But what happens? You go to a timber camp, you go downriver, you earn a lot of money, and you get a bloody great Johnson outboard motor, and you take that upriver.

Now there's nothing you can possibly put it on, they're very far, shallow by the time you get upriver, but you put that on a big piece of wood, outside the longhouse. You'll see all these rusting motors instead of heads, there's these huge rusting Johnsons. And you get the girl. She's impressed.

And then there's another part of the story to do with outboard motors, I can't think how I remembered, but I did. Johnson, they just couldn't work out so many shear pins were needed in the interior of Borneo, tremendous demand for shear pins. The pin that shears, breaks off so you save your propeller, the motor, it whips up on a rock. And well, it's an interesting story. Again, it goes back to, well, thousands upon thousands of years, certainly pre-Rajah Brooke, anyway. To please a girl, once you are too old, once you are over 20, you go down to the river until your spear gets small, sitting in the cold water, and then the medicine man, the shaman, though they don't really have such things, the senior guy, the tuarum, the chief, comes. And he's got a little auger thing, and he bores a hole, wooden, through the glans. That way and then the other way. So you've got two holes right through the head of the penis. And then, to begin with, it's a wooden plug that you move around a lot until the hole is healed, and then the great day comes, when you're fully dressed, and you put a couple of Johnson shear pins across. And they're really good. And then on the end you put wooden balls, so that you've got four balls at the end of your penis. And this distends the walls of the vagina and produces the most astonishing orgasm. Now James and I, we'd be followed by these young women, and knowing all about this, I'd go off to pee about a hundred yards away, just in case anybody saw that I wasn't a real man at all and didn't have balls on the end of my penis.

But the trouble with the steel is, like all modern things, there's always a catch. You build up uric acid crystals and calcide, so you can have terrible problems. Much better to stick with the wood, but the girls don't like the wood as much.