Zambia World Wide

Gerry!’, ‘GERRY!’, ‘GERRY!!!’. ‘Wake up, for Gawd’s Sake!!!!’.

Thus it was that, in the middle of one starry night in early 1966, warm and cosy amidst the burrowing bedbugs of a dilapidated PWD mattress that had been cynically redistributed to the Lusaka Customs Mess, following probable decades of abuse by political prisoners of the Federation KGB, I was dragged back into reluctant consciousness from a scented, lovely place. A location full of lascivious, large-chested females, Irn-Bru, Scotch pies, Empire biscuits & Nardini's ice cream.

The brutal dream intruder was Browning, consumed with agitation and urgency. ‘I need your car. I want it NOW’ said the priapic swordsman of Brecknock Road, in a no-nonsense tone that combined sexual frustration with acute desperation.

Turned out that, returning with his latest conquest in his fancy-schmancy Vauxhall VX4-90, en route to deceive yet another unsuspecting, cuckolded husband, Roger had swapped driving awareness for carnal thrill-seeking. This caused him to fail to notice the illuminations, klaxon-wailing and general hugeness of a giant goods locomotive, as it traversed the ungated crossing in front of him. His companion must have been a hell of a fellatrice, but there could only be one climax to this collision and it was not to Browning that it came.

Post the steely mating of his auto with the train, his magnificent mobile bordello was a total write-off. He, with the usual luck of the committed amoral, escaped without injury. His paramour, happily, for him, was disengaged from his tackle at the time of impact, but was left a bloodied mass of glass cuts and multi-coloured contusions. There she was an hour later, still not sufficiently sober, I noted, to have sufficient decorum to not sit next to him on the edge of my bed, whilst I nakedly returned to some form of awakedness.

Now I was on the horns of a dilemma. My Pogo 203 was not a new car, nor a fancy one, but it had reclining seats and, probably, dozens of expatriate females had given themselves up to lubricious exercise within its confines, in the seven years since its manufacture. My problem was that, however eagerly anticipated, I had not yet been a participant in any such sexual shenanigans and, in any case, I had just had the thing expensively valeted.

Was I willing to risk the probability of having Browning's DNA liberally spread over the coarse vinyl seat covering, then favoured by Peugeot, BEFORE enjoying an opportunity to splash my own? On the other hand, how much did I fancy returning a maverick female, covered in fresh bruises and mysterious stains, to her disgruntled, possibly muscular, partner, in the middle of the night?

After a nano-second’s thought, my moral compass i.e an instinct for self-protection, kicked in. Browning could have the Pogo and I would suppress any questions about intra-journey vehicular activities. Nonetheless, I had my suspicions that, once again, I was going to live an exotic sex life, wholly vicariously. Sigh.

Apart from sharing my car and Dettol with the Mess Don Juan, the year had started well, despite the increasing levels of privation that the Rhodesian UDI was inflicting on Zambia and its customs officers in particular. For example, petrol rationing was an inhibitor to socialising, but pooling coupons generally provided a way around most travel difficulties.

An even better solution had been to persuade the authorities that the bunch of drunken civil servants, with whom I had the privilege to be part, were essential users, their duties to perform, and for  them to issue exemption permits. Unfortunately, Paddy McCormack, our rambunctious boss, roared into Celtic condemnation and had them rescinded.

Actually, that had been one of his lesser expressions of disapproval, where I was concerned. He loudly objected, for instance, to the expression of distaste that I sent to a truly useless operative employed by the customs clearing agents Allen, Wack & Shepherd. Exasperated by yet another basic error in documentation, the statement ‘Get a grip of your SK’s’ would have been inappropriate enough for the Zambian Civil Service, but, dumbly I chose to spell it out as ‘get a grip of your sweaty knickers’.

This induced a howl of complaint from the boss of the plump female nitwit author, who was the subject of my comment and led to me standing bowed in front of Paddy’s much chewed desk. Unreasonably, he would have no truck with my defence that, being a complete porker, her lingerie probably WAS a bit perspirationally challenged, so my bottom left his lair thoroughly slapped, albeit figuratively. He was a bit of a sociopathic nightmare to work for, Paddy, but I don’t want to label him a pervert. After all, fair is fair, even for an explosive Irishman.

