While visiting Malawi in 1990, I was detailed by police in Blantyre and questioned about my apparent interest in the country’s then President Hastings Banda.

In 1963, Banda was formally appointed as Nyasaland’s Prime Minister, and led the country to independence as Malawi a year later. Two years later, he proclaimed Malawi a republic with himself as president. He consolidated power and later declared Malawi a one-party state under the Malawi Congress Party (MCP). In 1970, the MCP made him the party’s President for Life and the next year he became President for Life of Malawi itself.

Banda remained friendly toward the West and was the only African ruler to establish diplomatic ties with South Africa during apartheid and the Portuguese regime in Mozambique.

Despite this, he was a virtual dictator and it doesn’t pay to mess with dictators.

Shire River Bridge, Mangochi, Lake Malawi.

I had to spend one night in Blantyre before flying back to Harare. The drive from Mangochi was just over two hours, but I had trouble finding my hotel. Maps were not common in Malawi at that time and, of course, GPS was unknown.

Blantyre is the commercial capital of the country and has a population today of about 750,000. I suspect it was considerably smaller in 1990, perhaps about half that, and the CBD itself was not very large.

I thought it simply a matter of driving around for a while and I would find the hotel.

At one stage the streets were blocked by crowds of people and police were conspicuous. It was a happy crowd though.

I parked the car and spoke to a policeman, who told me the President was about to make a procession through the city.

Still having some sense at that time, I asked if it was okay to take pictures, and was advised against it. I should have asked the policeman for directions to the hotel.

I waited for half an hour or so as the crowd built up. Eventually, there was a chorus of women singing praise like a gospel choir and the President came through to the cheers and applause of his people.

The crowd dispersed and I continued my forlorn search for the hotel.

I knew things were going awry when the road climbed higher and began to leave the populated areas. Instead of turning around I thought “what the heck, I’m a tourist and should explore”.

That was a mistake because the road came to a halt outside the gate of a large compound with alert guards protecting the mansion behind them and its inhabitants.

This time I did turn around, but the guards sprang from their watch house and apprehended me.

I explained that I was an Australian tourist looking for my hotel, but they didn’t seem to believe me. They made me wait while they consulted higher authorities.

They told me where I was, however. It was the President’s Blantyre residence.

Blantyre is the commercial centre of Malawi. Photo by bigdmia

Taken into custody

A senior police officer drove up from the city and accompanied me to the police station. I can’t remember if I drove, with him as a passenger, or if another officer drove my hire car.

The police station in Blantyre was a sparse, stone building with no real comforts.

I must say that I was treated respectfully at all times. Indeed, I was very lucky because at another time or in another country I might have been locked away without interview or trial.

I was not placed in a cell or a locked interview room. As I recall, we spoke in a small room adjacent the main counter.

The motivation to write this came after I read a story by Karen van der Zee at Life in the Expat Lane, about her altercation with soldiers in Uganda.

The Malawi officers were interested to know where I had come from and what I was doing outside the President’s house.

At the time, I was a journalist, albeit for a farming newspaper, but I had the good sense not to mention that. South Africa at the time discouraged journalists from visiting and I had some trouble getting my visa for that country.

I told the Malawi police that I was a public servant in the Agriculture Department.

Whether they believed me or not, I had no idea, but after an hour or so they let me go. In fact, they escorted me to the elusive hotel.

The next day I returned the hire car to the airport and boarded my plane for Harare.

As we waited for take-off, an official came through the aircraft and asked if Michael Gorey was on board. I answered him and he seemed satisfied.

That was the end of the matter and I left Malawi.

• Here is my other travel post from Malawi, about the Tyre Doctor

Hoon activity can be doing a burnout; dangerous or reckless driving; racing another vehicle, speeding, and accelerating or braking and skidding wildly.

I think it’s fair to say WA is the hoon state of Australia and Kalgoorlie-Boulder is the hoon capital. I saw some figures last year which showed there were more hoon arrests here than anywhere else.

