This past Sunday during our weekly family Houseparty call, the family got involved in a discussion about climate change including what energy we will use in the future. Cars? Interesting and a good subject to express my layman's views within my blog.
Luckily for you all, I have decided to delay my opinion on the subject as my trains of thought deviated, I say plural ‘trains’, as my old mind seems to go down many tracks at one time. I was distracted by two events, one which especially amused me.
I mentioned last week I had made a doctor's appointment at the old folks home run by the Misericórdia de Penela, a five-hundred-year-old charity, which in its many roles takes care of the old, poor and homeless. On Monday, I had my appointment very early in the morning with a resident doctor there. My journey there was shrouded in dense mist as the sun had not yet burnt it off. Poor visibility to say the least. Anyway, on arrival at the Misericordia, I was the only person around although the doors were wide open. No security worries here. Shortly after my arrival, an elderly gentleman appeared who looked more like a resident than a member of staff. A few minutes later he returned to the foyer in a white coat requesting my attendance in his consulting room. He was the doctor. I presented him with all my details including my eye test results carried out previously by an optician. After entering my details in the Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes (MIT) online site, he was then meant to carry out a physical and psychological assessment for the purpose of allowing me to revalidate my driver’s licence. In Portugal, this is done every two years once you reach the age of 70. My health and psychological state seemed to be assessed by a single quick glance. I must have looked healthier and saner than I felt. No issues. He then scrambled around in his drawer pulling out a red and yellow magic marker. Not satisfied, he scrambled around some more only stopping once he produced a green magic marker to add to the other two. He then held each up, in turn, to confirm I could see and identify red, green and yellow. He obviously did not have an orange one. He then showed me some handwritten letters which I read out to him, despite my eye test confirming I was not colour blind. He then signed me off fit to drive but for some reason added glasses which I noticed when I translated the form on returning home. He did not speak English while my rudimentary Portuguese leaves much to be desired. I have glasses but my optician informs me my eyes are good enough to drive without. I should say just the one eye, as the other has only 30% vision. Combined I have 80%. Não faz mal. Thirty Euros covered his time, the alternative was 50 Euros for an online private consultation. I presume this is added income as it was outside his work time for the Misericórdia. Also, who needs sophisticated equipment when a biro and some magic markers will do. As I write, I have still been unable to get onto the MIT online site to validate my licence. Why are online tasks always such a challenge?
The second event was a visit to the dentist. The fourth dentist we have used since arriving in Portugal in our hunt to find one who can clean Rozanne’s very sensitive teeth with no pain. I went first this time. While I waited for Rozanne, I reflected on my historical dental visits.
“When did the dentist chair change from a place of perceived torture to a throne of technical wonder? It certainly happened within my lifetime.” - Peter McSporran
My first visit ever to the dentist was in Tobermory where the dentist arrived by boat which provided him with both transport and a fully equipped consultation room. Should it be called a ‘consulting cabin’? I remember having to be taken out to his vessel by rowing boat. I thought it was a real adventure until he started to work on my mouth. My mother was still alive so I am unsure why I was visiting the dentist at such a young age. My feeling of adventure was short-lived, as unfortunately, the metal tool he used burnt both my cheek and top lip having been taken straight from the steaming steriliser. I have had an aversion to dentists ever since, although some have been both friends and masters of their trade. I looked up on the internet who the boat dentist may have been. I learned that dentists named Cadden who were brothers used to do work on the Inner Isles in those days by boat. The records talk about the 60s while my episode was in the 50s. Even so, I am sure it was the same dentist.
Long gone are the days of painful memories of a noisy drill, the smell of burning ivory and pain which the quick whiff of laughing gas failed to temper.
My next visit to a dentist was to Oban Cottage Hospital following being trampled by a cow I had been halter training for Salen Show. It flattened me after being spooked by a cat. In doing so it stood on my mouth knocking out my newly emerged second front teeth. Whatever they did at the Oban Cottage Hospital was under full anaesthetic with pain only being present before and after.