As a single incident, that might have passed as a youthful indiscretion, but our resident UNIP office sneak, Nkunika, was carefully recording any activity which did not conform to regulations, or, indeed, his UNIPean view of what was acceptable behaviour in white Europeans. I wasn’t the lone subject of his unbrotherly spying, but I was, it must be admitted, his most provocative and abusive colleague, in the wholly Glaswegian hope that it might induce him to plant one on me, giving me the excuse to beat him to a pulp.

Anyway, like most of my cunning plans, it didn’t work and a stream of vindictive reporting saw me as a frequent visitor to the rug in front of Paddy’s desk. For example, failure to customise the incoming Bulawayo flight on Sunday, March 21^st 1966 (Guilty as charged: I fell asleep in the admin office, leaving the bewildered incoming passengers to mill helplessly in front of an equally nonplussed immigration guy).

Reported for ‘borrowing’ Paddy’s personal GRZ Rover 110 in a (failed) attempt to impress a staggeringly stacked secretary from an adjacent office block (hey, it worked for Browning), brought further recriminations from our very own Celtic Tiger. He also wasn't too fussy about my frequent absences caused by hitching lifts on Royal Canadian and RAF transports to exotic destinations like Zaire, Tanzania and Kenya. There was no pleasing Paddy and that’s a fact.

Luckily for me, my randy mate Roger managed to divert some of his explosive attention, more of which, later.

My working life, therefore, was filled with barely comprehensible, snarling managerial invective and threats, but, generally, I was enjoying myself in the Capital. Apart from the insatiable Holdsworths deflowerer, I had made a more than casual acquaintance of an athletic Scottish lass, Sheila Greig, on whom I was heart-stoppingly keen, but who extinguished any prospect of advancement to a higher level of intimacy, by declaring that she valued our friendship too much; that depressing language d’amour which approximates to being forced to imbibe a giant cup of bromidic sick.

Still, she was good fun, occasionally peripherally horny when tipsy and I hung in there, demonstrating, not for the first time, naive desire triumphing over bitter experience.

More encouragingly, however, she had lots of other expatriate girlfriends, who were much more relaxed about combining mateyness with uncommitted total intimacy. When I could prise my sexually abused Pogo from Browning’s determination to ruin, at the very least, the suspension, I was a very satisfied little mobile Caledonian bunny.

Just in case the casual reader infers that The Scots Lad had but one thing on his mind, I also developed my own constellation of platonic females, chief amongst these Gail Paterson, which is how I began to discover who really runs the universe. True, this knowledge was not of much use in the brainless Y chromosome world of the callow 20 year old male in a Customs Mess in Central Africa. My future business career in retail , however, turned out mainly to feature as a leader of women, precisely the opposite of what I hoped it would be, and it must have had some benefit for that. Admittedly, you would have to ask said women, for an accurate confirmation of that theory. Please don’t.

Nowadays, of course, unsweaty, spiritual relationships abound between the two sexes, although, personally, I have never found much use for them (the relationships, not the female gender), but I suppose it was good training for a probable sex-starved future and better than assuming, as I aver, even these days, that any female who displays a reluctance to engage with me romantically, is a major muff-diver. S’amazing how many of these I’ve met over my lifetime.

Early in 1966, the Crown Agents reached the barrel bottom in recruitment standards and an Fred Karno army of individuals, strangers to the Official Secrets Act of 1911, started to join we bona fide UK civil servants, on 3-year contracts. By and large, without any knowledge of Civil Service procedures, they weren't much use until trained and Paddy and his cohorts, their eyes firmly fixed on completing whatever regretted commitment they had made to Zambia and fleeing to another ex or current British colony, weren't huge fans of personnel development programmes.

As I type, I'm aware that I'm sounding pompous, but taxi drivers from Cardiff, or Nantwich fantasists with a single O level in accounts (yes, I'm talking about you, Happy Howarth), weren’t bringing to the job any particular experience.

True, there is little skill required, beyond developed perversion, to be able to stick your mitts into a suitcase of soiled laundry, but the instinct to detect fraud or cunning defalcation in an import document isn’t speedily developed. There was a benefit from this influx, though. Suddenly, one or two of us more experienced types, who actually could read a tariff book, became a tad more valuable to the system.

That gave me a bit of relief from the Wrath of Paddy, much to the disappointment of the ever-miserable Nkunika and his toady mates', like Jones, the suck-up expat git. All I had to do was keep my noddle beneath the parapet for a few months and all would be well, I felt. Of course, I understood the theory very well, but, not for the first, or last, time, proved incapable of practising it.

