Every middle aged man is required to be self-confident, bullish and able to deal with a variety of situations in a phlegmatic and self-assured manner. Few circumstances are permitted to penetrate that veneer of worldly wisdom and boundless self-assurance. With … Continue reading
‘Can I see your identity card?’ It’s not really the sentence you want to hear from a security guard, particularly when the only available answer is ‘no’. My first evening in Hong Kong, and I was surfing on a wave … Continue reading
First stop – we had to see ‘the volcano’. Little was I to know that two weeks later, volcanoes would become a very big thing in Indonesia. At this time it was just something to see. We drove for 1½ … Continue reading
What was Bali like? Hard to tell. It was something of a staging post between two airport visits, in many ways. Having spent weeks in the grimness of Stalag Karawaci, anywhere would have been a breath of fresh air, so … Continue reading
Sometimes it’s the smallest things that give you perspective. A friend and myself were in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (a sort of theme park but stranger than that – more details in a later blog) and it was raining. We … Continue reading
So we left the travelogue with me full of beer and ayam goprek bakar, in a car driven by a houseboy, being driven to meet the parents of a teenager that my colleague and I had only really known for 6 … Continue reading
I was trying to think what to call this post, and I suppose ‘trying to get under the skin’ is about as close as I can get to the reason why two white blokes were following an Indonesian teenager round … Continue reading
Those of you who read the last blog will know that I was about to set off – with another examiner – with the lovely Angke on a guided day trip round Jakarta. You’ll also remember that I described her … Continue reading
Well: I said I’d write about clouds – and I will – but I’ve changed my mind. Since there’s a chance that people are reading this in order to gain some wonderful insight into the life of an examiner in … Continue reading
I feel like I’ve got something out of my system with that last rant about the long haul flight from London to Singapore, so as this blog’s Fotherington-Thomas yin to last blog’s Victor Meldrew yang, here’s a little about the … Continue reading