30 January 2005 Iraqi insurgents shot down RAF Hercules XV179, killing all ten crew on board. Painting by aviation artist Barry G Price

While you were out - Boy Entrants Senior Entry paid a visit

Richard and Caroline Allen of Llanmartin, South Wales, celebrated their 26th anniversary recently

John and Rachel Belcher celebrated their 30th on the 21st July

Phil and Emma Overson - 21 years and counting!

Bruce Townsend is with Jane King-nee Bairstow - the Beer Garden is open!

Kaz and Bugsy Felstead tied the knot 26 years ago!

Bev and Kev Laing were hitched 37 years ago!

PAF C-130 ramp load - note the fuel oil dripping into the rice sacks!

Artwork that was hanging in the Air Movements lounge at Gan in 1963

Peter and Rose Herring exchanged vows 53 years ago!

In this colourized picture from the 1939-45 era, a group of Women's Auxiliary Air Force transport drivers pose at RNZAF Station Ohakea

It's been eight years since Ian (Stretch) and Emily Mansfield said, "I Do!"

The Misadventures of Jarvo

Episode 1: Jarvo loses it in Addis Ababa
(his bag that is...)

Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, July 2017

On a warm sunny Sunday morning, my first in Nova Scotia, I decided that I really fancied a coffee.  So, I wandered across the road from my newly rented apartment to my local Tim Hortons.  I say local because it was the closest, although at times it’s possible to see three of them from a single location, very confusing; are they different?   Apparently, they aren’t as I subsequently found out.  As an Englishman, I find the concept of ‘Drive Through’ quite amusing.  In England you would only drive into a retail establishment if you were robbing the place.  Anyway, it seems that the drive through is exclusively for people still in their pajamas and driving an obscenely large black pickup truck.

The queue of cars seemed endless.  I wandered inside and looked up at the menu while the staff stared at me expectantly mumbling into headsets.  Thankfully, another customer came in and stood behind me for a few minutes before noticing my blank face and then politely asking if he could go ahead of me.  He ordered a double-double tugoh.  I peered at the menu and could not see that anywhere.  When my turn came, I asked for a coffee with milk. 

“Fuhyere?” asks the lady.

“I’m sorry?” I said blankly. 

“Is it fuhyere or tugoh?” 

“I don’t know,” I said starting to panic.  She started to look at me like I had special needs. So, I said “Tugoh” as the previous gentleman had done.  The relief on her face was a wonder to behold.  I paid for the coffee and sat down to enjoy my beverage.  Epic fail, it was a dark muddy colour and the milk had failed to add any essence of lightness. I finished the liquid with some effort and was about to leave when the lady breezed past running a cursory damp cloth over the surrounding tables. 

“I thought you wanted coffee tugoh,” she said cheerily. 

“Isn’t that what I have?” said I.

“No, it’s fuhyere obviously!”  Obviously, bless her, she explained and also enlightened me on the double-double thing which sadly is not very enlightening for the coffee.  I now drink French Vanilla.

A year later I am in beautiful Lunenburg, still in Nova Scotia and still unable to handle anything but French Vanilla. How did I end up in Lunenburg?  Well, it’s possible, if you weren’t really paying attention that you can get to a stage in your life where it feels like you have something of an uncertain future looming in front of you.  Not renowned for my ability to pay the slightest attention to anything, I found myself in that place during a hot steamy July in Naples, Italy in 2006 where I was posted as a Royal Air Force officer to the NATO headquarters. 

Newly single and a tad frustrated, I recklessly volunteered to be a NATO Movements Control Officer for four months or thereabouts, assisting the African Union (AU) moving their troops and civilian policemen in and out of Darfur in the Sudan.  It was to be a period where I would rediscover some of the things I loved about life, re-establish a loving relationship with my parents and meet the person who would forever change my life for the better.  What follows is the story of my time rampaging around Africa and how it made me look back on all my previous mammoth muck ups around the world; there were a few, I’m ashamed to admit.  It may read to some people like one man’s descent into insanity and in some ways it very nearly was.  It may also be offensive to some people, especially the French, but at the end of the day, it’s a love story and I emerged from the entire debacle liking myself a lot more and certainly liking the world again, so tough shit.  Enjoy!

