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By Rodney Gascoyne
15: Working for myself in Canada: I had decided to return and work in Toronto. Adventurously, I had also decided to try to set up my own consulting firm, in a city and region I had never worked before, and with only a few contacts at the CICA. In London I had not only been the Computer Audit Manager, but I was also able to move sideways and work with the Consultancy arm of the firm, in areas that went beyond the audit role but where clients wanted additional help implementing suggestions we had made, or in performing deeper analysis than was needed for the annual audit. The last two jobs I had undertaken in this area involved major clients. One was an exercise to review, document and evaluate the adequacy of controls in a totally new financial accounting system written in-house by a major international firm of architects and engineers. They were also moving to new hardware and systems software at the same time and I wrote reports to identify areas of risk, with suggestions for measures to correct the main problems. The other one entailed reviewing and documenting the IT disaster recovery abilities in a large bank and its national network of branches. This involved a detailed review of their entire operations and lines of business and identifying the problems we encountered, together with suggestions for architectural changes to cover for any inadequacies we found. A major report and presentation was made directly to the Board and were later implemented much as we had recommended. Before going to Toronto, though, I wanted to make a side trip and to visit Hawaii en route. When in Sydney before, I had met with our associates and had made some useful contacts and friends. I arranged to go and visit them for four months, the maximum time I could conveniently arrange on a working visa without getting into a protracted set of applications and procedures. They offered me a job for that period at an attractive salary as a consultant for IT and Computer Auditing. This gave me the chance to work with the Sydney office and then to visit the offices in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Cairns. In each office I assisted on the main audits and suggested and demonstrated how they could use modern methods and CAATs to upgrade the IT audit aspects of their work. I also helped them develop sections for a new audit manual, similar to the new ideas we had worked on in London, but customizing the work for Australian standards and culture. The Sydney office had also, with my help, become the agent for IDEA in Australia. They had their own software interests and as a side issue I helped them develop a simple demo for IDEA that would fit on one diskette. It was self activating and would allow a possible user to step through a series of screens to see how the software worked and what functionality it contained. Allied to this I also ran a series of training courses in each office to show staff members how to use IDEA to best effect in their audits and work. I found more and more that I was involved in training although this was not an area I had expected to work in often. Like other similar functions I was to get into over the next few years, I learned that in consultancy work you often get asked to do things you had not originally identified and planned to be doing. As well as travelling by air between the offices and for some audits, I did manage to make some other side trips for myself and used the opportunities to see as much more of Australia as I could, including the Agincourt area on the Barrier Reef, the Atherton Tablelands in the north, together with a trip beyond the Daintree, through the tropical rain forest as far as Cape Tribulation. I also went by train from Adelaide to Sydney, through the outback and bush country. Once, when going to Melbourne, I borrowed a friend's car and drove out via Gundagai and Ballarat and then home along the south coast, and a revisit to Nimitabel, to call on family in the Snowy Mountains. I was lucky to have found friends with whom I stayed in Sydney, near Five Ways Corner in Paddington. This was a very central location and I was further lucky to have the chance to mix with a group of their friends. Mostly they were people from Britain, or at least their families came from there originally, and all were about my age. We were 'Poms' as the Aussies would call us. They were a very active social group and we went out to eat together most evenings, when we could manage it. We ate all over Sydney and the suburbs and mostly in smaller, ethnic restaurants although I guess that there, like in North America, the food was westernized and not as bold or strong as in their ethnic settings. We partied at each others' homes and took a few trips away too. All this was a very enjoyable and lively time for me, and a far more active social time than I had had, since leaving the ocean liners in my time at sea years before. I was sorry to leave it. When fixing to go to Sydney, I had considered that I might want to move to Australia in the future as its weather at least, was the nicest on offer. That stay for four months, though, told me that I was not as well suited to their culture, as I was to Canada's. Its hard to put a finger on it, but their overall culture is less mature than ours in Canada, and there is a certain undertone there that is anti authority and anarchistic, that I was never really comfortable with. The country was just not as secure and confident in itself, and people seemed somehow to always be suspicious of others. For some odd reason, Australia seems rather distant from Canada in a number of ways and yet, when visiting Sovereign Hill in Ballarat and then Heritage Park in Calgary, you cannot fail to be struck by