The State Government began legislating to fix the problem in 2004. I’m pretty sure the laws have been made even tougher and it’s now possible for citizens to “dob in a hoon” without being required to give evidence in court.

Hoons are generally young males driving souped up cars who drive at excessive speeds in built-up areas.

I headed out for a walk at 6.15pm this evening. I was nearly at the Hannans School when I saw a hoon race past. In the few seconds that followed, these were my thoughts in actual order:

i) What an idiot;
ii) Why didn’t I bring my mobile phone;
iii) He’s going too fast for me to take a picture or see the number plates;
iv) Where are the police when you need them?

The hoon had just got around the corner and was revving his engine to accelerate again towards the next intersection.

Immediately, I heard a police siren! Nankiville Road doesn’t normally have police parked in it, so either they were waiting for this idiot or they were there for another reason.

Whatever, I expected to see the hoon pulled over. It surprised me a little when he turned up Graeme Street and didn’t seem to be slowing down. I thought he was probably going too fast to stop and still expected to see him pulled over as I continued my walk in the same direction to the telephone tower.

It wasn’t to be; the hoon led police on a chase. The police must have seen him turn onto dirt tracks at the back of the Hannans golf course, because I encountered the police turning back the opposite way, presumably to intercept the hoon.

I don’t know how it turned out; will be an interesting news story to follow up tomorrow.

What can be done to stop hooning? I think the politicians are right to make the laws tougher. In my opinion it should be two strikes and you’re out. Impound their vehicles and sell them on the second offence.

That’s a little surprising when you consider that journalists are writers. But when you think about it, we are craftsmen while novelists are artists. We ply a trade while they follow their creative spirits. We have responsibilities, they don’t.

Three good books about newspapers come readily to mind. PG Wodehouse wrote Psmith, Journalist in 1915; Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop in 1938 and Terry Pratchett published The Truth in 2000.

In Wodehouse’s classic, Psmith arrives in New York on a cricket tour and becomes involved with the home entertainment weekly “Cosy Moments” which he transforms into a hard-hitting investigative journal. He rides the bumps of organised crime and American politics along the way.

In Waugh’s story, scribe William Boot is mistaken by the publisher of the Daily Beast for a war correspondent. He is uprooted from writing country garden features to covering the civil war in Ishmaelia. Both novels are cleverly satirical.

Pratchett’s The Truth is a typically fantastic work from the author of the Discworld series. The hero in this case is William de Worde, who teams up with dwarfs to print the first newspaper in Ankh-Morpork.

As usual, Pratchett offers some tremendous insights into human nature. His observations of the newspaper profession are also very sharp, suggesting excellent research or personal knowledge. For instance, he offers a rare literary tribute to the unsung work of sub-editors.

I’ve just finished reading The Truth for the second time. I found the focus on hired assassins to be distracting and kept wanting the story to get back to the trials and tribulations of The Times.

There are some great one liners, like when the dwarfs make a typesetting error with the newspaper’s logo, which becomes: “The truth will make you fret”.

I related personally to the serial pest who kept coming into the office with remarkable vegetables. Anyone who has worked on a country newspaper will know there are people in most towns who like to show off their giant tomatoes or funny-shaped parsnips.

I admit it’s one of my long-term ambitions to write a satirical novel about newspapers. I started taking notes of strange but true incidents last year, like when one of my reporters disappeared while on the trail of visiting Mongolian detectives.

I have heaps of material; just need the time to write it.

I think it's bureaurcracy gone made. We sponsor youth exchange programs but unless you're a host family (for which a police clearance is reasonable) we hardly have anything to do with young people.

I had a day off today and went to the police station for my National Police Certificate. After paying $43 I received a piece of paper saying that I do "not appear on the disclosable court history records of any Australian Police Jurisdiction". That's reassuring.

I haven't had many encounters with police.

The first was when I was about 11 years old. A friend and I were playing on the railway embankment in Traralgon near the old hospital. We learnt that if you placed a five cent piece on the railway line for a train to run over it the result was a flat piece of metal.

