Adventures In the Luminous Aether

I arrived in Saudi immediately after having been on the Mi Amigo, the Radio Caroline radio ship. It was immediately obvious that I needed some kind of vehicle. The problem with taxis, in Saudi, is the mafi worraga problem, (phonetic equivalent of the Arabic as I heard it. It means the person cannot read or write.) I didn’t have a pile of money to spare, so I went to a car auction site. Don’t ask me how I found my way there. I was 27 or 28 years old, and when I tried to spe...ak the Arabic I had learned on Masirah Island, the locals laughed and said I was speaking some retro fishing people’s dialect. The vast majority of the cars were practically brand new Mercedes or other upmarket brands. Way out of my price range. Finally it came down to a choice between a Mercedes saloon that looked like it might have belonged to Himmler, or a 1972 Cadillac Eldorado. I bought the Caddy. In the song ‘Asshole’ bu Denis Leary, (part of his comedy routine) he says: I'm gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac, El Dorado convertible Hot pink with whale skin hub caps and all leather cow interior And big brown baby seal eyes for headlights, yeah And I'm gonna drive around in that baby at 115 mph, getting one mile per gallon. And that’s how it was with me. The thing had a 7.7L (472 cu in) V8 motor, auto transmission, and FWD. It did 7 mpg. That didn’t matter since petrol cost 10 cents a gallon. The following day I drove the 29Km to Kilo 29 Transmitting Station to do my afternoon shift as station manager. It’s out there on the Mecca Road from Jeddah, past the junkyards full of endless, sand-scoured, bright steel 1950s Buicks. As I approached the gates I saw an unusual hive of activity. Soldiers forming an honour guard. Wondering what that was about I pulled up at the barrier. The officer peered in, visibly angry, and gave me an earful in Arabic. Fortunately, I had no idea what he was saying, but I memorized the vocabulary for future use. Someone had spotted the approaching Caddy and assumed a member of the Royal family was visiting. See more

When I became an installation engineer I never imagined it was going to take up a big chunk of my life. The Gambia, for instance. These guys lost their lives just a few weeks after we left. I just cannot imagine why a bunch of mercenaries working for Colonel Gaddafi thought that the aerial engineer and his assistant were some kind of threat. Even the DJ who I used to sit in with, to do the two hour Sunday reggae program. Also killed. Suffocated in a stinking jail cell with do...zens of others crammed into an unventilated room. There are still times when I wonder if Tim and I could have done more, changed the outcome. We could hardly have grabbed the letter off the guy in the bar. But when we approached the (British) security guys, they wouldn't take our word for it. Told us to run along. Nothing happening here. And that makes me wonder. Was it really incompetence - or another thing? If I play a mind game... I'll imagine that they knew about it already. That would explain their reaction better. See more

Boarded at Sea - Part II. ~ After the close pass, the trawler steamed rapidly away. I should have tracked it on the radar, but by now everyone was needed to transfer supplies and people from the coaster, in a heaving sea. It took a while to transfer 1,500 gallons of diesel for the generators, and at the same time we were moving the relief crew, the stores, fresh food, fresh water, transmitter parts, new ventilator fans, generator spares and I had to brief the replacement b...Continue reading

Scenes from Bar Beach, Nigeria, near Lagos. About 1979. On this same beach, the government tied armed robbers to posts and shot them.

BOARDED AT SEA - part I. Towards the end of my time on board, we started seeing the big trawler more often. Once, a light aircraft flew over and dropped a package to us. It landed about thirty feet from the ship, but too far for us to get a line on it, so we never discovered what it might be. One day the HF radio woke the captain, and the captain then woke me, with the news: prepare to leave! The forecast was good enough to arrange a transfer, but the weather window was quite... small and we the Brits would have to leave by fast launch to the English coast. (The alternative was to board the tender, but we’d have ended up in Spain.) We worried about this, and our fears proved to be well-founded. About ten o’clock, a coaster hove into view. We’d had it on the radar for the last half-hour, but we maintained radio silence on VHF and HF because we knew the DTI would be monitoring us. Just as the coaster approached the Mi Amigo, what should appear but the big spy trawler, which arrived at about twenty knots, a big bow wave in its teeth. Trawlers don’t usually have that kind of speed. There were a lot of big guys hanging off it, dressed in butch clothes and bobble hats. Many of them had binoculars and cameras in their hands. They passed a mere twenty feet from our stern, and the Mi Amigo rocked in the wake. I had donned my own bobble hat and dark sunglasses as soon as the spy ship appeared, and noticed the other Brits doing the same. See more

Late 60s, the BBC: At Skelton we went through a massive upgrade, scrapping the old patchboard-and-relay system for high tec. It had NORBIT logic, this was DTL discrete-component logic in plastic blocks like big Lego on circuit boards. So several racks crammed with that. Then there was the main memory: 1MB in size. About a foot square. No less than a ferrite core-store. The BBC-designed control desk in the middle of all this had a green fluorescent tile display that had a 400V 400Hz power supply, later on discovered to be wired back to front when Dave Clegg, its designer, was the first to touch its frame and a rack at the same time.