Which is where I am, and it’s been a very long time indeed since I posted anything other than a frontpagefury and even those, I must admit, were stored up and posted in a couple of highly delayed batches.
So here we are on the island of Zanzibar, with its dhows and fierce white light and somewhat out-of-place Maasai ‘beach boys’ haunting the sands. We’re staying in an airbnb where the internet is feeble and there is little ventilation at night, so the rooms are very warm. The benefit of this is that we’ve both started waking at the crack of dawn, even the GF, for an early morning swim.
I’ve become more aware of tides and moon phases than ever before – it was full moon soon after we arrived, and the tides here are quite dramatic so I’ve taken to keeping an tab on timings. Something I would like to do elsewherr as well, but in Istanbul the difference between low and high tide is about 10 cm, so perhaps I won’t bother.
I read the Zanzibari Nobel laureate’s book a few days ago, and it was very good, with one spectacular passage about one of the protagonists wandering around East Africa as part of the German army in World War I.
And a novel from Uganda, which gave me a better sense of culture and ways of seeing the world than many I can think of.
And am now reading that classic (if that is the word) book about the Rwandan genocide, though I will try to find something by someone actually from Rwanda as well. I was rather appalled yesterday when I looked up a lists of books from (not on) Kenya and found a list of travelogues and animal guides. Kenya!
I might fill in some of the gaps in the past few weeks. Or I might not.