Bryan Islip's Blog, page 6

Ah, Bahrain

All newly adopted action means taking some kind of a chance. When you come to a crossroad in business, as in personal life, it is often necessary  to weigh up the odds as carefully as you can but eventually to take the path of greater rather than lesser risk. If you have the guts, the drive or the stupidity, that is. Only history will tell which of these belongs to you!

I was at that crossroad in 1995. Having come out from under the umbrella of corporate employment and the property owning thing some eight years previously we were sitting relatively pretty. Of course a long shadow was cast over life from my wife's incurable disability even though she was being well looked after in the South Winds Nursing Home. Robert's problems were if anything even more disturbing. But it is as the old Irish song tells us; What cannot be cured, love, must be endured, love. .As I say, in spite of all that Dee and I and our young pair of Hungarian Vizslas, Mati and Sorosh, were living a more than acceptable lifestyle in long-leased Laundry Cottage. Our consultancy / agency, operating now over the entire Middle East, was riding high. I had a Saudi as sponsor and an office in said sponsor's building in downtown Al Khobar plus I was renting a villa within a very good expat compound. I could come and go as I pleased, subject UK tax laws of course. Freedom!

I would probably still be there had I not seen an opportunity to climb a few more rungs up the business / affluence ladder ...

It is as well at this point to bring in the Emirate (now I believe the 'Kingdom') of Bahrain. Bahrain is approached via a twenty five kilometre causeway from Saudi Arabia's Al-Khobar. Its capital city of Manama was and I presume still is far more westernised than its Arabic neighbours and is therefore a weekend target both for Saudi-based western expats and the more - how should |I put it - fleshpot-loving young Saudis. My own stays at the Intercontinental Hotel in Manama had for years been a highly acceptable staging post for UK/Middle East flights in and out. I have especially fond memories of a certain Italian restaurant there. The excellent singer/guitarist would surrender the microphone to anyone with half a voice professing to know the words. Ciou ciou bambino was one of the favorites, as was My Way. You know ... 'And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain etc etc  ...'  Anyway much to Dee's amusement I determined to learn the words so I could take my turn with the mike and perform for my very first time in public! Dee had flown out to join me for a short stints in Bahrain. She and I returned to that restaurant and when the guy started on My Way I stood up, held out my hand for the mike and for several minutes wandered around the crowded tables. What is a man, I sang, accompanied by the guitarist, What has he got? If not himself  .... Looking at all the faces I knew I knew I had them. Hey, a star is born, I thought, long in the tooth or no!  Then - calamity! I looked down on a particularly lovely young lady - one in possession of one of life's more impressive cleavages - and lost not only the words but the whole bloody plot. Serve you right, Dee chuckled as I sat down red-faced to a mixture of stuttering applause and general hilarity.

Back to the track ... I've got ahead of myself ... Why not open an office over is Bahrain? I wondered. With my visa there wouldn't be any problem coming and going across the Causeway and a Bahrain based business with a high profile address was more than acceptable throughout the region. With the right new staff I felt we could take ourselves fromn where we were to a whole new level. I talked it through with Dee. She was against it. 'We're doing OK as we are' was the gist of her argument, and of course our overhead costs would absolutely sky-rocket. I sat down with my single employee to talk it through again. By contrast  Robin absolutely loved the idea (why wouldn't he when much of his nightlife was over on the island!) even though for sponsor reasons and to keep his mind on the job he himself would be required to carry on actually residing in Al-Khobar.

I consulted Delia once again, finally convincing her to go with me on the move. Taking the proverbial deep breath I  rented a suite of offices in one of Manama's most prestigious tower blocks and then a magnificent penthouse apartment for myself on the 19th floor of another tower. Right outside my apartment was a rooftop swimming pool. I scoured the island for suitable furniture and office equipment and began looking for staff. My new offices were high up in the tower between those of The Bank of Bermuda and Cable and Wireless, each of them large corporations managed by very experienced Englishmen. The Bermuda man, Thomas, who was to become a special friend, introduced himself and enquired as to whether I might consider his Anglo/Iraqi wife, Dina, as my Personal Assistant. Dee came out for the interview. They got on famously from the beginning although I gather the talk was probably more of shoes and clothes than business. Dina was (is) a very bright lady, fluent in several variations of the Arabic as well as English of course, seemingly able at all times able to navigate the complexities of visas, travel, banking and general business life in Bahrain and the Middle East. Next we hired an Indian lady accountant and an Egyptian salesman called Saeed AEl-Jeddawy.

Bibs-industry (Bahrain) was up and running, and how!. 

There was a lot of driving - especially the 400 klix across to Riyadh, and a need often for several flights per week to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar or the remoter parts of Saudi Arabia. My consultancy / agencies continued to prosper. Quickly I settled into the new life. At weekends there were bars, especially the Harp in the Holiday Inn just opposite my residence, even cinemas to go to besides many good restaurants, shopping malls and the famous native 'Sukh' (open air gold market). Even an impressive zoo, would you believe! Most of my breakfasts were taken in the Sunset Cafe over the road rather than up in my apartment. Looking out from my nineteenth floor window I could watch the shrimp boats going out into the Gulf in the evening and could see as far as the airport in one direction and the famous Pearl roundabout / monument. (now destroyed after the riots) in the other. Once I took a special trip down island to see the Arabian Gulf's very first, tiny, long since disused nodding donkey oil well - and that amazingly ancient, very famous Tree of Life.

Yes, expatriate life and social life was not at all bad! Courtesy of Thomas Dee and I were invited to attend Bahrain's famous Poppy Ball (11th of the 11th), also many times to private parties and several times even to the British Ambassador's garden parties.


At this point I was renting a house near Winchester, UK, a villa in Saudi Arabia, a prestigious office suite and equally prestigious penthouse in Bahrain. Oh, and I almost forgot, a very nice Lexus for myself and Ford Galaxies for Robin and Saeed.Our combined mobile telephone bills amounted up to around two thousand pounds a month. But cost mean nothing by itself, I told myself; sales income means everything - and sales were doing just fine.

The golfer and the sheikh

In 1995 after Tim Henderson-Ross left my operational base in Riyadh I employed a young Englishman of considerable personal presence, an expat already living in The Kingdom, up to then employed by DHS, the world-wide courier service. I'll call him Robin.

Now, every businessman (woman) knows there are four elements to the making or the losing of money in business...:
(!) Getting the work - that is, selling and marketing the goods or the service,
(2) Making and delivering the goods or providing the services that have been ordered by a client - in best order and on time.
(3) Getting paid.for the ordered goods or the services
4) The organisation that knits together the whole operation.

I had hoped Robin could support me on all fronts. In a small operation versatility always has to be key. The personable thirty something, Robin, proved reasonably good at (1), of little or no use at (2) - i.e. report writing and advising, creative work etc, an irrelevance for (3) but wasn't at all bad at (4), i.e. linking with sponsor, getting all the necessary paperworks done, banking, travel etc, etc, which is why he lasted with me for some five years. But the laddie always had problems beginning with his difficulty in getting out of bed in the morning and ending with an overcrowded night time social life amongst the younger elements - especially female - of the vibrant expatriated communities in Al-Khobar then Bahrain and Dubai. Perhaps the beginnings and endings of each of his days were linked in reverse, if you see what I mean!

