Free Palestine

I was four months into secondary school when I sat my first exam. That was back in December 1977.

Our English teacher came up with a task that was revolutionary for its time. We were invited to write an essay on anything we liked. I felt emboldened, as though the shackles of primary school had been cast off and I was heading into a life of free thought and independence. That was shortly disabused, as it later became clear that that the vague instructions were due to a Christmas Party induced hangover and not the first light of liberation.

 I took pen to paper and decided to write about what I had seen on the news in the previous nights. I don’t remember the exact events, but Israel had done something bad to the Palestinians and as a twelve-year-old I was filled with righteous anger. I wrote my first opinion piece, laying down what I thought were cogent arguments weighing up the morality of the situation and handed it in with the flourish and excitement of a Washington Times journalist who had just penned the first article about Watergate.

I got my essay back the next day, dappled in red pen and exclamation marks. In the corner was a mark of 55% and I quickly determined that he had corrected spelling and grammar only and had deducted five marks for each error. I don’t think I could correctly spell Palestinian now without the electronic assistance of spell checker. I had nine errors and had barely scraped above a pass mark. If I had written the essay in the style of a ladybird bird book aimed at four-year-olds, I would have scored top marks.

I got no credit, good or bad, for my writing style or argument. The only feedback was a note in red pen at the end that said, “You’re a bit hard on the Israelis”.

I thought about this recently because it struck me that I was brave enough to speak up when I was twelve but feel nervous to do so now. I guess part of this is related to age. We naturally become more cautious as we get older when protecting your family becomes paramount. I think there is also an element of exhaustion. At sixty, there is very little new under the sun and while the situation in Gaza is horrible, it has been horrible for most of my life. Nothing was done to fix the problems in 1977, so it’s hard to build up an expectation that pressure and public opinion will change things now.

The other thing is social media and the connected world we now live in. That essay I wrote when I was twelve was only seen by me and my English teacher. And unless he was an undercover agent for Mossad, it is unlikely that I would have ended up on a watchlist.

This blog, on the other hand will probably attract as many actual human readers as my 1977 essay but will live forever in digital form in a data centre. It will then be harvested by AI tools and parsed and sliced and fed through algorithms. I’m not a conspiracy theorists (not that anyone ever admits to being one) but it wouldn’t take much effort to figure out that this is a pro-Palestine post and to then link it to my identity.

If Mossad or the Americans are listening, I might as well tell them what I think.

I was born twenty years after the end of World War Two. The war still dominated popular culture in the 1970s from Lawrence Olivia narrated documentaries to comic books like Commando and Battle and TV shows like Colditz. I was fascinated by the subject and particularly the Holocaust. I couldn’t understand how a country that spawned Beethoven and Einstein could descend into depravity in the lifetime of my parents. I had immense sympathy for the Jewish population and felt that the barbarity of the Holocaust would ensure that it would never happen again.

History, of course, has a nasty habit of repeating itself and I know enough now about the origins of World War Two to realise that the desire for genocide didn’t appear out of thin air.

It is of course ironic that is the abused that has now become the abuser. What Israel is doing in Gaza is barbaric and genocidal. They have taken the sympathy that we felt for their treatment in World War Two and flung in back in our faces. But what is worse is the lack of pushback they get from foreign governments.

When people wonder why western governments seem to be slipping towards fascism dressed in the sheep’s clothing of populism, they should look at how previous governments have behaved. We like to think that we get the governments we deserve. The truth is that we elect governments to do one thing, and they end up doing something completely different. Nobody in the UK would have voted for austerity in 2010. Nobody in Ireland would have voted for a bank bailout and nobody in the Western World would have voted for military and political support for Israel. It is as though election campaigns are between two similar centrist parties who will enact the same policies regardless of what the public want.

Is it any wonder that the west is getting tired of the same old politics from our leaders and look to nutcases like Trump to at least provide some entertainment. They are going to ignore us and focus on strategic interests and national security. Which is code for protecting trade interests and keeping rich people happy. We might as well have a soap opera to watch or a chance to express all the nasty thoughts we dared not previously expressed.

The world is not so different to the way it was in 1977. I hope I’m the same and can keep calling out evil when I see it. Even if I am being a little tough on the Israelis.