The train driver must have thought we were rascals planning to derail the Gippslander and called the cops, who seemed quite satisified with our explanation. Nevertheless I'm pleased it didn't show on my National Police Certificate that I'm a suspected terrorist who once threatened to blow up a locomotive.

Thinking of that experience, it seems a clever way to convert coins to base metal and could become popular as coins are now worth more than their face value for the first time in years!

The next time I met the police was when riding my bike home from squash in Traralgon in the early 80s. I didn't have lights on my bike and took off down a side street when I saw a police car. They followed me and gave me a serve. That's not on my record either, fortunately.

That side street, which was a dirt track to nowhere, is now the road past the Kmart shopping centre and ASIC.

His main character, Inspector Kurt Willander, is a thoughtful introspective man who reflects on societal change while solving murder mysteries.

This particular book was different to anything I’ve read by British or American authors. There wasn’t a build up of suspense, but more an unravelling of why certain things had to be.

Willander gradually comes to understand that three brutal murders were committed by a woman seeking revenge against men who abuse women.

Although the murderess wasn’t named until late in the book, she appears in cameo scenes throughout and there is no puzzle regarding her method or motive.

Mankel drew an interesting parallel with a vigilante group committed to seeking retribution against criminals not apprehended by police.

The values of modern Sweden come under scrutiny without any pompous moralising.

Wallander’s approach and methodology are fascinating to read and there is subtle humor in the digs at police bureaucracy.

There’s no great pace to this book, but it gives an insight to Sweden and police work generally.

Nearly 400 people have been injured in a village in Bangladesh in a series of clashes over controversial umpiring decisions in a cricket match between two rural teams. At least one man is reported to have died while a dozen houses were torched in the scuffle.

Paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles and police fired gun shots and tear gas shells on Thursday to disperse a fighting mob from a village near Brahmanbaria district town, 100 km from Dhaka.

“More than 200 people were admitted to different hospitals with injuries,” a police inspector was quoted as saying in a Reuters report. “The victim succumbed to stab injuries while being shifted to Dhaka for higher treatment.”

The rival villagers used guns, sticks and whatever weapons came to hand in sporadic clashes that began on Tuesday.

Delayed television footage showed hundreds of people carrying sticks and fighting on a newly harvested paddy ground at Sarail. The clashes continued through the day and night before the police and paramilitaries went into action in the village.

“The situation is now under control,” the inspector continued, “but scores of people were injured and huge properties were damaged.”

My comment: It’s a pity the Bangladesh national team doesn’t play with the same passion.

I live in the UK. 40 years ago we moved to a 400 year old farmhouse halfway up a Welsh mountain (we lived there with our three sons for a few years). It was on the site of a Roman cattle road. The house needed a lot of fixing. We took out the floor boards in a bedroom – you could see through to the slate floor below. One night, I heard my 4 year old son crying.

I found him at the far side of the room, in the corner against the wall. He was sleep walking and had crossed the beams on his own in the dark. I had to cross them also to pick him up – no easy task. How had he done it with his little legs?

When he woke he said the Gorey had taken him there. I had never heard that word before. A couple of weeks later, he pointed to his teddy bear, which he had lost in the woodpile in the yard — he said, ‘It’s the Gorey.’

A local person told me that a man named Gorey used to live in the house many years ago. The reason I’m writing is I have always been puzzled by this. I see your family is Irish — did you have any Gorey relatives in Wales in 18th century? I found your site by chance looking up something quite unrelated.

The haunting didn’t stop and there were many more times when we, or one or two visitors saw, or felt a spirit. I don’t know if it was the same one, or different ones. The house — Bwlch yn Horeb, known as the Bwlch — was on an historic spot and we discovered that from about the 11th century to 1800s it had been an inn, before becoming a farmhouse.

The “spirits” could have been wind, or even rats, though more than once actual shapes were seen and voices heard. I camped out in it on my own when we first bought it, when it was a virtual wreck. Many times, I had such a strong feeling of a presence that I had to run outside.