Be that as it may, however exasperated I often became I always enjoyed Robin's company. I liked the guy, tell the truth, almost envied his devil-may-care attitude. His well-educated life as a teenager in England had focussed on the game of golf, his handicap having been down to scratch at age seventeen. I've often thought how awful is must be to have a great sporting talent but one that is not quite great enough to earn you all the multimillions and the enduring fame. Nobody would relish the life of a journeyman near-miss golf professional. Few can stand it for more than a few years.

Be that as it may, it was Robin who, in a roundabout kind of way, introduced me in 1994 to a quite high-ranking Saudi Sheikh in Al-Khobar - let's call him Faisal. In Saudi Arabia you have to 'sign up with' a local sponsor in order to enter The Kingdom if you want to live and/or visit for work and monetary gain. My sponsor at the time was a Riyadh based Prince, a fair man but one with limited interest in the business of those from abroad coming under his wing. Faisal on the other hand was a British-educated Sheikh, a bright guy interested in what you were doing although not at all interested in hard work when he could find folk like myself to do that kind of stuff. Deeply religious of course, in the Sunni / Wahabbi tradition. In fact Faisal's grandfather had camel-ridden with king-in-waiting Abdullah Al-Saud and the locally famous British officer Captain Christian in 1916 when they combined to subdue the many other desert tribes by force of arms. This allowed British diplomats to draw lines across the map of Arabia to create Saudi Arabia and neighbouring Arab States.

Faisal became a man I thought of as a friend. He was not the eldest son, therefor not the leader of his clan, but was very well connected, wealthy of course, with his main  home in the East of the country at Al Khobar and one just over the Causeway in Bahrain. Such a sponsor as Faisal is absolutely essential if you want to do business in the Middle East. I would often join him at his beach-side mansion of a residence on a Friday - the Moslem holy day - to compare business notes and anecdotes, often with his high powered banking and business friends in attendance and always with the option of the 'forbidden' Johnny Walker Black Label uniquely available. Male Philipino servants would ply us with a marvellous array of food although never much before midnight. Before that out would come the karaoke mike. All in turn would be encouraged to deliver a song or a ditty. This was where I first tried and became quite famous for my awful version of Sinatra's My Way and those Irish folksongs, Mother Macrae and Sweet Sixteen. Songs I would never attempt in public when without the hard stuff! I have to confess nobody previously had bothered to applaud my on and off key tenor efforts, alcohol-fuelled or not. Faisal also had a pokey little downtown hideaway with a pool table and etcetera. Good for workday extended lunchtimes!

I have to say that I came to like - even admire - most of the ways of Islamic life. You were always safe from crime in The Kingdom though not always, as I shall relate, from the cruel (by western standards) arm of shariah law. Although there was never a trace to be seen of the female of our species, in a strange sort of way you quickly grew accustomed to an entirely male and, as I say, mainly peaceful society. There are always opportunities to share in the incredible wealth of  the place via creative business efforts provided you came to learn and live by their rules, both written and unwritten.

Rule number one; Arabia, as being the place favoured by the Prophet Mohammed is superior to the rest of the world. One over-warm evening, strolling barefoot along  the beach on a Thursday (weekend) night Faisal said, Bryan, I suppose you wonder why we seldom perform work - as is normal to you in the West? I said something like 'I wouldn't be so rude, Faisal'. I'll tell you why, he went on; It is because we, (he was using the 'we' to mean highborn Saudis such as himself), come from three thousand years of a slave owning culture. When we need labourers we go to the Indian subcontinent or to Africa; when we want management or more creative people such as your goodself we go to Europe or The States. For the payment of them these days Allah has given us the gift of oil. That stopped me in my tracks. I had never been called a slave before (though was intimately familiar as are most with the term 'wage-slave')! I looked out over a calm, star-spangled sea and up to the heavens then back to Faisal's beautiful mansion, lit up in the night like Blackpool front. I took a mouthful of dear old Scotland. But what about when the oil runs out? I ventured. He laughed quietly. You in the West must worry about that, he said. Your peoples were accustomed to live in one of two cultures - capitalism or communism - were they not? But now, overnight, you have only option one. Your capitalism is secular, almost entirely without a spiritual dimension. Yes, capitalism will disappear soon, as will the oil. You then have little or nothing left. Chaos. We on the other hand have Allah. We shall prevail even if we should go back to the deserts of our Bedouin grandfathers. Out of politeness I didn't argue the point. But I would have found argument difficult anyway.

Faisal told me how he had taken his teenaged son to a local 'place of punishment' where an adulteress was for a large part buried in the sand, surrounded by jeering villagers. As the local Sheikh the crowd parted to make way for both of them. The son was awarded the special privilege of throwing the first stone at the poor lady. It hit her head, Faisal informed me, without any obvious emotion. I can only hope it killed her outright. If not the following hundreds of rocky missiles most surely would have done.

By contrast I remember Faisal taking me one night to an extensive place of giant sand dunes in his four wheel drive Lexus. Similar vehicles and trucks were ascending in the moonlight a certain dune and descending / sliding down at great and dangerous speed on to the flatter desert land below, where were the small tents and glowed the camp fires of many small groups. We  joined the merry throng up and down and again and again before Faisal slid his poor motor car to a stop by a group of four well bearded men sitting around their own fire. Somehow they seemed to sense Faisal's rank. They stood up, salaamed gravely and invited us to join them - I have to say without overmuch enthusiasm for me and my plastic cup of the Black Label. I watched their gaunt, black-eyed faces in the firelight. Of course all the talk was in Arabic. These were proud, strong, hard people, capable of great cruelties and equally great kindnesses, secure somehow in a world of their own between past and present, unquestioning in their spiritual beliefs.

I thought of my own religious forebears: Simon Islip, died 1366, Archbishop of Canterbury under King Edward the Third; John Islip, died 1532, Abbot and builder in chief under King Henry the Seventh of many sections of Westminster Abbey. It seemed to me that there were many similarities in custom, spiritual attitude and behaviour between them and these peoples of the desert with whom I was sitting, painfully cross-legged on the sand. Of course these folk didn't burn people at the stake, as did my own, but that was only because there is an obvious shortage of wood in Saudi Arabia.

Arabian nights

1995. It's now forty years since the opening of the Karen's baby eyes in Newmarket General Hospital. So much water under so many bridges since then. But we had by now found ourselves a good measure of that elusive thing called happiness. I was by now fully expatriated, earning our living almost entirely in the Middle East. Expatriates were not liable to pay UK taxes provided they spent no more than ninety days a year in the UK. Perhaps I stretched that ninety days a little bit but nobody other than myself and my accountant was counting. Some of us commute to work an hour or so daily down the road and others ten hours or so via Heathrow to Riyadh or Jeddah or Dharan or Bahrain or Dubai or Quatar. Wherever was the money.

The routine on landing at my destination was always to find and join the shortest interminable queue at immigration, be very patient and ultra polite to the officer, hire a car, exit the airport and find my way to my pre-booked hotel or, after I had set up a permanent residence, to my home from home. When in Saudi Arabia it was of course goodbye to the demon drink - unless I was invited to a friend's (native or expat) home for dinner. At a certain social and financial level some of the illegal hard stuff magically might become available.

