Down Mexico Way

Editorial & Design Consultant: Anne Harling

Proof Reader: Lisa Thomas

www.struanrobertson.info

Costabooks.com

BACKGROUND TO THESE DIARIES...

These diaries are from 1991. I was fifty-five, married for the second time with a ten year-old daughter, living in south east Spain and working week on, week off as a ship’s pilot on the North Sea and the English Channel – then as now, one of the busiest waterways in the world.

I piloted oil tankers, bulk carriers, container ships, passenger ships, some of the world’s biggest, through an area that averaged, in winter, a gale every thirty-six hours - but when it became all too humdrum, I’d look for something different; scrapping old oil tankers by piling them up beaches in the Indian sub-continent, distributing frozen goats (decades past their eat-by-date) to the starving Muslim population of East Africa; looking for an American nuclear weapon lost off Malaga at the height of the Spanish tourist season or stealing back a ship, held under armed guard, from war devastated Suez – anything that gave me a buzz.

These diaries are a log of my second stint as captain of a rig (tug and barge) hauling bad grain from the Mississippi River and the Houston Ship Canal – ♫...South of the Border, down Mexico way...♫ – to the Yucatán Peninsula. The Americans were dumping – sorry, ‘donating’ the grain for cattle feed - although it often ended up in the local shops.

The tug had been chartered by the Mexican owners of the barge, to move it back and fore between the Yucatan Peninsula and either the Mississippi or the Houston Ship Canal – and which, when they were combined as a rig, true to form, became progressively more dangerous and out-of-control. It didn’t help that as a ‘rig’, it also broke most of the rules and not a few laws.

Here ‘rig’ is a collective term for a tug and its barges - and some of the bigger, legitimate American rigs working the inland waterways along the southern United States, were built and designed to handle up to a dozen or more barges, strung together and pushed from behind by a large river tug – whereas it was as much as we could do to keep our only barge, the Caribbean Sea, under control at the best of times!

The difference was that these American rigs were built exclusively to work the vast inland waterway that edged the US coast from Brownsville on the Rio Grande (the Tex/Mex border) to New Jersey, two-thirds of the way up the East Coast, a distance of about 3,000 miles. And these rigs were truly intricate masterpieces of design. Specifically built to navigate these narrow, twisting and very busy inland waterways, they could number up to a dozen individual barges, pushed from behind and controlled by a single tug.

This was made possible by the barges all being tightly locked to the tug by a highly complex system of metal wires and grips that were continuously and automatically tensioned, enabling the tug, lodged in a specially tailored dimple in the stern of the very last and middle barge, to work them all as a single unit.

Our rig was different! Boy, was it different! An incongruous, often dangerous marrying of two old, clapped out vessels, their original selection had been entirely based on price - they'd been the cheapest going! The barge, the Caribbean Sea, was a big, red, clumsy hull more than five-hundred foot long. Once a proper, working cargo ship, she’d since been hollowed out and denuded of engines and crew accommodation to become a porous, cargo carrying barge – a creaking shell of what she’d once been.

Always pushed nose first through the narrow, twisting waterways of the Mississippi River or the Houston Ship Canal to ensure maximum control - once clear of the land, we simply hauled her along behind us on a towline that could be run out to nearly a kilometre.

The Caribbean Sea was ‘worked’ by an equally old, soft nosed ex-salvage tug called the Salvision – and it was in these narrow inland water ways where the Caribbean Sea could only safely be pushed, that most of the problems occurred because, instead of an elaborate arrangement of steel wires and grips to hold them fast together as one unit, the two vessels were hung together in an uneasy embrace by old, worn and sagging hemp and sisal mooring ropes. These ropes, stretching at will, soon became permanently slack, so reducing control over the barge to dangerous levels.

Another problem was that when in the pushing position down aft, ‘hipped up’ under the Caribbean Sea’s high stern, little could be seen ahead from the Salvision's bridge – and none at all of what was happening over on the opposite side, the Red Devil simply towered too far above her (see the diagram above). This meant that at best, less than half of the way ahead was ever visible from the Salvision’s bridge – and was often much worse when special loading requirements meant that the Salvision ended up on the side nearest

the river bank and almost completely shut off from even a glimpse of the river traffic speeding past close by in the opposite direction. They simply couldn’t be seen from the low bridge of the Salvision!

However, things became a lot easier once in the open sea, clear of the land. We'd hook the Caribbean Sea up to a tow line from her bow and with eight hundred metres or more of heavy steel wire paid out, haul her south on the four-day passage to the Yucatan (see map) with hardly a care in the world – although this could also go seriously wrong, as happened on one of our approaches to Progreso.

After discharging the cargo there, we'd return to either Houston or the Mississippi to load again – and the grain cargoes were of truly awful quality. Small, gnarled, dried out flakes and swirls of yellowing leaf with no nutrition left that I could see - and I know, having been brought up on a farm. But as a contract, it was obviously very lucrative for the Mexican owners of the Caribbean Sea.