That said, I know that the experienced reader expects me to start this paragraph with the word ‘unfortunately’, but nil points for anticipation. I did become (quite) a good boy, well, less of an unreconstructed hooligan perhaps. Some of this improvement was down to a smiling Welshman, Alvar Griffiths, possessor of the most polished footwear in Christendom. I never saw him actually processing a piece of formal government paperwork, but he ran the Customs football team like a premiership manager: ruthlessly and with relentless, hurtful opprobrium that he labelled ‘encouragement’.

Football consumed him completely and he inferred that I possessed a bit of footballing talent,  which had passed unnoticed hitherto and he determined to nurture it. In truth, had there been a squad of lumbering carthorses somewhere, I might have made the reserves, but, within a team that would have had trouble defeating eleven limbless ex-servicemen, sans their prosthetics, I managed to move up to become a minimally acceptable forward.

This led to us playing against schools and colleges, where the players invariably were native boys, bootless and, often, shirtless. Generally, we were thrashed. Most of our opponents had corns with more talent than we possessed in both our feet, but it introduced we pampered white boys to the underclass that was going to have to be the future of Zambia. This particular PWB, felt maturity being laid on with a trowel, as our soccer matches led to deeper social involvement on other levels.

For example, I agreed to address a class of pre-pubescents on the mysteries of electricity and, dredging up a lesson from my own schooldays, I sketched out a simple electrical circuit, using a doorbell as the example; an electric circuit as a closed loop with a continuous flow of electric current from the power supply to the load; and an interrupted connection being made via a switch, to cause the bell to ring etc. etc.

Perfect comprehension ensued, until I asked if there were any questions. One young lad piped up saying ‘Sah, what is a door bell?’ Turned out that, in his particular domicile, there wasn’t a proper door, never mind the luxury of a communications medium. Sobering, that was, and helpful in my assimilation of the real culture we allegedly were there to serve.

So Alvar set a few of us on a route that started to return something to Zambia. Asked to assist a class of weightlifters, which had been my chosen activity as a youth, possibly accounting for my muscular midgetdom, I met a giant 21 year old, Oliver Tembo, married with three kids. He reminded me of Lenny from ‘Of Mice and Men’, or Idi Amin, but combined bulbous biceps with a sweet nature and fists like two giant hams. Discipline in the group was never a problem with Oliver around and, oftentimes, I was glad of it, since the training sessions took place within one of the townships and white faces weren’t always welcomed, especially after dark. And that danger doubled when chatting up one of the many attractive, westernised females hanging around the shebeens.

I did my inadequate best to help the boys but this didn’t extend much beyond scrounging some equipment for them and bullying my office colleagues into funding the group a little, including offering tiny ‘loans’ to members of the group, despite being cognisant of the certainty that they would never be repaid.

However, Oliver and I were to cross paths again and, this time, it decidedly was to my physical benefit.

Tobacco products are stored in bonded warehouses i.e. duty unpaid until sold, but stock sometimes lingers there beyond sell-by dates. In that instance, to avoid paying duty, it has to be destroyed and certified so. One fine day, I was tasked to consign a mountain of perfectly smokable cigarettes, across the popular brands, to the firebox of the government incinerator at the Public Works site.

Merrily going about that task, my helper and I looked up from shovelling fags into flames, to discover a burgeoning crowd of restless onlookers. Having an audience appear from nowhere for any particular activity is not unusual in Africa, where there is too much population and not enough employment or entertainment. I’ve found the same phenomenon throughout Asia too, probably for the same reason, although it may just be that the TV programming is rubbish, which it is, on both continents.

Whatever, one could innocently cut a corner, sharply at speed, late one night, on a quiet suburban street in East Lusaka, thus causing a hapless, dark clad, unlit, cyclist momentarily to appear, via the windscreen, as a front seat passenger, before exiting through a (closed) side window. Before you could say 'Open Sesame', there is assembled a gang of critics assessing liability and tut-tutting away about the copious flow of blood from the two-wheel owner and the resultant likelihood of his early death. (he lived, btw)

Or one could be copulating vigorously on a secluded Nkana golf tee, where, at the carnal commencement, the cry ‘fore’ echoed around a totally empty environment and, before the first ecstatic gasp had been emitted at the denouement, there were more scruffy voyeurs than the Windmill Theatre ever attracted, chattering encouragingly and giving points for style.