One old friend now resident in Riyadh, I'll call him John, had worked alongside me through the early days of Sweetheart International. He had been production director when I was marketing. A thoroughly good, middle of the road Geordie business executive. But his was one of those stories that really are the stuff of a novel. His domestic life had not been of the happiest and, on leaving Sweetheart he had secured a high level job with a large, government owned company in Riyadh. After a while he became so content with life (and the money) out there that he was minded to make one last effort to save his marriage; perhaps then his family could be persuaded to come and join him? He flew his wife into Cairo and joined her for the legendarily romantic trip of several days and nights down the Suez canal to the ancient city of Luxor. Unfortunately on her first night off the plane in Cairo she fell foul of  the stomach complaint common to those adventurous enough to dine out in that city. After that and for several days and nights cruising down the canal she would be below in bed writhing around under medical care whilst he, John, would be out on the deck in the moonlight, leaning on the ship's rails watching the empty desert glide by, next to him a rather beautiful and as it transpired high born young Saudi lady. Inevitably they fell into conversation and then - or possibly later back in Riyadh where she lived, inevitably they fell in love. Now, everyone in 'The Kingdom' knows the extreme penalty under Shariah law for both male and female if found in unwed company with each other, especially inside a motor car, never mind in any bedroom type liaison. But in spite of all their efforts at ultra secrecy their affair was leaked, so my friend was called in to see his big boss, (a Prince of the realm), and presented with a first class ticket on the red-eye that very night back to London. You are crazy, he was told,  This woman was promised at birth to the son of  Sheikh xxxx.  If you are here in the morning you will be arrested.  Robin knew well that, even had he managed to get himself on board that flight, his young lady would be doomed - and I do mean doomed. If he stayed they were both doomed. No sir, I will not leave her, he responded. I wish to marry her.  The Prince recoiled in shock; Impossible, he was told; unless you convert to Sunni Islam straight away and wish to live here and behave in all ways in accord with the custom and the Law.

Well, by the time I re-met John in the mid-nineties he was a thoroughly remarried man and a Saudi in all but birthright. He spoke Arabic, knelt to pray five times daily, wore the  long tunic called a thawb and the traditional Saudi red-chequered headress called a keffiyah. He and his lady lived in a large and sumptuous apartment in central Riyadh. Several times I was invited to dine with them - the first and only times in my ten years working out there that I had the pleasure of a woman's company or even spoke to one. Saudi males on getting married are granted a piece of land by the king. John proudly indicated on a wall map his very own piece of the Saudi Arabian desert. The apartment looked down on to a beautiful private swimming pool. John chuckled. When xxxx has a party she invites all her lady friends, he said. The view from here is great. So far as I know my friend is still there with no desire at all to 'come home'. Sometimes there really are happy endings.

My visits to The Kingdom were not all work. By the mid nineties I had many friends there, both expats and 'local'. The expats almost always lived on a compound reserved for people of like race. These berths offered residents and visitors alike absolutely no hardship. Sid-fuelled parties seemed no different than similar get togethers at home even if most of the partygoers were male. Invariably someone would suggest a game of cards. I had to be sure of having plenty of Saudi riyals before joining in for these were highly paid executives, natural risk-takers. Well I guess my gains and losses, large as they seemed,  probably evened out over time.

I shall write about my experience of life with the locals on another occasion.

Back home we had closed our Winchester office in favour of setting up in a wing of Laundry Cottage as HQ for Bibs-industry. Jane Green had gone her own way and Delia was tending to the books and the bank and the VAT. One day I was with a client when she called me on my mobile* in a state of panic. I've just had a call from the VAT Inspector, she exclaimed. What shall I do? Knowing well how assiduous she was with her bookkeeping and how terrified she was if ever she thought she, I or we might have broken any law I said, do nothing, darling. Just calm down. Several hours later she called me back. How did it go? I asked. She laughed; well, this man came in and spent ninety percent of the time trying to convert me to Jehovah's Witness. He hardly looked at the books. On another occasion I was sitting in front of an extremely important Saudi - a potential client - when my mobile rang. A month earlier our new bitch, Mati, had come into season. She was too young for puppies and not wanting the pleasure of a litter of puppies running around, much to our dog Sorosh's evident disappointment we had taken him away to board with a friend in the West Country. I knew Dee was that day set to to bring him home after the normal twenty three days of Mati's 'heat'. What are we going to do, Dee wailed. As soon as I brought Sorosh home and into the kitchen I turned around and they were at it in a tie. They are still. Take her to the vet for the day after pill, I advised, to the evident surprise of the immaculate His Excellency. Problem solved.


* Yes, I bought my first mobile - the size of half a housebrick - as early as 1990. It cost us a fortune but was worth it to me. Many's the night drive across the desert when the boredom and incipient depression would be assuaged by those so very expensive conversations with my lady, all those miles away in Headbourne Worthy.

A few of my favourite & unfavourite things

A memoir should be about oneself; about the likes and dislikes and feelings that go to paint the self portrait. Glancing back from my early 1990's 'blogger chronology' I realise I've probably focussed more on events than on myself - at least as was myself back in, say, 1993 - now that I have interrupted my narrative at that point. I'm not sure if and where I might have reversed my feelings since then but to round out the picture here are or were my top likes and dislikes - apart of course from family and friends ...and in no particular order ...

LIKES
1. The wilderness 
2. The company of a woman
3. The ocean
4. Watching most sport.
5. Reading Hemingway
6. Listening to great music
7. Painting pictures
8. Writing fiction
9. Composing verse
10. Reading Shakespeare
11. Pubs and company
12. Good wine and whisky
13. British royalty
14. The City of York
15. Dogs
16. Manufacturing industry
17.Porcini mushroom gathering
18. The scent of bluebell woodland
19. Sea fishing
20. Small boats

DISLIKES
1. Westminster politics
2. Airports
3. The (financial) City of London
4. Older age / disability
5. 'Retirement' (no chance)
6. Loud noises / loud people
7. Aggressive religion
8. TV weather forecasters except Carol
9. Most but not all abstract 'art'
10. Standard motor cars
11. Multiculturalism
12. Divorce
13. Tesco
14. Travelling by other than train
15. Madonna
16. Hospitals and medicines
17. Hypocracy
18. Unearned privelege
19. Spiders
20. Mobile telephones (but not computers)

Perhaps the above will be anathema to some folk. No apologies, we all have different backgrounds, different experiences from which to cull our own likes and dislikes. These are just mine (or those that I can immediately pin down). And if they should inspire any of you to fly away from me no apologies.Sorry (for not being sorry!).

This I painted in 2002 ...

Paintings

I painted this in 1968 when living in Solihull - oils on Dalerboard.

