Yes No UNsure

We venture out of Monrovia and into the deep recesses of the counties that are dark with vegetation and the green of ordered rubber plantations. A voice I know from a not too distant broadcasting past heads through the traffic to meet me and we greet each other and he's been around all this time, reporting on a war only the action junkies ever saw close-up in his quiet understated way. And no not everybody is right about this place everywhere he goes there's a great deal of support for Charles Taylor. If the UN wasn’t here ofcourse things would collapse but he did his best for his people and I know that such a view is not popular amongst knee-jerk Africa-watchers but that is true they all voted for him. You should write a book I’d read it One reader does not a fortune make but ofcourse this is a story that needs telling and I hope he grabs his memories before they fade.

There are cops everywhere who are as much a show of the nation's rekindled defense as it's potential for self-destruction - guns everywhere and the masses both uniformed and civilian are the armies but a year ago you wouldn't have seen a Liberian policeman out here. Over at the United Nations Mission in Liberia the folk are career diplomats international soldiers and policemen and an army of lawyers and bureaucrats who call themselves international civil servants. Yes everyone goes on about how the country would collapse without them and Liberians know this to be true that within a fragile peace such as theirs it will only take three or four stoned kids with guns to empty the city. But I’m fascinated by the UN as a way of life, how these people end up here away from the comfort of Helsinki and even Jordan to take a chance on malaria and yellow fever and restore order where none existed before. The heavily barricaded headquarters are teeming with at least 48 different nationalities and we are here to get our UN accreditation so we can fly on the UN choppers so we sign a waiver dissolving them of all responsibility just so we can get some shaky shots of the country from on high.


In the beginning I’m told the UN soldiers were bored and started doing more than their fare share of cocaine but now random drug tests have been introduced and when you see them out in many of the city’s fine restaurants they seem well behaved and courteous and as you enter their headquarters free condoms are available in neat little boxes. Whenever you mix great poverty with international assistance there is a sexual imbalance that occurs and the locals will feel exploited by their helpers and at times the helpers will encourage this poverty prostitution and without knowing it slow down the development of many. A Ugandan civil servant tells me this is her third tour for the UN – she was in Eritrea she did Sudan and now she is here but she can go home as often as she likes and where is home I ask oh New York. The world needs the United Nations because there is no alternative, but those who say it is an overgrown dinosaur with deep pockets which may never run dry because they rely on pledges have a point too. And what is the difference between mercenaries paid to take over a country and those soldiers paid to protect one - no-one really knows. Down below I can see where Stone should have shot his Platoon for the jungles are endless and unexplored and every now and then a human edifice springs out at you like a scar on a scaled green back and there are no roads connecting it to another structure.Why would the Ugandan civil servant the Pakistani lawyer the Swedish policeman the Indian policewoman the Malawian bureaucrat be here at all if it wasn’t for the money? In many cases the officers from Third World or far Eastern realities are earning more for themselves individually than they would in their own forces back home, never mind what their respective countries are getting from the UN pot. To think this way would be mean-spirited though, many an African life has been improved in the post-conflict duties of the United Nations for both the victims and the peacekeepers. There's a bar in a village somewhere in Kenya and it's called bar Kosovo and the owner served there and one Ugandan officer tells me he's been in the Ugandan police force for twenty six years and serving in the UN got him a house in Kampala but he doesn't understand these officers who stay on and on to make money and never go home. For what is money compared to your family he asks me A man can never be a real man unless he spends time with his family I quote a line from the Godfather to him and he agrees totally and introduces me to the Indian policewomen who are out here keeping the peace having left children and husbands behind. A woman called Charity is directing the Liberian National Police on her two way radio, ordering them to go here and go there and I notice the flag stitched to the sleeve on her upper arm and I say good morning in Shona and she is shocked to speak her mother tongue this far up and west and no she hasn't been home in two years she's sold her holidays back to the UN so she can work on and there are about thirty six of them from the broken country and really my brother if you look around these people's country would you say we have problems?

This is a massive country made larger by the absence of workable roads and unexplored rainforests but you can see it all in one day if you board a UN chopper at 9.30 and head back to the capital by 4.30 and you can stop in Nimba County and its capital Sanniquelli and ten minutes later you're in Grand Gedeh twenty in Grand Bassa or change direction completely and go North to the border with Guinea Conakry and end up in Lofa or Bong or Cape Mount. Yes the maps have been well thumbed and these long bumpy roads all lead to somewhere. Once a gathering of dancers descended on a small town in the north and the costumes were spectacular but this was no ordinary show all the participants listened to the drums in religious fervour and the citizens watched in awe as if some ancient ritual was taking place and the air was thick with superstition or was it faith but people watch in all seriousness and the only ones ignoring the dancing like they've seen it all before and fanning their faces with invitation cards are the politicians and the diplomats.and the tall thin wispy man-spirit made the children move away and a man in a mask dressed like a woman opened a bag and a black cat jumped out and made the crowds scatter in fear and the beating of the drums echoed a thousand hearts and this was strange to see up close and it must have always been this way far from the ocean edge away from the ships and the corruption of their civilization and I don't always have a camera attached to my eye but this is worth remembering it's the kind of colour you see in the background of a sweating sweltering movie. But there's also suspicion everywhere from the man with blue paint across his face scanning my eyes for weakness and asking for a dollar to get some water to the security detail with the ear piece stuck in his ear like Wormtongue whispering positions in his ear and he's jumpy at every movement around him oh the nerves are taut how taut are they.


