I’m half Scottish. My father, John S Richardson, was born in Glasgow before moving to Australia with his family when he was aged ten. My mother, Rena M Cox, was a second-generation Australian whose ancestors lived for more than 100 years in Southwark, London. My wife, Rosemary, has a number of ancestors from the Scottish Highlands. Rosemary and I moved to London in 1968.

Rosemary and I made this trip in June 1995. Here’s our report.

Rosemary and I popped up to Scotland for four days. We flew to Aberdeen, about 700 kms directly north of London, after work. As it was June 21, the longest day of the year, it was still daylight when we arrived in Aberdeen at 9.30pm. We picked up a hire car at the airport. By the time we had completed the paperwork, the airport terminal had switched by being a buzz of activity, brought about by the arrival of two large planes at once, to being nearly deserted.

We were booked into a farmhouse B&B about 15 kms from the airport. It was perched on the top of a hill at the end of the end of a winding road, with potholes almost big enough to live in. There were large numbers of rabbits. I hadn’t seen so many since the rabbit plagues back in Australia.

We reached the farmhouse about 10.30pm, and although the sun had disappeared over the horizon by then, it was still very light. And it was still light when we hit the sack an hour later.

The B&B was owned by a former British Army paratrooper of uncertain sexual inclination and his wife who was a professional nanny. He was a non-stop talker and was revealed to be what must be just about the last Conservative Party voter in Scotland. Not that he thought much of John Major, who did his “I resign” act while we were there. He fondly recalled the great days of Margaret Thatcher. (I didn’t know there had been any!)

The bedroom was quite acceptable with an en-suite bathroom. Breakfast was cooked and served in the lounge on a combined stove and heater. Our hosts bought the farmhouse as a ruin six years ago and were progressively restoring it. Consequently, the surroundings were a bit scrappy, and the landscape was rather spoilt by high-tension power lines and heaps of rubble in nearby fields.

Apart from having the longer days, we were also being transported back to Spring. It was quite strange to be among plants that were in full bloom six to eight weeks after they had been in bloom in London. The growing season in Scotland is very short. It is also very fast, no doubt because it is light from about 2am to 11.30pm.

The countryside around Aberdeen is very, very different from the Highlands. It is more like Western Victoria. It is mostly lush, gently rolling green fields, with the occasional yellow rape field. The farmers were busily mowing grass for sileage to feed to the dairy herds. A second harvest of grass would be taken off towards the end of summer. The nearest thing to a mountain in the area was a hill called The Mother’s Breast for quite obvious reasons. A single rock on the top represented the nipple.

Aberdeenshire is one of the richer areas on Britain because it is the main base for the landing of North Sea gas and oil. It is also one of the few parts of Britain where house prices have not been falling.

We spent two days in Aberdeenshire, mostly visiting some of the many castles scattered across the countryside. Many of the castles are owned by the Scottish National Trust, but some are hotels or private homes. Our favourite is Crathes Castle, not so much because of the castle itself, but mostly because of the stunning gardens. I don’t think we have ever seen gardens to match those at Crathes. Just inside the main gates was a large pond in which was reflected the backdrop of lilac-coloured rhododendrons.

Further along the drive there were other rhododendrons in deep reds and purples. Beside the castle itself were formal, walled gardens, each one different in style from the other. One garden was ablaze with lupins, poppies and other Spring flowers. We don’t think we have ever seen such large poppies. They were about 1.75 metres high with blooms about the size of a saucer. They were mostly iridescent reds or pinks. We spent ages taking photographs of them.

Another favourite is Fraser Castle. It is a very grand and beautiful building surrounded by vast lawns. A short distance away from the building is a walled vegetable and flower garden. Not as spectacular as the ones at Crathes, but nonetheless, very pleasant and relaxing.

The car we hired was a smallish Vauxhall Astra. It was very comfortable and easy to drive, though the engine power was only slightly more than that of a spin drier.

On the Friday, we drove north to the Banff district coast. As we approached the coast, the temperature fell by several degrees and the brilliant blue sky disappeared behind cloud that rolled in from the sea. Our first stop was Portsoy, a 17th century former fishing port, now apparently better known for its marble works. The port entrance was protected by a large, attractive stone barrier. The seafront homes were very attractive. Some were in Portuguese and Dutch styles.

We were booked into a B&B in a small conservation village, Fordyce, about 5 kms back from the coast. The house was a former school building and was very attractive and beautifully furnished. Our hosts were a part-time physiotherapist and her town planner husband.

In the evening, the coastal cloud had disappeared and we drove to two stunning local beaches, at Sandend and Cullen. Cullen was also a very pretty town notable for the spectacular railway viaducts that tower over parts of it and are sadly no longer used.

On the Saturday, we drove to Inverness to take the train to the Kyle of Lochalsh. Scottish Rail keeps threatening to close down this line on the grounds that it loses too much money. But it is arguably the prettiest and most spectacular train journey in Britain. Anyway, we nearly missed the train because just about everything along the 100km road conspired to slow us down. There were roadworks, and caravans and petrol tankers hogging the middle of the road. There was even a three-wheel Reliant Robin car pootling along at about 55 kph. We caught the train with three minutes to spare.

The journey was everything we could have hoped for. There was an overcast sky as we left Inverness, but within 45 minutes the sky began to clear as we climbed into the mountains. Fifteen minutes later there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and we could see the mountain peaks still clothed in the remains of the winter snows.

The train passed though rock cuttings lined with wild rhododendrons and roses in full bloom and meandered through the glens and around the lochs. It was breath-taking, particularly as we went around Loch Carron, the area where a branch of Rosemary’s Gillies family once lived. We could look out of the train straight down into the crystal-clear water of the loch. At one point, we could see thousands of jellyfish in the water. Six of the stations along the route were “request stops”. In other words, you had to wave the train down if you wanted to join it, or alert the driver or guard if you wanted to get off. One of the smaller stations had a platform just long enough for one of the train’s carriages. One of the main stations, Plockton, also doubled as a restaurant. Tables, nicely laid out with table cloths were placed along the platform, with people enjoying their meals in the sunshine.

There was a kids birthday group in our carriage. The parents decked out their seats with balloons and hung streamers out the windows. It was all very informal.

We arrived at Kyle around lunch-time and immediately caught the the ferry across the water to Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye. Sadly, the ferries will soon disappear, to be replaced by a toll bridge that will open later this year.

We walked about 3kms up a gentle hill to a recommended restaurant for lunch. We were starving by the time we got there, but the walk was well worth it. The specialty was seafood. I had a seafood salad. It was huge, with langoustines, mussels and lobster flaps. Langoustines are a bit like yabbies. Lobster flaps, which I had never seen before, were the juicy bits right at the end of the lobster tails. I washed all this down with Guinness. Not exactly a Scottish drink, but most refreshing all the same.

On the way back to the town, we stopped for awhile and lay down on the grass beside the water. We could have stayed there forever, and it was very hard to drag ourselves up to catch the ferry back to Kyle. The sun was very high in the sky and the temperature was in the high 20s. We were in danger of getting quite burnt.

The return train journey to Inverness was also very enjoyable. The landscape had a different look about it as the shadows lengthened across the Highlands. We reached Inverness at 7.40pm and drove to Cullen for dinner at a very nice hotel.

On our final day, we drifted back towards Aberdeen, still in brilliant sunshine. We just pulled up beside the road whenever we saw anything worth studying and/or photographing. Our final stop before going to the airport was to Belmedie, a vast beach just north of Aberdeen. The beach is very deep and long, against a backdrop of huge sand dunes. The place was packed with families taking advantage of the unusually warm weather. Many of the bodies had clearly not seen the sun for a long time. There were going to be some very sore people that night.

Because Scotland is normally a cool place, ice has never figured much in restaurants. American tourists, in particular, find this extraordinary. We were having lunch at one of the castles and some Americans at the next table were baffled by the fact that the waitress couldn’t supply ice for the water jug. “Is there an ice shortage in Scotland?” asked one. “No, replied the waitress, “we just don’t have it.” The train to Kyle had ice on the outward journey, but when I asked for some to go in my drink on the way back, the girl in charge of the food trolley said: “Sorry, it has all melted.”

**********

And finally from a letter to my family dated March 5 1995:

BBC VISIT TO ROME

Work has been hectic as usual. I was in Rome for about 48 hours last week for negotiations with Orbit, the company that runs the cluster of satellite TV channels that includes the Arabic BBC TV service. Because of marketing problems, Orbit has delayed plans to extend our daily transmission period from eight hours to 24-hours. The negotiations were pretty tense as quite a few million pounds are at stake. Still, I am sure it is all character-forming. But it would have been nice to have had some spare time to see a little of the city before flying back to London. All I got to see was the airport, the BBC office, the satellite broadcast centre in the suburbs, my hotel and a couple of restaurants. So much for the glamour of the jet-set life!

NOT FOR THE HANDS

A BBC colleague of mine recently took her mother and an aged aunt to Scotland on holiday. At the end of a visit to the toilet, the aunt complained that the hand-drying machine wouldn’t work. “No wonder,” she was told, “it’s a condom machine.”

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters can be found HERE.

Carolyn tells me that copies are still available in the Golden Grains Museum in Charlton. I have also been able to buy a second-hand copy of Grace’s book: “The Shire of Charlton - 100 Years On”, which is long out of print but available to read at the Golden Grains Museum in Charlton.

This was published in 1995 and I made the launch speech reported by the North-Central News:

The second-hand book has reminded that I wrote the Foreword to the book when I was still working for BBC World Service Television in London. I’m not sure how much interest there is in this, but here it is:

Another discovery from Grace’s book was that the Shire of Charlton once had a seal:

There is now no such thing as a Shire of Charlton. Charlton is now part of the Shire of Bulloke, along with Birchip, Donald, Sea Lake and Wycheproof and several small towns in the area.

============================================================================

Let me return to my account of the Centenary Back-to-Charlton

Extracts from a letter of April 18, 1995

On the Saturday night there was a Period Ball in the Charlton Shire Hall. It was great fun. They had all the old dances, such as the Pride of Erin, the Valletta Waltz, and the Foxtrot. I couldn’t remember the steps, but my sisters, Ruth and Alison, and I had a go anyway. There was also a supper of tea/coffee, cakes, sausage rolls and sandwiches included in the entrance charge of $10. My mother, Rena Wood, couldn’t dance, but had a wonderful time chatting to all her old friends. She didn’t really want to leave when the rest of us decided to pack it in around 11.45pm.

Heavy rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning, began in the early hours of Sunday morning and continued until the Back-To parade began at 2pm. It was the first decent rain for some time, so all the locals were delighted to have it seriously interrupt the celebrations.

The street parade was mostly made up of club groups, old cars and old farm harvesting equipment. It was well done and appropriate to the community.

The weather was turning cold during the afternoon, though there was no return of the rain. Late in the afternoon we all drove up to 10 Peel Street, our favourite home in Charlton, in the hope that we could have a look inside, but the current owner wasn’t there. We had a look around outside, which has changed a great deal since we lived there in the 1950s.

When my mother sold the house to the Tardrew family in 1960, there was a high Cypress hedge at the front. The old bungalow (outhouse), where brother Jeff and I slept, is still there, but very dilapidated and now used as a storage area. The old shed, the outside toilet, the poultry pens and the front hedge have gone.

A “CAVE” VISIT

We also went out to Curnow’s Hills (Mt Doboobetic), just outside the town, and visited our old “cave where we used to have barbecues in my early teens with our friends. It was a cave in our imagination only. It was a hole blasted in the hill to explore the possibility of it being turned into a blue-stone quarry. The quarry project went elsewhere.

Sisters Ruth and Alison hadn’t been out to the “cave” since they left Charlton, so they particularly enjoyed seeing it again. Some of the bits and pieces, including a grill, used for our barbecues, were still there.

Here is my visit to the “cave”:

In the evening, we went to a concert. It was tremendous fun, despite the first impressions gained from the programme. It began and ended with a singalong which I dislike. In between there was a variety of local singers and a comedy act. The compere was Bill Clifford, a local guy I grew up with. He had had very little education and had worked all his life in quite lowly jobs. But he was an excellent compere with a wonderfully rich voice and an excellent fund of beautifully-told jokes. I told him that he should have been working professionally in broadcasting. At the end of concert, there was another supper of tea/coffee, cakes, sandwiches and sausages rolls. All the food was homemade.

One thing that has struck me as the weekend has progressed is how few people of my age are still in full-time employment. The most common phrase I heard was “I took a (early retirement) package”. This was either because of staffing cutbacks in their organisations or because of poor health.

On Easter Monday, we packed up, saw a few more people and returned to Melbourne.

The Back-to-Charlton was a brilliant success — much better than I had dared hope for. I must have met hundreds of people from my past and was well talked out. My mother also had a wonderful time. She really sparkled. It could well be her last visit to Charlton, so it was marvellous to see her enjoying herself so much.

DARWIN AND A SIDE TRIP TO THR KAKADU NATIONAL PARK

The BBC wanted me to take lots of colour transparencies of Darwin and Kakadu for its news files, so took none for my personal use. Sad.

The following are extracts from a letter to our two boys in London

The flight from Sydney was pretty straight-forward, except that we flew to Darwin via Brisbane, not Alice Springs as we had expected. We arrived in Darwin at lunchtime after a flight totalling about six hours. We got an interesting view of the Gulf of Carpentaria on the leg between Brisbane and Darwin. There were huge sweeps of beaches, several miles deep. The beaches are very deep presumably because the tide in that area is up to seven metres high.

Getting off the plane in Darwin was like stepping into a sauna: the temperature was 33C, with very high humidity. Our hotel — the Atrium — was on the Esplanade, across the road from a very pretty park. The Atrium is a very pleasant hotel. It is six storeys high and the atrium itself was very attractive, with creepers hanging down from the upper floors. Our first room had a good view of the sea; our second was on the other side, with a view across Darwin’s CBD (Central Business District). In both rooms, the air conditioning system had an uphill battle keeping the temperature at an acceptable level.

On turning on the local commercial TV channel, the first advert we saw was one for a lost dog. Somehow, I can’t see such an advert appearing on British TV, if only because a minute of airtime is usually charged in multiples of £10,000.

We liked Darwi, at least as a place to visit. It is very pretty with some very nice parks and some interesting buildings. But I don’t imagine that its nightlife is much of an attraction. The place seemed to close down about 7pm, though I am sure that if you know where to find it, something must be going on somewhere.

One thing we particularly enjoyed was the visit to Aquascene, where fish come in with the high tide to be fed. Someone had taken to feeding the fish years ago and the message had apparently got around, with more and more fish coming in with each tide. Eventually, the place was developed as a tourist attraction. It was fascinating. Thousands of fish, most of them quite large, came right up to the shore. Visitors were able to stand on a concrete ramp in bare feet with the fish swimming around them seeking scraps of bread.

We were surprised to see that the majority of foreign tourists in the territory were German. They mostly seemed to be on packaged tours.

We felt that being a weather forecaster in the Northern Territory would be a bit on the dull side. For five months of the year, the forecast would be 28 degrees and downpours; for seven months it would be 33 degrees and sunny. It must be strange being able to go through life knowing with reasonable accuracy what the weather would be on a particular day of any calendar year.

VISIT TO KAKADU

We hired a car for much of the visit to the Northern Territory so that we could drive to Kakadu National Park under our own steam, rather than take one of the bus tours. We got a Toyota Corolla, which did the job nicely for us.

We left for Kakadu about mid-morning. It was bloody hot. We were extremely grateful for the air conditioning in the car, even if did nt more than bring the temperature down to a bearable level. If we switched off the engine during any of our photographic and refreshment stops, the temperature in the car rocketed within minutes.

We found the landscape very interesting. Neither of us had expected it to be SO lush. There were lots of warnings not to enter the water or hang around the water’s edge because of the crocodiles.

We stopped at Humpty Doo for a milk-shake at the wonderfully-naff Hard Croc Cafe. Style was not its strong point, but it was a fun break in the journey. Lots of truckies were also there. Most were wearing huge beards, plus the regulation wide hat, shorts and boots.

We were booked overnight into the Gagudju Lodge at Cooinda, about 300 kms from Darwin. It had a number of motel-style cabins, or if you required something cheaper, there were budget rooms with just a bed and air-conditioning. And there was a caravan park as well. Our motel-style room was comfortable and in pleasant surroundings. The air conditioning seemed more efficient than at the Atrium Hotel in Darwin. Entertainment was a bit limited in the rooms. The lodge is out of range of domestic television and radio. However, I was able to pick up the BBC World Service’s shortwave signal from Singapore.

We arrived at Cooinda about mid-afternoon, comfortably in time for a sunset cruise on the Yellow Waters Billabong. The cruise lasted a couple of hours and was very enjoyable. But because the wet season had only recently finished, the water was very high and covered a wide area, and this meant that the wildlife was dispersed. We were told the best time to see the wildlife is towards the end of the dry when the billabong is quite small.

We didn’t see any crocodiles, which was a bit disappointing. But we did see a sea eagle’s nest and several sea eagles. As with most parts of Kakadu, there were lots of other, smaller birds of prey drifting about the skies. We also saw a variety of other birds. And the sunset over the billabong was very pretty.

Back at the lodge we had a barbecue. I had kangaroo and Rosemary had Barramundi. I thought the kangaroo tasted a bit like venison. I imagine it would be better stewed rather than grilled. The Barramundi was earthy and a bit like what we imagine Murray Cod tastes like.

In the morning we went to Nourlangie Rock, which we had visited very briefly on our way to Cooinda. It was very dramatic, like an Albert Namitjira painting. Rosemary stayed in the car sweating it out, while I sweated it out on a walk up to the Aboriginal rock paintings. Hot though it was, it was a very enjoyable walk, with lots of scenes to be photographed for the BBC Picture Library. Here’s just one sample of the Aboriginal rock art:

We had also hoped to go to Ubirr, an area recommended by several people, but this wasn’t possible because the waters were still high. Only four-wheel-drive vehicles were able to make the trip.

We had lunch in Jibaru, the main town in Kakadu, most noted for its hotel built in the shape of a crocodile. Subtle it wasn’t.

From Jibaru, we made a relaxed trip back to Darwin, with several stops along the way for refreshment or to take photographs. I got some good pictures for the picture library of the giant mounds made by the cathedral termites. These were about 10 feet tall and up to 50 years old. We also got good pictures of some road trains and of a varied flock of wading birds feeding on the fish at a water hole and stream beside the road.

We were surprised to see that the majority of foreign tourists in the territory were German. They mostly seemed to be on packaged tours.

Qantas failed to find seats for us on the Sunday night flight back to London, SO we were forced to stay another day. We didn’t mind too much because the area was beginning to grow on us. But it did mean an unbudgeted extra day in the hotel.

We made the best of the extra time by going swimming, catching up on a few more sights and taking photographs. We went out of town to a crocodile farm. I was astonished at the size of some of the crocodiles and at their camouflage skills. It confirmed the warnings we’d heard about how easy it was to walk right up to a croc without seeing it until too late.

I also took the opportunity while in Darwin to visit the headquarters of Australia-TV, one of the BBC’s main competitors in Asia. It is a very small operation, but very effective.

On our last evening we went on a sunset cruise around the harbour. It lasted about two hours and the views were quite stunning. One aspect we had noted earlier was the speed with which the sun went down and the almost-unearthly afterglow that lasted for nearly half an hour. We assume it was the sun being reflected off the dust in the sky. We also enjoyed seeing the stars shining so brightly against a pitch-black sky. This is something not seen in London, where the sky always has an orange glow from the street lights.

In the final hours before going to the airport on Monday we had a fish-and-chips lunch on the Darwin Wharf and visited the local art gallery and museum. We were most impressed. The aboriginal art was particularly enjoyable to view.

BACK HOME IN LONDON

Extract from a letter to my family in Australia. London, May 6 1995

We came back home from Australia to what passes for a heatwave in England. Though there has been the occasional cool day, most of the time the temperatures have been in the high seventies Farenheit. The past week has also been windless. The combination of no wind and hot, sunny days has seen the ozone pollution levels very high. The pollution was so bad today that it was difficult to tell the difference between the clouds and the blue sky

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters can be found HERE.

We made it to Singapore without a hitch. Our Qantas flight left on time from Heathrow and we reached Singapore 12-1/2 hours later at 6pm Singapore time. The flight was very comfortable. We had seats right at the front upstairs and loads of space to spread out. The food was very good, though we didn’t feel like eating much. Dinner was served at about 0100 London time -- long past our normal bedtime.

We both got lots of sleep, which helped the time pass. If we had any complaint to make about the flight, it came from Rosemary who missed the ending of the film Quiz Show because the headphones were taken away as we began our descent into Singapore. She’ll have another opportunity to catch the ending on the next leg to Melbourne, but the mood will have been broken.

The one thing that I always find bizarre on Qantas flights are the envelopes they provide for a mail-order film processing company in Australia. On the back of the bag is the instruction “In the Event of Motion Sickness, Please Use this Bag”. An interesting combination of the commercial and the practical.

There were no delays at Singapore Airport and we got a taxi straight to the New Otani Hotel, which was about 30 minutes away at Clark Quay on the Singapore River. The hotel entrance is on the ground floor, but the lobby is on the seventh, above a shopping centre. Our room is on the 21st floor, so we have quite a reasonable view. On arrival, we had a cup of coffee in our room and watched the sun go down. I suspect the view from this side of the hotel will change dramatically in the next year or so because it looks like a rather tall building is being erected on the other side of the road.

As you will have deduced, the hotel is very large, but the service is very good. Our room is spacious and comfortable with an en-suite bathroom/toilet, TV and radio, a fridge and facilities to make tea and coffee.

We went out last night for a light meal at Clarke Quay on the Singapore River. It is an attractive area mainly taken up with shops and riverside restaurants. We finally chose a satay stall which sold half a dozen sticks of chicken or beef satay for the equivalent of about £1.25. It was very good value. We polished off 18 sticks between us, then went back to the hotel for a bath and some sleep.

Before we crashed at about 10pm, we watched the local television for a short while. It was total crap. There was a quiz show that was excruciatingly bad, and the news didn’t seem a lot better, what we saw of it. It amused us to see the newsreaders wearing name badges on their jackets. The credits at the end of news bulletins include the make-up and hairstyle and the fashion house that provided the presenters’ clothes. I can’t ever imagine that happening with the BBC.

We slept very soundly until about 3am. After a few hours we got back to sleep, to be awakened at about 8.45am by our breakfast being delivered. We ate breakfast at the window in a semi-comatose state, idly studying the view and the early-morning bathers in the swimming pool 15 floors below us. Jetlag is very difficult to deal with.

I had lunch today with the BBC cameraman based in Singapore, Kym Hallion, and a friend of his from Reuters Television. As we were going to be mostly talking business, Rosemary went shopping.

We spent the evening slouching around our room, then had a swim before dinner in the hotel.

After dinner, we watched some television, including Singapore Television’s version of Crimewatch. It was an “aren’t our police wonderful” kind of programme. There were no appeals for public assistance. Instead the programme was mostly made up of reconstructions of police triumphs, plus a film taken in court of the sentencing of a child molester, who had been rubbing himself up against school girls on the public buses. Such crimes are quaintly described as “Offences Against Modesty”.

Another TV programme to catch my attention was a cheapie discussion programme called “An Intellectual Discourse With...”. It was very, very dull and very, very pompous.

If you are wondering how we have been able to follow the news programmes, it is because English is a de facto official language in Singapore and Malaysia and many of the TV programmes are consequently in English.