how similar much of our nineteenth century history was, and how each tackled life, family and nation building, from early settlement till the time of the First World War. We should be far closer. I had planned a final fling before leaving Sydney. I fixed to travel to Beijing, thinking this was the nearest I would get to there, to see the Great Wall and all the major sites in the City and area. I moved this at the last minute to make it my final week in Sydney. The evening of the night I would have travelled, there was the suppression of the students in Tiananmen Square. I would have landed right into the middle of it and most likely have been confined to my hotel and then flown out earlier than expected. As it was, I was booked one week later, and a few days before we were due to fly, Qantas told me that the Chinese Government had cancelled the flight and all access. I eventually got all my money back and made the trip 4 years later from Canada. As it was, I was able to move up my flight date to Toronto, and so set off to re-establish myself in Canada. The moment I landed, I again needed to find somewhere to live and to get a car to make me mobile. Working and living downtown proved to be a great choice, as Toronto is one of the few cities anywhere that allows this, and everything you need and want to do can be carried out within walking distance, including shopping, sporting and entertainment events and most social activities. City planners had arranged over the years for every new building downtown to link up to an underground concourse system that now allows you to walk everywhere within the centre in a climate controlled area, devoid of traffic and adverse weather. With a good subway and transport system, a car is often superfluous as it is not easy trying to park or get around in the jams anyway. Eventually I realized this fact and sold my car altogether, having tried to fight the obvious for years. Toronto is unique in a number of other ways. This also shows up some of the differences between Canada and the United States; whereas the US is considered the melting pot of the world, where all new comers are expected to adapt and conform to American culture and customs, Canadians actively promote and endorse the ideals of multiculturalism. Toronto, like so many other cities and communities countrywide, illustrates this in the daily life. The city is full of individual ethnic areas where people gather and trade or live their lives, largely surrounded by people from the same part of the world or at least sharing ethnic origins. Thus you can find Little Italy, or the Greek quarter or Chinatown, plus an array of other districts with their own flavour of cuisine, entertainment, fashion or culture, to suit your interests or likings. If you had wanted to travel to experience the sounds, sights and taste of different cultures, around the world, we can now partake of all that in Toronto, as the world has moved in and now share their talents and delicacies openly with all takers. This is encouraged in all areas and one is expected to share the wealth of your own culture, customs, fashions and foodstuffs with everyone else. There cannot be many materials, knick-knacks, fruits, spices or ingredients from any country that cannot be found in some shop or other within the city. Variety and originality have many positive values. There are also a few downsides to this, of course, and so racial or regional conflicts can a few times get repeated here from their root areas, although mostly only affecting those involved. We, like so many other large cities, also have drug, weapons and gang problems, that had their birth elsewhere but then we are a part of the modern world and would not want to be separate from it. I needed to register my business name too if I wanted to start work on my own. I did all this within a week, finding a penthouse apartment overlooking the city centre and lakefront and buying a used Jaguar XJ6. This last matter was influenced by seeing them in Sydney and for once I forgot my rule of only buying a locally made car. It was a mistake I corrected a year later. I contacted CICA and my friends there to see what I could learn and what help we could be to each other. The man for IDEA was interested in the demo I had made for Sydney and he immediately ordered a version for use in Canada, and later some other countries too. I took a booth at a local trade show for accountants, not too much later and this soon led to me getting some interesting work, and making further contacts. Things were starting well and faster than I expected. That show also introduced me to the editor and publisher of a national accounting magazine and started a six year association with my writing a column on computer and auditing topics almost every month. I later wrote for two years for a national computer magazine too, with articles on the chaotic hardware and software market that suddenly blossomed in the mid 90's. Other articles were used, by CICA, and sister institutes elsewhere in the world in their magazines, and a few other publishers. Although I expected the local bylines to be beneficial, people who knew me said they read the articles, but otherwise it seemed the firm's, and my name in the column, had almost no effect on my business. I even ran a few ads for new, upgrade versions of IDEA, but these too seemed to have little impact. For my home, I rented the apartment because I detected that housing prices were over inflated. In hindsight it turned out that I had made a few wise decisions. On selling my London place I had sold at the top of the market. The top for Toronto had happened a few months before my arrival but prices did not drop until some months after my renting a place. After that the prices in both markets fell through