Settling in

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.