April 1 1995

MALACCA VISIT

Today we were up at 6.30am, after a rather restless jet-lagged night, so that we could be breakfasted and ready to go on a bus tour to Malacca (or Melaka, if you prefer the Malay version).

It was an excellent day out. There was some rain when we first crossed from Singapore onto the Malaysian mainland, but it cleared by lunchtime. By the end of the day my poor bald head was quite sunburnt.

Most of the trip was made on the north-south toll highway, but we spent some of the time on the old coastal road, which was much more interesting because it went through villages and small towns. The highway was mostly lined with rubber trees and palm oil trees. Rubber used to be Malaysia’s main export earner, until the arrival of synthetic rubber. Now, the main export is palm oil. Other good earners for the country are electronics, fish and tourism.

We had lunch at the Park Plaza Resort, a purpose-built tourist resort on the outskirts of Malacca. The food was very varied and excellent. The buffet menu included some wonderful Thai-style chilli soup that left our lips numb. I imagine that most people who stay at the resort do so to avoid having much to do with the locals. In this respect, it was like Port al-Khantaoui in Tunisia.

Malacca was very interesting. We were dropped off on one side of the town, then the tour guide walked us through an ancient Chinese temple and the old shopping streets. We were finally taken to the remains of an old Portuguese fort before being taken back to Singapore. We returned to our hotel about 12 hours after setting out this morning.

We had dinner at a riverside restaurant at Clarke Quay. We had grilled tiger prawns in chilli sauce, grilled sea bass, bean shoots with dried fish pieces and cooked in chilli and oyster sauce, and boiled rice. It was a lovely meal and very cheap.

April 2 1995

BACK IN SINGAPORE

Rosemary had her first unbroken sleep last night. I woke up for a couple of hours, but I feel much less jetlagged today. We had breakfast in our room and eventually managed to drag ourselves out about 11.30am to do some shopping. I was looking for a modem connector for my laptop. I didn’t find one, but in the course of the search, Rosemary took me to a restaurant she’d found on a previous visit to Singapore. We were the only westerners among the several hundred people having lunch there.

The tables were all in the centre of the restaurant with a whole variety of individual kitchens providing different sorts of food. All you had to do was choose what you wanted to eat, give the kitchen your table number and wait to be served. I had a lovely soup of noodles, tiger prawns and crispy pork bits, while Rosemary had a dish of pork, greens, won tons and noodles. My meal cost the equivalent of about £2.50 and Rosemary’s £2.

After our abortive shopping expedition, we returned to the hotel for a swim before checking out of the hotel for the next leg to Melbourne. We also managed a quickish visit to the shopping centre beneath our hotel.

April 4 1995

OFF TO MELBOURNE

The Qantas flight to Melbourne took just over six hours. Dinner wasn’t over until about two hours into the flight, then breakfast was served three hours later. This meant there was little time for a real sleep. I got a couple of hours, but Rosemary did no more than doze. The plane touched down at Tullamarine Airport just outside Melbourne at about 4.30am. We arrived at grandma Wood’s unit in Melbourne by taxi at about 6am.

We had a sleep until lunch-time, but were still pretty jet-lagged. Grandma Wood, my brother Jeffrey, wife Glenyce, and daughters Kareen and Andrea joined us for dinner last night. It was quite pleasant, though Jeff’s political and social views remain difficult to stomach. Son Johnny wasn’t there because he has a job with the Salvation Army in another town.

Today, we were up early so that Rosemary could catch a train to Bendigo to visit her mother, Val Batson, for 24 hours. We didn’t get a very restful night. First of all, we were awakened just before midnight by grandma Wood’s personal alarm going off because of a technical fault, then we were kept awake by her grandfather clock that chimes every 15 minutes. Grandma doesn’t notice it because she is so deaf, but eventually I could stand it no longer and switched it off by stopping the pendulum swinging.

I spent today pottering about in a jet-lagged daze. I managed to phone many of our friends to organise meetings with them.

April 5 1995

There was lots of rain overnight, but it should be another reasonable day. So far it has mostly been sunny, with temperatures about 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit.

INDOOR BOWLS

This morning I took my mother to her weekly indoor bowls competition at the Blackburn North Baptist Indoor Bowls Club in the suburb of Melbourne. I would say that everyone there was over 65. They seemed a cheerful lot and really enjoyed the social side of the competition. My mother was full of confidence with considerable justification, as you will see from this wonderful video:

For reasons of brevity, the video does not show the full game, but I can assure you that Mum’s contributions are genuinely hers. Amazing.

I spoke to one of the organisers of the Centenary Back-to-Charlton today and she said that I am likely to be asked to make a speech at the schools re-union. So that’s two speeches I have to make. I will have to think of some more weak jokes and homespun philosophy!

April 11 1995

For the next several days, Rosemary and I travelled back and forth between Bendigo and my hometown, Charlton, an hour’s drive apart.

BENDIGO GATHERING

Yesterday’s gathering of friends here went off well. About 30 people came, scattered over about nine hours. (Sadly no photos.) We got to have a proper chat with most of our friends. Only three people failed to turn up. One had to work, and the other two got their days mixed up.

We had lunch today with friends Gary and Glenda Murdoch at 6 Brougham Street, the home Rosemary first lived in. It is a beautiful Australian Victorian home, built just over 100 years ago. Gary and Glenda have lovingly restored it to its original glory. It is the sort of place that you would open to the public, if it were in Britain. Both Gary and Glenda are in good form. Glenda doesn’t yet have a job, but Gary is working as a business consultant for a supermarket in Bendigo. They are already planning their next trip abroad. Well, Glenda is!

April 12 1995

ROSEMARY MEETS AN OLD ADMIRER

Rosemary had an amusing and embarrassing moment yesterday evening when we walked over to the Bendigo Railway Station to check the tickets for the trip she and Nan are making to Albury over Easter. The ticket clerk, Ian Angove, noticed the names on the tickets and said: “Rosemary...ah... Rosemary Batson?”. “Yes, I am Rosemary Batson,” she replied . Ticket Clerk: “Do you remember me at Spring Gully School? I used to have the ‘hots’ for you! Blush, blush, went Rosemary, modestly flattered.

BENDIGO EVENTS

This morning I went to the Central Deborah Gold Mine in Bendigo. The upper tunnels are open to the public, with frequent guided tours. The lower tunnels are being investigated by a mining company with a view to resuming the search for gold using modern equipment. I have never been down a mine before. I found it fascinating. The working conditions must have been appalling. The worse thing must have been the noise from the drills and the rock excavating equipment. I found the helmet and battery light very heavy, and I felt rather light-headed for the rest of the day. I can’t understand why people talk in romantic terms of mining.

This evening we were joined by Peter and Julie Batson and children James and Alice. We all went to Sizzlers, a fast-food place in Bendigo. It had a limited menu, but you could have as much to eat as you wished. Alice, who is quite tiny, took them at their word and had three or four bowls of soup, a slice of water melon, a peach. a bowl of pasta, several bowls of ice cream and other sweets, two glasses of orange, and a glass of cherry drink this in no particular order. We couldn’t believe that anyone — let alone anyone her size — could eat so much in such a short period of time.

THE BACK-TO-CHARLTON CELEBRATIONS

Mum and I are here for the Centenary Back-to-Charlton celebrations. Rosemary and I arrived here on the Thursday in time for the special church services and the launching of the book on the history of the “Shire of Charlton, 100 Years On”, written by local historian Grace Cadzow. My sisters, Alison and Ruth, arrived the next day.

The Protestant churches combined service in the local Anglican Church on Thursday night was dreadful. It went on for ever, and the sermon was dreary in the extreme and irrelevant to both Easter and the Back-to-Charlton. It was as though the vicar had rummaged through a heap of old sermons and dragged out the first one he could find. Being non-believers, Rosemary and I aren’t much impressed by any religious service, but the churchgoing Christians in this congregation also complained about how poor it was.

BOOK LAUNCH

About 300 people turned out for launching of Grace Cadzow’s book — many more than expected. My speech was the promised mix of weak jokes and homespun philosophy and seemed to go down well. The book has been nicely printed and has proved very popular.

I gave a copy of my speech to a local reporter. Her report summarised it in a simple sentence: “Mr Richardson spoke of the past”. Fair enough!

I did better in the account by the North Central News:

The speeches were followed by a very nice supper provided by the townspeople. We drove back to Bendigo afterwards.

BACK IN BENDIGO

Earlier in the day, Rosemary and I went with Nan, Peter, Julie, James and Alice to Maldon an historic former gold mining town near Bendigo. It is now promoted as a tourist centre. It was okay, but nothing special. We had a wander around the shops and had lunch in the local park before returning to Bendigo to collect our luggage and leave for Charlton.

Not long after leaving Bendigo, we were stopped at a police roadblock, where I was breathalysed. There is random breath testing in the State of Victoria. I hadn’t had an alcoholic drink for nearly 24 hours, SO after a quick puff into the machine, was sent on my way. In the next town we were stopped by another roadblock. This one was set up by the local fire brigade members who were collecting donations for the annual Good Friday telethon.

The landscape north of Bendigo is very flat, and because of the drought, extremely dry. All plant life, including the trees, looked bleached by the sun. There were many dams and creeks that were dry.

BACK IN CHARLTON

Charlton itself looked in pretty good shape. Some of the ruined buildings had been cleared away and/or replaced by new buildings. Mum and I did a gentle cruise around the town in the car to study the residential area and any changes that had been made.

I drove back alone on Good Friday morning for the official opening of the celebrations at lunchtime. In the evening, I escorted Grandma to an official dinner for former councillors and their wives. She was invited by virtue of Bill Wood’s long membership of the shire council. It was a pleasant occasion, though I had to leave about 10pm to drive back to Bendigo. As I left, I was presented with a pair of commemorative drinking glasses as thanks for my help with compiling the shire history. Grandma stayed until about midnight. Fortunately the dinner took place at the motel where she was staying, so she didn’t have far to go to bed.

The drive back to Bendigo was very enjoyable. It was a full moon and the sky was very clear with masses of stars. During the 60-mile journey, I passed just 13 cars; three going my way and 10 coming from the opposite directions.

Rosemary and I got to bed just before midnight, but had to be up again at 5.15am, so that I could drive her and her mother to Kyneton to catch the train to Melbourne. Dawn arrived as we approached Kyneton. There was a low mist through the eucalyptus trees and the apple orchards. It was very pretty, but I would have preferred to be in bed.

BACK-TO-SCHOOL

I returned to Bendigo to have breakfast, a shower and to pack my belongings before setting out for Charlton again this time for the Back-to-School celebrations, which started at 10am. It was a lovely day, with the temperature about 25C and a brilliant blue, cloudless sky. There was a huge turn-out of former pupils and teachers but they seemed to be more interested chatting among themselves than paying attention to my carefully-crafted speech!

Among the many dozens of people I met, was my former French teacher, Sheila Hernan (don’t know her married name). She is now in her 70s. She is a charming woman, but signally failed to teach me more than a smattering of French, which the result that I was asked to leave her class and a second history subject, The History of Australia and the Pacific. I used this as a kind of running joke in my speech.

Many of the people I met were still teenagers or very young men when I last saw them. They are now all in their late 50s and some were barely recognisable. One of my old school mates, John O’Brien, looks like a really old man partly because he had developed multiple sclerosis and could not get around without the aid of either a motorised wheelchair or a couple of walking sticks. It was also a shock to come across teenage girls (as I remembered ‘them) who were now old women. The shock was probably mutual. The school itself hadn’t changed much. In fact it was very much as I remember it. The only significant structural change was the replacement of the outside toilets (or “dunnies”) with a proper modern toilet block.

There were prizes of commemorative mugs for various people at the Back-to-School celebration. I was awarded a mug as the student who had travelled the longest distance for the Back-to.

After lunch, I checked into the East Charlton Hotel which is just across the road from what was the “new” Tribune office in High Street. The hotel was locked into the past. Nothing much had changed inside it in the past 40 or 50 years. The corridors were very dark and lit only by bare bulbs. They were austere. Mine was considered “posh” because it had a handbasin, an electric overhead fan and a picture on the wall. Most other rooms had just a bed, a small wardrobe and a dressing table with a mirror and a couple of drawers. There were communal male and female bathrooms and toilets. But it was all very clean and served the required task. And it was amazingly cheap. I paid £20 for two nights with a cooked breakfast.

Grandma Rena didn’t stay at our hotel because it would have meant her going up and down stairs to her room, so she stayed at a motel on the edge of town. She had to pay about £25 a night for her room, but of course she had an en-suite bathroom, a TV set and a fridge.

The “new” Tribune office is once again being used as a newspaper office. The Charlton Courier, a small weekly newspaper established a year or two back, is now there. Over the past century, the building has been used twice before as a newspaper office. It was the home of the East Charlton Tribune, before it became the Charlton Tribune and moved along High Street to the double-storey Willey Building near the Avoca River Bridge. After Dad bought the Tribune, he moved it back to the original location in the 1950s, where it remained until it was sold, re-sold and incorporated into the North-Central News.

The “old” Tribune office, just to be confusing, that’s the one near the river bridge, is in a pretty poor state. The front downstairs part that housed the printing equipment is used as a kind of community centre and was the registration office for the Back-to. We were taken upstairs, where we used to sleep and where Grandma Cox died of a stroke. It is empty, after having been used for a time for community art classes. The single-storey back part of the building, which included the kitchen, dining room and lounge room, is even more of a ruin than when you both saw it on your last trip to Australia.

More on the Back-to-Charlton celebrations in the next chapter.

Other chapters can be found HERE.

December 23 1994

Extracts from a letter to my friends and family in Australia

As you will see from the address, we are in Sousse, which is on the Mediterranean and on the east coast of Tunisia.

We flew here on the 21st. Although the flight itself lasted less than three hours, it was a long day. This was mainly because the flight left from Gatwick Airport, about 40 kms south of London, rather than from Heathrow, less than half an hour from home. It was irritating to have to drive past Heathrow to get to Gatwick, and to have to check our car into the long-term car park. The result was that we had to leave home about 9.30am for a flight that didn’t leave until 2pm. (Actually, it left at 3pm because the plane was delayed on an earlier flight.) Never mind, we finally made it to our hotel on the northern fringes of Sousse about 8pm -- just in time to catch dinner.

All four of us are on this trip -- the first full family holiday for many years. Rosemary found a cheapo package deal that included the air fares, a three-star hotel, breakfast and dinner. The holiday company, British Airtours, has its own aircraft to transfer its clients to and from the resort areas. The aircraft are single class and usually fully booked, which is why the fares are so reasonable. The all-up cost was about £350 per person; this for the peak Christmas week! Long-term stays are extremely cheap and lots of retired people come to places like Sousse for most of the winter. It is cheaper, and with more agreeable weather, than staying home.

The hotel is modern and just across the road from a long stretch of sandy beach. It is pretty basic — no TV or mini-bars in the rooms or anything like that -- but there is an en-suite bathroom/toilet and both rooms have balconies with a good view of the sea. The meals are buffet style and the food is plentiful. But as there are 645 rooms in the hotel, individual attention, either in the restaurant or anywhere else for that matter, is not the order of the day. Our hotel is one of three adjoining ones owned by the same chain. They have some variations in facilities and quality of facilities, but guests in the hotels can use the facilities in any one of the three. The complex is in the middle of a wide range of restaurants and local shops. It is about 20 minutes by foot from the centre of Sousse, which is Tunisia’s third largest city.

We all slept like the dead on our first night, partly as a result of the long trip here and partly because of the release from the tension of our jobs. Rosemary and I were also probably helped by being able to leave the balcony door open to let the sounds of the sea wash over us all night.

The maximum temperature here at this time of the year is about 20 Centigrade. A coat is required outside in the evenings, but it is cool rather than cold.

Tunisia has a population of around eight million people and has borders with Libya and Algeria. It has a long northern and eastern coastline on the Mediterranean. Tunisia is a former French territory, so French is very widely spoken. Indeed for the very well educated Tunisians, it is often their first language. But there doesn’t appear to be many French guests in our hotel. The Germans are an overwhelming majority -- at a guess, as high as 80% -- with most of the rest being British.

Yesterday, we went into the old walled town, the Medina, to look about. It is a tangle of alleyways, mostly stuffed with tiny shops of all sorts. Not surprisingly, a great many shops sold crafts intended for the tourist trade. Haggling over the price was expected, and the shop owners could be extremely persistent in trying to get your business. On holiday trips abroad, there is a tremendous temptation to buy souvenirs -- only to wonder on returning home what possessed you to purchase such rubbish. So, we are particularly fussy on this trip about what we buy. On this particular occasion, we managed to leave the Medina souvenir-free.

Today, we went on a bus trip to Dougga in north-central Tunisia. Dougga is the site of what is said to be the most complete Roman town in the world. I would think “in Tunisia” would be more accurate because I have been to Jerash Jordan, and this is more striking with almost complete colonnades in very good condition. Dougga was built about 200AD on a hilltop with a wonderful panoramic view of the countryside. Presumably, the Romans chose the location not just because of the beauty of the view, but also because it allowed them the opportunity to spot any advancing armies. The two best preserved buildings in the town are the open-air theatre and the temple. Both are very striking. It is extraordinary that despite the ravages of time and various wars, so much of the town remains, even as ruins.

Our only real problem with Dougga is that our tour representative had not thought to warn us that we would need coats there because of the icy wind that cut through the town. It was freezing, and because we were so cold, it took much of the enjoyment away. Another, less serious, problem was the bus. The rows of seats were so close together, our knees were jammed against the seat in front.

On the way back to Sousse, we stopped at another ruined Roman town, Thuborbo Majus. It was very interesting but had almost been levelled by the activities of builders who had dismantled most of the columns for use in relatively modern buildings. It was a real shame.

It was also irritating to be pestered by people trying to sell “Roman coins”. The coins certainly looked authentic enough, but I cannot imagine that they were genuine. Had they been, they would hardly have been on offer for about £1 each! I have since read in a book that there are very active mints around Tunisia -- all producing “genuine” Roman coins.

Visiting the Roman ruins has made me ponder just how little civilisation moved on between the Roman Empire and the early 20th Century. Just think. Even before Christ was born, the Romans had very advanced architectural and building skills, drains, sewers and central heating. There was then a jump of around 2000 years before the invention of electricity, telephones, motorised road transport, air travel, radio and television and so forth.

The Tunisian countryside to and from Dougga was interesting. In the Sousse area it was mainly a grain-growing region. The further north we got, the greener it became. Vast areas were taken over by olive trees and vegetable plots. Most of the farms were divided by “hedgerows” of prickly pear cactus.

Apart from the olive trees, the most common trees to be seen in our part of Tunisia are the eucalypts of the type that dominate much of the Australian landscape — types that require little water through the summer period. Presumably they were imported from Australia many decades ago. They have been mostly used to line roads.

The Tunisians don’t seem to have much instinct for keeping the place tidy. Most empty blocks of land in the urban areas and villages are blighted by holes dug in the ground or dumps of earth, rubble and other rubbish. They never seem to bother to level off the ground. In addition, the wasteland is littered with flattened soft drink cans and bits of plastic bags and sheeting. With such cheap and plentiful labour, it is a pity that people aren’t given work to clean up these areas.

A common sight in both the countryside and the towns is men wearing a crude brown woollen coat with a peaked hood -- just like the outfits worn by some of the characters in the film Star Wars. Star Wars was filmed in the south of Tunisia, so presumably the idea for the costumes came from the traditional Tunisian male coat.

Rosemary and I tried the Turkish bath and massage in the neighbouring hotel last night. I have had plenty of saunas, but never a Turkish bath and never a massage like the one I got. And Rosemary will remember her experience for some time to come.

One by one, people were taken out of the steam room to be given The Treatment on a large raised marble area by an athletic Tunisian man. We had some hint at what was to come when one of the women returned to the steam room to tell her husband or boyfriend in some awe that she had been twisted and turned every which way at great speed and that she had been told to pull up her bikini top to be pummelled both front and back -- and as she put it, her “tits given a jiggle”. Another woman later returned and announced: “This guy must have squeezed more women’s boobs than anyone else in the world!”

Rosemary’s great surprise as she was shoved and pulled about was to discover at reasonably close quarters that the masseur had nothing on under the towel wrapped around his waist. As for me, I just remember about ten minutes of wrenching and cracking bones and being walked all over. In the course of being scoured clean, I lost several layers of skin. By the time we got back to the hotel, I felt as though my bones had been turned to rubber. Rosemary just looked rather flushed!

Christmas Day 1994

This must be our first Christmas Day on which there have been no special meals or other Christmas events and no exchanging of presents. This trip is our present to each other.

Tunisia is about 90% Muslim, so Christmas is mostly ignored except in the tourist areas. The hotels put on Christmas carols and other traditional Christmas events, and I have just come back from the poolside where a couple of locals dressed as Father Christmas and Joseph turned up with a camel to pose for photographs with the guests. Sadly I had not brought my camera with me, so do not have a photographic record.

It’s a bizarre scene, but no more bizarre than last night’s Gala Christmas Eve Dinner. At the very least there were 1000 guests at it, and it was an experience to say the least. There were terrible rows over the seating, and even before the first course had been served, there was a blazing row between a couple over the other side of the cavernous restaurant. She stood up and called him “a stupid bastard”. He responded by taking a swing at her and punching her on the shoulder. She then charged through the restaurant with husband just behind. She paused only to turn on him to repeat that he was “a stupid bastard”. The other guests cheered and roared with laughter as the couple departed.

The service was a shambles. Our poor waiter appeared to be doing the job for the first time and had the attention span of an ant. It took us nearly an hour to get a drink, let alone our first course. The waiter would dart from table to table without any evidence of logic. He would serve a couple of people on one table then turn to an entirely different table and serve the guests there. In one case, he served soup to three of us, then moved to another table where the soup had already been served and gave them seconds.

The food was about what you would expect from mass catering of this kind. There was no choice, but we were given asparagus soup, followed by a seafood pate, followed by a sweet (mandarin mousse), followed by what can only be described as a kind of turkey dish, followed by a slice of rather dry Yule Log cake. There was a wine list, but in reality, there was a choice of just two wines— an unprecocious Tunisian red or an equally-modest Tunisian white. The wine claimed to be 12% alcohol, but I would be surprised if it made 2%. It had no known wine taste and the mellowing impact of a glass of lemonade. We now know why Tunisian wine is not a feature of wine cellars around the world.

The entertainment was provided by a small Tunisian band that insisted on singing western songs (very badly). There was also a performance by some jugglers and dancers accompanied by bongo drums. This was rather more to our liking.

The event which was one that we will remember for many years, wound down about 11.30pm -- and ended as it had begun: in a bit of a shambles.

I have brought my shortwave radio with me to keep myself vaguely up to speed on the news from around the world. The BBC World Service has been coming through with a varying strength of signal, but I stumbled across a strong signal from Radio Australia yesterday. It was broadcasting what I thought was a pretty odd programme for an international audience: Wagga Wagga’s Sporting Heroes. Honest. Niall went to the Medina yesterday and came back to the hotel triumphant with a very nice pottery bongo drum. He was very proud to have beaten the price down by about a third to 20 Dinars (about £15).

Harley and Niall spend quite a bit of time going for walks around the area to soak up the atmosphere. They have also been to the hotel night club a couple of times. One night there was a belly dancer; another night there was a snake charmer. The hotel photographer has been able to provide us with evidence of the boys’ attendance at both events!

Yesterday, Rosemary and I caught the “Happy Noddy Train” (a kind of toy train that takes the tourists back and forth along the seafront) to Port al-Khantaoui, a huge tourist complex built with Kuwaiti money, a few kilometres north of Sousse. The “Noddy Train” gets its name from the fact that all the passengers nod away as the carriages bounce along the highway.