the floor. There followed a period of some years where normal economic conditions just seemed not to apply. Housing and other normally stable assets seemed to lose much of their value, and then the Bank of Canada started an aggressive fight against inflation, that sent interest rates sky high and deepened the recession that had already begun. Luckily for me, none of this affected my business as my main work then was with the Government and the CICA, where I became actively involved with the development of newer versions of IDEA and was secretary to the International Steering Committee, that the Institute set up to oversee development of the product. Later still I became the project manager, working with the programmers, to implement all the changes and enhancements requested by the Committee. This meant a lot of travel around Canada and abroad. Working with publishers and others also extended my use of electronic communications and the changing office technologies, that expanded so rapidly from the early 80s. I started to compose letters and reports directly online, from 1982 on, with the arrival of the first word processors and microcomputers, only handing over completed documents to secretaries for final printing. By 1986 I was producing reports and final printed proofs of a new manual, using a variety of fonts on a new laser printer, that only needed to be photographed for production with an offset printer. That same year faxes suddenly exploded onto the scene and transformed local and international abilities overnight. They remained the best method to share documents for many years to come. Early magazine articles were either mailed or faxed for editorial comment and then were typeset to produce the magazines. By the early 90s, Bulletin Board Systems were set up and I would use a modem to logon and, with a special ID, upload files of articles directly to their servers, that then also fed the edited text directly into their automated typesetting systems. Early electronic mail started at the same time but for some years this only worked within Canada as either plain text or, later, with attachments. Only after the arrival of the early text based Internet, did international electronic mail capabilities grow, but this also suddenly exploded together with the arrival of websites and then browsers. By the late 90s it became simple to research and share documents and ideas through websites, and even post or collect text and image files from all over the world. Telephone based systems also rapidly expanded, starting with direct modem connections between computers at any distance. Working with programmers in Ottawa, we often exchanged files of data and program updates, during the upgrade process, using a 9.6k modem which seemed so fast at the time. We also began to use teleconferences to reduce the need to travel internationally for our regular meetings. Once, when there was no time to fly out to attend an important meeting on the west coast of Canada, I used a Toronto resource centre to take part in a two hour or more video conference with a team in Victoria. As an independent businessman, all these means allowed me to match the modern advances with companies worldwide during the course of my work. Even presentation and teaching abilities changed over the same period. In the 80s I would prepare overhead foils to share ideas at conferences or other meetings, moving on to an overhead PC panel , to project screen images and later to show running programs. By the 90s, I constantly used my laptop computers to directly connect to client projection equipment for presentations and to illustrate work ideas with software. For many years my own program capabilities were superior to the network setups within clients. My business expanded and I did work for firms of accountants and large companies, and even a few financial services and banking organizations, both in the US and across Canada. My work with the Government was largely with the internal audit community, where I also became a regular presenter at their half yearly education week. I was getting more involved in other training sessions and in international sales of IDEA. I even edited the IDEA International Newsletter for some seven years and wrote or edited the User Manuals and Help screens for newer versions. This combination had me travelling for quite a bit of work overseas, for training or for sales, including opportunities in Asia, Mexico City and many islands of the Caribbean. The work with CICA continued apace until they started to develop a Windows version - WinIDEA. For this they appointed a software firm to handle all the development rather than the team of independent programmers I had worked with till then. My involvement became reduced but I still made many diskette demos and tutorials of both products, to support sales around the world, making my own sales at home and abroad and running numerous training courses, including the use of simultaneous translations in Spanish or Mandarin when the need arose and English would not suffice. I worked with the Institute in academic areas too and assisted with a number of special books on IT auditing techniques and in reviewing new IT Control Guidelines that have since been published. I am proud that CICA continues to be the leader in this field, of any respected organizations from around the world, and I am grateful for the chances I have had to work with them on publications in those areas for more than ten years. I carried on further community work in Toronto, helping for periods of up to five years each as a volunteer with a few local groups, mainly for children's charities. One of these matched me up with a teenager who had lost his father. We took part in almost all the organization's events, outings, tournaments