Gordon Barlow

My first foreign country was Norway, in the summer of 1963, - not counting the few stops the ship made between Australia and England, and not counting England itself. I hitch-hikeded by myself around the three Scandinavian countries, and worked for a few weeks in one of them. That story belongs here in this "Back in the Day" thread. However... in what I can only call a fit of absent-mindedness, the other day I started a thread in the Scandinavian forum. Still in the "Living and Moving Abroad" section, but in the Europe sub-section, and the title of the thread is "Travels in Norway".

Now... I can't duplicate my posts - that's against the BE rules - and I don't want to abandon the poor old Scandinavian forum, which needs the attention - so I can only invite anyone who would like to read any of those back-in-the-day posts (limited to Norway and its near neighbours) to go over to the Scandinavian forum. So far, I've only told about having a birthday swim inside the Arctic Circle and rejecting the offer of a week-long voyage up to Spitzbergen, but there was plenty else that happened in my three months in the region.

I wish I'd done more. I now have three Norwegian grandchildren, who probably expect more. Sigh...

Gordon Barlow

Cripes! That's pretty thick of the girl's parents to spoil their child - and dangerous for their own financial security, surely. The deposit on a unit isn't going to help much if the girl isn't taught the basics of earning a living! I must admit that Linda and I paid for our son's first house - a nice little shack in a forest in southern Norway when he looked set to marry a girl there. He and his friends built on the ruins of what was already there, and the cost to us was about $60K, if I remember. We reckoned that every child can reasonably expect the old folks to come good for the first house. (Though not at age 17, for goodness sake!) His marriage intentions fell away, but one of his daughters lives in the house now, and pays him rent. His next purchase was for 60 acres of (mainly) trees on the side of a mountain up in ski-country, but that one he had to take out a 20-year mortgage for. My first house was a "town house" (a two story condo) here in Cayman at the age of 39, and we paid cash from what we'd saved over the years.

His (my son's) financial-management skills have lain undeveloped for as long as he's been alive, pretty much. He was a hippie for more years than was prudent. The closest he came to owning a house (well, to be fair he did actually own it, although er...) was living for six months in a tree-house in Guatemala overlooking Lake Atitlan. The local Mayan natives built a platform 20 feet or so up in a solid tree while he and his girlfriend were down in Peru. In theory, he still does own it. Ah well, that's a whole nother story! I'll stop here.

Gordon Barlow

As I've told in the "Small World" thread of this Forum... when I stepped off the bus from Southampton to London in 1963, Graham was walking down the street and greeted me with a surprised "G'day Pablo!" We had been school chums in Brisbane eight years before - he a day-boy, me a boarder. On long weekends we boarders were allowed to spend Sundays with friends at their homes, and Graham invited me a few times during the years we knew each other there. His mother thought Pablo was my real name, and neither of us bothered to correct her. That happened with most kids with nicknames. How I got my nickname was this...

I was eleven when I started at boarding school, 250 miles from home because the local school ran out of teachers. Painfully shy, and small for my age, I was put in the charge of a veteran boarder of my own age who showed me the ropes and introduced me around. Four or five of us kids squatted in the dirt and scratched our names in block capitals with twigs. When some older boys came by to see what we were doing, we hastily erased them to avoid being jeered at; but I wasn't quick enough to do more than wipe out my first name and bits of the surname. One of the intruders looked down scornfully at what was left. "What's this name? It looks like PABLO! What is he, a Mexican? Hahaha!" "Yes he is", my protector retorted bravely. "So what?" "Huh. He doesn’t look like a Mexican." "Well, his mother's Mexican. Have you got something against Mexicans?"

Now, even bullies were rarely brave enough to bad-mouth a boy's mother. Shamed, the intruders wandered away. My companions - all younger than the others, remember - felt obliged ever after, to call me and refer to me by the invented name, lest they be beaten up by the older boys for lying. There were a few foreign names in the school, but I was the only Mexican, and the name stuck like glue. Very few of the 1200 pupils ever knew my real name. When my brother came the next year, aged nine and even smaller than me, he was Little Pablo.