I met two young policemen who told me about the ‘ghost’ they saw; it’s a long story.

The walls were four feet thick, stuck together with a lime and mud render. When we knocked a hole in one for a window, piles of wheat poured out and we saw the ‘rat runs.’

Locals told us the meadows behind, used for hay in the spring and then sheep, hadn’t had wheat on them since before the War. They meant WW1.

We left to live in Italy and later sold the house. We have never returned, so I have no idea how the current occupants find it.

The ghost story

Briefly: The Bwlch was cross shaped, a block at the front with a porch and front door, central stairs with rooms left and right; and a wing sticking out of the middle at the back.

There was a very small front parlour to one side of the central hall (later we knocked it into the room behind); on the other side of the hall was the main parlour, which was the depth of the house.

One day I was walking past the smaller parlour, when I saw a man in heavy tweeds hunched up in an armchair by the dead fire. I went in and there was nobody there.

One Easter, a year after the incident which I mentioned to you last time, when my son sleepwalked, lured by the Gorey — my parents and teenage sister came to stay. My sister went for a walk on the mountain and disappeared in a sudden blizzard. My father went to look for her and got lost. We called Mountain Rescue.

Twelve big policemen turned up and searched for her. They found my father, but my sister had vanished. During a regroup, standing around the kitchen, drinking hot tea, two of the older policemen told us that years ago, when young, one winter they had been called to the Bwlch because the elderly shepherd who lived there — a Mr Gorey — hadn’t been seen for a while and his dogs had broken out and made their way down to the village.

The policemen walked up through deep snow and in the small front parlour found Mr Gorey, dead in an armchair in front of the ashes of an old fire. The house was freezing.

They picked him up to carry him upstairs to the bedroom, but he was frozen into a bent shape, as if in a chair. They carried him up anyway, and laid him on the bed. His legs were bent, in the air. Without thinking, one of them went to straighten him by pushing on his legs. It made him sit up. They yelled and fled. They were sheepish, of course, when relating this.

I said I’d seen him once, in the armchair. That just led to lots of local Welsh ghost stories, in the middle of which, we got a telephone call to say my sister was safe. She had gone over the top and eventually ended up in a distant farm, by doing what I told her, follow a stream down if you get lost.

Incidentally, there was an Irish connection, though I don’t know if with Mr Gorey. Cattle and travellers would land from Ireland on Anglesey and follow the old Roman cattle (or drovers’) road that passed the Bwlch to Chester or Shrewsbury and then down to London.

Senior Victorian police officer Peter Halloran was last night cleared by the Sierra Leone Court of Appeal of sexually assaulting a teenage girl while working as a war crimes investigator for the United Nations.

Superintendent Halloran was facing 18 months in jail after he was controversially convicted in February.

The two-one decision in his favour by the three-judge appeal court came after months of delay. The appeal decision was repeatedly adjourned after one of the judges refused to attend court because he was on holiday.

Halloran was working in Sierra Leone for the United Nations. He was charged after a colleague made accusations against him. The girl he supposedly abused gave evidence in his favor, but somehow he was convicted.

He has spent several months in a fetid cell, with little publicity in this country, especially compared with Schapelle Corby in Indonesia.

The Age today reported the sad story of a real estate agent being murdered in Melbourne.

This triggered my interest earlier in the day when a breaking report said a man was being interviewed in relation to the murder. It was subsequently reported that the first man was released without charge. A second man was then interviewed and charged.

So what about the first bloke? Presumably he was a friend, relative or lover of the victim, usually the first port of call in muder inquiries according to my Peter Robinson and Ian Rankin books.

The poor bloke is probably distressed about the woman’s death, but he’s a suspect! I have faith in our legal system, however it must seem daunting if you’re innocently caught up in it.

It was interesting therefore to read the headlines about a terrorist being shot by police in London.

The Australian trumpeted: “Five police bullets end it for London bomber who tried again”.

A day later, I knew while reading it the dead man wasn’t a bomber.

I really expect our media to give closer scrutiny to police and government reports. This is poor reporting.