Livvy reminded me of this. In a recent post. So eloquent and graceful and honest and generous in its delivery. Livvy reminded me that most of us – lots of us – lose our way. Sometimes. It’s not surprising. Not when you’re a woman. Our route maps might as well be roughly sketched on the backs of cigarette packets: you could be any number of the following: daughter, sister, career girl, lover, wife, mother, carer, grandmother … or something like that … roughly speaking … if you see what I mean … and not necessarily in that order either, by the way … sorry I can’t be more specific …

But how will I know when I ought to shift gears, move from one to another: marriage to motherhood? From job to job? Career to career? One kids to two? Two to three? Is there a right time to change roles between career, say, and motherhood? Ought I work or stayathome? How do I even do my new job, come to think of it?

Quick, desperate glance at back of fag packet clutched between trembling fingers: … sorry I can’t be more specific …

Nobody knows.

It’s why titles at Amazon on Parenting abound (36,751 at last count), where those on Rocket Science do not (678).

It’s why, at least I think it’s why, women are more likely to succumb to Depression than men. Their myriad, merging, multi-faceted roles begin to smudge the boundaries of Me.  That’s what happened to my mum. We moved. The last of her babies, with shy beating of newly stretched wings, flew the nest and Mum was sunk into a chasm of What Now? What Next? She lost her particular copy of that hastily drawn map and before she could confidently pick up the path again, Depression had slipped a cold clammy hand into hers and dragged her off into the dark.

I lost Me once. I remember it clearly. Not just because I wrote about it but because I remember what prompted the words. Changes. Mostly. Like with mum. And more role manipulation. No longer a full time mother because children were no longer at home full time: my days were emptied of demands to read, to feed, to watch Pingu on the telly.  Pingu bugs the hell out of you until you’ve got nobody to watch it with.

I especially remember the moment the realization that I didn’t know Me anymore hit home: I sat on the kitchen counter consumed by an overwhelming feeling of disorientation. Loss of direction. Loss of definition. Loss of enough to do to the point of near-redundancy. Loss of self-esteem. 

Just loss, really.  Mum agrees: that’s what did it, she remembers, Loss.

And I cried. Great, big gulps of sadness and confusion and fear.

My husband looked on askance, regarding me with a peculiar mixture of sympathy and horror but mostly horror.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked as gently as he could.

I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him that I had Lost Myself. You lose keys, Goddamnit (at least I do, often); you lose your glasses; you don’t lose yourself. Not if you’re a man. (My friend B, a man and dad of two, tells me men can’t lose themselves because they lack the emotional intelligence to know how).

So I didn’t test the fine veneer of his trying-to-be-patient-and-understanding facade by saying I have lost Me. Instead I said, ‘I don’t know what to do next’.

My husband is dear and kind and clever. And – above all – eminently practical.

‘Make jam?’, he suggested.

Make jam? Make jam!

I was indignant (which at least arrested the sobs, briefly) that he presumed knocking up preserves should replace the busy, important, involved, mothering, nurturing person I had – hitherto – been for ten odd years.

I didn’t make jam.  I mean I do. Occasionally. Really, really badly. So that either it won’t set at all and slips and slides all over your plate and cannot be spread obediently on toast. Or else it cements itself inside the jar and won’t be coaxed out.

But I did begin to write; I began to fill hours with words. And I wrote my newspaper story about how it felt to lose your way. Its publication, of course, was gratifying. But much, much, much more gratifying than that were the letters I received subsequent to its running. Women aged early twenties to late eighties wrote to me. (Their messages are archived carefully, too). They’d all been there. Where I had found myself. In the wilderness of lost, wandering, women. Some were still there, flailing about, groping their way through the dark, trying to find somebody who could explain the Job Spec for wife or mum or whole, happy women, trying to find somebody who knew what the hell they were doing, who would be happy to impart a little wisdom without sounding smug. Others had navigated their way out the other side and were able to shine a light on my stumbling journey, ‘it gets better’, they said, ‘it gets easier’.

And it did. I continued to write. I still write. It’s My Thing; my metaphorical Jam Making.

It isn’t the jam that’s important, it’s certainly not how you make it that counts. My husband -wise boy - knew that. It’s the purpose, direction, happiness, engagement and occassional real achievement that comes with it, whether it’s fat glossy strawberry preserve winking at me from a hot jar, or a screen full of words that I have threaded together to make a pattern that suits my moods. It’s not big or important or even, usually, a money spinner (jam would earn me much more).

