bring his massive stump destroying machine and get rid of it once and for all.

In order for him to get to the stump, I had to dig out what was left of the fence, which entailed me hacking out a virtual Maginot line of concrete, rocks, wire and metal. The graves of at least two previous fences were under there and as there was originally a blacksmiths forge on the property, I suspect that the Smith had tipped all of his metal cut offs in the holes, to ‘reinforce’ them. Digging out hole after hole was a Sisyphean task and it put me on my back for a day or two, but I eventually struggled to my feet and and visited the mystical ‘Kiro Kids’ ™️ whose spooky pressure point techniques managed to straighten out my pretzel like spine and have me walking again without looking like a WWII Polish great grandmother.

The fence on its way out, with the stump stubbornly there on the right

Somewhere we had found a water colour post card of the house, based on an old photograph and it showed that there was a twisted wire fence with plain wooden posts and so with that in mind, I planned to replicate but personalise the original fence.

I pictured it in my head, sketched it out and after shopping around, I eventually found the timber I needed for a reasonable price. Over the next few weeks, I primed and painted the wood, to try and make sure that it would last as long as I needed. Although it isn’t a heritage colour, I painted the wood black to fit in with the colour scheme we are planning on for the house but that’s the next big project that I won’t start until the summer. I even found a supplier of heritage twisted wire and someone for a replica of the old and heavy ‘sunshine’ farm gates. I hitched up the trailer and collected everything else over a weekend.

I was pretty sure that such a fence would be beyond my meagre DIY talents and most certainly within the Christmas 2020/2021 time frame for completion that had been suggested (i.e. stipulated) and so I shopped around for tradies on the internet. Unsurprisingly, no one could do the job before the holidays for any kind of affordable price and so in frustration, I called one of the local wood yards and asked them if they had any recommendations. They claimed that they only recommended one guy, who specialised in ‘old style’ feature fencing. And so, like a lamb to the slaughter, I called him.

This fellow and I’ll call him ‘FW’ after a very appropriate Australian insult, agreed to do the work for an almost reasonable sum and claimed that he could have it finished before Christmas. Gulled into a false sense of security, I agreed to meet him on site to brief him before I headed up into the mountains for yet another presumably unsuccessful deer hunting trip. At my most politely pedantic, I explained that I wanted the posts a third of their height in the ground (I googled it and apparently that’s the way to do it), I marked the exact distance in between posts and I even showed him pictures of how I wanted the wire fixing to the posts and which way I wanted the gates hanging. I left for the mountains feeling that I could not have done any more or been any more clear in communicating my requirements.

I’d been on the road about three hours when I received a call telling me that all of the wood I had purchased was either the wrong length, the wrong width or unsuitable for the design. I was pretty cross, but I blamed myself, after all FW was the professional. I should have suspected something when FW offered to provide the timber and have it installed before I got back but by that stage, I just wanted the fence up and so even though he told me it would cost more, I told him to go ahead.

I returned from the mountains tired but happy, even if the Deer evaded me again; but the smile disappeared from my face when I saw a wooden version of Donald Trump’s border fence. I couldn’t believe it, the posts were almost four metres high! The big gate posts that I’d insisted on and he’d kept, were so high I couldn’t think that they were actually in the ground. I couldn’t resist it and so I wobbled one of them. It fell straight over. The 2.8 metre high gate posts were 400mm in the ground and that wasn’t a third, by anyones maths.

The cement shows how shallow the biggest posts were

There was no way that posts that shallow in the ground were going to hold a gate that weighed 70+kgs, plus they just looked ridiculous. The front gate posts were so tall, I thought that they might have been the beginning of some kind of ceremonial arch.

Gate posts almost as big as the house!

I called FW and asked him what he was playing at and he actually got quite shirty and insisted that the work would be ‘fine’ I explained that it wouldn’t be fine in any way, shape or form and that he should come and get his wood, clean up the worksite, (which was a mess) and not to expect to be paid. With the speed of a 1000 startled Gazelles, his offsider appeared and pulled the posts that he’d supplied, straight out of the ground and threw them on the back of his truck, before driving off. Bastard.

By then, the holidays were almost upon us and so I put in a temporary chicken wire fence to amuse the foxes, momentarily delay the dogs, give the smallest boy something to destroy and decided that I’d wait until after the holidays to find someone to fix the fence. Unfortunately, the shallow holes that the long poles had been in were now full of concrete and so I asked around for an introduction to someone with a digger and an auger bit. I quite quickly found a lovely old guy who’d clearly long been retired, but was desperate to get out of the house and use his very well maintained toys again. He actually turned up within forty minutes of me calling him and with a smile on his face, he quickly routed out the holes to the correct depth with his backhoe and didn’t charge a fortune. I covered up the holes and went on to eat and drink myself into a Christmas coma on a daily basis.

Over the break I endured much piss taking about my sagging chook wire fence and numerous age related comments and I decided that no matter how long it took, I would do it myself, to the best of my ability. After all, I reasoned. I couldn’t possibly do a worse job than FW.

After Christmas, I started uncovering the holes and scooping out the mice and frogs that had fallen in and I ordered the bags of quick set concrete. Turning my back for a moment I heard a small cry and turned around to see blond tuft of hair bobbing above the grass. Smallest boy (now 6) had fallen into the hole and couldn’t get out. I mulled over leaving him in there for a while as a kind of childcare facility, but after a moment, I lifted him out and set him to work with the hose pipe. I lined up and propped the posts in the holes, poured in the bags of dry concrete and he topped them up with water.

Over the next couple of months, I rebated the rails into the posts; stuffing things up on several occasions, but I got them looking square and a bit like something a professional had built – if you didn’t look too closely of course. The great thing about working with wood is that when you stuff up and I often do, you can trim, fill, sand, paint and hide your mistakes. My father would never let anyone see his attempts at DIY until something had been completely fluffed and buffed. I now understood exactly where he was coming from.

Working on weekends and in-between different clients emergencies; I managed to deal with the weather and passing villagers questions about how long it was going to take, what it was going to look like when it was finished and why did it originally look like I was building a prison of war camp? Slowly… oh so slowly, I fixed the wire onto the posts, touched up the scrapes and hung the small gate. I felt that it didn’t look half bad, but the next challenge was the heavy farm gate.

I was quietly confident that the posts would be more than strong enough as I had buried them over 800mm into the ground and they had 6 bags of cement around each of them. They had also had about three weeks to set so I just had to make sure that I drilled the holes for the bolt hinges properly and so I jury rigged my drill with a couple of levels and gave it my best shot.

Heath Robinson had nothing on me

After eschewing any kind of assistance and attempting to move the 3mts wide gate from its resting place to the posts, I realised that I was well on the way to becoming Polish Babusia again and I rolled around on the ground at an attempt at some spine stretching yoga. A passing MAMIL pulled his feather weight, but massively over priced bicycle over and concernedly asked if I was ok? I grunted in the affirmative and managed to choke out the word “DIY” He smiled, nodded sagely and clipping his silly clacky shoes back into the pedals breezed away to his latte down at the local cafe.

I decided that being able to walk was marginally more important than saving face by not asking for help and so I enlisted the help of Mrs Jerry and #2 Son and between us, we carefully inserted the bolts through the post and hung the gate in pride of place. After a fraught moment with my finger being crushed between the post and the gate, we did a little bit of adjustment with the bolts and stood back to admire the finished result. It had taken just over 8 months, but not including my time, it had cost around the same as if FW had done it.

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The fence, now looking a bit like a ‘bought one’

It was difficult not to walk the perimeter several times a day casting a critical eye over the fences imperfections, but I sanded and touched up the bits that upset me me the most until one evening we stood with the the neighbours and had a socially distanced drink. Filled with Nurofen and ale, I straightened my spine and smiled with just a hint of pride. That was just before a large Magpie briefly landed, then shat copiously, christening the side of the largest gate post.

Cheaper than Champagne I thought.

Kidnappers and the blue suit

This is a true story and although most of the details of the original tycoon kidnappings in Hong Kong are in the public domain, I’ll be selective in the details as most of the events have become the stuff of legends in many lunchtimes, including mine. With the probable exception of the individual behind it all; most of the people involved at that time are still alive, so I’m going to change a few of the details in the telling of this for privacy and legal reasons. It’s a long post, so you might want to put your feet up for it.

Back in 1997 I was 32 years old and living in Far North Queensland, Australia, occasionally teaching scuba diving and taking tourists on 4WD tours around the Rainforest. I say occasionally, because it was during the wet season and there wasn’t a great deal of work around and as lovely as it was, walking barefoot along Port Douglas’s Four Mile Beach didn’t pay the bills. And yes, this is what it looks like…

A busy day down at the beach…

Very late in the day, I received a phone call from an old friend, whom I will call ‘Frank’ after Frank Farmer, Whitney’s minder in the movies. Unlike Frank Farmer, who was very straight, this Frank wasn’t and he’d obviously just left what was probably a succession of bars and didn’t sound too sober. Hearing his slurred voice was a very pleasant surprise. My eyes quickly widened when I heard what he had to say. Frank had some work for me, it was in Hong Kong and he wanted me there the day after tomorrow…

Not too long before, Frank had left the Special Duties Unit (SDU) of the Royal Hong Kong Police (RHKP) and joined a new company that was operating in the corporate security sphere. A new client had approached them asking for help, as a person in his social circle had recently been kidnapped and ransomed for a lot of money (reportedly in excess of USD70M). Franks company was quickly hired to protect several of the worried tycoons and they needed some extra manpower.

