22nd december

Dave Sr. turns up at about 2-ish and is obviously staying the night, depositing his overnight bag in the double bedroom and unceremoniously dumping all my freshly aired sheets in a heap on one of the single beds.
“I've got this thing about having my bed”, he says, undoubtedly feeling a guilt pang. Apparently, he built it himself.
“Did you make your bed?”
“Yes! Did you make yours?”

He has brought his dogs, mother Negra and the other blond hairy one, and Negra junior is overjoyed for the company. They sniff each other and do things that I couldn’t possibly get away with.
We go upstairs to the balcony to chew the cud and he lights a joint that somebody called Alfredo gave him on the way in. We smoked about half of it. Dave says he wants to see the mayor about getting electricity to the house so we go into town. The mayor's office is closed for the Christmas period it seems. I take the opportunity to shop enough for about three weeks after my recent experience, including one or two goodies for Christmas day, and Dave gets some mince for burgers and some beers. We come back and do hamburgers on the gas stove - one each and then I drop one on the floor and swear. I contemplate cleaning it and eating it still but even I draw the line there. Over is over, and I have to bring the table down into the kitchen from the balcony. I would have done it anyway soon. At least he likes the pot plants.
Over goes home and Dave and I ‘balconise’ ourselves again.

Balconise /bálkзnīz/ v.tr & intr. (also – ize) make for or move to balcony, to seat oneself on a balcony.