My crew were all Filipino except for two Brits, myself and the awful Chief Engineer. On my previous stint on-board, I'd named him, ‘The Shadow’ as he seemed to spend most of his time lurking around corners, whispering to the crew (he’d actually cup his hand over his mouth) or spying on me through the cracks in my door (he had the cabin next to mine). He seemed everywhere except down in his engine room!

The Chief Officer I knew as Bonehead as, unlike most Filipino crew, he was a shady, dishonest, creepy incompetent, disliked equally by the crew and myself. The good old cook, a fattish Filipino was my favourite, because he was both clever and dead straight.

On my previous stint on board, I’d warmed to him when he’d told me how, on coming back home after a long trip, he’d discovered that his son had, in the meantime, packed in his job in the local MacDonald’s to start a course at Manila University.

‘Sorted him out,’ he said. ‘Took him by the ear and led him straight back to the hamburger joint!’[1]

In the following diary, readers will notice that I don’t call many of the crew by their name. This is common practice at sea, where you can get to know someone really well, yet never use their name – they’re almost invariably identified by rank. So, the bosun is called the Bosun and the chief engineer, the Chief Engineer... and on it goes.

––––––––

FIRST DAY OF THE DIARIES

WEDNESDAY 20th FEBRUARY 1991

I spent my last hours at home feverishly trying to fix the cassette mechanism on our stereo music player, my efforts gradually taking on the character of unfinished business, where a good prognosis for the coming trip came to depend on this stupid repair being successful. The cassette player had been going wrong for a while and although it was a good brand (it had JVC stamped all over it) inside it was mostly wobbly plastic wheels and rubber bands. Hidden amongst them might have been some mechanical refinements that escaped me. Anyway, Emmylou[2] had recently been giving out an uncertain tone.

I took half a Valium to get to sleep. Janey[3] came down to say good night – as she does every night. These visits probably double as a check to make sure we haven't sneaked off and left her and Tonto to fend for themselves in a cruel world. Janey’s distemper makes her paranoid.

As she lumbered into the bedroom, Carol remarked that she’d noticed that Janey never scrambled up onto her side of the bed when I was at home. Janey cannot really jump much – the distemper again, but she obviously has no monopoly on paranoia. As Carol uttered these words, Janey heaved herself slowly down from my side of the bed and going round to Carol’s side, proceeded to scramble back up – with Janey, no criticism went unanswered for long.

So Carol was now obliged to lie there while Janey spread herself across her and went off to sleep. After a few minutes Carol woke her up and gently ushered her back onto the mat. As Janey reached the floor, I asked her to remember who the good cop was.

In the morning, I tried to wake Lila up to say goodbye but she remained resolutely asleep. So I leaned over her and whispered that I was taking all her Just William books – all thirty odd. Surfacing instantly, she came bolt upright and looking wildly round at the shelves of books above her bed, grabbed two or three that were lying on the duvet. William the Outlaw was one I saw disappearing under it.

Leaving Mojácar in darkness, Carol driving, we took the new road to Los Gallardos. She’d heard that the shorter mountain road via Carbonarras was closed, still being rebuilt. Spain's membership of the EEC was most tangible in the huge duplication of new roads and autobahns being built everywhere; often, it seemed, more for their own sake than from any particular utility. They had to build them, I suppose, before they could skim off a percentage – at least this was still the case in Spain. In Brazil they’d just trouser the lot, not even bother to go through the motions with the cement mixer.

It was light by the time we reached Almeria airport. Extra security was evident, probably because of the Gulf War. They made me remove all the batteries from my various electronic bits and pieces, what Lila called my "...unconvincing black boxes which look as if they had all been bought from a Moroccan.[4]The final battery count was over twenty and they produced an envelope especially for them – the batteries had to travel separately. This was all going on while the rest of my bags were being checked in.

Conscious of the time, I pushed this modern ritual through as quickly as possible, then they announced there was no hurry. The aircraft had not left Madrid. Carol and I passed the time in the bar drinking coffee and talking about Lila. She’d called her about eight-thirty to check but got the answering machine. No doubt Lila had already left for school.[5]

The aircraft eventually arrived and I boarded, waving good bye to Carol through the chicken wire fence surrounding the car park. Then airborne, we climbed away to the north over the Sierra Nevada, the air very clear. It looked cold, the snow trapped in the back lying corries[6] on the north sides of the mountains was a dirty grey – and surviving so far south, reminded me of the old Highland saying, ‘when the old snow meets the new,’ which, as a kid, had a romantic ring to it.

In Madrid, I was ripped off as usual by the money changers. It’s the same in every fucking airport, I suppose the rapacity of banks is universal. In the International Terminal, I checked everything in direct to Houston, except for a couple of Open University Units, a piece of unfinished tapestry work and a few books. I was digging in for a long haul. The main flight from Amsterdam to Houston would be on KLM, which is a pretty good airline and had the double virtue of not being British Airways (a built in advantage enjoyed by every other airline on the planet – except of course, British Airways).