But it helps me to make sense of my world when life knocks the edges off and leaves me feeling exposed and vulnerable. It keeps me company when I feel lonely. It reminds me who I am when I am no longer sure.

I think, girls, we all need to learn to Make Jam.

Amelia fainted yesterday.

We were in the pharmacy in town. It is small and airless and forever filled with a crush of people paying for malaria drugs which the WHO insist no longer work but which are still sold here (by shopkeepers who either don’t know or don’t care what the WHO says) and purchased by desperate people who either don’t know that the WHO feel so strongly about combined drug therapies in the treatment of malaria that they have articulated a desire to have anything else pulled off dusty shelves across Africa. Or cannot afford them.

So I - because I can read English and because, given our geography, have had to educate myself to a degree about medicine and because I have a tome about health care published by the BMJ and a copy of the drug bible, BNF - am leaning over the counter having reached the head of the hot little crush and am reading the insert in a box of antibiotics.

Amelia is behind me.

I feel sick, she says.

I only half hear her. I presume this is her fourteen year old way of complaining about the wait and the heat and the warm-body smells exuding all around us.

I feel sick, she says again. A bit more insistently this time.

I turn around. She is the colour of chalk. I realise I need to get her out fast.

But we don’t make it. As we turn to leave, she crumples in a heap on the floor, her head is saved from crashing to the cement because of the heaving density of the crowd and the counter she collapses against.

For a few seconds I do not hear anything. I don’t see anything except my young daughter’s blanched expression and pale lips and glazed eyes. And then, thank God, thank God, the colour returns to her face, she registers mine, and bursts into tears.

We stumble out of the pharmacy, I try to put my arm about her shoulders to draw her protectively towards me but she is too tall. Instead I clutch her elbow and guide her to the car, watched by a gathering crowd, and we drive home, all windows wide open.

I used to faint. My mum did too. We were swooners who ought to have been armed with smelling salts. 

But it’s different when it’s your daughter. It’s not something, then, to boast to your mates about, ”I fainted you know”. Now it’s something to worry about.

And it’s a big worry when you live this far away. In the bush. Living in the bush exacerbates your health paranoia to the point of hypochondria. albeit by proxy in the case of loved ones.

We get home and I make Amelia drink a pint of coke and eat a bar of chocolate and lie down with a book. And then I fuss over her all day, shadowing her, insisting that she leaves the bathroom door unlocked when she goes to the loo whilst I hover outside anxiously.

“I’m fine, Mum”, she says, sweetly trying hard not to sound impatient at my clucking.

Teenage girls are liable to faints. Especially when they’re so tall. Especially when they’re growing. Especially when they can’t be bothered with breakfast. Especially when their mothers make them stand and wait too long in hot, airless, little dukas.

I know all this. But I get online and re-read it all anyway.

My children’s health is my greatest concern here. Where the medical facilities are lacking. Basic. Extend, at most, to a laboratory where you can get a blood slide read - though not necessariy accurately - for signs of malaria. Or a stool sample, dysentery.  If any one of us were really sick I would be obliged to phone Flying Doctor in Kenya for an airlift. And even if they could scramble a plane then and there, we’d have a nail-biting, sky-scanning, three hour wait for it.  And during that interminable wait, I would forget that I am lucky I can afford such a luxury.

I try not to think too hard about it.

I resort to the internet. I make calls to friendly doctors. I put my worries to them. Which is unfair: how could they diagnose over the phone. I subject Amelia to a blood test to check her iron levels. I make a promise to myself to make her eat breakfast.

And I continue to watch all three like a hawk.

Whilst my daugher MSNs her mates, ”I fainted, you know!”

Two big ugly black and white pied crows have taken up evening residence in the garden. They have clocked, because they are clever birds, that that’s when the dogs are fed. Hang around long enough, hovering hopefully, and the dogs, having picked all the meat out of their supper, leave the rice behind. They wander off then, and flop into the shade and the crows take over, pecking delightedly whilst perched cheekily on the edges of the dogbowls. I have urged my fat labrador Kanga, ‘Sa, sa!!’ but she looks at me disdainfully with liquid brown eyes as if to say, ‘Look honey, I am not going to deign to chasing crows’.

