We are writing on behalf of the Insanity Police, Bogota to inform you of your insanity: something you most probably are not aware of.

Over the last 2 months of our tenancy we were witness to multiple events and circumstances which we hope you will agree point undeniably to a behavioural threshold across which you have stepped and where, we believe, you spend far too much of your time.

Please take this letter as your first and final warning.  Failure to make amendments to any future behaviour will most likely result in extreme disdain from those around, the failure of your business and a fierce case for the creation of a dislike button on Facebook which would be the only means of joining the Juan Diego The Mexican Facebook Group.

To substantiate the claims in this letter we hereby attach a list, by no means comprehensive, rather indicative, of the concerning behavioural traits we refer to.

1) Wearing tight pink women’s pyjama tops which expose the lower third of your belly.

2) Wearing said pyjamas while emptying the contents of our freezer at 7:30 am on Monday morning.

3) Charging $500,000 pesos for a room with no windows, no furniture, no lock, no keys for which, despite supposedly including “all services”, you believe it to be appropriate to request a contribution for a replacement gas bottle for the kitchen.

4) Selling rooms on the terrace of your building on the basis of there being access to i) hot water, ii) a kitchen (to be installed soon after tenants move in) iii) “maximum security” and iv) a washing machine. Yet, after living in the building for 4 weeks, these tenants i) do not have a functioning hot shower, ii) only have access to a kitchen two floors below where they live IF you are in your apartment because you refuse to install one on the roof and refuse to give them a key to the kitchen, iii) have only suitcase padlocks on their doors because the latches are only so big, iv) have access to a washing machine that does not rinse, drain or spin things properly, making it a big metal box that fills very effectively with water.

5) Calling your girlfriend at various times which include 8am and 10pm, and referring to her as azucita.

6) Your inability to speak English after living in Texas for 30 years.

7) Stealing our friend’s umbrella which we left in the corner of the apartment we rented from you because you believe that we only rent the room, rather than the communal space.

Letting untrustworthy Colombians move in to the building who eventually broke into 5 different rooms and removed nearly $30 million pesos worth of goods and cash.

9) Denying that any of this was your responsibility.

10) Pissing off the 3 different restauranteurs who had moved in to the space on the ground floor in the 3 months we lived in your building, to the extent that they felt the need to sneak into the building one morning (because you had locked them out) and try to kick their way in to the restaurant to remove their belongings.

10a) Telling us not to worry about said restauranteurs because the building was safe in the knowledge that you keep a gun under your pillow.

11) The fact that, rather than buying new light bulbs, you felt it better to simply move the two working bulbs between your apartment and the communal stairwell  during the 8 week period I was on crutches and returning home after dark and having to feel my way up three flights of stairs.

12) The fact that you consistently claimed to having “called a Colombian workman and paid him half the owed amount to fix x problem” even though they would never turn up.  We feel that doing this more than twice makes you an idiot borderlining on the incompetent.  We recall this happening on close to 7 or 8 occasions. We were unable to devise a scale that would appropriately and accurately reflect your level of dysfunction.  Social or psychological.

13) You accused our close friend of breaking the lock on the door to his room, when in fact the hole in the wall was a direct result of the shoddy workmanship you insisted on in order to save $6 or $7.

14) The fact that in the four months we were living in your building you were unable to organise a plumber to fix the leaking toilet bowl in our second bathroom, nor address the fact that there was only one shower between 6 people that produced water hot enough to shower in.

15) The fact your changed the locks to the doors several times and only provided us with one key.

16) The fact you repeatedly let yourself into our apartment to introduce us to your family without knocking or letting us know that they would be coming through.

17) The fact that the two English boys and one Japanese boy in our apartment were referred to only as “England” and “Japan” in this time.

18) You called Henry, Jeanry.

19) You accused our friends upstairs of coming home at 3:30 am and making a load of noise when you, on a weekly basis, would wake the entire building up at 7am when you walked out of your apartment and greeted the men working on the street.

20) We had to argue for 2 weeks over reducing our rent after we lost more than 8 grand worth of stuff, and this was all while we were still waiting to receive a new lock on our door – the eventual installation of which produced a massive crack in our door, compromising the security of our room.  Yet in protecting the building from the “crazy beer-selling” restauranteurs, you managed to change the lock on the front door in less than 24 hours.

21) The fact you cleaned the roof of the terrace with sulphuric acid and then wondered why the bricks felt slightly spongey underfoot and the roof of our bedroom below was leaking.

22) The fact that you were unable to ever, in these 4 months, deal with the issue of the leaky roof nor attend to the copious amounts of mould which grew as a result of the leak.

23) The fact we should have had our suspicions when you told us the room was clean and ready to move into when it wasn’t (and you’d moved the bed we had asked you to leave in our room into another room so you could lie to another potential tenant about having the bed), AND in the same week, you told us the empanadas you were selling were gourmet – and they weren’t.