Then you can take the roads which everyone says are bad but our Guinean driver knows too well and speeds over potholes for four hours at a time to get us to the second port city of Buchanan and then four hours the other way to get us to the town of Gbarnga which Charles Taylor made his headquarters after he sneaked in with a couple of hundred men and over there is a checkpoint called the iron gate many people were killed there and the Mayor of Gbarnga says that’s all changed now things are fine now and there are men and women from across the country here to celebrate 162 years of independence and the colour of their celebrations has nothing to do with a flag closer in affinity to the stars and stripes nor the yank accents you encounter from their educated elite but with the true realities of what makes Africa Africa to Africans – a deep spiritual belief in the presence of those who trod these footpaths before us a kind of Jungian couch of heaving collective subconscience that gave birth to deep dark secrets which in turn created voodoo and juju and all that mysticism our modern world tries to pass off as primitive and not for the last century nor for this one. Along the beaches of the second port city of Buchanan also know as Grand Bassa county the abandoned houses of steel workers and aspirational locals sit in the surf like incomplete cement castles because the war arrived and disrupted their completion and here and there I spy on families talking in the morning sunlight in a courtyard where nudity is quite normal and there's a presence in the air that's far removed from wannabemodern feel of the capital and the folks sing openly and the ladies in dazzling white say good morning and I'm even more curious about just who these people are at heart because even in a land where there's only three and a half million of them there are just so many differences and it must have been the variety of tribes and groupings which gave rise to suspicion and the last resort of civil war in search of superiority over one's neighbours. Now groups of children follow me around one village like I'm the pied piper I and go walkabout with the kids and they grip my hands and the edges of my pockets until I notice a variety of skin ailments weeping on their wrists their skulls their arms and I'm not Mother Theresa and run away to the safety of the beach which is cleaner than Monrovia's waters and populated by genuine fishermen who offer you twenty live lobsters caught that very morning and still alive all for a dollar each and we don't buy them because we're driving away again to another place to be seen and that's a shame.

In another town the citizens are celebrating independence and I know that the dude in front of me with the ripped arms and the fit legs is a man - despite the tissue filled bra he's wearing plus the jean skirt and the fake pearls above his Akon branded vest - despite all this I know and the crowd knows this dancing singing energetic creature is all man. But there are more of his kind, young men in sideburns all poised like they have a big hole where something else should be and all spruced up in the dust in make up and wigs and pearls and handbags. Still the ripped young man is singing some bawdy song about being raped and the real women are laughing at him and his lady boy mates. But still the young men keep kicking up the dust and I ask someone what's with the draggies and he's a photographer and he says oh don't you know this is how the rebels would dress and it's very normal in this county for men to dress this way for their juju and I imagine some deity setting out the rules of worship for his gun-wielding whigged coked up draggies but the best was yet to come and there on the road an impromptu catwalk was started by these young men and the crowd watched them mince back and forth and the women amongst them found it the funniest part of the entertainment.


We get arrested only once for a trivial reason and are held for five and a half hours before someone in charge apologizes and we move hotels to finish the trip in a quieter place 35 minutes drive from the centre of Monrovia and I put on several pounds I'd lost from the richness of the seafood and then we concentrate on the painter once more and leaving a country is harder to do than getting there because it’s all packed in my head in concentrated doses the people the places the beautiful faces and it will be hard to shake off. Would I come back here? Why not, every place leaves it's mark and this nation's greatest resource is its people and as glib as that might sound it really is. There's very little to say except that the best prayer is till we meet again and I'm taken by the landscape and I'll recommend it.Then the gears start changing what's going on the northern hemisphere and damn I'm heading into Virgo land soon and is that another year gone? The years go by as quickly as you wink. At the airport there’s a pile of cash to pay for excess baggage and the flight is on time and only six hours to Brussels. Some young buck from Manchester wearing traditional garb is seated in the Monrovia airport all suntanned and blond and goes I’ve just been made a paramount chief by the people of Buchanan we’ve been installing water purification units in their villages and I tell you man it’s the proudest day of my life. Too tired to speak I nod and smile. Let me see your hands, he says, and I show him my hands. That’s what I thought, you have soft hands like you’ve never done a day’s work in your life what do you do and I say I’m a missionary. Ah well, says the new paramount chief, I should have done better at school. Shouldn't we all, my son, shouldn't we all.

Seeds of Renewal

We spent an afternoon with the Liberian artist of the moment and the only things better than his paintings are his impeccable manners. The nerve centre of Monrovia demands infinite patience, electricity is erratic and the constant hum of generators is more than a hum it's industrial in tone and totally takes over the sound but Monrovians take it all on board and the gentleman painter says I could switch it off and I go but then we won't see anything very well I shall leave it on he says I guess we're in Africa I say patronizingly yes we are in darkest Africa he says but we are going to light it up so he's ever the optimist and the pessimist in me says by the time you light it up we'd have gone deaf and he hands me an ice cold can of fanta cooled by the generator no doubt and says don't worry we're going to be ok and I put the attitude away sheepishly and wonder around his art of the heart gallery totally taken in by these pictures that breath colour and mood .

Ordinarily I'd quite like to just hang out with the man since news crews have passed through the city and done ten minute pieces on him and that's not enough to show a man's body of work began as it was long ago in some Liberian war and this is a frantic pace of working back and forth not just filming but looking for the right documents to be able to film and chasing a Presidential interview and ofcourse it's normal stuff in the job description but I’m getting grumpy and in need of a lie down or three and I should have listened to the wise producer who said if you don't demand your time off you'll be running around without a day off and they'll all ask you to get this and get that while they're on their fucking holidays but it's all so new and we'll do what we can and no more but that may not be enough. Too much traffic is a good thing in a city that was once so empty the roads says the gentleman painter were rough and impassable and you wouldn't want to have driven them just three years ago and for a beat I'm annoyed over these constant reminders of what it was like before because what it's like now is a beating heart taken for granted normal and central to functioning. The roads are too straight around here long and linear and going in two directions like lines on the jungle's palm. Ofcourse - the roads are the newest additions to the landscape.


Our driver/fixer is from Guinea Conakry and he knows these streets like he knows the streets of Mali and Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana because he drives through all these countries and their cities and entertains us with the stories he knows and the journeys he's made and he knows Liberians too from way back he knows them and like a tourist guide he's going that's the Ministry of Defence started by Samuel Doe but never finished that house there is Charles Taylor's that's the American Embassy where a lot of people were hiding at the end of the war but the rebels threw rockets at it anyway and do you see the big yellow house on the beach? That's the Chinese Embassy. Then on every street corner the former rebels are parking cars and selling newspapers hustling for a buck and he laughs out loud and goes see, see now they have no cocaine no gunpowder no ganja no weed no guns no diamonds no money all the things dem used to have and smoke dem gone and dey are just like nothing to everyone now life is funny no?


