I was granted Sergeants’ Mess privileges whilst on the Falklands. Queuing up with my tray one evening, I noticed the man in front had quite a few insignia stitched to his Army jumper. Having had more than a pre-dinner sherry at the bar beforehand I felt bold enough to say to him, “You look like a bleedin’ Boy Scout with all those badges.”

He turned, and on seeing I was a civilian, decided not to crush me with his bare hands like a used fag packet but smiled and said, “Hi, Sean Bonner, but everyone calls me Junior.”

We sat together and over dinner he told me what each badge signified. “When I was 17 I joined the Royal Marines to be a commando and kill people,” he said pointing to the dagger insignia. “As I didn’t manage to kill anybody in the Marines and the Paras were doing this rather well in Northern Ireland, I transferred to The Parachute Regiment,” he continued indicating his parachute wings.

“I didn’t kill anyone in the Paras either so now I’m in the Army Air Corps,” here he showed me the roundel. “I’m PDB’s personal helicopter pilot.” Peter de la Billière was then Commander of British Forces Falkland Islands. Junior didn’t talk about the Excalibur insignia.

“Can you send me some Gold Spot when you get back to England?” Junior asked. “It doesn’t look good flying the Boss around whilst stinking of booze.”

“Sure,” I said, “but tell me, what about your ambition to kill people?”

“Oh that!” said Junior, “I’ve killed more than enough people as a Helicopter Instructor.”

Falkland Islanders don’t like being called Kelpers, they deem it derogatory. Not as derogatory as being called a Benny though.

Kelp is a type of seaweed, gathered and burnt to produce soda ash. Benny Hawkins was a half-witted character in the British TV soap, Crossroads, who wore a knitted bobble hat much like the Islanders wear today.

When the high command at Biffy HQ (British Forces Falkland Islands) heard complaints from the Islanders that they didn’t like being called Benny, an order was given forbidding the use of the name.

Squaddies being squaddies, Benny was instantly re-christened Still.

“He’s still a Benny……….”

Once again, Biffy HQ issued an order that Islanders must not be referred to as Stills.

They’re now known as Andies.

“And he’s still a Benny.”

I see that the Upland Goose is up for sale. Malvina House, built in the 1880’s and named, curiously, after a Scottish lass not the islands, is now The Malvina Hotel and Restaurant. It’s taken all their business and the Goose has gone bust.

The proprietor of the Upland Goose Hotel at the time of the Argentine invasion was Desmond King. The Islanders, or Kelpers as they are sometimes known, or Bennies as the troops called them, believed he had profited from the billeting of senior Argentine officers during the occupation. He was therefore known as ‘King Rat’ after the character in James Clavell’s eponymous prisoner-of-war novel.

The Bennies rumoured that after the Argentine surrender on June 14, 1982, when Major General Jeremy Moore, Brigadier Julian Thompson and newspaper reporter Max Hastings ordered a round of drinks in the bar of the Upland Goose and raised their glasses, toasting “The liberation of the Falkland Islands!”, King Rat replied, “That will be £8.50 please gentlemen.”

I first met John the Prisoner at a disco in the police station in Stanley. I say ‘disco’ but in reality it was just a boom box with flashing lights in the middle of the floor, blaring out Abba and Boney M. Whilst the gay stewards danced with some Royal Military Policemen, Phil the Filth was chatting up a couple of nurses from the hospital. I noticed a morose figure in the corner of the room huddled over a can of beer.

“That’s John the Prisoner,” replied Phil, when I asked who he was.

“Why so glum, chum?” I said by way of introduction.

And John told me his story.

He was a carpenter, one of the huge gang of British construction workers flown to the Falklands to build the new airbase. One Friday night, pissed as usual, he couldn’t get back to the Boatel, his squalid accommodation block floating in the harbour, so he walked into the Upland Goose Hotel, took a key off the board at Reception and passed out in an empty bedroom. When the cleaner woke him next morning he was arrested and appeared before the Magistrate charged with breaking and entering, burglary and theft. As the Magistrate was Des King, the proprietor of the Upland Goose, he got six months. John was being repatriated to complete his sentence back in the UK. Meanwhile he was being held in the police cells.

His daily routine began with washing the police Land Rover followed by a stroll down the main street to the NAAFI for breakfast. Being a carpenter, he had built a comfortable bed, some bookshelves and a table to furnish his cell. He was not relishing the prospect of ‘porridge’ in HMP Oxford next week.

“Have you got any magazines?” he enquired. I said I’d ask amongst the crew and drop them off next time I was passing.

“If I’m not in, just leave them behind the counter for me,” was his reply.

There were two cells behind the front desk in the Police Station in Stanley and they had the names of the occupants written in chalk above the doors. One was “John the Prisoner” and the other was “The Wicky Man”.

I asked Phil the Filth, the Hampshire policeman seconded to the Falklands just after the war, what “The Wicky Man” meant.

“It’s a long story,” said Phil, which it usually was with him.

It turns out Wicky was a Korean fisherman on a squid boat trawling the South Atlantic, who had stabbed a fellow crew member in a drunken brawl at sea. The trawler had called into Stanley harbour to off-load the body and hand over the crewman. As the fight had happened on the high seas and there was no Korean representative on the Falklands, there was some confusion as to what to do with Wicky, so they kept him locked up in his cell waiting for a decision. During his prolonged stay he had picked up a bit of English from John the Prisoner.

“Yes, but why is he called The Wicky Man?” I asked.

“Well, every time we asked why he had done it, stabbed his captain,” said Phil, “All he could say was, ‘Too much Wicky”.

So whenever I wake to a severe headache - as I did this morning - I also put it down to too much Wicky.

Freddie has just given birth to three kittens. They are the ugliest little things I’ve ever seen and it’s clear she has been consorting with some rough farm cats from the borda up the hill behind us. Instead of being fluffy and ginger they are a mixture of black, white, grey and orange. The roughest of the farm cats is an evil-looking brute called Paul, named after an Arsenal fan we know. Freddie is no oil painting herself having lost her tail in a mysterious accident a couple of years ago.

When Bautista brought us a pair of kittens after Cat died we called them Fred and Ginger. Unfortunately we got the sexes wrong and Ginger Rogers turned out to be Fred Astaire. Cat was a sickly creature who only lasted a few weeks, not long enough to earn a name. He was a replacement for Chairman Miaow who was living in the garage when I moved here seven years ago and who disappeared one day without trace. Ginger, on the other hand, was found dead by the side of the road as was his son, Duke, a year later. Freddie’s other son, Roger, also vanished in February, much to Jo’s distress. He was a beautiful fluffy marmalade cat with huge orange eyes and a certain French hairdresser’s sort of campness about him which is why his name was pronounced Roget.

When little Astaire came home pregnant we dumped her and her kittens in the borda. That left us with Freddie and Spot (the Mistake). Now we have Garlic, Basil and Rosemary to contend with. Spot has been given the Basque name Far-Quit as he has inherited his Uncle-Dad’s lack of intelligence.

Far-Quit and Freddie

Got a bollocking from José Antonio last night at the wine tasting.

“Why aren’t you writing your Blog?” he asked.

“Because nobody’s reading it.” I replied.

“Look!” he said, “I do a radio programme every week with Álex Múgica. We sit in an empty studio talking about food and wine and there’s nobody there, just the two of us. I never know if anyone is listening to the radio but last week I was at a wine festival and a chap came up to me and said, “You’re the man on the radio who talks about wine, aren’t you?”

“So bloody well get on and start writing again!”

So here I am early next morning huddled over my PC in the back room freezing my whatsits off hoping there’s somebody out there reading this.