The border between Chad and the Central African Republic, 1985 (although it seems like yesterday to me)

The guy with the gun seems fairly calm.  I say the guy with the gun but they all have guns, I mean the guy with the gun pressed against my forehead.  The one pacing around behind him is not so calm, in fact he is rather animated and becoming increasing loud and seemingly agitated.  I don’t understand what he is saying, perhaps that’s for the best.  It goes quiet and the man in front of me starts counting down from ten.  He is counting in French, I ask him to speak English and he stops counting and looks at me with a bemused look on his face and lowers the pistol.  He asks if I am American, again in French, I say no.  I happen to be wearing a Union Jack T-shirt which he seems to notice for the first time.  He looks over my shoulder, presumably at another of his colleagues.  I know there were at least 4 of them when they stopped my Toyota but I suspect there are more.  I ask if I can have a cigarette and he tilts his head slightly to the side in a gesture I take to mean yes.  I extricate the packet from my very sweaty shorts, there are 2 inside, I offer him one.  He takes it and I take the other one, light it and pass him the lighter.  He lights his own crumples the empty packet, drops it on the dusty ground and puts the lighter in his pocket.  I have another pack in the vehicle and ask if I can get it.  He nods and I retrieve the pack and give it to him expecting him to pass them around his men, he doesn’t, it goes in the pocket with the lighter. 

Things are calmer now, I am shaking but it seems to be diffused.  They have a quiet discussion which I don’t understand, I stay silent and never look at any of the others.  By not being American I seem to have disrupted whatever they had planned.  Ten minutes pass.  I tell him I have to be at the airstrip in 15 minutes.  More discussion ensues, although it is not as quiet as before.  He turns back to me and points with his chin in the direction I was travelling when they appeared. 

I get in the Toyota, start the engine and drive slowly away...

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Sunday 27th August 2006

Boredom had started to get a hold of me as it tends to do regularly whilst serving in the military, ‘Hurry up and wait’ had become something of a mantra for me.  I had been working for a year as the XO (executive officer) for Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds in the Operations Center in NATO’s Naples HQ.  Big G was a delight to work for despite his occasional under pressure twitch.  He had a brain the size of a planet, a great sense of humour and a somewhat heroic willingness to place his trust in others, even the French. 

The Brigadier chaired a daily meeting at ten o clock in the morning where a representative from all aspects of the NATO operational system would be present to either brief him on what was happening or to answer his many questions.  Most people sat around the periphery of the room except for a select few who sat at the big table with Big G.  This was his Predict Team of eight or so, Intelligence people mostly, who were the ones who were supposed to warn him of any impending problems in the Balkans theatre of operations.  One morning I announced his arrival at the meeting, everyone stood up, he did the usual “Good morning gentlemen” thing and sat at the head of the table as normal.   However, he was alone at the table, no sign of his Predict Team.  He turned to me and said “Jarvo where are my Predict Team?” “Maybe they know something we don’t Sir,” I said.

He made all the decisions while I farted about making sure he was in the right place at the right time, in the right uniform, 2 socks the same colour and with all the facts he needed to hand.  I was also largely responsible for walking his dog Spud, which I largely delegated or possibly abdicated, some would say, to my assistant, Corporal Sarah Packham.

I’ve never had much luck with dogs; they were never even close to being my best friend.  Spud was a lovely intelligent Jack Russell but, whilst he was under my care, I lost him a number of times around the HQ, my plaintive cries of “Spud, Spud please come back” were to echo around those buildings on many occasions.  I also failed to stop Spud munching his way through the venetian blinds in the Brigadier’s office, watched stupefied through the office window as it hauled itself onto his desk and ate a bar of chocolate he had left in his in-tray which, poor Spud then proceeded to projectile vomit noisily and rather stinkily over a chair during an important video conference.