I don’t want to give the criminal behind the kidnappings any more space here than necessary, but it would benefit the reader to know that there was one person who was – and I don’t want to use the word ‘the mastermind’ because that might infer some kind of admiration for him, but he did have the motivation and ambition to do what he did, but the very act of kidnapping and especially the way he did it, didn’t leave my colleagues and I with any respect towards him, other than a kind of a professional appreciation. He lived life very large before he was ultimately caught and reportedly executed, across the border in China with a bullet in the back of his head. But, he’s a part of this, so here goes.

Before he was caught, the gangster, known as ‘Big Spender’ had sequestered several people, but after the original victim, he was rather cheekily threatening to target a number of others and he was demanding $1, 000, 000 a month each from Hong Kong’s ten richest men NOT to kidnap them. My client had approached Frank’s company and asked them to protect him and his family.

The reason why Hong Kong’s elite were so scared of being kidnapped by him was largely because of his methods. His first victim was taken on his way home from his mistresses apartment up on the peak late at night. They had stopped his car and bundled him into another vehicle, with nothing heard from him for over two weeks. It was his family who received the call demanding the cash over the weekend and they opened the bank to get the cash out. It transpired that he’d been kept in a coffin sized crate the whole time. The crate had been buried underground with only a plastic drainpipe to the surface and once a day they’d pass food and water down the pipe, without ever speaking to him.

Those two weeks almost totally deprived of all sensation with insufficient food, water and lying in his own filth left the victim with lasting physical and mental health problems. Those who knew him say that he was never the same again and certainly, it had major ramifications for his family and business.

There was also another reason why the elite had good reasons to be worried and that was because they literally had billions of undeclared dollars that was stashed in banks in Hong Kong and if they had to hand tens of millions over, without it even denting their fortunes, they would have to answer a lot of questions from the media and the authorities.

For me, I didn’t have billions stashed away and the offer of work was very good news at just the right time, but the knowledge that I had at least three months overseas was tempered with the sobering realisation that I’d be leaving behind my wife and son, who was just three years old. My morning walks with him on my shoulders, through the sugar cane fields down to the beach, pointing out the Flying Fox colonies in the paperbark trees and snakes lurking in the undergrowth, became even more special and I knew that I was going to really miss them.

On the sartorial front, there was another concern as Frank had reminded me that I’d need smart business attire each day. That did worry me a bit as I only had the one suit, two decent shirts and a tie, very little money and no opportunity to buy more. I literally hadn’t worn footwear, unless I was going for a run, for a couple of years and so, as I thought about the administrative details, I brushed off the light green tropical mould that furred my black brogues and polished them to a high gloss. I also figured that as HK tailors could knock a suit up overnight, I could probably get another if I needed one, when I had been paid.

The aforementioned suit was a good quality, dark blue wool affair that I had purchased in Hong Kong from Marks and Spencers some time before as a wedding suit. [side note – I got married in Hong Kong in 1989 after an exhausting month of bar crawling with Frank and his mates from the Police, leaving for Australia with lifelong memories and $20 in our pockets] Of course, I hadn’t worn it for many years but luckily it still fitted and the moths hadn’t got to it. I didn’t get there the ‘day after tomorrow’ as was initially demanded, but I did get there four days later, after having borrowed the air fare from the ever generous Frank.

The job that I had flown out there for was to take over a close protection team that was ‘securing’ one of the local tycoons against kidnap. A full time team leader had already been selected, but he was in the process of leaving his job in the Police and wouldn’t be available for three months. And so, within 48 hours of arriving in Hong Kong, I was running three close protection teams, one for the client, a smaller one for his wife and basic one for his children, who were actually at boarding school most of the time. A small team of specialist ex Police and Gurkhas would mind the family and the residences.

My team had three armoured BMW’s at our disposal that I discovered would protect the occupants against all but the heaviest bullets and were resistant to hand grenades, small to medium mines and even poison gas! (more of that later). The local company drivers had been flown out to Bavaria and had been trained in handling the half a million dollar beasts, reportedly marvelling at the speeds they were allowed to drive at there, having hardly been able to get a car into fourth gear in HK.

One of the very nice (and expensive) 7 series high security Beemers

My home for the duration of the contract was to be the New World Harbour View, a well known five star hotel, overlooking Victoria harbour. All the expenses were going to be picked up by the tycoon and I was told to eat in the hotel, whenever possible to ‘keep expenses down’ I’m not quite sure how much money could be saved by my eating in a five star hotel, rather than a noodle store downtown, but that was the instruction, so I went at it with a will when I had the chance. There were four very good restaurants in the hotel and over three months, I estimated that I had eaten every single item on every menu (except for sharks fin soup) at least twice, whilst I was there.

A few years teaching scuba diving in paradise had helped me forget how busy and noisy cities were. I really wasn’t very good with crowds anymore and the days proved to be long and were unsurprisingly stressful, with very little downtime. After picking the client up from his home each day at around 07.00 and taking him to the office; sometimes via a hotel for a business breakfast and I would usually rush back to the hotel for a workout, wash my kit, shower and have breakfast before heading back to the small ‘ready room’ near his office to wait for any movements.

There were always two to three ‘out of office’ meetings during the day and usually at least one function each evening and all of them at the smartest of hotels and most amazing of houses. The higher up on the peak the houses were, the richer the inhabitants were. It was clear that there was several generations of wealth that had gone into that kind of property, either that or some very ruthless business dealings. Probably a bit of both.

Bodyguarding, or Close Protection as it’s mainly called in ‘peacetime’ is all about counter surveillance and anticipating and hopefully avoiding an attack before it happens. Sadly, unlike in the movies, you cannot legally go out loaded for bear, intending to shoot your way out of an incident, so you have to be smarter than the bad guys. We knew, through the office staff what meetings we had to ‘advance’ – which in bodyguard speak, is to travel to and check out each venue for lurking bad guys before we brought the client there.

An attacker will always look for patterns in behaviour to exploit and ‘choke points’ (places where a route narrows significantly slows, or stops traffic) in regularly travelled routes and so we had to avoid setting patterns, but as you can imagine, it’s difficult to vary fixed times, such as your departure from the house, your arrival at work, the time you leave for lunch, return from lunch, go to the gym and arrive home etc., so I tried every method to vary the routes taken, keep as many of his movements as random as I could and not set patterns, but that was almost impossible in a small city like Hong Kong. When you’re doing a job like this your head really does have to be on a swivel with your senses attuned for threats that could literally materialise out of nowhere and being at that high level of awareness day after day was exhausting.

Before long it was obvious that my nightly habit, after being dropped off back at my hotel at around 23.00hrs, of washing my shirt, jocks and socks in the sink and pressing my suit by hand, just wasn’t sustainable when sleep was the main priority. More than once, I had woken up on the way to the bathroom floor, with the soapy socks still on my hands and although I always polished my own shoes, I resigned to having the laundry done in the hotel overnight with my suit being dry cleaned every other night. I didn’t look at the price as it was all covered by the boss and thankfully, the proverbial Chinese laundry never failed me, with someone knocking on the door at around 05.15 each morning with my clean and pressed clothes on hangers.

One morning, I came down in the lift with two very large and imposing colleagues, who were staying in the hotel on similar tasks, but for another client. The door opened and standing right in front of us was Murray, the red Wiggle. His usual googley eyes widened even further as he saw three of us in front of him and he was frozen to the spot. The three of us, all of whom had kids and knew who he was, automatically did the wiggles ‘hand gesture‘ to him and he broke out into a broad grin as we stepped past him.

Some nights, after a really hectic day, I was just too hyped up to go to sleep and so I wandered out of the hotel and into one of the many pubs in Wan Chai. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Wan Chai, it’s the old red light area that at that time was full of neon lights, bar girls and drunken ex pats. It still is, but with markedly fewer expats and more eastern European hookers. If you were down on the strip just before midnight, you’d see the bar girls coming ‘on shift’ and hoping to make enough money to keep their families fed, they would burn Joss Paper in the shape of dollar bills, cars and luxury watches. All hoping that riches would come to them in this world, or the next. I would occasionally pick up the notes blowing down the road and deposit them in the nearest brazier myself, in the hope that there would be another day without an incident.

Several guys in the industry were doing similar jobs to me in HK for high net worth individuals and we swapped intelligence and compared stories over a couple of beers; this meant that although there were plenty of 24 hour tailors, I never did get around to having a second suit made, preferring to using the little down time I had to eat, drink and sleep, rather than stand around in a tailors shop.

We did have some issues with the BMW’s in the beginning, in that the aircon in the cars kept failing. Within a couple of minutes, there was a blast of cold fresh air, but it was annoying that a brand new and very expensive car would malfunction like that. Given that the client had three of them, he did have a little pull in the service department and so BMW flew two of their engineers out from Bavaria to find out what the problem was. After a few hours, their verdict was that the pollution in Hong Kong was such that the cars system thought that there was poison gas outside of the car and it had cut off the ventilation and switched automatically to the cylinder of pure O2 in the boot to save the lives of the people in the car! The mistaken reading for the gas came from the benchmark of pure German mountain air compared to that of the environment around the (not so) fragrant harbour and the car felt that it was under attack!.

