Farewell, Old Friend

Well, I have survived the rigours of Christmas........actually, between you, me and the gatepost, there were few rigours to cope with as not much happened. Mrs B was (and still is) bed-bound with some nasty sick-y, chest-y malaise so no traumas of Christmas lunch, no subtly leaving the room as the sprouts took effect and no groaning and dozing for the rest of the day.

In fact, truth be told, I was a bit dicky myself so Christmas was all a bit anti-climactic apart from the visits of the young Bassetts who showered me with a cornucopeia of gifts on Christmas Day and introduced me to the ridiculously funny board game called Balderdash on Boxing Day. I might just mention at this juncture, my beautiful young 18 year old, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth daughter who has never ever sworn in my presence before but let herself down rather badly after a particularly shrewd ploy of mine during the aforesaid board game. Anyway, sweetie, I have a birth certificate to prove what you called me isn't true!!

I am, as usual, moving away from the subject in hand viz. a farewell to an old friend. Who is this, I hear you ask? Could it be an epitaph to Harold Pinter? Might it be the passing of my dressing gown (replaced by a rather snazzy M & S grey marl version)? Is it a precursor to the wailing and gnashing of teeth as Brighton & Hove Albion slides inexorably from the nondescript region of Division One to the barren wastes of Division Two? Is it possible I am bidding goodbye to the gremlins perched sardine-like on both shoulders? Nope, it's a tribute to the great institution that we know as Woolworths.

When I was a child and we ventured from the cave into the realms of civilisation, there were several chain stores. Obviously nothing like today: you still had small shops where people called you Sir and Madam and you were sent for "half a pound of bacon and not too fatty" from your local butcher. I remember we had Home & Colonial, Mence Smiths hardware store and the biggest of the lot (whose name escapes me) where, after one had paid, the cash was placed in a container which would zoom along the most amazing system of cables across the ceiling to the central citadel where a large, superior-looking woman sat like a giant spider - custodian of the dosh. The one which always stood out however was F W Woolworth & Co. It was a veritable treasure trove where a small boy could wander and wonder at the vast array within.

I can still remember getting lost in there and standing in the middle of the store bawling my head off until a nice lady rescued me and reunited me with my mother. The traumas of this stayed with me for some time but I eventually managed to re-enter the confines without tying a safety rope around my waist and attaching the other end to the entrance doors. In those days, Ladybird clothes were the must-have of the cool kid and shoelaces were a necessity. The floors were always really shiny and great for sliding and the biscuit counter was at exactly the right level for young eyes to gaze in lust. I also have to say that Portslade Woolworth was tthe scene of the one and only time I have ever shoplifted (a packet of Polos, I seem to recall).


Both my children earned their first pay packets as Saturday staff at Woolies and, even in the last decade, there was always something there to capture my interest. Pick 'n Mix of course was always an attraction and I remember going in to see my son once and him standing there chatting to us as, much to her embarrassment, he shovelled large amounts of Pick 'n Mix into Mrs B's bag and pockets. He also related the story of having to redo all the bins as there were some little beetle-like things inhabiting them and - best of the lot - the eccentric lady who was banned from the store after weeing in the aforesaid Pick 'n Mix bins!!

I popped into my local Woolies today and it was a sad sight. Like vultures stripping the bones of a once great warrior, the people latched onto the last bargains. Having said that, they were flogging off the sealed boxes of Pick 'n Mix so I was tempted with a 3.5kg boz of strawberry cables marked down from their retail equivalent of £20 to a mere £10. I took it to the checkout and the young lad explained that there was a further 50% reduction hence he could only accept 5 of our glorious English pounds. I reacted rather like John McEnroe doubting the presence of the Prisoner of Azkhaban ("You cannot be Sirius!"), told him I would be back shortly and, cutting a long story short, added 3 more boxes of apple cables (spot the deliberate mistake here!), Haribo liquorice wheels and strawberry sweethearts to my purchases. I now have 14kg of sweets for the princely sum of £20 and the plan to start my diet regime after the New Year might just be in jeopardy.

A suitable memorial perhaps but I shall still miss the old girl. After all, where else do I go if I need some stick-on soles in a hurry? Where else can I wile away a few minutes watching a TV demo of the latest JML gadget?

RIP Woolies - you'll be sorely missed. You were an anachronism in this modern world but you were part of Life.



PS I make no apologies for the new juke box selection - Christmas is a time to indulge!

Season's Greetings

As Greg Lake says in "I Believe in Father Christmas", the Christmas you get you deserve.

To all my lovely readers, a truly magical Christmas where you are surrounded by love and happiness. May your every dream become a hope and your hopes become reality.

Monkey Business

Lucky is defined as "having unexpected good fortune".

