DAVID BENTATA

  Chapter 32 – BUSINESS BOYCOTT  Perhaps this chapter does not entirely fit with the general idea of my stories, of my life. But I want to explain, clarify and encourage any of my readers who have met with severe setbacks, especially setbacks in business.  It must have been late 1960s or very early 1970s, long before TEO, our family business then, became as most can remember it. I ended up working there, very much under duress.  In my first years working there, I HATED the shop! Having been criminally careless in school, being so laid back about any sort of work that I was almost horizontal, I felt I was sentenced to life in the Alcatraz of the family business. Not just that but with a boss that was my father, a top salesman, the handymen who could paint, do carpentry, elementary electricity, mechanic, a tasteful window dresser, running a business and with the capacity to work 18 hours a day fuelled only buy 3 packs of cigarettes!  (In fact, Dad had won the Quee...

  Chapter 31 – BOUZNIKA & “GINGER” Gibraltar in the 1970s was an amazing little place. The Frontier was shut tight and we Gibraltarians all rallied to protect our home itself from the expected difficulties   of yet another siege (the 6th? 7th?) by our neighbours to the North. Millennials have .... NPI ... no idea what it was like then, and when we, the older generation of today talk about those times, I'm sure it sounds to them very much like when our own parents talked to us about “the War” and “the Evacuation”. The sad thing is that most of our parents have died and we did not have the patience to listen, not just to hear, but listen with attention to the stories they told us. Now it is our turn to tell our stories to a generation super-glued to mobile phones and technology, and subconsciously thinking that we who were born in the 40s and 50s and 60s belong to a David Attenborough documentary on the Rock’s Stone Age. Let me provide you with just a vignette of tha...