Tag: rally

The EU are bullying the UK

A short screenplay, by me.

It’s a Monday morning at a small train station on a mainline. It’s bustling as business travellers head to London for their week’s business. The air is cool, with people blowing little clouds of steam as they head into the station from their taxis and cars.

Mr Hock, a late-middle aged man with a red face and bumpy nose caused by years of excessive alcohol and rich food approaches the ticket office. Miss Nowak, a young Polish woman living in the UK for five years now, is behind the glass, and looks up as Mr Hock sets down his briefcase.

Miss Nowak (neutrally): Good morning. How can I help you?

Mr Hock (confidently): I’d like an open return ticket to London Euston please.

Miss Nowak: That will be £193 please. Are you paying by card?

Mr Hock (with irritation): £193? I’m not travelling first class then, how much for standard class?

Miss Nowak: That *is* standard class. If you need to pay less you can travel out of peak hours. Would you like that?

Mr Hock (exasperated): That’s outrageous! How can it cost so much? I used to travel this way a lot in the eighties and it only cost £20!

Miss Nowak looks down for a moment, then regards the queue of people behind Mr Hock.

Miss Nowak: I guess things have changed. Do you want a ticket or not?

Mr Hock, squinting one eye: Why are you bullying me?

Miss Nowak (confused): What? I… no, this is just how the prices work. Do you want a ticket or not?

Mr Hock (his face reddening): Well can’t you give me a special price?! I’m a very important person you know! People in shops often negotiate you know!

Miss Nowak: I can’t do that, and look, there are other peo….

Mr Hock (interrupting): I will pay £80! Not a penny more! And it must be first class, on the next train to London as I have a very important meeting at ten o’clock and will miss out on getting a very important job if I don’t get there on time!

Miss Nowak: I’m sorry, but rules are rules and I’m not allowed to give you a discount. If you want to go to London you’ll have to try a different way. Now please pay, or go, there’s a queue.

Mr Hock, now furious, grabs his briefcase and storms away to the exit of the station. Looking at his watch, he realises that if he misses the next train he’ll be late for his meeting, and then it dawns on him! A brilliant idea! He grabs his phone and scrolls through his contacts, looking for his friend John.

Mr Hock: John? Hi John! Yes… can you hear me OK it’s a bit… yes, good… OK, remember when we used to watch Scrapheap Challenge? Great wasn’t it? Shows how easy it is to make a vehicle! I need to get to London for 10am. It’s far too long to drive, and the train company is bullying me for £193! But if we can just knock up a home made train in an hour I can make my meeting and…

John interrupted, his voice is a little distorted over a poor mobile connection: Roger? What are you on about? We can’t build a train in an hour… Scrapheap Challenge is just a show and…

Mr Hock: Poppycock! The show only ever lasted an hour and they built all sorts of wonderful machines in that time!

John: No, it doesn’t work like that. These things are carefully orchestrated to make entertainment, and in real life making a train in an hour is impossible.

Mr Hock pulls his phone away from his head and stares at it, shaking with fury, before bringing it back to his ear.

Mr Hock: I see. Well if I fail to get to the meeting, it’s YOUR fault! I’m fed up of people with a can’t do attitude! What happened to plucky English spirit eh? EH? We need to stop letting train firms bully us with their inflexibility, high costs and hatred of people like us! I am proud! I fought in two world wars and won! Well not me personally, no, John… but people like me! And we didn’t make bouncing bombs in two hour…

[muffled voice on phone]

Mr Hock: Yes I know I saw it in a film, and it lasted two hours, it was amazing. Plucky English heroes!

John: You’ve gone mad, Roger. What are you on about? You don’t know anything about bombs or trains. It’s simply impossible. And even if you do make it, National Rail won’t just let you put it on the railway… and… why am I even bothering with this?

Mr Hock: Well it’s people like you that hold people like me back! This should be easy! John… John?

Mr Hock looks at his phone and realises John has hung up. He looks around, sees a taxi, and raises his arm. He gets in. The screen fades.

The taxi pulls up outside a scrapyard, and Mr Hock looks, optimistically, at all the materials there that he can use for his project. A large man in greasy overalls, dismantling an old car, eyes him up as he gets out of the taxi and approaches.

Mr Hock: Good morning!

Large man: Alright. What d’ya want?

Mr Hock: I’d like to make a train! I have one hour. Well, fifty minutes.

The large man stares at Mr Hock, up and down, slowly, without answering. Mr Hock starts to feel uneasy.

Mr Hock: Well?

Large man: Is this a gag or summat?

Mr Hock: I’m deadly serious.

The large man starts to laugh.

Mr Hock: What? Are you one of them? Are you in cahoots with the train company? Is this a conspiracy to take away my freedom on trains?

The large man, between laughs: Fuck off!

Mr Hock turns, and gets his phone out of his pocket. He dials a number and puts it to his head.

Mr Hock: Yes, hello, is that Stephen Barclay? Well, it looks like I can’t get to London for today after all. Yes, I know I wanted the job of chief negotiator in your department… yes… I appreciate that, it’s just I have some minor things to sort out, all fixable with technology of course, and then I’ll be there… Stephen? Stephen? Hello?

Screen fades out.

Why political parties lose support by winning.

People do like to look back angrily, don’t they?

Yet many a time, their anger today doesn’t reflect how they really felt back then. If you look at the Iraq War, and the UK’s involvement in it, most people supported the action. For sure, an awful lot of people today don’t think it was right to be involved in Iraq. And if you suggest they did, they react angrily and deny it vehemently.

A Yougov poll and survey suggests that what’s happened isn’t the same as what people say happened.

Are people lying?

Not really. It’s more that most people’s memories are far more plastic than people realise. Hindsight bias is one type of problem with perception.

So if you support Labour right now, it’s very easy to throw everything that happened in the Blair years under the bus. To disassociate yourself from the man who was involved in starting an illegal war in Iraq. It was obviously illegal at the time. That’s why you cut up your Labour membership card and joined the Liberal Democrats. Right?

Labour membership did plummet just afterwards.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#/media/File:Labour_Party_membership_graph.svg

Oh.

It was already pretty much half what it was. In other words. The plummet started… when Blair got into power.

Membership up in opposition when an attractive leader turns up. Down when he or she deals with the tricky nitty gritty of life in power.

Never mind.

At least councillors, being local and well known figures in their communities, won’t be punished by the parliamentary party shenanigans, right?