In my first weeks in the role, I had been shadowing the guy running the team before I took over. Tim* was a very serious former US Navy Seal with a carefully hidden sense of humour, but we got along well and during our handover, we had stood together in so many doorways on the Peak ‘waiting for Whitney’ that we had learned where many of the potential kidnap targets lived and what they did in their spare time. Not all of their ‘hobbies’ were reputable, mind you, but you don’t ever talk about that. Seeing how they lived and how they treated their staff was certainly an eyeopener into how the ‘other half’ lives and I still shake my head when I think about some of the things I have seen.

*Not his real name

It was hard not to make value judgements of the people you were looking after but you never gossiped about them. There was also an unwritten rule that when you were having a few beers with the other operators, that you were never too specific when you spoke about your client, but it certainly sounded like I had been allocated a decent man. His son, who was overseas at boarding school most of the time was back in the colony on holidays and I ran him around to few of his old school friends houses. They were heavily stage managed visits, with staff fluttering around all of the time and it was hard to get a read on what kind of a young man he was.

One morning I picked him up from their house before heading to the office to collect his father. I was taking the two of them to lunch at a hotel they owned in Kowloon and he wanted to look smart but was struggling with his tie. I sat in the back with him and tied him a full Windsor knot, which he seemed to really like. We chatted about his school, which was, of course, one of the most exclusive public schools in England and I found out he was actually a really nice guy, which I think was a credit to his parents. I struggled with forming an opinion of his father at first as he didn’t do small talk, but an experience with the two of them that day really impressed me.

We had to go to a very downmarket area in Kowloon before lunch and the boss explained that the building we were visiting was owned by a friend of his. It was an old factory that should really have been condemned, but it still had several small businesses operating out of it. There were live wires running over the ceilings, what smelt like raw sewerage running across the floors and flames lighting up the gloom in several of the rooms. Surprisingly good cooking smells came out of one very dingy room and the boss noted ‘fish balls – very tasty, but you don’t want to see them being made!’ He was taking us to the area where the workers lived and I’d heard about them, but I’d never seen the ‘cage dwellers’ before. In Hong Kong, where the poorest of the poor lived from hand to mouth and a lot of them still had an opium problem, despite it having been illegal for many years; the cage dwellers rented small cages to sleep in, not much bigger than their bodies, with their meagre belongings hanging inside the wire for security. The cages were all around the walls of the rooms and in some cases, they were four high, with small step ladders made from old pallets for them to climb up and down.

The client turned to his son, who was as wide eyed as I was and told him that although he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, not everyone was and this was where real people lived and died. He explained that his son was going to spend the next two days working with an outreach program that one of the churches he sponsored ran and that he’d be helping to feed some of these people. His son was silent all the way to lunch and his father shot up in my estimation from then on.

Late one evening in Wan Chai, the topic of conversation over a few too many beers was the amount of money that the kidnapper and his gang had reportedly taken over the months of his spree to date. We totted up at least USD250Million in ransoms that we knew of and of course, all of that was paid to him in cash. One victims family even had a bank open its vaults on a Sunday morning and they withdrew over $70M in cash to pay a ransom. We heard that it took two trucks to carry it all. By the time we’d had few more beers, we joked that we were in the wrong jobs and instead of protecting them, we should actually be kidnapping the tycoons!

One night, just before my colleague Tim left Hong Kong, we were coming down from a house party on the Peak in the Beemer. The two of us sat in the back flanking the client and scanning the dark and almost deserted roads ahead for suspicious movements. What most people don’t realise is that not far from the neon lit streets of central Hong Kong, there are pockets of secondary jungle, that remain from the originally cleared forest slopes and during the ‘advance’ of the route prior to our arrival earlier in the evening, we’d noticed that there was a old water tower just set back in the jungle with a small parking bay for city vehicles to service the utility.

This time, my eyes were drawn to a point some 200 metres down the road and I could see that there was a truck parked in the dark bay, but with its interior light on. It occurred to me that it was too late for government workers to be out and at the same time, only a short distance beyond it, I saw the occupant of an illegally parked SUV that was pulled over by the side of the road, sit up quickly and start his car. Tim noticed the same thing and I muttered ‘stand by, stand by’ as we both pushed the client back in his seat, linking arms across his chest, preparing for what I was sure would be the truck ramming us and shortly afterwards, sledge hammers smashing against the armoured glass as they tried to grab the client. In these kind of cases, kidnappers have no interest in taking the bodyguard as you’re just an inconvenience to them, so you just know that its not going to end well for you.

I leaned forward to slap our oblivious driver on his shoulder and shout ‘drive, drive, drive’ and he did, slamming his foot to the floor. The cars monster V12 engine propelling us forward like a scalded cat. The driver of the truck panicked and tried to turn his interior light off at the same time as putting the truck into gear and in his hurry, he stalled half way out onto the road. I looked at his angry face screaming obscenities at us as we passed him and then switched my attention to the blocking car that was trying to pull out and close off both lanes in front of us. Our driver, who by this time, was well aware as to what was going on, quickly drove on the inside of the blocking car and mounting the pavement, pulled around the rear of the SUV. The inside of the heavily armoured car was probably the safest place in Hong Kong at that moment, but it didn’t feel like it as despite the upgraded suspension, the centrifugal force of swerving around the SUV caused us to speed wobble several times before he gained full control again and got us on the way back to the residence.

We calmed the client down by getting our own heartbeats under control and quietly discussing how the attempt had gone wrong. The client, I suspect was doing some mental maths, working out that the money he’d spent on protection had, in this case, been well invested! I quickly contacted the other close protection teams operating locally for our company to alert them that there had been a ‘contact’ with the kidnappers but that we were fine; just in case the bad guys had more than one team out that night. After seeing the client safely home, we were dropped off back at the hotel. That night, in a certain Wan Chai bar, there was full turn out of the other team leaders and there was a thorough and liquid debrief. The next day was a Sunday and thankfully, the only movement was taking the client to three different Church services, all sponsored by him and then on to a tennis game at one of his homes. After which, I stood down for the day.

Coming up to Christmas I had found myself with several black tie functions to attend with the client and so I skipped the gym one morning and got the driver to take me to one of the very glitzy malls nearby and I splashed out on a dinner suit. It cost me the equivalent of two weeks wages back in Australia and I felt pretty guilty for spending the money. Luckily, it fitted me straight off the peg and I was sure that I’d blend in at one of the many fundraising balls that I’d have to attend. I didn’t blend in of course, as the only fit looking Europeans there who were around my age, were clearly there as security and everybody knew it! It was around that time that I had occasion to run the bosses wife to some charity and social functions during the day. I knew that the client was busy in meetings and wasn’t going to leave his own building so there was no chance of him slipping out without me but I knew that some protectees try that, just for fun and end up getting into serious trouble. Luckily for me, he wasn’t that adventurous.

The bosses wife was a young, very smart US trained lawyer and although she didn’t have to work for a living of course; she was active on the Hong Kong social scene and was always organising for a worthy cause. She also happened to be attractive and had a sharp eye for any imagined breach of protocol by ‘the help’

Tim had made a point of warning me that when I opened the car door for her to get out (that’s not just a fluff move by the way, it’s actually so you can shove the protectee back in the car and quickly shut the door if there’s an incident) to make sure that I was looking outwards so that there was no chance of her thinking that I was staring at her (admittedly very long) legs. Aside from the fact that it would have been counter productive professionally, as you always need to be looking outwards for threats, I was very aware of protocol before I met her and I hoped that basic good manners would carry me through as I wasn’t in the habit of ‘sneaking a peek’ in any case.

It was impossible not to feel like a bit of a fashion accessory at times, but the bosses wife understood that I wasn’t there to be a shopping assistant and besides, the stores literally came to her. She did mention casually one day that she would have ‘one of her people’ look at some suit options for me as I think that she had realised that me wearing the same blue suit all the time, wasn’t just a fashion choice… I felt that I had always got on well enough with her and her husband to have a frank conversation as I took them to a function on the peak over what form her protection would take when the full time team leader took over. She confided that although she realised that she had to have the security cover, she herself had no fear of being kidnapped. I asked her why and she smiled when she answered that the wives weren’t really a target for kidnap because their husbands would tell the kidnappers to keep them! The boss, very unwisely in my view, kept quiet…

Looking up at Central, the HK Convention and Exhibition centre in the left middle ground .

It was around that time that the media was frothing at the mouth over the fact that although several tycoons had allegedly been kidnapped for huge ransoms, not one of them had reported the crime to the Police. Because the kidnappings had not been reported, there was legally ‘nothing to investigate‘ although the media obviously knew what had happened; how much had reportedly been paid and even who was behind it. They became desperate to get pictures of the *gweilo’s being paid to protect Hong Kong’s richest men and it became a secondary game of cat and mouse to avoid being snapped by Hong Kong’s paparazzi.

*Foreign devils

My predecessor Tim was snapped one day trailing the boss as he walked through one of the shopping malls he owned, but far from being embarrassed by the media attention, he went out and bought several copies of the magazine as souvenirs. I was feeling quite proud that I’d managed to avoid the attentions of the media but one morning, thanks to a rookie error, we arrived at the clients office and took the lift from the secure basement up to the private executive floor. One of the sneaky reporters obviously had a lookout near the car park entrance who tipped him off and he had legitimately entered the guarded lobby floor and was waiting by the lifts as we we were coming up. He’d pressed the lobby button and it opened, right in front of him.