I 'painted' this in 1989 when living in Sopley - brush and ink on paper
I painted this in 2003 when living in Peace Cottage, Mellon Charles - oils on canvas
I painted this in 1982 when on holiday in Gairloch - pastels on paper Painted on commission 2011 - oils on canvas I painted this in 2012 - oils on canvas Another commission - pastels on paper - 2008 Sunset on Aultbea - the view from Kirkhill House 2010 - pastels on paperboard I painted this in pastels when living at Lee-on-the-Solent in 1970 - pastels on Dalerboard (see poem) I painted this in 1974 whilst on holiday in Gairloch - pastels on paperboard



The first of my completed / retained paintings; this is my copy of The Fall of Rome by, I think, Carravagio; painted in 1960 when living in Kings Heath, Birmingham - oils on board

Storms and sunshine

In the early nineties my beautiful, sometimes bearded son Robert would turn up unexpectedly at our home in Laundry Cottage, near Winchester. First stop the bathroom although he would never consent to the actual use of soap. (Man-made chemicals secretly killing us all, was the unstated implication.) There was about him this all-pervading smell of stale perspiration and both kinds of tobacco. Most of his clothing would go into the washing machine and the rest in the dustbin. Luckily he was my size. Then after hours or days with us we would see him off on the road again. At other times I would hear from concerned, well-meaning officialdom asking for money to set him on his way home. When he was present with us there was always this sense of other-worldliness and sheer physical strength that so frightened Delia and so depressed myself. Whatever had happened, I wondered, to all that potential, so obvious to everyone when he was a child? A question without answer, for now he was where I / we could never be or ever want to be.

When Bob did turn up at home invariably he would accompany me on one of my visits to his mother in the South Winds Care Home. These were very often truly heart-breaking times, Joan in her wheelchair sitting with us out in the South Winds garden or in local pubs, Bob so mentally and Joan so cruelly, physically disabled. Those stuttering conversations were quite surreal, for both of them were sure that their own conditions (not that Bob would openly admit to having a 'condition'), was somehow related to or caused by the other's condition. At more private times my one on one conversations with Joan always focussed on our eldest son, notwithstanding my efforts to feature news of the rest of our family and the world at large. Not long before her death in fact Joan repeatedly asked me to promise that |I would 'always look after Bob'. I made her that promise even whilst knowing that I couldn't possibly honour it. My lovely son was out of my - or anybody's reach. But I believe it helped her and I suppose a mother will always seem to care most about the most vulnerable of her offspring. And me? By contrast I was typically trying my best to normalise everything.
 
Sometimes I would travel with or without Dee to visit Robert or help retrieve him from custody or mental hospitals in sundry places. I recall Dublin, Taunton, Stirling in Scotland, Portsmouth and central London. On one occasion I received an irate telephone call from a certain Mr Workman, farmer and owner of the Shell Island camp site in remote West Wales. Shell Island was where, some fifteen or more years previously, our family had spent such happy camping and fishing holidays. Workman told me that a dishevelled Bob had turned up out of the blue asking for money or work or accomodation, preferably the former. That was a bad conversation. On another occasion I learned he had got himself a job on a fishing boat based at Ullapool, close by the site of our latterday holidays. That employment did not, could not last long.

I still loved my son and still do. And I still loved my wife Joan, the mother of my children, and our other three children, all by then with their own families, therefore mine as well. But Delia was the one who lent to me a certain kind of sanity. Years before she had been through her own brush with the terror of a partner's mental illness. No need to go into it here except to say that it had left her with her own set of mind-scars. Looking back it seems incredible that this woman would stand by me and mine through those dark days. Besides the family my other saving grace was our new pair of dogs, both Hungarian Vizslas like old Seth and Chloe, who had outlived her mate by some year and a half. We were convinced that Chloe had gained an 'extra year' by us bringing in Mati, a lovely and over-lively little bitch puppy, then six months later the puppy dog called Sorosh by his breeder. We only found out by chance much later that Sorosh means, in Hungarian, beer drinker! But how well I remember the time when fifteen years old Chloe, with the other two already in the back of the car for the first of their daily walks, just sat down by the kitchen door looking first at us and then at the car before getting up and walking slowly back into the house. She could not have made it more obvious that she had had enough. And so, more tears.

But I realise I may be giving the impression that all was doom and gloom in those early nineties at Laundry Cottage. Not so. Apart from family visits of which there were many, and all the joys of grandparenthood, there were the quiet fireside evenings in that lovely fifteenth century thatched cottage and those daily walks in all weathers through the Hampshire countryside. Even today up here in the far north of Scotland I can relive those walks - the wildflower covered rolling chalk hills, alongside the river Itchen with its weedy, trouty scents of summer, bluebell time in Micheldever wood and sometimes going back to revisit our favourite tracks through the New Forest. And we loved to walk the mile or so along Worthy Lane to visit the Saturday farmer's markets and fine shops of Winchester. Oh yes, and my favourite pub, The Eclipse, where we met and made some good friends and acquaintances. Dee was always a bit wary of my attraction to The Eclipse. When I liked things and people too much I possibly was inclined to drink overmuch as well! Winchester's unique Hat Fair was the city's most ancient celebration and a particular memory for us. All kinds of street entertainment, much of it highly eccentric. A lot of good music and eating and drinking. A wonderful let your hair down Summer's day out, often with our families. Yes, good times; very good times.

Money in and money out

January 1990: It's after midnight and I'm in Riyadh airport awaiting my flight home to England having just finished my second assignment for Almarai Dairy. Consulting work is now beginning to open up for me both in Saudi and in England; a veritable sunflower opening up to the new light of a new day. Sipping a coffee I begin a casual conversation with an Indian businessman, a total stranger. I tell him of my hopes. What will you be calling your business ? he asks. Bryan Islip Business Industries, I say. He shakes his head. It is too much. The acronym Bibs is better. He makes a peculiar kind of humming drone deep in his throat, then says,. yes, 'Bibs'; It is good karma. Thus is born Bibs-industry Ltd, co-owners Bryan and Delia Islip of Winchester, UK and wherever else we wanted to base ourselves, especially in the Middle East; downtown Riyadh for a start.

All money is real but several times in my self-employed consultancy career in the late eighties and nineties I generated opportunities to make what is often called 'real money'. In 1990 'Bib-seal' was the first. A contact had let me know that Coca-Cola was on the lookout for promotional ideas. I looked again at the familiar paper Coke cup with its essential hollow base. Could I think of a cost effective way to enclose that space? If so something 'promotional' could be encloses; perhaps a party balloon or Christmas cracker type gizmo, joke etc? The cup was made of PE coated paper. Perhaps I could heat seal PE coated aluminium foil to the PE coated bottom rim of the cup? Dee and I did a lot of kitchen experiments on our ironing board. It worked! Through a Coca-Cola marketing agency I presented my concept. They went for it straight away - an order for five million Bib-tabbed 12 ounce cups, foil underseal specially printed with a one in a thousand prize number for the upcoming World football Cup to be held in Italy. I hot-footed it to London's Chancery Lane and the dusty old office of John Orchard, a wonderfully intelligent man and one of the country's leading patent agents. Just for my interest John took me around to the massive UK Patents Office, showing me some of the old documents appertaining to historically important inventions, James Watts' steam engine amongst them. The Bib-seal patent was duly applied for and the required world-wide searches for conflicting patents began to take place .

It was only a few months months to the World Cup. Not having half a lifetime ironing Bib-seals on to five million paper cups I drew up the outline of a small rotary machine. Perhaps it would do the job. Dee and I went up to Cheshire to a suitable machinery manafacturer and persuaded them to rent us five of their specially modified machines with a promise to purchase them later, if and when the Bib-seal concept worked. Next I short term rented a factory in Devizes. I had got to know and to like a bright young man called Tony when I'd worked at at Dolphin. He agreed to come on board to manage our operation. We then hired twenty or so young students plus other unemployed males and females - enough to run our unit round the clock, seven days a week for two months.

