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HENDON COUNTY – CLASS OF ‘54 |
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Name: Geoff Bond
Address: 21, Ellados Ave, Suite 117, 8020, Paphos, Cyprus Husband/wife/partner: Nicole
Children:
Joanne (1971) , Jamie (1974) -- out of Jennifer Grandchildren: Alexander, Alysia (out of Joanne) “Turning the accomplishments of many years into an hourglass” I wanted to study English, French, History and Geography -- but Harold Wilson needed innocent, idealistic storm troopers for his “white-hot technological revolution”. Orders went out: even Maynard Potts took heed and duly persuaded me to go for maths, physics, engineering and yet more maths. Potts threatened me with a future as a bank clerk otherwise. This prospect seemed even more dreadful than partial differential equations and the rum-soaked breath of the ex-navy physics teacher, Commander Grundy. My white-hot liaison with Peter Thompson’s fifth-form sister, Vivien was in trouble -- my defences were down -- I acquiesced. So welcome to London University and all its distractions. Drinking too much Cyprus sherry at all-night parties and working it off the next morning as captain of Boats (rowing); my party piece -- The Ballad of Eskimo Nell -- is still freshly remembr’d. Engineering was probably a mistake but it was made bearable by taking optional courses in physical anthropology and biochemistry. Anyway I was excited at the thought of heading off into the Empire, driving roads where no man had gone before and learning some exotic language. I was still determined to learn a language (“you live as many lives as languages you speak”, quoth my bilingual mother). The summer of 1963 was spent as a trainee engineer, much of it under 2 atmospheres of pressure entombed in huge caissons being sunk as foundations for a massive bridge over the Ebro in Zaragoza, Spain. This was El Caudillo’s country still at its most traditional: glasses of ‘tinto’ for a couple of pesetas, a two-shift day with four hour siestas, out with the men till three in the morning, blind lottery-ticket sellers on every street corner, olive oil for breakfast, flamenco dancing in the paseos and, yes, bull fights. My Spanish got a lot better. In spite of the terrors of Fourier transforms, I got my honours degree in 1964 but still had to do the articles for Chartered Engineer. Off to Bucks County Council where we built the M40 through the county. There’s a rather nice, slender, prestressed concrete footbridge on the Beaconsfield by-pass at the locality called Windsor End for which I got a design award. It is still there to this day. During this time I was courting Jennifer Powell originally from Copthall Grammar school, local beauty, athlete and now doing a teaching degree at Keele. I still felt a bit cheated by Maynard Potts and took my English and Spanish A levels just to prove that I would have enjoyed them more. I did -- my memory banks are full of Keats, Shakespeare and many others which give me pleasure to recite even to this day. By 1969 I had done my time, joined Oscar Faber (consulting engineers) done my Professional Exams and got chartered. On the way I got married to Jennifer and bribed an estate agent to ‘fix’ me a mortgage that I couldn’t justify on my salary (how times have changed). I was finally properly qualified to be let loose in foreign parts. However, too much time had gone by: Macmillan had disappeared the Empire. Worse, somehow I had missed out on the swinging 60’s getting ready for it. So nothing loath, we went to Nigeria anyway. It was just as exotic as I hoped and had plenty of excitement too -- nearly got shot as a Biafran spy on the Niger Bridge, narrowly escaped a green mamba bite in Kaduna, got malaria in Minna and galloping blood poisoning in Kano. Somehow Joanne got conceived in all this and there was a big debate whether she should be born in the local catholic mission hospital. In a rare display of lucidity, I decided that she would never thank me for a Nigerian nationality -- so back mum went to Edgware General. Was I doing much engineering? Just the bare minimum to justify my time: I was studying the Hausa agriculturalists and the Fulani nomadic herdsmen. Into their villages, learning their lingo, drumming the tom-toms, drinking their sorghum beer and fighting off the shiny she-devils who would sell themselves for an orange. Back in UK there was a three-month postal strike: I only heard about Joanne’s birth via a telegram portered 300 miles from the Ilorin telegraph station to Zaria where I was billeted. In honour of that, we made it (Zaria) Joanne’s middle name. After that it was back to Oscar Faber in St Albans, but it was all rather tame. There’s only so much interest one can find in designing cement silo foundations in Gravesend -- or listening to colleagues exchange tips on Lada maintenance. Even so, I had some gems: wrote a monograph published by the Steel Industry on the mathematics of fireproofing hollow steel columns by circulating water inside (sic!); another award winning footbridge (post tensioned catenary) in the Peak District National Park; and letters published in the Economist on how every peon sees the link between pay and productivity, but not the car industry’s Red Robbo. Jamie came along in 1974: he was lucky, I was already dreaming of foreign parts and was travelling a great deal to Morocco. I wanted, and got, a total immersion French course: then we took up residence in a sumptuous colonial house in Rabat. Now I was supposed to be into project management and travelling all over the country. I was particularly fascinated by the Berber cultures of the Rif and Atlas mountains. I sat cross-legged in tribal tents and ate their couscous, mechoui and unknowable concoctions of spices, brains, liver and testicles. I was still pretty naïve and hashish smugglers nearly set me up as the fall guy in a contraband operation. I shared an office with a Moroccan engineer -- graduate of one of the Grandes Ecoles, L’Ecole des Mines. Suave, intelligent, bearded and disciplined it was my first brush with something quite surreal -- come Ramadan he started fasting earlier than needed and finishing later than needed “to get extra points with Allah”. I got the full story including the fountains, the ripe fruit and the 72 virgins waiting on him in paradise. What has become of Lahlou I wonder? On the way I was perfecting my French and passed the exams of the Institutes of Linguists and of Interpreters and Translators. (I am still an accredited French translator and interpreter.) Our fifth-form French teacher (who replaced the pretty, but inadequate, Miss Newcomb), the flinty Mr. “I’ve killed Germans with my bare hands” Jermey, might even be pleasantly gratified. The children started their schooling in a local kindergarten where they were exposed to Arabic and French. But later, the unfeeling and inflexible discipline at the French junior school was too much; we switched them to the local American school. Joanne was in the same class as Princess Zineb, the King’s niece. They became friends and Joanne visited the Palace for tea on Saturdays in the company of the governess. Sometimes the princess would be whisked away to say her weekly ‘hello’ to her father, the King’s brother. Meanwhile the long-suffering Jennifer was teaching in local schools, fitting it around my selfishly determined program -- no wonder she freaked out a lot. I managed to stretch my tour in Morocco to 4 years by switching horses to WS Atkins (consulting engineers) but at what seemed like a high price: the commitment to take over their Algiers office with a multi-million pound turnover. But it wasn’t so bad -- there are compensations for living in a Stalinist, Kafkaesque police state: well not that -- just the palm trees, sunshine, Mediterranean sea, red wine and wonderful fresh fruit and vegetables in season. But it broke our marriage and Jennifer went back to live in Morocco with the children. All this time I had been pondering some of the teachings of our anthropology courses. Nothing that I had seen in my immersion in humanity around Africa chimed with them. Then, to my immense relief, the idiotic precepts of Margaret Mead (“there is no such thing as human nature”) had been exposed as a fraud. But she had done a lot of damage. She had set back by 70 years the social sciences -- and social anthropology in particular. In addition, in physical anthropology, there was another unbelievable orthodoxy of the early sixties: that humans had sprung into existence simultaneously in widely separated parts of the world. But by now the Leakeys had uncovered ancient human remains in East Africa. Not all the pieces of the puzzle were in place: but I was seeing patterns in the chaos. I had been brought up in a free-thinking family that practised a form of 1930’s vegetarianism. We had an unusually sophisticated understanding of foods, their nutritive value and why we ate some and not others. I was probably the only one to get a full meal at the bun-fight school dinners -- by taking everybody’s boiled-out cabbage for a quantum of thinly sliced gristly sausage. But in my travels I had been hoping to find the secrets of the ideal human diet (was it indeed vegetarian?) -- but without success. Nothing seemed to recommend itself -- all cultures had their problems. Even the Barbary Coast palled even though I had been making many excursions to the extraordinary Touareg in the depths of the Sahara Desert and to the non-Arab natives holed up in the Kabylie mountains -- the same who had seen off the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, and Visigoths. I applied for transfer and got the mega-million pound turnover of the Kuwait office. It was the state’s golden era -- 1984 to 1987. Saddam Hussein was fighting the Iranians, the odd rotting corpse came floating down the Gulf, occasional Scud missiles landed in Kuwait City; but Kuwait was already a sophisticated playground and very rich. The children came out for holidays and had a great time. The Kuwaitis all wore dishdashas and were thoroughly Americanized. However, whenever there was a feast day, they camped out in the desert in multi-room marquees with television aerials on top. In the meantime, remarkable progress was being made in DNA analysis. We were beginning to see that all humans on the planet had a common origin -- but where and when? Girl friends had come and gone, but there was no one serious until Atkins offered to rotate me out to head a newly created company, partnered with IMG (the sports management group), to develop golf and country clubs around the world. We started with continental Europe but somehow I got to know an English dyed-in-the-wool feminist, bachelor girl and very quarrelsome. We had some splendid arguments -- she from a “ this is how it ought to be” point of view, and me from an anthropological “this is how it is” point of view. Vanessa knew that I did not want fatherhood again, but one day she got pregnant, insisted that it is only her decision and, in 1989, gave birth to Imogen. I have been a fatherly, but non-resident, presence ever since. Imogen still benefits from one of the last grammar schools in the country: Dover Grammar for Girls. She is bright and talented in music and dance. Meanwhile Joanne and Jamie had stayed in the American system and were finishing their schooling in the American Community School in Hillingdon. Joanne got her high school graduation in 1989 and Jamie won through to obtain the incredibly testing International Baccalaureate in 1992. He went on to get an honours degree in business studies at Brunel. Meanwhile I based myself in Peter Mayle country, Provence, France; we bought sites in Vichy, Avignon and Brussels and there were many other promotional opportunities hovering. I got to know the estranged wife of the town’s Notaire, pin-up cute, sexy and feisty Nicole. A romance developed that has