Party membership chart over time, showing its decline overall. Source: House of Commons Library

Dammit. No. Whilst Labour were in power, their councillors dropped off. Whilst Lib Dems were in power… their councillors dropped off. Whilst Labour were in opposition, councillors went up.

So in the Lib Dems, a traditionally localist party, we can look back and see that being in government was terrible for the party. But it turns out, that being in government is terrible for all parties.

Why?

Because, it’s hard. Being in government is tough on a party. It means making difficult decisions and trade offs that can’t possibly satisfy everyone. And they can express that dissatisfaction and will hold onto it for a cyclical period.

Which leads to a question. What’s missing in politics? Why does the party in power always suffer loss of members (although Conservatives have been failing to gain members whilst out of power, which is a problem for them) and councillors and never please the majority of their actual supporters?

Is it a case of becoming complacent? Like a decent but lazy football team that gets 2-0 up and then coasts to a 2-3 defeat?

I’ll posit another reason.

No party politicians ever manage to engage with a majority, because they never address all the issues

So here we go… turnouts for the last twenty years have always been below 70%. And not above 80% for over fifty years. That’s in spite of it being ever easier to use postal votes.

Voter turnout in UK general elections 1918-2019. Source: House of commons library

And the number of votes for the winning party has hardly ever been over 50%.

Source – Wikipedia

Look at that. Since 1930, no single party has offered a view to satisfy the majority of voters, let alone the majority of the population. So when a party gets into power, it’s in an unenviable position – most people don’t want them there.

Only twice have there been governments that are technically approved by a majority – the WW II coalition, and the 2010 Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition.

Both weren’t rewarded by their voters.

If we keep repeating the same mistakes, all parties keep losing by winning

One of the best ways to avoid losing your hard fought members is to not win. UKIP have almost entirely fallen apart recently… because they ‘won’ at Brexit. Boom! Job done! Party wiped out. Their purpose over, and the public scrutiny of the Brexit process rapidly revealing them as little more than political arsonists of little substance. Everything they said turned out to be bluster. It’s not the fault of the immigrants, and it’s not the fault of the EU that people’s salaries have been stagnant. It’s more to do with a greedy class of company boards and underperforming pension funds coupled with a financial crisis. The reasons for all that I’ll go into another day.

Now, given that avoiding losing members and popularity by avoiding winning in parliament sounds like a silly idea for a political party, we have to think a little more deeply about what anyone, in any political party, can do to actually get some stability back into the country.

I have a few ideas, and I’m using my marketing and business experience here…

1. Work for everyone, but especially the people who have been left stagnant

The economy has been stagnant for a lot of people, for a long time. Not the very poorest, who are generally in a better situation than ever before.

Not the very richest, because they’re actually quite well off and much more so than for a long time.

Labour has systematically failed people who are not unionised and who work. Try being a cleaner on £8 an hour, looking after two kids, and dealing with school holidays and child care in a constructive and nurturing way. Go on. It’s almost impossible.

And the Conservatives have been cutting finite resources, such as social housing (and Labour, when in power, didn’t grow social housing either, so they can’t get too smug here) and then both have become surprised when populist anger has risen, blaming immigrants, globalisation and bankers. Yet without more immigrants we are not going to be able to care for our elderly, or deal with our NHS… we will go bankrupt. If we allow the populists to leverage the anger of the people who have lost out from economic growth, then we will have huge problems in the future.

This graph charts the distribution of income across earners, with 50% of people getting only 20% of the income and the top 10% most recently getting 35.7% of the income – so 3.5x as much as the rest.

On the upside, it’s way better than it was at the turn of the 20th century. But the lowest half haven’t increased income that much, and the top have reduced income, so it suggests that people the top 50% to 90% range, the middle classes, have done best of all and must have seen their incomes do quite well in that period – probably largely due to the emergence of a new technical class.

Source: ONS Chancel and Piketty (2021), in the World Inequality Report 2022

2. Stop looking at averages

Don’t look at averages, but look at curves like the above. Those poor performing people, those losers, are the working class and lower middle classes of Western economies.

We need to look and listen to the stories of people and stop looking at averages. Average income going up is no use if you’re in the group of people where average income is not going up. But we need to find convincing stories to bring back to them. We can’t say “Hey, we’re cutting back all the welfare for you and spending on your schools, but we can spend it on bringing in a load of immigrants!” Now, we are 100% correct that we need lots of immigrants here, but we have to explain why – if our economy is based on the amount of workers and the amount of capital in the system and we’re not replacing our population then populists will do the stupid thing. They will say “No to immigrants! More welfare and money!” But that can’t work. It’s pathetic.

But it’s imaginary and easy and short term. So when Farage says this they’re just trying to take advantage of a situation that the rest of us leave lying around.

3.  Politics has to stop ignoring the voters

All parties are doing this. They pretend people are better off because they can afford smartphones and big TVs, but if going to university leaves you with a massive debt (rather than leaving it on the shared government balance sheet) and you feel you can’t afford a house like your parents had, then you don’t feel better off than your parents did… you feel annoyed and angry.

But listening to the voters doesn’t mean doing what the voters tell you to do. It means showing thought leadership. Explaining, patiently, why you can offer more than the previous status quo. The constituency I live in has voted Labour since its creation. But it hasn’t become better off even when Labour were in power. Why not? Why did house prices still rocket up?

4. Create these policies

Because I’m intolerably lazy, I’ve broadly nicked these 5 changes from an expert on all this. A chap called Mark Blyth. He’s an expert. I know we’ve had enough of them, and I know why we’ve had enough of them. But Mark Blyth is genuinely sharp on this. Look him up. He’s not right on everything, nobody is. But that doesn’t mean these points aren’t valid:

  1. Make university tuition free again. Because it takes a stress away. Yes, the system in the UK is very well structured and very fair, but it doesn’t feel it. And that matters.
  2. Provide much more subsidised childcare over a broader. Including during school holidays. Because it discourages women from fully contributing when the cost of childcare for two children is more than a salary. And because it helps single parents to function properly and give the nurturing care their children need.
  3. Resist and prevent the NHS being dismantled or turned into a multi-payer US style system. Simple, that one. The NHS is hyper-critical.
  4. Corporate reform of how shareholder value is distributed. I know this will scare the capitalists, but it shouldn’t. Because trust me, an angry and inward looking economy looks like North Korea or Venezuela. And that’s even worse for you. You’ll still be rich if you can keep our economies open. Trust me.
  5. Break up or open up digital monopolies. They have too much power and too many rewards for too few people, with returns of over 60%. That’s just not sustainable. So you have Google blocking YouTube from certain platforms and Facebook downgrading your pages’ natural viewings if you don’t have a healthy advertising budget.