Two years after that chance meeting with Graham in London (see above), Linda and I were dragged into a shop in Esfahan, Iran, to meet another pair of European bums. It was always a fun thing for the local loiterers to watch foreigners gabble away in their weird languages. Graham didn't disappoint them - or me. "G'day Pablo!" he said in surprise. And he still calls me Pablo on the phone and in emails. Gathered around the barbie at his home last time I was in Australia, I was introduced to his friends as Pablo. Well, why not, eh? It's too late for him to change now.

Gordon Barlow

In my dotage (84 in August), I fill in my days wondering what to do with all the junk in this house. Starting with the old stuff. An oil painting of my English grandfather's grandmother, for instance, dating from the mid 1800s. I first saw it in my dad's cousin's house in Bath in 1963, and she promised to leave it to me in her Will. When she died, her lawyers shipped it to me in Cayman, and insured it for 2000 pds in case it got lost along the way. It didn't get lost, and in due course I got a call from Cayman Customs telling me I could collect it for a fee of 800 pds. Say what??!! "It's worth 2000 pounds and the Import Duty is 40%," I was told. I protested that it had no commercial value at all, and the senders had just plucked a figure out of the air. "Sorry, but rules is rules. Pay up or you can't take it." Huh. Well, that was easy. I told them to send it back to England.

Now if there's one thing a bureaucrat never wants to do it's to reverse a decision. And if there's one thing I never want to do it's to lose an argument. The talent that bluffed our way through the Berlin Wall forty years before (1965, I've posted the story somewhere on BE) came to life and lifted its stubborn head. After a bit of argy-bargy, we agreed that the painting probably qualified as an antique and as such didn't attract any Duty. The girl and I had a bit of a chuckle, and I picked it up next day.

It's on my wall in the lounge now, opposite a pastel picture of a Mrs Farrar who was some kind of family friend in Bath. Sadly, that picture (painting, is it?) is spoiled by water that dripped from a hole in my roof that I didn't notice in time. Can pastels ever be re-done? Remember that one of Jesus in the museum in Madrid a few years ago, that the cleaner wiped with a wet cloth? Was that ever fixed?

Rainydaze

If you have old photos or documents from a specific area and time, they may be of interest to a local museum?

No advice about repairing the pastel, sorry Gordon. Only that you couldn’t possibly make a bigger farce of it than that Jesus picture

Gordon Barlow

For those who don't know what Rainydaze and I are laughing about, here's a link to a short YouTube summary of the disaster.

Gordon Barlow

For any visitor here who is interested in travel stories of earlier times, there is a wonderful series of posts called "The Travel Thread" in The Lounge forum by BE member Kimilseung. The stories are well worth reading. It begins on the thread's Post #32. He hitch-hiked in Mongolia, Tibet, and Cambodia, to name but three. I've invited him to post here in "Back in the Day" too, and I hope he does.

Gordon Barlow

I can't be the only father on BE who didn't want children. The English comedian Simon Evans says that when his wife told him, "it's now or never", he thought "so never is an option. Alas, no. That was merely a rhetorical device..." I too was abruptly out-voted.

And at the actual birth of our son, I regretted being there. It was the most outrageously nasty event of my life - watching a display of a cruelty beyond measure. The average woman's response to that complaint is "Well, what about us? You only have to watch. We're the ones suffering the pain!" Which rather evades the issue, doesn't it.

A question arises... When and why did it become customary for men to be present during their wives' torture? I don't think my father was present for any of his children's births (1930s & '40s). Old movies show fathers pacing up and down in corridors, waiting to be allowed to greet a baby cleaned of all blood and intestines, in the arms of a smiling mother glowing with pride and sweat. So why did that ever change? I went through the ritual forty-odd years ago, yet it's still painfully easy to recall. I can't be the only father here who regrets being present. Surely not.