One of the things you do when in a lift with a protectee is to stand right in front of the door, just in case something like this happens. He was holding a small camera up to his eye as the door opened and other than that, it was clear that apart from being an annoyance, he wasn’t an immediate threat. The panicking lift attendant did a little dance on the spot and pressed several buttons other than he one he wanted, which was the door close button… Luckily, I knew exactly where it was and without breaking eye contact, I wished him good morning in Cantonese and pressed the button, closing the door. I noticed that the client was staring into the corner in order to avoid being photographed, but he thanked me for quickly closing the door. The next thing I did was designate that lift as a VIP lift, and I had a technician program that lift to go directly from the secure basement to the executive floor.

A couple of days later there was an article in one of the most popular English language newspapers, that discussed how outrageous it was that everyone knew what was going on and in order to protect themselves, the tycoons had to pay for gweilo security rather than rely on Hong Kong’s own very effective Police Force. This of course, stemmed from the fact that the alleged crimes hadn’t been reported. Another Cantonese language magazine covered the same story but unfortunately, the shot taken from the lift lobby had made it into the magazine. The reporter had kindly noted how ‘cool and calm’ I was when the lift door had opened on me and mentioned that I had watched him intently as the door closed… The secretaries in the clients office giggled at the sensationalist tone of the article and also thought that it was a nice picture of my blue suit, but they were of course, being sarcastic as they hadn’t seen me wearing anything else since I had been there. Unfortunately, this also meant that the bad guys had probably seen my picture and they could associate me with the potential target.

That proved to be the case when about two months into my contract, I had to take the client to a breakfast meeting at the Hong Kong Club in Central. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s right next door to the Cenotaph between the Chater and Connaught roads. Connaught road at that time had some major road works and traffic was moving quite slowly, so a lot of cars had decided to take Chater road as a short cut. Consequently, it was also quite congested. Jackson road, the small one way street cutting between the two main thoroughfares was a prized dawdling place for limo’s and it was so crowded, I had to keep my driver circling the block.

The Hong Kong Club. They do a good fried breakfast.

On this particular day, the weather was quite good and I spent a few minutes watching the scene outside the club. It wasn’t just for the hell of it, as counter surveillance is a very important part of the job. In the military its called looking for ‘combat indicators’ such as no women and children on the streets in what is usually a busy market, or windows shuttered when they’d normally be open. Essentially, you’re looking for the absence of the ordinary and it was the same way that Tim and I had noticed the truck parked at night, with the blocking car down the road automatically, as their presence was unusual and by rights, they shouldn’t have been there.

In Central Hong Kong that day, the combat indicators were people not dressed appropriately to be in this very dressy part of town or the vehicle that looked out of place among the BMW’s, occasional Rolls Royce’s and Mercedes. On this occasion, lo and behold, I saw a small covered flat bed truck across the road, lurking outside the public library, that looked suspiciously like the one that had tried to ram us up on Barker road.

As I walked towards it, the driver made the mistake of looking directly at me and made eye contact. I couldn’t believe it, as it was the same driver as before! He wouldn’t have recognised me from Barker Road, as I had been sitting inside a darkened car the last time, but I certainly recognised him and the way he looked at me this time made me realise that he knew exactly who I was and what I was doing. He’d probably been shown the picture from the magazine and been briefed that if he saw me, the target wouldn’t be far behind. The driver had the decency to look away quickly, but he knew he’d been made. If my heart hadn’t been beating so hard, I might have smiled.

I knew that the Police would move the truck along before too long as he was on double yellow lines, but I had to buy some time before we went out on the pavement, so I headed back inside and checked on the client. I knew he didn’t like to spend more than an hour sitting still anywhere, so I stood on the other side of the room but in his line of sight, so that if he looked up, he’d know I was there. We had an agreement that if he was within five minutes of wanting to make a move, he’d give me a nod, but this time he made eye contact and shook his head. I called the driver to find out where he was and I told him to stay there. Next, I went back outside to see if the truck was still there and it wasn’t, but there was a dark SUV with heavily tinted windows parked in front of the club that hadn’t been there a few minutes before. That wasn’t unusual in itself, but most vehicles picking up and dropping off at the club were in and out in seconds.

In the past, the kidnappers MO had been to intercept the victims at night on a quiet road, or as they came out of their homes. They knew that if they came out hard in the middle of the city, the resulting hue and cry from the Police would be such that they’d be lucky if they made it out of Central alive, as Franks old mob would have hunted them down. I had a quick word with the doorman at the club and he promised to find out whose it was. “He’s not a member Sir” was the answer and I resolved to keep a wary eye on the vehicle. The client then appeared without warning behind me and told me he’d finished earlier than he’d thought, which left me with a real problem as we were on the pavement, with no car waiting and a suspicious vehicle opposite us. I called our driver Sam, who was luckily just out of sight alongside Chater Gardens and he quickly pulled out and turned across the traffic to a chorus of blaring horns and the screeching of tyres.

The view from Chater Gardens

The situation was now critical, as whoever was in the SUV could literally rush out and take the client by force, so we retreated back into the doorway of the club just as the door of the SUV opened just a couple of inches. As no one got out. it became a Mexican stand off, with us not wanting to run to the car and maybe not make it and them not wanting to reveal their hand and rush us when we would have probably have been in the car before they got to us. Out of the corner of my vision, I could see our car forcing its way past the others lining up near the Cenotaph and I mentally measured the distance between us and the SUV, us and the inside of the club and us to the BMW, working out what would be the fastest way to get to safety. If the kidnappers were heavily armed, going back inside the club would be of no help, but if we could get into the car, we’d be safe.

Our driver pulled around the cars in front of him and put two wheels up on the forecourt of the club. As he unlocked the doors on our side from the inside we were still trying not to make things obvious and panic the public, but we rushed across the paving and as gracefully as we could and without making it clear what we were were doing, we jumped inside. The door of the SUV closed and slowly pulled away. I immediately reported the plate number to the Police through our liaison and found out that the plates were false, which didn’t surprise me in the least.

The Hong Kong Police and Special Branch knew exactly where the kidnapper was hiding out and they had him under surveillance in a farming area over the border just outside Shenzen. Big Spender knew better than to set foot back in Hong Kong himself because Franks old team were waiting for him and so he satisfied himself with swanning in and out of Macau gambling Millions on a single spin of the roulette wheel, but he didn’t stop his gang operating there. The intelligence services confirmed through satellite technology, that his followers had been busy, constructing a purpose built jail, complete with watchtowers and a high perimeter fence. They estimated that there were at least six cells for his victims, which suggested to everyone in the know that he was nowhere near done with his activities.

I experienced an awkward moment one day when the bosses wife asked me if I could play golf? I answered ‘not well’ which was the truth. In fact, that was actually dressing it up a little as I am pretty shocking at golf, but she said that it didn’t matter as I could caddy for her. I realised that I would have a couple of days free as the boss had announced that he was going on his annual ‘retreat’ and whilst I thought that it was a bit of an unusual request, it was just within the scope of my job, so I said yes, I’d be her caddy.

The bosses ‘retreat’ was just that and amongst many other things, he owned a country club in China and for just two days out of the year, he helicoptered into the country club, which was just over the border and played cards with a couple of old friends, smoked cigars and drank good wine. I didn’t put two and two together until I overheard the client tell his secretary to have his golf clubs sent to the country club and then it became clear that his wife resented the fact that he was chilling out without her and wanted me to take her over there and make sure that he wasn’t having the wrong kind of fun. He just wasn’t the kind of man to do that sort of thing and I felt really bad for him but also for me because if I did that, I’d ruin the trust that we had between us.

I had to make a difficult call to my employer and tell him what was happening and ask for an intervention. He made the call and my new career as a caddy ended as quickly as it had started. Unfortunately, this also meant that my relationship with the bosses wife became distinctly frosty.

Luckily, my time in the role was coming to an end and I needed to hand over the team to its new leader. As part of the handover with Tim he’d mentioned that there was a bit of a ritual, whereby any senior member of staff who was leaving was summoned to the bosses wife’s office where she would thank them and give them a present from the small room behind her desk. The presents were actually unwanted gifts that had been handed over as she left a function or party and reportedly, some of them had been very valuable. Most of them hadn’t even been unwrapped and she knew, by the status of the host who had provided the gifts just how nice it would be. I have to admit, that I was secretly hoping for a nice watch or something similar.

I had hardly spoken to her since ‘caddygate’ but it was a nice surprise to see her being so friendly as I dropped in to say goodbye. After a cup of tea with her and shaking her hand, she excused herself and went into the gift room. She came out with a small package and with an air of noblesse oblige handed it over. I thanked her and left for my employers office.

Later that day, I sat amongst my colleagues sharing the debrief of the last three months. My employer left the room in order to answer a phone call that turned out to be the clients wife. Apparently she’d just gone through my hotel bills and had discovered that my laundry bill over the last three months had been within $250 of the cost of their daughters new car that they’d bought for her at college in the US! I didn’t feel too bad as I knew that they owned the hotel and could afford it.

