We were living in China when our son (Jake) suggested that we all settle in Australia and build a house. We were planning to live in rural France when we stopped working, and so this was a real change in plans for us. Our plans were made in the time that Jake was living in France, so we felt that living in France as retirees would fit the bill admirably, so we were thrown into confusion by the fact that he was thinking of living in Australia.
We were busy finding all about a house in rural France when he suggested this, and researching the idea of farms in France (completely ignoring the idea of how we would live in rural France as retirees and be ultimately dependent on others for transport, which we are in Australia).
So we were happily thoughtless about transport and where we lived. So we agreed that we would live in Australia when we finally retired and gave no thought to where we would actually live.
And also we decided to build our house (we couldn’t afford a “real” builder).
We also left the decision of where it would be in Australia to Jake and his then wife, Caroline and didn’t really give it a thought. It was enough that it would be in Australia and we didn’t really care where.
So, they chose to live in Brisbane, in the State of Queensland (for those who don’t know where Brisbane is). And they chose to live in a more or less vertical bit of land about 40 km from Brisbane. This was because it was cheap, and a horizontal bit of land was too expensive. So we had to work on a near vertical bit of land. Which entailed a bunch of builders working to create terraces (which have lasted for 12 years, in spite of loads of rain) and I had to build a load of Guillotines for supports……
These are supports for the posts – 116 of them!
And here is the house…. Almost ready to live in…..
Almost built! We had the help of a number of friends. Jake is up the ladder!
A corridor in waiting
Me and a mate sorting out the roof.
Caroline and Jake working on the roof.
Gerry and Jake contemplating the roof
The underside of the building….
How it all arrived with us!
We created this as a part of a kit, which was handy for us! We had a kit of building instructions, which was easy to follow.
So, we built this construction and have been living in it ever since.
Once when I was Production Manager of the Roundhouse, we had a production from France, Rabalais, which was an amazingly exciting production, which the English actors had real difficulty with, as they were much more at home with words then action, unlike French actors, who are the other way round.
I well remember the time he had to demonstrate a War Horse to an English actor, he was superb!
The staging was really odd, being a large stage, and the audience was standing, and thus free to move about freely as they often did at the Roundhouse.
Seating plan for Rabalais
So the audience could have seats on wooden blocks or be standing, so the weekly rock concerts were a real problem for us! We had to build a stage, and demolish the set for Rabalais, which we did- but it wasn’t easy!
The girls had a clause in their contracts which specified that they had to be prepared to have their breasts exposed, so they had a lot of naked tits around, which added to the joy of the events.
We got off on these!
There were a number of “famous” actors in this production…. Several of them. Bernard Bresslaw who played Friar John, and Bill Wallis who played Gargantua.
Bill Wallis
Birds……
Pope Bird
All in all, it was an amazing experience, and we had a great time of it!
While I was working and living in China, I had a number of experiences that were – for me – tricky to deal with. I had all manner of work related experiences and life experiences.
One such work experience was the way we worked in the school I was employed in (Western Academy Beijing – better known as WAB) . As I have said we worked a hell of a lot of hours, much like the Roundhouse Theatre. We worked from about 7 o’clock to about 11 o’clock every day, starting from the Early Learners Centre and working until about 11 o’clock in the evening with a rock show, and in between we had films, and other entertainments. So basically it was non-stop all day long. Sometimes we had a relaxed day, which we celebrated!!!
But generally we worked all the hours that we were sent.
Normally we worked from about 10 until about 6 in the evening. With exceptions!
When we had Pop Concerts, we worked until they were finished (obviously), quite often they were added to by other International Schools in Beijing which was fun. I drew upon my professional experience a lot for these concerts – shades of my Roundhouse days – in was much the same. It was a mix of groups, a Heavy Metal group or a folk group, following on from each other, a real mix of groups! In my Roundhouse days we never mixed them up in that way, we tended to have a “type” of group, so Heavy Metal with Heavy Metal and such like….. Ah Doctor John!
We worked on these which was one thing we did, but otherwise we worked on kids talking or another thing…. We were really impressed by the kids presenting themselves…. They were so professional. Striding around the stage as if they possessed it.