If you notice, none of this says “Punish the rich.” Don’t do that. They feel unfairness as much as anybody, and there’s no point making them angry as well. Just fix the structural issues and things should balance out fine. You don’t need to simply turn up and take their money off them with a massive tax application. Just make sure their money has to be invested, rather than spent on impressive schemes like rocket ships that don’t address the problems that many people actually face.

Enough already

That’s my thoughts for now. About 1800 words of them, which is enough. These are the under-considered problems of the past generation, that are structural and required for a political party to prosper. And, if they get it right, perhaps they can even get a majority of people on-side.

Who knows eh? Maybe somebody can do it, and can convince enough people to do so. I don’t really care whether it’s Labour, the Conservatives, or my own favoured party, the Liberal Democrats. But somebody has to do it before the populists get another chance at polling booth. We don’t want them. At all.

Photo by H E N G S T R E A M on Unsplash

This article was updated with new charts and some copy changes on the 28th of May 2024.

Finding a missing person in South America (and elsewhere)

I promised, ages ago, that I’d write up some tips on how to find somebody who’d gone missing in South America. Recently I had an email from somebody in the same situation which has spurred me into action.

Since 1997 I’ve found or been found by my mother, my brothers and my sister. Here I’m sharing some ideas and tips that I wish I’d known when I started.

Before I start

What I’m going to tell you may help improve your chances of finding somebody who’s missing. It may not, but I suspect it won’t hurt because these are things to add to what you would do naturally anyway. I can’t promise they’ll make any difference, but had I done them I may well have found my father before rather than after he’d died. But hindsight is always perfect. Hopefully by sharing this I can help you.

Whether finding my father would have made my life or his life any better, I don’t know. And you’ll have to think about that for your own situation. Sometimes people hide or disappear for a reason, and finding them may not help. On the other hand, they may have no idea that actually they’re still loved in spite of what’s gone before. Who knows?

I hope that if you use these tips they help you achieve what you need to achieve. It’s not easy missing a friend or a family member. It’s not easy finding them. It’s not easy reconciling what’s happened. The important thing is to be open, forgiving, and at peace with yourself when you set out. If you want them to say sorry, to be humble or to suddenly love you then you should probably not start out. If you want to show them your love and be a person in their life, even if that’s a small part of their life, then go for it. Anything else is setting yourself up for disappointment and heartbreak.

I’m going to refine this post over time. It’s not cast in stone. What you read is based on nothing more than my own personal experience and understanding. It’s not definitive. You will have your own things to add.

So let’s get searching

I’m going to break this up into a few parts to break down the problem.

1. Gather all the data

You’re going to need every address, phone number, email, photo and location possible, because that’s where you’re going to look. You can do a lot of this without leaving home, if you’re organised. Get it together. Scan or photograph everything so that you can store it somewhere off-site like Skydrive or Dropbox. These will be important documents in your search – don’t risk losing them. Don’t carry them with you on a trip. You’re going to use this data to create a one page letter and email to send out to as many people as possible.

2. Think about differences

There are key things that will differentiate the person you’re looking for compared to those in the country they’ve settled in. Language, looks, and so on. But there will also be their interests. Were they big tennis, pool, or football players? They may have taken it up in their new location. List everything that is distinctive about this person relative to where they live. I’d divide this list into culture (languages, country of origin etc), interests (sports, pastimes, hobbies), and work.

Then, tackle each one. If you’re dealing with an English speaker, perhaps they’ve tried teaching it in order to make some money? It’s a common way for travelling types to make ends meet. If they’re mad keen on pool, they probably headed off to the local pool halls. If they’re computer programmers, they may have tried to do that. This gives you targets in your search.

3. Find the matches

So, now you have a list of things about the person, and some data. Start to work out how to match things up.

For example, with my father he liked pool (and billiards and so on), gambling, drinking, watching sports, puzzles, and he spoke English and Spanish. With the data I had there were about 12 cities which he seemed to have written from and talked about. So, for English I need a list of all English schools in each of those cities. For pool, every pool and billiard hall. Gambling is trickier – but casinos can be worth checking out. For sports and drinking, think sports bars. Link things together. You have limited resources, so look at the best possibilities based on the data and knowledge you have. Did most letters come from one city?

Then there’s the most important – embassies, consulates and honorary consuls. At least, that’s what they’re called in Britain. You need to contact as many of these in your target regions as possible. The people who work at these places are often well connected within their local communities. They may not be able to facilitate directly, for confidentiality reasons (after all, not everybody wants to be found) but they can pass a message on.

4. Time to get organised!

OK, you know what you need to think about, now it’s time to get organised. I’d personally create a database or spreadsheet into which all this data can be pumped in. That means you can later run a mail merge to produce letters to each of these targets. In my naivety I only sent mail to all the embassies in South America.

5. The letter itself.

You’re going to create a letter describing the person you’re looking for, his or her names, and, most importantly, photographs. Nowadays colour printing is cheap, so scan in those old pictures and include them in the letter somewhere or on a separate sheet. If you’re on a budget, use a black and white laser printer.

So, you found them. Now what?

This is where it gets tricky. You find your missing person. Depending how that happens, you either have to initiate contact, or make friendly contact happen.

Here’s another list…

1. Don’t assume it’s really them

You get an email back. You need to meet up, perhaps, or something else… perhaps they need help? Do be careful you’re not being scammed. There are a lot of people who are hungry, poor, or plain greedy and they might just seize the chance to get some money out of you. Be wary. If you’re meeting them for the first time, ensure it’s in a safe, public and neutral place.

2. The pain

Here’s another potential issue – depending on the nature of the separation, establishing a fresh link could be incredibly painful. They could be in a relatively bad way. They could be angry about being found. They could be happy, but emotionally messed up about it all. Do not underestimate the problems here. Be prepared to be strong, to walk away if you have to. If I’d found my father and he’d tried to manipulate me like he did when I was a teenager then I don’t know for sure if I’d have coped. I’m far stronger today, but who knows? Would I regress? It’s impossible to tell.

So, make sure you have support on hand – either with you if you’re meeting in person, or on the end of a phone line.

3. And then…

Once you have re-established contact… you now have the long path. My sister and I coincidentally started to look for each other around the same time and we worked out where we both were. She approached me first, after months of deliberating about how to do it. I’d similarly been waiting for a while, and worrying.