And the gift? I expect that the bosses wife had her revenge after all as it was a shoe cleaning kit…

Postcript.

A couple of months later I was in Indonesia, contingency planning for the fall of the Suharto government and a conversation was relayed back to me that had happened in the Hong Kong office of my employer. The man who had taken over the team from me was due some leave and the client had suggested that they bring me back to stand in for him. One of the guys said, “Jerry’s in Jakarta right now” and my employer said “well, we could always send in the blue suit, it knows what to do”…

Spending time out in nature…

(And now it’s time for a good moan)

It’s almost the height of summer where we live. That said, we still have the fire lit three nights out of seven. It’s probably only really necessary on one of those nights, but there’s nothing like a real fire in the evening. Things always feel much more Christmassy with a real fire, even if it’s sunny outside.

Last years more ‘modest’ tree

In the manic rush to have ‘things’ appropriately ready for the various family events we held, there were several tasks I had been detailed off to finish before Santa arrived. One of them was to replace the old front fence. I had decided to hire some tradesmen to do this and save myself some time (and protect my back!) and I eventually managed to find a guy who came recommended by the local timber yard – “we always recommend him” they said. OK then, that’s good enough for me. I should have suspected something when I could never get him to answer his phone or return messages, but I thought he was probably busy and I did eventually get an emailed commitment to start on a certain date and time.

I’d spent quite a while selecting the proper timber and on the advice of the company who sold me the traditional ‘sunshine’ gate, I’d scouted around eventually found some large rough sawn posts, that would take the weight and hopefully last a hundred years in position. I finished them with the plane and then gave them several coats of paint in preparation of sinking them well into the ground.

And yes, they were a bugger to move…

That morning came and I had decided to brief the tradesmen and then clamber in the car and drive six hours up into the mountains to meet #1 son and go deer hunting. Because its a long drive, I was keen to get away at a decent hour and arrive a couple of hours before dark. By 10 am I was getting twitchy and having repeatedly texted and called his phone, I decided to drive down the village and fill the car up with fuel. When doing so, I noticed that my missing tradies were sitting outside the local cafe drinking coffee. I politely pointed out that I’d be waiting back at the house for them and luckily, they took the hint. They arrived a few minutes later and took a look at the job. I had, of course, briefed them in writing, but it seemed that in time honoured fashion, they hadn’t taken too much notice of that. Eventually, I drove away thinking that I’d done a reasonable job of explaining what I wanted and to what standard, but I’ll come back to this saga later…

I had a great time with #1 and his mates in the mountains. Needless to say, they had all filled their esky’s with venison before I got there and Bambi and his mates were well aware what was going on and they were all muttering amongst themselves “nope, we ain’t going out there tonight” and I came home empty handed. Don’t get me wrong, the young fellas did their level best to get me into a position where I could take a shot, but they were too far away for my diminished abilities to ‘humanely’ pay off. I retired in shame and had a leisurely drive down the mountain and just past Hotham heights I pulled over at one of the huts that the high country is famous for.

Never seen it without snow all around it before.

The Diamantina hut is close to the road and although I had driven by it many times, I had never had a look inside. They were originally built as shelters for cattlemen and adventurous types who wanted to get out and about. Before they were built a number of people had died of exposure after getting lost or over estimating their abilities and they are still life savers today. I remember a having tea break in the Seamans hut (named after an unfortunate young man who died of exposure) on the way to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko on skis over thirty years ago and came across two student doctors and a trainee vicar, who had slept there the night before and had obviously had a bit of a party. There were really amusing guys and an hour or so later, I left them boiling their umpteenth mug of restorative coffee and chuckled my way to the summit and then down again to Charlottes Pass, where I was ‘working’.

Not a bad view

I returned home from the mountains to a strange sight, slightly reminiscent of the wall between East and West Berlin. Three metre long posts poked out of the ground and my huge 2.4 mt long load bearing gate posts looked as if their tips alone were underground. Whilst maintaining social distancing (as I was wearing a mask and they weren’t), I had been at my most politely pedantic self explaining to the tradie what I expected of him and his drooling offsider and he’d clearly gone and done just what would allow him to get away with the minimum of digging, but why he’d chosen posts that were so long, when the finished fence was supposed to be 1.3 metres high was beyond me.

I called the fencer up and asked him what was going on. He claimed that the posts that I had selected and spent a long time priming and painting weren’t long enough and that he’d supplied his own, at a premium of course. When questioned on the subject of the teetering gate posts, he claimed that he was confident that they would “be ok” – I just as confidently stated that they “wouldn’t be ok” and that there were two choices, return and dig them in properly and set the correct posts at the correct height or take away his posts and return the site to its previous state. The smug git sent the drooling one back to pull out ‘his’ posts and leave the rapidly setting mess of concrete in the ground. He didn’t of course, remove the large sentinel gate posts and left them as silent ‘f*** you’ to my efforts to hire someone and not to do the job ‘properly’ myself..

Not well dug in posts…

Whilst on my travels, we went in and out of various lockdown stages with many a semi ‘karate kid’ moment of ‘mask on, mask off’. Christmas at home, thanks to Covid was going to be quiet in comparison to previous years, but I think it was probably the same for most people, who couldn’t have the normal cast of thousands over to their homes because of the virus. In previous years, I had gone out of my way to source the largest Christmas tree I could find (in defiance of the usual strict instructions to the contrary) and heave it into the front room. I usually break something in the process, which unleashes a myriad of domestic sanctions, so this year, I resolved to be relatively sensible and whilst indulging my guilty pleasure of online shopping for crap, I had read about a Christmas tree farm in nearby Daylesford. I hooked on my mask, hitched up the trailer and headed over to see them.

What a find it was! Dozens of acres of manicured xmas trees of various sizes and somehow, I managed to limit myself to a modest three metre tall beauty. The friendly chap working on the farm (who annoyingly had his mask hanging off his chin, leaving both his mouth and nose completely uncovered) chainsawed our tree down and helped me wrestle it onto the trailer. Muttering under my (non infected) breath about germs and other non politically contentious issues, I thanked him and ever so slightly sarcastically wished him a safe and happy Christmas and got the tree home.

Green trees in a dry landscape, on a beautifully clear day

Surprisingly, but probably thanks to the fact that it didn’t have an extra two metres of growth on top of the tree, #2 son and I manhandled it in to place and I noticed that there was a scrape on the ceiling from the previous years tree and mentally thanked my restraint in choosing one of a slightly more modest stature.

It… will…fit…

By this stage in the pandemic, I’d witnessed several instances of paranoid (or just plain ill advised) people getting very upset when confronted by people who in their minds weren’t complying with the Covid guidelines in terms of mask wearing or practicing proper social distancing and I have to say I had a fair bit of sympathy for them, but I also had some sympathy for the folks who are just a bit ‘over’ being shunted around and bullied into compliance. What had really started to piss me off however, was those who were paying lip service to the preventative measures, but not adhering to them properly. By that comment, I mean the previously mentioned fucktards who cannot, or would not wear their mask properly.

By dint of a sinus re-bore and multiple sinus infections, I have sadly become a bit of a mouth breather. I hasten to add, not the slack jawed kind that drops their food all over themselves (ok, sometimes I do) and wears pyjamas to the supermarket and high vis clothing in the house through choice (never, not even once…) but the kind that tries not to sleep on his back and snore the house down. I have therefore stopped looking down on all of the unfortunates who might not be able to help it and instead focused my slightly irrational hatred on the nose breathing bastards (henceforth referred to as NBB’s) who could conceivably be committing mass murder through airborne dispersal of the virus by leaving their snouts uncovered by their mask.

By this stage, I was fairly ropeable and in order to maintain what was was left of my sanity, I decided to take myself off back to the mountains and try to fill the freezer full of venison once again. This time, I went alone, back to the same region as before, but to a different site that #1 son and his mates had visited some weeks ago and found to be ‘infested’ with feral deer. A note here; deer are of course, not native to Australia and in some areas, are considered as real pests, so they do need to be humanely culled. The other benefit here is that they do taste fantastic.

I loaded up the car, confidently purchased a new large esky and set off on the five hour journey towards Jamieson. The forests up there are beautiful and although they have all been logged at some point, there are some lovely big trees and a lot of native wildlife. The birdlife here is amazing and at every turn in the very windy mountain road, pairs of crimson rosellas dashed off the grass by the roadside and suicidally flew across the front of the car.

Looking down to Lake Eildon from the main road

I had my hunt mentally mapped out and as I fuelled up in the small country settlement of Yea, I ducked into the garage kiosk to see what kind of food they had on sale. Sadly, as part of my post Christmas detox, I had forsaken fried food, pies and my favourite boiled sweets in favour of a healthier, lower calorie alternative and so after loading up my cavernous esky with ice to keep Bambi fresh, I ignored the other temptations and resolved to buy something more organic enroute.

I honed the plan over the next couple of hours and decided that after my hunt, I’d dress the meat, put it on ice and drive down into the town of Jamieson and have dinner and a few celebratory beers in the brewery there. I’d probably manage to sweet talk the owner into letting me roll out my swag out the back near the river and so have a restful night before driving back home the next morning. Based on that premise and knowing I had a thermos full of hot water, peppermint tea bags and plenty of cold water in the car, I confidently passed a small roadside store without loading up on snacks and food. A rookie error in retrospect.