I have no explanation for these curious occurrences, but they certainly happened, or so I’m told (the missus reads this, possibly the Zambia Police too and I have no idea about the terms of statutes of limitations for driving transgressions, or pre-marital lubricity)

Anyway, back at the boiler room of the PWD: our audience, at the start simply curious, became aggressively restless, once they comprehended that tobacco, the preferred currency of both working and indigent classes, was being cremated.

It became increasingly clear that their preference would be for the pristine packs of 200 coffin nails to be redistributed amongst the deserving masses i.e. themselves.

Even more crystal, was the likelihood that a single, prickly Scots Lad official and his shivering whippet of an assistant would present no obstacle to preventing this obeisance to the proletariat. Then a giant shadow hove into sight and, shortly afterwards, the enormous Oliver himself. I had forgotten that he worked at the PWD.

Taking in the situation at a glance, he parted the sea of agitators like an ebony Moses, growling ‘Thees biwana eesi mi frien'. ‘Eefi you weesh to haam him, you fust must deal wiv me’.

Muttering dark, but, sensibly, barely audible threats, the would-be assassins melted away and The Scots Lad lived another day. A (never repaid, but I retain the IOU) five bob ‘loan’ well spent, methinks. Plus the sophisticatedly oval, 400 aromatic Wills Passing Clouds that the Dept. of Customs and Excise donated to my gigantic saviour and not the oven, was a bargain too, especially as Paddy never found out.

Until now, that is.

And so, I was well settled in to life in Lusaka. I knew my way around, Browning generously left me a few mis-shapen females on which to practice for adulthood and the RAF and their Canadian compadres were flying me for free around a great wodge of Africa, as long as I was happy to sit seatbeltless on a dangerously flammable barrel of petroleum product in both directions. More kittens for Mama.

Occasional weekends with the Customs crew in Chirundu at the border post were a feature too. To describe these lunatics as having gone native would be to insult crazy, machete-wielding forest-dwellers throughout the Dark Continent. To an extent, their descent into neanderthalism was understandable. Forced to live their entire existence in huts alongside the bridge that crossed the Zambezi, about 80 miles south of Lusaka, they had developed a culture of their own.

Chirundu was a permanently and excruciatingly, blisteringly hot locale and, although the Federation had supplied them with air conditioning, (which their opposite numbers on the Rhodesia side did not possess, to their chagrin), it meant that the only entertainment was homemade; indoors and heavily alcoholic. No TV, lurking crocodiles and Zambezi sharks for neighbours and, worst of all, living permanently in a female-free zone. Who could deny them the odd rampage?

So they went nuts. Slowly, but certainly, emphatically kerrazy. And because they then became known to be, at the very least, a bunch of deranged sociopaths, they mostly were left alone to develop their own psychotic society. I believe that they fell within the administrative ambit of Paddy’s domain, but I never heard of him or his managers going down there. Shame, he may never have returned and that could have materially improved my own daily grind.

Naturally, I fitted in comfortably with their little gang of loonies, joining them for the odd fishing trip in their home made dugout canoe and joining their excursions by government Land Rovers down to Kariba, where weekending secretaries from the Capital could often be found camping. I sort of lost the taste for the angling experience, however, when four of us found ourselves physically unable to paddle the dugout back to the bridge, having ventured a little too far downstream.

We had to recruit a volunteer, from one of the crowd of locals who, as previously described, had magically appeared to grin at our discomfiture, to return us to base. The memory of four lusty young males having to be riparian chauffeured by a single, emaciated, elderly African has stayed with me for five decades and my head is hanging in shame as I recount it now.

I departed back to the city soon after that experience and, apart from a holiday weekend in Kariba, spent with Browning in the Peugeot, where I found myself evicted from my own car at 3am, because he had managed to locate some witless female on the beach and entice her back to our vehicular bedroom for upholstery staining activity (MY bloody upholstery), I never returned for longer than it took to cross the border.

Back in Lusaka, I had a few cash generating wrinkles going on as well, developed through friends I had made outside of the Civil Service. For example, Tony Coetzee, a Cape Coloured refugee from apartheid, who was a true genius with aluminium, enabled both of us to generate a comfortable supplemental income from roof racks and sports car luggage brackets he miraculously fashioned from expensive materials nicked from his window frame employer.