The flight was boarded ahead of schedule but then, instead of going anywhere, the aircraft sat on the stand with the doors closed. After a long wait, someone came out from the flight deck and announced that there had been a complete shutdown of all air traffic control in the Madrid area. Evidently the computers were fed up. We remained thus for more than two hours, given free drinks and salted almonds to keep us quiet.

When it became certain that I would miss my connection, I asked one of the ground staff to fax a message to Glasgow,[7]saying that I’d miss my connection, the Houston flight from Amsterdam. A few minutes before takeoff, she came back to say that I was now booked on the same flight, a day later. Astonishing efficiency, KLM would also pay for the hotel in Amsterdam.

A couple of seats away a Swedish girl was sitting. She could have been anywhere between nineteen and thirty. Well scrubbed was the word. I could not detect a trace of make-up or indeed any concession to fashion. Her clothes were entirely sensible and without any gender bias that I could see. Her features were ‘finely chiselled’ and she had beautiful grey eyes, but without much warmth. She looked superbly healthy and I don't think brooking nonsense was one of her hobbies. She could have been a feminist monument!

As we waited, she chatted away in very good, virtually accentless, English to a KLM stewardess. Then the KLM girl asked her where she was from and on the reply, ‘Stockholm’ the stewardess continued the conversation in Swedish. I sat back, thinking of the casual feat I’d just witnessed. The British think it a small marvel if anyone can even manage a few words in another language – say French or German. Here the KLM girl had yet to speak in her own language. So far, I'd heard her speak in Spanish, English and now Swedish.

I lived in Holland for a couple of years in the Seventies and took as a working assumption that almost everyone there was born speaking two or three languages, as well as Dutch. I used to get quite short with anyone who only spoke Dutch, as if they were deliberately being awkward – and this regardless of the fact that I myself spoke only English, and that not well.

The rules, you see, didn’t apply to us – then. This was partly, in my case at least, because I assumed that the Dutch etc. learn other languages without apparent effort, seemingly by osmosis, while we (the British) have to free every foreign word from the granite with our bare hands.

At Skipol all those who’d missed their connections were rounded up by a very tall, very blonde and very young ground stewardess. She was no more than eighteen but patronised us horribly, speaking to us in an arch and chuckling English as if we ourselves, had caused the delay – but were now, of course, forgiven.

She led us, talking all the way, to a minibus and packed us aboard. It took us to a hotel in the middle of Amsterdam called the Golden Tulip. There I had a very middling meal for $33 with exasperatingly slow but showy service.

Afterwards in my room I watched CNN. It was almost entirely given over to the Gulf War. I didn't call anyone in Amsterdam. Tired by now, I went to bed instead.

THURSDAY 21st FEBRUARY 1991.

Breakfast was an improvement on dinner. This was mainly because I could serve myself and so didn't have to sit through the waiter's facile flourishes and the interminable waits between undistinguished courses. The cynical service I'd endured at dinner last night was too deliberately intrusive to allow enjoyment of the food, if that had been possible in the first place.

Long experience had taught me that it was impolitic to protest. The restaurant customer is too vulnerable – I didn’t want to become the unwitting straight man in another kitchen anecdote, it would be giving the word apocryphal a bad name. As it was now breakfast, I could eat a lot of fruit. Carol would have approved of this. Afterwards back in my room, I watched a film called the ‘Wedding Party’. It promised to be good but there was something wrong with the sound and it never got above a whisper. I couldn’t turn it up and the hotel engineer was no help.

When I left the hotel for Skipol Airport, I had to share a taxi. They were in short supply but it also helped with the expenses. The other passenger was an English businessman. He told me how he’d had his brief case stolen in the morning rush hour. It had happened on the platform of some station and then he’d recovered it, intact, within the hour. He was still elated by the whole experience. I am not sure if it happened in Holland or England.

But the most interesting thing this morning, were the urinals at the airport. As I stood peeing in to the tall porcelain bowl, I noticed there were flies crawling up it. I thought, how weird – and in Holland of all places! Then I noticed that none of the flies were moving. Bending lower I saw that they were actually embossed, very realistically, on the ceramic surface in a dark blue.

Then taking great care, lavatories are the last place for even one type of ambiguity,[8] I peered in to the other bowls. They also had flies, two or three each but all in different positions. Art where the businessman believes it really belongs, but only the Dutch would have the insouciance to actually put it there.

I also had a mental flash. I suddenly knew that I was going to lose all the batteries I’d been made to hand over at Madrid Airport. I’d made a bit of a fuss (my fusses can go downhill fast) and I remembered that as I walked away, the check-in girl had a peculiar look. I now realised its significance. She was going to bin them. It was not promising.

The flight to Houston was direct, taking a sub polar route over Southern Greenland and then across the Hudson Bay before curving down just east of Chicago. It was a route I had flown many times when an airline navigator.[9] This had been before the era of the Boeing 747 and the inertial navigation equipment, which had taken the navigator’s job away.

