After a ten-hour overnight flight and a morning spent shopping for crockery and bed linen in a supermarket that was busier than Tesco on Christmas Eve, we arrived, crippled by hunger and a lack of sleep, at what was to become our home. Our home, a bungalow of sorts I suppose though more Mediterranean, more open, than the English panorama the Hindu word conjures, was bare save for a bed, a wardrobe, a cooker and a fridge-freezer. That night we ate by candlelight – there was no power – sitting on the camping chairs we had bought a few hours earlier, one of which promptly collapsed underneath me. So it was that I turned twenty-five and we arrived in Zambia.
Over the next few weeks we slowly acquired various pieces of wobbly furniture: a sofa and armchairs, a coffee table, a dining table and chairs. And as pictures went up – of our windmill, of London and Bath – and we scattered books and binoculars and newspapers and packs of cards about the place it began to look lived in and feel more like a home. But we were still without curtains (every night for the first month or so we hung towels over our bedroom window) and without them the white-washed walls, barred windows and cold stone floor bore a striking resemblance to a prison. Now though, finally, we have curtains; and with them up this bungalow-of-sorts looks suitably presentable for a picture, so here it is.
There has been a lingering intention to start a blog since Rachel and I arrived in Zambia a little over a month ago. Time and a useable internet connection have proved themselves rare commodities though, so the intention endured as just that. But if Boris Johnson can find an hour on Sunday evening when he is not busy with his mayoral duties to write a column (which I get to read thanks to the Weekly Telegraph, but more of that some other time), then I’m sure we can do likewise and put a few words down about our African life (though I fear the readership of the two won’t compare). And temperamental internet connections are not quite the frustration they once were; after all, if one were to get frustrated at the sun for rising in the East every day then life would soon become quite unliveable. So here then, soon to follow, will be our Letters from Africa.
