Not pink, just dotty.

I caught Bobby at a good moment.  We had a window and we opened it wide onto the world.

And so it was that we went back to the 1960's.  

From there we traveled with a pen from one small aerodrome to another, skipping across the ocean like a stone, because this was a tiny plane and to get from England to the Caribbean you had to go via Iceland and Nova Scotia, New York, Florida etc.

Africa is easier.  You touch down in Marseille or Granada and then you can hop along the West coast and back up the East coast.  The South was Terra Nongrata (sic). For some reason the middle needed very little mapping.

In the suitcase I'd found an article that bobby had written in the 1970's, describing a Christmas spent alone in the Saudi desert which he'd crossed with all the camera equipment in a borrowed Land Cruiser.  
The crew had left to go home on Christmas eve and the new crew were due out mid January.  In the meantime it was his job to transfer the dark room from Jeddah to Riyadh. 

He describes crossing the Wadi Fatima, taking the enforced detour known as the 'Christian Bypass' which kept non Muslims at a distance from Mecca and headed on to the east of the Arafat Plain.  

He describes the cold wind off the Nafud and the clear night skies, the wind drifting the sand across the road and the earth's horizon rounded as if it were the ocean and not land. 

At midnight he finds a deserted village of mud houses and spends Christmas night in his sleeping bag in one of them, with a cup ,of Bovril heated up on the primus.

I finish reading and nudge him and say 'who wrote that?' He puts on a falsetto voice and says 'Me, before I was a silly bugger'




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