Some people are quite lucky when it comes to winning raffles, draws etc whilst others are lucky in less material ways. I am certainly of the latter although the reason for this small but perfectly-formed blog entry is to celebrate the fact that ..........I HAVE WON SOMETHING!! Please allow me to elucidate:

Now, there is an extremely talented and quite idiosyncratic lady of whom I have an internet acquaintance and who goes by the name of Kitty Wrinkle. We are part of the same forum and she is one of these people who seems to remain positive throughout all sorts of happenings in her life. She writes a blog which is full of .........dare I say, girly things such as sewing and crafts and the like. Not exactly the thing for a superhero although she does write very wittily about all sorts of other matters and has this quirky view of Life which can be both amusing and thought-provoking. However, she gets excited about buttons.......need I really say any more?

Anyway, it seems to be the done thing in the weird and wonderful world of crafting to share one's talents by swapping not only exciting pieces of material or a particularly amazing ball of wool (shakes head sadly) but also exercising the philanthropic gene by doing the occasional giveaway. Followers of Kitty's blog will see that she has been quite lucky in these giveaways herself but I am now the object of her own particular generosity insofar as I appear to be the proud owner of .............................. SantaMonk!

Of the 70 odd comments left on her blog where this specific act of Christmas cheer was announced, the name of Bassett was apparently randomly generated and I now have a simian Santa to cherish. Kitty is justifiably a doyen of the monkey-making world and her creations are much sought after so I am both touched and honoured that I have a second creation of hers. Second?, I hear you say. Oh yes, she created Plod Monkey which I commissioned when Master Bassett became a police officer and he now resides in the foetid pit which is PC Bassett's bedroom alongside the Liverpool posters, sports equipment and pictures of scantily-clad wimmun.

Thank you, Ms Wrinkle and may your sock box never diminish.

"Winning" SantaMonk made me think back over the other wins of my long and tedious life. The first I remember is on the now defunct Radio Brighton when I entered a phone-in competition and won an LP token. It was my first album - Well Respected Kinks - and is still in my possession and worth every penny of the 17/6d which I didn't have to pay.

Other wins have been a limited edition Monopoly set, Rolling Stones tickets and a portable TV although, I have to say, I'm not somebody that necessarily goes in for competitions as a matter of course. Actually, come to think of it, maybe I AM quite lucky and ought to enter more things.

Anyway, I shall publish an in situ photograph of SantaMonk in due course and wait hopefully for Kitty creations to assume the financial worth of an early Steiff bear. Gosh, the thought of Arthur Negus' great grandson handling my primate is making me feel quite faint!

Above image from sockmonkeylady.com

Bertie's Travelogue Part 5 - Iraklion to Entebbe

It's been a while since I last published my flight journal. Although I have been carrying on with my circumnavigational exploits, a combination of factors prevented me from sharing them with the world - until now, that is! Thrill to the bounce of an horrendous landing at Luxor, marvel at the combination of pixels that represents the pyramids, gaze in admiration at the devil-may-care way I walk through the green channel at Entebbe customs, share with me the rigours of a Ugandan prison after they caught me (sigh).

I left Iraklion in a blaze of Mediterranean sunshine and climbed to 13,000 feet en route to Cairo. I have to say that, considering it's a virtual trip, I was quite excited at travelling through Africa. Egypt has always held a fascination for me and I can remember , at the tender age of 16, reading all 3 volumes of Carter & Mace's "The Tomb of Tutankhamun". I still periodically dip into my other Egyptian tomes although I have yet to realise my ambition of a visit to the country. One author of whom I am quite fond, Wilbur Smith, writes with a deep love of Africa but, more importantly, he's an author that provides a lot of historical fact. He has written a series based in Ancient Egypt as well as many others chronicling the discovery and exploration of this great continent so I felt quite at home with many of the pla ces I was to visit.

A gentle flight found me at Cairo, Africa's most populated city and also known as Al-Qahirah, or 'the victorious" by the Arabic world. It never existed during Egypt's greatest period and was not founded as such until almost 1000 AD. Lying at the mouth of the Nile delta it is, to many visitors, merely a starting point for the journey south , deep into the dynastic majesty that was Ancient Egypt.

Now, in reality, I would have made a beeline for Cairo Museum but time was short and I had no more Egyptian Pounds to put in the parking meter so off I flew. The first thing I looked for as I left Cairo and set a course for Luxor was,of course, the Great Pyramid at Giza. Sadly, the view of the pyramid with the desert behind it is a bit misleading as, if you swing round 180º, you find the slums of Cairo gently nudging its perimeter.

I won't bore you with details of this monument and burial place to Khufu (or Cheops); that's why God invented Google. Suffice to say it was the world's tallest structure for almost 4ooo years. It comprises of 2,300,000 blocks of sandstone each weighing 2.5 tons, is perfectly orientated to the points of the compass and has no more than 8 inches difference between the 4 sides. Damn' clever these Egyptian chappies!

Back to the flight and I sped over the Sahara with the Nile to the West and the Red Sea just about visible in the far distance to the East. One of my great holiday memories was flying over the Sahara on my way to Sri Lanka. As the dawn came, I gazed in awe as this seemingly limitless expanse of sand was slowly revealed; the rising sun giving it an a blood-red cast and its beauty almost enough to take away the discomfort of a long flight in a cramped aircraft seat.