and parties and won quite a few trophies over the years. As he reached his late teens we met or shared trips less often, although one we did keep going for seven years in all was the annual fishing contest that he won our first year. We shared with another two guys and made it a weekend trip to remember each year at an inland, lakefront resort not too far from Toronto. This friendship with his family still endures and we continue to meet when the occasion demands, such as helping him learn to drive a car and pass his test. Some years later I wrote up the tale of our friendship and his growth, as he transformed his career into a high tech role at the centre of the financial services industry. (See Electronic Generation) On weekends and at times during the week, I followed a number of old interests in my new surroundings. I joined a sailing club on the outer harbour and took an active role in running races and in teaching newcomers to use single handed 'Lasers'. For two years I served on the Executive. I took further bridge lessons and joined a club to play regularly, but later dropped this back, as I did not find the competitive excesses, you find in duplicate games, to be enjoyable. I found a new club, luckily, where I could play a more relaxed form of bridge, without the hassle. Other activities included canoeing and camping on wilderness lakes in Ontario parks, and downhill skiing. The 90's were also a great opportunity for me to do much of the rest of the world travel I always had at the back of my mind. While in Europe for meetings, work or just to visit family, I made every opportunity to take tours from there. England had a mature holidays package industry that sometimes made last minute offers. Added to that I was often able to arrange to be there outside of normal holiday periods and so could find the real bargains, many times at only days notice; I rarely fixed for these trips till I arrived in London. Using chances like that I made a lot of trips and mostly for ridiculously low all-inclusive prices. I visited Venice at New Year, toured Malta and Majorca, Athens and local islands, Turkey including Istanbul, Tunisia and Carthage, Holland and Amsterdam, Belgium and Bruges, and Spain's Costa del Sol at different times. I also used air miles earned, to fly into Europe and then rent cars for other local trips, such as Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, Italy and a return to Paris. These car trips were a great enjoyment and let me see wonderful places and sights. The first was a flight to Frankfurt from London and a Volkswagen Rabbit for a week long tour by autobahn. Soon after the fall of the Wall, I managed to see much of the old East Germany, including Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin and Potsdam and you could not be fooled which side of the old line you were on. The stark buildings, bad roads and generally dilapidated infrastructure told you when you were in the East. The same applied when within Berlin itself. Czechoslovakia was not covered by the car insurance and so I went to Prague by train from Dresden. As well as Nuremberg and Heidelberg, all these cities were wonderful to visit and to stay in small hotels that I found on arrival. I repeated this approach when visiting Vienna directly from Toronto. In the week there, I visited most of the city, its main attractions and buildings and made side trips to Saltsburg and Budapest. Palaces, cathedrals, museums and other major sites were always on my calling list and all left a lasting impression, including the Vienna Woods and even the royal hunting lodge close by. The Paris trip was a quick flight and a small hotel I found near Place de la République. Mostly I walked around to all sites and places I remembered so well from earlier visits to the city centre, plus a few trips on the Metro. This was always my preferred way to see Paris, and used again on my next visit. Best, though, was the trip to Tuscany. I flew with my mother from London to Geneva and hired a car. We drove down through the Mont Blanc tunnel and the Aosta Valley to get to the main autostradas, en route to Genoa, and then round to Piza and finally Florence. I had been told about Fiesole and so we found a beautifully old and large Pensione in the hills, with a terrace and magnificent views of the valley and Florence below. The scene was perfect, after supper, when a fellow guest started to play Beethoven piano concertos on the grand in the main lounge, with a sunset view of the city below, through the windows, across the terrace. We only stayed there one night as we had prebooked our main accommodation near Siena in a large, fortified, hilltop farm, deep in the hills close to the city. From here we toured the local countryside and the wonderful hilltop villages and towns of the district, eating out whenever we could in small restaurants. Two of the main historical places we could reach were the small, walled village of Monteriggioni and the towered town of San Gimignano that was the magnificent backdrop in the countryside for the film "Tea with Mussolini". Both towns, with Siena and Florence themselves, were unforgettable. I slowly eliminated all places and sites I had on a long list that I had maintained for some time. One trip to Amsterdam almost became a problem. The only cheap trip we could book had us returning to England the evening before I was to fly home. We used the high speed, catamaran car ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich and the trip was very rough in almost storm like conditions. On my way to Heathrow the following morning, I talked with two Dutch students on the tube and learned they were trying to get home, because they had lost their catamaran ferry trip the evening before, to the Hook, when it was cancelled due