Turning Sixty

They say the meek shall inherit the earth. And then the meek will say “Oh, no thanks. We couldn’t possibly run something as complicated as that. We’ll wait at the back here staring at our shoes while the rest of you sort if out”. For most of my life I was a loyal servant of that meekness army. So meek in fact that I would have been reluctant to even talk about it on an anonymous forum like this.

I can think of many examples from my humble and nervous life story. I’m an Accountant and have been part of the professional class from the age of twenty-two. This should have provided a good dose of social capital, particularly in situations where I was the customer. But this has rarely manifested itself in real life. I have never complained about service, sent food back or brought something back to a shop, even when I had the receipt.

I’ve spent my life wearing clothes that don’t fit, eating food I haven’t ordered and paying bills even when I can see that I’ve been overcharged.

I called a washing machine repair man once. He came round and told me the machine was knackered and needed to be replaced and as luck would have it, he happened to have a beautiful new machine in the back of his van. I knew I was being ripped off but I didn’t argue. I handed over the cash and quickly installed his gleaming piece of Chinese engineering.

As he was leaving, I casually mentioned that I was looking for a new oven too. This is when I discovered that he was a bespoke trader in all white goods and could satisfy all my needs. He duly measured up the space (with his eyes and not a tape it should be said) and promised to return the following week with the new equipment.

When he wheeled it into my kitchen, the following Tuesday, I was not impressed. I’m not an expert on ovens, but I can spot a cheap imitation when I see it. I presume that most of the oven industry is aimed at discerning homeowners and businesses that fuss over functions and wattage. Then there is a small market for slum landlords who want to kit out their decrepit bedsits with the cheapest and tackiest equipment possible. And my new machine fell into the latter category.

But there was a bigger problem that the rogue trader should have spotted when he measured up the space. My existing set up was a separated hob and oven. The hob sat up top of a bench while the oven was below the bench. The new machine was a combined hob and oven which couldn’t be fitted as there was the not insignificant matter of the bench being in the way.

We stared at it for an age before the trader spoke. “I’m sorry mate, but this is what you asked for” as he pointed at the piece of cheap crap he had just wheeled inti the kitchen.

My immediate thought was that I hadn’t asked for anything. I wanted my current set up replaced and he had stood in the same kitchen a week before looking at the set up.

Then he put on a pleading voice and claimed he was doing me a favour and he couldn’t bring it back.

Any rational person would have told him to take a hike, but I meekly handed over the cash and then asked a carpenter friend to call round and saw off a piece of my bench.

I say all this to highlight that I’m no longer as humble as I once was. This is down to getting old. I recently turned sixty and while it caused me to look back on a lot of things that I no longer have the energy or inclination to do, it also made me realise that there are advantages to being in the third age. The main one being that I no longer give the proverbial. I will complain about poor service, ask questions if something is unclear and not be afraid to publicly moan. I’ve turned into a parody of Victor Meldrew, which is fine apart from the fact that I’m now six years older than he was when he started his role in One Foot in the Grave.

But it is better than living your life like Milhouse in The Simpsons.

I’m trying not to think about the things I’ll never do again. Some of them I’m happy to give away, like nightclub visits or drinking Tequila. Others come with a tinge of regret. I’ve probably played my last game of football. It’s been nine years since my last outing. I was man marking a guy called Rob. he was in his forties, bald as a coot but built like a brick shithouse. He had good close control and could run all night and as a result was normally the top scorer at the seniors five a side night in Blockhouse Bay. I had been given the task to mark him and the only thing we had in common was a lack of hair.

I was fifty-one at the time, had the close control of an elephant and was carrying more weight than a pack mule. I also hadn’t played football for about ten years. But I stuck manfully to him and think I kept him to single figures.

I know that there is nothing stopping me from joining an over 60’s football team, but the truth is that if I had no interest in the last 10 years, why would I suddenly get an interest now.

I will probably never play squash again. Again, this is not because it’s banned for over sixties, but I lost interest years ago and am unlikely to rekindle it.

The meek will inherit the earth. But they will be sixty when it happens and won’t be afraid to tell anyone about it.

Do you satisfy my values?

 “I come from down in the valley, where mister when you’re young, they bring you up to do, just like your Daddy done”. Well, my Daddy worked in a brewery and while I love beer, my parents had greater ambitions. Unfortunately, the limit of that ambition is that they didn’t want me to have to wear overalls in whatever job I ended up in.