The centre of attraction at Port al-Khantaoui is a very pleasant marina from which you can take trips on small motorised catamarans with a centre section encased in glass below the water line. These so-called “submarine” boats take you out of the harbour to view the seabed. It was a fantastic Jules Verne-type trip. It was wonderful to see the shoals of fish swimming by and to study the rocks, cliffs and valleys below the sea.

Rosemary is fighting off a cold -- partly brought on by the cold winds at Dougga -- and Harley too has been feeling a bit feverish.

This afternoon we caught the train to Monastir, south along the coast from Sousse. The trip took about 30 minutes. The train network was built by the French. It seems very efficient. The train we went on was very smooth and fast. We found the journey interesting, though the scenery was not at all attractive. We seemed to be travelling alongside rubbish dumps a lot of the time. The rest of the time we crossed through open country, olive groves and salt pans. One of the stations was called “Sousse Industrial Zone”. There was not a building, let alone a factory, to be seen, yet many passengers appeared as if from nowhere.

Monastir is a very different town from Sousse. It is much less densely populated, with far fewer tourists. Few people were in a hurry. We enjoyed strolling around the old walled town. Monastir is dominated by a large fort on the seafront. It is very impressive and a photographer’s dream. The fort has been the location used for a number of films. Perhaps the best known in the west is the Monty Python film “The Life of Brian”.

It is an irony that we should spend part of Christmas Day exploring the location of a quite blasphemous film. Arguably the most famous scene in that film is when Brian (the Messiah) is surrounded by thousands of cheering worshippers when his mother pokes her head out of a window and shouts “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy. Now go away.”

It was notable in Monastir that most women aged 35 years and over, wore identical lemon-coloured wraps over their hair and clothes while in the streets. If both their hands were occupied carrying things, they clenched the wraps in their teeth to keep them in place.

Boxing Day 1994

We had a relatively peaceful day. Rosemary was fighting off a cold, so went down to the beach to enjoy the winter sun. Harley, Niall and I went to Port al-Khantaoui — Harley and Niall to go on the “submarine” boats while I shot some stock film for the BBC news film library with a lightweight camera given to me for the trip. I managed to do the filming, but Harley and Niall couldn’t go on their trip because the weather had clouded the water.

This afternoon, Rosemary and I returned to Monastir -- this time with Harley for another look around the town, but soon after we got there, clouds obscured the sun and it became rather cool. And Harley was suffering from visual indigestion from all the sight-seeing, so we caught an early train back to Sousse.

In the evenings, the band has been playing in the large bar lounge. It makes an interesting stab at rock ‘n’ roll and pop music. Rosemary and I couldn’t resist bopping away. Harley and Niall viewed this with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. They appeared to be grateful that they weren’t being humiliated in front of their friends.

December 27 1994

We hired a car today to do our own thing in the Tunisian countryside. We got less than half the distance we planned because the roads we used had speed limits of between 50 kms and 80 kms, and in any case, they were quite narrow with very ragged and rough shoulders. We were supplied with a small left-hand- drive Renault. It was in reasonably good condition, though we discovered when we got to Kairouan, our lunch-time stop, that the driver’s side door wouldn’t lock. So we made sure everything was put out of sight in the boot and hoped for the best. Not that crime is a serious problem in Tunisia. There is very little violence, and the only real problems for tourists are pick-pockets who sometimes operate around the main hotels, and people who tried to befriend you to rip you off in the markets.

We wanted to get away from the tourist route -- and that we certainly did. Less than 10 kms from our hotel we found ourselves in a village which, take away the passing motor vehicles, seemed to be locked in an age many centuries past. It was fascinating. The landscape was very flat agricultural land, but quite interesting.

About an hour out of Sousse we were stopped in the middle of nowhere by a chap who got us to slow down, then stepped right in front of the still-moving car. It was an extraordinary act of faith on his part that we were going to be able to pull up. He came around the side of the car indicating that we should wind the windows down so that he could talk to us, but as he had made no attempted to stop the vehicles in front of us, we assumed he was up to no particular good, so we accelerated away. Despite this, the Tunisians have a well-deserved reputation for friendliness.

Kairouan is well inland but still seemed to have attracted a reasonable number of tourists into the souk in the walled town. The most notable difference from the other places we’d visited was the number of women wearing very bright, patterned dresses and headgear. Some wore the traditional desert dress of purple with a skein of luminous green wool tied around their waist. They looked very attractive, and unlike many other Muslim women we’ve seen, didn’t attempt to obscure their faces.

For lunch we found a pleasant Tunisian restaurant, where Rosemary had soup, brik (an envelope of very thin deep-fried pastry containing an egg, tuna and herbs), while the rest of us had a very nice dish of pasta and stewed lamb.

On the route back to Sousse we came across some brightly dressed women stripping olives from a tree. I went over and got their permission to take some photographs, and we were soon joined by a young lad on a donkey and a chap with a crook and wearing a traditional herder’s blanket. They were very friendly, but as we spoke neither Arabic nor French, it was difficult to communicate with them. I tried to take a Polaroid instant photo for them, but there was something wrong with the camera and the pictures failed to come out properly.

December 28 1994

Back to London this afternoon. But our bus didn’t leave for the airport until just after 4pm, so there was time to do a few things. Harley and Niall returned to Port al-Kantaoui and this time were able to make their “submarine” trip. Rosemary spent some of the morning on the beach, while I went into town to do some filming for the BBC. After lunch, Rosemary, Niall and I made a final visit to the shops for a few souvenirs. Rosemary and I came away with a few pieces of crockery and Niall bought a dead scorpion in a small glass display box. Harley went and had a Turkish bath and massage and finished off catching up by post with all his friends. In all, he sent 30 postcards.

New Year’s Day

We arrived back at Gatwick to blustery winds and heavy rain, but the temperature was mild. There had been some cold weather -- the first real burst of winter -- while we were away.

Niall was anxious that he might not get work during the Christmas/New Year period, but his “temp” agency phoned the morning after our return to offer him two days work with the BBC. He was sent to a BBC building near Television Centre to help sort out some of the film archives. Harley is still working at the BBC’s Elstree Studios, with no sign of the “temporary” job ending. So Rosemary joked that she should also try for a BBC job -- then we could all go off to work together!

Today is very cold. There’s been some light rain that has desperately been trying to be snow. The plants in the garden are very confused after so much unseasonal warm-to-mild weather. Some flowers, which normally don’t come out until late in January, came out several weeks ago. The daffodils have also poked their heads through the soil about six weeks ahead of schedule.

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

WEATHER NEWS

We’ve been having a wonderful Autumn in southern England. It is said to have been the warmest since the 1600s. It’s been a real treat. The Autumn leaves -- particularly those on the grape vine which extends right across our garage -- have been a glorious sight. The only problem is that we are into Winter Time, which means that it is dark by 5pm each day, but at least it is still possible to get about some days without a winter coat.

We gather from bits and pieces appearing in the papers here that much of Australia is still in the grip of the drought. It seems to have been going on forever. It must be very difficult for many people on the land.

WORK FOR OUR SONS

Harley has been working for the past month or so as a temporary employee at the BBC’s Elstree Studios in north London. He is working with Facilities Management, the department that keeps the buildings in good running order, allocates dressing rooms and looks after the security. He will be there at least until the end of the year. It isn’t the sort of job that he would want to do long term, but it is reasonably well paid and he is being given more and more responsibility. He also gets to see some of the stars who visit the studios. As Top of the Pops is transmitted from Elstree, he gets to see the occasional pop star, and he saw Tom Jones recently. Last week, he saw Barbara Windsor, the former “Carry On” actress, who now appears as Peggy Mitchell in the main BBC soap opera, Eastenders.

Niall is now back home after a year of living an alternative lifestyle. He seems to be glad to be back with us, for the time being at least. It has been a pretty austere year, but he has benefitted from the experience. None of the work he’s been offered is very exciting, but he was thrilled to discover that in his first three days he was able to earn about three times what he would have got on the dole. He is also meeting new people who are rather better motivated than his mates who shared the house in the London suburb of Vauxhall.

LONDON HOME-TO-HOME DEVELOPMENTS

Rosemary has had quite a reasonable year with her business after a very slack period because of the recession in the travel industry. The GuestAccom network, which had London Home-to-Home as its London entry, went bankrupt, but Home-to-Home is now so established, the impact was marginal. Rosemary and her business partner, Anita, have now found a couple of other very promising networks. All in all, there’s been a steady improvement, partly because the various economies around the world seem to be improving and partly because of the IRA ceasefire.

FAMILY HOLIDAY

As we are all together again as a family for the moment, we are going to Tunisia for a week over Christmas. Rosemary found a cheapy holiday in Sousse, so we are using up some of the Long Service Award I received from the BBC earlier this year. It should be good fun. All being well, the weather should be sunny with temperatures around 20c. More on this in the next chapter.

SCHOOL NEWS

I recently got a lovely surprise when a copy of my hometown newspaper, the North-Central News, landed on my desk. It contained a page of photographs supplied by Heather Phillips, who has just retired after 47 years as a teacher. The picture were taken in my last year at the Charlton Higher Elementary School, and there I was pictured in the Science Class, along with such people as Brian Bartlett and that dreadful teacher and bully, Bernie Molloy. There was a whole array of half-forgotten teachers and pupils. The photos were all of a very good quality and I suspect they were taken by Dad for the Charlton Tribune.

BBC ARABIC TV GROWTH

Looking back over my year, it has been a hair-raising one at times, but very rewarding. The Arabic satellite television news channel is now on the air for eight hours a day and should be available round-the-clock from the end of January.

Our permanent newsroom with space for more than 40 journalists and translators has been completed and occupied and our new Arabic studio is now operational. The audiences across the Middle East and North Africa are relatively small at this early stage -- being counted in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions -- but we should also be available across Europe and throughout the Americas before 1995 is over. There are huge Arabic-speaking communities across Europe and the Americas.

There have been times when I wondered whether I would ever get the Arabic news operation on air on schedule, but with the help of hard-working and talented colleagues, we made it. We recently appointed an editor for the Arabic news service, but I have been asked to stay on with the project for another 12 months as Managing Editor. I will also retain my umbrella World Service Television News title, News Development Editor. I still have responsibilities outside the Arabic project. We are currently about to extend our operations across Europe by launching two new channels late in January. One channel will provide entertainment, the other news and information. As a result, we are having to build another new English-language newsroom with space for around 70 journalists.

It is astonishing to think that when World Service Television News was launched in March 1991, there were just 12 journalists. Now there are more than 200, plus about the same number of studio directors, vision mixers, sound engineers, videotape editing, graphics designers and engineers. It’s been a tremendous thrill to be involved in such an exciting project in my final years on the BBC staff.

BRILLIANT AUSSIE COMEDY

Finally, we have been enjoying recordings of the ABC comedy program, “Frontline”, sent to us from Australia. The show is brilliant. One of the funniest and most observant TV shows ever to come out of Australia. The tapes are doing the rounds in the World Service TV Newsroom.

I tried to get the BBC to run the series but my proposal got lost in a change of channel controllers. A shame.

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters can be found HERE.

The trip to the Moroccan capital, Rabat, was both enjoyable and interesting. It was another recruiting trip for the new BBC Arabic Television channel and I was accompanied by our Arabic Language Editor, Sami Haddad, and World Service’s Head of Recruitment, Jane Saxby.

I had never been to Morocco before. We travelled via Gibraltar, arriving at The Rock just after dark. The Rock was lit by powerful floodlights and made a dramatic backdrop to the airport. The hop from Gibraltar across to Casablanca International Airport took less than an hour, but the airport is 110 kms from Rabat, so that added another one hour and 15 minutes to the journey.

We stayed in the La Tour Hassan Palace Hotel, which was Moroccan style rather than the “international-you-could-be-anywhere” type of hotel, such as those in the Hilton, Hyett and InterContinental chains.

The weather was sunny with the temperature in the high 20s, so it was extremely pleasant. Unlike previous recruiting trips in the Middle East, we had a bit of time to spare because some of our Algerian candidates were refused visas to enter Morocco. Our local Arabic correspondent organised tours of the city, which we found very attractive and relaxing. We saw just two beggars -- which is more than can be said for London these days -- and we never felt threatened or harassed in any way. The city has a very low skyline, with the highest buildings being the mosques. The architecture is a mix of Moorish and French with lots of greenery and wide avenues. The old part of the city is walled and very interesting. We were taken to the Mohammed V Mausoleum which was a wonderful sight, just made for photography.

A high percentage of the population wore traditional Muslim clothes, but few of the women had their faces covered, and the outfits were often very bright, with green being the most popular colour. There seemed very little road traffic at any time of the day. After 10pm, the roads were almost deserted.

We were there for four nights. On the final night, as we were finishing our evening meal, Sami spotted two Arab women broadcasters at another table. They invited us to join them, which we did. They insisted we shared a bottle of whisky with them. That was fine, except we had already had a couple of bottles of Moroccan red with out meal. The consequence was that I woke the next morning with a shocking hangover that would be long remembered. We were taken back to the airport in a bus and I have vivid memories of wincing every time we hit one of the many potholes.

The flight home was a bit hairy. There was a terrific crosswind as we came in to land at Gibraltar, which has a very short runway. Instead of letting the plane gently drop onto the runway, the pilot flew the aircraft hard onto the runway and instantly reversed the engines to stop us running off the end. Flying doesn’t normally worry me one bit, but I wouldn’t fancy any more landings like that one.

GENEVA WEEKEND

We stayed in an hotel in the centre of Geneva, about a five-minute walk from the shores of Lake Leman. Rosemary and I were briefly in Geneva in 1969 when we did our quickie drive around Europe in a converted post office van. It was very pleasant to spend more time in the very pretty city. It also gave us an opportunity to catch up with Rosemary’s distant cousin, Judith Lameille (nee Batson), who lives in Geneva with her three teenage sons and her Swiss husband, Bernard. Judith grew up in the small Australian bush town, Goroke, where her parents still live.

Late in the afternoon on our first day, Judith and Bernard drove us into the nearby mountains to a viewing point overlooking Geneva and Lake Leman. The lake stretches east to Montreaux, a distance of about 50kms. The centrepiece of the lake at the Geneva end is a water jet that shoots 500 litres of water a second to a height of 140 metres. It was a very beautiful scene as the sun went down and cast its long shadows across Geneva, the lake and the countryside. We were then taken by Judith and Bernard to their flat in Geneva. Judith and Bernard, who met on a horse riding expedition in South America, are good fun and charmingly eccentric. Bernard is an interior decorator working for an interior design company.

We found Geneva a very attractive city. Its population of around 400,000 seemed mostly well off and relaxed. Roller skating is a very popular craze among teenagers. The city is very flat, so it is very easy for the youngsters to get about the city on their skates.

One of our more memorable experiences was to come across a wedding party outside the city’s Anglican Cathedral. It was the wedding of a Japanese girl to an African man. The girl wore a traditional white western wedding outfit, while the groom wore a brick-red velvet suit. The guests all wore an amazing variety of fashions.

On the second day (my 57th birthday), Judith and Bernard took us into France to Chamonix at the foot of Mont Blanc. It was a terrific treat. There we were sitting in Chamonix in short sleeves, while towering above us was Mont Blanc, 4,807 metres high and covered in snow. Beside it was the Bossens Glacier. There is a cable car that goes up to the Aiguille du Midi peak on Mont Blanc. I have never been in a cable car before but decided to give it a go. So did Rosemary. It was a real experience. We were warned to wear a jumper and coat, which was just as well. By the time we got to the peak (3842 metres), it was freezing cold with furious gusts of wind that almost blew us over. We were also quite breathless from the low oxygen level in the air.

The cable car journey took just 20 minutes each way. At times we seemed to be travelling almost vertically. The view was quite stunning, and it was easy to see how treacherous these mountains can be. One of my BBC World Service Television presenters fell 100 metres down a mountainside near Chamonix two winters ago and is now a helpless spastic in a hospital in London. It was a sobering experience viewing a scene that was both breathtakingly beautiful and tremendously dangerous at the same time.

Extracts from a family letter dated October 9 1994:

SYDNEY-LONDON ROCKET

You will probably recall that when Rosemary started off Home-to-Home, she also had a mail re-direction company called London Mail-Link, which didn’t succeed. However, she has continued to look after the mail of a Yugoslav guy who lives in New South Wales and for obvious reasons should remain nameless. He is an inventor of all sorts of extraordinary things, including space platforms from which rockets could carry passengers between Sydney and London in three hours. He recently told Rosemary that he had applied for loans from British banks for his rocket proposal and asked that instead of her re-directing the replies to him, she should open the letters and fax them. A few days later, a letter arrived from the Bank of England. It began: “Dear Mr Mxxxxxxc. Thank you for your application for a loan of £500-million, but...” Ah well, you can’t blame him for thinking big!

ARABIC TV PROGRESS

Life with the Arabic TV Project continues at a hectic pace. We are currently transmitting for six hours a day, but will go up to eight hours on October 23. We are due to go to a 24-hour operation at the end of next January. I think we must be bonkers! We have yet to appoint an Editor for the Arabic Newsroom, so I am running the show very much as a one-man band. However, as of tomorrow I will have a projects organiser to help me. This will mean I can hand over many of the routine matters for her to do while I try to find time to think about where we are supposed to be going. Thinking time is in very short supply at the moment. On top of the Arabic Project, I now have to build another English language newsroom, nearly twice the size of the one I built just two years ago.

My report on a BBC working visit to Dubai and Jerusalem:

CONFERENCE TRIP

I was accompanied on this trip by Alistair Brown, General Manager Regional Programmes Worldwide Television, Sami Haddad, Arabic TV Language Editor, and Tim Cabral, World Service Newsgathering News Editor. November 13-19, 1994

This trip took to me to Dubai, capital of the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf, and to Jerusalem. I went to Dubai mainly to attend a conference on satellite and cable television in the Middle East. Most of the speeches were pretty boring, but it gave me a chance to make some useful contacts.

Dubai is a former British territory, so English is very widely spoken. It is very modern and clean -- and not surprisingly, there’s lots of sand. Though it was autumn, the temperature was still around 30c. In summer, it often remains in the mid-40s for weeks on end.

It is a very relaxed, prosperous city with hardly a beggar to be seen -- which is not something that can be said of London since the unfortunate arrival on the political scene of that dreadful woman Thatcher. (Sorry, I can’t resist having a swipe at the old bat!) It was quite a thrill to sit in my hotel room and watch both the BBC’s English and Arabic channels on the TV set.

Dubai is officially a “dry” city, except that there is plenty of booze to be found at the airport and in the hotels and main restaurants.

One afternoon, a colleague and I had a few hours to spare so went on a late-afternoon desert tour. It was a very touristy trip, but well worth it. We were taken in a convoy of 10 four-wheel-drive vehicles into the desert about 45kms from the city. It was great fun charging through -- and sometimes getting stuck in -- the dunes of extremely powdery sand. The tyres had to be let down to less than half pressure to provide reasonable traction, but even so, the vehicles took some controlling. I don’t recall ever having been in a vehicle that moved sideways and forwards at the same time, but I didn’t feel we were in any danger. As the sun set, we arrived at a camp where we were provided with a huge meal of salad, bread and barbecued lamb, fish and prawns. There was also some entertainment by a belly dancer, but this being a conservative Gulf State, her belly was kept out of sight. I have no idea where she came from. She just appeared out of the night, then disappeared again after her performance was over.

I flew from Dubai to Jerusalem via Cairo. I went to Cairo with Emirates Airlines, which was excellent. But I then had a wait of more than four hours at Cairo Airport for my El Al flight to Tel Aviv. The security for the El Al flight was very, very tight, with every passenger being closely cross-examined about why they were using the airline and why they wanted to go to Israel. The airline itself was very poor. It was only a short flight, but even so, it is not unreasonable to expect something more than a dry, tasteless sandwich and a glass of warm wine in Business Class. My plane had what must have been the world’s most ancient air hostess. She was even older than I am. She looked like the archetypal dumpy Central European grandmother. She behaved as though she was sort of helping out, rather than actually working as a hostess. (Ok. Enough of this ageist, sexist criticism.)

I arrived at my hotel in Jerusalem at 1.30am. I was there for just one day to check out our news bureau and to recruit an Arabic-speaking correspondent. My colleagues and I did a quick walk through part of the Old City late in the afternoon. We briefly visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, said to have been built over the site of the crucifixion.

The visit was very interesting, but far too brief. Next morning we had to be up at 4.30am to catch our flight to London.

That’s the end of this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

The trip had been postponed several times because it was considered too risky. Lebanon was still recovering from the civil war and there remained vivid memories of the kidnappings of Westerners, not least that of Terry Waite who was held hostage for five years. The trip went ahead when senior BBC executives were given assurances by those now in charge of Beirut that we would be safe.

Of all the trips I have made this year, the one to Beirut was the most memorable. Having written countless stories about the Lebanese civil war and the many kidnappings of prominent foreigners, it was fascinating to actually be there to see the place for myself.

Our Middle East Airlines plane came in very low over the Shi’ite Muslim area near the airport -- so low, in fact, that I could almost see what people were cooking for dinner. When we stepped off the plane we were immediately escorted by armed men to a waiting Cadillac and transferred to the VIP lounge. This had been arranged by our Arabic correspondent. I have never received such posh treatment in the VIP lounge in my life -- nor am I likely to in the future. The airport and its terminal were pretty run down because they were closed for most of the civil war.

We were driven to our hotel through Hezbollah territory which, until early this year, was a very dangerous place for foreigners. There were a number of road blocks with armed soldiers, but the area seemed pretty relaxed. Fifteen minutes later we came over the crest of the road to see our hotel set against the dramatic backdrop of the sea and a building that had ben partly demolished by a shell during the Israeli invasion.

The hotel, the Summerlands, is one of the few decent hotels still operating. It is more of a resort hotel than a business hotel. It is on the coast in south Beirut, has its own private beach, plus two swimming pools.

We were there for just a few days, interviewing potential producers, translators and presenters and talking to government bigwigs about the possibility of the BBC re-opening a news bureau. The Lebanese Government is extremely keen to get the BBC to move back into Beirut because it would be regarded as a strong vote of confidence in the city. As a result, we were able to have meetings with the Information Minister, Michel Samaha, the Prime Minister, Rafiq Harire, and President Elias Hware. Hware also agreed to do a television interview for us.

There is a very big audience in Lebanon for both BBC World Service radio and television. The interview with Hware took place at the Presidential Palace, which was very interesting. Our local correspondent, who set up the interview, nearly died at some of the direct questioning from one of my colleagues from London. Most interviews with Arab leaders are extremely obsequious, but the President seemed to enjoy the rough and tumble of our interview. At least, he didn’t order us into the courtyard to be shot.

The meeting with the Prime Minister was very interesting. We had to wait in an ante room for about an hour, along with a whole lot of other guys, most of whom turned out to be members of the Lebanese Cabinet. They had to wait their turn after us. In Lebanon, there is none of this Western nonsense about government ministers giving up their business interests. Hware owns the biggest construction company in Lebanon and had the contract to reconstruct much of Beirut. He also owned one of the main television stations in Beirut. The Lebanese didn’t seem to mind too much, just so long as he got the country back on its feet. Earlier in the day, when we paid a courtesy call on the Information Minister, we found ourselves being filmed for the evening television news on the state-owned network TeleLiban. God, it must have been a quiet news day!