Following the GPS instructions provided by #1 son, I headed off the main road and onto the narrow logging tracks in the state forest. A professional beekeeper had decided to use one of the many old overnight logging stops to laager his bees. They were very active in the sunlight and were hopefully, busy making lots of bush honey.

Thousands of happy bees coming and going

The camp site was around 25kms down the track and at its end, there was nothing more than a lightly gravelled turnaround by a fast flowing creek. I scouted around the area and was horrified to see the amount of rubbish that had recently been left there by some NBB feral hunters. I say hunters because that’s the only reason why you’d be all the way out there. Generally speaking, hunters are people who love the outdoors, love being out in nature and above all, respect their surroundings so I was astounded that someone would leave all their crap (literally) around the area. I grabbed a garbage bag and picked up all the non bio hazard waste and chucked it into the truck.

I didn’t hold out much hope for the number of deer in the area after seeing the state of the campsite, as poor campsite discipline usually denotes poor hunting behaviour. Sure enough, I saw no sign of deer in the whole area and instead devoted my stalk to a mini ‘clean up Australia’ session. I wasn’t overly disappointed, as the weather was great, the drive not too onerous and the forests so beautiful. Aside from the trash, of course.

I have learned that there’s a certain type of person who drinks ‘monster’ energy drinks and throws rubbish on the ground and let me state that they are without a doubt, the same high vis pyjama wearing, nose breathing bastards, who I mentioned before. There’s bound to be a special place in NBB hell for them and so I headed up into one of the gullies where the deer usually like to sleep and I sat quietly watching for an hour as the sun slowly slipped beneath the mountain tops, leaving the dappled light rays to just penetrate the forest canopy. Aside from the parrots and the odd Wallaby, nothing stirred and after a very pleasant but wholly unintended doze in the bracken, I empty handedly followed a game trail down to the water and followed the creek back to the campsite arriving just on dusk.

Happily for the deer, who had clearly left the area and steadfastly refused to respond to my ‘come hither’ deer calls, but sadly for me without so much as a Bambi kebab for dinner, I pulled my camp chair out and ruefully made a cup of tea to help me think… much as my English forebears had done for generations whilst contemplating a lost battle, or the unsuccessful wholesale slaughter of wildlife. I decided that to teach myself a lesson, I wouldn’t drive down into town for dinner, but that I’d have an early night and try another stalk just as the sun came up.

I had borrowed #2 sons swag and for those who don’t know what a ‘swag’ is, it’s a canvas sleeping roll that allows a person to comfortably sleep outdoors wrapped up in its embrace, in most weathers. Mine had a substantial mosquito screen built in and it resembled more of a small tent. After some searching, I found a slightly furry boiled sweet in my jacket pocket and took an apple that had been left wrapped up in the swag the last time it was used, to bed with me and idly thought about how much nicer a beer and steak down at the brewery, whilst smugly contemplating my esky full of venison would have been.

Waking just before dawn I enjoyed watching the stars through the mozzie net before I rolled out and laced up my boots. I retraced my steps from the day before and discovered some more litter that I’d missed. I stuffed that into my pockets but there were of course, no deer to be found. I am sure they were watching me from the bush and sniggering to each other at my expense as I packed up and set off for home.

I have come to the conclusion that after returning from the last two hunts empty handed, I will from now on, due to massive piss taking from my family and friends, refer to my trips, not as hunts, but instead as ‘spending time in nature’ Middle age has clearly not cured my overconfidence, but perhaps it just might remind me to take some sandwiches next time.

In hospital, again…

Yes, I actually am back in hospital, again.  This time, it’s to fix the damage to my shoulder done several weeks ago on our last ski holiday -(https://www.thebearandthebees.com/?p=1632(opens in a new tab)).  

This morning, I had a ‘last breakfast’ of bacon and eggs at 05:45 and feeling like a condemned man, but hopefully without the noose at the end of it, I checked over my day bag and went outside into what looked like it was going to be a lovely day to feed the animals and go and get myself repaired. 

For me, it meant six hours of fasting and then, as we had luckily reactivated our health insurance, it was off to the (very) Catholic private hospital in town.  The Covid – 19, semi safe check in only took a few moments and I took the lift up to the third floor.  I passed through their lobby following another lady of certain age rocking a lovely shock of white/grey curly hair.  She obviously sensed that I was a little out of sorts and mistook my haunted look of hunger for nervousness.  She glanced up at the ‘Christ on the cross’ icon hanging on the wall, perhaps thinking that I might also draw some comfort from the sight, but I had actually noticed the unusual pose of Jesus, firmly affixed to the cross, but with his arms strangely raised in a hallelujah gesture.  For some reason I thought that it should be captioned “LOOK DAD, NO HANDS” but I didn’t mention that to the nice lady.    

I was processed through the formalities and issued my knee length anti blood clot stockings, my familiar backless nightie and thankfully a fluffy white dressing gown. She showed me to a curtained waiting area with a surprisingly comfortable reclining chair and then offered me a warm blanket.  Now, if you’ve ever been in a cold hospital and accepted the offer of warm blanket, you’ll know just what a pleasure they are and this one certainly was.  I booted up my laptop and put on an episode of ‘Dope’ and promptly fell asleep dreaming of what legitimate painkillers I might be offered.

Around two hours later, I woke up thinking about what was to come as I was being loaded onto a cot and wheeled into the waiting room.  The very experienced surgeon, breezed in and boosted my confidence no end by asking me which arm he was ‘doing today’ I semi confidently identified my left shoulder and presumably as an aide memoire, he used a felt pen to clearly mark the side he was supposed to cut.

I could hear the staff in the operating room joking and laughing between patients and then a slightly manic Scottish anaesthetist bounced into the room, looking like a cross between a Wiggle and Salman Rushdie.  Giggling, he introduced himself and described his part in the proceedings as passing a needle encased wire down the side of a nerve in my neck and said that he’d electrify the wire and he’d know that it was in the right place when my shoulder started ‘jumping’ He must have noted that my eyes had widened somewhat as he told me not to worry saying that he had some ‘really good stuff’ to fill my veins with and that I wouldn’t remember a thing.  In fact, he said, as he passed over my premeds, I probably wouldn’t remember anything after the multi coloured pills.  He was quite right, as moments later, I had floated away into unconsciousness and this time, missed the whole procedure.    

Mrs Jerry had kindly come into the hospital to check on me that evening as I partially came out of the fog of narcotics and demanded MacDonalds.  The shoulder ‘block’ was still working spectacularly well, as I also demanded to know where my arm was?  I then allegedly loudly broke wind and passed out again.  A few moments later, I repeated myself (minus the fart), again demanding Macca’s and to know which bastard had stolen my arm.  Mrs Jerry thought this was hilarious and after I had fallen asleep again, promptly called #2 son and shared the story with him.  The (not so) little swine very creatively said that she should tell me that “I had lost it in the war years ago” 

Some hours later I came too again and feeling a little strange, I reached over to feel my stump.  I couldn’t even find that, and I began to panic until I discovered that my arm had actually fallen through the bars on the side of the bed and was hanging almost vertically down to the floor.   When I dragged it back into the bed with the other hand, I was relieved to note that although I had absolutely no feeling in it, it was still warm at least.

As is my wont, during stretches of hospital incarceration and very much earlier than I am supposed to, I dragged myself to my rather unsteady feet and attempted to dress myself.  This simple procedure can be a little hit and miss for me at the best of times, but I had clearly under estimated the degree of difficulty in doing it with a completely dead arm.  I had cunningly packed a zip up hoody, for convenience, or so I thought, but I figured that I could at least get my jeans back on.  Not so convenient, doing up the zip one handed and tackling the buttons on the fly…  That was a diverting forty minutes that I will never get back but I managed it and tried to read a paper while I waited for the surgeon.

He was horrified that they had made me stay overnight, until the accompanying nurse told him the story of my missing arm, as recounted by Mrs Jerry.  He left chuckling with a comment that he’d see me in two weeks for a check up.  On the way out, I received my party bag, full of different kinds of medication and without looking left or right, I hurried directly to the lift.  ‘Y’MCA Jesus did catch my eye however and I could have sworn his eyes mournfully followed me down the corridor.  Over the last three years, I have had both hips and both shoulders fixed, so hopefully there’s nothing major left to break. Or am I speaking too soon? 

Stoners in the mountains

It’s the time of the year when those interested in winter sports get excited about the  snow in the mountains.  Of course, in the time of Covid, no one really knew what kind of a ski season it would be, given that the outbreaks in Victoria and the closure of borders with NSW had severely limited the possibility of just packing up and driving over for a few days. Although there the weather had been very mild, there was snow on the peaks and the TV had shown clips of people flying down the slopes, so I thought, there’d be a reasonable chance of getting a couple of days skiing in this year.  

Whilst trying to book accommodation and lift passes online, I saw that there was something of a booking lottery, and only a limited time to book your passes.  Getting up very early one morning I got onto the site one minute after the sale of the passes came online.  Predictably the site crashed before I could even finalise my transaction.  I called the helpline and then came the soul destroying recorded messages of “if you want to book lift passes, press one” that took you round and round to “all of our operators are busy”  thanked you for supporting them and then cut you off.  Whilst on hold and abstractly daydreaming about burning the resort down, I actually managed to get back online but discovered that I had to buy a pass for a minimum of three days, rather than the two I had planned on.  Grrrrrr but never mind… I shelled out the extra money and I had the confirmation number printed out, the mountain access pass booked and our accommodation paid for.