The thing you have to remember though is that it’s not all going to be just like a normal relationship. The gaps and the different lives you’ve experienced will make things different. You won’t be visiting each other every week, or acting like brother/sister or mother/daughter for the rest of your lives – the relationship will take time and real work to make things happen. You’ll go to social events if invited. You’ll send cards and gifts. At times it could feel one sided – you may be overwhelmed, or the other person might be. All I can say is that once you know each other you can work on filling in the gaps. Don’t rush it. It’ll happen if you give it time.

The findability thing

In 1997 I hadn’t seen or spoken to my mother, father, brothers or sister for years. I didn’t know where they lived, what they did, or exactly how they might look. My half-sister and my half-brother I knew the least.

In 1998 I found my mother, brother and half-brother in a remarkable half hour of work one lunchtime! I simply rang every address and phone number I could find and asked if they knew them. Within no time I was speaking to my half-brother, that evening with my mother. Problem solved.

My father… well, you can read the story here on this blog and then viewing the newer posts in that archive. There are twelve at the time of writing, you should start with the oldest.

My sister… this is where “findability” works out. I consciously made a decision around 2001 that I should be easy to find online. Since around then I’ve been the top ranking “David Coveney” on Google. But that’s not what she first searched for, because she didn’t even know she had a brother…

It works the other way – if you have a blog and you’re looking for someone with a reasonably uncommon name, create a post about them. If you searched for “Chris Coveney” then for years a post on this site about my father would come up highly in Google. It gave a chance. I thought my father might Google himself. He didn’t. But his daughter did. And as a consequence, Maria, my half-sister, found me a few years ago. Happy days!

This is what I call passive searching – you set everything up to make things as easy as possible for people to either let themselves be found, or to find you. Because maybe, and you can hope, the person you’re looking for is missing you too.

If nothing else, running a blog will let them know how you are – they may not want to contact you, but they can follow your life, your loves and your family in a public and open way. Obviously, be careful what you publish.

Get out there, look around, be prepared, and be open. Good luck, and I hope you find who you’re looking for. If you have a story to share, please do so in the comments section below.

What It’s Like to Dine Out When You’re Veggie

Imagine, you arrive at the restaurant. It’s slick, it’s luscious. Wonderful smells assault your nose.

You’re hungry. Very hungry. This is going to be great!

So, you sit down, the waiter comes over.  Oddly, he doesn’t hand you a menu.  Instead, he decides to tell you what you can eat.

“Tonight, for starters, you can have smoked duck breast with confit duck fritter, orange & shallot dressing.”

“Sounds delicious!” you reply, “What are the other options?”

“I’m sorry sir, that’s the only dish we have for starters.”

“Oh, OK, well, good job it’s tasty! What’s for mains?”

“Roast Duck Breast with spiced plums, shallot puree, spring onions & crispy confit duck,” replies the waiter.

“And?”

“Sir, that’s the only option for you tonight I’m afraid.”

“Bit… heavy on the duck, isn’t it?”

“Sir, you like Duck?”

“Well yes,” you reply, “but twice in one meal is a bit much. Don’t you have anything else?”

“No sir, that’s your only option.”

“Not much of an option. Still, I’m sure it’ll be nice. And what do you do for dessert?”

“Oh sir, naturally we have about twenty desserts you can choose from!” he exclaims, “You can have chocolate mousse, creme brulée, a variety of ice creams…”

You decide to interrupt him and then… realise that it won’t change anything. Your a minority voice – everybody else is offered ten dishes, it’s only you that’s stuck on duck.

And that, my friends, is what many restaurants are like for vegetarians. You get a single cheese based starter, a single cheese based main, and lots and lots of dessert choices. I’d love it if more restaurants got with it and offered a broader range of food. I also think a lot of restaurants could improve their week-night takings by offering healthier food… people who travel a lot for work don’t need to make themselves sick as a result of eating out four or five nights a week.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/unanoslucror/7314646402/ by Jon Smith on Flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0

It’s OK, Coming Second Isn’t So Bad

One of the lessons I’ve learned, from motorsport and life in general, is that coming second is actually OK.

You’re brought up in school to believe that winning is important. Anything else is being a loser. Well, they’re wrong.

The minute you learn to accept that you win by being the best that you can be, is the minute your self-esteem rises. What happens next is remarkable. From my early twenties I’d done the odd bit of indoor karting. I’d never been particularly bad or good – but I’d never been in a final. I didn’t really mind, but one day I realised that perhaps I was losing out simply because I tried too hard. Because winning every race had become too important to me. I’d chase someone down and often spin out before I made it to the front.

So I decided, along with a friend in a similar position, to relax a little. All I had to do was drive as fast as I could, but if passing the guy in front was too hard it would be better to accept it and concentrate on my driving.

That night I came home with my first trophy for third place. Awful bit of plastic tat, but I was so proud of it. I’d also enjoyed my evening far more than ever before. The wins soon came naturally. Took a long time to apply that thinking to my life, but lately in business I’ve been able to take a similar approach – try to be good at what we do, keep improving, and don’t stress about the competitors that are ahead of us. So far, so good.

It really is the taking part that matters, and I’ve yet to see a convincing argument against this.

If you disagree then perhaps you think Buzz Aldrin being the second man on the moon makes him some kind of loser.

Thinking Digital University (2011)

So, here I am again at Thinking Digital.  Only this time I’m no longer driving the seemingly doomed Golf TDI I had last year that did one of it’s self destruction tricks en-route.  Consequently I’m not missing out on the workshops here.

In fact, I’m doing better than that – an additional workshop was added for the Monday by Jer Thorp of Wired fame.  A workshop on Processing.  That, I must say, was a wonderful find.  Processing, in case you’ve never heard of it, is a data visualisation tool or sketchbook.  It’s a bit old-school, but this is a good thing, generally, because this has the advantage of being relatively accessible.  In fact it reminded me of the fun early days of BASIC on small computers.

Simply put, you can easily draw things, and you can analyse data with it.  Some was stuff I could do on a Dragon 32 nearly thirty years ago, but with many thousands of times the power – and that means you can do cool stuff in real time.  I recommend you look up some of the online Processing materials.  You can even try it out without installing anything by using my colleague Robert O’Rourke‘s website, hascanvas.com

During Nancy Duarte’s Workshop

That Resonates With Me!

Then on day two it was a half day ‘off’ which, for me, meant a series of telephone calls with clients while I ensure that work continues as it should.  The afternoon, however, brought along Nancy Duarte‘s “That Resonates With Me!” workshop.