I think it all started in my childhood in Leicester, with my Father who at the time considered me to be childish and irresponsible, I think he still does.  Far too irresponsible obviously, to have a dog or any kind of pet really and I consistently proved him right.  I think it was his hatred of dog shit that was the real reason.  He did relent enough to let me have a Gerbil, which I let out of the cage and never found again, a budgie found hanging from its perch one morning, a rabbit which died in mysterious circumstances possibly suicide, and tropical fish, which due to a thermostat problem, boiled in their tank.  Despite the fact that negligence was never actually proven, I had a sneaking suspicion that I would never be the next David Attenborough.

I did 2 spells in the military, firstly as a Sapper in the Royal Engineers, then after a seven year gap, I joined the Royal Air Force as an Officer.  Most ex-military people will almost certainly tell you and always when they get together over a few beers, that as time passes you look back on your past and can only seem to remember the good bits; even what seemed quite miserable at the time can seem very funny later in life. 

After I left Leicester at the age of seventeen in 1979 to make my way in the world, I did sort of have a dog on two occasions.  The second time was at RAF Lyneham in 1998.  I called my desk officer, who decided on Officers’ Postings, and asked if there was any likelihood of me being posted anywhere overseas, “No chance Jarvo” she told me.  So, based on that iron clad response my wife and I got a Jack Russell pup for the kids.  A mere six months later we were on our way to Nairobi in Kenya for three years without the pup.  You have to love the military.

The first time was after I left the Army in 1984. I managed to find myself a job as a surveyor and the forward reconnaissance man for oil exploration crews in Chad, Central Africa, and the Sudan.  The crews normally consisted of fifteen ex-pats split into teams and two hundred and fifty local labourers and it was a tough old job, long hours, bad condition etc., etc., boo *ucking hoo!  When the crew was in a fixed location for a period of time, they would pull four large trailers containing the accommodation, mess hall, offices etc, Wild West like, into a square, plonk a line of trestle tables in the middle and that was the limit of our comfort.

Anyway, our four-man survey team in the Sudan had a fairly cute looking stray dog attach itself to us whom we affectionately named *uckrat.  Being suddenly surrounded by a strange alien race that didn’t kick him or throw stones at him like the locals were prone to do, he very quickly assumed that he was a fellow alien and barked, snarled and growled at anyone with anything more than a reasonably good tan.  The seismographic team did not particularly like *uckrat and had a rival pet; a goat named Gerty who would sit on the lap of their chief at the table bleating softly to itself as he somewhat disturbingly petted it.  The seismographic chief was a huge Scotsman called Ballbag who had the hairiest mat of a back I had ever seen, it was tough not to stare as it often had large amounts of debris hanging from it.  Being quite young and fairly hair free I was fascinated by this carpet thing on his back.  It was only years later when I woke up one morning with hair seemingly sprouting from every orifice that I felt any sympathy for him. 

One day, Gerty clomped her way up the steps into our office trailer and proceeded to chomp her way through all of our days’ precious survey computations.  My boss, John Wood, surprisingly took exception to this and instructed our labour team to get rid of it forthwith which they duly did.  And very tasty it was apparently!

That evening, Ballbag wondered the camp calling for Gerty with a little tear in his eye while we feigned indifference and concern.  Sadly, the morons in our labour team had eaten Gerty and then decided to stretch out the skin above their tent to dry out, which of course, was the first sight that greeted Ballbag when he emerged from his pit the next morning.  Initially, his revenge was fairly restrained.  We were due to be visited by the head of exploration for the oil company to which we were contracted, who was unfortunately a large Afro-American gentleman.  As he exited the helicopter at our site, he was greeted by a snarling beast of a dog decorated with a marker pen pair of glasses, *UCKRAT written in large letters on one side and most appallingly of all, I HATE *IGGERS written on the other side.  “Whose dog is that?” “It’s the Survey teams, Boss” was Ballbags helpful reply.  Suffice to say we didn’t have a dog for long after that.

Ballbag wasn’t finished, one night he set off a fire extinguisher, threw it into the cabin John and I shared and shut the door.  I awoke thinking a savage sandstorm had hit the trailer and flipped it over.  John leapt from the top bunk in a panic. Luckily I was there to break his fall and we both burst from the room clad only in our underwear, caked in powder and coughing our guts up.  Ballbag sat outside, beer in hand, feigning indifference and concern.  That was not an experience I would care to repeat.