Everything worked, if not exactly to plan. Much nail-biting in fact but we met our Coca-Cola deadlines. True, our costs exceeded our income of £93,000 by a few thousand. It had been a very steep learning curve and now at least we were in business. I had begun to negotiate new Bib-seal orders home and abroad when the ceiling fell in. A friend in the USA, Dick Folkoff, who had been in the cups business as long as m pointed out that there was what is called 'prior art'. Apparently a US patent twenty five years old. Although it had proven redundant for technical reasons it was close enough to obviate my UK application. Anybody could do what I had done without paying me a penny. In fact the patent holder could sue me for a lot of money. Goodbye Bib-seal. Nothing new under the sun?

Altogether the early nineties were for me relative calm after the furore of the eighties and the earlier pressures of the seventies. I was spending most of my time earning a good and most satisfying living in the Middle East, based first in Riyadh, next in Al Khobar and latterly in Bahrain. But my consultancy business also took me to every part of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and to all other parts of the Arab world as well to packaging and packaging related machinery companies all over Europe. Quite early on I needed to bring in some of my old business friends to help me establish 'Bibs' both at home and abroad. For Saudi Arabia in particular Tim Henderson-Ross joined us, and in our newly implanted Winchester office, Jane Green, ex buyer for Marks & Spencer agreed to manage things mostly with Delia. Several others also came on board, mostly on an irregular assignment basis. Exciting times but I think on reflection one bridge too far..

In the course of my consulting work I had several opportunities to become exclusive agent for European packaging and packaging machinery companies. I had the contacts and these companies had the needed products. Very rewarding of course. An agent's ten percent of  a machinery installation that could easily run into hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling is not to be easily ignored. But the problem for my consultancy in becoming an agent for a packaging or packaging machinery manufacturer was that in so doing I might all too easily compromise - or at least appear to compromise - my consultancy position. After all, as genuinely hard as I tried to be impartial in giving my advice, one can hardly be seen to be totally pbjective if one has potentially a large reward for favouring one potential supplier's product over another's when one is agent for the former! Especially so if said agency is 'undeclared'. I decided early on to restrict Bibs-industry to only four agencies but even so it is fair to say that although these agencies yielded me a lot of money, in the end they landed me with more problems than benefits. Oh well, we all make mistakes. Don't forget I was operating in a region where all kinds of commissions and what we (and Sepp Blatter) would call back-handers was the perfectly normal order of the day!  Having said as much, I can add with hand on heart and not wishing to appear holier than thou that I was myself neither giver nor receiver of any such unearned largesse. 

Typical of this dangerous dichotomy, Almarai took my advice to re-equip their milk bottling plant with stretch-sleeving (i.e. labelling) machinery made by a French company called PDC. Dee and I had become good friends with the owners, Jean-Claude and Margaret. We were now the Middle East agent for PDC as well as for the actual stretch sleeve material as made by Bob Barratt's UK company, EPS. That proved to be a very good investment for my Saudi client and an equally good one for Bibs-industry. My mistake was that I did not declare my interests in PDC and EPS at the beginning, which led to a nasty situation with my Irish management friends in Almarai. By that time I had become virtually part of the Almarai family, often accompanying them to rugby matches in Paris, London and Dublin, playing poker and brag and partying with them in their residential compounds in Riyadh and so on. Although |I continued for years to work with Almarai, especially on the packaging innovation and design front, the relationship and degree of trust could never again be quite the same. Not helping matters as regards my impartiality, my consulting services were soon in high demand by virtually all of Almarai's Middle Eastern dairy competitors and half the plastics packaging manufacturers trying to get a foothold in the region.

Life for expatriates in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia could be extremely pleasant. The authorities make sure that each residential compound is home only to those of similar nationality or culture. Therefore you would find a compound for say Pakistanis next door to one for Europeans, although never the twain shall meet. I remember walking around his compound one evening with Brian Mullally. Noting that an adjacent compound for Asians I remarked on how surprised I was that the Pakistanis had such a love for dogs, several of which were chained up outside the huts.  Brian looked at me strangely. Bryan, he said, they certainly do like their dogs. They like to eat them!

A European or American compound would be very well appointed with its own restaurant, swimming pool, post office, shop etc.The air-conditioned houses were generally of a high standard and many expatriates had their wives with them, some even their children for whom special schooling was provided. Weekend parties were the order of the day. Of course there are two things that are not permitted, even on the compounds. Alcohol is one and any religion other than Islam is the other. Discovery of being in possession of an alcoholic drink or a Holy Bible leads to prison and a quite terrifying entanglement with Shariah Law. A senior manager friend (not at Almarai!) fell foul of this and it was his experience in a Saudi jail that formed the start point of my first published novel, More Deaths Than One. Yet, (would you believe!), alcohol was commonly distilled in the compounds and mixed with Pepsi Cola to produce a noxious, fairly powerful drink they call 'Sid'.

I remember one hilarious occurance on a compound when dozens of fermentation glass bottles actually exploded. The roof of the bungalow literally lifted then settled down about five centimetres out of place leaving the window curtains trapped half inside the building and half outside. As for religion, of course the internet covers all and any religion in which one could possibly have an interest, try as hard as the locals might try to censor it.

By 1993 Tim and I had our own villa in the Dwidag compound, he living their more or less full time and myself commuting to and from Winchester. Life was an adventure for new each day. My Winchester office was well up and running under Jane Green - Delia's O Level accounting skills to the fore! The consultancy was doing well, having branched out into packaging design and associated graphics, as was our agency work. All seemed set fair. I flew home to meet my friend and mentor Bob Barratt at EPS in Leicester. My proposal; why not set up stretch-sleeve manufacture in Saudi Arabia close by the dairy and soft drinks markets instead of importing the product into Saudi Arabia from the UK with all the attendant hassle? Bob agreed to make me a director of his company and I would manage the new venture in 'The Kingdom'. All we needed was the right Saudi national as sponsor. Enter Sheik Faisal Al-Suwaiket.

Not content with being agent, business consultant, packaging inventor, designer and super salesman I was now to become a manufacturer. A bridge too far? Perhaps. Well, my Delia thought so.

Some kind of peace.

In 1990 we made our ultimate Hampshire house move. Laundry Cottage sits in the little village of Headbourne Worthy just to the north of Winchester - has done so since early in the fifteenth century. It is today a protected building with thatched roof, daub and wattle walls, oaken cross beams, great big chimney nook and a lovely little minstrel's gallery. The cottage itself now serves only as the property's living room. It connects to a modern kitchen area then a Victorian section of three bedrooms, two of them en suite. We were fortunate enough to agree a private rental deal with the owner, London solicitor John Duckworth who over the years became a good friend. That arrangement lasted unchanged for the next twelve years as I commuted back and forth to my various business interests and part time residences in the Middle East.