It’s become a bit of a ‘thing’ for Jerry Minor (AKA #2 son) and I to head up for a couple of days each winter and as I haven’t been flying all over the place for work for the past few (try 6) months, this was going to be an ideal opportunity. We were both pretty excited and I started to get the car ready and loaded in the gear that I packed a few days in advance.  Not so #2 son, who was glued to his computer screen and for the last few days, had only been coming out of his room for food.  I dropped a few hints that he might like to try on his ski gear and see if there was anything that needed to be repaired or replaced but of course, that fell on deaf ears and there was absolutely no packing done in advance.  I eventually dumped everything that I thought would conceivably fit him, just outside his door so that he’d have to do something with it or trip over it.  Of course, all he did was just step over it on his way to the fridge.

The mid week morning of our departure came around and I made a point of waking him at a reasonable hour so that he had time to have some breakfast and pack, as I loaded the car.  This won’t come as a revelation to anyone reading this who has teenagers; but I had formulated a cunning plan and had given him a cut off time that was actually one hour earlier than I intended to leave the house at, just so as I didn’t get stressed out chasing him around the house and out the door.  We managed to leave about 30 minutes before my actual planned departure and that was after a torturous five minutes of asking “have you packed X and Y”? and him answering yes……, in a bored but slightly offended monotone. 

My several cups of tea with breakfast necessitated a comfort stop about 40 minutes from home and just as I got out of the car, Mrs Jerry called and pointed out that we seemed to have  forgotten the Epinephrine pen, did we have the spare?  we didn’t of course, even though I had placed it next to his wash bag in the bathroom and I should point out that this is no small omission as #2 son has anaphylaxis – a severe allergic reaction to certain foods; in his case, Crustaceans.  Breathing deeply but saying little, I turned the car around and headed for home.

We sat in silence on the way home until he plugged his phone into the car stereo and selected a podcast for us to listen to.  He chose something apparently made by a group of young stoners, who discussed their experiences with ‘edibles’ and smoking ‘cones’  I have no violent objections about how people get their kicks but a couple of the guys seemed to have done rather too much of whatever they preferred and talked absolute shite, with the annoying valley speak word ‘like’ appearing every few seconds.  #2 son announced his intention to have the sides of his lovely dirty blonde shoulder length hair shaved into a mullet for the end of the year rowing competition and some tattoos done on his arms and chest when he left school.  I am sure he was just pushing my buttons, but I knowing that the more I expressed my displeasure, the more determined he’d be; tongue in cheek, I observed that I really admired Mike Tyson’s tribal face tattoo and that perhaps he might like to consider that as well? He was quiet for a moment and and I idly considered slipping a prawn into his lunch, just for fun now that I had his Epi pen, but I kept that thought to myself.       

We stopped in the foothills of the mountains at the small town of Bright and had a very pleasant socially distanced lunch before picking up our hire skis and snow chains.  If you have never been there, Bright is a lovely town that acts as the smart face of rural life meeting tourism.  It has obviously suffered badly from the Corona virus shutdown as the town was uncharacteristically quiet and many of the shops were closed.  The side benefit of that for us of course being that there was no queue at the ski hire shop.  This was unusual, as it’s normally a 20 to 30 minute wait where I end up buying lots of things I don’t really need.  Kind of like the $300 screwdriver from the hardware shop.  This time, we escaped with a relatively light bag of swag; a new hat and thermal underwear for Jerry minor, who by that time had turned back from obnoxious teenager into a normal decent human being. 

The drive up the mountain started after a polite ‘Covid’ check at the bottom of the incline where four men in high vis jackets waited to check that we’d booked into the resort in advance and decide if we looked ‘a bit peaky’ or not.  We passed their examination and carried on up the mountain past the lush new growth that has thankfully followed on from the dreadful fires that tore through Victoria mid last year and through to this year.  One thing we didn’t see was snow and that was obviously pretty important to us.  I was also surprised not to see more cars on the road but in keeping with the lack of tourists in Bright, I thought that the enforced ‘thinning’ of the crowds was probably working.

Eventually we did see snow on the tops of the mountains and all of a sudden, our spirits, but not the clouds, lifted. 

A bit wet, but it’s snow!

Things quickly brightened and it really was enough to be out in each others company and we began to chat about friends, work, school and life after it.  We had both been looking forward to going up there all year and we were finally almost on top of the mountains. The temperature was dropping as the metres of elevation rose and by the time we drove through the short tunnel into the resort, it was two degrees above freezing and lo’ and behold, the snow lay round about, even if it wasn’t quite “deep and crisp and even”.   

We checked in at the resort office and discovered that Melbourne was being ‘locked down’ to try and stop the spread of the virus and the managers confided that they didn’t know exactly what the ‘knock on’ effects of that would be and they weren’t sure if they would be able to keep the resort open through to the following week. Somewhat chastened, we drove down to our accomodation just as the sun set. 

As we climbed the steel stairs, I could hear music and noted a curious but not entirely unfamiliar herbal scent in the air.  #2 son looked at me and raised his eyebrows and I was about to ask him how he knew what it smelt like, but then realised that kids today (I have just realised how old that reads…) are fully conversant with most diversions, even if it is just hopefully at an academic level.  It turned out that we were staying next door to a shared apartment for the resort staff and they were clearly living the high life, with overflowing ashtrays and several empty beer cartons piled up in their porch. 

Having worked in the NSW snowfields some 30 years ago, I was reminded that nothing really changes.  As we started to unpack, the herbal smoke drifted through the open door and I wondered if we’d get too cold leaving the downwind windows open. The loud thumping rap music hit me like a punch in the face however and I muttered aloud that I might have to ‘have a word’ with our neighbours. #2 sons grief stricken face told me that this probably wouldn’t be the best thing for his street cred, so I suggested that he join them for a beer and drop the lie that I was a Cop into the conversation.

By the time I got back from parking the car, the music was off, the rubbish had gone from the entry way and the staff had disappeared inside. I was reminded that experience and cunning beats youthful vigor every time…    

Dawn on the mountain.

The next morning I fried up a massively (un)healthy breakfast and checked over the gear while #2 son slowly, oh soooo slowly, got ready. I asked him to do one thing for me that day and that was to fill the esky up with snow to ensure that the beer was cold by the time we got back that evening. I thought that with luck, he might just remember and do it. Minutes after leaving the apartment, the resort snow bus stopped just outside the accomodation and we clambered on board. The runs were literally only 300 metres up the road, so we were first in the lift queue for the 08:30 start. The clouds were low on top of the mountain and visibility wasn’t great, but it was hovering around zero degrees and you couldn’t have had a better first run of the day.

Snow cover was good on the Summit run and freshly groomed. Historically, I’m not a bad skier and have taught in both the service and at a civilian resort here in Australia, but of course, that was over 30 years ago and I am not nearly as young, confident or flexible as I once was. Not surprisingly, I also heal a lot slower. #2 has progressed steadily to a competent grade two skier who can descend most green and blue runs quickly and in control and it was obvious that it wouldn’t be long before I was chasing him down the slopes. We were very keen to get going and we excitedly skied quickly off the lift and on to the very top of the mountain.

It was a case of ski top to bottom, jump on the lift and rinse and repeat until lunchtime. One of the many things I have noticed as I have got older is that I get tired and lose my concentration more easily. This is obviously not optimal when you are hurtling down a steep run at the very edge of control and all of a sudden “ooooohhhh look, there’s a squirrel…” and BANG!, I was face down on the edge of the run in a tangle of ski’s, blinking snow out of my eyes and removing a ski pole from my backside.

Luckily, I was back on my feet in an instant, just before #2 arrived. He obviously noticed me dusting myself off and asked if I was ok? Of course I was, I explained, but that a couple of those ‘bloody out of control ski embryo’s with their arses 6″ from the snow cut me up‘ and in order to avoid cleaning them up, I claimed that I’d taken the heroic choice of the snow bank. #2 nodded sagely, not believing a word of it and obviously recognising that his old man was a ‘bit weary’, he suggested lunch and I nodded gratefully.

We chose the ‘Swindlers’ restaurant, which is just at the top of the main run and I was again pleasantly surprised by the lack of people around. Staff were allowing just 20 people in the restaurant at one time and whilst lathering myself in hand sanitiser I spoke to one of the resort engineers who was picking up his take out pizza, who said he’d be surprised if they were open by the end of the week and that it was a good job we were here now. After a very average plate of fried chicken wings coated with Garamssala and a watery cheese sauce (WTF?), we lumbered back out onto the slopes.

More like it. But the snow was getting a little slushy

For the next two hours we hurtled down the runs, dodged ski embryo’s, got cut up by snowboarders and generally had a fantastic time. I found myself slip into the elusive skiing ‘groove’ and put in some reasonable parallel turns before the 16 year old #2 got tired (Ha!) and he disappeared back to the room to have a lie down. I still had a little energy left and so I thought that I might try a couple of different and more challenging runs before I gave it away for the day.

Alas, I was about to manifest the the hubris brought on by a clear day, a relative lack of joint pain and a stunningly clear run.