But it isn’t that funny really because such a huge contingent of former fighters is a worrying prospect as the President tells me a day or so later our peace remains fragile says the woman they’re calling the Iron Lady only because she’s a female leader even though there is nothing like Thatcher about her and there is genuine concern in her voice about the lot of so many illiterate young men once schooled in the dark arts of war because at any moment they can be persuaded to do bad things and that’s a repeated thought because the country’s borders are long and porous and Charles Taylor once came in via the Ivory Coast with about two hundred soldiers trained in Libya and we all know what happened after that. It’s always a bit of a coup to bag a presidential interview but I don’t feel that way and when you are trying to know a person 26 minutes seems stupidly short.We’d been ordered to dress like we're meeting the head of the nation and my shooter’s sweating like a rapist in the brown suit we picked up from the Muslim tailors late last night and all around us men with guns are surveying the landscape for assassins and it’s best to end the interview now and maybe try for another one later during our stay because it's hard to gauge whether this was news or a genuine chat which makes for better interviews anyway so we leave her to her affairs of state and I wonder how much easier it would have been with someone to knead the dough before baking the bread meanwhile up above us the Monrovian skies are always moody and full lipped like a passionate face about to burst into tears and while Monrovians talk of the downpours they've had before I arrived I haven't seen any just these purposeful clouds the sun keeps escaping.

The other subject for documentary study is a young man barely 27. The other night at the hotel he had been bemoaning the fact that the Liberian constitution has an age limit for presidential hopefuls and I got it right there and then that if ambition were a commodity this precocious kid would be trading it on Wall Street and he’s well on his way to placing his name and deeds in the nation’s conscience that when the time comes they may well elect him and that's not all - he's become one to watch to politicians from all corners it's not much of a surprise to see the President of the Republic walking around with him as if he is already the chosen future.

Picture this – you are nine years old fleeing from the rebels your mother finds shelter for you in an abandoned house being used by twenty families or more also fleeing the rebels. The living conditions are dire food is scarce and in the middle of the abandoned house’s courtyard bodies are piling up unburied after malaria cholera yellow fever starvation has claimed the souls they once carried – no one ventures too far for food and the soundtrack of gunfire ensures it stays that way. The nine year old contracts yellow fever and lies perfectly still being fed rain water by a concerned mother. The other people watch him and interpret his lack of movement as lack of life. Your son is dead he should be with the corpses why are you keeping him with the living they say and she says no he is alive and then they hold her down and grab the nine year old and toss it on the pile of bodies in the courtyard. That should have been the end of it another body another statistical reminder of a world that doesn’t care as UB40 once sang it.

I'm walking around the abandoned house from his nightmares and in this new century it is still abandoned and he's pointing you couldn't move on this corridor for the bodies. But unless you’ve been a mother, there can be no explanation to what happened next. After a long while they released the wailing mother who stumbled out into the rain and dug through the corpses looking for her son’s body. She identified him by the cloth she’d wrapped him up in and shook him and shook him and implored him to hear her and said she was right there and he opened his eyes. He tells me that it was at that moment he vowed to himself that no child in Liberia should ever have to go through what he went through and decided to give his life to youth activism. Five years later as the war refused to end the boy is still a boy at 14, but this time he is travelling the country urging rebel commanders to take the guns away from the kids and the bastards are listening to this child.

Fast forward to now and an array of humanitarian partnerships have been harnessed by this young man’s energy to help rebuild his country. There are teacher exchanges from the United States, and outreach programmes for youth in Liberia Sierra Leone and Uganda a Women’s Empowerment Centre and a general buzz around his offices of innovative humanitarian work tailored to the needs of his war shaken community. So maybe all this normality is as normal as normal should be.The cynic in me thinks a great deal of charity work relies almost entirely on a talent akin to that of relentless self publicists and the billboards set up in strategic places on Monrovia's streets have the head of youth action international proclaiming Age should never be and must never be a barrier in determining the measure of the contribution an individual can make to his or her country which is fair enough as long as the people you're putting it up for can read and write.But let the cynics keep their mouths shut because women who once upon a time were the worst victims of war and everywhere you travel you see the rusting billboards asking them if they've been raped because rape was just that common are now empowered enough to get an education to run their own businesses and all because of some impossibly focussed boy/man whose influence on the way the country will now go will far outlive him and attract the philanthropists.

Now I don’t know about you, but being a sinner makes me feel nervous in the presence of saints and I needed to say let’s get drunk and we did and he drinks pink cocktails called El Presidenté and that’s his ambition speaking not his taste buds and gets by on three or four hours sleep and matches me shot by shot on the tequila and knows his country inside out and is attended to by a team of interns who are genuinely into what they're doing a generation attuned to their own needs and from all corners. And all of this human attention makes me see why the Californians the New Yorkers the Australians the Canadians the English humanitarians in town are all attracted by this young Liberian's honest to goodness energy and purpose so over the next few days we film and hang out and eat together and travel great distances in search of new schools to open in search of plots of land to kick start agriculture to say hey to some orphans and fall asleep tired and full of good intentions.The folk hanging out with our character have been trying to recruit me to a cause called Humanity Unites Brilliance. They invest in viable social causes and unlike the cash you give to charity and write off, they give you your money back with profit. How much do I have to pay? $99 every month. Can’t afford it. But on some evenings I can afford a single malt in the sea spray and my thoughts wander and I fire off a couple of texts to a ghost knowing full well that the dead don't answer back.

Over

I’m going to try and catch you up on some of this year’s stuff and ofcourse I’m writing retrospectively because I left the land of liberty some time ago and all that initial excitement has been tempered by passing time although I still think it's a fascinating place and much of what I’m telling you now has become memory and I need to write it down because my memory for events and places isn’t what it used to be everything can just merge into one long dream full of exploding colour but yes I remember people and who they were and how we clicked or did not and the past is not a place I like to travel to much because it isn’t really there and cannot be lived like today nor altered like tomorrow if fate leaves us well alone we can change our paths but the past is concrete and still and immovable and how we look at it varies according to the emotional state we were in when we lived it and that’s why some people whose paths once crossed hate each other when the love has cooled because looking at the past is like an outer body experience there you are watching yourself stripped of reason bare of dignity responding by sheer instinct animal and human and it’s not always flattering to your present you and whole nations feel that way too.

In Monrovia I was overcome with much the same thoughts, for there are reminders everywhere of people’s recent past and it’s a past I couldn’t imagine surviving were I Liberian and I tell the kids over the phone yeah it’s really beautiful but it’s just one of those places I’m really glad I wasn’t born in and that seems to be enough to get them the picture. A couple of evenings into the trip I’m sitting on the impressive front of the Cape Hotel tucking into lobster when the cameraman reminds me that only the other day we were filming on the beach and saw people crouching in the sand crapping into the Atlantic and do I even know what the lobsters here eat and he manages to put me off my dinner and the restaurant is selling thirty dollar bottles of wine which we shall soon find costs seven bucks in the Lebanese supermarket around the corner and we’re bleeding our per diems to this rip off but after a 16 hour day you need a drink. Is there a city in Africa where the hotel restaurant is not some light which attracts tropical moths in the form of whores? There they come attracted by the cameraman’s Caucasian possibilities dressed to shiver in the evening breeze and sea spray pulling up chairs by our table fluttering their way into the conversation and you can be puritan and chase them away or hear authentic local voices because every city has them. Was the war very bad? Yes it was bad, she says , very bad says the other.