I describe my annoyance to the girls as we walk our splendid new verdant estate. And several hours later they constructed (under the nightwatchman’s nonplussed gaze) a solution to my avian pests.

He is called Senor Margherita. I don’t know why he’s wearing a beret. He should be Monsieur Escargot. Particularly given that he has a Gauloise hanging from his bottom lip. No matter his origin; he is very handsome (though not, obviously, in rugged Marlboro Man way). Albeit astonishingly short. The sign the girls have erected beside him reads WARNING: SMOKING STUNTS YOUR GROWTH. I feel they ought to exhibit some restraint regards their anti-smoking exercises, given what their father does for a living. Given that its the noxious weed that not only puts food on our table but that of the dogs as well. And the crows come to think of it.

They could also have warned: SMOKING GIVES YOU WRINKLES (look at his) or SMOKING CAUSES SUCH SERIOUS LACK OF OXYGEN THAT IT MAKES YOU BLUE IN THE FACE.

But they could also have written - and you must forgive me, it’s more than my (my husband’s actually) job’s worth not to offer some defence of the industry - SEE THE WORLD: SMOKE.

Come dawn though, and Senor M had clearly decided to kick the habit. Or perhaps somebody had hammered it out of him overnight? Orlanda maybe?(Orlando until we instructed the vet to pick his pockets only to discover, once under sedation that he was a she without pockets to pick and thus newly christened Orlanda) who perhaps offered to sit beside him in the morning sun  but only if he put his fag out in the dust first.

Which he obligingly did.

Frankly I couldn’t care whether he lights up or not. No long as he sees the wretched crows off.

We are home now.

A brief sweet week of long lie-ins for my big kids and rediscovering her books and new bedroom for Hat, before we must head north towards school. How swiftly the holidays seem to have raced by? Did time always move so quickly? Didn’t Christmas used to take an eternity to come around again, yet already we are August and people are muttering about plans for a four-month-hence festive season.

Already Nairobi seems so long ago. A small capsule of family and giggles and – in a house populated predominantly by the very young – not enough sleep. The two weeks went by too fast too. I was the proverbial Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Except that I didn’t feed my so many children broth. My young charges demanded boiled egg and soldiers for supper. So I buttered the toast and cut it as instructed and was reminded of a time when my own young required the same of me.

The immediacy of mothering the small is hugely gratifying: you feel so needed. So in demand. So very necessary.

I did send them to bed afterwards though. Earlier than their own mother might have done. For by then, older than my dear sister and harried from a long day herding half a dozen assorted offspring, I needed to put my feet up.

Are you looking forward to Mummy coming home? I enquired of my youngest niece and God-daughter, Katie.

Yes, she trilled gleefully, ‘cos then we can go to bed when we want to!’

I was born in Nairobi. My father was too. But it is alien to my own children who have spent their lives in Tanzania. They don’t know anybody there – other than their aunt and their three cousins.

‘Good Lord!’ Exclaimed a mildly shocked acquaintance of my mum’s, ‘what on earth are you going to do with teens in town if they don’t know anybody?’

Well. I took them to see Kung Fu Panda, along with the rest of the team. We sat giggling. At Po’s antics and at Kate who, just four, was perhaps a little young to sit incarcerated in a cinema seat for two hours.

“I think it’s bath-time now’’, she hissed 20 minutes into the movie, ‘we had better go home’’.

I sent them, the big ones, my big ones, to watch The Dark Knight on their own. I took them shopping. I fed them pizza and curry and ice-cream, rare treats in the Outpost. And we all fed the residents at Giraffe Manor and stroked their soft velvet noses.

All six children spent endless hours in a garden playing football and French cricket (the little ones, ready for an aged aunt’s early bedtimes, already dressed in their pajamas and smelling delciously sweetly of Baby Shampoo and damp heads).

Amelia blew bubbles for her young cousins. I do not know whose expressions were the more lovely: Lizzie and Kate’s for their evident excitement as they raced to pop each one, or Amelia’s at the ease with which she effected such tangible delight.

Hattie choreographed a ballet sequence and she and Katie delivered it on a lawn glazed with orange evening light filtered cobweb by towering Eucalyptus trees. Ben bought Ollie a cricket ball and taught him how to bowl.