The Lebanese, like most Arabs, do not seem to have got the message about the dangers of smoking. They all puff away furiously anywhere and everywhere. When we visited the Information Minister, there was a large basket of cigarettes on the table in front of us. There was just about every brand on the market and we were invited to make a selection.

Almost everywhere you go in Beirut there are signs of the civil war that went on for 17 years and took the lives of about 100,000 people. Very few buildings seem to have escaped some sort of damage. Because most of the fighting involved small arms and rockets, rather than bombs dropped from the air, buildings were chipped away rather than flattened. Despite all that I thought I knew about the civil war, nothing prepared me for the full impact of the devastation. Just imagine, for example, Melbourne City Centre with every building burnt out and chipped away by millions of bullets and rockets. Imagine it too with no trees, no street lights, no street signs and no traffic lights. It was breathtaking. It was hard to understand why members of the human race would do that to each other in the name of politics and religion. And all to no real purpose. They simply fought themselves pretty much to a standstill, then the Syrians stepped in and ordered everyone to put down their weapons.

The infrastructure in Beirut is having to be rebuilt, but the Lebanese are natural businessmen, so another five years will see much of the city rebuilt. Meanwhile, the electricity comes and goes and most telephone communication is via mobile phones using an American AT&T satellite link to an exchange in New York. It is bizarre to see people phoning each other only blocks away, but using New York telephone numbers. Calls from our hotel cost $US10 a minute, with the charges starting the moment the phone at the other end begins to ring.

Despite the war there are a huge number of very wealthy people in Lebanon. Most had fled to France, Britain or the United States with their money as soon as the fighting got seriously under way. Once the war ended, they came back.

On our final night in Beirut, there was a wedding celebration at our hotel. The bride was the daughter of the Security Minister. There were at least 2,000 guests. Watching them arrive was like being at a Hollywood premiere. For about an hour there was a constant stream of wealthy couples through the hotel reception area to the swimming pool area. The women were paraded like race horses, wearing only the best designer clothes and dripping with jewels and gold. It was a most extraordinary sight.

There were lots of photos I wished I could have taken but I didn’t have my camera with me.

******************

From a letter to the family dated July 6 1994:

ARABIC TV LAUNCHED

The Arabic TV Service was launched on schedule on June 20 with two hours of news and documentary programmes. The launch was delayed for about 40 minutes because our commercial partners messed up the satellite bookings, but other than that, it went flawlessly. I am very lucky to have recruited an extremely enthusiastic and talented team of people who have produced some brilliant programmes with very limited facilities. On July 20 we increase our transmission to four hours a day, then we go to six hours on August 8. The expansion then levels off while we complete construction of our permanent newsroom and studio and while we recruit and train all the necessary staff.

I hope this trip will be my last for a while. I enjoy foreign travel, but these BBC trips are hard work, and I miss relaxing in the evenings with Rosemary. It also puts an extra strain on her, though it is useful for her currently having her mother Val Batson and or elder son Harley here to help her and provide her with some company.

And a letter dated July 31 1994:

HAYLING HOLIDAY

Rosemary, Val and I are having a weekend on Hayling Island near Portsmouth. We all needed a break from the Arabic Service! Hayling Island isn’t up to much, but it’s reasonably close to London (about 80 miles away), and we are staying at a very small family hotel recommended to us. It is just across the road from a beach, and it has its own swimming pool, which we have enjoyed using. It’s a pebble beach, but is quite acceptable. Rosemary and I went swimming in the sea this afternoon. The water was reasonable because there is a warm current that passes by this area.

The hotel has just five bedrooms and some elements of Fawlty Towers about it, so I won’t name it. We can’t put our finger on it exactly, but I think it has something to do with the pretentiousness of it. Something we’ve never struck before is the bell push beside each table in the dining room (sorry, Café Le Jardin!). You are instructed to push the bell as soon as each course is finished. And Hey Presto! the owner appears instantly at your side with the next course. The owner was very proud to tell us that we were being served chicken bought in France. I can’t imagine that a chook that grew up in France tastes much different to one that grew up in England.

The hotel is in the same b&b network as Rosemary’s company, London Home-to-Home. This is how it came to be recommended to us. We both felt that while it was quite good, it was very over-priced: £80 a night for a double bedroom and £25 each for dinner. Rosemary charges about a quarter of this for much the same service -- though there is admittedly no beach across the road and no swimming pool. We won’t bother to come back. We couldn’t afford it. Still, it has been a very pleasant break from London - and I have hardly given the Arabic Service a moment’s thought.

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

ARABIC TV PROJECT

Johan Ramsland, editor of BBC World Service Television News, was in touch yesterday to bring me up to date on the BBC Arabic TV channel on Orbit Satellite Television. We are now to go on air on June 20 with two hours a day, with a further two hours on July 20 and a further two hours on August 8. Because of the changes, he needed me to revise the budget which I have now done and zapped back to him.

Extracts from a letter dated April 24 1994 after my return to London:

SYDNEY TO SINGAPORE

The flight from Sydney to Singapore was very straight forward and comfortable. I got an aisle seat upstairs in the “bubble” of the 747 jumbo jet. Qantas Business Class is now fitted with four-inch television monitors that fold out from between the seats. There are about eight channels to choose from. Most of the film offerings are still crap, but at least they are in focus with good quality sound. And if you miss a programme first time around, you can catch it when the whole cycle is repeated a couple of hours later.

Sadly this facility failed to work on my group of seats on the 13+ hour leg from Singapore to London. I don’t even have the music and chat sound channels. Indeed, three-quarters of the way through the flight, even the overhead light and the cabin crew call button had ceased to work. I think this calls for a compensation claim. I don’t see why I should still pay a Business Class fare if I have missed out on one of the key things that helps keep me sane on such a long journey. At least I had my laptop computer on which I was able to catch up with my correspondence and do a few reports and memos. It helped fill the hours when I was not trying to sleep.

SINGAPORE TO LONDON

The Singapore to London was completely non-smoking. I have never been on a long-haul international flight before with smoking banned. Presumably smokers were warned beforehand and offered alternative flights. There were a couple of very firm lectures from the “cabin director” (formerly known as the chief steward or stewardess) as we took off, warning that smoke detectors would catch anyone trying to have an illicit puff in the toilets. Someone told me recently that they were on a Qantas flight when a passenger set off the smoke alarm in the toilet. A steward kicked the door in and humiliated the guilty person in front of all the other passengers in the vicinity. Quite right too. It was an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

I nearly forgot to mention that on the Sydney-Singapore leg the dinner menu included emu. I couldn’t resist trying it. It tasted and looked like venison. It was a bit rich for my taste, though that may have been because the sauce was rather salty, so I don’t think I will bother again. Still, it was worth the experience. By the way, I wonder what an emu drumstick is like?

MALAYSIAN CENSORSHIP

The visit to Singapore went fine, though I made an unexpected discovery that will have serious consequences for one of our newest WSTV News re-broadcasters, Radio & Television Malaysia. I made a special effort to watch a re-broadcast being transmitted by RTM’s TV1 channel and picked up in Singapore. I was horrified to discover that it had been censored. TV1 had deleted the Asia headlines and removed the top story, which was about the riots in Indonesia. Presumably, it was considered too sensitive by the Malaysians. I immediately reported my discovery to London and as I write this, a rocket from our lawyers is on its way to Kuala Lumpur, pointing out that censorship is in total breach of the contract and that our bulletins will be removed from RTM’s airwaves immediately, if this happens again.

Otherwise, I didn’t do much in Singapore. I went for a swim, I did a bit of window shopping and visited our Singapore Correspondent, Jonathan Birchall, and his cameraman, Kym Hallion, to give them a first-hand briefing on the latest happenings in World Service Television. The weather was warm and humid, but quite bearable.

Extracts from a family letter dated May 24 1994:

ANCESTRAL CHURCH EXPERIENCE

A few weekends back Rosemary and I went to Aldwincle, the Northamptonshire village of her ancestors. We were joined by Harley and stayed in a lovely bed-and-breakfast place. On the Sunday morning we went to the morning service at one of the parish churches where her ancestors worshipped.

There was a woman priest. We thought the service was a bit of a shambles. The organist seemed to think that hitting the correct notes was all that was required. To Hell (so to speak) with the rhythm. And the priest’s sermon was delivered off the cuff and wandered all over the place. Her theme was brotherly love and the Channel Tunnel ­which seemed to be stretching any possible connection to the absolute limit. Still it was an interesting experience.

The organist’s performance reminded me of the Morecombe and Wise sketch in which Eric played the piano very badly, which he denied. He was told by guest André Previn that he may have been playing the right notes, but not in the right order.

ARABIC TV PROBLEMS

The Arabic Project is total chaos. I knew that setting it up would be rough, but not THIS rough! We are supposed to be on air on June 20 with a two-hour pilot service, but we still don’t have a newsroom, the computer isn’t yet operational -- and the company which owns the satellite transponders hasn’t yet managed to set up a satellite link between BBC Television Centre and the operational headquarters in Rome. But somehow I will get the bloody thing on air, and no doubt I will look back on the project one day as another “interesting experience”.

GEOGRAPHY LESSON

We recently had an American couple in our flat upstairs. They were from a two-horse town in Nebraska. He was a businessman and had been abroad before, but his wife had never been outside the United States and rarely outside her home town. She confessed that until she got hold of a map, she didn’t know have a clue where London or England were. She said she started looking at “the big bits” on the map, then eventually discovered, to her huge surprise, that London was on an island. And she also revealed that her trips on the London Underground were her first time on a train since she was four (she is now in her mid-30s).

******

ARABIC TV RECRUITING TRIP

A report on my visit to Bahrain to recruit staff for the new BBC Arabic television news channel. I was accompanied by Sami Haddad, Arabic Language Editor. June 28-July 2, 1994

Our trip to Bahrain was interesting in a rather limited way. It was very, very hot. The temperature every day was around 42 degrees Celsius with high humidity. It was also rather windy. On the first two days the sky was a light yellow because of all the sand blown in from Saudi Arabia. It is the first time I have stayed in an hotel that boasted that it chilled the water in its swimming pool.

For almost all of the trip we were stuck in our hotel, which was where we held our interviews. We got out just once: for an audience with the Bahraini Information Minister. (In this part of the world, the Information Minister is also the de facto director-general of broadcasting.)

Bahrain Airport is one of the world’s better airports. It is rather like a small-scale Singapore Airport in style and efficiency. The airport was extraordinarily efficient. We went through Immigration in a flash, and our luggage was already off the plane and lined up by the carousel by the time we got into the baggage area. We were met by an official of the Bahraini Information Ministry and taken to our hotel in an official car.

From what little I saw of Bahrain, it doesn’t appeal much. The island is about 20 miles across with a population of 450,000. It has a link by causeway with Saudi Arabia, so it is relatively easy to get off the island by road -- to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is an extraordinarily-restricted society. Very fierce media censorship, not just on political matters, but on anything to do faintly with sex or non-Islamic religions. One person I spoke to had worked in the censorship department and said that by the time he had finished with many films they made no sense at all. All Christian religious symbols had to be removed...no-one could be seen drinking alcohol...nudity, semi-nudity and kissing were definitely out...and it was not permitted to show males and females even touching each other. Female sports events weren’t covered if the pictures showed bare legs or arms.

Bahrain itself was very much free-er and showed BBC World Service Television News round-the-clock on the main TV channel. The signal could be picked up across the Gulf and well into eastern Saudi Arabia. But women certainly played a pretty minor role on the island, though their situation was not nearly as restricted as in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Even so, it was very common to see women covered in black from head to toe with even their faces covered by a thick black net. The traditional wear for the men is a white ankle-length robe and Arab head dress. It looked pretty cool (in the temperature sense). I did wonder whether the Muslim women were forced to wear black because it would absorb the heat and therefore act as a further deterrent to leaving their homes. Sami Haddad, our Arabic Language Editor, didn’t know, but felt there might be something to this theory. He did reveal -- from experience I suspect -- that Muslim women usually didn’t wear knickers under their black outfits.

Censorship in the Gulf is a real recruitment problem for us. Almost all the journalists seeking work with us have spent most of their professional lives working for newspapers, magazines or broadcasting stations that are totally under the thumb of their government. While the candidates, almost to a person, say they wanted to work for the BBC because it is free and is a trusted, independent organisation, when we ask them how they would handle certain types of sensitive stories, the majority say their answer would depend on “what the BBC’s line is”. They just don’t seem to be able to comprehend that we don’t have a “line”.

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

These are extracts from letters and reports written to the family. It concentrates on my research into the death of my WW2 bomber pilot Uncle Alexander L Cox of Melbourne, Australia.

Alex became a sergeant in the RAAF and flew with 458 Squadron from RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor in Yorkshire. On the night of Saturday, November 15 1941, his RAF Wellington bomber R1775 was sent to Emden in north-west Germany, near the Dutch border, to bomb unspecified targets in the city’s industrial area. He was 2nd Pilot. Forty-seven Wellingtons from various RAF bases took part in the raid on Emden; Alex’s Wellington was one of four that did not return. He was just 22.

458 Squadron first came into existence at Williamtown in New South Wales on July 8 1941 and began to establish itself in Britain on August 25 1941 at RAF Holme as a night bombing unit. The squadron was equipped with Wellingtons, the RAF’s most common bomber. The Wellington was designed by Barnes Wallis, the man who also designed, among other things, the bouncing bomb used by the RAF Dam Busters. The plane was described as immensely strong and able to take large amounts of damage and still fly. Wellingtons were initially used for daylight raids, but they were too vulnerable to attack from fighter planes during daylight. The defensive guns on the Wellingtons were not very manoeuvrable, and the German fighter planes were half as fast again as the bombers, with their top speed of only 255mph (411kph).

Post-war investigations into the loss of Alex’s plane revealed no trace of it or the crew. The presumption always made in such cases is that the aircraft crashed into the North Sea. This view is supported by the fact that the flight from RAF Holme to Emden would have taken a Wellington about 90 minutes, so allowing for the time that might have been spent over the target area, Alex’s Wellington must have been well on its way back across the North Sea when the last contact, an SOS, was made. There appear to be no records of what the “contact” was, but it is most likely that the crew broke radio silence because the plane was about to crash. We will probably never know whether the aircraft went down because of damage done by German ground-to-air, or air-to-air fire, or because of mechanical failure. Even if the crew were not killed on impact with the sea, the waters of the North Sea would have been bitterly cold and survival would have been difficult.

Another visitor to the memorial site was Bess Carr, one of Alex’s sisters.

A stripped down Wellington recovered from Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands is at the Brooklands Museum at Weybridge.

My cousin Fiona Stewart and I were allowed into the main body of a Wellington bomber at the Brooklands Museum and it was clear that getting in and out of the aircraft in a hurry would have been very difficult, if not impossible. My guess is that the crew were still in the plane when it ditched and sank to the bottom of the North Sea.

Emden was one of the most heavily defended ports in Germany. When there was an allied raid, the German fighters would stay on the fringes of Emden, for fear of being hit by the intense flak fired at the allied bombers and would instead attack the bombers on their way to and from their targets. The casualty rate for allied bombers early in the war was very high. It was “bloody good going” if a crew managed to survive five raids. The main target in Emden was the German U Boat base. But in the early years of the war the submarines sheltered under very deep concrete roofs and the 250lb and 500lb bombs from the Wellingtons would just bounce off the roofs without causing any real damage. It wasn’t until 1943/4 that larger bombers began dropping 10-ton bombs that were able to penetrate the concrete at Emden.

View this five-minute VIDEO I made at Holme-on-Spalding Moor. Sadly, the exhibition that I filmed no longer exists as the host company, J Rotherham Memorials, was taken over by Mindful Memorials and moved to another location.

En Route Cairo to Amman - May 27 1994

Extracts from letters to my family in Australia.

I am writing this on a flight to the Jordanian capital on a recruiting trip. I was in Cairo just 18 hours, which is seriously bordering on the ridiculous. I was supposed to fly there at the beginning of the week, but a one-day strike at the BBC caused a delay. I had cancelled the trip altogether, but when a planned repeat strike was called off, an abbreviated trip was organised at short notice. So, at 9.30am yesterday morning the decision was made that I should go at 12.l5pm I had my tickets, by 3.15pm I was at Heathrow, and at 1am this morning I was tucked up in bed in the Ramses Hilton in Cairo.

The trip is one of several we are making to seek presenters, producers and translators for BBC Arabic Television. This morning I joined a couple of my colleagues in seeing a few people, and two proved to be recruitable. After a quick visit to the BBC Cairo Bureau and some lunch, it was back out to the airport. A shame really. I had a room with a wonderful view of the Nile but could enjoy it for no more than 10 minutes before getting down to work. And in any case, the air pollution was horrendous.

The weather in Cairo was hot -- in the 90s, or whatever that is called these days in Celsius or centigrade -- but as I hardly got out into it, it was not a bother.

Cairo Airport is pretty scruffy, but I’ve been in worse -- Moscow Airport, for example. The security seemed fairly tight, but not very consistent. But before passengers could get onto our plane -- operated by Royal Jordanian Airlines -- we had to walk to where our luggage was laid out on the tarmac. Each passenger had to identify his/her luggage before it could be placed in the hold. I fear my case got pretty hot, which can’t have been good for my cameras and my film, which I had packed inside.

The take-off from Cairo took an eternity. We taxied for more than 20 minutes, and at one point I thought we must be going to Amman by road. The airport is on the edge of the desert and I got a fascinating view from my window seat. The sand dunes made interesting patterns, so did various earthworks, which seemed to be related to the clusters of buildings. Right near the airport there was what appeared to be a huge prison compound with watchtowers every 100 metres or so. After a while, we flew out over the Gulf of Suez and into Jordanian airspace. Inside an hour we touched down again. Coming in to land, I noticed flocks of sheep in compounds, but I couldn’t see what they could be eating. Surely sand couldn’t be that nourishing.

Amman, May 30 1994

Amman Airport had all the architectural style of a tin shed, but at least I got through Immigration in a couple of minutes (compared with 45 minutes at Cairo Airport). I then had to wait ages for my luggage to appear.

The airport is a long way out of town (about 45 minutes on the motorway), but the trip in was interesting -- if only because my taxi driver seemed to be in training for Formula 1 racing. It was a real squealing-tyres job, especially on the traffic roundabouts. But he always seemed to have full control of the vehicle, so I sat back and enjoyed the excitement. Sections of the motorway were lined by peppercorn trees, which I have never before seen outside Australia.

My three colleagues who are on the same recruiting trip came to Amman later in the day on EgyptAir, which is clearly not one of the world’s great airlines. The pilot did not give any warning that the plane was about to land -- with the result that the cabin crew were still clearing up after the in-flight meal. The seat trays were still down and the cabin crew was not seated. One passenger had to grab hold of a food trolley to stop it charging down the aisle. It was also supposed to be a “no smoking” flight, but passengers were happily smoking all over the plane.

Amman is a tidy, modern city, relatively free of pollution. You can even drink the tap water, which is something in a Third World capital. As recently as the Second World War, Amman was little more than a village. But the Jordanians have kept a sharp control on the rapid development of the city. Almost all buildings are in an Arabic style, built of the local yellow-coloured stone. The police are relatively honest and tipping is kept under control. One of my colleagues even had a tip declined by a barman at our hotel. In Cairo, absolutely everyone wants a tip. Even the guys putting the luggage through the security scanning machines and loading our cases onto the plane from the tarmac. Mostly I refused unless someone had provided a genuine service.

Our hotel in Amman was not very full, so I was given a two-room suite for the price of a single room. The main room had two double beds. There was even a free half bottle of whisky. I think they were trying to impress the BBC. It was very nice, but hardly necessary.

We were kept very busy during our 2½ days there. I didn’t even get to use the hotel swimming pool. We were interviewing for about 12 hours on the Saturday. A number of our candidates were Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied West Bank and it took as long as six hours for them to make the border crossing into Jordan because of the bureaucracy on both sides. Not much fun with the temperature close on 100 degrees. I will try to remember this next time I get grumpy waiting for a mere 10 minutes in a bank or post office queue.

We did a few of our interviews at the studios of Jordanian Radio & Television. JRTV was pretty basic by our standards, but everything seemed to work and everyone was very friendly. The security was rather tighter than at the BBC. The guards at the front gate were armed with automatic weapons.

We were driven to and from JRTV in an ancient Ford Mercury with the gear stick on the steering wheel and a front bench seat. I guess it must have been at least 20 years old.

Most of the people we have interviewed seemed very nice and straight forward, but over the weeks we have uncovered a couple of Syrian intelligence officers who are clearly hoping to get a job with us so that they can spy on the staff. But both have been very stupid and gave themselves away quite quickly. In Amman, we had one guy who even proudly declared on his application form that he was an expert on psychological warfare. And he clearly decided he was going to enjoy himself at the BBC’s expense. He had been told that we would pay reasonable travel and accommodation expenses, so he hired a taxi for the return journey from Damascus to Amman ($US200) and booked himself into the Executive Suite at our hotel (£200 per night). He didn’t seem to be able to understand why he got an earful for trying to rip us off.

One of our recruiting team is Sami Haddad, the Current Affairs Editor of our Arabic Radio operation. He is a Jordanian who is famous in his country because he spent seven years as a Jordanian television newsreader and, of course, is also well known for his BBC work. Everywhere we have gone with him in Amman Sami has been greeted by old friends or associates, most of whom seem to be in positions of some power. I was told that on one visit he was greeted as an old buddy by a chap who was then identified as the-then Jordanian Prime Minister. He is very Arabic, very well educated, multi lingual and very entertaining, but is just about the most vain man I have ever met. All his clothes are designed by Gucci or other big names in the fashion industry. Sami is in his late 50s and looks like a Hollywood matinee idol. He says he needs to be well kitted out in designer clothes, “otherwise my mistresses will refuse to have anything to do with me”. I don’t think he was joking.

Sami is travelling Business Class on this flight, while the rest of us go Economy. He has an arrangement with a woman manager in the Royal Jordanian Airlines office at Amman Airport. In exchange for providing her with some sexual entertainment whenever he visits Amman, she upgrades his ticket to Business or First Class free of charge. It comes as something of a surprise to learn from him that he is a practising Roman Catholic who once trained for the priesthood. [Sami Haddad died January 19 2021.]

Yesterday, our interviews were organised at the beginning and the end of the day to allow us to have a bit of a break. Two of us hired a taxi to go to the Dead Sea, about an hour’s drive from Amman. It was bloody hot -- over 100 degrees -- so we were grateful that the ancient Dodge taxi had air conditioning. The trip was fascinating. We went the scenic route, rather than the motorways, down through the Jordan Valley, which is below sea level. There were lots of banana plantations, and we could see across to Jericho. Very few people were at the Dead Sea beach, which is hardly a beach as we know one. It was ordinary earth almost to the water line where it was replaced by small pebbles. I brought my bathers with me so that I could experience the sensation of floating on the extremely salty water. It was very weird. It was something like lying on an air mattress. I couldn’t swim properly on my stomach because my legs were lifted out of the water. The only easy way to swim was backstroke. I borrowed a magazine and my colleague photographed me lying on my back in the water “reading” it. It took me a while to get the hang of this. The first few times I lost my balance, rolled over and copped a mouthful of the horrible salty water.

The food in Jordan is very nice: lots of salads with spices and herbs and barbecued fish and red meat. And it is usually quite safe to eat, which can’t be said for Egypt and some other countries in the Middle East. Even so, my Jordanian colleague had a very upset stomach today.

From the Dead Sea we drove to Jerash, the site of a town built by the Romans over two thousand years ago. Much of it has survived in some form or another. The main avenue still has most of its stone columns. There are two amphitheatres, one of which is still used today. There was no more than a scattering of visitors. This may have been, in part, due to the temperature and the blinding sunlight. I felt as though I was standing immediately under an electric radiator with a spotlight in my face. My sunglasses seemed to make little difference.