What do you remember? Well for the last three years of the war I ran away I was living in Ghana why Ghana my baby father was a soldier with Ecomog the West African peacekeeping force. And so the thoughts randomly fly off again about the chance encounters these people had about the high likelihood of residual need when a war is going on all around you and you are a young beautiful woman you won’t survive it by joining the nunnery will you security and protection is better than a fairy tale romance. I remember once, she says after the third Club beer, a girl who lived on our street was pregnant and rushing home during a lull in the fighting and as she reached her house the fighting started and we were all scrambling for cover but she was too slow and the rebels fired a rocket propelled grenade and it killed her baby but left her alive. It went through her belly and took the baby. Jesus. How do you live with seeing that? She laughs at me. It was bad in the beginning because we were so young. But we saw worse after that.

And over the next hectic days such stories will be repeated by all classes in Liberia from the President down and it’s little wonder that the truth and reconciliation commission set up to heal the nation here has done little but open up old wounds because five or six years ago is not a long time in which to forget a past like that. Closure is hard to come by, and those that are alive should just get together and get it out of their system. Easier said than done because like all wars the guns have been silenced but there are many more explosions going on in people's heads and that's not the hack speaking you can see it wherever you are if you look long enough on any given day from the one-legged young men on their crutches hanging out by the ex-pat supermarket looking for handouts from tightfisted foreigners much like me and I'm on the kind of budget that lets me get in the hotel and wait for dawn for the breakfast mentioned in the bed and breakfast deal.What happened to you where's your other leg I asked Oh we were running from the rebels and I stepped on a mine Oh that's terrible do you like football Yes ofcourse I like football. My team's Arsenal and you? Barcelona. And on and on it goes this return to normality but the memories of the war clinging on to them like the dust of Monrovia's streets plastered onto your skin by the sea spray from the shit stained ocean. One afternoon I'm walking around the city and a crowd is heading to a police station with a woman who they've tied up. What happened where you taking her Oh she was causing trouble in the market she say she want to kill her babies and herself she's not ok in the head she was threatening to stab herself with a pair of scissors. And whatever was in her head scared me too. It scared her half to death and that's for sure. I meet Sgt. Syms at the cop shop who assures me they released the ailing mother and everyone is just so keen to show you just how much their country has changed.

Loving the post war generation though, they react to cameras as if the machines are old friends and the machine with the moving images attracts all their attention and there's nothing to it you simply turn it on and let the screen show movement like looking in a mirror but the fact that the frame gets them so attentive is interesting and the film missionary in me gets to work and shows them how to record, where to zoom and before long I'm daydreaming about travelling this land and discovering the Liberian Directors of Photography. But their war took everything - it took their sense of self their aesthetic souls their photographers their cinema their chroniclers of nationhood and when the artists returned they started turning bullets into crosses. Sure I'll pray with the rest of them that the madness stays away and over.

Blood & Bondage

Dusty boots time means the business of leaving the familiar and exploring close up what’s even more familiar – bits of Africa that we’ve known through headlines and as every Africa watcher will tell you the headlines never do the place justice. But it's one big story pool and even the stories you don't set out to get are there in great numbers the characters so familiar the landscape so visual might as well see it while we have eyes to see and the kids go where is this place is it near Ouagadougou yes same part which is west when you back? Soon. Maybe there’ll come a time when I get bored of it all, but it never fails to fascinate and for now the dusty boots need replenishing with more dust and whatever it is Liberia has to offer and even the overpriced sandwiches at what must be the world’s worst airport for its eurodullness and the row upon row of crap duty free shops all over Brussels airport at some ungodly hour fail to dent the swelling excitement of getting out of one place and onto another.The travellers are from America and Liberian from France and Ivorian travelling on to Abidjan because as patriotic as one might be there is no Liberian Airways to get you to Monrovia and in the mid-morning Belgian ennui I do the Guardian crossword twice and check in only to be told the plane has a technical problem and we are delayed by another three hours and that's fine by us because technical hitches ignored have already downed two aeroplanes this summer and I'm not going that way no thank you so fix the fucking plane.

The brief has been simple enough, to head to Monrovia and bag a Presidential interview with the first female African head of state, to talk to an audaciously talented young man who at the age of 14 was asking rebel commanders to disarm child soldiers. And to interview an artist stroke painter stroke genius whose paintings are an explosion of colour and sensitivity about the world around him and such a brief is not work it’s a working holiday and my shooter is my friend we get drunk together off the Tottenham court road and just like we did once in Gabon we’re going to shoot the hell out of this place but this time with three cameras and try out different ways of telling the stories and in a way this is not news but fluffy documentary all good news all positive and the war has been over for some five years or so although the memory of war is still fresh in everyone’s heads.

What can be said about this place? There must be an alternative history and it goes something like this early in the nineteenth century America bought up land on this west African strip and caught up with France Britain Portugal Belgium and Spain in the scramble to own a part of the African continent. And, given America’s aversion to racial unity in those dark old days the story was just not that simple. Picture it, thousands of freed slaves are running around free and frightening the hell out of southern gentlemen concerned about their ladies’ honour with their slave freedom. As one slave trader – John Randolph - put it, the freed slaves were ‘promoters of mischief.’ Where on earth can they be placed - for they are free but not American, their colour saw to that definition, or, as one slave sympathiser believed – “because of unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, the freed negroes never could amalgamate with the free whites of America.” It was not until 1847 that a freed slave called JJ Roberts became the first President of an independent Liberia but a great deal of water had passed under the proverbial bridge and it was bitter stuff. A group of powerful and influential white Americans created the American Colonisation Society and lobbied their government for the right to settle former Africans back in Africa. But there was to be yet another twist. Around the time Spielberg set his Amistad, that epic about a ship carrying slaves, the slave trade was in its dying decades and as the American Colonisation Society started settling people in Liberia, ships full of slaves captured from elsewhere – The Congo, for example, were being intercepted in the Atlantic and the passengers were being offloaded on Liberian soil.