Laundry Cottage was so named because one of its bedrooms used to be the laundry for a nearby 'Big House', long since gone the way of all things. In our garden, buried deep into a grassy bank, there was a world war two air raid shelter, emplaced there by John's father. I myself would not venture into its dark recesses - arachnophobia yet again! - but some of our many grandchildren visitors most surely did. Whether I was home or away Dee would invite them all at once, with parents, either just for tea and games or for longer stays. I well remember how on arrival all the little girls would gang up in one end of the property and all the boys in the other. Warfare invariably ensued but with zero fatalities or even any injuries other than to some over-excited child's pride! One teatime in particular I remember well. We had shoved several tables together in order to accomodate all, I think, eleven grandchildren. All except the one latecomer were seated when total silence fell as little Josh arrived with his father Rudi. The seven year old came in, stood there stock still surveying the assembly for a moment then burst out with, who wants a fight then? There were no takers. Not immediately anyway. But there was lots of laughing for Josh was one of the smaller ones.

Our pair of hungarian vizslas plus two very old cats had accompanied us all the way from Raynes Road to Headbourne Worthy. Laundry Cottage became their home as much as it became our own. There were familiar walks along the river Itchen and up on St Catherine's Hill with its clever maze created by Winchester College schoolboys, (so it was said), and Stockbridge Down and the great field we called the racetrack because it had once been used for point to point horse racing. Many others, too. Dee walked the dogs twice daily in all and any weather. Me too when I was home. So we got to know and love so much of the Hampshire and New Forest countryside and its wildlife inhabitants.Each day provided us with a fresh adventure, exploration or what have you. So many incidents about which I could continue. Maybe later. But this I wrote sometime in the early nineties ... I wrote it for Ella, our number one grandchild and now our first teenager ...


UP ON STOCKBRIDGE DOWN
Just walk with me on Stockbridge DownI close my eyes and see us there I hear our foot-fall’s icy crunch,Out-face the numbing breeze and knowThe silence of the world below,Asleep beneath grey-scurrying quilt;Come sit with me on frosty stumpAnd fill the steaming cups, contentWith January’s snow-drift smother And here and now with one another‘Till Spring can fight her way, contriveTo force the ground with her strong thrustTo make surviving feathered onesSing fair to life’s continuumFor to such songs their lovers come: Soon there’s this miracle once moreBright petals blaze within the brushOur hill is tinged then floods with green.You stop to bend to touch a flower,So easy, feeling nature’s powerOn Stockbridge Down: Such crowns Of England bear the marks of Man -Old earthworks, limey pathways cut -But this we know, that when we goThey’ll not take long to overgrow...When summer comes let’s climb the hillAnd stop to gaze o’er quilted fieldsOf crops, breeze-stroked like squally seas;But why must yellow rape defile - Man’s greed so violent, so vile?In far-off strips of trees, with silver Glint does weedy river lazy flowWith musky scent of rising trout?This landscape merges with the skyIn hazy distance. By and by We’ll sit together, stretch out on The cush’ning burnt brown grass, hard earth And listen to small living thingsThat drone and buzz and chirrup, andJust be content to love this landWhilst overhead a sun-crazed larkStep-dances over washed out blue.Oh yes, lay back and close your eyesAnd smell this English summer’s dayAnd dream of its extended stay 
One day we noticed a kind of lesion on our lovely Seth's head. He was fourteen. On the advice of our vet we took him to the Queen Mother's Veterinary hospital in north London. He stayed there for tests for a few days. When we came back for him and to hear the verdict it was with indescribable sadness that we learned he had a kind of inoperable cancer. Well, actually we knew it already from the way he was and the way he looked and the way he looked at us.We took him home and made him as comfortable as possible, his fur now falling out in tufts. It seemed that old Chloe, mother to his puppies and his lifetime mate knew all about it. Several days later we simply had to put an end to his suffering. Whilst waiting for the vet to arrive, Seth lay unmoving, uncomplaining  in my arms, alternately in Dee's. We talked to our friend. We talked and talked to him about all the good times and all his favourite wild places and the wild creatures he knew so well. I know he heard me but of course cannot tell if he understood. As our vet carried his beautiful body out of the house I felt such an intensity of sadness. I am not ashamed of all my unaccustomed tears that day. This magnificent animal had truly been with me and the ones I loved, for us all, always tail wagging, always loving throughout the trials and tribulations of our past fourteen years. And now he was gone as all must go ....

Only A Dog

Russetmantle Seth, Hungarian Vizsla, died 4th December 1992…In the gathering of the darkness, the crying of the gulls.
'Only a dog', some might say but not those who knew,those with the eye, the mind to understand, who,meeting, seeing the life in him, filled to the brimwith all the magic of those things they saw him dowondered at such grace even as his light grew dim.
You reached out to touch him when he looked to youand watched as he ran, leapt, moved soft in undergrowthand stopped to point a bird or greet a dog he knew:when called by kindly death you knew he was not loathebut did you feel, as I, the pull of some old goodness, too?
Our ancient progenitors along the sacred Nilemight better understand than we who have lost touchwith what’s now covered by the petty works of Manperhaps would know why he was loved and is so mucha part of all that lives and all that is not vile.
He is…
In the night-breeze sigh through moonlit treesin the gold-red flicker of our Winter firein the green-burst rush each Spring o’er the leasand those to be of which he is grand-sire:in the light, in the land, in his world now at peace.
So no goodbyes, old boy: your memory does not dull:you champion of our hearts, you knower of all sorts.sleep you out the ages ‘though life through time annulsand thank you for the wonder that each day you broughtto the rising of the sun, to the crying of the gulls.

Bryan Islip8th December 1991
On Boxing Day we drove the seven hundred miles with Seth's ashes up to his favourite beach in the far northwest of Scotland, returning New Year's Day. Here is what I wrote about that ...  

A Place For Seth    

New Years Eve 1991
This pact he made with nature for himself,
Not Dee nor me, the dog is ours no more.
Now here’s his place, this heathered grey brown shelf,
Strong rocky arm flung round an ochre shore
On which with her he’d run in flying sand
And loved the cream-capped swell of ocean wave.
Seth knew each salty smell of this sea-land
And there is nowhere else he’d rather have;
He looks across to Skye, as from the croft,
And with the calling of the birds his norm
He’ll sleep through rain and shine of summers soft,
In comfort feel each shaking winter storm.
Clean cuts sharp iron spade through root, black peat,
We bend to place named urn and champion’s scroll.
Six rocks we, breathless, bring up from the beach,
This celtic place Seth’s memory shall extol.
In failing light and our sad task achieved
We go in silence, stumbling down the path.
There was no bad in him for whom we grieve
But how we suffer in his aftermath.
We ford the burn then pause, about we turn
And just still see his cairn atop the mound:
Already snow-birds drift o’er him we mourn
‘He’s ours,’ faint comes their melancholy sound.
As midnight nears the piper holds the stage,
In Gaelic swirl brings in another age.
Our glasses touch and then at last our eyes,
Minds now with he who’s gone, we know our prize:
His final gift, last comfort, certain truth;
The good each does alone surviveth death.
Too soon we leave this hard and long-loved place
From rain-swept brae we turn to distant shore
And there a dancing light, such wondrous grace -
Oh Seth, our friend, we shall not miss you more
For you will be the upsprung green of spring,
Each dusty summer’s calm fecundity,
In autumn mists you will be lingering
White winters too shall hold your memory.
Chloe, soon, again shall run fast by your side
And best of all for Dee and me it’s true
You’ll see us from another puppy’s eyes
- And always there shall be this place for you.
Now: New Year’s Day of nineteen ninety two


The first Gulf War was such a strange event in so many ways. Not least, not really a war. Whilst on a stint of report writing at home in Hampshire I recall receiving an e-mail from my friend and Almarai sponsor in Saudi Arabia, Brian Mullally; It's started, he wrote. I'm in Riyadh. Saddam's just sent us over a nice present. Scud missile landed not far from the compound. Kuwaiti royals on the run they say.