Funnily enough, her resonate analogy was the one bit that didn’t work for me.  She used the peculiar patterns of salt as it’s vibrated on a plate as a way of showing how different people can resonate with your message in different ways.  It’s interesting, but I feel that people don’t work that way.  People can, however, be like salt – you know, small, hard, square and bad for your health.  So perhaps she had a point.

BUT – I’m picking.  Because truth be told it was a fascinating workshop that helped me to see through the clutter of my presentations and to find ways to understand my audience and find ways to connect with them.  The simple exercise she gave will help me improve my presentations – of that I’m sure.  I just have to make sure I put them into practice.

The Rest

The rest of the conference is more classically organised, with the usual talks, networking and information overload.  In the evenings there’ll be the usual entertainment.  Already I’ve been better at avoiding alcohol than last year – I’m remarkably sober tonight.  This is a Good Thing.

Highlights, I suspect, will be Jer’s talk (always visually amazing – check out his Vimeo feed) but the rest I’ll have to report on later.

The Story of Juanito

Here’s something… a smiling, happy and charming man who knew my father in Arica, lives just around the corner from the hotel I’m staying at.

He actually lives in the cabin that guards a car park.  Just him.  He’s been married twice, I believe, but that’s all I know.

So how can I tell his story?

I can’t, not really.

But it made me realise – he had many things in common with my father.  Two marriages, keeps quiet about his personal life, and a very modest lifestyle.  And truth is, I see people like this all the time.  And they all have a story.  It’s just that it is, largely, untold.

Even when it is told, you only have their take on it.  Given how fragile memories and emotions can be it’s almost impossible to extricate what’s really happened.

Pushing Away

I think it’s entirely possible that anybody can end up alone and relatively marginal.  Worse, some can even end up utterly destitute and on the streets.  Something makes this happen to people.  They destroy their personal relationships.  Before too long, they are relatively alone.  They have friends, for sure, but not close ones.  And drinking friends, as we all know, are the ones who aren’t there when you need them.

If we look at my father, he ended up being rejected by me.  If you look at the picture of me with my father, you’ll see something that I’d never noticed until a psychologist here noticed it and mentioned it to Joaquin… my father is touching me, but I’m distant.  I could be just another surly teenager, but here’s the thing… I wasn’t a surly teenager.  I just hand’t formed many attachments.

At the pool hall

There were two points when I pushed away from my father.  When I was around 11 years old he’d split up with his second wife and I was living with my grandmother.  I’d struggled to settle into the new school – a rather rough school that was failing its pupils, and the bullying and harrassment had become quite extreme.  Yet some level of that had happened at every new school.  So I stood firm and when my father suggested I went with him to Belgium I opted not to.  Enough was enough.

Wasn’t easy.

That was the first stage.  He was obviously angry with his mother who supported me in the process of requesting her to be my guardian, and consequently their relationship deteriorated even further.

He’d already pushed away from his second wife and daughter, simply by failing to cope with certain aspects of the relationship.

Then, years later, when he was demanding money from me, I couldn’t handle it.  He was too hard on me.  I had to reject him even more. Not so easy, really.

Suddenly, he’d lost all familial contact.  Nobody wanted to deal with him or support him.  He was a lost soul.

We Judge on the Negative

One thing I’ve realised is that most people form relationships with other people based on the good character traits.  They find the other person attractive, or intelligent, or caring… that kind of thing.  But they break relationships based on the bad.  That may be stating the obvious, really, but it’s important because the bad things are usually a very small part of that person’s character.

Think about it – your average burglar probably spends no more than a few hours a week breaking into house.  A wife beater doesn’t beat his wife every day.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  It’s why sometimes women find it so hard to break away because “he’s a good father” or “he’s so generous most of the time.”

People aren’t black and white, no matter what films and the media appear to suggest.  My father wasn’t generally a bad man.  Remove the mood swings and the occassional domestic violence and you had a charming, intelligent and thoughtful man.  Everyone I’ve met here considered him a good man.  If anything, they found him a little naive – he got ripped off and let down on a number of occassions because he trusted too much.

He wasn’t evil.

He just had flaws that made him impossible to live with.

And Juanito?

I know I made the title of this post misleading, but it’s relevant.  I don’t know his story.  I can’t even suggest that he was pushed away from his family.  All I know is that he’s living alone, in a small hut in a car park, and that he’s a personable and kind man.

All I know for sure is that there is a story in everybody, and no matter what mistakes they or others made they’ll feel the pain of their past.

What Have I Learned?

Value your friendships and relationships.  As far as I can see, they’re one of the primary things that keep us from ending up alone and in poverty like my father did.  It’s important to accept that although they can be a pain sometimes, and oh so restrictive, we need those boundaries and checks that they bring to us.  Being told you’re wrong, or being stupid, or hurtful… that’s something we all need to hear now and again because we can all be wrong, stupid or hurtful.

Without that, we can’t limit ourselves, and we can’t free ourselves from our mental barriers.  It’s often said that children need boundaries, or they can become insecure.  I believe, very much, that adults need them also.

Now, I must apologies for the random keyboard psychology above, and promise that normal service will be resumed soon!

Arrangements, part dos

Anyone who’s experienced the death of someone close to them will know that there is often a lot to do.  No exceptions here, plus the added pressure of limited time.  However, I’m not entirely unhappy about the time thing… makes me get things done.

Cementaria Parque de Arica

Center stage, as ever!

So, following the funeral I went yesterday to the cemetary to finish off the paper work.  The tomb is owned in perpetuity by me, although a typical arrangement, that may seem strange in Europe, is to simply rent a tomb for a number of years.  Once that time is up the coffin is disinterred and transferred to a shared grave.  I also had to sort out maintenance again, in perpetuity.  It’s not a lot each year, but with no easy way of paying fifteen pounds to an account in Chile every now and then I had no option.

I actually saw this happening on my second visit.  You could see a clearly subdued couple watching as the coffin was lifted from a tomb, cleaned up, sealed in plastic, then loaded onto a hearse.  It was a sad sight.

And it’s all made slightly bizarre by the music that’s piped into the cemetary.  If you have a funeral it does seem to be suitably sombre, but at all other times they appear to often play cheerful music for the workers to enjoy.

Piping out the tunes

It’s tricky feeling sombre and respectful when you can hear an Abba song.

Still, at father’s tomb it wasn’t so audible.

I took some photos, walked around, paid my respects, and headed back to town for a meeting with the reverend David Hucker who carried out the bilingual service.  He’s clearly a nice man, and initially refused my attempt to pay for the service.  It had to be turned into a donation to his church before he’d accept.  Given the service included a singer, I was amazed.  The kindness of people here doesn’t cease to amaze me.  We chatted about why he and his wife came here, my own background and so on.  All very pleasant.