So, the Freed Slaves needed a home that wasn’t the united states because despite their freedom they will be called freed slaves and that’s the thing with the English language you can see their freedom but you remember what they were – slaves - and back they went those freed from their bondage but it was not like returning to a land they remembered because for several generations they fought and died in civil wars picked tea and coffee and became to all understanding Americans and when they landed on these African shores facing the Atlantic they called the place Liberia because, they said, “the love of liberty brought us here.” But Liberty gained for some is liberty denied to others for the interior of those shores was awake with indigenous Africans in many tribes and traditions and the next century and a half was one of blood and deep distrust and we can say with all historical perspective that the wars of Charles Taylor and Roosevelt Johnson and Samuel Doe and Prince Johnson and General Butt Naked and the anarchy of the 20th century stemmed from the American Colonisation Society’s well-intentioned but short sighted decisions but how were they to know that the Americo-Liberians, once in charge, would subjugate the local Africans into the very life of slavery and bondage from which they had been freed?

I'm reading stuff on the plane as we near Monrovia and the pilot reminds us that Liberia is in the grip of its rainy season but ofcourse it will be hot when it's not raining and my cameraman says he's glad he asked for two camera covers and we land to the sultry heat and just as we descend it's clear this is a coast line of lagoons and stunning Atlantic waves.

Fast forward to 2009 one evening in the now and here we are being greeted by porters who could be Kru or Khrahn or some other of the many tribes that have steadfastly held on to their beliefs their animism their spectacular rituals long lost by us in Southern Africa but paid a heavy price to do so and the wars and blood letting are over but take a look at that car park by the sea waves upon waves of UN vehicles here to keep the peace and this should be like my last trip to neighbouring Sierra Leone with the UN everywhere keeping the peace together and making millions for their respective national coffers and soldiers and police from Uganda Malawi Bangladesh Jordan Ukraine Russia you name it they are here because the alternative is some new rebel or warlord with a comic book name.


So for now the General Mosquitoes and General Butt Nakeds are not around and the city is pleasant enough the hotel a little too steep and the beaches filthy but there is a functioning normality as policemen and women patrol the streets and every charity and donor agency in the world has set up an office here to deal with the fallout of two decades of war. We blag our way to the best rooms in the house and get a balcony and pop open the duty free single malt after a first day of filming general views and wonder what the next couple of weeks will hold because first impressions have been magnificent and the Lebanese cuisine alright but a little fattening but there's a gym to work things off and all the equipment is here minus a couple of boxes full of lights mysteriously left behind in Brussels and my impression of the Belgian capital is sinking by the hour and no I didn't take the malaria tablets so this could be the mosquito kisses speaking already.What time are we starting tomorrow? I don't know, we need to get our local accreditation touch base with our contact and there's a bunch of humanitarian folk arriving in the morning you can go and shoot some more hilly roads and yellow taxis and kids playing football by the sewage ridden beaches I may stay in and produce from bed and try and finish le Carré’s slow boiled but gripping A Most Wanted Man. Really? No ofcourse not, we go when our Guinean driver comes and that's at the crack of dawn. Damn nice change from the crossword this.

Leaving July

How are you? Ofcourse I regret this long silence, it’s like that time I kept away from the emails and cyberspace for a whole two months and fucked up on so many levels but ofcourse this silence has been for different more grown up reasons and looking back I have no idea where the month of July went one minute there it was with all it’s celebratory air a couple of family birthdays here and there the children’s plays and concerts then their exams and great reports the memorial for the king of pop and all it’s syrupy sickeningly overplayed pathos and I realized as the weeks went by oh my god the last thing on this blog was the death of a pop star and you must think like his imaginary widow I’m so deep in mourning I cannot bring myself to update my blog. As if.


The English summer went along drifting from meetings about meetings to solid pre-production planning on the stories we need to hard labour on to idiotic news stories about the redundancy of men now that scientists have found a way to manufacture sperm and I suspect they're all being teenage boys over-preoccupied with their tools. A couple of jottings down of close-to-the-heart themes and the novelists I read seemed to make the industry of writing so effortless I wondered if I had the stomach but at a certain age you’re halfway to the grave and you’d better just get on with it and so I inhaled a large gulp of life-giving air and decided to stay calm and carry on.I headed west to see my offspring as usual and did dinner with my grown up teen who told her old man she feels like traveling this town is too small for her and it seems every place for those born with itchy feet is too small for one imagination and I wondered if she inherited this nomadic trait or whether it was the rebellious teen beginning to form. But I say where do you want to go anywhere I want to see more people more things I’ve done this city and ofcourse the idea that her ideas are being so well articulated means a busy time of hunting and gathering to make her dreams come right and I put myself in providence’s hands and enjoy the animal on my plate as she resolutely sticks to the vegetarian choice.

I watch my son in his open air play in incredible heat maybe the hottest day in the English summer and thought he had talent and his teachers confirmed his commitment to the acting profession ofcourse one more actor of his ilk is sorely needed by stage and screen but the world as it is makes me cynical and I root for him and pray he keeps his dreams solidly backed up by other skills. Back in the city that’s losing its glam in the age of the jobless and the uncertain, a couple of visitors land from the broken country and I find them armed with a jug of pimms down by the Angel and I sit with them to hear stories of friends and the other city I love and ofcourse it’s pretty difficult the silly money has gone and the hard currency is hard to find and yes they’re staying on and I see no reason why they shouldn’t and will I be returning and ofcourse I will.

I head south one evening to see a woman and her man and we do this the three of us catch up every now and then and the streets are busy with everyone trying to catch the last of the day's sun as the weekend begins and I used to live in this borough so many years ago pushing a pram up and down the common chasing pigeons. Now the grass is dry from the heat-wave and we're drinking rosé on their balcony built in 1935 and below are the new adults racing to their mating games down the Pavement and nothing much ever changes isn't there more to life than this predictable game and in all my life female friends matter except when they're inappropriate to others then they just stay hidden and I want to know if she's happy and there's not much in the eyes except if they don't make it work then what and that's a ransom too far and then she turns it on me and says are you in touch with so and so and I feel a stitch in my flank like I've been doing a long distance race and I want to know how the hell she remembers that name but say no I'm not and she goes that's a shame she meant a lot to you. And I decide there and then that other people’s relationships are like other people’s children and I have little time for neither and so head down to the sweaty underground just to get away from their sanctimonious perfection and just because I’m not flashing togetherness on an art décor balcony does not mean I’m sad and in need. I have an enormous need to get drunk in another country.