I then went through an extended time with no lower front teeth until eventually receiving both a plate for my missing teeth and a brace for my upper large protruding front teeth. How I hated that brace which became agony due to my own actions. I would diligently go back every few weeks for it to be tightened which became ever more painful as in-between visits I would remove it regularly for comfort. The dentist could not understand why it was taking so long to straighten my teeth no matter how often he tightened that brace. Eventually, it dawned on him what I was doing. Subsequently, he refused to see me anymore leaving me happy without the brace but deteriorating teeth. As a child, I had very bad teeth. My parents said it was because of the soft mountain water on Mull. Our water came directly from a small burn in the hills behind our house. Maybe it was the water, maybe it was due to the sweets my aunts gave me money for every day or it was maybe just that I was not too diligent in brushing my teeth. Aunts are not as diligent as parents in policing these matters although stricter in others.
At boarding school, a dentist was only visited once the pain was too much to handle. Treatment by the school clinic for toothache was standard. A handful of codeine pills to chew on. Treatment for a headache was similar, this time you swallowed the pills. I had many headaches due to being prone to concussions from rugby. We could access a limitless amount of codeine at Keil School, unlike today where there are strict rules on its use. I lost a few teeth in senior school with a further one removed in Mombasa while I was in the Merchant Navy. That particular tooth came out painfully in bits. There we were given cloves for toothache, dentists were only for extraction it seemed, not for tooth protection. Cloves do relieve the pain to some extent. We were in the right place to buy cloves as we visited Zanzibar every trip.
Dentistry obviously was not so lucrative in those days compared to now with all its various treatments. While in the Merchant Navy during some fracas a large air conditioning unit fell on my head with the only damage being to my front teeth plate which smashed. I did not have it replaced. For the next ten years, I went with a large gap in the front of my mouth, hidden by my large top front teeth and the fact that I am “overshot”. Livestock farmers will know what I mean.
At college, I never visited a dentist the whole time while I was there. Alcohol replaced codeine. When arriving in Zimbabwe with a mouth of rotten teeth I was forced to visit the dentist. The unfortunate dentist that had to deal with me was Erik Borthwick, who hailed from Greenock, just across the Clyde where I had gone to school. He removed the unsavable and stemmed the rot in the others. Shortly after Zimbabwean independence, he left with John Plant becoming my dentist. His dad was our crop sprayer pilot. He not only looked after my teeth but also provided me with a bridge that has stayed in place for close to some forty years. In Scotland, even with my stepmother pressing, the dentists refused to put in a bridge as they said it would not last, the neighbouring teeth being too weak to support it. John Plant to his credit proved them wrong. Once John moved to Australia Alex Coyle, surprisingly also from around Greenock or Gourock, took over. In Zambia, a nice young lady Maxine Snowden looked after my teeth. It has now been more than ten years since I lost a tooth, which she had to remove with a hammer. Needless to say, I have lost my fear of dentists, however, I am not proud of my teeth.
“Most of the young women’s eyes I have looked into over the past ten years have been dentists.” - Peter McSporran
A Lonely Farm Assistant Life
As I had joined my employment well into the cropping season I had missed the planting of the crops. Following the detasseling of the seed maize, the male lines were cut out by hand using machetes. Then carried on the back of the cutter to be loaded onto a trailer and taken to the home farm where it was chopped using a Gale silage cutter which also blew it into a silage pit. Huge hand-dug pits, we had used crawlers for the like in Scotland. That Gale was belt driven with white metal bearings soon becoming the bane of my life. Everything stopped when it stopped all the way back to the field cutting. Something easily noticed by my boss no matter where he was on the farm. Those white metal bearings gave me endless headaches. Hamish became very animated when the machine stopped as the whole farm stopped. He blamed me for each and every stoppage. “Did you not grease these bearings?” was his battle cry. Fixing required a two hour trip to an engineer's works in Salisbury for the soft metal bushing to be replaced. I made many trips that first year. In hindsight why we did not replace the white metal bearings with roller bearings, I cannot say. Yes, wise farm assistants do what they are told, they are not paid to think. A number of times I decided to use my own initiative and it did not end well.