to bad weather! Back home, I completed my long distance travels by train, making it from coast to coast at different times on the Canadian transcontinental system, using their vintage sleeper and dome cars. You can see so much of this vast country by taking those trains. I made a few special trips and used the Chunnel train under the English Channel for a quick 3 day trip to Bruges by car. In 2004, I used the Eurostar train to revisit Paris. This last trip was unusual and a new experience. I wrote about it later and it was published with a colour photograph here under Rodney's Ramblings. I finally made the trip to China and Beijing, over Christmas, seeing all the sights I had originally planned to do from Sydney, including the Temple of Heaven, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, Beijing Zoo, the glorious Summer Palace and its frozen lake, the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Temples, a Lamasery and even the Opera and an acrobatic show. I was very taken with China and the people I met and how they were managing the transition to the modern world. Then I made my trip to India. (1) This I wrote up in two articles, with photos, that are accessed by these two links; The next morning, and at breakfast ......(2). I also had the chance to take holidays within North America or further afield, including Cuba, the Bahamas, Turks & Caicos and Bermuda and even the Canadian high arctic, en route to Resolute. As a self employed person I had every opportunity to take long holidays when I wanted and usually at non-peak times. One worthwhile trip was a return to Egypt to see the Pyramids and to go to the Upper Nile, to visit Abu Simbel and then cruise from Aswan to Luxor, visiting many ancient temples and valley tombs on the way. I have always had an interest in world history and culture, together with an appreciation for architecture and beautiful buildings. One fascinating sight was finding a family of farmers on the banks of the Nile, using methods and equipment similar to ancient times, still watering their land from the river with the aid of an ox driven pot-wheel. I started to cruise the Caribbean too, after a local tour operator in Toronto began to charter their own ship for those waters each winter. When they could not fill the ship, they would offer last minute deals in the final week and I would pounce on these. I cruised for much less than normal and with charter flights direct from Toronto. The ships were old but not too large, so we had none of the lineups and waiting to land we heard of on the larger, newer cruise ships. I visited most of the islands over time, so that now I find it difficult to find anywhere worthwhile, interesting or new to visit. Even better, I made contact with clients on many islands, I would then visit while in port, and either sell them software or run training courses for IDEA. Some times that work paid all my expenses for the trip. A double bonus. One year I took two back-to-back cruises from that tour operator with my mother. She flew to Canada and stayed with me each end of the cruise, and then we flew from Toronto and saw about 12 islands. We enjoyed this very much and so later arranged other holidays together in North America or Europe, cruises being our favourite way, as we could both be independent when we wanted to be and yet could travel and visit in the easiest way. Neither of us wanted to do too much walking or travelling with bags. We even managed some contract bridge onboard after we learned to compromise on conventions. I made a few cruises to other places as well and on similar discounted terms, including the QE2 that I had seen set sail on her maiden voyage, visiting Hawaii and the South Pacific islands of Samoa and Fiji while making the passage from Los Angeles to Auckland, as part of a World Cruise. I visited the region again, by air, and toured Tahiti en route to a possible final visit to friends and family in Sydney. I also joined QE2 again for a transatlantic crossing via the Azores, to England. That last call was unexpected, we should have gone to Madeira but we were diverted mid ocean to help rescue a sailor on a Spanish trawler who had suffered a very bad accident. The detour involved about three hundred miles of steaming, back on our own track, to pick him up. We all watched as they transferred him aboard in our lifeboat. As that took up extra time too we could not make Madeira during daytime so we headed for the Azores instead. I was fine with that as I had not visited them before. We dropped the Spanish fisherman there after QE2 doctors said he would recover. I met an engineering officer on board, who had previously served with Union-Castle, and he invited me to visit the Wardroom and Officers' Mess, and a few parties. I also sailed on the "Caronia", Cunard's only other ship then, round South America from Rio de Janeiro to Valparaiso, including sailing around Cape Horn. That day the weather was perfect, the seas were almost flat and it was 65oF in bright sunshine. Not exactly what I had expected but I was very happy to see it that way and took many pictures as we sailed up and down off Cape Horn, before entering the Beagle Channel and heading for Ushuaia. Apparently, the Captain upset the Chilean Navy by using an Argentinean pilot, and so they made us stand off five miles from the Horn. They also required the Captain to visit them ashore in Punta Arenas for a dressing down. I joined the table party of a senior officer for that trip, as I had on the transatlantic trip on the QE2, and so made visits and became more aware of the happenings on, and workings of, those ships. We later toured the Chilean fjords and glaciers, after cruising the Straits of Magellan. On a day visit to Montevideo, previously on the trip, en route to Buenos