Fed up of wondering if something is, was, or should be a word. I’m going to make my own up (except the ‘з’ - I couldn’t find the reverse ‘e’.) Dave’s dictionary, I’ll call it.
Anyway, there we are sharing the peace pipe and he casts his practised botanical eye across the swamp and past Over’s house to a tree that has caught his eye. “Hey, has that hickory tree got a nut on it?”
I follow his gaze but have no idea where he’s looking. “Hickory tree?” I say helpfully.
“Yeah, I think it does. Can you see that big pale nut about the size of a football?”
I looked in the general direction of his waving finger. “Yep, got it,” I affirm but I actually have no idea what he’s talking about or where he’s looking. I just want to feel involved and I am feeling mischievous.
“That’s a hickory nut. I wonder why there’s only one. Have you ever seen hickory?”
“Chicory?”
“Hickory.”
“… dickory dock?” I quip.
“What?”
“What?” I repeat. If you want to derail a conversation, just start repeating everything the last guy said and look confused. Never fails.
“Did you say duck?” he asks me.
“Duck?” I repeat, trying to look confused.
“What did you say?”
“What did I say?”
“Did you say duck?”
“I didn’t say duck. I don’t know anything about chicory, Dave.”
“I’m not talking about chicory. I said Hickory. It’s like pecan. Have you heard of pecan?”
“Peking duck?” I repeat. Word association such as this always helps and should not be discouraged when confusion is the intended destination.
“Did you say duck again?”
“I did then but I didn’t before. Peking, wasn’t it?”
“It’s pecan. Its hickory,” he said so quickly that the words all collided with each other.
“Bless you.”
“What?”
“What?”
He takes a deep breath. “Well, I guess you wouldn’t have seen it before. So Dave,” he says. “What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Why? Who’s been talking?” I say in my exaggerated voice. It goes right over the top of his head. I’m actually feeling on top form tonight, I’m full of it, and need to be with someone who appreciates my relentless stream of humourous prompts. I’m just so funny sometimes… I hope I’m not winding him up too much.
I don’t expect to get all the credit for my jokes - I’ll play the straight guy too - but this is ridiculous. Dave Snr doesn’t have a bad sense of humour but it’s Americised (is that a word? And if it is, should it be capitalised? Should I invent it too? ) Whereas someone like, for example, Mr Bryson’s is quite anglicised and well rounded. The problem sometimes with Americans is that hey don’t know when the English are taking the piss, they just put it down to eccentricity I think, or the EU. My humour is lost on Dave. I want to be obtuse, poky and take the piss in a nice way, and have someone take the piss back, which I really don’t mind. Well, the English don’t, do they?
I daren’t. After suffering his furrowed brow pointed ruthlessly in my direction and interrogating me about ducks, I apologise. “Sorry Dave, Joking. To answer your question, I’ve been writing. I dabble a bit.”
“You do? What do you write?”
“Well, anything I guess. I’m writing a novel about ants at the moment. All handwritten.”
“Gee that’s great. I had a book published once,” he states, as though I’m supposed to be surprised. I’m not surprised because he’s obviously very knowledgeable about vanilla.
“A book about vanilla?” is therefore the natural postulation I present humbly at his botanical feet.
“No, a novel. It’s called the Dweeb.”
Now I am surprised! At this point, he did explain the plot to me but I’ve lost the thread a bit now. It was something to do with the Internet and a guy on another planet who somehow inadvertently comes to control the world porn supply, or something like that. I hope I’m not doing him a disservice. I have since looked it up on Amazon and there it is – ‘the Dweeb’ by David S Gardella. If I ever have any money, I’ll buy it.
At this point, he has risen my estimation again. I know he’s a good businessman and I know he’s had a varied life which I appreciate, and he’s a nice guy letting me wreck his rain forest time share country home as I am. I have the greatest respect for people who have the ability to reinvent themselves and make a success out of more than one thing. He did his Peace Corps thing after his National Service, emigrated, done his Vanilla thing and had a novel published too. This guy is not afraid of life.
Being published ain’t easy anywhere. The only thing I’ve ever had published was a little poetry many years ago and a couple of snooker match write ups. In truth, the poetry is the only thing I have ever tried to get published but that’s not the point. You have to be good to be published. By his own admittance, he only sold a handful of copies but its there on his CV and it’s there on his bookshelf. Well done, Dave.
“Yabba yabba yabba, blah blah blah,” and on we go, chatting away merrily before we are rendered stone cold speechless by a spectacular shooting star that belts right across the sky in front of us before exploding in an abrupt flash of white and orange blaze. It was a wondrous moment, thoroughly extravagant and uplifting, like seeing a cinder shoot out of Gods own fire. It set Dave up telling a story about how he rented a car on time
“I hired a car in Honduras and drove to Costa Rica in it. I had an accident and so I had to pay to get it repaired and obviously, while it’s in the shop, I can’t use it and I still have to pay by the day, too. I got the car back and then the chip in it went faulty and I had to wait for that to be repaired too. I finally had to drive it back to Honduras – I just wanted to get rid of this car. As I was crossing the border, the patrolmen wanted to stop me but I didn’t want to stop so I kept going. I hit a gate, a black gate that someone had dragged into the road. I just didn’t see it. I didn’t even stop because I was so sick of the car but the police caught me, pulled me over and fined me. I drove and drove through Honduras but I couldn’t find fuel anywhere. I had had this car for weeks and weeks, it was costing me a fortune, and I was sick of it and just wanted to get it back to the hire company.”
“I was about to run out of fuel,” he continued. “I started banging on the wheel and said ' why me, God?' I slowed down until I had almost stopped. In the road, about 100 metres in front of him landed a meteorite. Maybe if I hadn’t slowed down, it would have hit me.”
The chances of seeing the shooting star were virtually nil for us. We are sitting facing the swamp and behind us is the rear of the balcony and the hill across the road so no sky viewable there. To our right is the planked wall of the dormitory and to the left the balcony railing and then palms outside, above us the tin roof. The only visibly sky we can see is the narrow strip in front of us and that in itself is narrowed further by the roof above us and the jungle trees across the swamp. It is the equivalent of watching a wide screen television from a distance of three feet but the shooting star had amazingly entered one side of the screen and rocketed across perfectly horizontally, burning up just before disappearing off the screen on the other side. We were blessed that night.
“How could we combine a shooting star with the thunder dome,” I put to him.
“Hey, what a great idea that would be.” I know he is impressed that I have beaten him to the punch. “Of course, we could never combine the two things because of the timings. It would be a million-to-one shot.”
“I suppose also that a shooting star needs a clear sky but thunder and lightning need cloudy skies.”
“Yeah, but if I had a helicopter that was very high in the atmosphere, releasing grains of sand, they would fall to earth under gravity and burn up in the atmosphere. It would look spectacular. It could be the next stage in pyrotechnics, Dave. Fireworks released from the sky instead of from the ground. I don’t think a helicopter could get anything like high enough, unfortunately.”
“I want a cut on this, Dave, for my contribution.”
“You can have cut price tickets, a ringside seat and the British syndication rights.”
“Cheers mate.”