Elsewhere I've written about my short professional detour via the Solomon Islands - click here - which was shortlived not because it wasn't a beautiful place to live in - it absolutely was! - but because it offered no professional challenges.
There are plenty of people, and certainly many accountants, who like nothing better than to find an agreeable place in which to while away their years with the least amount of effort, but I was not your average accountant and still in my mid-twenties which were my "Sturm und Drang Jahre" and intent on changing the world and my place in it.
The position I had successfully applied for was that of "Secretary", which is a government terminology for a commercial manager of a statutory body, the British Solomon Islands Electricity Authority, and I was totally unprepared for the sheer mundaneness and repetitiveness of the job.
It had suited the previous incumbent who introduced himself to me as "Lamb by name, lamb by nature" and who could have been expected to hog this sinecure of a job until his very retirement had he not rather un-lamb-like - so the rumours went - claimed year after year substantial allowances and annual airfares for himself and a family of four. When he was eventually questioned, that family mysteriously died in a car crash.
Which is how I got the job, but I didn't stick around long enough to claim my annual airfares. All this was long before the internet and long before the National Archives of Australia went online, or else anyone could have seen that "Lamb by name, lamb by nature" had year after year ticked "Divorced" on his passenger arrival cards at Sydney airport.
