Day 3 - This Is Me (Part 1)

Its now Monday. My hangover that turned yesterday into a misery has subsided somewhat. My wife is talking to me again - she spoke at me yesterday, not to me - there is a difference believe you me!
Kids have gone to school as the holidays are over and I am left here to reflect on what I am going to write. 
Had some interesting comments about Amanzimtexas after yesterday...the problem I think is that most people may think this but few want to say it. And I understand this, really I do. People live in 'texas for different reasons and others, like quite a few of my mates (are they actually my mates?) operate businesses from here and have a customer base and profitability to consider.


In order to set the scene for the days ahead I suppose you should know a bit about me - I'm in my early 40's (but others would say that I often behave like a kid). In a nutshell, I completed school in the late 80's, went off to National service where I qualified as a commissioned infantry officer, volunteered and went off to 101Bn as a platoon commander at the tail end of the bush war and then a bit later, at the end of that war, spent some time in the townships in Pietermaritzburg, which if you don't know is about 90km west of Durban. Say what you want, but as a 19 year old 2nd Lieutenant in the 'Maritzburg townships in what was then still the apartheid era - it was flippin exciting and adrenaline intense!!
A short stint as a rep followed that then went overseas - with a backpack and about 400GBP (why can't I find the pound sign on my computer?). Spent a few weeks in Spain - I needed to tick a box so disappeared off to Pamplona and ran with the bulls. Crazy shit! Made my way back to the UK, ran out of money, got a job in a pub called Drummonds in Richmond, London, and found my calling in life! That was 1992 and the days when South Africans weren't allowed to work in the UK so it involved a fair bit to a lot of ducking and diving.
Arriving in the UK, young free and single it was the absolute intention to stay that way forever! The world was, after all, my oyster and filled with nubile young lasses and cold beer. Within 2 months I met my wife to be...and the rest is history.
Mid '93 decided that I needed to travel a bit so packed up my shit and flew to Turkey and what would be the start of my back packing odyssey across Africa to SA, arriving in Dec '93. 
You'll know that travelling is one thing but travelling with only a backpack, a map, a few hundred dollars in your neck pouch and a head full of wit and charm is something else. There are no friendly hotel concierges to guide you, holding onto your passport is more important than life itself (you don't want to be without identification and a visa in Africa), beds in crappy hotels / motels and backpacker lodges are usually shared, often damp and it seemed always dirty and damm hard slabs of cement with no pillows, transport is absolutely unreliable and jealously fought over and its the best thing a 20 something person could ever do! And it was cheap!


Like anything in life the journey is enriched by the people you share it with. And I met some great people, the people I worked with on the beach in Tel Aviv renting out deck chairs and umbrellas, the set that I partied with in the clubs of Jerusalem,the South African journo who paid me to write an article for a Cairo newspaper, the guy on the bus who made sure I got to a safe neighborhood in Cairo, the fellow travelers I met along the way, the Kiwi guy I shared a felucca with on the Nile (and a big bag of weed to), the pom that I met in Nairobi and climbed Mt Kenya with, the overland truck driver who gave us a lift over no mans land to Tanzania and of course the medical people in SA that got rid of my malaria when I eventually got back here. There are countless other people...out there somewhere...and if they ever read this, please know that I salute you for the good times we had.


Back to the UK in '94, just before the elections, interrogation at Heathrow but got through eventually and immediately got a job, this time as a pub manager in north London. Still illegal to work there but no one ever asked...
So thats it for now, we're now in about May '95, I'm running a pub in east Finchley called The Old White Lion, life is good and it wouldn't be long before that changed again.
More about this later, until tomorrow..