We hope that this letter finds you in good, but slightly confused spirits (after all, we all know how well you deal with the English language, especially when it is combined with the subtleties of truth AND wit), and should you have any further comments or issues you’d like to try to raise with us, do not hesitate to contact us – we would be most happy to supply you with further claims and details of events to substantiate any of the suppositions outlined herewithin.

Many gracious thanks (to God).

Jane and James,

The Gringos. (a.k.a Los Australianos…KANGUUROOS!)

But it has also been a week of those famed “only in South America” moments: just a friendly little reminder that there are still voids of logic that linger in this world.

Where else in the world could you ask for a leg of goat, get sent to the totally wrong side of the market, and then be sold a leg of goat that looks and tastes suspiciously like pork for twice the normal price?

Where else could you find a staff room of teachers who have not been granted access to the blu-tac supplies, or the photocopies in case they…gasp…use them?

Where else in the world could you ask for a vegetarian omelette and receive one full of sausage?

Where else in the world could you ask for butter, have the sales assistant go out the back bring something back and try to sell you margarine, twice, and then suggest you by the butter, marked “butter” sitting on the shelf.

That’s right…only in South America.

In a much more exciting note, the old knee is on the mend – I’m now walking with no crutch (though not very far – and this usually entails me walking to the spot where I last left my crutch…or walking around cursing like an 80 year old searching blindly for his dentures first thing in the mornings) – and have just been invited on a press trip to Cartagena in the last week of June thanks to Duncan at www.theurbantravelblog.com.

Ah, I hear you all sigh with relief, we’ll finally get to the bottom of the secret service prostitute scandal.  There is more action an adventure to come, so stay tuned for the Folicular Chronicles, live from Cartagena…coming soon!

No, but seriously, it is awfully nice to be offered the spot, given the promises I made to deliver material to him in early February only to have everything of value, including the notes and preparation I had made to send him…stolen by those ghastly sewer rats who moved into our apartment the week before my birthday.

It is true, though, that in times like this you can’t help but feeling like you’ve bloody well deserved a fucking good old fashioned (free) holiday.

What is your mum doing today? Are you in a place where you can call her? See her? Pop over for a cuppa? And tell her you love her?  Is she going to be able to look back at you and hold that conversation and tell you she loves you too?

If so, you ought to act on that, because not everyone is in your position.

As the city wakes this morning there is a very anxious lady getting ready for something that she’s not so confident about.  Something the doctors tell her is going to work, something she once told her doctor she wanted.  A thought process she can’t quite take herself through just one more time, so she can remind herself….why?  Because she can’t remember all the little things from the last 6 or 8 months, that have led her to the room she wakes in today.

It’s one thing to know that you won’t see your family for several years – often that’s a decision you have to make in order to really experience the breadth of life and wonders of the living.  It’s another thing when you know the people you love are making very tough decisions, and living through the consequences.  Somewhere, at some point in the day – not just in another postcode, but in another country.  In another language.

Walking away from the family you know will have to make those decisions in your absence: That is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.  And now I sit, so far away that I’m in a country that doesn’t even have postcodes.  Thinking.  Wondering. Knowing.

ECT has its stigmas.  There are people who don’t know, nor understand what or why. Or how.  So maybe this will help.

To put this in perspective answer me this.  How many times have you walked into the room and had to remind your mum you’d already popped in and seen her earlier in the day?  How often do you have to offer your reassurance that that word…the word she can’t quite find, but searches for intensely and with a grimace…that word…is Wednesday?

So, knowing that your mum is waking up to put herself through this all once more, knowing that she chose to take herself in, because she wants to get better. Knowing that it was her choice, a choice that she doesn’t quite understand, knowing that thousands of miles away, she is sitting there thinking through what is about to happen to her, and how it might change her, but that at the end of the day it’s all in an effort, which is for the first time in 20 years within the realm of her control, to find the peace she is starting to believe she can find…

This is the definition of courage.

What’s your mum up to today?

Now while it is true, and always will be, that practice makes progress – the day progress finally arrives, in whatever form, is an experience everyone is entitled to have: it´s a basic human right.

Just up the road from our apartment, I crossed the road tenderly this morning, feeling a little shaky on my leg, when I felt something particularly strange.  On any other day it could have been mistaken for a twitch, or a jerk.  The kind of flash that runs through you, reminding you that you have muscles you may have neglected from your attention.

It´s amazing to go through the process of forgetting, and then remembering things, movements, memories, whatever.  And the moment those wires flicker and spark, and the current runs, not so smoothly, but runs nonetheless…that is the moment you remember that you never really forgot what it was like.

I remember trying to explain to friends that in all honesty, if I were to drop my crutches and try to walk free of support that I have no idea if I would be able to…and at that moment in my imagination, everything stops, because I have no concept of what that loss of control would feel like.

I learnt to walk again today.  And that is something I can’t explain.  Something for which any explanation I offer would undermine the reality of those recollections that came shooting up my leg.  But that is just the kind of progress that everyone of you deserves to experience, at some point in your lives.

And how fitting that it would be on a day like today.