It comes as a shock to realise that this is still Spring in the Middle East and that it doesn’t get really hot until late June, July and August. I don’t think I could cope. Winter is a total contrast, with temperatures down to zero and occasional snowfalls.

En route Amman to London, May 30 1994

This is another Royal Jordan Airlines flight. It is fine, though not as good as British Airways or Qantas. Since the Gulf War very few airlines fly to Jordan because of the serious decline in tourist and business traffic following King Hussein’s ill-judged support for Saddam Hussein. British Airways was one of the airlines that stopped flying this route.

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

August 20, 1993

We are now in Devon for six days. We are currently staying in very nice bed and breakfast accommodation in Dartmouth and will move on later to another place overlooking the sea further round the coast. So far, the weather has been quite good. Although it has been dull in the mornings, the sun has been out in all its glory by mid-afternoon. The temperatures are in the low 20s, but still sufficient for Rosemary and I to go swimming at our favourite beach at Slapton.

August 21, 1993

One of the great joys of this visit to Dartmouth has been to stand at the window of our lovely room and enjoy the wonderful day and night-time views across the harbour. We have really struck it lucky with the weather and the accommodation. Dartmouth is such a peaceful and beautiful place with its great variety of ancient buildings clinging to the steep hillsides down to the harbour. It is certainly not a place for people in poor health because the streets are so steep.

It is like a fantasy town, but it is all real and has been the centre of many important historical events over many centuries. It was from Dartmouth that the Pilgrim Fathers left the shores of England on their way from Plymouth to the Americas. Just below where we are staying is Bayards Cove which was used to represent Liverpool port during the very successful TV sailing ship series of some years back, the “Onedin Line”.

August 23, 1993

Yesterday we moved from Dartmouth to the village of Strete between Dartmouth and Slapton. We are in bed and breakfast accommodation above cliffs overlooking the English Channel. The views are magnificent, and it is possible to walk down a steep path to a secluded beach, accessible only by foot or by boat.

It is interesting to compare the three bed and breakfast homes we have used this time. All have been excellent, but in different ways. This is one of the reasons why B&B can be such fun. The first place was run by an Australian guy from Frankston and his English wife. I would guess they are both from well-to-do families, and they both spend most of the English winter at their home in Frankston. Their place in Dartmouth is decorated in great style, and as well as offering B&B, provided dinner parties to order in their home on a massive dining room table they had made. The second place was also classy, but more amusingly eccentric. Everywhere there were toy or china pigs, and the visitors’ book had some quite amusing entries. The owners were English. The husband had once lived in Kenya and I suspect was someone who had been made redundant and had decided to go into something different. Then, the third place is run by a retired policeman from Rochdale and his wife. The house doesn’t have the style of the other homes but is spotless and extremely well cared for.

Our hosts recommended a coastal walk about 10 miles away. It was magnificent, and the weather was excellent, even though rain had been forecast. The first leg of the journey was about one and a half miles and took us to a fine pub, the Cricket Inn at Beesands, with its excellent food and lovely beach.

The return leg wound around the rugged coastline for about three miles at a height of about 100-feet above sea level.

August 28, 1993

Our final day in Devon was very enjoyable. We drove home via Dartmouth where Regatta Week was getting under way with the arrival of the British frigate “Battleaxe”. It was a wonderful sight seeing the huge ship coming into the narrow harbour with its guns firing in salute. It slowly made its way up the Dart River about a mile, then amazingly managed to turn around in it. I never imagined such a massive craft would be able to turn around in such a small space. All in all, it was a wonderful, relaxing break.

******************

Rosemary & Ian Richardson, February 1994

I took Rosemary to the South of France for four days to celebrate her 50th birthday. The weather was perfect, apart from a couple of hours late one afternoon when the clouds came over and a chill wind sprung up.

Although Rosemary knew she was going to France -- she realised that because she had to fill out a visa application -- the actual location was a surprise until we checked in at Heathrow Airport. We flew direct to Nice on the Cote D’Azur, rented a car at the airport and drove to Cannes where we were booked in for three nights in an hotel just back from the foreshore and in the centre of the town.

The skies were a brilliant blue, and although it was still winter there, the temperatures hovered around an exceedingly-pleasant 16C mark. It was glorious to relax over a meal or a drink in the sidewalk cafes, or to stroll along the foreshore.

Cannes is an extremely rich area, and one we could not have afforded, had we not been able to take advantage of off-season rates. The last time we were in Cannes was in October 1969 when we did an impoverished two-week tour of Europe in the second-hand Morris Minor 1000 van we then owned and had converted into a sleeper. We mostly lived on bread and cheese, hot dogs and cheap wine. When we stayed in Cannes then, we found a space close to the foreshore. [See Chapter 20: Tour of the Continent]

When I talk of the area being “rich”, I mean “seriously rich”, with fur coats for everyday wear and marinas choked with yachts that could each just about provide accommodation for an entire family. We had never seen more fur coats to the hectare in our lives. What came as something of a shock was not just that the owners could afford the coats, but that they happily wore them in an age when wearing a fur coat in many cities would attract not just verbal abuse, but sometimes violence. Cannes is clearly a very politically-incorrect place.

Many of the women, and some of the men, looked grotesque in that they clearly had no idea how to grow old gracefully. They obviously didn’t know the difference between “looking their best” and looking ludicrous. It was weird to see women in their 60s and 70s parading about, stick-thin, in clothes designed for people in their teens or early 20s. The current anti-smoking campaigns in most parts of the world appeared not to have had any impact on most women living in the South of France. I am sure that they regarded cigarettes as an elegant fashion statement rather than a health hazard. Small dogs were also a very popular fashion accessory. The dogs -- most of them poodles -- were taken everywhere, including into food shops and restaurants. Many of the owners didn’t even expect the dogs to walk; they carried the bloody things in special carrier bags. It brings a new meaning to “doggie bag”.

The Cannes population certainly helped provide us with endless entertainment. We also enjoyed window shopping in the expensive designer clothes and furnishing shops in central Cannes. You have to hand it to the French: they really do have style. Some of the furnishings, household nick-nacks and clothes were breathtakingly imaginative and beautiful.

Another source of entertainment were all the old men playing boule in a park on the foreshore. There must have been hundreds of them, all in small groups under the plane trees. Boule, if you don’t already know, is played on earth — any old earth, it seems — with steel bowls. The aim appears to be to get your boule as close as possible to the kitty and if anyone gets closer, you try to knock theirs away. Unlike lawn bowls, the steel boules are thrown with a back-spin to stop them rolling too far from their target. The players’ coats were hung on special steel racks under the plane trees and concreted into the ground.

On our second day, we drove round the coast towards San Tropez. We never made it there because we took the long, winding coastal road and stopped too often to enjoy the beautiful scenery. There were quite a few eucalypts among the trees, and the wattle trees were in blossom. Away from the built-up areas, it was quite easy to imagine that we were travelling along some of the nicer parts of the Mornington Peninsula in Spring. Of course, the moment we came to houses, the illusion was broken by the very distinctive Mediterranean architecture. We got as far as St Raphael, a resort which appeared to be pretty much closed down for the winter. It took us ages to find a restaurant or café that was open.

Our little Renault 5 hire car was just right for us. Being a left-hand drive vehicle, it was a useful reminder to me that we were in a foreign country where people drove on the right-hand side of the road - and that I had to drive anti-clockwise around the roundabouts! Rosemary kept a beady eye out for any motoring transgressions on my part and carried both a map for directions and a small English/French dictionary for some emergency translations. Sadly, neither of us is fluent in French, but over the years we have accumulated a narrow but useful French vocabulary. Fortunately, many people in the South of France speak some English, so in a tight corner, we could usually find someone to help us.

Most of our third day was taken up with a trip inland to the medieval village of St Paul de Vence, a famous centre for artists. The graves in the beautiful local cemetery include that of the painter Marc Chagall. The village is on a hilltop and is surrounded by a high wall. The streets are so narrow that very few of them are wide enough to take even a small car but it was a very pretty place.

The next day we went briefly to Monte Carlo. By accident we went there on the Autoroute. It was a spectacular road high in the mountains back from the coast. The exit from the Autoroute was via a long tunnel that plunged down to the outskirts of Monte Carlo.

After a cup of coffee and a quick look around, we returned to Nice via another medieval village, Eze. This is about a couple of kilometres back from the coast, but at least 1000 metres above sea level. It gave us a spectacular view. Not surprisingly, there was a terrific sense of history. As we wandered along the narrow streets or entered buildings, it was impossible not to wonder what events, both good and bad, had taken place there over the centuries.

The final day again brought brilliant sunshine, so it was rather sad for us to have to leave for home and, as it turned out, some very cold weather.

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE

LOOKING AFTER THATCHER

Lady Thatcher -- always referred to by one British newspaper columnist by the wonderful name, Mrs Hacksaw -- has been back in the news with her attacks on her successor, John Major, and others for failing to nuke the Serbs. She was interviewed on World Service Television and it was my task to be her official “greeter” and host. It was like meeting a ghost. She had very white make-up and rather watery eyes. Sadly, no photographs were taken of her at this visit to Television Centre. The best I can do is post this photo taken at about the same time, but without the white make-up:

It was fascinating to watch her “switch on” the moment the interviews began. It was a typically aggressive Thatcher performance: no holds barred and always attempting to make it appear that legitimate journalistic questioning was quite simply an outrageous attack on her public spirited nature. Frankly, the old witch is barking mad; even madder than when she was in her final years of power. It was hard to believe that it wasn’t so long ago that she held this country in an iron grip.

As I escorted her from Television Centre and back to her security officers, she asked what I thought of her interviews. “Oh they were fine with some powerful points,” I lied because I wanted to keep my job. But I really wanted to say “Don’t ask me for my opinion, you nasty old bat,” but didn’t, of course.

It was my third meeting with Mrs Hacksaw. The first was when she was opposition leader and wanted to meet any journalists working for media outlets in New Zealand. The declared reason was to get some flattering articles filed to NZ in advance of her visit to that country. She failed because she just couldn’t resist being rude to the journalists. The second time was when she was Prime Minister and Rosemary and I went to a reception at 10 Downing Street for the Foreign Press Association. As she circulated among the journalists, she came to Rosemary and I and a married couple from the NZ Herald. As we chatted politely, Thatcher was told by the Kiwi woman that as a teacher she was finding it difficult convincing her pupils that they would all get jobs when they left school. Thatcher responded by telling the woman “All I can say to you is that you must be a terrible teacher”. At that she abruptly turned away to talk to someone she considered held more positive views.

As the evening progressed, we were approached by a woman who identified herself as the wife of the Cabinet Secretary for Wales, Nicholas Edwards, Baron Crickhowell. Rosemary told her that her husband’s brother, David, was our immediate neighbour. Her face lit up. “Oh really,” she said, “I must get Nicholas.” She walked off and returned a short time later with Baron Crickhowell. “These people are David’s neighbours,” she told him. “How interesting,” he said and asked “have you met his girlfriend?” They seemed very surprised to learn of David having a relationship. We admitted that we weren’t aware that the reclusive widower had a girlfriend. I don’t think we did meet Faye until after she and David married. We later learned they had met through a dating website or somesuch. They had both since died and there are new occupants in the property.

From a letter dated May 25 1993:

UPS AND DOWNS OF WSTVN

Life with World Service Television News continues to be pretty hectic and unpredictable -- and often exhausting. The trouble is that we are expanding at a rate way beyond the wildest expectations. Our newsroom is about to go through its second rebuild in just under six months, doubling its size. We are now broadcasting to the whole of Africa, as well as Europe, most of Asia and the Persian/Arabian Gulf. It will take a while for the Africa audience to build up, I suspect, because there we are mostly available only to cable subscribers. But our audiences in Asia are already staggeringly large. In India alone, the audience is already said to be in excess of 20 million. All the indications are that where we are in direct with America’s Cable Network News (CNN), we are beating the pants off them. One Indian survey showed 80% were watching us and just 11% watching CNN.

We are told that WSTV will be available in Australia fairly soon, but the details have yet to be finalised. Canada is also high on the expansion list.

Some of the news presenters are still as difficult as ever. A substantial part of my job is what is only half-jokingly referred to as Head of Egos. Sometimes the presenters drive me nuts with their self-centred and relentless complaining.

My worst Head Case Ego recently got a great deal of publicity in the tabloid press when she effed and blinded her way through a speech during a Cambridge University Union debate. She seemed to think it was amusing, but I thought it was just further evidence of her serious immaturity. Just as well the public doesn’t realise how incredibly childish television “stars” often are. I suppose the problem is that most news presenters and other “stars” are fairly inadequate personalities. After all, what normal person would want to be recognised and fawned over every time he or she stepped outside the front door? There would be no private life or sense of perspective.

Sadly, I have lost my best and most grown-up presenter, Ian Smith. Nearly three months ago he fell 100 metres down a glacier on a skiing holiday in France and suffered such severe brain damage that it is extremely unlikely he will ever work again. It is tragic to see him reduced to little more than a vegetable.

From a letter dated July 4 1993:

WONDERFUL WEDDING

Rosemary and I recently went to an amazing wedding. One of World Service Television’s lovely woman presenters, Lindsey Brancher, married Cliff Beard, a very rich businessman (at least he was before the wedding!) and it was an all-stops-out affair. The wedding itself was a civil ceremony because both were divorced, but the blessing was in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral before 230 guests. It was a lovely ceremony.

This was followed by a wedding lunch for the immediate friends and members of the families, and in the evening a party for the rest of us. Monkey Island, an island on the Thames at Bray, west of London, was taken over for the event. It isn’t any ordinary island. On it are an hotel and a restaurant in their own lovely grounds inhabited by tame peacocks. Lunch took place in the presence of, among other things, a string quartet.

The evening party was a knockout. There were unlimited drinks, including champagne, and a terrific dance band that could play everything from the traditional ballroom numbers to a very creditable Rolling Stones medley. We were also entertained with croquet and clay pigeon shooting. At 10.30pm, as darkness fell, there was a Mother Of All Fireworks Displays. It went on for 30 minutes and exceeded anything any of us had ever seen. After that, there was the cake-cutting ceremony, during which the bride unveiled her present to her new husband: a bronze bust of him! He, in turn, gave her a watercolour painting and a large hand-engraved glass bowl.

At midnight, the wedding breakfast was served. Then just before 1am, the couple went to the very classy Cliveden Hotel to spent their first night as a married couple. Then they were off on their honeymoon in Venice. The whole day was recorded by two professional television cameramen, a professional wedding photographer, and a professional artist. It was all gloriously over the top. But if it had been done by anyone else, it would have been hard to take. In fact, everyone agreed that it was a wonderfully happy event. The only question still being asked is: “How much did it cost?” We don’t know, but it was lots and lots. And that wouldn’t include the day trip to the pyramids on Concorde, during which Cliff made his proposal of marriage!

Extracts from a family letter dated November 3 1993:

ARABIC NEWS PROJECT

My work with the Beeb remains busy and interesting. We have just completed a re-design of our News and Information Channel. This included a new studio and set, several more hours of news each day, and an entirely new image. It seems to have gone down very well.

In another development, I am soon to move to another job for about six months. I will retain my News Development Editor title but will become a full-time member of a small project team responsible for setting up an Arab-language satellite television service. Although negotiations are still going on and final contracts have yet to be signed, the new service is likely to be at least as big as our English-language satellite service. The satellite footprint will cover all the Middle East and North Africa. It is going to be an extremely challenging, if not hair-raising, project. For a start, we have to recruit something like 250 Arab journalists, translators and broadcasters, all of whom will have to be fluent in English as well as Arabic. That alone will be one hell of a job. It also means finding and designing a new studio and another newsroom.

The Arab project has brought to a head the tensions between BBC World Service Television and Rupert Murdoch, who recently gained control of Star Television, the pan-Asian satellite service that carries our channel and which currently attracts an Asian audience of around 60-million. Murdoch is thought to have plans to give World Service the elbow and replace us with his own British-based Sky-TV news channel, which he hopes to turn into an international service. The trouble is he can’t afford to get rid of us yet because we are Star TV’s biggest revenue earner. So, it looks as though he is stuck with us for a while, and in the meantime, we are looking at the options open to us on other Asian satellites. The cause of particular grief with Murdoch is the fact that the Star TV signal substantially overlaps that of the projected BBC Arabic channel. This wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for Murdoch’s plan to set up his own Arabic TV channel. At one stage, he was threatening to close down the BBC channel on Star if we didn’t scrap the Arab project, but the BBC took him to the High Court in London and forced him to withdraw the threat. Round One to us, but we are sure that the war is just beginning. [Murdoch did later switch off the BBC, but that was for a different reason I have yet to explain.]

HOSTING THE FAMOUS

One of the attractions of my job is the number of internationally-famous people who agree to come Television Centre to appear on the World Service channel. Hardly a day goes by without a government minister or president turning up to appear on our programmes. They would often be seated with me in my office while waiting to be taken to the studio. One of our most colourful guests has been Chief Mashood Abiola, the man who won the Nigerian Presidential Elections a few months back, but who was stopped from taking power by the military. He is a man of considerable stature and wears spectacular tribal outfits.

One of our more fashion-conscious women producers says she could hardly restrain herself from asking him who designed his “frocks”. I dropped a diplomatic clanger when I asked if I could take a photo of the chief for the BBC. He happily agreed until I suggested he should remove his hat. “No,” I was firmly told, “that’s part of my outfit!”

I recently played host to a rather slight, apparently-shy African gentleman. He was Chief Buthelezi, head of South Africa’s Inkatha Movement. It was hard to believe that this inoffensive-looking chap indulging in small talk with me in my office was in reality someone who was indirectly (and perhaps directly) responsible for hundreds of killings in the increasingly-vicious anti-Apartheid power struggle now going on in South Africa.

I recently also had to play host to ex-King Constantine of Greece who was invited to participate in a BBC World Service Television programme. He was anxious that the presenters pronounced his name correctly: (ConstanTEEN, not ConstanTYN). This reminded me of a story our deputy editor told me of the time when Constantine was still king and she was producing a programme that had him as guest. It was arranged that he be brought to the studio in a BBC car. Harry, one of the seen-them-all BBC staff chauffeurs, was assigned to the task. As Harry showed Constantine into the hospitality room, he introduced the production staff, then turned to him and asked: “And where did you say you were king of?”.

From a letter dated December 11 1993:

JOBS FOR THE BOYS

I have just been talking to Niall. He and his flat mates now have a phone. It is for incoming calls only, so that they don’t run up big bills making calls. But it suits us because it allows us to contact him with ease. He has been doing a lot of useful work around our house and doing odd jobs for other people. It helps keep him afloat financially and allow him the occasional luxury. This afternoon he and his mates all chipped in to hire a recording studio for a couple of hours for a musical jam.

Harley will be back next weekend from university for his month-long Christmas break. He plans to take some casual typing jobs for a couple of weeks to earn some money, then to take the other two weeks off. He is in good spirits. He is earning a bit of extra money here and there by designing and typing essays for fellow students at Nottingham University. He charges a pound a page. He does the typing on his Apple Macintosh Computer which has a simple desk-top publishing programme.

ARABIC TV NEWS DELAY

The signing of the contract to set up a BBC Arabic Television Service is still being delayed by the lawyers from both sides going through every page word-by-word and line-by-line. It is driving us nuts, but the High Ups seem confident that the contract will eventually be signed. I have handed over about half of my World Service TV News responsibilities to another chap, so that I can concentrate on the Arab Project. We do our first programme pilot tomorrow to try to establish how many translators will be required. I expect to be doing a lot of travelling over the next few months: to Rome, the home of the headquarters of the Arab satellite company, and to such places as Cairo and Amman to set up a network of Arab correspondents.

That’s enough for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

Rosemary and I are on the second day of a holiday in Scotland with two Valeries from the South Bendigo Ladies Bowling Club: Rosemary’s mother, Valerie Batson, and her bowling friend, Valerie Eskdale.

We flew to Inverness yesterday morning and hired a car there.

Our first major stop was Balmoral Castle, summer home of the Royal Family. It rained most of the day. This was, of course disappointing, but even in rain, the countryside remained refreshingly attractive.

From Balmoral we moved on to explore the lovely village of Ballater where we stayed for the night at a very pleasant bed-and-breakfast:

June 27 1993

Today, the weather was magnificent. Temperatures in the low 70sF, with lots of sunshine. We drove first to Crathes Castle on the recommendation of our B&B host. It was amazing. We were given a very good idea of what it must have been like to live in the castle in past centuries. One of the more interesting bits of information was that the wife of a past owner had 21 children in 22 years of marriage, yet survived to the age of 85. Astonishing for an age when the average life span was in the mid 40s.

But the real attraction of Crathes Castle is the gardens. We have never seen anything like them. They were far and away the most stunning gardens we have ever seen. There were avenues of hedges cut into beautiful shapes and acres of brilliant displays of poppies, lupins and other varieties of flowers. The size of the flowers was amazing. We didn’t think it possible to grow such huge plants -- specially in a climate such as Scotland’s. It was impossible not to be in awe of the minds that designed such extraordinary gardens.

From Crathes we went to Frazer Castle, which was like something in a Disney movie. It was truly stunning inside and out. It also had a walled garden which was quite different from what we had seen earlier in the day, but was nonetheless very fascinating, Walled gardens were needed to grow vegetables in the cold climate. Imagine the cost of building a 12-ft brick wall around two acres of land.

Our trip is taking place barely a week after the longest day of the year. We are so far north that it is daylight until about 11pm, followed by a few hours of twilight before it gets light again.

June 27 1993

We moved west and yet further north today to Knockan to spend four nights at Tom and Rae Strang’s excellent Birchbank Holiday Lodge activities centre where we spent some time last August with younger son Niall. Sadly, we never took photos at Birchbank, but we have this Google Earth satellite photo of its location:

June 28 1993

It was again a glorious day. Our hosts said it was the first decent day for weeks.

Birchbank is a short distance from the spectacular Knockan Crag with magnificent views:

The countryside is very different from the Ballater area. Trees are very sparse and it is very hilly. This is the area where Niall spent so many hours vainly watching for golden eagles.

HIGHLANDS LATE NIGHT

Last night we switched the lights off at 11.30pm (well, to be more accurate, the power supply failed) and it was still light enough outside to see colours and to go for a walk, if we’d had the strength. It is the first time we had seen the mid-summer twilight, but I remember Nana Richardson talking about it when we were kids.

After a dullish start today, the weather picked up and has been sunny for most of the day. We drove to Golspie, on the north-east coast, to visit Dunrobin Castle, seat of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. Dunrobin is a huge castle dating back 800 years. It’s our second visit there, but it was well worth returning because there is so much to see. The formal gardens are also a delight to view from the castle and for a stroll.

Last night, Rosemary and I went for a cliff top walk nearby after dinner. It was dead still, except for an occasional bird and the trout feeding on insects foolish enough to land on the water of the loch below. The view was magnificent. The loch below looked very well stocked with fish. A couple also staying here have been out fishing most days and have been catching about 30 trout a time -- most of which they throw back. Recently someone staying caught a l4lb brown trout. It was three feet long. It apparently wouldn’t have made good eating because of its huge size. Instead, it is being stuffed and put in a display case.