There was something precious about our sojourn. Something sweetly innocent. Time didn’t just stop as far as my own chidren were concerned. It took several strides backwards. No Facebook, no Nintendo, no texting friends for there were none to text there.  We played My Spy With My Little Eye every time we got into the car and laughed when Katie spied a HangBag. And when we weren’t doing that we sang loudly and tunelessly along to the Corrs, me too, as I drove six kids (all warbling, nobody wincing at how uncool a mum they had: any wincing came from Granny, ”do we have to have it so loud?”)

Did they mind? Their enforced sortie back to unadulterated childhood? Their mother’s singing? Did my almost-17 year old son object to playing goalie to a seven year old’s kicks for hours at a time? Did my fourteen year old mind reading Tony Ross to a pair of little girls every evening? Was Hat irked by Kate’s eternal pleas that she play camping with her in the tent?

I don’t think so. If they were, they graciously kept their counsel and got on with the job in hand. Getting to know their cousins a bit better. Even – perhaps especially – teens appreciate the glue of family life. Perhaps they must be forced to step, briefly, off the hectic treadmill that is growing up? Perhaps they were quite glad to be allowed to be kids again. Perhaps it gives them time to realign emotional compasses, to take stock, to heave sighs of  relief as the pressure of peers is alleviated. For a bit.

And now, after two weeks of rising at dawn to clamorous appeals to eat breakfast en grande famille (Coco Pops), they appreciate home even more: nobody has woken them up even though it’s almost lunchtime.

People have been extraordinarily generous of late. And have bestowed upon me awards which I absolutely do not deserve. Such flattery has left me squirming with an uneasy mixture of delight and bashfulness. The pretty one above is the Wylde Women Award ; Mozi Esme gave it to me. The criteria is that award recipients “teach you new things and live their lives fully with generosity and joy”; I don’t think I’ve taught anybody anything new (except how not to raise chickens, perhaps). And alas I frequently fail miserably at the ”living life fully with genorosity and joy” thing; I am often unspeakably ungracious about having to put up with life in an outpost.

But thank you, Mozi, for a lovely award and for believing I am a better person than I really am!

This one came to me from my friend Janelle at Ngorobob House. She is a much more special, and eloquently flamboyant, scribe than I shall ever be. She uses language daringly and vibrantly where I would never have the imagination to use the same word. I have - ironically, though perhaps not? - grown to know her better since we both began to blog. I like to think - simply because I began before her - that my waffling inspired her to get talking too. I like to think you can thank me for delivering her lovely, passionate, full-of-life-and-colour words to you. She’d have probably have done it anyway - begun to blog/blab - but it’s always nice to think you’ve helped drag the latent creativity out of somebody whom you could see bubbling with the stuff all along.

This one was from Potty who is practically a celebrity and who sweetly endured my emails in lieu of comments for months and months because I was too thick to manage to say what I wanted to say via conventional blogging channels and instead sort of stalked her via Outlook Express. I think she was quite relieved when I worked out how to get around the problem without jamming her inbox. I hope Random House or similar is paying attention because everything she writes is brilliante - which is why she got the award to pass on in the first place. And so now I am a stalker and fully fessed up Potty groupie.

And the very grand award here is from Alcoholic Daze who writes about life with her alcholic husband with grace and courage and even - which augments the already evident bravery - humour and all without a trace of self pity. Not even a hint of it.

My scratching was recognised by Not Enough Mud . And Milla at Country Lite tagged me. Which was very nice of her but I need to point out - here and now, for the record, lest anybody who reads me but doesn’t know me yet meets me in the future and is horribly disappointed - I am amongst the most awkward and gauche people I know. I write - like Mud - because ”there are many things I would not talk about. However, I find I am able to write about them. I then find that, far from being a lone weirdo, other people have these thoughts, fears and peculiarities (although maybe not all at once!) and are able to tell me so. More than once I have breathed a sigh of relief or laughed out loud at someone exactly pin pointing something I had been feeling or worrying about, rather reassuring.”