Headstones

I felt like I’d taken enough of Joaquin’s time so I decided I’d make the effort to arrange the headstone entirely on my own.  With limited Spanish and nothing more than a vague idea of where a stonemason may be, I set off.

Now, this is where you have to admire the Chilean desire for efficiency.  The hospital is at one end of a road approximately 1km long.  At the other, lies the municipal cemetary (not the one Chris is in).  Along this road are numerous funeral directors and various parked hearses, ranging from custom made examples to tired looking old American station wagons.  Given this is one of the more important routes to the hospital, I can’t help wonder if it helps reassure incoming patients.  Still, it’s efficient.

After some aimless wandering I spotted a suitable stone mason, went inside, and did my best.  On Monday morning I’m either getting exactly what I wanted, or a very rough approximation with some crazy typeface.  Let’s see.  Again, Chilean flexibility and a can-do attitude helped.  I explained I wasn’t likely to be around for much longer and that I couldn’t wait the usual week.  He made it happen.

The House

It was very dark when I took this picture of the house Chris lived in.

The next job of the day was to visit the house where my father lived.  He’d rented a room here for over ten years.

I had a real shock when the first item brought in was his suitcase.  It’s the only recognisable item I saw in his belongings – the same cream coloured Samsonite suitcase he’d used throughout much of the eighties.  It was a touch battered, but it even still carried a sticker for a hotel in Sluis in the Netherlands (a small, sleepy town once notorious for having the highest density of sex shops in the world) at which I remember him buying me waffles with cream and strawberries each time we visited on his tours.

From there on in it went a little downhill.  There was no wallet, no photo album, no sign of his early past in South America.  Apart from a couple of postcards from his days in Belgium(!) and his passports going back to the mid-eighties there was nothing.  None of my letters to him were there, nor any photos of me or any of his children.  I still have to visit another place where he apparently kept some stuff, but mostly I believe they were just things he sold on the market where had a small spot.

The old suitcase

So what did I find out about him?

Looking at his passports he travelled an awful lot up until around 2006 when he broke his hip-bone in a fall during a tussle of some sort.  He’d been trading in clothes and, for a while, also appeared to be running some sort of homeopathy service.  He was buying significant quantities of remedies from a german supplier in South America whose exact location I’ll be working out shortly.  He had three books in his belongings, two of which were on homeopathy, with the other being an encyclopaedia.

The rest was mostly junk.  Old lottery tickets, some snacks he sold, a collection of out of date milk cartons, old clothes (though mostly in good condition – looks like he still preferred to be smart!) and a lot of random notes.  No notes, however, spoke of feelings, interestingly.  There was no journal, no address book even.  Just accounts of his work, routes he was taking and so on.

To a twelve year old, this hotel did the best waffles in the world. Ever.

There weren’t any signs of written correspondence with friends anywhere.  I did, however, find a printout with what would appear to have been an e-mail address.  So I now know that at least sometimes he went online.  Maybe he did find me after all but opted to keep quiet?  Who knows.

The house itself was relatively clean, with the downstairs occupied by the landlady and her son, and upstairs by various lodgers.  But my father didn’t really spend much time there – as had been the case when I knew him, he preferred to be out at bars or selling at the market, using his modest room as merely a place to sleep at night and to store a few things.

And that’s really it, so far.  There’s little more evidence.

The Wake

After this it was off to the bars where my father liked to hang out.  He had a few acquaintances and friends there.  People he would drink and play billiards with whilst arguing about sports, politics and any other subject that caught his attention.  It’s fair to say he hadn’t changed much, in many ways.

Myself, Rafael, and a guy whose name is evading me right now. I’m drinking pancho.

So we’d agreed to meet up at the pool hall and have a few drinks and a game of billiards (or pool or whatever it’s called) in his honour.

It was fascinating to sit in the places my father sat, and play the tables he’d have played at.  I didn’t get somber.  In fact it reminded me that his life, whilst poor, wasn’t terrible.  He had friends, and he had things to enjoy.  That’s a big part of what we all need.  So we drank a little, and I learned the favoured drinks of his friends – one called pancho, which is basically beer and Fanta mixed together, and another called hota which is a mix of wine and, believe it or not, Coca-Cola.  Yes, I was surprised by that one too!

Later, as I tried to encourage one particular drunk friend of my father’s to NOT play with my camera, Joaquin told me he’d a call for his mariachi band to play a serenade.  “Would you like to come,” he asked.

How could I refuse?

The bar and stools where he often sat

About two hours later I concluded that Chilenos are, essentially, completely mental.  But in a nice way :o)  They arrive, in their slightly too small costumes, from different directions at the specified address.  And they must keep quiet outside and not be discovered.  Because nobody expects the mariachi.

At the allotted moment they all pile into the house and the singing starts.  The lady whose 50th birthday it was seemed bemused at first, but appeared to enjoy.  Her husband, however, was a strong, surly type who looked like someone who made a living from ripping lorry tyres from their rims with his bare hands.

Still, he didn’t kill any of us so I gues it was OK for him.

And then it was off for a burger.  I was granted my wish of a vegetarian sandwich, which turned out to be a chip sandwich with salad and avocado in it that tasted suspiciously meaty (cooked on the same griddle, no doubt)… but I had to chuckle at many of them ordering nothing more exciting than a cup of tea with their meal.  Which was, of course, served in china, with a saucer.  Don’t see that much in English burger bars at 2am in the morning…

A burger and a nice cup of tea at the end of a night out.

It’s now Saturday here and I’ll admit to a slightly lazy day.  I got up late, wandered around town, had yet another terrible breakfast (they’re better in Peru, I have to say) and generally felt slightly subdued.  The day before had been quite happy, really, and now it was simply about going back to normal.  I have no tasks left until Monday, and attempts to find options such as teaching people how to create websites have failed to elicit much interest.

So I’ll go through the small bag of items I took from my father’s place, take some notes, and generally meander today.  Don’t expect an exciting post tomorrow!  I also have to decide what to do next.  I still have two weeks to use up, but no clear leads in other countries.  I suspect once I’m finished here it might just be time for a bit of a holiday.  I just need to decide – relaxed, or exploratory?  Any thoughts?

The Funeral

And so it came.  In a way it’s weird… I always felt there were only two likely things to happen.

First, I would find my father (or he would find me) and a period of reconciliation may take place.  Closeness, perhaps never, but reconciliation would be fine.