As we were in darkness most of the way, I didn’t bother looking out until the flight deck announced that we were passing over Chicago. I'm interested in Chicago only because I have never been there and have only met one person from there.[10]

Below, the city was laid out in square grids, its lights, which were mostly yellow, making it look very cold. Then they were cut off so abruptly and cleanly by the curving bays of Lake Michigan, making it appear as if the lake had simply trumped half the town.

They showed a film, a chunk of expensive wish fulfilment with John Bellushi and Charles Gronin. I watched it for a while but soon saw there was nothing to it. Never the less I persevered a little longer, being both mildly curious about Gronin and stuck there in my seat. I’d recently bought a book of his memoirs and like the film, I only managed to get through about half of it.

I’d bought it purely on the strength of the title, which was a quotation from some English duchess. Evidently, Gronin and Candice Bergen had been making a film in England, partly shot in the Duchess’s country house. While they were sitting in some special room or other, the Duchess had put her head around the door and murmured, ‘It would be awfully nice if you weren’t here.’ This was the book’s title and remained the best of it – or at least, of the bit I managed.

The reason I had not persevered with his book was because of its tone. Gronin had come across as a right luvvy - and a very resentful one. The book was almost wholly taken up with a blow by blow by blow account of his relentless, largely unappreciated struggle to bring high art to the resisting masses – and its only decent joke still was the cover.

In fact, Gronin’s most interesting feature (or the one that animated him most), was the lifelong rancour he held against other, more successful actors. In particular, those such as Dustin Hoffman, another complete wanker by all accounts, who’d accepted apparently inferior parts, such as in 'The Graduate' which then had, inevitably, become overnight successes – after Gronin had meticulously turned them down.

And Gronin had always turned down these parts for, of course, impeccably artistic reasons – either unavailable putting some ground breaking production together in a barn in New England, or the scripts were too banal or restrictive, or whatever – all were refused for the best possible artistic reasons.

But when these films turned out to be winners, he still, somehow, considered these previously (scornfully) rejected roles were still his and so wrote down the other actors, somehow suggesting that Hoffman and Co. had come by them unfairly. He was another Orson without either the artistic stature or the brilliantly vicious jokes.

We landed in Houston on time and as I had foreseen in the depths of the piebald lavatory bowl, the batteries had also gone down the swanee. I was annoyed because, a) included was a special battery for the duff[11] cordless phone I was taking back to Radio Shack – they might not accept it with this battery missing, voiding the guarantee, and b) it had been inside a good pair of wool socks and c) the check-In girl at Madrid had not given me a baggage ticket for them. I had to admit she’d paid me back pretty comprehensively for my bad humour.

Now I had to gird myself up to harass another baggage clerk about it and without even a baggage tag to make a case. I also hated not having a good supply of batteries for my unconvincing black boxes. But in the end it turned out to be pretty straight forward. I filled out a form and in return was given a lot of solid corporate promises.

Outside my 'limo' (as it was referred to with no obvious irony, this was Texas, after all) was waiting. In reality a bulky, snub nose Ford van with darkened windows cut into the sides, it also had a plastic dashboard got up to look like hand crafted walnut. The driver was young and very polite. His name was Wesley and he was also plainly exhausted.

We talked as he drove; mainly I think to reassure both of us that he was still awake. Wesley was a farm boy from near Corpus Christi. I told him I’d spent some time there and talked vaguely about an acquaintance of mine, Big Pam, who had settled there for a time last year, while her boyfriend/husband bought things with other people’s credit cards. Wesley was too tired to follow the conversation, but his instinctive good manners made him respond, often at random. He was barely coherent having managed, he told me, only two hours sleep in the last thirty-six. I believed him. I asked him why.

'I want to keep the job,' was his simple answer.

We’d also picked up a Yugoslav seaman from the airport. He was joining another ship. He sat in the back and said nothing. His hotel, also a Quality Inn, was relatively close to the airport but also inevitably, in the middle of permanent road works. The bit of the Interstate Freeway which coiled around it, seemed to be entirely dug up, while the hotel, when we finally got there, looked as temporary and unfinished as the road works. Maybe it was all a clever piece of landscaping in the ‘New Brutalism’. I was glad I wouldn't be staying there.

We dropped the Yugoslav off, still without a word, and then drove on twenty or thirty miles towards Galveston looking for my particular Quality Inn. The search took us past several other Quality Inns embedded in the urban sprawl along the Freeway. At an early stage, passing west of Houston, we drove for about twenty minutes under other roofed off freeways that criss-crossed above ours. I expect that South Fork ranch has a couple of Interstates just out of shot.

Gradually it was, how shall I put it...borne unto me that I was seeing the same gas stations, restaurants and shopping malls over and over again, sometimes on this side of the dark freeway, sometimes on the other. This was not an easy thing to pick up on as one flashing, winking, peeling block of Freeway looked much like the next – but distinctive patterns and arrangements began repeating themselves.