Zoom zoom zoom zoom the world 's in a mess Slap that bass, slap it till it's dizzy, slap that bass, keep the rhythm busy, zoom zoom zoom misery you've got to go are the words filling my ears from the ipod and I rather like these new jazz remixes twinning old classic vocals from Ella with someone like Miguel Migs in the age of computer manufactured rhythms and it makes me want to slap a face desperately. Then out of nowhere one of the lines we cast in the deep expansive ocean of television commissions gets a bite and we must leave for Liberia within days and will I have a chance to say goodbye to my big little daughter traveling on a student exchange programme to Bordeaux for two weeks probably not so I head to the post office and stuff an envelope full of euros and say have fun darling I’ll call you from Monrovia. No sentimental good-byes.

In Love & Death

As hot seasons go, this has been fabulous. Enough heat to keep the memory of winter a very distant memory and it makes sense to do the minimum amount of moving and keep the fans going and avoid all meetings and encounters beyond a three mile radius because the trains are stuffy and traveling by tube before seven in the evening leaves you exposed to the kind of human odours which can suffocate creatures of the natural world so I walk instead and order a pimms for a friend who says parking by the south bank is a bitch and she’ll be a while and when she arrives she's all glowing because she's on her way to a reunion with her man in the desert soon and they've found a way around their trust hurdles and if love is to be rekindled this is the season for it. Then I wander through a park in the long evenings to catch up with a producer who’s enjoying a cigar by the back of the bar because he loves them although I think it’s just part of the producer image to chomp on a fat one like he’s a player from Miramax surveying the fruit of his creative kraal.

The boy’s in a school play whose details I’ve forgotten and he wants a gangster cap which his character is required to wear and I take him one overpriced bit of head gear which I secretly think is naff but clearly pandering to his drama teacher’s need to make the most of what my boy could represent on stage even though he’s the opposite of that and wonder why such stuff is so very expensive but he’s thrilled with what his character will wear on stage and isn’t everything in playacting a reason to escape and experiment though you can only get so far in the experimentation according to the number of years you may have lived and the sum of your experiences but the look is garnered from the age of rap and still faces exuding anger and or indifference but I feel his natural smile threatening to break out and I must make time for his performance just to see if the would-be-gangster is as mean as he thinks he is and somehow I think not.


Out by the river bank on yet another hot afternoon looking for a spot to read and sip on super malt a dozen teenagers in school uniform who can't be more than fourteen go hello as I pass by where they're lounging and exchanging cans of cider and a bottle of something. I go hey and one says would you like some rose´ and I say not right now and they laugh at my prudishness and I reckon I could be done for inappropriate vicinity to drunk teens and walk on faster until just the ducks and the water stand between me and my book. It's the letters of John Keats published in 1931 and found in some obscure bookshop the other morning as I took refuge from a sudden shower and I figure I only read this dead poet because of one affecting encounter but he's good for that back to basics sensuousness with words and it makes the cynic in me wonder who would believe lines like Write immediately... write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain... Jesus. No wonder she married someone else. Actually, he'd been dead for twelve years before she did. Out on the nature trails the foliage is thick again and I've been climbing trees as part of a new exercise regime set in motion by the daunting prospect of appearing in front of camera again and while I haven't binge drank for ages I can't get this middle aged gut under control except via the treadmill and a grumpy personal trainer over at a gym called flex and ofcourse it's all vanity and where the hell would we be without it.

The al-Shabab group controlling Southern Somalia has decided to forge ahead with its version of Sharia law and nabbed four teenagers who admitted stealing handguns and mobile phones and in a public show of barbarism cut off a hand a foot from each of them as divine punishment for light fingers and is this not the most lawless land where the law is more shocking than the crimes. I’m drawn to the story because of the implications for thieves and lawmakers it’s possible one day to drive through Kismayo and see row upon row of parked crutches and more shockingly these thieves cannot be far older than my teenage daughter and there is something altogether scary about religion when it takes on such inflexible authority and we can say to each his own but this is down right fucked up. Over in the broken country a Prime Minister has returned empty handed from his trip to raise money and as he does so the old President says see, I told you so, the colonialists will give you nothing and a big debate has began about whether the exiled children should return and I rather fancy a return myself but have little say over the workload.

Finished dinner on Thursday night and turned on the radio to hear that one Michael Joseph Jackson had had a heart attack. Then the whole world went on pause. This wasn't just another dead rock star, this was Michael Thriller ABC Ben Living Off The Wall Moonwalk Rock With You Man In The Mirror songs of our experience soundtrack to first wet dreams and first kiss Jackson. This is what grief over death looks like internationally. Over on the African arm of the World Service a couple of women were coming out of a club and were informed by a radio reporter in Accra that Jackson was no more. You lie you lie you lier screamed a woman it's not true while the other said he's not supposed to die he's Michael Jackson. In Kenya they gushed just as much until a sensible man said he wanted to be white poor man I had no time for him but sad that he's dead while my son reckoned 50 is a pretty young age to die and that's not a bad thought at 12 going onto 13. Even the great Madiba could not have imagined as he grinned at the plastic man's right hand side that he of all people would outlive the man who could sing little groupies to tears.

In death as in life this androgynous human being who was neither male nor female black nor white whose songs are full of the sexual tension his own individual self lacks this incredibly talented mish mash of hope and naivety managed to have billions talk about him the weekend God chose to call in his chips. I remembered that first turn table my sisters and I fought over - me to play Marley or Black Uhuru and they to spin that scratched overplayed Off The Wall album and the thriller video and the subsequent hype and the posters on their walls getting lighter and not because of sub-Saharan sun streaming through their windows but because the man himself was experimenting with his made up disease of pigment loss and a cursory glance at all the tree murder in the weekend newspapers painted a picture of a one-off talent not suited to adulthood born to perform in need of being needed and hurtling towards just such an end as that which came to him as if by design. I ring my sister in Jozi and remind her of her youth. How you feeling about it? I'm gutted, been wearing black all weekend. Poor thing. Hey, some teenagers smoking weed in a North London park spoke loudly enough to be overheard, MJ isn't really dead, he's in a children's ward having a stroke. There's that, and the music for ever.