The weather was a bit dull today, but we drove north-west to Kylesku for a boat trip on Loch Glencoul. We arrived just as the rain died out. Rosemary and I did the boat trip last year but still enjoyed doing it again. The loch is very beautiful with a 600-ft waterfall Eas a' Chual Aluinn at one end. There is an abundance of bird life nesting on the various islands and on the cliff faces. The boat’s skipper said there were now two golden eagle nests above the loch, but we didn’t catch sight of any of the birds, which have 6-ft wing spans. The skipper said he had seen one yesterday, but then perhaps he says that every day. There are several seal colonies in the loch. Lots of baby seals had been born in the past few weeks.

The rest of the afternoon was spent driving around a spectacular coast road to Lochinver with its single row of houses and shops along the loch front.

The village is famed for its Lochinver Larder with its wonderful range of pies — almost as good as the renowned Gillies pies in Rosemary’s hometown, Bendigo, Victoria.

Then it was back to Knockan for dinner. By the time we reached there, the mist had come down, obscuring most of the hilltops. It was a very Scottish and a very beautiful sight.

Talking of dinner reminds me to mention the wonderful food we have been getting at Birchbank Lodge. There is no choice of menu, but everything is beautifully cooked, and there is plenty of it. The meals are a real treat.

June 30 1993

We’ve played Scrabble a couple of times, but our confidence took a blow when a newspaper reported this week that the world record for a single Scrabble word scored is 392. The word, for anyone planning to emulate this achievement, was caziques, a South American songbird or American Indian chief. My best single word score so far this trip is a piddling 40.

Rosemary and I would love to go walking at midnight in the twilight, but haven’t yet made it, nor are we likely to. Though last night we went for a walk after our Scrabble games and didn’t get back until just before 11pm. It was drizzling throughout, but it was still lovely. Perhaps we’ve finally flipped our lids.

July 1 1993

MIDNIGHT WALK

Well, last night we actually did it. Rosemary and I stayed up and went on our midnight walk. It was wonderful. We were out for close on an hour and we had no difficulty seeing our way about in the twilight.

HEADING HOME

Our last day in Scotland. It was sad to be departing. We left Knockan mid-morning in light rain. We made our way back to Inverness via Ullapool, and as the day progressed the weather improved. Not that a little rain is necessarily a bad thing in Scotland. Part of its charm is the constantly-changing weather which helps create a varying landscape.

The only other notable event on the trip to Inverness was a pants-wetting one when a jet fighter on low-flying exercises passed over us in the mist and shook the car (and us) with the roar of its engine. We never actually saw the plane because it had disappeared into the mist before the sound had hit us. Earlier in the week we saw several jet fighters charging through the glens on exercises aimed at avoiding enemy radar.

We spent the afternoon in Inverness shopping. Rosemary and I find Inverness a very boring place, but the two Valeries were excited to be back in civilisation. We have a suspicion that given the choice between shops and a beautiful landscape, the shops would be a clear winner.

We got a lovely view of Loch Ness as our plane took off on the return journey from Inverness to Heathrow in London. And what an extraordinary difference between the two airports. There were just two aircraft at Inverness and many hundreds at Heathrow.

It was very hot back in London, and the day ended with Niall and me having a blazing row over the untidy state of his bedroom!

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

I was asked to fly to the USA for a week, primarily to go to New York to look at a computer system we are thinking of buying for World Service Television. [We didn’t buy it.] But as the meeting was just two days after the American elections, it was decided that I should go first to Washington to help out with the coverage of that event.

So, a week after Rosemary got back from Australia, I was off to Washington, wearing my old “fixer’s” hat. It was good fun. My role chiefly was to liaise with the team producing the special programme for BBC domestic television and for the World Service Television team back in London. It was nowhere near as stressful as in my days in radio. Television is far too complicated and high-tech to allow the likes of me to go lashing various bits of equipment to telephones and broadcasting cables.

It was extremely interesting being able to not just monitor the programme as it was being transmitted around two-thirds of the world, but to listen to all the conversations going on between the various members of the production team pulling all the various strands together. It was the first time I had ever worked with David Dimbleby, Britain’s top TV anchorman. It was amazing to see how easy he made it look, while behind the scenes near-chaos prevailed.

By the way, just in case you were on holiday on Mars, the election was won by Bill Clinton.

The weather in Washington was unexpectedly warm, which was a problem as I had brought mostly winter clothes. It rained throughout the day before the election, but election day itself was a glorious day with cloudless skies, topped off with a spectacular sunset.

I am writing this bit of the letter on the Metroliner train from Washington to New York. It’s my third trip on this train in recent years. I enjoy it very much. It takes just under three hours, not much longer than going by plane, if you take into account the time spent travelling to and from the airports.

It is a dull day with rain on and off, but I am still enjoying the architecture and the last of the autumn scenery. My ticket included breakfast, which was a plate of sausages and pancakes filled with Blueberry sauce, plus juice and coffee. A challenging change from bacon and eggs and toast.

November 6 1992

A very successful afternoon’s work in New York. I had lunch at the United Nations with our correspondent, Jon Leyne, and met some of the people responsible for the UN’s television facilities. [Jon died of brain cancer after being posted to Cairo.] Later in the day I went to the BBC Bureau in 5th Avenue for a chat and a few drinks with our North America Business Correspondent, Richard Quest, and an independent producer who makes quite a few films for us. I had a fabulous snack meal at a Japanese diner across the road from my hotel. For $10, I had a beer and a huge bowl of soup of scallops, prawns, noodles and vegetables. There was no need to have anything else; the soup was a full meal in itself. Then it was off to bed for an early night.

November 7 1992

Today I was joined by the Head of World Service Resources, Tony Troughton, who’d flown in from San Diego, where he had been looking at some new satellite equipment. We went to New York 1, an all-news television station opened just a month ago. It was technically a most impressive operation, from which we were able to pick up lots of useful tips on a new news computer system. [Tony died of bowel cancer in November 2025.]

Tony had never been to New York, so we made a diversion up the Empire State Building -- the nearest I came to doing any tourism on this trip. Though it is no longer the tallest building in the city, it still provides a most spectacular view.

After lunch it was back to the BBC Bureau, then to the UN for some negotiations for a room in which to build a TV studio. That done, we headed out to JFK Airport for the trip home.

This trip I travelled by British Airways which is one of the airlines carrying World Service Television News. It is a source of pride seeing our bulletins on the aircraft, but it makes me grind my teeth to see how much the quality of the pictures and sound track are degraded by the poor playback equipment on the planes. The overnight return to London took six and a half hours, compared with eight hours the other way. This was mainly because we had a tail wind of more than 100mph.

Other news from a letter to the family in Australia, dated November 13 1992

NEW NEWSROOM

The new World Service TV newsroom was completed on time. It was wonderful to see it all come together after so many months of planning and negotiation. Everyone seems very happy with it. I now have to start thinking about the next newsroom when we grow out of this one, in about a year or so.

CUTLERY CHALLENGE

Harley is back in Nottingham after his summer break, during which he did a variety of jobs. One of these was work as a waiter in an Indian restaurant. It was not a job that came naturally within Harley’s skill range. For a start, he could never remember how to lay out the cutlery, something of a handicap for a waiter. The job was for just two days, and at the end of this period both Harley and the restaurant owner were relieved that it wasn’t any longer.

STAR SIGHTING

We recently had guests from New Zealand staying with us. We got on extremely well with them and one evening I showed them around BBC Television Centre. On the way out through Main Reception, a tall American walked by carrying a very large suitcase. He greeted his chauffeur with the words: “I think you had better let me carry this; it will be too heavy for you”. Which was a remark to be expected from Christopher Reeve, the actor best known for his role as Superman.

Extracts from a letter dated December 3 1992

THE YEARS PASS BY

Another year has ticked away. Harley is almost 22, Niall is 19, Rosemary will be giving 50 a serious nudge before long and I am firmly into middle age at 55.

ROSEMARY’S MIXED 12 MONTHS

As with all years, 1992 has been a mix of ups and downs. It has been a sad year for Rosemary with a total of three urgent trips to Australia because of her ailing Dad, who finally died in October. Her business, London Home-to-Home, has been very sluggish because of the international recession in the travel trade, but at least it has survived. She is optimistic that it will pick up significantly next year, but she doesn’t expect an early return to the heady boom years experienced in the mid-1980s.

HARLEY’S EDUCATION

Harley is at Nottingham University reading linguistics and mathematics. He seems to be enjoying himself most of the time but is worried that the linguistics department is being run down because of cuts in the money available for higher education. He now shares a house with five other students and enjoys this much better than having a tiny room in a block of flats. The house is quite large but is hardly an estate agent’s dream property. Not that this worries Harley and his mates. It is only boring old fogeys like Rosemary and me who worry about the finer points of home maintenance and decoration.

NIALL’S BREAK

Niall is having a year’s break from his education. He has had some casual work, but most of that was in a factory doing extraordinarily boring and badly paid jobs. Like Australia, work is in very short supply. He is unsure exactly what he wants to do, which is not surprising for a teenager. In addition to his art, he is very keen on music and fills much of his day with his guitar and synthetiser recording songs on his four-track recorder. He wants to form a band but is having trouble finding imaginative musicians with an interest in his kind of music. He stays pretty cheerful, but frankly I wouldn’t want to be 19 again for anything.

MY YEAR

I was appointed News Development Editor for BBC World Service Television and have had a tremendously rewarding time, designing and overseeing the construction of a new newsroom and a whole range of other interesting projects. WSTV is expanding at a staggering rate. We are now across almost all of Asia, all of Europe, all of Africa, a fair chunk of the Middle East, and all of Canada. We should be available in Australia within the next couple of months. The latest audience figures show that we have a regular audience of well over 20 million in Asia alone and that wherever we are operating we are beating CNN hands down. CNN aren’t taking it meekly, so I guess we are going to have some terrific battles ahead.

Finally from another letter to the family in Australia:

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

We had a German woman staying in our loft flat at the end of an English language course. One evening we invited her to join us for dinner, then to watch a French film on TV. The film turned out to be pretty raunchy, and seemed especially so with English sub-titles. The woman kept asking us to explain what certain words meant., e.g. “I’ve got a hard on”. Then later: “What is meant by ‘having a screw’?”. Rosemary attempted to explain as delicately as possible, to which our German guest replied “Oh I see. You mean a fuck!”

That’s all for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

RADIO TO TV

My laptop has disappeared, along with most of my files, somewhere between my old office in Bush House and my new abode in Television Centre. No doubt they will turn up in due course, but meanwhile, I feel as though I am having to operate with both arms tied behind my back.

Although I officially began with World Service Television last Monday, I spent much of the week elsewhere, finalising various things, not least my involvement in a strategy group that’s been working on World Service’s plans for the year 2000 and beyond. It has been a very interesting and challenging exercise. We had to give our presentation to the higher echelons of the BBC on Friday. It was a pretty nerve-wracking experience, but we laced our presentation with a fair dollop of humour to lighten the mood. Both our jokes and our proposals seemed to have gone down well.

Tomorrow I begin my first full week with WSTV. My responsibilities include being what is only half-jokingly called “Head of Egos”. This means that I am in charge of our dozen-or-so presenters, some of whom seem to think they stand (or rather sit!) head and shoulders above normal mortals. I have joined WSTV in the midst of a revolt by the Egos over their working conditions. They seem to think that a 30-hour week is an altogether unreasonable demand on the management’s part. They also object to having to pay for their own dry- cleaning and to travelling on “the dirty Underground”. My first task, I think, will be to bring them down from the clouds and nail a few feet to the ground. Fortunately there are some very pleasant, professional presenters in the team. I won’t name any “nasties” in this photograph:

WSTV continues to expand at a breath-taking rate. We are just about to go 24-hours a day to most of Asia, then next month we will begin to blast our signal all over Africa. In January, we start broadcasting round-the-clock to the Gulf. No date yet for Australia.

This is the WSTVN production team responsible for the very first bulletin:

From a family letter dated December 1991:

FAMILY NEWS

Another year behind us. As the years go by, Christmas (and birthdays) seem to come round with increasing speed. As with most years, 1991 has been a mix of ups and downs, but on the whole, there is more to be thankful for, than to regret.

Elder son Harley, soon to be 21, is in the midst of his first year at university, after taking a year off from education. He didn’t especially enjoy his Foundation Art year at Hounslow College because he didn’t hit it off with a couple of his tutors who were very much out of sympathy with his interest in comic art. He couldn’t get into the art courses of his choice, so he took a break, working for a firm of chartered surveyors in Mayfair, sorting out their filing systems. It was a good, though not necessarily very challenging, experience for him. During the year, he decided not to continue with his art studies, but to go for a university degree, reading mathematics and linguistics. He got a place at Nottingham University and will be there for three years. He is having a very busy time and appears to be (mostly) enjoying himself.

Younger son Niall, now 18, is doing a Foundation Art course at Chelsea College. He is apparently enjoying himself, but being a teenager, tries not to show it too much. He has changed in appearance a great deal in the past couple of years. His face has lost its roundness and he has long hair in keeping with a well-informed and keen interest in 60s music. He and Harley have guitars and find them very therapeutic. Niall will have to decide in the next couple of months what to do in the next education year, beginning September 1992. At the moment, he isn’t expressing any interest in university, preferring the idea of doing a full course at an art college.

Rosemary and I are having to adjust to seeing less and less of the kids. We are, as part of this, re-discovering all sorts of interests we had back in the days before we had children. We enjoy the company of Harley and Niall, but feel pretty comfortable about them venturing out into the great wide world. Harley has already been on a month-long cheapo rail journey with a mate to various European countries, including Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy, France and Spain.

LONDON HOME-TO-HOME STRUGGLE

London Home-to-Home is still struggling along after being knocked for six by the Gulf War. The only consolation is that very few people in the travel trade are having a good time. Rosemary and her business partner, Anita Harrison, hope that 1992 will see a steady return to good business health. Rosemary is making the best of the slack period by doing some dress-making, which she enjoys very much, and has also been re-decorating some of the rooms. She is also having a go at learning German.

NEWSROOM EXPANSION

Things appear to be settling down with the presenters, so I will be able to get on with my next task: designing a new newsroom to cope with our expansion into a global network. So far we transmit across most of Europe and most of Asia. Africa is next. Australia may happen in 1992 or 1993. There are plans for us to have a channel on the proposed Pay-TV network, but some of our news bulletins may also be rebroadcast by one of established national networks in Australia. It’s difficult to predict. Things happen so quickly in World Service Television that long-term planning is what we are going to do the day after tomorrow!

Extracts from a letter to Rosemary in Australia dated December 28 1991:

You have only been gone 48 hours, but I'm missing you already. The house just isn't the same without you around. Just as well the kids are here, more or less. At least I'm getting a chance to sort out all the photos and bits 'n’ pieces in the office.

Harley is downstairs cooking dinner. Not sure what he has in mind, but it is something with chilli and red beans. He volunteered to do the job. He said he wanted to do something that wasn’t too taxing on his brain.

Harley got home about 3.30am today after a day and night on the town with the two Greek girls who’ve become friends. Quite an adventure. First, one of the girls left her plastic shopping bag containing all her holiday money, £300, beside a park bench in Regent’s Park. When they went back in the vain hope that it would still be there, it was and was being watched over by a chap who thought it might be a bomb and had alerted the police. The girls couldn’t believe their luck.

After dinner at their hostel in London, they went clubbing. Harley found it a revelation, particularly the way the girls were pursued by a selection of randy young men. One moment almost giving the lads the come-on; the next rejecting them. God, I feel ancient.

Niall got back in the evening from Josh’s hut-warming. He said he enjoyed himself. All six managed to sleep in Josh’s room. All things considered, he looked fairly fit.

That’s all for 1991.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

DEPARTURE FOR HOME

The meandering trip back to London was enjoyable and interesting, though the first leg, Melbourne to Albury, nearly didn’t get off the ground -- literally. The check-in clerk at the airport said the luggage handlers might refuse to handle my case because it weighed 37 kilos, many kilos in excess of the limit agreed with the unions. He further advised me that as the Kendell Airlines plane to Albury was quite small, each passenger was limited to 14 kilos of luggage. He asked whether I could split my luggage into two bags. I said “no”. He said he would put the case through and he would come back to me if there were any complaints. There apparently weren’t any and the plane managed to take off successfully,

The plane was a SAAB propeller-driven aircraft. It was very comfortable. It flew at about half the height of jet airliners, so I got a wonderful view of the countryside. The flight to Albury took about 40 minutes.

It was wonderful to catch up with Rosemary’s brother, Peter Batson, his wife Julie Batson and their children, James and Alice. It was also interesting to visit the Border Morning Mail, where Peter is Picture Editor and Julie works part time in the advertising department. I haven’t been to Albury since our family passed through the city with Jack Elkin on our way to, or back from, Canberra. I was then a kid, Dad was still alive and Jack was the proud owner of a new, early model Holden. So that gives you some idea of how long ago it was.

My flight next day to Sydney was on an Ansett Express jet Fokker. I had a good seat and got an excellent view. An hour and a half after leaving Albury I was having lunch in central Sydney with the BBC’s correspondent, Red Harrison. Some of you will remember Red as presenter until a year or so ago of the ABC’s AM programme. After all the miserable weather in Victoria, Sydney turned on a very pleasant 75 degrees.

My visit to Sydney was very useful. I got lots of business done with Red and with the ABC. I visited the ABC’s new headquarters at Ultimo. It was impressive, and some of the new digital equipment that’s being installed there is going to be bought by the BBC. On the second day Red and I had lunch in an open air restaurant at The Rocks. The sky was a brilliant blue and the temperature perfect. There was a stunning view across Circular Quay to the Opera House.

Red confessed to me that his real name was Arthur Leslie Harrison, born in South Shields, Tyne and Wear, on August 18 1932. He detested the name Arthur. When he was given the nickname of "Red" due to his flame-coloured hair, he gratefully adopted it as his personal and professional first name. Few people knew he was Arthur, and those who did, were sworn to secrecy while he was still alive.

That evening I got some breath-taking photographs from my hotel roof of the Sydney skyline at sunset. It was a brilliant red, courtesy of the Mt Panatobu eruption in Philippines' Luzon Volcanic Arc. I have never seen anything like it.

On the way to my hotel in a taxi we passed through Kings Cross, which is the pits. The cabbie and I were talking about photography when he yelled at me to grab my camera. Ahead of us was one of the more extraordinary scenes I have witnessed. A prostitute had her head in the passenger-side window of a punter’s car. Her backside was poking out into the roadway. So, you ask, what’s so big deal about that? Nothing, except that she was wearing only a top and high heels. The rest of her was as bare as the day she was born. I took no photographs.

On the Saturday morning, I had an early (for me!) breakfast, packed my case and returned to Circular Quay for a quick return journey on the Manly Ferry. Then it was out to the airport to catch my early-afternoon flight to Bangkok.

Australians are well known for the familiar use of first names almost immediately on meeting, but even so, I was surprised when the Immigration Officer at Sydney Airport returned my passport with a “have a nice trip, Ian”.

By the time I came to leave Sydney, all the germs collected from kissing mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and friends caught up with me. I developed a terribly running nose -- the first cold I’d had for many years. The dry atmosphere on the plane resulted in rather painful sinuses by the time I reached Bangkok.

WORKING STOPOVER IN BANGKOK

There was a severe storm over Bangkok as we approached, so we had to go around in circles for a while, waiting for it to ease. When we touched down it was still extremely wet. There was a severe shortage of taxis because of the storm, but I eventually got one. It was in rather poor shape. Water was leaking onto the engine, sending clouds of steam through the ventilators into the car. Water also leaked all over my feet.

My hotel room was quite comfortable, but I spent most of next day recovering from my cold, though I did manage a meeting and lunch with our local correspondent, Neil Kelly. The following day I got out and about a little, taking some photos, but the weather wasn’t particularly clear. Still, I wasn’t there to take photos; I was trying to sort out an improved BBC coverage of Thailand and neighbouring countries. I think I made progress on this matter, but a few months will have to pass before it becomes clear how much I succeeded.

Bangkok is becoming incredibly polluted and the traffic is said to be getting slower by the day. But for some reason I still like the place. It is certainly better than the antiseptic and boring cleanliness of Singapore.

There was a security notice in my room, listing all the dos and don’ts to ensure my safety. The final item on the list was a warning to guests that they “should not associate with solicitors around the hotel”. Fair enough. I have always felt that members of the legal profession should be avoided where possible. Ditto, young woman who were soliciting!

QANTAS MECHANICAL DELAY

My Qantas flight to London was due to leave at half past midnight, but as I was about to check out of the hotel, I received a call to say that the flight was running a couple of hours late because of a mechanical fault. We (the passengers) eventually got onto the plane shortly before 3am, only to be told that another fault had developed. We had to stay on the plane while it was fixed and we eventually took off at 6am. Not a good start to the flight, which eventually reached London six hours late.

BACK HOME IN EALING

As I returned to London, Niall was starting his course at the Chelsea Art College. It’s been a nervous time for him, but he is very much enjoying the lectures and tuition. He claims that it is the first time since he started his education that teachers have told him anything interesting. No doubt something of an exaggeration. Let’s hope he still finds the college as interesting and challenging throughout the course.

October 5 1991

TELEVISION JOB OFFER

Life has been rather busy since returning, what with our 25th wedding anniversary, Harley going to university and an exceptionally heavy workload at the Beeb. And this has been topped by being made a job offer I couldn’t refuse. I was asked if I would like to move to World Service Television for at least six months to help get the service off the ground as a global network. I thought it over in consultation with the family and jumped at it. It is a new management post, Newsroom Editor. Among other things, I will be responsible for maintaining the World Service ethos in the fledgling service, designing a new “dream” television newsroom, and strengthening the ties between the World Service radio and television newsrooms. It should be fun. I start in the first week of November. It means moving to Television Centre, which is much closer to home than Bush House. The offer was made on my birthday -- a nice present.

A QUIET ANNIVERSARY

Our wedding anniversary went off quietly. We had planned to go out to Heathrow in the morning and hop on any plane that would take up somewhere interesting in an hour or so, stay the day there, then fly back at night. But the weather across Western Europe was dire, so we scrapped the idea and spent a pleasant, leisurely day in Ealing. We went out for lunch at a local restaurant, which was very nice.

AN ABSENT SON

The following Friday, Harley went up to Nottingham to check into his university accommodation. We took up his possessions - - most of which seemed to be LPs -- the following day. He has a room with shared kitchen and bathroom in an apartment block just outside the university grounds. The room is quite small, but he seems confident he will fit everything in. It will certainly encourage a little tidiness in his life. We’ve had a couple of calls from Harley telling us that he is settling in well. He seems to have joined a large number of university organisations and is planning to do a music programme on the university radio station. He will have a ball.

Rosemary, Niall and I have a bit of adjusting to do, now that Harley has moved out. We are going to miss his cheerful, chatty company. Rosemary and Niall had a chance to get used to his absence when he was away in Europe for much of the time I was in Australia. He and his mate, Glen, had a fascinating trip. They went to France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy and Spain -- all in less than four weeks. Harley returned home exhausted, which is not surprising. The train journey from Spain took 27 hours -- ­longer than it takes to fly from Australia. Harley and Glen apparently spent several nights travelling on trains to cut down on their accommodation costs. It took Harley nearly a week to recover from his “holiday”.

DECORATING TIME

Rosemary is currently busy decorating the front downstairs room. She is also planning to get new beds and furniture to make it more attractive as a room for paying guests. London Home-to-Home is continuing slowly, much as it has for the past 12 months, but it is at least still going -- more than can be said for a lot of businesses in these depressed times. Rosemary and Anita are currently working on a new brochure. They hope it will present a more warm and cheerful image than the current cold blue and boring one.