Once Big G sadly had departed to pastures new, his replacement, a German Colonel, had completely different requirements, an outrageous accent and a distinctly dodgy limp.  Cpl Packham and I were bored shitless.  That was when I decided I had to get off my arse and do something else or end up drinking myself to death alone. 

The job that luckily presented itself to me looked deceptively simple at first glance, four months roaming around Africa making sure that the strategic airlift supplied by the NATO nations to get the AU troops in and out of Darfur was being properly utilised and that nothing went horribly wrong.  Fat chance of that, I’d been doing this sort of thing for years, six of those years in Africa, and it was always a hiding to nothing job. 

The first act of the whole show was to get to the NATO HQ in Lisbon where the mission in Africa was supposedly being run and from there to Addis Ababa where they had a deployed office near the African Union HQ. 

In the terminal at Naples airport, I met up with Terry White, the American captain who was going with me, at the check-in and we spent the next hour tutting and hissing at the stupidity and rudeness of the Neapolitans and their inability to stand in a queue only to find we were in the wrong queue ourselves!  Terry is a tall, clean cut genial family man from Sweet Lips, Tennessee or somewhere like that and being a Spam, a slightly rude term for an American, translates in one way as Self-Propelled Automated Mouth, was wide eyed and eager to get going on the adventure.  Exceptionally, he was a quiet guy unlike your average American, as we say ‘lovely people but no volume control’.   As a space briefly cleared at the right check-in desk, Terry butted in beautifully, I followed the Terry-shaped blur and we were away.  Unfortunately, he appeared to have brought the entire contents of his wardrobe and enough toiletries for several years despite my advice, he believed that Africa was all mud huts and no shops, so it was a somewhat painful check-in. I suspected there was a wifely influence in there somewhere.

Italians irritatingly and inexplicably love to clap and cheer whenever their aircraft lands safely; sometimes they even drop their mobile phones, it seems like they have never really embraced the miracle of powered flight.  Terry and I spent an eternal seven hours loitering in the eternal city’s Airport and then flogged on to Lisbon. 

Lisbon had a nice relaxed feel to it after the constant undercurrent I felt whilst in Naples.  In fact, in the first thirty minutes there, I wasn’t robbed or run over at all.  We met up with our erstwhile traveling companion, Rafa Rubio, a swarthy Spanish Air Force Officer who seemed very cool and immediately likeable.  He would be staying in Addis Ababa as our liaison officer while Terry and I travelled round Africa. 

The three of us endured an interminable period of preparation briefings, mostly what seemed like totally unnecessary crap including a long ramble on the Arabic language and Arab customs even though I pointed out we were not actually going to any Arab countries.  After two days, Terry, Rafa and I headed back to Lisbon airport to fly to bloody Rome to connect to Addis.  However, the flight from Lisbon to Rome was delayed and we were reduced to wandering around the airport seeking some entertainment. It was at this point that my life changed forever. 

Lounging at an Internet terminal and attempting to surf porn to waste half an hour, I exchanged a few pleasantries and eventually contact details with a lady sat next to me called Karen, a Canadian from Halifax, Nova Scotia with Dutch nationality on her way back to Holland, who was also delayed. Despite my previous less than glorious experience with Canadians who are basically Americans with table manners, I decided bravely to give her a chance. 

The boss on the oil exploration crew in Chad was a French Canadian, who I found very difficult to understand.  It was even worse when he spoke.  As part of my duties on the crew, I was charged with setting up satellite navigation (satnav) stations to check coordinates around the working area.  Don’t be confused, this wasn’t a simple task of wandering around with a tiny box and being home in time for tea and medals like it would be nowadays, this was a logistical nightmare.