NewDads

When the city's grey as it often is there is always a burst of colour in every shot and I've resigned myself to the Albion summer because it's good and far better than it was and all my peeps in the Southern hemisphere are complaining about a bitter winter and there's no real rush to get back until the writing's done and the deadlines met and our man is back from Cannes and we meet for a catch up to find out what's going on in World Cinema and sure enough the Latin Americans are way ahead of the pack and there is an unspoken crisis in African cinema the gulf between the stories and the scripts and it's not good to rejoice in such bad news but there is a gap we hope to fill.

The river is still the place to meet there's too much going on with the sun bringing out the skateboarders the tourists the lovers the boats the buskers with their saxophones by the bridges and it's a time to walk and listen to snippets of conversations and the tunes in your head like Aretha going till you come back to me and the excellent newly discovered John Coltrane tunes live in Paris before you were born. The Prime Minister of Zimbabwe is in town and the phone goes over and over again and I don't have much to say beyond what's already been said by the films I've made then a friend says there's a dinner on for the visiting delegation at 75 quid a head and I reckon I can put that to better use even a few new books would last longer than the confidence I have in the new man but then again what do you expect him to do he's grabbed a snake by the tail and is running with it at arms length because the snake needs the man and the man the snake or all things will be at a standstill.But the truth is that this is a story that has been slipping off the front pages for some time and while the charitable organisations continue to call for assistance to the disadvantaged millions there is a growing feeling that the story is beginning to drift after all over in Persia an entire generation of young folk are saying no to stolen elections with one voice and risking life and limb in the pursuit of justice and there couldn't be a bigger contrast with that story I've chased for too long without any hope of an ending and that's why it feels alright to ignore it and enjoy the fattening summer.

So it's father's day weekend and if it wasn't for my beautiful offspring I'd ignore it entirely who needs to be told they have a father by a day meant to bleed you dry in cards and false sentiment but still I ring the folks they are certainly growing old gracefully and I hear my mother giggling and strongly suspect an awful lot of old people happiness but say how are you and they seem well enough to wonder why I'm still here and I remind them that they have grandchildren and they seem to get that and say just make sure you have a good relationship with them and I'm beginning to feel like an old parent myself because all around me are new parents and new tots while mine are behaving like undergraduates before my ageing eyes. I head to the post office one day to send cards and parcels to little Maelle all three months old of her and say well done to Thomas on his third birthday and go and see a man who sells kids clothes that fell off the back of a lorry and send off sandals to nephews in Jozi and a new arrival in Zambia and reckon this is probably what father's day means. I train it to Bristol with specific instructions from my boy to bring a movie camera because he wants to make a film about the planet Uranus and thinking he's been set up by some cruel teacher he says no the planets were divided up and his came out of a hat.

They've made a great effort with the weekend theme and there are presents for father's day a day early all wrapped up and laid out and too much chocolate and they shouldn't have and I take them out to dinner in the Bristol dusk to say well done for the great studying and the fine exams. We shoot the breeze about everything and exchange music news about their changing tastes and it's Nirvana now for her and yes I will try it out. This time I don't have the suffering bastard cocktail but opt for the red stripe beer because it's been hot and after a bout of cricket in which I was run ragged and he won by nearly half a century it made sense to forego the curried goat and rice and listen to the thoughts of emerging youth because it's probably what these years' memories will be made of and I'm happy to be in the picture just like any other father up and down the land. What you doing after dad heading to some studio to write and talk about the flipping same place but it's been great hanging out with you same time next week? Cool.

Dub Nights

Once when the skies were playing havoc with the drama of light it seemed normal to try and get out of our heads but only because there wasn't much in them to begin with and I ring a friend over by the grove and say an email landed in my inbox about a gig near his manor something to do with a lover's rock reggae revival and he reckons he's tidying up but he'd be up for a drink sure why not and the city's pleasant enough for the time of year a few scattered showers here and there and mostly rain on the Prime Minister as the government seems to be about to implode but Brown survives that and it seems only a small fraction of the population actually give a damn but these latest elections which produced a marked swing to the far right all over Europe get me thinking that it's bad enough having national front types lurking around every borough but European Union's open door policy has thrown up waiters from beyond the tolerance zones so it's possible to pass a British National Party meeting on your to a bar where you'll be served by an eastern european waiter who resents serving you.

In the end it doesn't really matter these things go by in circles and it's far worse for the Romanians in Belfast and the odd refugee flung as far as King's Lynn and not forgetting the Asylum Seekers from more familiar quarters of the globe and the changing face of the city is written all over the faces of the new citizens. I started one night in a favourite haunt for the Africans and did a beer to catch up but they didn't have much to say and then an eager hug and handshake broke my wrist jewelry and it felt like losing a pet and I'll have to head to Johannesburg's African Market in Rosebank to have the damn thing fixed for the fourth time in seven years and it's really just superstition like if I lose it for good I lose the possibility of a reunion with my fate and that unsettles my inner karma.

The gig over at the Tabernacle is not all that in fact it's rubbish just a bunch of old rastas clearly excited about being up on stage after a long absence and doing cover versions of tunes my dead granny could recognise and poor Bob Marley gets pulled out to the rhythm of one love and more importantly the audience seems to be rocking in their chairs and not dancing and the large hall is empty and I suppose they began the gig at eight in the evening and now it's approaching midnight and we are better off at the bar and onwards and a familiar face pops out of the blue flirting with a portobello trustafarian. Out in the uncertain chill of a summer night there's always one more place to go and the strained bass and drum of the cover versions has us yearning for a full force reggae night and we wander into the Globe basement where the feel for the tunes is a little more authentic and the weed is genuine.

I've known dozens of these basement clubs over time, the kind in which you can't see anyone but the music is like an encircling wall of sound and between the four quid beers strangers in dreadlocks offer you the latest in the best stash to make the night go quicker and ofcourse I think I'm hardened enough to try it out until the walk back to my seat seems full of stars and the music doesn't so much close in on you but feel you up like a pervert in a dark crowded train. Tune. Tune. Says the man from the grove as the DJ rolls out the 12 inchers from Baby I've been missing you to Ganja farmer and the barmaids laugh at my changing faces and reddening eyes. After a certain age we can only do this once in a while but it's as needed as a run in the park or a bench press in the gym or filthy dirty fun with the right female.