Aires, I had met up with friends, one of whom I had taught on courses in Mexico City. They showed me all around the city, and the Capitol building, and we had lunch together. Later, they asked me to return and speak to the South American regional conference for their international firm of accountants, in Buenos Aires and so, within four months, I found myself flying back. That time it was winter, and cold and wet the whole time I was there. Luckily, I did all this before September 11th, 2001 and so had an easier time than I would expect nowadays. The cruises in Europe with my mother, early in the new century, took us to some out of the way places, including the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Baltic cruise ran from Harwich and was aboard a brand new superliner, the biggest box I have been on, so far. After normal stops in Oslo and Copenhagen, a major disappointment occurred when the Captain was advised that the likely winds would be too high to let us enter Stockholm, a city I had not visited before. He quickly decided to stay in Copenhagen an extra night and so removed immediately any hope of calling there later or finding another port-of-call. We continued on to Helsinki and then St. Petersburg, where this time I got to visit the fuller city and then the beautiful out-of-town czarist palace of Pavlovsk. Peter the Great's inspiration seemed all covered in scaffolding, as the following year the city was to celebrate it's 300th birthday. Finally there was the historic and wonderful city of Tallinn and the chance to walk throughout the walled city, taking pictures. This was not a happy ship and was plagued by poor entertainments and a disinterested staff generally, and a misplaced 'British holiday camp' atmosphere demanded by the Cruise Director. Despite these upsets, we enjoyed the ports enormously and the chance to see Russia again, although I was discouraged to see how much the general population were being left out of the new life being generated there. The Black Sea trip started in Venice aboard an old, small Greek ship, chartered by an English company specializing in holidays for older people. It was a converted car ferry that had 'too small' public rooms and awkward layout that made it hard to move around easily. We stayed overnight in Venice and so we got the chance to tour the city by foot again, taking more than 250 photos with my digital camera that lets me shoot everything of interest. It was then a great joy to sail from the port on a gloriously sunny afternoon, passing between St. Mark's Square and the island of St. George's and out through the Lagoon. We moved down the Adriatic calling at the walled city of Dubrovnik and then the island of Corfu, although the weather here was less than perfect. Early next morning we entered the Corinth Canal, with just one meter on either side of the ship, and its four mile trip through to the Aegean Sea, then a call at Piraeus and Athens. Next we crossed over to Kusadasi and the obligatory tour of the ruins of Ephesus, leaving again that afternoon, between the Greek islands of Chios and Lesbos en route to the Dardanelle's, which we passed at midnight. At dawn we began to approach Istanbul and to passage the Bosphorus. This was another perfect occasion to take endless pictures on a fascinating trip that lasted over two hours before we were free, out into the Black Sea. We were very lucky, as the voyage to Yalta was very smooth and in warm sunny weather. Our next three ports of call were all in the Ukraine, the first two in the Crimea, and the chance to see these wonderful cities and visit the historical sights. In Yalta we toured Czar Nicholas' Livadia Palace where the WW2 conference was staged between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, as well as the interesting city itself that was so loved by the Russian nobility as a summer retreat. Next we moved onto Sevastopol and a visit to Balaclava and the valley sites there of the battle and Charge of the Light Brigade. Together with a Panorama painting and model for the siege of Sevastopol, during the Crimean War, this was a very worthwhile revisiting of history. Our last port was Odessa, another summer resort for Russians. All three cities showed signs of their glorious pasts, but were very run down and must have been in a sort of limbo since the dissolution of the USSR, in the early 90s. People were still obviously in serious straights and not an encouraging prospect in sight. This very much reminded me of the Russia we had witnessed the year before in St. Petersburg and the shared plight of both general populations. We sailed back across the Black Sea and into the Bosphorus for our return to Istanbul and this time an overnight stay before flying home. We toured the city by foot, taking many pictures of the mosques and beautiful sights of this remarkable city, before returning to the ship after dark. The trip overall was very enjoyable and we gained all we could of the port calls and the chance to experience the atmosphere and culture of these disparate countries. As I had done before, in the Caribbean on the Canadian chartered, Greek owned ship, I marvelled at the lack of co-operation and co-ordination between the Greek officers and the charter staff looking after passengers. The food was very good but the entertainment, again, was delivered mostly in that misplaced and out-of-date, clichéd manner of the 'British holiday camp', even though the passengers I met were all well travelled and sophisticated cruisers. How come this attitude of Cruise staff still exists, on sailings with a largely British entourage, when I found it so inappropriate back in the 1960s, when I was an Assistant Purser on Union-Castle's "Reina Del Mar"? I only re-experienced this travesty on these two European trips, but luckily, not on Cunard or my other cruises around the world. I have been writing for some years, for an Australian based EZine, or web magazine - Bonzer!, using some of the material from this memoir. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina hit the city, the editor asked for items about New Orleans. I sent in this article as the third item on the Theme Stories section of the Features pages. More recently, I took a train ride to Prince Rupert and then wrote the following for that same EZine - I have set up links here, as my articles are published with photographs - Riding the Skeena under Rodney's Ramblings,. Other holidays were also written up and placed into the magazine, together with many photos: Trip to Japan #1; Japan episode 2; Japan episode 3; Modern Cruising; Yukon Gold; Rarotonga; Cruise into the Blue; Chilean Islands; Machu Picchu; Indian Ocean Island Hopping, Nickel & Diming Airlines; Spring 2008, I took a surprise cruise overnight from Stockholm, that I wrote up as the second article on this page. On reflection, I wrote another article, about people who seek power through ego and the need to control others, under Rodney's Ramblings. The early years of the new century and millennium, I am still self employed and following a similar pattern of work and travel that I have enjoyed since returning to Canada, although I am slowly running out of vacation places to visit. Recently, I moved cross-country to set up home in Calgary, the start of maybe another lucky adventure? So far, this has worked well, and I am enjoying my return to Western Canada. In these troubled times, we are undergoing a major paradigm shift. At the same time, I realize I have been prepared for this throughout my life. Born when I was, I have always remained a minimalist: Expect little, make the most of everything and create what you really need. The main orientation, though, came from experiencing constant transitions and change: I always seemed to have been on the cusp of something new and deserting the old. My childhood was spent in a London recovering from the devastation of World War 2: There was rationing and shortages of just about everything; an economy that took years to recover and get out from under the debt from earlier wars; a steadily increasing realization that the Empire was over and gone, and that we must accept a lesser role and influence in the world; my schooling also saw change, my initial place gave me a partial 'real education', that teaches you to adapt, but then it received certification, so the staff had to become more professional, but somehow less effective; and, then my public school moved from an inner London suburb to the green fields of Hertfordshire, in my time, as it transformed into the top exam factory in the UK. Each subsequent job was accompanied by being the end or beginning of an era. Starting in overseas banking, I saw 'Africanization' as heralding the end of a colonial system and hence no future. Next was something I knew would not last, but I wanted to experience all I could, while I could, as ocean liners and the Royal Mail service by ships throughout the Empire, would soon change, but I had had enough before it did. I returned ashore to train as a Chartered Accountant and by accident almost, fell in with the formation of one of the eight giant firms that started to dominate the profession worldwide. I took a sabbatical after working for the first time in industry, where I became involved in community work in Northumberland and Newcastle Upon Tyne. This coincided with systematic changes to government structures, as well as education in particular, that led to a less caring attitude and smaller funding opportunities. Eventually I returned to professional life and industry, married and so just volunteer community involvement. The family moved, first just within England, but later emigrated to Western Canada, with an open minded, enthusiastic approach to change, that we always thought we could reverse, if we did not like it. We did and so all stayed. I also embraced a relatively new professional specialism, that of controls in, and auditing of IT. During some of those moves, I worked with two other international accounting firms that each fell apart, soon after I had left, as their associations failed amid scandals or the loss of major clients. Even the two industrial companies in England are no more - both later disintegrated or became absorbed, as market conditions evolved and they did not. Another office decided to have a major fight with its main supporter and should not have been surprised when they were cut down to size, for issues I had warned about before I moved on. Even as a consultant for many years in Toronto, a number of my clients seemed later to transform into something less, or were caught in a transition they could not fully cope with. Here in Calgary, I am working with a large, international company that is expanding rapidly, resulting in more that fourfold growth within a few years, through many acquisitions, a few of which were obviously major and have involved me in many aspects of integration. There is no time to be bored, things change so fast, but then by now I am used to that, and should find it simple to adjust yet again, to the transitions of surrounding economic and financial crises. (See a few rants I have written recently and placed in my business website.) After divorcing some years ago, I have not yet remarried although I guess this could change some day. I have maintained contact with, and made visits to my children in Canada, including my grandson, and the family in England and so feel myself to still be very privileged and lucky. I guess I have just been lucky all along by the look of it.
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