And because - being clumsy and plagued by self doubt in reallife- I feel comfortable on the page. A reallife conversation might leave me tongue tied and breathless and blushing. But at the keyboard I can take the time to articulate what I want, how I want. I can select the words at leisure, like a child does the precise crayon for her colouring. She thrusts the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and deliberates carefully between the orange and the green, as I do the words. Sometimes the choosing is easy, sometimes I wonder if there isn’t some tiny writerly guardian angel at my shoulder nudging me encouragingly. I like to think it’s Dad, who wrote such beautiful letters to my mother,

The lights have long since gone out and I am writing by torchlight.  There is a grasshopper sitting at the top of the page obviously trying to read this.  I don’t know how he does it - reading from the bottom to the top –  but I am sure he is reading out aloud, probably to the two illiterate moths, the one tiny black beetle and the very sedate and proper praying mantis who are all sitting in an audience around him.  If I look closer I will probably find the grasshopper is wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and a gold watch chain.

Dad in a letter to Mum, 1964

But often its not at all easy to find the right one. And then I huff and puff crossly and snarl at my children and prove I am not a bit worthy of Mozi Esme’s award, or any other for that matter.

Mostly this overwhelming recognition requires that I mention where the awards came from.  So I can confidently tick that box. And put the handsome awards in my sidebar, which will be challenging given that I cannot organise my text font or line spacing. And nominate writers for the same awards.

Which is where I am going to cheat a bit.

Once upon a time there was a wonderful blogger called The Good Woman who moved from Scotland to Kenya and we haven’t heard from her since. Which is really sad because she wrote brilliantly and because now we are all wondering what happened to her. Blogland can be like that - you make fantastic friends who you absolutely believe to be real (because they are, of course) and whom you develop a certain affinity with and whom may suddenly drop from view. Good Woman invented her own award which is what I am going to do.

Because I’m an indecisive cheat, mainly, and because for me, in this splendidly isolated OutPost, I really only get Out by writing and reading and swanning about in cyberspace. So my OutThere Award - which doesn’t have a logo because, as Potty Mummy will testify, as the fact I cannot comprehend why I have gone from single to double spacing will prove, I am too techo-challenged for that, though I can give you an OutThere photograph -

 goes to an assortment of people who have made me feel less lonely OutHere:

Kathleen who feels like an old friend; Ann who is just bloody cool. And a great-granny. Which just adds to how cool she is; Mr Sherman who has been a faithful and patient reader who never tells me I am boring, just politely and gently points out that I’ve already touched on that particular topic; Roberta  because she - another old friend - loves books too.  Nutty Cow because she blogs regularly and because I, who hurtled past the sign for 40 so fast I hardly saw it, am hugely flattered that anybody so young should read my often Grumpy Old Woman rants. And Primal Sneeze who doesn’t really do tags but who is getting one because he had a sense of humour big enough to laugh off the fact I call Him Her.

I don’t expect anybody to do anything with their award. Unless they feel compelled to pass it on, in which the only criteria would be that nominees have helped to feel you less lonely when you might otherwise have felt a little bereft of company.

Okay.

I feel compelled to describe my introduction to eyebrow threading.

I feel it necessary to emphasize that my own knowledge of same was born not of any sophisticated leaning or, even, especially, zealous adherence to latest innovation in beauty therapies.

No. My eyebrow threading initiation was a happy – though admittedly quite painful - accident.

Once upon a time, back when I resided in relative civilization, I used to get pedicures at a tiny salon in Arusha in northern Tanzania where I lived (with friends and lattes and – yes – regularly buffed feet) for sixteen years.

The salon was owned and managed and almost solely staffed by an Indian lady called Noori. She wore tight blue jeans, high heels, glossy pink lipstick and her hair in a voluptuous henna-red pile upon her head.

I ended up in her shop mainly because I couldn’t afford to go anywhere else, but also because it was convenient to where I lived – the right side, the farm side, of town – where there was rarely a queue and I could flick through back copies of Indian Cosmopolitan – a 170 page medium to illustrate the colourfully chaotic clash between East and West.

I sat whilst my feet soaked in a bucket of suds, my laptop or diary on my lap, quietly absorbing the flamboyant atmosphere around me. Noori visited India regularly and brought back with her treasures to sell: kaftans and cheap jewellery and skin skimming trousers not unlike the pairs she wriggled into every morning.  Her CD choice was eclectic so whilst I pretended to write, I might listen to Sade or Michael Jackson or the richly undulating strains of the latest musical offering from Bollywood.