At this time the Stevens at Portlet decided what I needed was a dog for company instead of sitting on my own in the evening. A remedy for loneliness? They had Rhodesian Ridgebacks so I duly received a Ridgeback pup called yes, Shumba. As I did not have a pickup, once the dog, a bitch making a mockery of its name, was old enough, would run around the farm following my motorbike, scaring the living daylights out of the farm workers' children who she loved to chase. Never a bite luckily. That was all well and good until she decided the boss on his motorbike was a better challenge than a village child. After successfully dismounting Hamish by force twice from his motorbike on the move, the dog was banished to the house wherein my absence it slowly devoured the little furniture I had. At about this time an elderly retired tea planter, Mr Bradshaw who leased the Highland Farms house, left. I moved from my cottage into that larger house with its bigger garden allowing me to leave the dog at home. Boss Brush as Mr Bradshaw was called loved shooting birds, especially guinea fowl. He would instruct me if I ever shot guinea fowl, only to shoot the old birds as it strengthened the flock. He claimed he always did this, how I do not know, as even with my young eyes I could not tell the difference between a young and old guinea fowl in flight. Yet his eighty-year-old eyes must have, as guinea fowls surely prospered on Highlands, more than any of the other farms.
My social life was still restricted to once a fortnight Saturday nights at the Foxes. Why do surrogate parents think a good home-cooked family meal is better than carousing the night away in town. Without transport, I had no alternative. We did manage a few beers in the Quorn and Feathers Hotels, both close to Marlborough and I sampled the Blue Gardenia’s hamburgers often on my way home from shopping.
Despite the novelty of my new life, I was probably the loneliest I have ever felt. Was it because I was far from old friends or lack of female company?
After harvest and following the processing of the seed maize, it was suggested by Hamish that I take some leave. My sister and brother-in-law were on Tanganda’s New Years Gift tea estate in Chipinge. Close to some 500 km away. How to get there? Of course, buy a second-hand car. This was to prove a very costly mistake.
Two Extraordinary Men
One day whilst in my office in Lusaka, I was asked if I could come down to the International Finance Corporation (IFC) offices on the floor below to meet someone looking for funding on an irrigation project. On arriving at their offices, Willie Franklin, a well known and respected Zambian commercial farmer was there. He had come to them, the IFC which is part of the World Bank, with a proposal for an irrigation scheme on the Kafue River which not only included commercial farmers but also the local community. At face value something that could interest InFraCo as it required soft money for the irrigation infrastructure. I was sceptical about it, as it seemed complicated with large distances to be covered. Needless to say, Han liked the idea with both of us being impressed by Willie’s presentation followed by a positive meeting with the local community. There were many hurdles to face but on meeting the impressive community leader and local councillor Maurice Hakapulwe it was proposed to at least develop the scheme on paper. To work it would have to include the neighbouring village of Chikupi which held control of the land between the Chanyanya community and the commercial farming land. The commercial farmers involved were Willie Franklin, their de facto leader, Tom Roberts, Jacob Schoemaker and Kevin Puffett. In principle the commercial farmers were in favour as were the Chanyanya Community, the problem was the people of Chikupi were not sold on it, with both national and tribal politics rearing their heads. This was in 2006 with Richard Parry, a director of InFraCo now taking an active part.
One of the difficulties was that Maurice was a member of the opposition party, UNDP along with being a supporter of HH, Zambia’s now recently elected president. He was a Tonga while the Bemba’s had control of parliament. Remember this was some fifteen years ago. The further complication was the Chanyanya Community had uniquely taken land title while the Chikupi area was still deemed traditional land, therefore resistance was found within the headmen, the traditional leaders who feared they would lose some of their vested power. Maurice was the most unselfish community leader I ever came across, working tirelessly for his area for no reward. It was decided to go ahead with a pilot scheme called the Chanyanya Infrastructural Company Limited (CIC) in the hopes that once the Chikupi community saw the benefits they would reconsider. To this end, a young Canadian from Engineers without Borders, Kevin Thompson, was employed to work alongside Maurice with the community including implementing the Resettlement Action Plan (RAP) and house building exercise. Kevin was also unique in not only believing in what he was trying to help achieve but also implementing it for little reward. Both these selfless men have always stood out as genuinely good people. Their patience and endurance along with their people skills were extraordinary. The pilot scheme was set up under their efforts funded by InFraCo. Unfortunately in this period, Kevin was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. We were shocked to see such a fit young man waste away so quickly returning to Canada where he passed. At about this time my partner, Paul Cartwright left our consultancy to take up full-time employment with InFraCo in London to develop the larger scheme which is now nearing completion as JaKana Farms. Unfortunately, Willie’s land was found to be too great a distance to move the water while both Jacob and Tom benefitted. Jacob to the extent he sold all his land to the scheme while Tom sold part. I am unaware of the present structure having left Zambia some five years ago. Good luck to the participants and sponsors. It has been a long slog.
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