The streets are dead and quiet although earlier in the night two gangs of youth were going at each other with scaffolding pipes until the police turned up too late to catch anyone but early enough to prevent a blood fight and if it was raining the streets and their lights would look like scenes from Taxi Driver and we walk the empty streets and commit silly scenes to camera and take shots on the walk home that seem very creative to addled brains until the dawn begins to peer above the skyline and I have a train to catch early in the morning plus I've forgotten my sunglasses this is going to be a long day and there's not much I can cancel not even the meetings and at least I've killed enough brain cells to start that scene or that chapter with a fresh perspective.

When in June

Bha Bhe Bhi Bho Bhu I heard you calling and thought I’d respond because Sundays should be like they were in the old days when we sat by proper desks and caught up with our correspondence and wrote by hand and smudged the writing paper with tears and ink and drips of coffee and full lips coated in lipstick and looked outside and were pleased by the ordinary the flight of ducks the sun in June the breeze on leaves the Sunday papers the music of doubt the amazing graces of faith in the now. But Sundays aren’t really like that anymore and a welcome break from useless words are more words and people don’t catch up with their correspondence they write on each other’s imaginary walls and the summer is not pretending to be here anymore it is here and the living is easy like the old song said it would be give or take a few dramatic shots as the rain soaks us but not for long whatever the reasons for the overall warmth of the planet the warnings are out yet again about the dangers of too much exposure to the Sun God and I get the sun worship all too clearly.

But the living is gone for our old friend Omar Bongo Ondimba who died last Sunday apparently although the government of Gabon denied that such an occurrence ever happened as if they had a direct line to death’s list for that day and claimed mischievous enemies were spreading a rumour with the sole purpose of destabilizing this tiny nation with its huge reserves of oil and timber and minerals. It will be written down as the passing of yet another African dictator, the longest serving African head of state so far at 42 years, whose accumulated wealth includes a property portfolio worth 135 million dollars in France alone, and more millions in various banks, which won’t be going anywhere soon because the dead man has left his money behind to corruption lawsuits and all assets have been frozen. But we know all this. It's been the pattern for many an African strong man and once in a Malawian cottage I met the son of Zaire's Mobutu, on the run and on the trail of his father's vast fortunes frozen in neutral snow and then there was Abacha whose cash had been simply lifted out in laundry bags millions at a time and there was Charles Taylor attempting to flee into Cameroon from his Nigerian hosts with two million bucks in a suitcase.Far more interesting is how Mr Bongo fell ill and died barely three months after his 45 year old wife Edith Lucie Bongo died in a Moroccan hospital. Here are the makings of latter day Romeo and Juliet, following each other to the after life and leaving their greasy wealth behind. Or was it really like that? Edith was the daughter of the King of Congo Brazzaville (or President which is the same thing) and when the houses of Denis Sassou-Nguesso and Omar Bongo were united by this marriage, a plague of corruption surrounded their respective peoples like a thick fog, so said their detractors, and cash from their combined oil sales enriched them beyond the abilities of ordinary calculators. I once hang out in Libreville and felt I knew the deceased couple and I'm reminiscing with a Cameroonian producer plus our friend from Benin and I go incredible that they should follow each other in death like that what happened oh don't you know they say there was a strong element of African juju in Edith's passing she went into a room in the palace which only the President was permitted to enter and the spirit in there attacked her mind and she went mad yes it's true for the last four years her mind had gone and the spirit finally took her life too. Too many questions too many exclamation marks exploding all over my head. A room you say? They laugh. Yes a room, a special room for the President's portions spirits fetishes and prayers. And him? To be honest, he had cancer, although in truth he died a long time ago, sick of his own immense power and that's it that's what we do when we reflect on their passing these men and woman who insist on representing us sometimes for decades at a time and then our thoughts move to speculation about who will be the next one to rule and to die.


Meanwhile the Orator has become the world's Greek Chorus - opening his mouth and his impressive brain to utter a few words of advice on the way forward based on the paths behind. And so we watched incredulous crowds at Cairo University nodding in agreement about the need for a new middle east attitude and his words broke through several decades of standoff but it is too early we were told to tell if there will be action behind his words and the brilliant South African cartoonist paints a thousand words with his picture of the tightrope walker in search of peace. Later one day I'm down in the west country to have lunch with my boy and we use starbucks as a meeting place and he takes the magazines from my weekend readings and seems very well informed about the world at large but still I say I don't know why you want to read the papers there's nothing in them just death and destruction and fashion shots of unwomanly women I wouldn't bother if I were you and he goes yeah I know I want to read about the plot to assassinate Obama and I'm not sure he should be filling his head with stuff like that but then again the racists were around when I was growing up and now they are even members of the European parliament he'd better get used to the existence of hate. Is it interesting? It's interesting how utterly stupid these losers are. Too damn right. Yet the Orator is still with us and there he is in the White House welcoming Zimbabwe's new Prime Minister and praising his tenacity and courage and the pictures are seen everywhere but Harare and I really do think it's time for Obama's praise singers to shut up and let the man do his job without feeling like Elvis or Hendrix or Lennon or Marley and we all know what became of those rock stars. But the Prime Minister who is in government but not in power succeeds where the old man failed to hoist the Zimbabwean flag amongst other nations and as nervous as he is in such august company these are scenes missing from the Harare diplomatic photo album for over a decade but what does it matter when the people are led to believe that his trip for a nation's rehabilitation has been a failure that he is still a puppet.

In June the summer is loud and full and I've been spending far too much time indoors writing like a nutter on death row and with deadlines looming don't we all try and find the truth of our words with speed and without sacrificing their meaning and I conclude I'm crap at that or are the creeping years taking the energy out of me or is it the enthusiasm or do I just need that muse. But right here in the sunshine of the slave city are some true inspirations and I wonder what's been on their minds and we watch new parents with their screaming brats and know we're in a brand new era of communication between us which is beyond parent and child and I rather look forward to sharing a pint with the boy and the girl in a couple of years time.Still we put such thoughts away and watch the blossoming of sun soaked life around us and sometimes yawn because there is always something missing to make them truly memorable and I'd rather be on set and yes I've been wishing that forever I tell my boy as we lunch on one of his free moments and she joins us and I should say well done for doing so well in your exams why don't you join us for some nosh I can't dad got another exam on Thursday and right now I've got saxophone practice then let me buy you a summer t-shirt from that new shop on the high street and ofcourse I get a few more minutes with her because young ladies love their clothes don't they and even if she hates the colours that I like which is usually just black.