Reaching your peak too soon often means you have nowhere left to go

 

At my house at Komin Kochin Avenue # 7 in Rangoon in 1975

 

In any memoir it is usual for the first sentence to reveal as much as possible of your subject's nature by illustrating it in a vivid and memorable motto, and with my own first sentence now drawing to a finish I see I have failed to do this!"

I could have claimed these to be my own words, but I've placed them in inverted commas to show that I took them from the first paragraph in Paul Theroux's book "Saint Jack". It is about an expatriate living in Singapore who begins to fear dying, alone and vulnerable, in an alien tropic, which may well be why I left what has been the best job I've ever had when I was stationed in Rangoon in what was then Burma.

 

 

There I was, twenty-nine years old, with an accounting degree on which the ink had hardly dried, occupying the position of chef-comptable with the French oil company TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles.

 

Flying out to an offshore oil rig

 

I occupied a sumptuous office which I shared with three Burmese accountants and two beautiful secretaries, was chaffeur-driven to and from work in a brandnew PEUGEOT 504, and lived in a gracious British Empire-style mansion in the leafy parts of Rangoon where I was being waited on hand and foot by four domestic staff. To top it all, I earned a salary several times higher than what I could have earned at home.

 

My three Burmese accountants

 

Did I stay when the French general manager almost begged me, first in French and then in broken English, to renew my twelve-month contract? I didn't, and to this day I still don't know why I didn't! I loved my job, I loved Burma and its people, but boredom, hubris, call it what you want, maybe even the money piling up in my bank account back home, made me chuck it all in — and I have lived to regret it over and over again.

 

My secretaries

 

What I should have known was that after having reached such a peak, everything else thereafter would taste like ashes in my mouth. For several years I kept thrashing about, looking for another job like it, and I wasted a whole six years before I finally hit my stride again in 1982 when I became the group financial controller for a large commodity trader in Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia is not beautiful Burma.

Perhaps the first sentence in my memoir yet to be written should read, "Reaching your peak too soon often means you have nowhere left to go."

 

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Are we all waiting for Godot?

 

 

No one dreamed about being born. We were just sent here one day without having a choice. No one dreams about leaving this earth. We will just leave here one day without having a choice. If we define Point A as the day we arrived on this planet and Point B as the day we will leave it, what happens between point A and B is what we typically call life. That "in-between" is what Samual Beckett describes in "Waiting for Godot".

Godot’s meaning is a much-debated topic. The most popular theory is that it means God as in (God)ot. But Beckett originally wrote the play in French, in which the word for God is 'Dieu'. Beckett himself commented, 'If by Godot I had meant God, I would have said God, and not Godot'.

"Waiting for Godot" seems to be about the act of waiting itself. We all choose to wait for Godot in our own way: when we have graduated, when we get a better job, when we have saved enough money, when we have paid off the house; all endless distractions in our eternal wait for Godot. But as Estragon points out 'It would have passed in any case', to which Vladimir replies, 'Yes, but not so rapidly'. We are all just passing time with occasional distractions in our way. And yet we like to think that our existence matters, that we are not here without a purpose, which is why Vladimir insists that the boy tell Godot that he saw them.

It's not an easy play to watch because we all want to see the end of everything. The end of a movie, of a play and even of life because even ending provides a sense of comfort. That comfort is denied in "Watching for Godot" which carries on like an itch that won't go away. It's uncomfortable, disorienting and repetitive. It's perfect. It's all of us.

It's me, sitting here on the edge of my bed, waiting for morning to come because everything else I already have had: the better job, enough money, the paid-off house. Now I'm just waiting to watch the sun come up and to sit on the verandah with a mug of tea and wait some more.

 

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Another cool morning at "Riverbend"

 

Are these early autumn morning getting colder or am I just getting older? I've fed the possum and the ducks, after which I rushed back inside the house to sit just inches away from the electric oil heater. We have lots of firewood im the shed but I coudn't be bothered with lugging it into the house and lighting the fireplace.

It is at times like these that I wonder what insanity made me settle this far away from the endless summer of (say) Far North Queensland or the Torres Strait or other tropical abodes overseas I had previously lived in.

After returning from New Guinea in 1977, with a host of exotic overseas postings already under my belt, I took an accounting job on Thursday Island in Torres Strait. I've always enjoyed living in odd and colourful places, and few are odder or more colourful than the "Thirsty" Island.

 

My office was behind the window to the right of the "B" with a 180-degree view of the sea

 

The job was insultingly mundane but I could possibly have coped with that, had it not been for my boss who was a crotchety old bastard. He had previously worked on a mission station for the Presbyterian Church somewhere in outback Far North Queensland, where he discovered the difference between a debit and a credit, after which he had come to Thursday Island in 1972 to occupy the job he had just passed on to me, so that he could become the manager and thus my boss. But not for very long and not very successfully, as he was a difficult man to get along.