In those days there were lots of boxes, cassette tapes, antennas, a solar panel and a car battery.  It took a good three days to get a decent enough positional fix and I was finding that the solar panels were struggling to keep the batteries charged for that long.  So being my usual genius self I started nipping out early in the morning before anybody was up and about and swapping the batteries out from other people’s vehicles.  Every evening a different person would be complaining about their flat batteries but I pretty much got away with it until I was only left with the boss’s vehicle to plunder.  Sadly, he started work earlier than me and was watching bemused from his office window as I rendered his Toyota effectively useless.  His bollocking was memorable in that I didn’t understand a damn word of it, I thought I had been sacked, then maybe promoted, then sacked again.  Whatever, I had disliked French Canadians since that moment. 

The non French-Canadian Dutch Karen was a tiny thing, engaging and beautiful and there was an immediate mental and of course physical attraction between us.  She was to become my best friend, my soul mate and eventually my wife, so it was the most valuable few minutes I had spent in a long time. Thank you, Portugal Airlines, for the delay!

Back to the thrilling action and lo and behold thanks to the delay in Lisbon we contrived to miss the connection in Rome to Addis having scampered hell for leather through the airport only to get to the departure gate as the doors hissed sarcastically closed in our faces.  Our suitcases were checked through and no one could tell us if they had made the flight or not, they certainly weren’t on the baggage conveyor.  After wandering agitatedly around Rome airport attempting to follow their hopeless and misleading signs and sweating like a Newfy taking a spelling test, we eventually got a bed, well three beds (we weren‘t that close yet), in the horrendously expensive airport Hilton. 

Most of the next day was spent attempting to beat some kind of compensation to cover the hotel and nibbles out of Portugal Airlines while watching with mild amusement as the Caribinieri in charge of odd items, X-rayed dogs and fondled their crotches Michael Jackson (RIP) style each time anything remotely resembling a woman passed by. 

With hollow assurances ringing in our ears that our luggage would indeed be joining us, we boarded the midnight flight to Addis Ababa.  It was less than an hour into the flight before I came very close to killing the irritating child in the seat behind me, but I managed to maintain a superficially happy face as we were in Club Class (for the one and only time) and the Ethiopian Air Staff were excellent if a little over-attentive.

I had spent the best part of six years in Africa during my many careers and experienced some pretty dramatic weather conditions in that time but my God, Ethiopia, even from the air, resembled a very full sponge and it was still raining heavily as we aquaplaned to the terminal.  We found out that a thousand people had died in floods in the previous month alone and I could fully understand why.  To cheer myself up a bit, I accidentally dropped my weighty day-sack on the irritating kid’s foot and exited the aircraft hurriedly to avoid the screaming. 

The visa formalities were achieved with very little fuss and then came the bad news, Rafa had his bags but Terry and I were empty handed.  It was seven o clock in the morning, I was feeling cold and wet and now I was getting seriously pissed off.  However, I put on my best happy face, jumped in the waiting car and off we went to the Addis Hilton Hotel where I thought I could at least get a cup of tea and a hot shower… but no, we were informed that the rooms would not be ready until eleven-o-clock.  Then joy, a call came from the airport, our bags were now there so off we went again.  As I sort of semi-expected as a glass always half-empty type of guy, Terry’s bags were there, mine weren’t.  I’m sure you can picture my expression without me describing it, pretty much like the weather.  Once again, the Ethiopian Air Staff were great and I was eventually compensated with some beer tokens for the inconvenience.  Still, after an extra night in Rome with just my hand baggage, I was fairly underwear critical and not at my usual sparkling best.  Luckily, I was able to fit in well in Addis and was able to keep most of the flies away from Terry. 

Dinner that evening, with the three existing members of the NATO team already based in Addis, was in the Zebra Grill.  Although looking a little rough and shack-like from the outside, it was warm and atmospheric inside, i.e. pitch *ucking black.  This was Terry’s first introduction to the facsimile they call toilets in African restaurants and I could tell he was genuinely thrilled but liberal amounts of beer and our first goat kebabs of the trip eased his trepidation.  Roasted over an open pit in the corner of the restaurant by squinting chefs, the meal was more than adequate and thankfully quite cheap. 