We used to have demonstrations of the lights, in which we had the kids standing around the stage and shone different coloured lights on them. Which was intriguing. We discovered that blue gels in spotlights had a really weird effect. If we shone blue, simply blue lights on the kids, they were hard to focus and the weird thing was that they sort of were hard to see clearly. Odd effect.
So we worked all the hours that God sent, and generally functioned as serious professional roadies, which was entertaining, so the long hours really didn’t matter.
Towards the end of our stay in Angola I was unlucky enough to catch malaria one day. It seems there are two types of malaria, the one that most people get, and which reoccurs at regular intervals for the rest of your life, or the other main sort, cerebral malaria, which basically kills you in about 72 hours of it kicking in.
Being me, I of course had the cerebral variety.
If you live in a malaria area, after about three months, you have to stop taking anti-malaria medicines, as they will wreck your liver apparently, so you are then dependent on insect repellant to protect yourself. And as I discovered, if you leave even a tiny part of exposed skin uncoated with this repellant, the very small and totally silent Anopheles mosquito will find it and set too to slurp up your blood, and as payment, will give you a good vein full of malaria parasites.
As chance would have it, when the malaria struck me, I was up country in Huambo, visiting and supposedly helping the Halo Trust deminers with various computer problems. As it turned out, this was extremely lucky for me, as I was in an area where malaria was horribly common, and all the local Angolan doctors knew all about it – unlike the worthy western doctors one tended to see in Luanda who habitually treated people with malaria symptoms for flu, as a colleague who was infected on the same day as I was, and who as a result of the misdiagnosis almost died and had to be evacuated to South Africa when it was belatedly realised he was on the point of dying from cerebral malaria, and not simply suffering from a bad go of flu.
The first I knew of my infection was when I developed a nasty head ache one evening, and a general feeling of illness.. Nothing very specific, but I felt lousy. So I took to my bed and thought to simply sleep it off and be better the following morning. Not to be.
As the night passed, my head ache got worse, and I had bad stomach aches and dizziness attacks… But I managed to sleep more or less. However the following morning I told the others that I would spend the day in bed, assuming that a day’s rest and lots of paracetamol would fix me up.
But as the day went on, I began to develop a serious fever and started to hallucinate, and began to feel sicker and more lousy than I had ever felt in my life. One minute I was unbelievably cold, shaking violently and totally uncontrollably, the next I was boiling hot and sweating. And all the while feeling sicker and more awful by the minute. My head was aching fit to bust, my stomach was bloated and hurt like hell, I was dizzy, so much so that there was no way I could stand up, but even lying down the world was spinning around me.
I have never felt so bad in my entire life, and it simply kept getting worse, so when I was in the cold phase of my fever, I was scared I was going to break my teeth as I was shaking so hard and my teeth were chattering so hard.
Luckily Nathanial came back to the house in the early afternoon, took one look at me, and grabbed his malaria test kit, and stuck a pin in my finger to get some blood for the test. It showed that I had malaria, so he picked me up and slung me in the landrover and off we went to the nearest hospital were in no time a large and friendly Angolan doctor saw me, he also took one look, didn’t bother with any tests but simply gave me some medicine or other which was apparently for malaria, and amazingly and miraculously, in a matter of minutes most of the symptoms had disappeared and I felt almost human again.
Once I was more or less back in the word of the living, he explained what the prognosis was if I hadn’t managed to see a doctor before another night had passed – simply put, I would have been dead.
A very sobering thought believe you me.
Anyhow, thanks to whatever the medicine was that he had given me, I didn’t die (you may be surprised to read), and he prescribed some medicine that I would have to take for the next month or so, and told me the worst possible news as well – no beer for at least a month!
Amazingly enough, by the following day I felt well enough to get back to the work I was in Huambo to carry out for the Halo Trust guys, and in due time returned to Luanda and my normal daily life in Angola… None the worse for my malaria experience. But I do have an enormous sympathy for the millions of people every year who are not as lucky as I was, and who die because of malaria. And thus I am a supporter of the Gate’s Foundation’s work in anti-malaria studies in Africa.
And of course, extremely glad that Nathaniel was there to save me as well!!!! Quite literally his prompt actions saved my life, for which I am eternally grateful to him of course.
OZTHOUGHTS 