He was a wowser and a bit of a Biblebasher who played the church organ on Sundays and belonged to the Masonic Lodge. Given all those 'credentials', it was all the more surprising that just before my arrival on the island he had brought up his girlfriend from Perth and given her a job as secretary in the office. She lived in the company-duplex next to his and a carpenter was called in to cut a door into the dividing wall between the two, which became known as the 'Tunnel of Love'.

 

Cecil Burgess (standing, with glasses) aboard the TSI going across to Bamaga in 1977

 

Long after I had left, I heard that he was born in Tasmania in 1914 which made him 63 years old when we met, and my appointment was timed for me to take over from him when he retired as manager in 1981, but I wasn't going to hang around that long. With the old cry "ON! ON!" of the "drinking club with a running problem", the Hash House Harriers, on my lips, I departed the "Thirsty" Island for many far bigger and better jobs.

Postings in the Solomon Islands, in Apia in Western Samoa, in Penang in Malaysia, a year-and-a-bit caravanning working holiday in Australia, two more assignments in New Guinea, and three years in Saudi Arabia and Greece followed, before I again settled down, but I've often thought back to the "Thirsty" Island in the Torres Strait and pondered "What if?"

Socrates said that the unexamined life wasn't worth living and so, to eliminate at least one of the many "what ifs" in my life and to confirm in my own mind that I couldn't have stayed much longer on the island even if my then boss, Cec Burgess, had been less of a crotchety old bastard, I revisited the island in 2005. You can read about it in this travelogue.

 

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Keep looking at vesselfinder.com

 

vesselfinder.com

 

If you had just met someone and, after only ten minutes, said that you didn't like them, I would call you immature, and yet we do it so often with books. We start to read "Moby Dick" or "Heart of Darkness" or "Don Quixote", and ten pages into it, we decide it's too hard, it's boring, we don't like it. Your job is to push on and stay with the author's words and see what you can learn.

Which is what I just did with the book "The House of Wisdom", which is stuffed so full with fascinating facts and footnotes that the going can get a little bit tough. Whenever I needed a bit of a break, I looked at vesselfinder.com to see if the Chinese-owned tanker RICH STARRY was still stuck inside the Strait of Hormuz. The US Navy had stopped it from leaving the Persian Gulf which could well bring China into the conflict.

You see, while I doubt that neither the Americans nor the Irians are in the mood of breaking this ceasefire after their armed conflict had exhausted them and had reached a stage of ever-decreasing returns, this blockade by the Americans will really hurt China. The US knows it can’t compete against China in manufacturing, high-end tech, and its controls over the supply chains for numerous critical minerals. China's only economic Achilles heel, its only vulnerability, is its access to oil and gas. Oil is America's last weapon in maintaining its global dominance.

What will China do to free the RICH STARRY and any other Chinese ship caught in the American blockade? Keep looking at vesselfinder.com.

 

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Tomorrow belongs to me!

 

 

In the entire history of musical theatre, there is no scene more beautiful and at the same time more terrifying than this one. The song is beautiful and could almost pass as a children's song, but when you know its time and setting, it gives you a terrible chill.

This is how it all started: a few innocent songs, a few demonstrations, a mistaken sense of patriotism ... and millions and millions dead!

 

The sun on the meadow is summery warm. The stag in the forest runs free. But gather together to greet the storm. Tomorrow belongs to me! The branch of the linden is leafy and green. The Rhine gives its gold to the sea. But somewhere a glory awaits unseen. Tomorrow belongs to me! The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes. The blossom embraces the bee. But soon, says a whisper: "Arise! Arise!" Tomorrow belongs to me! Oh, Fatherland, Fatherland show us a sign. Your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs to me! (again) Oh, Fatherland, Fatherland show us a sign. Your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs to me! (hailing) Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs to me! (fading) Oh, Fatherland, Fatherland show us a sign. Your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs! Tomorrow belongs to me!

 

 

The clip is part of the musical "Cabaret" which is set in 1929–1930 Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age as the Nazis are ascending to power.

The boy actor in the film was a fifteen-year-old German called Oliver Collignon. However, his voice was dubbed over with the voice of an American youth, Mark Lambert. Neither of these two young men were included in the film's credits.

"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" was written by John Kander and Fred Ebb in the style of a traditional German song that stirs up patriotism for the "Vaterland". It has been mistaken for a genuine "Nazi anthem" and led to the songwriters being accused of anti-Semitism even though the lyrics are neither racist nor anti-Semitic, and both writers are Jewish.

German nationalism explained in three minutes flat! Chilling stuff! But we needn't worry because since those dreadful days they've gone to the other extreme and given away their country to every "refugee" who steps across their open borders. "Deutschland schafft sich ab", wrote Thilo Sarrazins. He left out an 'e' because "schafft" is already past tense.

 

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