Second, I would never find him, and that would be that.  Finito.

I’d actually come to the conclusion a few years ago that maybe he’d died some time ago.  In some ways it was an easier conclusion… it stopped me feeling guilty for not continuing a search or trying harder.

I don’t think I was ever ready for this.  And this morning I woke up very early at around 5am.  Partly because I went to bed very early, but also because my mind was spinning.  I decided to put some music on.  And this piece came up:

And I took a moment to try and remember what was really good about my father.  I’ve told the story that shows the negative in him.  The curious thing is that our negative moments in life tend to be far fewer in occassion than our positives, yet they often define us.

So I remembered:

  • Football in the garden when I was very young.
  • Him teaching me pinball – and his pride when I started to beat him, and most people, from the age of about five.  I still love pinball and if I ever have the space, I’ll have one!
  • Going to watch Liverpool play at Anfield on several occassions.
  • Learning about different cultures through him, that there was more to the world than the area(s) I was growing up in.
  • When I was 16 I met a girl in Oostende and, late in the evening, him quietly handing me enough money to take her clubbing.  He then made his excuses and dragged away others to give us space.  He continued in this vein all week.  It was just a holiday romance, but hey…

There was more… but those are what sprung to mind.  And I had my first ‘moment’ there in bed at about 6am this morning.

The next came during the funeral.  But first, a little about Chilean funerals…

Culture Shift

Chile doesn’t feel wildly different to Spain, in so many ways.  The climate, the landscape even… at least, when I compare it to Alicante where my family lives.  Culturally it’s similar enough that you expect things to be reasonably similar.  And I suppose they are.  But that’s still quite different to Britain.

First things first, you arrive at the hospital with all your paperwork a little before the funeral directors come to collect the body.  In our case we then had an hour or so of waiting before heading to the cemetary.  I’ve already mentioned that instead of burial plots, niches are used.

And in our case, as there were only two of us at the undertakers we could ride in the hearse, up front.  I was disappointed, in a way, as the hearse was simply a silver Ford Taurus Estate.  With BMW hubcaps.  As a car geek I was disappointed!  But then in the UK we use Fords for hearses as well, so I can’t complain… but I’d still prefer to head off in a Daimler, if anyone’s listening….

In the back was the coffin, wrapped in the skin of Bungle.

I realised that if we had an accident (not entirely unlikely) the coffin was unrestrained.  It would be… messy, to say the least.  Still, we made it to the cemetary where I met the kindly David Hucker from the Anglican Church, his wife, a singer he’d brought along, my father’s landlady, and several of his friends.

Given that funerals tend to be arranged very quickly here, and that he had no family at all here, it was a good turnout.

We then slowly walked behind the car to the tomb, where two rows of plastic garden chairs were laid out.  The Bungle-Coffin was then placed on a support, and the car left.  Nearby a bell tolled.

Rev. Hucker gave a simple ceremony in both English and Spanish with accompaniment and song from the delightful guitarist.  And then the moment I was completely unprepared for.  Everyone who knew my father stood up to say a few words of remembrance.  When it came to my turn, I fell apart.  I didn’t even start talking, just sobbed.

It’s so unlike me.  A few tears, sure.  But sobbing?  Proper, wobbly belly, heaving chest sobbing?  Nope, not since I was a little kid.

Every time I remembered the good parts of my father, I went again.  More than in the morning which was a single burst of tears.

After a few minutes and a few tissues I managed to compose myself to string together a barely articulate sentence.  It would have to do, or I’d just be off again.  I patted the Bungle-Coffin, sat down, and the ceremony was then brought to a close.

Of course, the English bits didn’t make sense, entirely, in the context, but they were familiar, which helped, I think.

Then the next new part – the coffin was then pushed into the tomb, and we got to watch the workers carefully seal it up.  The flowers were then placed in front of the stone, and we took turns to quietly pay our last respects.

My thoughts have also drifted to my brother and half-sister back in Europe.  The five grandchildren my father never even knew about, and the joy he missed out on with all of them.

One day I’ll explain this whole story to my new born son (and any others) and maybe I’ll be back in Arica once more.

And when we come back, I’ll give Joaquin Alvarez, the British Honorary Consul, a call.  He has been amazing, taking a lot of time and trouble to help me with arrangements.  He came to the funeral with us as a friend of my father’s, and has touched me with his kindness and generosity of spirit.  A true giant amongst men.

Chris Coveney…the Introduction

I’ve started writing this post in Amsterdam airport…I’m on my way to Arica in Chile where I’ll be (hopefully) burying my father, Chris, who died on the 19th of July. I say hopefully not because this is something I’m looking forward to but because I face a number of legal and monetary issues with the hospital where he died.

So, the backstory….

Chris Coveney in 1986

My father was born in 1944 in Liverpool. He had a childhood disrupted by his father’s death while he and his mother were travelling to join him in post-war Frankfurt.  At the age of 4 (I believe – this needs checking) it seems that this had a somewhat traumatic effect on his life. Whether it would have worked out any differently if his father hadn’t died so young is hard to know.  It seems he never really bonded with his rather quiet and gentle stepfather, John.

John was one of those people that sadly get little praise in life…he didn’t have a rapier wit, good looks or intense charm. His predecessor, it seems, did.  But he did do his best to provide a stable and comfortable environment for my father and grandmother (I later lived with them at different times of my life.)

Yet it seems that my father inherited his father’s flaws (a taste for women, good times and risk taking) without some key strengths (a disciplined and intellectually rigorous upgringing in particular) that would have helped my father excel. He was certainly charming, good looking and intelligent.

Family Life

My father, to the best of my knowledge, had three children… myself first, David, in 1969, Miguel two years later, to his first wife Ruth, and Maria in 1981 to his second wife Ann.

It’s fair to say that neither marriage went well. To paraphrase my mother:

He was a drinker with a vicious temper and a long arm. He couldn’t understand the word no.

There are other things I’ve learned recently which I won’t share…but the picture was of a man who couldn’t take his responsibilities seriously and, when confronted, would lash out at anyone around.

The Consequences

I’m going to skip forward now to 1985… by this point my father had been divorced twice and no longer had custody of any of his children. He’d kept me close for years, but even I tired of his temper, his constantly failing relationships and the occassional humiliation of a beating. It’s a curious thing about being smacked around by your father…the physical pain is nothing. It’s the betrayal of trust that hurts and damages you.  No parent should resort to violence when faced with the annoyances of raising a child. Nor, of course, should a child ever survey a trashed kitchen following violence between their parents. Ever. I could go into the reasons why violence breaks out in domestic settings, but that subject deserves better than I can give right here.