My workplace had become a boiling cauldron.

Milk and sand

It was now 1990: I met Brian Mullally at Heathrow, bound for Riyadh in Saudi Arabia without realising that for the next ten years I might as well have had a commuter's season ticket to Terminal four and BA flights to the Middle East!

I spent the following two weeks carrying out consultancy investigations at Almarai Dairy, which was and presumably still is such an impressive, market dominant set up, vertically integrated right through from growing the cattle feed to rearing and maintaining the cows under massive open structures way out in the desert. To keep them relatively comfortable the hundreds (or thousands) of Holstein crosses were constantly sprayed with water brought up from the 'aquafers' that cross deep under the Arabian peninsula from west to east. As a result of the most rigorous management milk yields are significantly higher and carry substantially less bacteria than those, for instance, in the UK. The milk is then emptied into huge silos at the processing plant, ready for bottling and labelling or for segregation and processing into consumer packed cream and various cultured products. One product of special appeal to me was the Arabic 'laban' drink. A bit like a European style drinking yogurt but sharper and absolutely gorgeous. I would buy it daily, were it to be available here.

The main of several Almarai processing plants was situated about an hour south of Riyadh, near the town of Al Kharj. Driving through Al Kharj for the first time, Brian Mullally at the wheel, a well bearded gentleman stepped out in front, bringing us to a stop with a mighty thwack from his big stick. Brian said and did nothing, expressionless, until this stern faced fellow stepped aside. Driving on he told me the man was an untouchable - a religious policeman called a muttawa (unsure about the spelling), who was simply reminding us that this was a holy day, a Friday, and that therefore nobody should be working or driving about, especially an infidel. Relationships and responsibilities between the secular police and the religious policemen seemed to me often to be quite obscure although the latter were undoubtedly senior. You did not, ever, argue any point with the muttawa! And, I was often reminded, you never, ever, made eye contact with a Saudi lady. Nine out of ten shoppers in the big supermarkets were men and what females did appear showed only their eyes through narrow slits in their head gear. What I recall most about them were my glimpses of their beautiful shoes, uniformly expensive no doubt. I was told to beware, for they were quite fond of surreptitiously goggling or oggling westerners like me! In my ten years operating my businesses in Saudi Arabia not once did I meet, never mind exchange words with a female of our species - but, ah, not quite true. More later on that.

The Al Kharj dairy plant incorporated a large and very well organised storage and distribution system. Dozens of loaded refrigerated vehicles left there each night for destinations as far away as Jeddah on the Red Sea, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Kuwait, all places hundreds of thousands of kilometres distant. My role was to report on the efficacy of everything Almarai except the agriculture and farming sectors of the business, with a special brief for packaging logistics. That is, the pallets and crates and the individual bottles and containers complete with lidding, labelling and graphic design etc. Plus of course the machinery supporting them. Much of the requisite technology was outside my previous experience but fortunately I proved to be a quick learner with a strong design imagination that appealed to the Almarai Executive.

Almarai had been suffering significant product damage to goods in transit. Early one morning I was let by Brian into one of the massive refrigerated vehicles, unbeknown to its Plilipino driver or anyone else, just before it set off filled with product bound for Dammam, some four hundred kilometres distant. My role was to see for myself the why and the how of damage in transit at first hand. (I tried to forget the fact that these Philipino drivers, driving unlimited mileages on straight and featureless cross desert roads constantly fell asleep at the wheel and ended up in or on the sand, sometimes still upright but often not!) The main problem very soon became clear as we traversed a speed bump or a pothole and all the loaded crates - including the one on which I was sitting - lifted off the floor of the vehicle and came back down again with a resounding thump! That realisation led to the company re-equipping its fleet with vehicles incorporating a new kind of pneumatic shock absorber. I recall on another very early morning going out with an Arab van salesman on his rounds of shops, large, small and tiny in a suburban sector of Riyadh.This was my main introduction to the real way of life of modern Arabia. In spite of its strangeness and sometime harshness I found myself liking and respecting this country, the Middle East in general and its peoples give or take the senior ones with whom I eventually crossed swords. As I will reveal, a fairly senseless position to take against a people whose flag actually features crossed swords - and uses them freely!

But it is fair to say I really liked this assignment and it certainly led on to many years of well remunerated consultancy with Almairai Dairy and others all over the Middle East. Over that period of time I designed and commissioned from an Italian mould maker injection moulded crates, stackable when loaded or empty,  compression moulded pallets from a company in England, thermoformed cups and containers from a plant in Dammam and blow moulded bottles in various sizes from a company in Riyadh. I also worked with the mighty Tetrapack (paper cartons), with a French glass bottle blower, various labelling and labelling machinery companies including the one in Northern France for which I became Middle East agent. (I remain good friends with the owner, now retired.) On the strength of the increasingly well known success of my efforts for Almarai, as time went by I gained consultancy work with and for many of these supplier companies and with many of Almaria's competitor dairies as well as from packaging companies trying to sell their product into my operational area. Treading the fine line between helping one dairy or European supplier without compromising my work and integrity with the others became a constant worry for me. The markets in the Middle East are small in scale by comparison with those in Europe and thus quite incestuous.

Back home it was time to move on. I was commuting from England to various parts of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East on an regular / irrregular basis. The New Forest seemed just too far from Heathrow and the locations of our combined families for it to make much sense. So we left Sopley and rented yet another splendid old detached cottage in the village of Micheldever, close by the M3 motorway and only an hour from the airport.. It had plenty of space for my office and ourselves / visiting family and a wonderful village inn called the Half Moon. It was also close to the beautiful bluebell Itchen / Micheldever woodlands and the South Downs Way with which we, especially Dee, and our dogs were to become so familiar. The advantages of renting over buying were by now becoming clear to me, if less so to my partner, who would have preferred buying on a fresh mortgage. Certainly we could not have afforded to purchase the level of properties with which we had become used, and the flexibility and certainty it afforded us had become more and more obvious, given the sort of rental 'contract' we always looked for and found. Of course we still had the usual problems with some, but by no means all of our family, including especially the ill and itinerant Robert and the South Winds care home-bound Joan. Our time at Micheldever was not  exactly paradisal, but we were getting closer to it as the nineties unrolled.

Pensions, dreams and adventures new.

The second in line of my five Sweetheart International managing directors, Lionel Klackan, had many qualities that appealed to me and from which I learned. On the lighter side I remember some amazing nights out with him in various places home and abroad, notably Paris, Brussells and Amsterdam. Tremendous fun guy. He was good with my customers and senior staff . And he was extremely good at laying down feathers in the nests of his boardroom colleagues, including especially his own through the company pension scheme, sub-addendum 'Directors'. I am to this day a perfectly legal co-beneficiary of his expertise in that  area.