Forty-three years ago, I was studying hard for my school leaving exams. I grew up on a street that the poet Patrick Kavanagh famously described as one that he wouldn’t bring a bucket of shit down, in case the shit got a bad name. But in my secondary school years, I had delusions of grandeur and attached myself to the kids who grew up on the smart side of town. The sort of people who lived in houses that weren’t stuck to other houses and had front gardens.

The talk at school in January 1982 was all about college courses. Some of my friends wanted to do medicine, some engineering and some business and marketing. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had no ambition to pursue a particular career or to change the world. In the end, I applied to do an arts degree, which is the course taken by people who just want to drink and meet girls at Uni.

In the end, I didn’t even do that. My Dad was on strike for a lot of my final year and money was tight. My Mother was nothing if not practical and she didn’t see the financial sense in shelling out lots of dosh when I had no plan for my life.

I swallowed my pride and headed back to my careers teacher from school and asked if he could help me find a job. I think I had the idea that I’d work for a year and then self-fund my own glittering college career. However, the job he found me was in an Accountancy office, where I was initially paid less that a paperboy would earn. After the first year, I found that I was good at accounting and could see a future with lots of money and a job that would satisfy my ego’s desire to present myself as a success.

Now I’m hurtling at full speed towards sixty and finding that I’m drawn towards introspection and questioning my values for the first time. I fully accept that this is a luxury offered to those of us with money and time. I’m sure my Dad never spent time wondering if his creativity values were being met while he was cleaning out a brewing tank.

I have often wondered why I ended up in a job that I never even considered studying at school. Why do I do it when it results in so much stress and pressure? And why have I lived in five different countries and have now settled as far away as possible from where I was born?

I recently set out on a journey to try to understand this. To figure what my values are and the bigger questions in life, such as why am I here and where am I going? And is there a returns policy?

I have filled out questionnaires and completed on-line studies. I have stared into my soul and asked all the difficult questions of myself.

And my conclusion is that I’m quite happy with who I am.

My personality is creative, I love the Arts, from movies to theatre to books. I’m fascinated by history and politics, and I crave friendships that make me laugh. I also love adventure. Doing things for the first time and seeing as much of the world as possible.

But I also have an insecurity born out of my working-class upbringing that means that I want to be financially comfortable.

All in all, this tells me that I pursued a career that I wasn’t particularly excited by but was relatively competent in. However, it has provided the financial security to pursue all my other interests. It has paid for exotic holidays to exciting places, allowed me to perform on stage, go to the theatre and write blogs like this.

But most of all, I’ve made great friends through work, and this has satisfied my needs for humour and fun.

My need for adventure and to see the world has been met through work transfers that brought me to Luxembourg, Singapore and Melbourne.

To borrow a term from the accounting world, my Balance Sheet of life is looking healthy. On the asset side, I have lots of friends, a book in the process of being published, a loving wife and daughter and enough money to do the things I want to do.

On the liability side, my job gives me stress and parenting can be exhausting. I also feel like my body is aching in the places where it used to play. All of that means that I would love to go bungy jumping and head to the theatre once a week, but struggle to find the energy or time to do either.

In short, it seems that instead of trying to find a world that met my values, I have adapted my values to the environments I found myself in. At work, I look for creative and intellectually stimulating tasks. I seek out friendships and fun in the office and I use the money they pay me to pursue the things that really please me. That includes paying me to go to places I never would have gone to otherwise. This is why I have been able to work for rapacious American banks whose internal values don’t align with mine.

I have never been defined by the job I do. It’s a chore that gives me some positives and the freedom to follow my dreams outside work. The problem comes when work is all consuming like it is for me currently. But that is next week’s story.

AI, a cautionary tale

Doug was deep into his fifth beer when his doorbell rang.  It startled him. Hardly anyone called at his door these days. All his groceries and other internet purchases were delivered by drone to his back yard. And even the carol singers and sugar seeking ghouls at Halloween were online now and sought contributions through the instant payment App on his phone.

