As anyone who has tried it knows, navigation in rough country is practically impossible. With almost every step, there is some obstacle blocking you from the way the compass says you should go. Usually a tree trunk, or an unscaleable rock-face, or bottomless bog, or overhanging boulder, and a mess of foliage so dense and brambled that there is no way through. Every time you go sideways to get around such obstacles puts you that much off-course. You never can go in the straight line indicated by the map. You constantly zig-zag, hopefully generally in the right direction, praying that the number of zigs is roughly equal to the number of zags.
    You had a compass and a map and were dropped off at a spot that they were good enough to mark on the map for you, and had to make your way to another place, also marked, about a 1000 metres away. The journey would take you over two ridgelines that were very steep and very heavily wooded. Some would have described it as jungle, but apparently it was merely rain forest.
    I was put in charge of three men, of which Duffy was one, which meant I got told I was going the fucking wrong way with every step. And he was probably right, too, as galling as that might have been, because I was definitely becoming increasingly bewildered.
    “You take the fuckin compass then, smart arse!”
    Duffy was a smart arse, too much so to fall for that one.
    “Ahh no. It’s better watching you fuck up.”
    The other two men looked on silently, staying out of it, knowing that they were being fucked up as well.
    I went far further than I should have before I found the courage to admit the truth.
    “Okay. We’re lost,” I sighed.

John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown, the man personifies the drought and when he dies because the dry has cost him everything, it rains. You are reminded of the Douglas Adams character who drove a long haul truck and wondered why it rained everywhere he went and never realised that in fact he was a Rain God. Steinbeck’s book is dreary, poetic and worthy but oh so dull. Once you realise that his death will bring the longed for rain, you want to kill him. But his death is agonisingly slow. I suppose the book is memorable, but it is very unenjoyable to read.

​

There was a film called Is Paris Burning? which nobody other than me seemed to like, starred the terrific actor who played Goldfinger so laconically, Gert Frobe, as the German General-Governor of Paris as the liberation nears. He receives orders directly from Hitler to burn Paris to the ground before leaving, but he cannot bring himself to obey them.
    Knowing the Americans will arrive any day, and aware that there is a plot afoot to assassinate Hitler, he hangs on grimly.
    Beset by the attacks of the French Underground and the determination of the Nazis in his ranks to carry out Mein Furher’s maniacal order, he tries to broker a deal to get the Yanks to hurry up, but fumbling US bureaucracy lets him down, as do the would-be assassins.
    In the end, it’s a choice between saving Paris or himself, and he makes a heroic stand. For his trouble, he got executed not by the Nazis but by the Americans in the end.