It is usually the directorate of a company that is, severally and in total, responsible for its employees' pension scheme. 'The Trustees'. But I was astounded by the potential for the abuse of company pension money by  those charged with its governance. I was also taken aback by the borderline machinations - call them sales efforts - of the pensions industry in their effort to grab from the Trustees and hold the lucrative management of company pensions. The poor old rank and file employees, whose money we are talking about after all, don't get very much of a look in even now after the revisions laid down following the infamous 1990 Robert Maxwell affair. It came as no surprise to me when that truly bad person took for himself, (then duly lost), the millions of pounds sterling of pensions money rightfully belonging to thousands upon thousands of his workers, aided and abetted of course by the New York / City of London gang of 'bankers' calling themselves Goldman Sachs. Naturally nobody went to jail. Of course not. Not under a Thatcher government, even as wounded as by 1990 it / she had become. 

Because of my grave suspicions as much as my desire to put everything Sweetheart International behind me, fairly soon after I left the company I withdrew my 'pot' of money from the company scheme - quite a substantial sum, and invested it in an annuity. A wise decision but I knew how vulnerable was the scheme to the ravages of predatory owners, invisible suits in the corridors of Wall Street. For the first time in my life I now had to look after my own financial affairs so I appointed an accountant. The wrong one. Two years later when we were still living in Sopley, in the New Forest, I received a lovely little letter from Her Majesty's Revenue demanding c. £20,000 in back taxes, or else. I called my accountant only to find him 'out' - apparently forever, and no sign of the receipts that I had been religiously sending on to him and of which HM Revenue had seen neither hide nor hair! Frantic enquiries in my man's home town  revealed that he had been spending more time in the local hostelries than in his office or home. Where can I find him now? I asked, to a miscellany of shrugs, downcast eyes, renewed mouthfuls of beer. I had to cash in half my annuity to pay the government. Self-employment is not always the bed of roses it might seem to the employed or the unemployed! (For the years up to age sixty five I made up in part for my loss by subscribing into my own private scheme).

Having left Dolphin and now on our own again I renewed my efforts to develop a business (or packaging) consultancy, making what can best be described as faltering progress. Fortunately we were always equally lucky with our rentals and with our landlords - that is, what little we ever saw of any of the latter. In Sopley Dee and I and the dogs lived the good life in that wonderful converted barn of a residence. The village, twenty minutes form Christchurch and the coast, consisted mainly of a classic Hampshire country pub complete with tinkling mill stream surrounded by a dozen or so old houses then miles and miles of heath, heather and woodland.

One day, like I don't know how many thousands of others in my kind of situation, I announced my intention to write a novel. With one mighty bound .... ! The house had a upper mezzanine floor completely unused. I carried my Amstrad computer up there, switched on and typed these words ...

Rose Feather 
Chapter one

She stepped inside, wrinkling her nose. The Brown Ball Snooker Club’s damp stair carpet smelled of the dirt carried in from the street on the soles of a great many shoes over a great many years. She unbuttoned her wet raincoat, took out her cue case. At the top of the stairs she opened the door, slipped into the dimly lit room, crowded, silent, made her way as unobtrusively as she could through the spectators. Billy wasn’t working behind the bar. There was only this big blonde woman she’d never seen before. Rose tried a smile but the woman, unimpressed, made no attempt at a welcome, just examined her in that familiar white woman way.
“What’s happening?” she whispered, not really wanting to know.
The woman sighed. “You want a drink, dear?” then shrugged. “It’s a money match on. The Italian boy, Roberto ..”
“Yes,” Rose interrupted, not meaning any rudeness, taking off the coat, “I just wondered who was winning.”
All my life I had been thinking - dreaming! - of writing fiction. I had recently bought Diane Doubtfire's remarkable little book called something like; How to Write a Novel. Basically, you must create a strong central character, she advised, one through whose mind and life your story unfolds. This character will have a grand plan but he or she will in chapter one meet with a set-back. Each effort he or she makes to overcome that set-back only leads on to the next unexpected set-back. And so on, right down into the depths of despair. Eventually, with that one mighty bound he or she overcomes all odds and meets his or her well-earned triumph. Piece of cake!

Driving thousands and thousands of boring business miles over the years I had constructed whole passages of fiction in my mind, often stopping somewhere to write up the notes. So by now I had the strory-line fairly well mapped out. My main viewpoint character was to be the pretty young coloured girl, Rose Feather, daughter of Henry Feather, a super-gifted old rake and owner of a snooker club. This young lady would be bold enough to penetrate the heartland of the game of snooker, the sexist world of working men's clubs and political clubs (including Lady Margaret's places!) and she would be good enough to challenge the big snooker stars, all of them (then as now) male.And why the hell not? I remembered Barry Hearn's words back when my daughter Julie was one of Britain's first female snooker pro's. The first lady player to consistently make hundred breaks will be a millionaire!  Well, my Julie couldn't make it but my Rose would be that girl! Being something of a club player myself and having attended the world championship in Sheffield many times - plus knowing how great were the TV viewing figures especially amongst the ladies - I reckoned I knew enough about the inside and outside life of the game to make it the scenario for a novel that would sell and sell. Today the New Forest; tomorrow the world!

Filled with excitement I had consigned chapters one and two of Rose Feather to my PC's memory when progress was stopped by a single phone call. The caller was Brian Mullally, a business friend when I'd been at Sweetheart and he had been production manager with Northern Dairies. As it transpired, Brian had been head hunted and was now playing a similar role in Saudi Arabia. He wondered whether I might be interested in a consulting assignment for his new employers, Almarai Dairies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Would I be interested? Would a duck like to start swimming? I took to the road and we met in the East Midlands Airport hotel. After that, for the immediate time being I forgot about being a novelist in favour of making some real money in the Middle East.

I had visited the nation whose Arab natives call simply The Kingdom some years earlier when exploring the potential for Sweetheart's export sales. I had taken with me Howard Cheek, one of my sales team who would shortly be promoted to manage our Scandinavia sales office in Stockholm. How vividly I recalled Howard's first encounter with Saudi Customs. He had brought in with him a softback novel, its cover showing a pretty lady with a moderately low cut neckline. The Arabian customs officer picked up the book, ripped off its cover and handed it back, without black-eyed expression and without a word,. to an astonished Mr Cheek.

I'll be writing about my first experiences as a consultant in Saudi Arabia in the next episode. And what an episode it turned out to be!

And my precious Rose Feather? I did continue with it in between times then, with ten chapters in the bag I approached a senior person in the world of publishing. I had no idea how stupid that move was. No publisher would look at a part-written novel and only one in two thousand submitted novels by unknown authors would see the printed page. But amazingly the lady in question, the head of the newly created Orion Books, thought enough of my submission to comment most kindly and request first sight of the completed typescript. I should have dropped everything and gone for it at that point. Of course I didn't, for things were moving fast in another direction. Ten years later I had the opportunity to continue. Eleven years later I stopped again. I now have nineteen chapters on my PC, plus two other self-published novels, two books of short stories and two books about life in the Highlands of Scotland. I do hope to finish Rose Feather before I die.