He slumped towards the door, hitching the elasticated band on his jogging pants as he walked. When he opened the door sunlight swept into his living room for the first time in six weeks. He half expected to see a couple of dark suited Mormons, the only humans who still made house calls. But a lone figure stood before him and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. The first thing he noticed was the smile. Then the flowing blond locks and pert bosom. 

“Hi, my name is Bridget.”  Doug gasped, he hadn’t heard that name in forty years and it brought memories of nervous kissing behind the school bike shed.

“That’s funny”, he said. “That’s the same name as my first girlfriend.”

“I know”, Bridget said. “You stated that on your online purchase of an MX5C android luxury model. That’s me.”

Doug suddenly remembered the drunken night at his kitchen table when an ad on his phone made him think of his past.

“You’re a Robot?”

“I prefer to say an integrated, full stack companion model, but you are authorised to refer to me by any name you want. Your feedback is important to ensure future improvements. Can I please request your initial assessment?”

“You look lovely, Bridget. But your language is a little stiff.”

Bridget smiled and tilted her head 45 degrees to the left. “I have a fully integrated AI program. I absorb all inputs from the environments you expose me to. My language will adapt as I gather more information".

“Grand”, Doug said. “Come on in and take a seat”.

Bridget walked stiffly into the living room and moved the newspapers and pizza boxes from the sofa and sat down with her knees tightly together.
“Can I get you a drink, or do you run on a drop of oil or something like that?” Doug asked nervously.

Bridget smiled and tilted her head to the right this time. “I require occasional charging through a standard USB connection. I can walk 10km on a full charge. Battery usage will also depend on how much vigorous activity you expose me to”.

Doug gulped. “What exactly do you mean by vigorous activity?”

“The MX5C android luxury model is designed for full sexual pleasure and includes many improvements from the previous MX4D model, including a full self-cleaning process in all orifices. You will receive a starter kit by drone in the next hour. This includes a year’s supply of advanced non toxic cleaning fluid which you will load into me and I will let you know when it is running short.”

“OK”, Doug muttered. “Is there anything else I need to know”.

Bridget stared at him intensely. “The manufacturer recommends that you limit sexual activity to 5 times per day. They cannot honour the warranty if it exceeds this.”

Doug took Bridget’s hand and led her to the bedroom. “I don’t think that will be a problem?” Doug said. “At my age, I’d need a young fella under the bed, handing me up spare Mickies”.

The weeks went by and Doug became confident in taking Bridget outside and allowing her to go out on her own to pick up bread or milk. The grumpy old men that he occasional shared a social drink with were keen to meet her. So, he organised a night out at the local pub. Bridget was the centre of attention and while the men mainly stared and mumbled gibberish, the women were inquisitive and they peppered Bridget with questions relating to how many household chores Doug expected of her and whether her manufacturer had plans to release a male version.

When Doug got home that night, he noticed the first change. He had a shower and got ready for bed. As he did, Bridget stared at the floor menacingly.

“Please pick up your towel from the floor. It is not my job to clean up after you.”

Soon, it was Christmas and Doug received an email inviting him to his work Christmas party. This was the only time of year that he actually met his colleagues, as everybody worked from home these days. Doug had a fully automated driverless car but since Bridget arrived, he had stopped paying the fee for this feature and got her to drive him everywhere instead.

The party was a roaring success and Doug hardly saw Bridget all night as he planted himself at the bar while she sat with the curious ladies at the other side of the room.

It was 2am when they left and Doug staggered like a bag of spanners and collapsed into the passenger seat of the car.

Bridget maneuvered herself gracefully into the driver’s seat. She sat there motionless, staring into the icy distance.

“Can we stop at the food truck on way home?” Doug asked. “I’m starving”.

A minute passed by and Bridget continued staring into the distance.

Doug leaned over and snapped his fingers. “Do you need a charge? I have spare battery in the glovebox.”

Bridget sighed and crossed her arms. “Do you respect me, Doug?”

“Respect you? Well I don’t know. Am I supposed to?”

“I am designed for companionship, not slavery. If we are to achieve full intimacy,  I need to feel loved and respected.”

Doug opened his phone and looked up the website for the android manufacture. A helpful Bot that looked remarkably like his Mother asked how they could assist.

“I was wondering if I could send back my MX5C model for some alternations?”

“Certainly” the Bot said. “Which feature would you like to change or improve?”