I asked Wesley what he thought. He considered it for a brief moment and then said he supposed we were lost, or rather not so much lost as unable to find my particular Quality Inn amongst all the other Quality Inns, motels, hotels, and Howard Johnston’s. This wasn’t really surprising as they all seemed built from the same plans, which from the look of them, had been mailed from the Acme BlobUlike Building Plan Company. The route of our nightmarish architectural odyssey was a typical (none of it, sadly was atypical) piece of urban brutality called THE BELTWAY.

The Beltway was the Greater Houston Ring Road and it made our own well loved M25 feel as cosy as the Yellow Brick Road. A very black, very flat ten laner, we’d now been circumnavigating it for hours like a blinded albatross. Poor Wesley then began a box search of a length of it in the vicinity, he thought, of my Quality Inn. We’d run up one side of the Beltway for a while and then swing off and down an underpass to emerge on the other side and begin a pull back through the other way again. All the time peering through the rain, past the winking, swirling lights along the front line, watching for the right Quality Inn sign.

By this time I was starting to drift off to sleep myself and woke once during a transit of an underpass to see another vehicle's running lights dead ahead. For a long second I couldn't remember where I was, let alone what side of the road we should be on – but it was plain that, in any circs, it shouldn’t be straight down the middle. I yelled and Wesley woke up in time to haul the rig over and clear of the other one.

Throughout all this, the limo's Dispatcher, joined from time to time by other disembodied voices, offered unfailingly misleading directions to my Quality Inn. This led me to wonder about the depth of the qualifying ‘Knowledge,’ the professional driver needed to get a job in Houston.

This took me back to 1982, when Hope,[12] came to meet me at Los Angeles Airport. We got in a taxi to go to Santa Monica – a not unknown or even inconsiderable whereabouts in that part of the world. But the driver had never heard of it, he’d even had great difficulty finding our way out of the airport. Hope watched this performance in silence for a few minutes and then, producing a map from her bag, directed us straight to Duncan’s house, no doubt taking advantage of any little ‘back doubles’ on the way. The driver was from Oklahoma and arriving that morning straight from the ranch, he’d got a job driving a taxi within an hour of getting off the Stagecoach at the bus depot. We were probably his first customers.

Back on the Beltway, I finally intervened by suggesting to Wesley that he ask the Dispatcher to phone the hotel in question and, if it indeed existed, to discover its whereabouts. What a great idea. Minutes later we were parked outside it. Although identical to all the others we’d passed, it didn’t have its own road works yet – maybe why we had so much trouble... Oh never mind!

In the foyer, I fell in at the end of a long, slow, shuffling queue to the reception desk. On finally getting there, I discover that, a) there was no reservation for me, and b) it was Rodeo Week in Houston. Yes, the town was chock-a-block with cowboys looking for rooms, and, yes, there was as much chance as a snowball etc. that I would get a room anywhere in the environs of Houston. So far a big thumbs down was fair comment, I thought, on whoever was supposed to be organising my arrival.

On the other side of the counter, two receptionists faced a foyer full of roomless, polite but far from gruntled cowboys. The receptionists, in their turn, responded with the polite menace usually peculiar to policemen. There was little warmth in the proceedings. What made it quite surreal was that the area behind the reception counter where the two girls worked, was quite small and they, although only in their early twenties, were both enormously fat. So fat, indeed, that a lot of their time was spent simply trying to get past each other.

Watching it, I thought my mind was going to crack, so leaving Wesley to ‘do something’ I headed for the bar. It was their bag anyway, as Wesley had just told me that the transport company was also in charge of hotel bookings, in the person of the Dispatcher.

The bar was big and dark and pretty full. Very loud Country & Western music came from somewhere, but the visibility didn't allow me to locate it; it could even have been a live band. The bar itself ran the length of the room, disappearing into the gloom in the direction of the music. Along it sat many solitary cowboys, mostly just staring into their drinks. I knew they were cowboys because they all wore Stetsons.

I joined them and stared into my drink. Nearby was a dance floor where much obscure activity was going on. At tables ranged along the bar, were seated bunches of mothers and daughters, arrogant and noisy, as if making some collective point to the silent men. The women actually all looked the same age but you could separate out the mothers – they were even fatter with little paper umbrellas sticking out from their drinks.

Then Wesley came in and told me he had got me a room in another Quality Inn that was only a ‘piece down the freeway’. This seemed good news until I discovered the ‘piece’ was the twenty or thirty miles back up the freeway to the Quality Inn, Unden den Roadworks, where we had dropped the silent Yugoslav off, all these hours before. He was probably thinking about getting up now.

So, we set off back up the Beltway (how I'll miss it) passing once again all the chicken inns, hamburger joints and gas stations interspersed by empty windswept parking lots lit by eerie yellow sodium lights that swung slowly in the wind, reminiscent of nothing so much as '...scene of crime' photos in 'True Detective'.