Actually, ‘genius’ isn’t sufficiently complimentary. He was a God of Non-Ferrous Metal. Indeed, he probably could have produced a three-breasted female form, had I requested it, but she still wouldn’t have been as hard hearted as the aforementioned Sheila (See? Still bitter, half a century later. Blame my mother).

Anyway, I was the salesman and marketing department and he the stealthy manufacturing base. It was very lucrative, while it lasted, but the Gods of Disapproval, who seem to have followed me around like a dirty great black cloud for much of my life, made sure that it didn’t.

Although mainly it came to an end by my own poor behaviour, it partly was Browning’s fault. The Lord of Carnality had become restless, once he had deflowered, dehumanised and/or degenerated the vast majority of the available distaff population of the city, married or single. One of his ex’s, however, foolishly had introduced him to the girls of the Zambia Airways ground staff, of which there wasn’t sufficient number to keep him interested for long.

Through them, though, he discovered an entire new cadre of would-be partners, employed by Air Rhodesia. Ploughing that particular furrow, necessitated flying down with them to Salisbury for their legendary UDI sex party weekends; which resulted, too often, in him being missing without permission on a Monday morning and, thereafter, not much use until Wednesday pm.

We tried our best to cover for our over-sexed, deviant friend, but hell, we had never even been invited to participate in that aspect of the southern revolution, so to speak, so, inevitably, the wrath of Paddy eventually descended, at light speed, upon Browning’s raddled bod.

Simultaneously, I had provoked an altercation with a smarmy little tubby toad of a European Police inspector, who lost a race to me along the Ridgeway, then pulled me over and booked me for speeding. In my humble opinion, he did so out of sheer spite and pique at being outgunned by an elderly Pogo and a mouthy Scots lunk.

On reflection, it might have been unwise to threaten the slimy git with the most intrusive of bodily inspections, accompanied by interminable delay, on the next occasion on which I saw him pass through the airport, but blimey, I won the race, didn’t I? He should have been congratulating me on my brilliant racing style. As before, Fair is Fair, innit?

Anyway, the upshot of that incident was that I had to complete an admission of guilt form, accept a ten pound fine and endure a lecture from his superintendent. Tant Pis! I had experienced several of those from the Glasgow constabulary. On one memorable occasion, the rebuke was accompanied by a light caress to the centre of my DA with a truncheon, as an indication of what could happen, accidentally, of course, should I make a further appearance. They terrified me not. Cops enjoy that sort of sport and, in a perverse way, so did I.

What I failed to anticipate was that the portly little nark was also a mate of, guess who? Yep, a certain fiery managerial Mick of my personal acquaintance, who called for both the Air Miles Shagger and me to join him in his office, where we stood side by side in proven ignominy.

The first tirade was aimed in my direction. ‘So now ye’ve bin abusing the feckin’ Police’ he bellowed at me, his big, crimson, hairy, whiskey-odoured visage not an inch from mine. ‘Clearly ye suffer from a feckin’ personality disorder, where ye detest and despise all humankind’.

My feeble protest that his criticism, though succinctly put, was too broad and that only certain categories of the species qualified and that it did not apply to whole groups of the populace, females, for example, fell on deaf ears. True, sneaky, fat bastard, graceless policemen did qualify, I admitted.

It was to no avail. I will forever swear that he transmogrified into a fair impersonator of Hitler at Nuremberg. Spittle spun from his lips, which had turned opaque, his hair stood out straight at right angles to his skull and I knew that my escape from this horror would happen only if he exploded and covered both Browning and me in intestinal goo. Unfortunately, he let me down on that score. Why is there never an aortic aneurysm around when you need one?

Oddly, he then calmed a little, perhaps in deference to his own blood pressure limits, as he pronounced sentence on me. It started with being thoroughly damned with faint praise: ’Yer not the worst examining officer I’ve known’, but then rapidly went downhill. ‘In t’ way ye behave though, yer feckin’ reckless, feckin’ feckless ‘n a disruptive bleddy influence to all around you’. Worse was to follow.

‘An’ t’ere ain’t much I can do about that, other than bollock ye now and then, but when you misuse your authority to threaten members of the public (Wot? A portly, second rate sneak of a copper, a member of the public? He wasn’t even part of the human race) ye go too far. ‘Yer a danger to de public and I wan’ ye as far away from people as I can sen’ ye’.