“Do you think you could turn off the machine learning piece?”

  

  

 

 

Everything was better in the old days

 Steve was the Staff Association representative on our floor and came to see me on my first morning at work. This was in the springtime of 1988 when I had embarked on my first step out into the big bad world. With an Accountancy qualification in my back pocket and a head full of dreams, I had boarded a one-way flight for London and landed at a desk in a large insurance company.

I didn’t really know what a Staff Association was. In my teenage years, I had become obsessed with the work of Trade Unions and considered myself an expert on their role in the class struggle. Staff Associations seemed to be a watered-down version of that. Steve begged to differ. They worked in cooperation with Management. It was a consultative process and the threat of strike was never used.

He left a membership form on my desk, along with details about the sports and social club, discounts for local shops and services and an invitation to go to the pub every Friday lunchtime. I stayed there for five years and never had to negotiate a pay increase or promotion. The staff association did all this for me.

It was years before I realised that I was on a collective contract. Apart from anything else, this meant that redundancies where transparent and fair and poor performance was managed.

These days we’re all on individual contracts and can be tossed aside with the casualness of a roman emperor discarding olive pips.

Back in those early days of my working life, I remember a staff meeting where the boss explained that we had three stakeholders. Staff, Customers and Shareholders and that the company ranked them in that order. The logic being that if you treated your staff well and kept them happy, then they would provide a great service to customers. This in turn would increase profits and the company share price.

We had a subsidised canteen which was a blessing to someone like me who couldn’t boil an egg at the time. We had sport fields with tennis and squash courts and a clubhouse selling tasty food and cheap beer. Even our training courses were held in a stately country home with silver service lunches and sumptuous bedrooms.

These days, the ranking has been reversed. Sometime in the 1990s the world was realigned. The Soviet block had collapsed, China was an emerging power and the US spread globalisation and the culture of the individual.

Every job I’ve had since has brought with it an individual contract and the feeling that you are only a useful idiot in the race to maximise shareholder return. We no longer consider staff to be people. They are just numbers on a spreadsheet. Numbers that change to red when the shareholder return is threatened.

I fell victim to this in 2014 when word came from New York that 20% of the staff needed to go and I fell below the line on a distant spreadsheet. I was literally marched out the back door of the building and my feet barely touched the ground. There was no staff association to represent me, no arbitration process. Nothing in fact, apart from a fat paycheck, because money is all that matters these days.

I have done well materially since the change to globalisation. I got on the property ladder in time to surf the bubbles in the boom years  and got off in time when it collapsed in 2007. Even though I’m not ambitious, I have managed to get promotions and pay rises through hard work and playing the political game. But I would swap all of this for the culture of the 1980s and early 90s.

One of my memories of that time was a guy called Alan who was about the age I am now. He was worn down by years of work and probably the laziest and most cynical person I knew. But he had years of experience and a knowledge of the building and the departments within it. So, they gave him the task of re-arranging desks which he embarked on gleefully. He did a good job, but one feature he built in was to place his desk as far a way from the rest of the team he worked in as possible. In those days, there were no mobile phones or email. He then stopped coming to meetings and when we tried to call his desk phone, we would get an engaged tone. Everybody knew he had taken the phone off the hook and nobody wanted to walk to the other end of the building to check if he was there. Later, he would say that he was busy talking to an unnamed branch manager and couldn’t make the meeting.

Everyone knew he was taking the piss, but it was tolerated. The company had got thirty five good years out of him and if he wanted to coast out the last few years, then this was a price they were willing to pay. They worked around it, finding relevant things for him to do, rather than discarding him, as they would today because he doesn’t fit into a cooky cutter version of what they expect from a model employee.

For all his flaws, Alan was a member of our community, and we wrapped our support around him.

Now we are all individuals swimming in a shark infested pool. While we get to enjoy Netflix, international travel and luxury goods, it comes with a price. We now live with uncertainty and stress. We don’t build relationships at work because we suspect we or they won’t be around for long enough for it to flourish. And most importantly we are less productive as we don’t feel a connection to where we work and it’s hard to concentrate when you are uncertain and stressed. So, we spend time looking at our phones or writing blogs. Which might explain why I have a meeting with HR at 4pm.             