I bobbed down and then rose up to take the weight off my skis in order to execute a very stylish parallel turn and for a nano second, glanced up to see the chairlift above me and before I knew it, that f***ing squirrel appeared again and I found myself in the pose of the spinning starfish and I slammed into the snow head first just as a chair of laughing teenage swines passed overhead.

Our next run saw us both about to exit the chair lift and as we’d done on previous runs, I would call out right or left, depending on the best exit route with the fewest people standing in the way and fiddling with their skis.  On previous runs, we’d gone to the right, but this time, for some reason, it was fenced off.  #2 immediately skied off across my front to the left and I hesitated slightly so as not to trip him up, but instead found myself stuck on the chair and about to turn the corner and head back down the mountain.  I had a quick call to make, stay on the chair lift, or jump off quickly.  My skis were around 2mts from the snow when I pushed myself off the chair and into the air. I had planned a graceful swoop back onto the slope but instead I landed like a bag of spuds, but with slightly less grace.  I heard the clang of the lift bell as it stopped and the lift attendant ran over to see if I had survived the fall.  Red faced and puffing, I clambered to my feet after the attendant had untangled my skis and helped send me on my way, to join my doubled over, giggling teenage son.      

I made it back to the apartment without further mishap and omitting further mention of my humiliation, I professed satisfaction with how relatively well the day had gone. I then reached for the esky and what was I hoped, a perfectly chilled beer. Wonderously, # 2 had filled it with snow and before I knew it, I had washed down some Nurofen with a couple of very cold beers and fallen asleep. I woke up a couple of hours later feeling like I had been worked over with a baseball bat and debated whether I should just roll over and go back to sleep. However, I struggled into a hot shower and emerged feeling much better and ready for dinner.

Food in the snowfields is generally a bit cafeteria like and certainly can be hit and miss, but down at the General store, or ‘Genny’ as its known, which is at the lower end of the resort, we were so hungry that spaghetti on toast would have been fine, as long as there was enough of it. I don’t even remember what I did have, but we both had a couple of very decent local beers and chatted about the day. #2 then rose up to find the ketchup and on his way back he quite unselfconsciously bent down, ruffled my hair and kissed me on the top of my head. There may or may not have been tears of pride in my eyes as the bar was filling up, but the lump in my throat was definitely there. I say filling up, but as far as it could fill up with the strict social distancing in place and so we got to a top of about fifteen people and table service was pretty fast. It may have had something to do with the fact that the two very nice pierced and dreadlocked barmaids were also our neighbours back at the accommodation…

Before we knew it, we’d finished dinner and had caught the bus back to the apartment. Someone’s stereo next door was rapping loudly with more profanity than I’d heard since I picked myself up out of the snotty heap earlier, but they must have seen us coming home as they very quickly turned the music down and closing the window, sadly closed in the heavenly scent.

Due to budget constraints, we had rented a smaller apartment than we normally did and there was only one bed so I had thoughtfully taken an inflatable camping mattress with a built in pump for #2 to sleep on (well, I wasn’t going to sleep on it!), but of course, it failed in the middle of the night and he’d ended up folded like a pretzel on the small sofa at the foot of my bed. He didn’t seem too perturbed and after I had fed him and cajoled him back up to the lifts, he saw how good the weather was looking. It was an incredibly clear day and we were the first to ski down the main run on the newly groomed snow. #2 son was skiing really well and I followed him practicing his turns and just enjoying the morning. I thought how lucky I was to have this time with him and what a fantastic young man he was becoming.

Later on that day, after Jerry minor had again declared exhaustion, I got geared up in my very dated cross country ski gear and hopped on the bus to the start of the Brabralung trail. It begins at the bottom end of the village and runs for 12 km over to the small settlement at Dinner Plain, where we have stayed in previous years. The first part of the trail was seductively easy going and I found myself thinking of the trails I had taken through the silver birch forests in Norway and I remembered the swishing sound of my skis across the snow and the squeak of the ski pole going into the clean unmarked landscape. Of course, I didn’t have my house and an armoury on my back this time and after about three kms, I was in my stride and all was well with the world. I reached a long downhill slope and let my arms dangle loosely by my side and with mind in neutral, the bloody squirrel appeared again and I ran onto a strip of gravel road crossing the track and BANG, there I was, once again, in a tangle of ski poles.    

The peaceful, but treacherous, cross country trail

As I struggled to my feet, I could hear the crack of small calibre rounds in the distance. To me, there was only one thing that could be – a biathlon range. I had very keenly competed in biathlons when I was younger and immediately stepped up the pace to what I kidded myself was my ‘average’ 20km cadence back then and sped (a relative term) along the well worn circuit track that had seen many people before me. When you’re competing in biathlons and you come up behind someone with the intention of passing them, it is sportsmanlike to call out “track” or the Norwegian equivalent “løype” which is a polite request for them to step aside. All I heard from behind me was a ‘GET OUT OF THE WAY’ as several little shits tore past me like I was standing still and raced each other around the circular track before heading off and onto the biathlon range.

As I was temporarily engrossed in track rage, I became slightly geographically embarrassed and mislaid the actual Dinner Plain trail.  Scouting around, I noticed that the trail turned back on itself and went under the road.  The sun was in my eyes, but I could see that there was snow in the tunnel so I started on the short downhill to dip under the great alpine road, mentally congratulating myself on past biathlon glories and only discovering at the last moment that the ‘snow’ in the tunnel was in fact, a white rubber mat.  Without having the time to wonder why the hell someone would lay a white rubber mat down, I discovered that it had the braking effect of a brick wall and I went head over heels eventually hitting the mat with my elbow.  I know, because this was not my first spectacular fall on and off skis, that I had probably torn something in my shoulder.    

Heading down into Dinner Plain and putting a brave face on my pain, I noticed a surge of x country skiers heading my way. They appeared to be all on my side of the trail (the left) and I was forced to move over to their side (the right). Once again, I had the sun in my eyes and didn’t notice that this part of the trail was in fact yet more gravel. This was to be one of those slow motion crashes, where you can see exactly what is going to happen before it happens and I even had time to notice that there was a videographer recording the groups efforts and that I was about to literally crash into the shot. I had a split second to to choose an alternative path, one that led into the snow gums and the very uneven clumped snow barely covering fallen branches and roots. I left the track with such speed and did what I imagined was ‘falling with style’ No one seemed to notice and when I disappeared into an impressive snow drift, I lay still until they had all passed.

It was at this time that I resolved that when I got to Dinner Plain, I was going to go straight to the Onsen, the upmarket Japanese style spa, have a long relaxing soak and then adjourn to the licensed cafe, just off the car park to sink what I hoped would be the first of several analgesic beers. I limped the final 200mts to the spa carrying my skis and was stunned to see a sign that the Spa was closed due to Covid-19. I wandered over to the cafe that I knew had a good range of local beer and a decent menu and was surprised not to see smoke coming out of the chimney. Sure enough, it was also closed until 7pm that evening. Oh, the horror, the horror…

Mentally recounting all of the really bad things that I had clearly done in my life and working out if they equaled the previous two hours of the day, I knew there was a warming hut nearby, where I could at least wait for the bus back to the resort without slipping into hypothermia. On the way to it, I saw the bus turning into the car park, but I was too tired to to throw myself onto the road in front of it to force it to stop. I limped over and the bus driver kindly recognised I was hoping to make it back to the bus stop in time and get a lift. She opened up her window and said hello. I managed to stammer out my intentions and she asked if I had a bus pass. Apparently since my last visit there, things had changed with regards to transportation. The bus to Dinner Plain was no longer operated by the resort and you now needed a preloaded card , which of course, I did not have. As the edges on my skis were too blunt to open up my jugular and put me out of my misery, I was forced to throw myself on the drivers mercy and ask her what to do.

It transpired that I had to go to the local ski hire store, buy the card for $10, then go across the road to the accomodation rental office and activate the card. Of course, they couldn’t do it, it had to be done online. As I struggled through the process, I knew that there wouldn’t be enough beer in that esky back at the apartment to deal with the day and I’d probably need to raid our neighbours stash as a stop gap.

But back at the apartment after a hot shower and a couple of cold beers and some deep breathing outside the neighbours windows, I once again felt able to face the world.  The resort was eerily quiet that night with only a few people in the restaurants but we managed to find a halfway decent dinner and discussed the trip.  It had been a really good, if rather short trip.  The snow hadn’t been great, but it had been good enough to get some good runs in – in between me wiping out regularly and I had managed to get a lengthy ski cross country, through some beautiful country.


We thought we’d pack that night and I would get up early and bring the car back from its remote parking place and load it up before the first run of the day.  We’d only have enough time for a couple of runs before we had to leave and drive home, but there was enough of an opportunity to make it worthwhile.


In the morning, we dressed hurredly and noticed that our neighbours the resort staff, appeared to have cleared out over night. We drove to the top car park, just near the lifts and got out to put our boots on.  Another car with a father and three kids did the same next to us, but it started to dawn upon me once that we were almost ready that we were the only two vehicles in the car park.  A lone staff member wandered over and told us that as the borders were still closed, the decision had been made to shut down the resort for the season.  Apparently, texts had been sent out late the previous evening, but neither we nor the family next to us had received them.  There was nothing to do but shrug, get back into the car and have some breakfast in Bright before heading home…

Until next year then!