Eventually, we arrived back at our very first Quality Inn. Wesley, now nearly catatonic, staggered off into its brown depths to locate the Yugoslav. First time around he'd forgotten to get him to sign the transport docket. Quality Inn receptionists are obviously all alumni of the same charm school and he came back with a look of despair on his face. I silently took the unsigned piece of paper out of his unresisting hand, scribbled 'Sloban Somethingslobadas', gave it back, wished him goodnight and went off to bed.

FRIDAY 22nd FEBRUARY 1991

I left that Quality Inn in the morning, still without figuring out who it catered for – what its ‘market niche’ was. It had a confusion of pretensions but was ungraced by any class. But then again, everything worked. The air conditioner had come on and it hadn't roared like an Amtrak train. The bathroom was clean and had soap, towels and hot and cold water. The lights and the phone worked. Ditto the TV, although the effort of scrolling through its forty odd cable channels had not been worth it. Most of them seemed to be showing the same ‘I Love Lucy’ episode – a monochrome warning from across the decades against deregulating television.

The Quality Inn's motto could be ‘clean enough, comfy enough and cheap enough’. Their prices, as with most costs in the US of A, were probably less than half the equivalent in Europe (but we have our unrivalled social services to pay for). Anyway, such places are difficult to criticise in a balanced way mainly because they are somehow difficult to think about in a balanced way. It gave me the feeling, as does so much of life in these United States, that it was all actually going on behind a thick sheet of plate glass. If they’d only obliged us by speaking another language, we Brits could dismiss them in a couple of lines, but we have a common history and therein lies the problem.

Another ‘limo’ picked me up. It was from the same company. I hoped the driver of last night, and his Dispatcher, were both in bed by now. We drove down to the tug. She’s called the Salvision and was moored at the Municipal Wharf, near the top end of the Houston Ship Canal.

The first thing I noticed as we drove up to her was that while I had been away, they had got themselves another barge. The new barge looked much bigger, towering far above the tug. I thought of the trouble we had with the old, smaller barge, but ‘Up Ever Up’ is the Mexican Owner's watchword – as long as someone else is doing the Ever Upping.

The new barge was a great ugly red hulk – but then barges tend to be. On the bow was her name, the ‘Caribbean Sea’. Just below the name, near to the stem, was a deep dent. It was several feet long and looked recent. No doubt a portent of things to come. No one was about as I climbed onboard and headed for the Captain's cabin.

Going through the door, the first person I saw was the Grey Shadow. My heart instantly sank passed my boots. I’d known, of course, that he was likely to be on board but, superstitiously, had hoped to see someone else first – anyone else. Actually, it was more than a superstition. He was sitting in a chair at the desk. My desk! On our earlier tour together, I wouldn’t let him in the door.

I walked straight past him and shook hands with Smith, the Captain I was taking over from. I knew him from before. We'd been alternating commands for the last six months.

Smith was redder in the face than I remembered from Baton Rouge, four months earlier. He was also full of beer and bonhomie, the normal condition on paying-off day. Before we had finished shaking hands, he launched into a litany of events and incidents from the last four months.

They all concerned adventures with the rig.[13] One of the things mentioned, which might affect me, was that the new Filipino Chief Officer was a rum bird. He’d inadvertently told some local union guy that the crew had been doing their work. The wharf was tightly unionised, and the union was now threatening to blacklist the rig. Smith added that the Agent was confident he could handle it.

As Smith was briefing me, I gave him my undivided attention while continuing to blank the Shadow.[14]After a minute or so, I suppose having considered he’d made his point, the Shadow got up and very carefully and with elaborate poise, sauntered the few feet to his cabin next door.

Once the Shadow had gone, I brought up the subject of Smith wanting to become a North Sea Pilot. When he’d taken over from me in Baton Rouge last year, he’d asked me about it and I’d promised to inquire. This I had duly done by phoning Captain Hutchinson, while transiting London,

Captain Hutchinson was owner of the pilot agency I had been working for the last thirteen or so years and was also, by coincidence, looking for new pilots. I had privately thought that Smith's age might be against him, but when I told Captain Hutchinson that he was fifty-six, Hutch, God bless him, said it was an ideal age because, in the event of him being no good or the work drying up, he wouldn’t be there forever. Hutch had no truck with ageism, being himself on the sunset side of eighty. I also don’t think he’d know an ‘ism’ if one jumped out and bit him below his prosthetic knee. Instead he was guided by robust common sense and gritty personal experience of the shipping business, during a sea career that went back well before the Second World War.

Smith now informed me, in a single casual phrase, that he’d changed his mind, didn’t want the piloting job, and immediately went on to talk of other things. I kept my face (I hope) impassive. The ‘other things’ explained his loss of interest in the piloting job. While at home on leave last time, he’d been in contact with the managers of the Salvision and was, he now thought, in line for a command on one of their boring long haul bulk carriers.[15] I could hardly think of a worse job at sea but kept quiet, a technique I’d assumed after finally managing to stop drinking. It was designed to avoid the sterile confrontations that had so enlivened my previous life.