Frequently Noori’s salon was full of other Indian ladies. Sometimes they indulged in ‘treatments’: a massage, a wax, had their tresses painted with cow-dung coloured paste that on rinsing shot their dark hair through with auburn light or endured a spot of eye-watering, eye-brow threading, but more often they simply descended upon her for a gossip: relating the progress or not of their ‘slimming’ efforts (Noori, with her hourglass figure was clearly an idol to be upheld and emulated); sharing deliciously in the latest scandals of their local community or coming armed with the fruits of their shopping trips to Mumbai or Calcutta or Delhi. It became evident to me, sat silently and unnoticed in my corner, with my jeans rolled to my knees, that Noori’s was a social hub as much as it was a trading post: shopping lists and fists full of dollars were exchanged with promises to deliver the requested goods within a week or two or three, depending on the duration of the trip back home. These high-pitched, excitable conversations were conducted in English peppered with lilting Gujarati and punctuated by laughter and squeals of delight or gasps of disbelief. And always, always, saturated by such infectious enthusiasm, that I wished I was party to their plans and promises and not an invisible spectator.

I watched bags being unpacked and I smiled inwardly as a bevy of Indian beauties paraded in front of the salon mirrors, saris held up to their shoulders as they – and I – admired the richness of the fabric, the silvery scaled glinting of sequins as lengths of material were flicked and tossed and lovingly caressed and sighed over. 

Sitting in the salon, I visited India vicariously. I shyly ventured to tell Noori that my mother was born in Mumbai, mindful to be PC.

“Oh we locals don’t call it Mumbai!”  she laughed, tossing her mane of hair, “it’s still Bombay to us.”

As it is to Mum. As it always was to my Gran.

And during those fanciful flights to the sub-continent, I gleaned a small souvenir.

Noori told me, looking sternly at unkempt brows, that I needed to thread them. She instructed me to tip my head back and hold the skin of my lids taut and then, with a length of sewing yarn wound tightly between the fingers of both well manicured hands, she proceeded to use it to tug the stray hairs and tidy up my face a little.

Tears ran down my cheeks, the skin around my eyes went scarlet but my brows were neatly aligned and matching within moments.  I stared at my expression in the mirror Noori proffered.

There now, she demanded, in her singsong voice, isn’t that better?

It mightn’t have felt it, but it certainly looked it.

And so I continue to thread my brows whenever the opportunity presents because I like to steal back into the memory.

And because I’m too idle to tweeze.

My hair has been done.

I am blonde again. Too blonde. Almost luminescent. As if I am wearing a halo. Perhaps that’s appropriate, given saintly offer to baby-sit my sister’s children …?

My feet, courtesy of a pedicure, are almost presentable. Sadly the cold prevents me from presenting them; instead my recently buffed soles and polished nails are encased in several layers of socks and a pair of boots.

And my brows have been threaded and reshaped so that they arch elegantly above my eyes. As if I am perpetually surprised, as if, indeed, I am mildly shocked at my rash offer (three under-eights for two weeks!) or my somewhat startling new appearance. As the friend I bumped into yesterday clearly was; she couldn’t stop staring at my Day-Glo fringe. I know what she was thinking: ‘has she always been this fair?’

Eyebrow threading comes close second on the Richter scale of feminine pain to giving birth. It makes your eyes water similarly. Though obviously I wasn’t shouting at beauty therapist, Grace, in same way I might have done husband; I wasn’t yelling obscenities (”and you can jolly well keep the **** away from me in future!”) at her. I simply surrendered meekly and quietly and then she gently dabbed away my tears with soft tissues and a consoling, ‘the pain makes you cry kabisa!’.

You’re not wrong, honey. Kabisa! And by the way, you ever thought of taking up work as a doula?

Amelia opted for threading too. As in:

Mum, can I get my eyebrows waxed?

Grace, which is better: waxing or threading?

Grace considers my question for a moment and then tactfully says, threading is more … um … effective.

I think she meant painful but I told Amelia she meant better.

Amelia now sports similarly elegantly arched eyebrows above, admittedly, scarlet lids.

God Mum! That was the most painful thing ever.

I haven’t told her. That it wasn’t. That it could be worse. If you’re a woman.

And I won’t: I don’t want to put her off; I quite fancy becoming a grandmother one day.

And then I can morph from luminous blonde to sugar almond pink or lavender purple rinsed. And shave off the brows altogether, replacing them with pencilled semi-circles.

So that I might forever look as if life can still surprise me.

Perhaps that’s the secret to eternal youth - an expression of permanent wonder – and not Botox?