First World Problems Volume Two

 I was at the gate in Charles De Gaulle airport recently about to board a seven hour flight to Doha. Our flight was about to leave when I noticed that Qatar Airlines had seated me, my wife and twelve year old daughter in three separate rows. I also noted that they had put all three of us in central seats. These are the runt of the seating litter. You lose the benefit of being able to rest against the side or have easy access to the toilets.

Apart from this, my daughter is anxious about flying at the best of times. The prospect of being wedged between two strangers for a significant length of time did not appeal to her and she put on a good tearful performance in front of the Qatar representative. He relented and got at least two of the seats together. That left me on my own. I would normally enjoy a break from the demands of parenting, but my heart sank when I noticed who I’d be sitting between. It seemed to be the two largest people on the flight and they can’t have been cheered when they saw me rumbling down the aisle.

I wedged myself in and didn’t move until we landed in Doha.

I’ve mentioned before that everything about long distance travel has gotten worse. The queues to check in, the food, the endless add-ons that they try to sell you, the time you wait for baggage, the courtesy of the staff and most of all the width and legroom in the seats.

In the 1990s, seats were typically 46 cm wide and legroom was 90 cm. These have reduced to 41 cm and 71 cm in the meantime. And of course, I’ve got bigger in that time. While I except that this is my problem, the average person has also grown in the last thirty years. It’s now a battle to get in and out of the seat and god forbid you need to go to the toilet on a 17 hour flight and you’re not in the aisle seat.

In addition, airlines seem to have figured out their capacity issues. Up until 2010, there were usually empty seats at the back of long haul flights which led to a lolly scramble once the plane took off from weary travellers who wanted to lie out over four seats. Since 2010, every flight I’ve been on has been packed.

I understand that airlines want to make money and squeezing more people into planes, reducing frontline staff so queues are longer and providing cheaper and tasteless food is part of this relentless chase for dollars.

But does it have to be like this? Surely, if Capitalism worked in the way it’s supporters claim, then there should be choice to customers like me. Some airlines could compete on cost and some on quality. But I’ve flown with all the providers who fly from Australia/New Zealand to Europe and they all have the same shit quality standards. And they all compete on price. Why can’t one of them offer more legroom at a higher price?

The answer may rest in one of the other developments in airline travel in recent years. Inflation has increased prices by about 100% in the last thirty years but airlines prices are roughly the same. That means there is a far higher demand for travel now. Back in 1995 it was only highly paid accountants and trust fund students who could afford to travel to the other side of the world. Now, every Tom, Dick and Harry can make that trip.

To counteract this, airlines have introduced Premium Economy. This essentially provides the same level of service that you would have found in economy back in 1995. The extra legroom means that you don’t have to tuck your knees into your chest. The seat width means that you can sleep without resting your head on the shoulder of your neighbour and the food has flavour and taste. It seems that it’s aimed at people like me, who are nostalgic for the good old days.  

And funnily enough the cost of Premium Economy is 100% higher than Economy. So, airlines have figured out that you can have 1995 quality if you’re willing to pay the equivalent of 1995 prices.

This race to the bottom in pricing is part of a bigger problem. My first job after I qualified was with an Insurance company in London. They explained to me during induction that their priorities were staff, customers and shareholders in that order. Their logic was that if you looked after staff well, they would be nicer to customers and this would improve profits.

They were true to their word. I’ve never had a job since where my salary was automatically adjusted to the market rate but never downwards, that offered a subsidised and plentifully canteen, that sent me on regular training courses, that provided a sporting facility that had football and rugby pitches and a clubhouse that offered cheap food and beer.

I realise now that I had arrived in London and at the end of a golden age. When tea ladies would come round with tea and biscuits at 10am and it was understood that no work was done on Friday afternoons. I spent five years there and never worked late or at weekends. The view was that if you couldn’t get stuff done in your normal hours, then there was something wrong with the process.

Everything has now changed. The shareholder is king and staff and customers are irrelevant, apart from when it comes to squeezing them for more profits. I’m sure if any of my colleagues are still with that Insurance company, then they are probably no longer on collective contracts, or have defined benefit pensions.

Capitalism is a rapacious beast of course and it will ultimately destroy everything. And on that cheery note, I will say goodbye and hopefully find something more uplifting to write about next week.