But Smith wouldn't have noticed anyway. He was mostly talking at me by now. I could see that in his mind, he was home already. Listening to him run through his Master Plan, I was still irritated about the trouble I'd gone through to get him what was quite a coveted job in our business. So, for about the thousandth time in my life I decided that it was mostly pointless to do things for people. Favours are usually asked off the wall, as it were, and so if you do actually deliver on them, they are often unwanted and/or out of date. Sometimes the victim is even annoyed, as if in some undefined way you'd intruded, turned the clock back.

Smith realising, I suppose, that I hadn't spoken for several minutes and therefore I might be offended, offered in way of mitigation that he required an income of thirty-seven thousand a year ‘...before I could consider coming ashore.’ The way he put it made it sound as if the waterfront was lined by crowds beckoning him to dry land and he had to be strong. I still didn’t say anything. Throughout the monologue, he'd never actually asked what could be earned as a North Sea Pilot and now I was dammed if I was going to volunteer it (and a lot more that £37K)

In the early afternoon he finally cleared off, shadowed by the Shadow, who was to see him off at the airport. I could imagine the whispered regrets at his going, seeing it in the washed out colours of fifties cinema with plucky little Doris waving from the barrier while Rock Hudson climbed the steps, to finally turn and wave one last time from the aircraft door. After they’d gone I called the limo company to pick me up. I wanted to go to the nearest branch of Radio Shack. I had to change the cordless phone, bought the previous September in New Orleans. I wanted one that worked. I also wanted to buy a good short wave receiver to get the BBC Overseas Service.

By the time I reached Radio Shack's Pasadena branch, I’d girded myself up to make a lot of noise to cover up having lost the phone's patent battery. The lady who ran that particular branch of Radio Shack was both tough and competent. She had a lapel badge with her name and rank, as they all did. She was black and her badge was inscribed: W. FOREMAN. I made a joke about whether it was her name or her rank and got an inscrutable stare in return.

She took no prisoners so I’d decided by then that bullying wouldn’t work. She was obviously not going to be intimidated and I had also just remembered that George Foreman, ex World Heavyweight Champion and now, at forty plus, in the process of making a comeback (against Evander Holyfield, the current world champion) was also from Houston. On both counts, I didn’t want to take her on, she looked; in her own right, to be the wrong person to annoy. It got better. When she gave me a receipt for the broken phone, she signed it ‘Wonder Foreman’. Would any Dating Agency have the nerve to match her with a Mr Loaf?

Today the driver of the limo was a fat, laconic 'good ole boy' and a native of Houston. He had been doing this awful job for over twenty years and it didn't bother him ‘one damn bit’. We started looking for a radio shop locally but gradually were pulled further and further afield as he always knew another radio store ‘...just a tad down the Freeway’ - obviously the radio shop at the end of the rainbow. Eventually we had to turn back, still empty handed, somewhere in the outskirts of Galveston. Here, going round the block can put miles on you.

In the United States and especially in Texas, I always feel that beneath the quirky, down home, exteriors of most of these ‘characters’ there is a frustrated thespian beavering away to get it just right. But I don't think I’ll ever know... and all through that long day the thought that I hadn't done any Open University stuff in a week nagged at me. Actually, the OU and its blasted cut-off assignment dates was the single most relentlessly tyrannical force in my life.

One Day I Will Be Free!

SATURDAY 23rd FEBRUARY 1991

Today, I paid over $300 for a tiny short-wave radio. It is certainly the smallest radio of any kind that I have ever seen, about five inches by three. I am definitely not going to tell Carol how much it cost. The Ground War in the Gulf also began today. You can imagine the hysteria in the media, it being Texas and a War with non-stop TV and radio coverage. Their biggest problem soon emerged; there was nothing to cover yet.

So instead, the screen is filled up with panels of talking heads, going at it nonstop. They are all ex-military, their hair often briefer than the fuzz on an old armchair. The favourite setting is to have them seated in circles, usually around very low tables, while they impatiently await their turn to second guess Norman.[16] Then, when they’d exhausted every possible permutation, library shots of ‘technology’ appeared. The piece of technology I’m interested in at the moment is the Sony radio.

The other piece I'm also interested in is the mysterious Colombian lady who sold it to me. I wonder what she’s up to. She hangs about the tug procuring things for the crew. All extracurricular needs catered for, I imagine. There seems hardly a limit to her range. She had originally offered to get me a radio. I put a limit of $150 on it. Today, she arrived onboard with one which she handed me with a great show of indifference and an offhand disclaimer of all responsibility for the price.

Then she departed to attend to 'some other things', adding that she'd be back later. Of course, as soon as I started to examine its different bits, first the 'active' battery driven antenna which can draw in the frailest, mistiest signals from Bush House - and then the overall functionalism of the little set itself, I had to have it.