I am staying in Karen; leafy Nairobi suburb steeped in Blixen history and saturated with mothers who drive to the shops and out to lunch and across town to deliver their offspring to playdates in shiny 4 x 4s. Their tresses bears witness to regular visits to their hairdresser and their wardrobes to a highly developed sense of style. They run homes as sleek as their appearances.

Many of them shop at Crossroads. And drink capuccino or a latte afterwards at Dormans whilst their children are entertained upstairs in Dragon.

Where - indeed - my small charges spent a portion of Sunday morning. Whilst my daughters and I trawled the shops downstairs, eyes on stalks at all the merchandise available.

Not like the Outpost, Mum, is it? commented Amelia.

Not at all. No.

I didn’t have a latte or a capuccino at Dormans, though. I have forgotten how to order one. Nor are my tresses recently coiffed or coloured. I was in yesterday’s jeans. And I looked like the mildly harrassed mother of - for the present at least - six children.

Not least becuase I arrived wearing my bedroom slippers.

Nairobi is cold compared to the Outpost; very cold.

I’m glad our suitcases arrived. Eventually.

We flew here from Mwanza via Kilimanjaro.

Our luggage came via Dar es Salaam.

I think it’s all part of Precision Air’s plan to make your journey even more unforgettable than it might have been anyway.

Having secured our visas on arrival (I, with a too full passport, was admonished by the authorities thus: there is no space in this, flicking through a document so battered that the gold lettering on the front has been rubbed off, your babies can get into our country but you will have to stay out until I persuaded them that it’d be fine to paste the necessary on the endorsements page of the passport) we tripped downstairs to gather baggage from the carousel.

Except that there wasn’t any. Or at least none that belonged to us. Only lots of other passengers lost luggage sitting forlornly in untidy piles being regarded in dismay by a dozen irritated travelers all demanding to know what had happened to their suitcases and did the Precision Air staff care that this was the 45^th  time they’d misplaced it?

Evidently not.

What about compensation, I demanded, for some spare undies and a toothbrush?

Airport staff looked at me blankly.

Precision’s policy does not involve compensation. At least not until the baggage has been missing for 13 ½ years. Or something like that.

Leave your telephone number, I was instructed, we will call you when/if it arrives, so that you can come and collect it.

Don’t you deliver?

Precision Air’s policy does not involve delivery of lost luggage.

Nor, apparently, it transpired, is it Precision Air’s policy to turn their telephones on. Or answer those that they have forgotten to switch off during office hours.

24 hours after arrival and following numerous calls to PA offices in Dar, Nairobi and Kilimanjaro I secured the number of the Station Manager at the airport.

Since you have still not received confirmation of your baggage’s whereabouts, I can release the number for the airport duty staff, I was told by a woman who had clearly answered a PA telephone by accident (perhaps she was expecting a call from a friend, how disappointing to have to speak to an irate, disheveled, unbrushed, unwashed and in yesterday’s clothes passenger instead). She delivered this information in tones that suggested travelers were required to reach critical levels of impatient frustration before being granted privilege of access to a useful telephone number.

Mr Faustin, owner of that number, who answered with helpful alacrity, called me back, as promised, to inform me cheerfully that my suitcases, yes all four of them, were safely in the baggage hall.  They came via Dar, he said, they arrived last night, he added, as if they were relatives I’d long been expecting a visit from who’d turned up early bearing gifts.  As if, frankly, he was both surprised and delighted at their appearance.

Ben and I traipsed back to the airport with little sister en route to South Africa.

Have you got your ticket?

Yes, she confirmed.

Passport?

Yup.

Yellow Fever card?

What?

Yellow Fever card? You need a valid one to travel to South Africa from here.

She looked stricken. Her long awaited, carefully executed, child-free (given imported minders) ten day break with her husband now in jeopardy because nobody had mentioned this. Until now; until 2 ½ hours before she was due to fly.

Omigawd; I’ve lost it, she wailed, on the verge of tears.

Don’t worry, I urged, seeing the expression on her face; we’ll make a plan.

This is Africa. T I A. There is always a plan. 

We tumbled from the cab as we pulled into the airport and tore up to the Health Office.

It was staffed by a very fat lady who led us, with a slow limp on account of legs exhausted by the effort of transporting the bulk above them, to the clinic.

We were ushered inside by a man with a hopeful glint in his eyes.