Me. A danger to the public. How insulting…..yet strangely complimentary at the same time, appealing, as it did, to the idiot macho pride of the average 20 year old Glaswegian thug. I must confess to preening a little on hearing this, imagining the ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive’ posters ‘ Motormouth Gerry- Wanted for Gravely Insulting Plump Coppers’ posted throughout the Central African Badlands. Yep, it was aggrandising, I had to admit.

Paddy hadn’t finished of course, but his delivery was reaching another crescendo, raising his normal deep, gruff tones to the level of a madman’s shriek, accompanied by his ensanguined countenance, showering spittle and accompanied by a severe stutter,. ‘Yer…yer…yer…Oi'm goin’ to sen' you where t’ere ain’t no feckin’ pooblic… Ch…Ch… Ch…’.

‘Bloody hell’, thought I, screwing up my courage to hear the last few syllables and consonants of the coming location without bursting into tears. ‘I’m being condemned to two years of liver and soul destruction in the loonie asylum on the border’.

But, when they came out, the word wasn’t completed with ‘irundu’, but ‘ingola’; Chingola, a speck of mining nothingness half way up the country, on the fringes of the Copperbelt region and the Congo border.

Relief, suffused with joy, shuddered through me, like the orgasms I so eagerly pursued in my leisure time. Had the huge, hairy, maroon Celtic phizog, not a millimetre from my head, not been flecked with a vertical halo of nutter’s spittle, I could have kissed it; such was my sense of ecstatic reprieve.

At this juncture, the hitherto silent Browning, who, throughout these proceedings, had been insouciantly admiring his own reflection in the glass of one of Paddy’s paintings, snorted his amusement at hearing my fate. Big mistake. HUGE mistake.The glowering Cranium of Doom turned from one victim to another, followed by a Quasimodo lurch towards Roger. Paddy couldn’t quite deliver to Browning the same drool-accompanied pyrotechnics, with which he had generously endowed me, because The Lusaka Lothario stood several inches taller than did he, but he gave it a damn good go, using his unique management-speak successfully to substitute for height.

‘ An’ ye…ye…ye…great feckin' lummox. Ye t’ink t’ whole bleddy world revolves around ye and yer dick’. (My turn to smirk… discreetly). ‘Tribbl is, ye cannae keep the dam’ t’ing in yer shorts…an what’s more, ye cannae keep yer shorts in t’ bleddy country’. ‘Well, I have a surprise for ye too. You’re goin’ somewhere there ain’t no bleddy WIMMIN’…..Abercorn!’. Well, you would have to have a heart of stone not to burst out laughing at THAT news. At a stroke, there was the ever ready, priapic Browning, emasculated by a raving Mick.

Abercorn (now renamed Mbala) was as far north as it was possible to go. It featured impassable roads, (in 1966) no Chinese railway, a sketchy air service and a sparsely developed European population. True, anthropologists reckoned that humans had populated the region for 300,000 years, but, generally it was felt, not recently. The Hove Humper had been well and truly shafted (in which I took no pleasure of course, he was my mate after all. On the other hand, one more valet and my car would be my pristine own again). I must say, it was the only time I ever saw his preternaturally tanned features pale. Almost matched his teeth, they did.

And so we two reprobates left Paddy’s lair with our marching orders and brand new ranks: Public Enemy #1 and Pubic Enemy #1. It might have been worse, had Paddy had more imagination, Public Enema #1 would have been the least palatable fate of all, especially if he administered it.

So, after a satisfying near year, circumstances were forcing me to hail goodbye to the many delights and entertainments of Lusaka; to say toodle-oo to the unrequited love of a Scottish maiden (the latter condition assumed, but, disappointingly, not confirmed); and to bid au revoir to nubile government secretaries throughout The Ridgeway. Worse of all, it was to be fare thee well to a second income from purloined aluminium. (Given the provenance of the latter material, Paddy might just have done me a big favour. Had the Law and I come into contact on that score too, the consequences might have been even more dire).

Soon, halloo to Chingola and a brand new sequence of Scots Lad adventures. The exotic, romantic Copperbelt was beckoning and the Pogo Love Wagon and I were on our way to sample such rural pleasures as were to be available to impecunious youth. Kindly brace yourselves, girls. (Glasgow foreplay)

Copyright: Gerry Hodes: May 2015