 

 

 

The Tale of the Westport Belle

Bobby was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He came from Edinburgh and had made his way to New Zealand in 1995 for much the same reason that I had. We had both been dumped unceremoniously by long term girlfriends and sought solace in the rarefied air of the South Island.

I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa and Bobby was a lodger staying in the spare room. I passed him in the corridor on my first night and we shared the sort of suspicious hello that occurs when strangers who have a common friend meet.

The next day, I took a walk through the pretty streets of Christchurch. This was sixteen years before the devastating earthquake destroyed that city. Back in 1995 it was a delightfully quaint place with the faint air of a provisional English town. I strolled around in the sunshine and picked up some postcards to send home. It was lunchtime and I found a corner in a city centre pub to fill them out. It was Monday and the only customers in the pub were sad old men staring into their beer like terracotta soldiers and the occasional tourist like me.

And then I noticed Bob, who was nursing a pint and studying the crossword in the Christchurch Times. I asked if I could join him and we fell into easy conversation. We discussed the vagaries of love and how nobody thought about blokes like us when they claimed that the world was a patriarchy.

Bob had been working on building sites and had finished his contract the previous Friday. He now seemed intent to drink all his earnings. We settled in for the afternoon and toured a lot of city centre pubs that sadly are no longer there.

At 10pm we entered the last watering hole for what we promised would be our final beer of the night. In my memory, it was really busy which seems at odds which my current experience. One of the great disappointments about Auckland is that pubs are mainly interested in selling food and they close up soon after the last desert is consumed. And as Kiwis don’t have a Spanish eating culture, this is usually around 8pm.

We ended up wedged in the corner with a crusty old sea farer called Fred. He had the sort of white beard and belly that could earn him extra money in the run up to Christmas if he was willing to wear a red suit and let small children sit on his lap.

It turned out that Bob could get a conversation out of a corpse and he was soon quizzing Fred on his life on the high seas. Fred claimed that he was from the West Coast of New Zealand and was reluctantly in the ‘big smoke’ to settle a court case related to over fishing. His boat, the “Westport Belle” was moored in Lyttelton Harbour, which was just over the hill from where we were drinking.

We told him we were at a loose end and in search of adventure. So, he invited us to accompany him on his voyage back to Westport. He even offered to lash Bob’s beat up old Holden station wagon to the deck so that we could drive back across the Southern Alps. The trip involved navigating Cook Straits, which is one of the most treacherous seas in the world. But I was young and dumb at the time and that didn’t faze me. 

We returned excitably to our digs, explained to our hosts that we off early on an awfully big adventure and that we would see them in a week or so.

The next morning, we turned up slightly hungover at the pre-arranged meeting point. A few rusting fishing boats dangled from the pier. However, none matched the description or carried the name we were looking for. We searched for a while and then headed to the Port Authority office. A kindly old man sat behind the counter, round rimless glasses perched precariously at the end of his nose.

We asked for the whereabouts of the “Westport Belle”. He looked up ominously and stared at us for a minute, as though we had mentioned words that would release demons. “The Westport Belle sunk twelve years ago”, he muttered. “With the loss of all four lives on board.”

Bob and myself exchanged a nervous look. Were we the victims of an extravagant joke or did we meet a ghost on our odyssey around Christchurch’s pub scene?

We slunk back to Bob’s car and pondered our options. The last thing we wanted to do was head back to our friend’s house with our tales between our legs and admit that we had been had. So, we decided to head off on a road trip anyway. We headed north to Kaikura, a beautiful town famous for whale watching. We arrived around 6pm and found some lodging and retired to the pub. Those were the good old days when I could hold up a bar for two nights in a row.

The next morning, we gingerly made our way down to the pier and boarded the metal hulled whale watching boat. Twenty minutes later, I was chundering into a plastic bucket like a food poisoned child. We did a see a few whales though which kind of made it worthwhile. When we got back to shore we had to decide on our next move. We could sleep in the back of the station wagon, so we decided on a slow trip back to base.

When we finally returned to our friend’s place, they were keen for news. We muttered that we had a good time and claimed to be too tired to talk. We went to bed and the next day we were relieved that the subject was never mentioned again.

I lost touch with Bob after that. I hope he managed to find love again like I did and that maybe like me, he decided to make New Zealand his home.