London Home-to-Home was transferred to our daughter-in-law, Ann Oliver, in 2006 and finally shut down in 2017.

That’s it for now.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

My British Airways plane to New York left Heathrow about 15 minutes late. But the check-in went smoothly. My case was given a special X-ray security scan because of the BBC electronic equipment in it, but fortunately I didn’t have to open it up for a hand inspection. It would be interesting to know how the X-ray operators judge the bits ‘n’ pieces in a suitcase. Mine would have looked pretty suspicious with all the cables etc in it.

One poor bugger wouldn’t have been very pleased with British Airways. His/her case fell off the luggage train going to the jumbo next to mine and was well and truly run over. It looked quite squashed. I’m glad it wasn’t my case. Imagine what would have happened to my equipment and cameras.

My plane - - a stretch jumbo of the sort that goes to Australia - - was full and there were problems finding suitable seats for two huge guys who looked like (and may even have been) Samoans. My seat was upstairs in “The Bubble”. It was fine. Not as large inside as the main part of the plane -- ­six seats across instead of ten. In more prosperous times it would have been used for Business Class passengers.

I am classified by British Airways as a “World Traveller” - - which is marketing bullshit for an economy class passenger.

British Airways, which not many years ago used to be a very poor airline, really has got its act together. In Economy (sorry, World Traveller Class), there appears to be unlimited booze and other drinks, free eye masks, travel socks and toothpaste and brush. We also have television sets with a more-or-less continuous programme, hi-fi headsets, sparkling wine with a very nice meal, and even liqueurs with the coffee. The trouble with booze is that it is the worst possible thing to drink on a long-haul flight. I wish I were strong enough to resist. But as it’s free...

NEW YORK & WASHINGTON DC

The weather in New York was a very hazy and humid 83F. There was very little to see of interest as the plane made its landing run.

The flight arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport on time, almost to the minute, at 1335 local. In the following 55 minutes, I managed to get through customs and immigration, transfer by taxi to La Guardia Airport and catch the next PanAm Washington Shuttle with just two minutes to spare. At 1530 I was in Washington.

The PanAm Shuttle had Airfone public phones in each row of seats. They could be operated with a credit card. I imagine they are expensive to use.

The temperature in Washington was 90F and humid, but the hotel is nice. It has a swimming pool, which I used soon after arriving. It also proudly possesses a “British Bar” called the “Rose & Crown”.

After my swim, I had a short nap then went for dinner with our Washington reporter, Chris Nuttall, and his Sri Lankan girlfriend [now wife]. She cooked a fabulous curry meal. It left the local Tandooris and Monty’s in Ealing for dead. By the time I got ready for bed it was 2200 local time, 0300 in London.

August 19 1991

NEW YORK MEETINGS

It was a hell of a shock to wake up this morning to discover that Mikhail Gorbachev had been given the boot. A huge story, but also quite alarming. I checked in with London, but there was little I could do to help.

It was a hot, humid and hazy day. The Grand Hotel, where I am staying, appears to be almost empty, presumably because it is the summer holiday period in New York. During my 24 hours in the hotel, I saw just one other guest. He and I had the huge restaurant to ourselves for breakfast.

Because of the Gorbachev story, my counterpart at National Public Radio couldn’t attend my planned meeting with NPR’s Vice-President of News and Information, but it was still a productive discussion. He told me that since the Gulf War, the BBC’s audiences, through National Public Radio and the rival American Public Radio, had grown enormously.

Much of the rest of the day was spent talking to various people in the BBC bureau. I also paid a short visit to the State Department to inspect our facilities there. One of these days I will get time to really see Washington. I love the architecture and the relaxed feel of the place — at least the nice areas. The black ghetto areas are apparently very, very dangerous, giving rise to Washington being the murder capital of the United States.

During the course of my various conversations, the bureau manager told me she was about to leave the BBC to go back to university. She had been forced to give up her studies when she was younger (she’s now about 30, I would guess) because of the cost. She says the cheapest university charges around $4,000 per term -- not including living costs. So I guess we should be grateful that we have to pay for just our son Harley’ s living expenses and not the tuition fees.

ENJOYABLE TRAIN TRIP

In the evening, I caught the Metroliner train to New York. It pulled away from the lovingly-restored and very beautiful Union Station on time, almost to the second. The train takes about three hours to New York -- roughly the same time and price as catching a plane and having to get taxis to and from the airports. There was a meal with wine included in the price.

I arrived in New York at 2200. I’m in an hotel just near the United Nations.

August 21/22

My 24-hours in New York was, inevitably, too short, but still very productive. I didn’t get time for any sightseeing. The weather was very cloudy as a result of Hurricane Bob that had just passed through New York State, and there is little point taking picture library shots if the weather isn’t good,

After a good night’s sleep, I went to the BBC bureau in the Rockefeller Centre (or Center, to use the American spelling) to see the World Service producer and our North America Business Correspondent. Then we adjourned to the United Nations for a wonderful buffet lunch with our UN researcher/producer. Happily, there were no serious problems to be solved.

By the time lunch was over, it was time to return to my hotel and get a car to the airport. It began to rain as I left, and by the time I arrived at JFK, it was bucketing down. Flights were temporarily suspended and I was warned that I might miss my connection in Los Angeles and have to stay there overnight. In the event, the connection was made with plenty of time to spare.

CROSSING AMERICA

Although the New York to LA leg was officially designated as Qantas flight QA3O2, it was in fact American Airlines flight AA12. Qantas and American have a partnership in which the two flights were consolidated into one. Qantas passengers were given vouchers for free drinks; everyone else had to pay.

I didn’t particularly rate American Airlines. It was adequate, but no more. It struck me as an airline that had done away with all the trimmings. The food was okay, but not particularly well presented. The plane was almost full, but I had a spare seat beside me. To be strictly accurate, it was half a seat. The other half was occupied by a grossly overweight young chap who could sit down only by raising the armrest between two seats. He was so big that he couldn’t lower the tray in front of him and had to eat off the tray in front of the spare seat. It is a long time since I had seen anyone pig their food down quite like he did. There were a couple of other people about his size on the flight and they too had 1½ seats. The airlines must hate them. And it must be pretty uncomfortable for the people concerned.

The plane was a DC10 which, if I remember correctly, used to have a habit of breaking in two in flight. I can only assume that this little difficulty has been resolved. The interior had an unusual configuration. There were just two seats in the side rows, with five in the middle row. Pretty tough on anyone stuck in the middle. I would reckon that at least half the passengers were Hispanics. There was apparently a connecting flight to San Diego and, of course, Los Angeles has a huge Hispanic population.

While waiting for the flight in New York I found myself sitting next to the crew. I couldn’t avoid ear-wigging their conversation. It was pretty funny listening to their running commentary on the passengers coming off the plane from the previous leg. Things like: “Here comes another King of the Skies” (a super-smooth Joe, who clearly fancied himself rotten, and “who helped her into THAT dress?”, as a young woman teetered by on very high heels and wearing a tight short dress that looked as though it had been spray painted on her. They clearly didn’t think much of many of the people they had to deal with.

The flight from New York to LA took almost five hours -- a little longer than usual because the plane had to be re-routed around storms associated with the hurricane. It was dark by the time we landed in LA, so we got quite a good view of the city by night!

It was a pleasure to step on the Qantas jumbo. It was so clean and cheerfully decorated, and the cabin crew were so good. My hostess was a Kylie Minogue look-alike.

It is interesting to note that while advertising often tells you very little about a product or company as they really are, uniforms do. The American airlines that I have travelled on have mostly had functional quasi-military uniforms, which seems to fairly reflect the style and service you get. On Qantas, the uniforms are mix-and-match, indicating flexibility. The cabin crew don’t appear to be thrown by any problems and exuded cheerfulness at all times.

CROSSING THE PACIFIC

The non-stop flight across the Pacific to Sydney took about 14 hours. It was pretty full. It was dark all the way, which suited me. There would have been nothing to see except thousands of miles of ocean. Just as well I chose an aisle seat, which allowed me to move about from time to time without causing any disruption.

I managed to get several hours sleep. I skipped coffee and had a beer or whisky every now and again to help me dose off.

The plane came in to Sydney spot on time at 0615, just as the sun was rising. As we descended towards Sydney there was the most amazing red sky over the cloud layer.

The stopover in Sydney was longer than scheduled. The plane being used for the Sydney/Melbourne leg was late arriving from Japan, then there was a long queue for take-off. As a result, I arrived in Melbourne almost an hour late.

THE REASON FOR AUSTRALIA

The prime purpose for this visit to Australia was to attend the 80th birthday party for my mother, Rena Wood, and her twin sister, Eelin Hutchinson. However, the party nearly never happened as explained in this extract from a letter I wrote to my family in London, dated August 18 1991:

Mum made a spectacular effort yesterday to kill us both in her car. She was about to turn into the fast lane of the highway, right in front of a speeding car. I had to scream at her to put the brakes on. Minutes later, she tried a repeat performance. I am afraid I gave her an earful about her driving, which also included slamming the brakes on at the last moment to make a left turn (the cause of her previous accident). As my younger sister Alison later pointed out, Mum doesn’t look anywhere but straight ahead when driving. None of this nonsense about looking left and right or checking the rear view mirrors. She is a menace on the roads and Alison is thinking of “dobbing her in” (to use the Australian vernacular) to the Roads Authority for the safety of both Mum and the public at large. None of us is guilty-free when it comes to driving, but Mum’s trouble is that she won’t admit that she’s not a good driver (and never has been), so she never takes any steps to improve.

My mother continued to drive until one day she collided with a tow truck and her car was wrecked. She was badly shaken and bruised, but no bones were broken and she was allowed home after a short stay in hospital. The tow truck driver was not hurt and got the job of towing Mum’s wrecked car to the scrap yard..

Back to the birthday party: It was a great success with almost all the extended family present:

One of my mother’s cousins at the party introduced himself as Dick Cock (yes, really!). He came up to me twice during the evening, telling me how much he had wanted to meet me. We went through two almost identical conversations within two hours. It was as though he had completely forgotten the first conversation. Maybe he had. He wanted to explain to me how the extended family had both the Cox and Cocks surnames in it.

Rena and Eelin were not identical twins. Quite the opposite. Rena was fair haired; Eelin dark-haired. They were also very different characters and didn’t get on a lot of the time. Rena would infuriate the family by often beginning an opinion with the words “As the oldest member of the family…” True, but only because she was born just three hours before Eelin.

That’s all for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

SUMMER ARRIVES

As I am writing this on All Fools’ Day there is a considerable temptation to include at least one fake anecdote, but let me assure you that every word will be rock-solid true.

This weekend saw the switch to summer time -- and not a day too soon. The government keeps promising to abandon winter time, but never does. I really hate it. I would much sooner go to work in the dark and have what little daylight there is in winter towards the latter part of the day.

The garden is coming to life nicely. We have a good display of daffodils, forsythia and yellow spring daisies. The trees are showing sign of coming out in leaf, so it won’t belong before the landscape is transformed.

The loft conversion is all but complete [following the fire reported in the previous chapter]. The builders have gone and the tiler has almost finished the bathroom. Rosemary, with some occasional help from me, has almost finished decorating the room. Later this month a professional decorator will do the stairway and hallway. It is too big a job for Rosemary and me. We are thrilled with the conversion. What we now have is an extra floor on the house. The room is spacious and cheerful with a wonderful view. The temptation for Rosemary and me to move up there is great, but we will resist for the time being. We will need to use it for some paying guests to help recover some of the cost.

UNWANTED VISITOR

On the subject of visitors, Rosemary recently had a phone call from a friend in Bendigo saying that her 18-year-old daughter had provisionally booked a flight to London and would like to stay with us for six weeks. She wouldn’t be able to pay for her food and accommodation, but would “help out about the house”. As we have only just begun to recover from the financial and emotional strain of having a guest stay with us for something like 10 months, this proposal went down like the proverbial lead balloon. It put Rosemary in a terrible position.

Rosemary didn’t want to hurt her friend, but Harley, Niall and I all felt that it was a dreadful cheek to present us with the new dilemma. We wouldn’t have minded so much if she had phoned before booking the flight, and hadn’t expected us to subsidise the trip. Anyway, the end result was that Rosemary summoned the courage to phone her friend and tell her that the best she could offer was three weeks - - and that it would really be better if she postponed the visit until she had enough money to support herself. This didn’t go down terribly well, but eventually it was agreed that the trip be postponed until next year. Rosemary still remains upset that a friend could have put her in such a position. I sometimes think that people believe we run a charity for travelling Australians.

April 6, 1991

BETTER BUSINESS

London Home-to-Home is starting to get into better times, now that the Gulf War is over, but the recovery will be slow because of the general poor economic climate in Australia and the United States. What LHH needs is a big feature in an important newspaper somewhere. The problem is that LHH isn’t really news any more because it has been going such a long time (getting on for 10 years) and other companies have copied it.

Harley bought himself an electric guitar a couple of months back. It gives him a lot of enjoyment and is a good way for him to relax. He is no Jimmy Hendrix yet (perhaps just as well!) and can bang out the odd tune. He has joined a band, but in the best tradition of pop music, it seems to be riven with artistic differences. Niall was keener on playing the drums, but enjoys picking out chords on Harley’s guitar. He thinks he might get one himself.

BUSY BBC

Work seems just as hectic, despite the end of the Gulf War. World Service is going through what must be just about its most rapid expansion since its launching in the l930s. World Service Television has finally got under way, though initially in Europe only, and my newsgathering department is doubling in size. All this is most welcome, but it does impose enormous strains on everyone. We just can’t recruit people off the streets. They have to be very carefully selected and intensively trained.

I am currently two-thirds of a way through doing a BBC senior management course. It is called “Managing Change”. The main part of the course was at a management centre in the lovely village of Great Missenden, west of London. I was there for five days. Most days we worked from about 9am until about 10pm. It was a residential course and we were pretty effectively isolated from our jobs while we underwent what would be called “re-education” in a totalitarian state. I found it challenging, stimulating, and for the most part, good fun. I certainly learnt lots about myself (some good; some not so good!) and about how to manage staff during a period of upheaval. The final part of the course is early in June. The following week I do another week-long residential course in Kent. This one isn’t run by the BBC, so I will be mixing with all sorts of people from a variety of businesses. I have yet to find out in detail just what I am supposed to be learning, but I get the impression it will be more practical than the other course.

From a report on a visit to Moscow by elder son Harley and me in June 1991:

TO MOSCOW WITH HARLEY

This was a four-day BBC business trip for me. Harley came along for the ride — at my expense, of course. I went to Moscow to try to sort out some serious personnel problems at the BBC Bureau, brought about by overwork and the severe stress that goes with being a broadcasting correspondent in a foreign post such as Moscow.

We were accommodated in a real Russian hotel (as distinct from the dreadful Intourist ones) about 15 minutes walk from Red Square. Hardly anyone in the hotel spoke more than a few words of English. The food was quite reasonable for Moscow -- and very cheap. The first night we were there we had a four-course dinner with one of our correspondents, Tim Whewell, who mainly does World Service, and the BBC Bureau producer. The total cost, including three bottles of wine and the floorshow, came to the equivalent of about £5. A couple of days later Harley and I had a three-course lunch in the hotel for the equivalent of £1 each. Mind you, for a Russian, that is a lot of money. And if we went into a foreign currency restaurant or bar, we were charged the earth. For instance, three small bottles of Irish mineral water and a couple of packets of potato crisps cost us about £8 in the hotel hard currency bar.

The trip was a great success for Harley. He was so stimulated by the trip that he couldn’t sleep the first night. Eventually, he went off at about 5am. He really missed his usual diet and this knocked him about one day. He just isn’t used to going long periods without food, and the food that he did get didn’t do a lot for him. In desperation one day he went to the Moscow Pizza Hut for the world’s most expensive pizza. Harley is not an admirer of Pizza Hut food. The best that could be said of his meal there was that it was no worse than in London. Harley spent most of one day drifting around the Red Square area by himself, sketching buildings and people. He got into quite a long conversation there with a chap who said he was an officer in the Red Army.

TWO QUEUES PIZZAS

The Soviet Union really is as economic and political mess. It has long been an economic shambles, but has noticeably gone downhill since I was previously there in mid-1989. People are finding it increasingly difficult to feed themselves and they often have to take time off from work to queue for food. It is very difficult in Moscow to find snacks, or even drinks. Fruit or vegetables, other than potatoes, tomatoes and cucumbers, are a rarity in Moscow. The Pizza Hut, one of the handful of joint-enterprise food places in the city, is divided into two sections: one part for the long queue of Russians with their near-useless roubles; the other for tourists and others holding hard currency. The latter provided instant service, but at a very high price. The whole exercise raises serious questions about the morality of such a blatantly two-tier economy. Just imagine, for example, if you had to stand for hours in queues outside restaurants in Melbourne while American tourists were able to flash their US dollars and walk straight in.

VISIT TO ZAGORSK

Harley got on very well with Tim Whewell, who took us on the Sunday afternoon to the fortified monastery at Zagorsk, about 75 kms to the north of Moscow. It was a magical time. The weather was glorious with the sky a mix of brilliant blue and picturesque clouds. There are about 10 beautifully restored Russian Orthodox churches in the monastery. Services were going on in most of them and the singing by the all-male choirs hidden behind the icon screens was wonderful.

Extracts from Harley’s account of the Moscow visit:

A YOUTH’S VIEW OF RUSSIA

I still haven’t gotten over the things I witnessed [in Moscow], particularly the difficulty involved in getting food. A balanced diet is impossible over there, it seems. Our weak Western immune systems led to me getting ill for a day, but I slept it off and headed off with Dad and BBC correspondent Tim Whewell to Zagorsk outside Moscow.

The cathedrals here look like Smurfland on the outside. Inside there were beautiful icon screens behind which were hidden the choir and most of the religious ongoings -- the former to give the effect of voices coming from the heavens, perhaps.

Back in Moscow, I met a drunk while I was drawing in Red Square. I couldn’t understand most of what he was saying, but I think he was trying to persuade me that he was a sergeant in the Russian army. He had no stripes on his scruffy uniform. He did show me how to pronounce some Russian words, which was friendly of him.

The only time I felt an oppressive atmosphere was at the airport, the passport being stared at as if they were pieces of wood. Generally it felt a lot safer than in London.

People drink out of the same cup at drinks dispensers in the street. Turn the glass upside down, press and a spray cleans the inside of the cup for the next person to use it, leaving lipstick stains, etc on the outside of the cup. This seems weird to me. Surely paper cups aren’t that difficult to get hold of?

Extract from letter dated June 8 1991 from family in London to Rosemary on her visit to Australia:

UNDESIRED RETIREMENT

I will probably be making a 24-hour trip to Brussels later this month to see how our new correspondent has been settling in there. I think you were aware that we were having terrible trouble there with the long-standing correspondent who is being extremely difficult about retiring and moving out of the bureau. After the newsroom bosses had written a series of “let’s be sensible” letters without any apparently effect, I sent him one of my “stop this stupid nonsense” letters which gave him three days to accept our offer or bugger off. It had the desired effect. He is buggering off. It is depressing that we seem to have so many correspondents who refuse to retire because they convince themselves they are indispensable.

A DRUNKEN CELEBRATION

Last night, at about 11.30pm as I sat in the loungeroom idly watching television, I heard scuffling and murmured voices out the front of the house. I discovered Niall’s mate, Mark [not his real name], and another youth outside the front door apparently trying to attract Niall in his bedroom (he wasn’t there). I opened the door and very quickly discovered that both were well pissed. Mark told me he was looking for Niall. I told him Niall was out and they scuttled off. Mark came back this afternoon and made a handsome apology for disturbing me. He said he had been celebrating the other youth’s 18th birthday and “things had got out of hand”. He said that when he got home he had been very sick in his bedroom. Niall told me that Mark was so ill he had thought he was going to die. Niall hoped it would be a lesson to him. He said Mark was having a lot of conflict with his parents and had left school without telling them. Every time Mark got a bit depressed he went to the pub.

BUSY BOYS

Niall vacuumed the house today. It was getting pretty dirty, not least because of lumps of fur from the cats and feathers from various birds that had been caught and brought into the house. As I write this, Harley is downstairs doing all the ironing. The washing is as overwhelming as ever. I have done five loads today and there’s still more to come. How many pairs of socks and underpants to our kids have? Five hundred? Two thousand? Five thousand?

Extracts from a letter dated July 9 1991 to my mother in Australia:

ROSEMARY HOME

It was good to have Rosemary back from Australia. The boys were very helpful while she was away and we survived reasonably well, but having to think about getting meals at the end of a 12/13-hour working day wore me down towards the end. I also made the discovery that Harley and Niall have between them something like two thousand pairs of almost identical socks -- or so it seemed. On the other hand, being so busy meant that I didn’t get time to miss Rosemary’s company quite as seriously as I might normally have. There is no doubt that the quality of life has picked up since her return!

London Home-to-Home is still struggling. The trouble is that a lot of the airlines are offering free, or very cheap, accommodation to their customers to help fill the seats. I imagine it will take at least another year before the world economies show a significant improvement.

Work at the BBC is as hectic as ever, if not more so. I am in the unusual position of being in charge of a department that is expanding, rather than contracting. I sometimes think the latter would be easier to handle. BBC World Service News, as a whole, is expanding at such a rate that we don’t have the experience and talent to meet all the demands.

YOUTHFUL BIRTHDAY BOY

Niall’s 18th birthday went off peacefully. He doesn’t care for parties, preferring what he calls “gatherings” at which he and his assortment of male and female friends discuss the meaning of life and try to put the world to rights. He went out to the pub one night, but because he looks so young, he finds it difficult to avoid being refused a drink. He drinks very little, but is offended nonetheless at having to produce age identification. I point out to him, at the serious risk of being tedious, that by the time he hits 40 he will be extremely grateful to look so young. But his concern is NOW, not when he is 40.

**************

NO-FUNERAL DEATHS — a chapter addition

There was a time when it was unheard of a death without a funeral, even if there was less than a handful of mourners. Not so now. I know of several, the most recent being the death of a former BBC World Service newsroom colleague. He died last month, giving his wife instructions that there was to be no funeral. No reason was given.

Another death without a funeral was of one of my wife’s cousins. She died in Melbourne in November 2023 aged 87. She led disorganised final years and there was no-one among her friends or family able to organise a funeral before she was buried in Melbourne’s Cheltenham Cemetery. The cemetery initially misspelt her surname and this has since been corrected.

In 1991, a retired senior BBC World Service editor died in Spain after catching Covid. Covid travel restrictions did not permit his daughters flying to Spain from the Middle East to organise a funeral. He was cremated within days of his death. We have no idea what happened to his ashes.

A retired BBC World Service correspondent died in hospital in Kent in 2020 from lung cancer. He left no will, nor any record of a family. Again there was no funeral, nor is it known if he was cremated or buried somewhere.

Finally, a step brother of mine became a recluse in his final decades and insisted that there be no funeral when he died in 1971. However, there was a small gathering of his immediate family some weeks later.

I suppose there is no reason why there does have to be a funeral — particularly so when the deceased has few friends or relatives. And we can all recall funerals we wished we’d not attended. They were either mind-deadening boring or the eulogies were so wildly inflated and inaccurate as to make you wonder if you’d come to the wrong service.

That will do for this chapter. Just one photograph this time.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

A lot has happened since I last wrote -- not least a fire that came within an ace of destroying our house and the Gulf war.