Since 1971 my father had been working his summers as a tour guide in Oostende, Belgium. This suited him fine…a steady stream of giddy girls on holiday, few responsibilities, and plenty of nights out left him, it seems, relatively contented.

South America

By this point my father, always a keen lover of all things Spanish, had started to spend his winters in South America where he could travel around enjoying himself whilst maximising the money he earned in his Belgian summers.

This was actually a fairly calm period… I lived with my grandmother and rarely saw him. Generally I did enjoy his company, but there was always a nervousness over when he might kick off but, in general, he seemed to have mellowed.

Unfortunately, in 1987, everything changed again. I was living with my grandmother and had done reasonably well in my A levels. I’d gained a job at ICI on a trainee developer program. For me, at least the future looked good. However, like all good things in my life there always seemed to be trouble waiting for me.

Loss

Just a couple of weeks into my new job, my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her decline hadn’t been pleasant to experience and before she was diagnosed she’d been struggling with shoulder pain that left her crying until the doctor could come and give her a shot of painkillers. Eventually it became too much for both of us. She was booked into hospital in a few weeks time… but that was too far away. I learned then a painful but valuable lesson.

The doctor could do nothing to have her admitted more quickly. I visited the hospital. No, they could do nothing either…it was a non urgent case of painful arthritis.  Yet it was all too much to bear…I was in tears when a male nurse took me to one side and explained something…

They’re letting you look after her. She’s dependent on you. You want to know how to get her into hospital quickly? Refuse. Just tell the doctor you’ve had too much and you’re moving out.

Basically, I was going to have to play poker with my granny. But I went straight from the hospital to the doctor’s surgery and insisted I saw him. Three hours later, an ambulance arrived.

The next day they discovered the pain was caused by secondary metastasis (I think that’s the correct term, I’m writing this on a plane). She had advanced lung cancer that had spread through her body. She had less than a week left.

There was a dull, hollow ache inside me. I wasn’t close to my mother since I’d not lived with her for 14 years and besides, her and her new family had moved to Spain two years earlier – something that at the time had left me less than impressed.

I had my friends, Linda and Peter especially who were wonderfully understanding. And that weekend, my father’s summer job finished and he was able to arrive.

So he signed over everything. It was down to me to deal with the estate. There wasn’t much there, to be honest, and a lot of debt.

My father had his tickets for South America booked a long time earlier…in this time air travel was still relatively expensive and inflexible. I later learned that airlines usually aren’t so bad in cases of bereavement. I think he could have changed flights.

But he didn’t and just a few days later he was gone.  Two days after that I buried my grandmother.

What’s crazy is that in all this I even managed to redecorate the lounge in time for the funeral, thanks to my friend Linda. It was important that in death everyone saw the best in my grandmother…

Losing Trust in Everyone

Soon after the vultures were circling…I couldn’t take over the mortgage or I’d have to pay off all debts, and I couldn’t get a new mortgage at such a young age and such little credit history…especially on a shared ownership house like this.

You see, what happens with a debt secured on property is that you hand over all rights to the lender. If you fail to keep up repayments the lender can take possession.  The lender will then sell it.  If a profit happens to be made then that’s great for the lender. They keep the money.

In fact, some even have a policy of quick repossessions during a buoyant market.

In retrospect I believe I was badly advised.  But lacking support just trying to hold down a job and simply live right was enough to occupy me.  When I was evicted from the house I lost my faith in society, my parents (sorry Mum…but you later won it back, so that’s ok, trust me) and everyone except my friends.

The council couldn’t help – I was told a single male would be at the bottom of the waiting list for social housing.

I didn’t want my fathers’s help and, by the dubious measure of taking out a loan to pay the deposit on a tiny studio flat, I had a place to live.  While this was happening my father was made redundant from his summer job and announced he was going to stay in South America.

Having discovered financial wizardry I even managed to buy myself a niceish car I couldn’t afford on credit.  Life had been hard, but now, I felt, it was improving.

Two months later I received a letter from my father asking for help – he said he’d been robbed of all his money and needed the money I owed him (I think he believed there was money in his mother’s estate) and could I send £1500 as soon as possible.

I had about £30 in the bank.

The next six months were hell as I sent over dribs and drabs in response to his increasingly strident letters, but I remember one triumphant moment. I’d been caught at work calling the Chilean embassy. I was in trouble until the reasons were explained to a senior manager.  He put me in touch with the right people and before I knew it the Foreign Office offered a loan to help repatriate my father.

I’d done it.  He was going to be ok.  I’d sent as much as possible to him, borrowing money, trying to sell what I could legitimately sell… but it amounted to no more than around £600 over the months.

I went out and bought a £15 phone card to give the good news.

Son… I thought you had a good job? I need the money why don’t you have any?!

I told him it was no problem… I could get him home!  I explained the loan.

What use is that? I’d be in the same situation, but in England…it’s much cheaper to live here

He was angry.  And I remembered all those times he’d been angry before.  The card ran out cutting him off mid-sentence.  It was over. I was never going to speak to him again.  I realised he hadn’t been asking me for help…he’d been asking me for money, that’s all.

Since then I stopped responding to his letters. I’d been struggling with the flat so I sold up and moved into a room.  We lost contact.

Update 29-08-2010: I was reading through his letters yesterday and realised that I’d found the solution of a loan for repatriation earlier than I thought I had.  I’d simply brought it up again during that last phone call and he essentially repeated what I’d said.  I also think I’d continued to send him money for a while, but remained mute.

In 2001 I managed to find out that he’d renewed his passport in Quito in 1997, but that was all I had. In 2006 I was invited to a wedding in Lima, Peru, and took that as an opportunity to try and find him.  I got close…searching the town of Arica in the far north of Chile.  But if he saw the notices he didn’t respond. If he’d even searched Google he’d have found me for years and years.  I even put a page up about him which was good enough for my estranged sister to find me with this year.  In the end I reached the conclusion that he no longer wanted to find me.

And then the knock on the door in the early morning. I don’t know why the police do it that way.  The officer was perfect…knew exactly how to break the news. Quickly, succintly, followed by the detail. He’d died on the 19th of July in a hospital in Arica, Chile.

I’m going to wrap this up now…it’s an awfully long piece to type entirely by phone and my fingers are aching. Hopefully I’ll be able to post it up on arrival to Lima.  More soon… my plan is to document this trip, my feelings and my need to find reconciliation wherever possible.  Sharing helps.