How many travelers? He enquired.

Just me, said my sister.

The glint dulled a little.

Come with me, he instructed.

I took a seat whilst my sister followed him into another office, the door shut firmly behind them.

You busy here? I asked the lady who’d delivered us to this point.

Oh yes, very, she said, very, very busy. Twenty four hours non stop. Always busy.

It didn’t look busy to me; the corridors echoed with the sound of a lone set of distant footsteps.

Lots of Yellow Fever business? I pressed.

Oh lots and lots, she said merrily.

I wondered later if that had anything to do with the generous expanse of her girth.

We continued our inconsequential chatter for a few moments before my sister emerged from behind the closed door.

She gathered me hastily up and we ran towards the Departure terminal.

Bloody hell that was expensive! my sister puffed

How much, I asked?

1,000 bob for the certificate, and another 1,000 for agreeing to give it to me without an injection.

In Johannesburg her story has been met with expressions of outrage and shock.

We can’t believe how corrupt your country is!

Hmm.  And I suppose there’s none of that south of our borders?

Tomorrow, at dawn, the children and I will pile into the car and drive five hours to Mwanza which lies sprawled as the worst kind of suppurating African urban spill on the shores of blue-grey-green Lake Victoria, its edges festooned with – alongside and in-between the corrugated iron roofed stain that spreads from its edges – enormous boulders which teeter precariously, like they have done for thousands of years, one on top of the other – balancing rocks – as if the tiniest nudge would send them tumbling down. A fragile house of cards.

And in Mwanza we will clamber aboard an aeroplane and fly north east. We will spy from the portholes as we sip warm Cokes and nibble curling Precision Air sandwiches Lengai and we will feel mildly disappointed that it has stopped its irritated volcanic smoking; we will witness the green puddle of lushness that leaks into the land around Arusha, damp and chilly and immersed in African mid winter now. And we will fly between two mountains, Meru and Kilimanjaro, standing face to face, sturdily sentential as they keep close watch over the border with Kenya, their hunched green shoulders collapsing to flat white plains whose surface is ribboned by the ancient, eternal tread of game and cattle and Maasai herders.

And then, twelve hours after leaving home, we will land in Nairobi where we will scramble into a very big taxi and we will drive across the city, marveling at its noise and size and interminable traffic and we will rendezvous with my sister and her three children.

And Mum. Who is well again. Who, after six months of being weighted down by Depression’s enervating shroud, has shrugged it off and is invigorated and happy and smiling. And she and I will, when my sister departs to join her husband in South Africa the following day, eat breakfast with a rowdy rabble aged between just five and almost seventeen. We will make mad trips to town, to the shops, to the cinema, to the Butterfly Centre and Safari Walk. Amelia and Hat will read to younger Lizzie and Katie. Ben will bowl endless cricket balls at little Ollie and will sweetly, in his gentle, early adult way, coax and encourage and make sure Ollie gets more runs than he really did. They will play rugby on the lawn. And Ollie will stare up at his older, taller cousin awed and delighted and shy. And he will remember every moment in order that he can recount to friends the days he spent kicking a ball about a garden with his big coz: my son will stand firm in Ollie’s young memory bank just like his older cousins have in his.  Fights will be few; there are enough cousins to go around. One a-piece.

And Mum and I will talk and laugh and talk and laugh and drink cold beer in the evening and talk and laugh some more.

When my mum is well she understands that life is to be caught tightly in both hands and held onto and she knows, within her grasp like that, how to milk it for every tiny ounce of happiness, for every sweet precious passing moment that it may render. She knows how not to worry, when she is well, about the mundane. About the incidental. About the unimportant. No matter the chaos that will whirl about us, that lunch will morph into picnics at Bedlam, that my small nieces who have climbed into our beds before it is light will dress as fairies wearing wellies when they accompany us to buy bread and milk, no matter. She will laugh. Because she is well.

She left Depression behind. She got on a plane, nagged and bullied by my sister and me, but we need you Mum, we pleaded on the phone across endless, unseen miles. And she left Depression behind. Sulking in her sitting room or whining in a cab or scowling on a train or hunkered miserable on a row of uncomfortable seats in London’s Heathrow. I don’t care. I don’t care where Depression is now.

Because for now it’s not with my Mum.

And so we will laugh. And spin some happy, lasting memories.

All of us.