The fire started during building work to convert our loft into an extra room. We were at home relaxing late on a Saturday afternoon when a joiner working on the new stairs smelt smoke and discovered the old roofing timbers heaped up the driveway alight. There was no way we could halt the blaze and we phoned the fire brigade. But as I was explaining to the brigade what was happening the line went dead -- just like in the movies - because the flames had burnt through the telephone cables on the side of the house. The fire brigade was here very quickly, but even so, the flames were by then above the roof line and the timber on the scaffolding was ablaze. Because my conversation with the brigade had been cut short, it thought that it was going to have to deal with just a rubbish fire -- ­so sent just one tender without a ladder.

The house was saved because there was a ladder up the scaffolding around our house. The fire was brought under control just as the flames broke through the temporary plastic sheeting into the ceiling. The fire brigade said that in another minute or two the flames would have got a hold onto the tarred felt lining under the tiles. Had that happened, burning tar would have fallen down into the main part of the house through two big holes temporarily opened up in the ceiling.

It is quite chilling when we think back to how close we came to a real disaster. As it was, damage was confined to a scorch mark up the side of the house, some cracked windows in our house and next door, burnt scaffolding planks, melted plastic down-pipes from the bathroom -- and, of course, the severed telephone cables. The repair bill comes to around £1000, which will be covered by our insurance. The fire brigade thinks the most likely cause of the fire was a cigarette butt dropped into the scrap timber in the driveway by the chain-smoking Polish builders, but we will never know for sure. Obviously, the boss was very upset, especially as there is always going to be a strong possibility that one of his men started the fire through carelessness. Incidentally, it is clearly no longer correct to talk just of firemen. It now has to be firePERSONS because the unit sent to our fire included a woman.

The loft conversion is going to be a great success -- providing us with what amounts to a self-contained flat in the top of the house, but even apart from the fire, there have been difficulties, mainly caused by the weather. The day after the roof was opened up to put in some of the new beams, a series of gales swept across the country. No matter what precautions were taken by the builders, the winds kept forcing the rain under the temporary plastic covers. Inevitably, there was quite a bit of water damage -- though none of it seems to have been serious. It also got very cold in the house because so much heat was able to escape through the open roof. This was made worse the day after the fire when the pump on the central heating system failed. Just one bloody thing after another. But the new room is certainly going to be lovely when it’s finished in about four weeks.

GULF WAR

On 2 August 1990, Iraq, governed by Saddam Hussein, invaded neighbouring Kuwait and occupied the country within two days. This resulted in an armed conflict between Iraq and a 42-country coalition led by the United States. The coalition's efforts were in two phases: Operation Desert Shield, which marked the military build-up from August 1990 to January 1991; and Operation Desert Storm, from the bombing campaign against Iraq on 17 January until the American-led liberation of Kuwait on 28 February.

I feel as though I’ve been living with the war for years at the BBC World Service. In some ways it is easier to cope with the war than it was with the run-up because we were always trying to plan for the unplannable. The constant uncertainty was very wearing. It was almost a relief when the two sides got down to doing what had always seemed to me to be the inevitable. Once fighting broke out, it was all hands to the pump (or in our case, computers, tape recorders and microphones!). In the first two days I got just four hours sleep in 40 hours with just a short break at home. But some of the guys out in the field have been surviving on about five hours a night for weeks. Still, it must be much worse for the military personnel -- and the Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians caught up in the fighting.

The BBC World Service audience in the Middle East is just staggering. Even before fighting broke out something like 45% of the population were listening to us each day in Arabic, English, or the Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Some of the Iraqi defectors have said their only source of reliable information was the BBC.

EDUCATION NEWS

Younger son Niall is absolutely thrilled to have been given a place in the 1991/92 school year with the Chelsea Art College. He will do a Foundation Course. His morale was given a particular boost because the college gave him an answer almost right away. Normally, places aren’t allocated until every candidate has been seen. Elder son Harley has decided to go to university next year. He is giving up art as a subject and wants to do maths and linguistics. He has already been offered places at Nottingham and Leicester universities. He is very keen on Nottingham (and to a much lesser degree, Leicester), but is holding off accepting either until he sees whether he can get into York University which is, marginally, his first choice.

Harley seems to have made himself indispensable at the firm of chartered surveyors in Mayfair which initially took him on for just a few weeks to sort out their files. He has been told his job is assured for the time being. They even allowed him to work a 3-1/2-day week, so that he could go back to school part time to do another maths subject. At the same time, he is busily finishing off the next issue of his comic Ugly Mug. This time he expects to have saved enough money to have it professionally printed and distributed.

QUIET BUSINESS

Rosemary’s business, London Home-to-Home, continues to have a very quiet time -- partly because winter is always a slow period, but mainly because the Gulf war has severely depressed the travel trade. Still, Rosemary is making good use of the time supervising the loft conversion and doing a part-time A Level course in art. She remains in good spirits and hopes that business will pick up once the war ends -- though she doesn’t kid herself that it will be anything but a long haul.

AND FINALLY

Among the thousands of congratulatory letters recently received by the BBC World Service was one addressed to “Somebody Really High Up”. Naturally it came to me!

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

We’re coming to the end of a week in a lovely cottage in Polbain. As something of a techno freak, I had a bit of adjusting to do. My cell phone doesn’t work here. Nor does my pager/bleeper. The nearest public telephone is about two miles away, although I can use a coin phone across the road in the general store when it is open.

We are in a very remote part of the Scottish Highlands. I reckon a total of no more than 400 people would live in the several small communities scattered along the 10 mile stretch of coast road. There doesn’t appear to be much new technology about. Some of the houses in the area have only recently been connected to mains electricity.

Our cottage is comfortable with one bedroom, a kitchen/diner and the small lounge with a panoramic view westward across a group of small islands known as the Summer Isles. The view is magnificent. Niall has the best spot. He is sleeping on the divan along the lounge room window. As for the view back from the sea, it is breathtaking. The mountains of the Western Highlands stretch back as far as the eye can see, or as far as the weather will permit. One moment the skies are a deep blue and the area is bathed in bright sunshine; the next dark clouds are emptying themselves all over you.

Niall and I struck it lucky one evening when we went deep sea fishing. The ocean was like a mill pond and there was barely a cloud in the sky. The sunset was wonderful and what’s more, we had a good catch of fish: mackerel, pollock and ling. We left some of the catch with the skipper because there was no way we would have been able to eat it all.

Earlier the same day, all of us went for a cruise round the Summer Isles. It was warm with a gentle breeze and the views were most attractive. We came across several seal colonies and went ashore on one island for a stroll and a picnic.

It is hard to fully appreciate that winter here is rather a different situation. Polbain is on a latitude that puts it north of Moscow. It is light for no more than 8 hours a day, with lots of snow on the mountains and winds coming off the sea, with an average wind speed of 45mph. Winds of 100mph are fairly common and all small buildings have to be specially anchored to the ground to stop them being blown away. There are just 21 buildings, including out houses, in Polbain. One of them is Polbain Stores, a small shop across the road from us with a truly amazing range of goods. It is an entire shopping centre collapsed into one store. It seems to have at least one of just about anything you like to name. I’m sure that if they haven’t got it they will get it for you.

This is golden eagle country and Niall is optimistic of seeing one before we go back to London. Yesterday we ventured into Inverpolly National Nature Reserve, but after a trek of a mile or so through some spectacular country, we had to turn back because the weather looked rather threatening. We couldn’t risk being caught in the mountains by bad weather. We hope to try again before we leave. It would be a tremendous thrill for Niall to see a golden eagle. They can grow a nine foot wingspan.

September 1 1990

It is only fair to report that not everything has gone well with this trip. We decided as we did last year. to avoid the long and tiring journey by car up and down the M1 motorway. We therefore flew to Inverness where we hired a car.

Having taken delivery of the car, we found that the engine ran very roughly until it had well and truly warmed up. Rather than risk being stranded in the wilds of the Highlands, we returned to Inverness and had the AA (Automobile Association) do an engine check. Everything seemed okay and we concluded that the automatic choke was not working properly when the engine was cold. So we pressed on and hope for the best. It was not until I checked with the car firm a few days later that I discovered that the car didn’t have an automatic choke. There was a manual choke button out of sight behind the steering wheel.

That was embarrassing enough, but worse was to come yesterday evening when Rosemary and I drove out into the countryside to go for a walk. I discovered to my dismay, as we were about to walk away from the car, that I had locked it with the key from our own Ford Sierra back in London. The key to the hire car, a Ford Escort, was still in the ignition and while my key had locked the door, it resolutely refused to open it again.

Fortunately, there was a farm house about half a mile away where for the second time in a week we phoned the AA for help. We were greeted at the farm house by a charming Mrs MacKenzie who invited us in for a cup of tea and a very pleasant chat while we waited for the AA. She seemed pleased to have our company.

Because of our remote location, it took the AA repairman two hours to reach us. The AA man battled for an hour and a half trying to release the catch and finally had to smash the lock on the rear hatchback door. A local lad came by and said he would have had no trouble getting into the car but his method would have been illegal!

On our return to London I went to the local Ford dealer to tell him what had happened and he confirmed that a Ford key locks all their models. His excuse was that it meant that at the end of each day’s trading they could use the one key to close all the cars in their show rooms and show yards at the one time.

September 2 1990

Good news, we have moved to a bed and breakfast place further inland and in the midst of golden eagle country. Niall was quickly up the steep hillside at the back of the B&B and reported seeing two or three golden eagles and a variety of other birds of prey. Such joy!

Today as the weather was pretty poor we drove to the east coast in search of sunshine and some interesting sights. We didn’t see much sunshine but stumbled across Dunrobin Castle at Golspie. It is an amazing place, just like a fairy tale castle in a Disney cartoon -- only it was real. It is the largest castle in the Northern Highlands with 189 rooms. It is also one of Britain’s oldest continuously inhabited houses dating back to the early 1300s, home to the Earls and later, the Dukes of Sutherland.

As an extra bonus for the day, the weather had cleared a little at the B&B and we were able to go bird hunting again. We saw what Niall said was a golden eagle in the distance. The views across the mountains were magnificent, made all the more so by the mixture of late evening sunshine and dark brooding clouds.

September 3 1990

Our final day in Scotland. Rosemary and Niall were up the hill at the back of the B&B looking for golden eagles by 7:00am, while yours truly stayed in bed. It was the smartest decision. Rosemary and Niall returned for breakfast rather cold but at least having seen some birds of prey.

After breakfast the rain came down as we headed to the east coast and better weather, eventually getting back to Inverness by mid-afternoon to catch our return flight to London. Tomorrow Niall begins the 1990/91 school year. Rosemary is back to work. Ditto for me as I make some hurried plans for the next Bush/Gorbachev summit in Helsinki. I do wish these two chappies would not announce these things while I’m trying to have a holiday.

That’s it for this short chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.

The only flight available from London to Bucharest was on Tarom, the Romanian national airline. I was assured that Tarom planes usually made it to their destination – a naturally comforting thought – but was warned that I should not expect first class service.

My first discovery at Heathrow was that there was no seat allocation. It is, I was told, “free seating”, which meant that the first on board got the best seats -- just like on a bus, I guess. I made sure I placed myself close to the terminal exit leading to the plane. I was consequently able to get a good aisle seat up the front of the British-built BAC 1-11 aircraft. The interior of the plane was pretty worn, but was clean, except for the dreadful toilets. There was a very strong smell in the plane, rather like mouldy socks, but it either went, or I got used to it, once the plane rose into the air.

The cabin crew consisted of just three people for the entire plane which, on this flight, was almost full. The hostesses had the cheerful demeanour and appearance of barmaids left over from the early l960s, bleached hair and a couple of good dollops of rouge. The meal we were given must qualify as the worst I have ever seen on a plane. It was an extremely unattractive assortment of stale bread rolls, cheese and cold meat. The drinks on offer were lukewarm Pepsi-Cola or mineral water, or black tea or coffee (“Sorry, we have no milk.”). Fortunately, I’d had a snack at the airport, so was able to put most of the meal aside without being overcome by hunger. Just as well, too, as the flight lasted nearly three hours.

Bucharest International Airport was quite dreadful. It was a dreary concrete building, with a dirty, gloomy and noisy interior. I went through immigration and customs without difficulty, but it took an hour for my luggage to turn up on the terminal’s sole carousel. The carousel sounded as though it had never seen a drop of oil since being installed and screeched and clanked away, drowning all but shouted conversation.

The trip into town was interesting, if only because the taxi nearly sent a drunk on to another world. He braked to avoid three drunks crossing the highway, when suddenly one of them decided to play “chicken”, hurling himself in front of us – and came within inches of being not just drunk, but dead, or at least severely injured.

My hotel, part of the Inter-Continental, is said to be the best in town, which doesn’t say a great deal. It was okay, but like all hotels in what used to be the Communist bloc, it just didn’t make it as a class hostelry. Certainly, it wasn’t worth $US125 a night. Still, why am I complaining? It’s a considerable improvement on anything to be found in Moscow. Interestingly, all the prices in the hotel are quoted in American dollars and the first language used is always English.

The hotel overlooks University Square, which was taken over by an anti-government demonstration that had already been going on for two weeks. It was quite interesting and reminded me in many respects of the pro-democracy demonstrations I saw in Peking, though having nothing like the scale. I guess there must have been 10,000 people there, listening to speeches and entertainment. (In Peking, the demonstrators peaked at close on one million.) There was a real cross-section of people, as in Peking. Members of the crowd would intersperse their cheers and chants with comments of their own. The general drift of the demonstrators’ argument was that the government was really the ousted Ceausescu regime in sheep’s clothing. Despite their complaints against the government, it must be an exhilarating experience to be able to take part in such a protest after all those years of living in a vicious totalitarian state. As recently as last December, demonstrators were simply shot where they protested.

As well as actually moving among the demonstrators, I was also able to watch and listen to them from my balcony on the 14th floor. The night time view is very un-city like, chiefly because there are so few lights. It looks almost like a city under blackout, though I am told that these days the power supply in central Bucharest is at least reasonably consistent. I see that my hotel room is equipped with a candle, just in case. Outside the city centre, both power and water supplies are subject to frequent and sometimes protracted cuts.

Daylight revealed only a hard core of demonstrators. There was a small tent city in the square, and there were anti-government signs draped over several of the buildings. But once the working day was over, the demonstration was once again in full swing.

The food in the hotel is quite good, and the guests are clearly privileged. For the ordinary Romanian, the food shortages are almost as bad as in Moscow. A queue forms as soon as something becomes available in a shop, and the queue itself attracts further people. The view, understandably, is that what is available today may not be available tomorrow -- so buy now! Once in the queue, the wait can be long. Our correspondent in Bucharest says a three-hour wait in a queue just to buy one chicken is not at all unusual. One result of the shortages of food and other consumer goods is that many Romanians have surplus cash with nothing to spend it on.

One of the most grotesque projects of the Ceausescu years is his massive palace looking along the Victory of Socialism Boulevard. A huge swathe has been cut through the old part of central Bucharest to build the avenue, lined by flats and office blocks that now lie uncompleted – and are likely to remain so for many, many years. A whole section of the city skyline is dominated by cranes that had been working on the avenue. A pretty part of the city not just been wiped out, but it has been replaced by something that the country did not want, nor could afford. While the people starved, Ceausescu regime shovelled huge sums of money into grandiose building projects.

The first free elections take place late this month. Most people seem to accept that Romania will stay a relatively free country, though there are still a substantial number of people who worry that the Securitate, Ceausescu’s armed secret police, could once again terrorise the country. The National Salvation Front, which took over after the revolution in December, is extremely confident of winning the elections by a large majority, though opposition figures are convinced the Front is run by old style Communists, though you wouldn’t know it, assuming it is true, from meeting the Prime Minister, Petra Roman. My visit to Bucharest was used as a reason for pushing for an interview with Roman by our correspondent, Owen Bennett-Jones. Maybe it was my suit that did it, but we scored an exclusive interview that provided quite a good story. Roman was a young, confident and photogenic man who spoke good English and was well able to handle even the trickiest of questions.

Roman’s official spokesman was a pretty slippery customer who seemed desperate to ingratiate himself with me, mainly, I suspect, because he was angling for an official invitation to visit the BBC World Service, something that would mean he could travel to Britain. Despite my reservations, lunch with him proved to be very interesting as he explained away, with only part success, how he managed to be a Ceausescu man one moment and a revolutionary official the next. One thing that emerged from the conversation was Ceausescu was totally paranoid about anyone with relatives abroad. Roman’s spokesman said he had once been accused of being a traitor by the Securitate, simply because a grandparent had been born in Russia.

My hotel seemed to be crawling with prostitutes after about 6pm – ­attracted, no doubt, by all the journalists and businessmen awash with hard currencies. Three of them hopped in the lift with me one night, and by the time it had reached the 14th floor, they had made a variety of interesting suggestions about how I could spend the rest of the night with all three of them. I suppose you could call it a job lot offer. I lied that I had my wife with me and they gave up in disgust.

On my final afternoon in Bucharest, I hired a young university student to show me around the city. He spoke excellent English, having lived for five years in the United States when his father was posted there to work on a joint venture mining project. He was very interesting and turned out to be a very keen and well-informed BBC listener. It makes all the difference in a place like Bucharest if you have someone to show you around and translate for you. It was excellent value for $US3O. We visited all the main sights, plus the scene of much of the fighting during the revolution.

I was taken around Bucharest’s main department store. It was rather like being at a closing down sale in a warehouse. It was very gloomy, scruffy and spartan inside. The concrete floor was covered with a kind of rubber matting. The clothes were displayed on racks with no sense of presentation or style. The quality of the goods was, on the whole, pretty poor. Certainly, I was not tempted to buy anything. Many of the smaller shops appeared to have very little in them. There was a queue outside one shop for tennis shoes.

I had trouble getting my ticket confirmed for my flight from Bucharest to Belgrade, so the Prime Minister’s press secretary just rang up the transport ministry and ordered that I be put on the flight. Nothing like knowing the right people!

By the time I left Bucharest, I had just about had enough of the demonstration in the square below my hotel room. Each day it went on until after lam and resumed again before breakfast. Even during that short break, music was played over the loudspeakers. Fortunately, I had double glazing on the windows, but this did not do enough to keep out all the noise.

My flight to Belgrade was scheduled to leave just before 7am, which meant rising at 4.45am – not a time I am at my best, specially when I don’t get to sleep before midnight. Check-in, customs and immigration took an eternity, and I was still having my passport checked at the time the plane was due to depart. The flight was in a Russian-built Ilyushin 18 propeller-driven aircraft. It was incredibly noisy – even worse than the luggage carousel at the airport. Happily the flight lasted only an hour. Many of the passengers clapped when the plane finally touched down in Belgrade. I don’t know whether this was from a sense of relief or whether they were applauding the crew for having completed another successful mission.

Belgrade airport was much more modern and cheerful than I have come to expect in Central/Eastern Europe, but my first impression of Belgrade as I was driven into town was the terrible pollution. The BBC’s local correspondent, Jim Fish, was quite surprised by my observation; he said it was an unusually clear day for Belgrade. He said you could even tell the sky was blue.

My hotel was the Moskva, an old fashioned and quaint, if not eccentric, hotel. My room was spacious and split level, with the bed and bathroom up some stairs on a mezzanine floor.

Belgrade is a kind of halfway house between a socialist and a capitalist state. It is still officially Communist, but may not be for much longer, after the imminent elections. The shops have an abundant range of goods, but they are very expensive by London standards. Belgrade was very heavily bombed in the Second World War, but much of the centre has been re-built in the old, attractive style. There is also a lot of modern building, some good and some not so good, but that is by no means unique to Belgrade.

Yugoslavia has made a remarkable turn-round on the inflation front. After a very dangerous period of hyper-inflation, the government is now claimed a small deflation rate. A substantial residual problem is the quantity of paper notes required for even a small purchase. It is an easy – if not unavoidable – achievement to be an old dinar millionaire with one modest visit to a money changer. A D100,000 note is the equivalent of just 50p. The government devalued the currency by simply stripping four zeros off the value of the currency, and is progressively replacing the old dinar notes with new ones, but this seems to have just added to the confusion. The solution for a great many Yugoslavs is simple: they identify the notes by their colour, rather than their face value. Hence, you will be told that an item you wish to purchase costs, say, “four red ones” (about two pounds sterling).

The local currency can cause problems when it comes time to leave the country. It can be a difficult balancing act, because you can’t change your excess dinars back to hard currency at the airport. It is therefore easy to find yourself leaving the country with a wallet choked with useless banknotes. With this in mind, I ran down my stock of dinars, but came unstuck when the hotel seriously under-estimated the cost of the taxi fare to the airport -- and compounded this error by failing to tell me I needed D100 Departure Tax. This left me with no choice but to pay my fare with a $US2O note, effectively giving the driver a 50% tip. This experience further reinforced my discovery in Bucharest that life is made much easier by keeping a wallet full of small denomination dollar notes.

Both Romania and Yugoslavia have a gypsy problem. In Bucharest, the gypsy community appears to provide most of the professional child beggars, and there is an intense hatred of gypsies. This feeling isn’t so strong in Yugoslavia – perhaps partly because there is less emphasis on the begging/criminal side. A substantial number are gainfully employed or work as street entertainers, but I did see one pathetic little girl, probably aged about three, squatting on the pavement and begging for money. As she sat there with a heap of near-useless notes in front of her, she ate a small bag of strawberries. I could see no-one standing in the background watching over her and Jim Fish said her parents had probably remained at home after sending her out onto the streets. The gypsies can also be an irritant at traffic lights, insisting on washing car windscreens. Drivers who protest too strongly and/or refuse to pay for this service are in danger of having their paintwork scratched.

It is interesting to observe that while we in Britain, and in the BBC in particular, agonise over whether people should be allowed to smoke in offices or public places, no such questions seem to pass through the minds of the east and central Europeans. The overwhelming majority smoke, and I did wonder how much this added to the pollution problem in the cities. Imagine the column of smoke if a million cigarettes were placed in a heap each day and set alight!

Superficially at least, central Belgrade looks much like any prosperous western European city. People are well and fashionably dressed and the shops are well stocked with the sort of goods you would find in cities like London, but the cost of living is very high. Jim Fish’s wife, Maja, said eating out and taxis were cheaper than in London, but most other things were about 50% dearer.

FAMILY NEWS

Finally extracts from a letter to my family dated June 16, 1990:

Somewhere in what passes for my files in my upstairs office (actually a great heap of assorted papers, at the moment), I have my incomplete notes on the earlier visit to Czechoslovakia and Austria. My latest visit to Washington/New York went off well and was very interesting, but I have had enough travelling for the moment. The worse thing about these trips is that the office paperwork back in London relentlessly accumulates as a form of punishment for enjoying yourself. The only trip on the horizon for the rest of the year is a return visit to Moscow for a Summit projected for early December. Like the previous summits I’ve been involved in, it is quite likely that I will not get to see either of the protagonists. However, on my visit to New York, I did get to see Henry Kissinger, New York Mayor Dimkins and Israeli ambassador Eban at a function at the United Nations. Small compensation for not seeing Gorbachev or Bush.

Still on the work front, big things have happened. It was decided this week that my boss should move to another job for six to nine months. He will be acting Managing Editor. I will become head of News Intake for that period. It means I am line manager for all the BBC World Service correspondents. It should be very enjoyable, though some of the things I would like to change cannot be done while there is a chance my boss will return to his current job at the end of his attachment. Coinciding with this news, I moved into my new office at long last. I have had to wait two years to get it, but it was worth waiting for. In fact, I have the best office of anyone in the News Department. It was luck rather than good planning, but I ended up with a nice view of The Strand. My boss has a very gloomy office looking out onto a car park.

That’s it for this chapter.

Other chapters of can be found HERE.