Luxor duly loomed and I ignored Air Traffic and went for a low-level flight along the banks of the Nile before touching down. Now, if this was a real flight, I would spend a lot of time at Luxor, what with The Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, the Ramesseum, the Colossi of Memnon et al. Luxor was previously known as Thebes, the capital of the Egypt of the New Kingdom. In the early days, its local god grew in stature commensurate with the growth in prominence of the city and this god, Amun, became linked with the sun go d Ra thus creating the new "king of gods" Amun-Ra. The great temple at Karnak is dedicated to him and, although Thebes lost its status as Egypt's capital during the Late Period, it remained the spiritual capital right up to the Greek Period.


(Apologies if I'm getting carried away with this - I warned you Egyptology was an interest!)

I'd better move on to my next stop, Khartoum; another city steeped in history. I have to say that the flying had become somewhat repetitious although at least there were a few lakes and hills on this leg: the principal lake being Lake Nasser which was created following the construction of the Aswan Dam in 1970 and solved the historical problem of the Nil e flooding.

Khartoum, where the Blue and White Niles converge, is remembered predominantly in the UK from when the forces of the Mahdi besieged an Anglo-Egyptian force led by General Gordon way back in 1884. Sadly, we lacked the ability to score the all-important away goal and the garrison was massacred. The replay at Omdurman several years later saw the Brits, under the captaincy of Kitchener, take not only the Mahdi trophy but also the country of Sudan.

These days, Khartoum, (along with the rest of Sudan) has a depressing modern history. In the '70s, the Black September group held ten hostages at the Saudi embassy, five of w hom were diplomats. The incident resulted in the deaths of the US ambassador, deputy ambassador, and the Belgian chargé d'affaires. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Khartoum was the destination for hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing conflicts in neighboring nations such as Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda. The refugees settled in lar ge slums at the outskirts of the city which were swollen even more when, from the mid-1980s onward, large numbers of Sudanese, displaced from the violence of the Civil War and Darfur conflict also fled there.

Hmm, depressing stuff. I had a search around for some positive facts about Khartoum but, apart from a museum, a souk and a bowling alley, it appears the best feature is th e runway out of there.

Off we go again and it's off to the first place whose name is unknown to me - Malakal. I can only imagine the stop is merely to refuel as there seems to be naff-all here. This is one picture I found which is entitled "Malakal marketplace" !!

Paying my Sudanese pounds to the nice man at the avgas station, I soared up once more and headed for my final stop in Sudan which is the the city of Juba, capital of southern Sudan and which sits on the side of the White Nile.. Now, in the back of my mind, I had a feeling that Juba was linked to slavery but research shows this was totally wrong. In fact, Juba is NOT a nice place to be as it was right at the heart of the Civil War and now has a virtually no n-existent infrastructure as well as a proliferation of land mines and other ordinance lying around ready for the unwary. On the positive side, as of 2008, it has 3 paved roads! Incidentally, the juba I was thinking of was actually the name of the food eate n by the slaves in the Southern States of America - I just knew slavery came into it somewhere.

I was glad to leave Sudan, It's like so much of Africa, historically war-torn and ravaged but with not a lot of the inherent topographical beauty to redeem it. Perhaps now, I can leave the arid desolation behind and revel in verdant splendour?

I knew that the flight to Entebbe in Uganda would take me over some more interesting country and it certainly did. To the west, Lake Albert and the Kabarega National Park whilst beneath me the massive Lake Kyoba. As I neared Entebbe I hastily checked my bearings as I seemed to have reached the coast whilst in the middle of Africa! Even at 19000 feet, Lake Victoria is colossal - 68,800 square kilometres (26,560 miles²) in size, making it the continent's largest lake and the second widest fresh water lake in the world. Enteb be is situated on the northern shore and it was a nice touchdown which left me with an almost palpable sense of relief.

For the more elderly (or scholarly) among you, dear readers, there may well be remembrance of a certain president Idi Amin of Uganda and his decision to expel all of the Indian residents of the country due to his paranoia of their entrepreneurial skills and his desire to seize their shops, factories and businesses. I was a 20 year old Civil Servant at the time and volunteered to go and work at one of the "resettlement centres" hurriedly being set up as planeloads of British passport-holders turned up without prior warning and little luggage. Yhey were allowed to bring out the equivalent of £22 and had lost everything. I arrived at a mothballed army camp which had hurriedly been resurrected and was given 6 staff and told to create a department , open 24/7, coping with anything that wasn't dealt with elsewhere! From memory, there were 27 centres opened and some 2 years later I ended up as Staff Officer at the very last one at West Malling. It was a crazy period where one never knew what was going to happen from one hour to the next and I made some wonderful friends among the residents. It's also pretty unusual in the Civil Service to see something through to the end (although the actual end is a bit hazy courtesy of a certain Major Colin Landells and his champagne cocktails).

Anyway, I digress and I am also conscious that I have wittered on for far too long. Next time, it's up, up and away to Mount Kilimanjaro..... hmmm, looks li ke I'm going to reach my peak!