continued to mature. Meanwhile, I had been following the remarkable work of the molecular geneticists -- Cavalli-Sforza in particular. We now knew that everyone on the planet is descended from a small group of people who lived just 2000 generations ago in the savannas of East Africa; moreover our bodies are still the same as they were back then. A light went on in my head -- that means that today’s bodies are designed for life on the African savannas; so how were they fuelled? There was by now a wealth of information about our body’s biochemistry and digestive systems; and also about the feeding opportunities for the Pleistocene human animal and what use they made of them. But no one was putting the information together. I knew that this is what my life had been a preparation for. I threw in my job; Nicole and I headed off on a world trip. I needed to check out Australian aboriginals in particular but found it agreeable to study Polynesians in Tahiti, Fiji and Hawaii, and the Maori in New Zealand. The Japanese too had something to answer for. We settled in Palm Springs, California and, while getting my handicap down to single figures, I started putting my thoughts together. Nicole and I got married in the Candlelight Chapel in Las Vegas, by which act I became husband number five. I spent the summer of 1996 in the British Library, pulling down over a thousand scientific articles into a database. By early 1997 I had written the first “owners manual” for the human machine. In doing so I had to come to terms with some uncomfortable conclusions: humans are not natural vegetarians: they are designed to eat a lot of vegetation, yes, but also toads, tortoises, caterpillars and carrion. We started eating according to the owners manual. The trick was to identify the general specification for the kind of nutrition provided by frogs, mongongo nuts and so forth -- and then find ways of eating in today’s world that fit the specification. (It’s not that difficult.) I started giving talks and in short order I was on radio chat shows and television. It attracted the attention of American companies. The owner of American Standard Inc., Joe Schuchert, was particularly enthused. He liked the concept and, like other companies, he was seeking to reduce the outrageous costs of employee health treatment. Together we published my “Natural Eating in a Nutshell” -- a 32 page brochure distributed to all 35,000 employees. Most medical doctors, when they heard what I had to say, were equally enthusiastic -- they recognized that my precepts were scientifically rigorous and filled in mysterious gaps in our knowledge of human nutrition. Public speaking became a very important aspect and at the Los Angeles chapter of the National Speakers Association I learned, over two hard years of coaching, the inside knowledge and expertise to deliver entertaining and persuasive talks. Meanwhile I was writing the flagship book “Natural Eating -- Nutritional anthropology, eating in harmony with our genetic programming”. After a lot of vicissitudes it was finally published by Griffin in 2000. An eminent doctor, Christopher Brown, M.D. wrote a wonderful foreword to the book. On the way, my daughter, Joanne, had married a first generation Greek Cypriot, settled in Southgate and had Alexander in 1996 and Alysia in 1999. My children were rather puzzled by my sudden change in direction but they slowly came round. Seeing Joanne struggle with raising two young children in a healthy way, made me focus more on the social aspect. Indeed it is one thing to know what you are supposed to do, but another thing to actually do it in today’s dysfunctional, commercialized food environment; it demands superhuman self-discipline. Nicole’s children, in France (Fred and Emma by husband number two) were faster off the mark. They immediately adopted the Natural Eating precepts and applied them assiduously both in their lives and to their own children’s. I began to get quite a following. Early on I started a subscription monthly newsletter to answer questions and to put into perspective the latest scare, fad or novelty food. Nicole who, as a proud French cuisinière had to make some painful adjustments, developed a set of conforming recipes that were published as “Healthy Cooking with the Bond Girl”. A number of other tools followed to guide people through all the confusion that’s out there: A workshop manual, a video, a set of cassette tapes, and a chequebook-size eating planner. The flagship book, “Natural Eating” was translated into German, Russian and French. I was making my living on several fronts: by giving talks, electronic sales, book sales and giving consultations: weight control, cancer fighting, cardio problems, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, allergies and many other conditions. However, 9/11 came along and we never knew how much time we would get to stay in the States: it was impossible to program anything long term anymore. We decided to sell-up and move somewhere that still had palm trees and sunshine (we are still tropical creatures!) but no visa problems. Cyprus came out of the hat and we finally moved to a beautiful seashore development near Paphos this summer. We now have a new venture -- health holidays, where clients can come and stay in our independent guest accommodation and learn to live like we say. I have a contract with a New York publisher, Square One, to write another book which is well underway. It will focus much more on lifestyle in general and how we can align living in today’s socially dysfunctional world with our savannah-bred natures. I still have the weight and muscle I had when stroking the University Eight and the healthy vital signs of a San bushman. We do of course, practice what I preach -- we have to be good ambassadors for what we say! I feel that I am only now beginning to fill the promise and hard work put in by my teachers. Just like the Energiser Bunny, I now want to go on and on… |