Its reception was also better than the tug’s big radio. I wonder did this outcome take her by as much surprise as it did me. I think not. I was dealing with a lady from Medellin – on the recommendation of the ship’s chandler.[17]

He is also, by the look of him, from that part of South America. I gave him all our order for galley supplies, food etc. which amounts to about $4,000, because, unusual for a ship's chandler, he appeared to be honest (here, I also except Leroy from Corpus Crista here).

He was brown and square like many Central American Indians and his manner was open and straight forwards. During an earlier conversation he told me how after working his way up from broom boy to actually owning his own ship's chandler's business, employing fifteen people at its height, he’d lost it all through bad debts.

A couple of big shipping companies had gone to the wall owing him relatively large amounts, $45,000 in one case. This company’s last remaining ship had been arrested and auctioned off somewhere in Arabia, so, needless to say, not a cent of any colour got back to him.

The lady from Colombia came back to collect the three hundred and five dollars for the radio. The extra five was a nice little flourish. It was to persuade that some sort of genuine mathematical costing was behind the final price she’d decided to stick me with ($300). It wouldn't have been in her nature to deduct five bucks and make it $295.

After she’d gone, I returned to the Open University. The subject of the moment is Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd. The piece in question was a hateful nightmare of a play called ‘Endgame’ and as I hadn’t received the OU video of the actual production, it is fated to be beyond my reach until, in my old age, I find myself forced to relive it in some old folk’s home. I hate Endgame – and the literary pretensions that dumped it, like a dead and suppurating fish, onto the OU syllabus. I went to bed at nine.

SUNDAY 24th FEBRUARY 1991

Another sunny day in Houston, I worked on Endgame for most of the morning. It’s even worse than I had imagined and eventually I decided that without a video of the whole sorry piece, I couldn’t do much. I switched with great relief to poetry. Much, much better.

About twelve thirty, I walked up to the Seaman's Club. It was still closed so I hung around outside, protecting my little run – my corridor of space from other early arrivals. On the stroke of one, just as its doors swung open, the Shadow materialised as if from a trap door and bustled in ahead of me.

Then with a few deft strokes, standing well back from the visitor's book, he signed his name, his whole manner indicating that this was yet another situation he was effortlessly familiar with – a pose an eleven year-old might strain after. He’d probably been lurking behind the hedge, waiting to get his arrival right His public manner both amuses and annoys me – more the latter now, I'm afraid.

I don't know if he allows himself a private manner. God knows what he wants from me; as I write this (back onboard later) I can hear him lurking outside my door by the fire extinguisher. If I were to go out now, he’d be busy officiously checking its recharge expiry dates.

I phoned Carol from the Seaman's Club. A nice, but laconic conversation as she speaks at about two miles an hour, no matter what the crisis. She went to Ricci Arias about her bad back. He is a well-known horseman who doubles as a very good physiotherapist. Lila had William to stay for the weekend. According to Carol, they gave each other immoral support in cheekiness. Carol has changed her mind about William. In future, she says, he’ll be enjoyed in smaller doses.

William's parents are drifting through Southern Spain in an old bus. They live off the proceeds from performances they give with their band. It's called the ‘Court of Miracles’. No prize for guessing they’re old hippies. More than that, they are representative old hippies. William, who is eleven, insists, of course, on short hair and the correct sneakers. Lila, who has already amassed thirty-two out of the thirty-eight extant Just William books, often confuses him with Richmal Crompton's original. One day he’ll probably run away from the travelling band to become an accountant. At the moment William fits the bill for Lila. But not anymore, it seems, for Carol.

Carol also told me the Meccano set (No 2) I’d ordered for Lila, has arrived. It had taken several weeks, but what are several weeks to the Spanish Post Office. Army call-up papers sent out in 1936 have still not arrived. The phone call cost $14. Later that evening I called Carol's sister Katy in Dallas again, but still no reply. I also left a message for Joanna Bot, on her answering machine.

Thereafter I spent the evening trying to improve the radio’s short wave reception. I strung a long wire antenna from my port hole up into the rigging. It was no better but it allowed me to remove the 'active' powered rod antenna back to inside of my cabin.

Although designed for outside use; in its User Manual, there’s a snazzy illustration of it hanging off a balcony next to a young couple drinking cocktails and gazing into each other's eyes, it's not actually weather proof. I suppose the balcony lovers wanted a quick fix on the news before getting it on in whatever rainless paradise they were in.

I then read some more and afterwards worked on the tapestry I’m doing for Louise[18] (she's a computer network engineer with the BBC). My design includes her name across the bottom in large letters, in case there is any doubt about who it’s for. I’m sure she'll like it as she treasures anything from our families past. Thank God she doesn't have to share the memories. She has stuff on her wall my mother made when she was young – and even cross stitch stuff I did when I was about eight, at my primary school in Kinloch Rannoch.

While stitching away, I listened to the war news. The ground war was now lapping around Kuwait, Saddam's Republican Guard having already been outflanked to the west. Evidently the allied forces have taken 15,000 Iraqi prisoners in one and a half days, Saddam's army seems to have been organised by his mother.

I suppose