The next morning, I was awoken by the telephone in my room with the mother of all altitude-induced hangovers to be informed that ‘Yes Mr. Jarvis, your bag is now at the airport’.  Off I trundled again to be led by the ever smiling Ethiopian Airways man round to the back of the airport to a stack of bags where he gleefully pointed out a Samsonite suitcase with an England sticker on the side and JARVIS written in big white letters on all sides (I like to be able to see my bag on the carousel).  ´That’s not mine´ I said in a cheeky chappy sort of way. I had never seen a man look more crushed.  I admitted the truth that it was indeed my case, ignored his ‘You English Wanker!’ expression, thanked him profusely and bumbled off to try and ruin someone else’s day. 

Back at the hotel, we met up in the NATO dungeon of an office, a suite in the bowels of the hotel. Terry, Rafa and I then proceeded to get briefed to death yet again with the same inane crap that we had endured in Lisbon.  I then retired gratefully to my room to surgically remove my underpants and unpack my suitcase to the sounds of gunfire and screaming from the slums opposite.

The Addis Ababa Hilton was a fairly typical posh chain hotel plonked into a developing country, full of ex-pats, business types and with a smattering of hopeful local ladies loitering in the bar.  There were a lot of military types in residence, the small NATO team and a few more European Union servicemen attached to AU offices. 

The Hilton did have in its favour a pretty good gym and Monday morning I decided it was time to try it out.  Sadly, I had foolishly forgotten about the debilitating effects of altitude and proceeded to set off at my normal running pace, male ego of course prevented me from slowing it down so after twenty minutes I was an attractive shade of beetroot and coughing up a lung.  I scanned the room checking out the admiring glances from the other people in the gym and casually waved away the hovering medical team.  Terry in his wife-beater muscle vest looked on mystified.

Tuesday was the day of our big meeting with the African Union team responsible for the rotation of forces in Darfur and the assigning of our local liaison officers.  Those guys were unintentionally hilarious, we had a massive movement of troops and equipment to plan and supervise but they decided to spend half an hour arguing about the loss of a $10 SIM card while we sat bemused amongst them.  The entire meeting was punctuated by racking coughs and noisy throat clearing and the occasional wheezing fit from me.  Terry just looked slightly bewildered; a look he would come to perfect over the coming months. 

We finally got to the main issue to be discussed.  It seemed that in the past, the aircraft payloads had been affected, largely out of the Sudan, by the troops bringing home gifts.  We were told that chest freezers, plasma TV’s and even goats had been presented as hand baggage, where they were getting this stuff from God only knew.  The Africans at the table all harrumphed, tutted, nodded and agreed that it was finally time to come down hard on this sort of thing. I coughed and smiled knowingly, I’d done this crap before all around the world, somebody will always consider themselves exempt from the rules, normally aircrew, wives of senior officers and the French.  The big Colonel, and he was big but had a really nice suit, tried to explain to us dumb white innocent officers, that it was in the African culture to bring expensive gifts back for each of your family if you have been serving abroad.  In fact, it was actually expected.  It’s not just African culture I told him in a slightly capricious way - just take a look in my ex-wife’s jewelry box!

After the meeting, Terry and I managed to get a good result with Lieutenant Colonel Azinta from the Nigerian army, who was to be our Liaison Officer when we eventually got to Lagos.  The Lieutenant Colonel had that battle-weary look about him and a dry sense of humour even if he rarely smiled himself.  Lieutenant Colonel Azinta was even able to sort out some transport (with his family in Lagos) and we generally had a warmer fuzzier feeling as a result.  This turned out to be very handy when the retarded NATO admin guy suddenly confessed to having a snag with getting our visas for Nigeria, basically he had done cock-all about them.  I made a quick phone call to this Lieutenant Colonel Azinta and we were having nibbles and cups of tea in the Nigerian Defence Attaché’s office with a shiny new visa in our passports that very afternoon. 

In the meantime, I had been working out our movement plan to meet up with the deployments and booking the flights which looked to be a complete nightmare.  Terry was a little overwhelmed by the scale of Africa.  Bless him, he had made himself a scrapbook of maps so he could get an idea of where he was going but hadn’t seemed to have absorbed much of it so was trying to put it all in relation to the size of the States.  I told him I thought he was in denial.  “That’s the Nile there, isn’t it?” he said pointing at the map.  I discovered later that Karen had done much the same thing with a map of Africa pinned to the wall above her desk, although she seemed to have secured the services of most of the globe’s intelligence services judging by the way she was able to track me down. 

We started with a map of the continent and proceeded to draw lines all over it until it resembled a map of the London Underground and didn’t really help at all.  For instance, I had to go from Addis Ababa to Lagos to Enugu to Abuja to Enugu to Lagos to Nairobi to Kigali to Entebbe to Kigali to Nairobi to Accra to Dakar to Addis Ababa which is hell of a post-it note to present to a blank looking travel agent.  It cost upwards of $7500 for economy including an eleven-hour flight from Dakar to Addis.  I was already looking forward to that one.  I wondered if I would ever see my luggage again.

Just as we seemed to getting our ducks in a row, we had some bad news, the whole show was apparently to be cancelled thanks to the internal machinations of the AU political machine and we were to be returned to Naples forthwith.  Disappointedly, we packed for home; Terry’s face was a picture incidentally, as his already bulging bags looked ready to surrender completely, it never fits back in once you have taken it out (sums up my sex life). We decided that we should commiserate in a difficult to locate German Restaurant called the African Queens, dodgy name, tacky furniture but it was actually quite nice. However, I suspected my lamb was a bit goatish… I know the difference.  Incidentally, Jarvos tip of the day, avoid Ethiopian red wine unless you’re constipated.  Eventually, political common sense prevailed and the troop rotation program was put back on track.  However, we had lost a valuable few day and would now leave on the following Tuesday morning which would leave us very tight for time to get the lay of the land in Enugu and then get the Nigerian Battalion ready to move.

Before we left Addis Ababa, the Cameroonian Colonel, Roger Quitcha, at the Darfur Integrated Task Force (DITF) the part of the AU running the Darfur operation, invited the three of us to have a spot of afternoon tea at his flat.  Rafa forgot, despite constant prompting from Terry and me, to find out if Roger was a Muslim or not as it would be a tad of a faux pas if we had turned up with a bottle of Scotch and some bacon sandwiches.  After much twittering and rock-paper-scissors etc., we settled on a compromise box of Danish pastries and some fruit juice.  The Colonel lived above a supermarket in fairly basic conditions and was obviously a bit lonely and missing his rather large family.  That said, we had a wonderfully pleasant evening chatting, sipping tea and nibbling on cake and biscuits. 

Back at the hotel I found myself staring at the chunky NATO laptop and satellite phone we had been issued and pondering the potential effect they would have on my already tightly packed suitcase.  Dumbly, NATO issue a brick of a sat phone instead of a mobile phone, these things are not meant to be used as normal daily communications devices and I had a strange feeling that I would probably be using my own phone more than I would have liked.  I had now completed my twentieth trial pack of the suitcase and it was looking a little tight to say the least, some things would have to go.  On the plus side, Terry was in a much worse state.  This was the part of the trip where I reasoned that we should only take things that we were prepared to lose but at least we could leave some stuff in the NATO office here in Addis if needed.  I slept the agitated sleep of a worried man, my dreams playing like the video of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’.

The phone networks were an issue though.  To save some money on my roaming charges, I had purchased a local Ethiopian SIM card.  However, I could text Karen but couldn’t receive any messages back so I thought she was ignoring me.  However, Karen is not a woman to be put off easily and she eventually tracked me down through MSN.  We chatted online endlessly and effortlessly as though we had known each other forever with a considerable amount in common.  The only fundamental and possibly relationship breaking matter was her preference for salt and vinegar crisps.  I’m a sour cream or cheese and onion man. The first time Karen and I managed to webcam we spent ten minutes just beaming at each other.  Luckily, I had found the time to take a chainsaw to my ever-blossoming nasal hairs, had I let myself go a bit... mmm.  However, life was good.  [To be continued – watch out for Episode 2 next month – “Jarvo gets ethnically profiled”]