How different so much is. Where to begin. Change jangles and rattles.

I bumped out of the outpost – a place I’d formed a sometimes uncomfortable allegiance with, developed a curious fondness for – and onto the beach. Flung from East Africa’s far west where the sun dips over the hills and sinks into inland seas and found myself sandy, salty gazing at dawns that sear my ocean drenched, eastern horizon.  Tanzania has slid behind me.  I am back home in Kenya.  Home simply because this is the place I was born, the one that tethers my particular clan to this continent; my Scottish grandfather traipsed up here from Scotland via a ship that docked further south more than 100 years ago.   Yet I have spent more of – most of – my life in Tanzania. An anomaly: this ‘coming home’ malarkey. The children all know they’ve come home: they who have never spent a day of their life living here. Until now, until Christmas.

But for my husband this is definately about coming home. This bit of beach. Where he grew up and goggled and dug for tek-teks and harpooned supper over the reef.   I’m in the small house he lived in as a teenager; the one built by his father, Grandad Simon say my children of a man they never knew and I only met once. There is a wind swept Tamarind tree planted to the south of the house for their paternal Grandmother, a baobab further along for a much loved Great Uncle. No wonder they are so confident of their roots.

But mine are still trailing. The cuckoo in the nest.  Change is always unsettling, there has been, as my husband articulates gracefully, ‘snot and tears’. Mine. Mostly.   In this hiatus of transience, where all five of us are far flung and scattered until dust settles, I miss the things that ground me: my children, my glass, Ant  – especially Ant – who should be with me  (this is his home after all) but cannot be yet, my words and even – I’ll whisper it – my Outpost.

But all change corrects itself, balance will be restored. I have, after all, found my voice and the words are lining up more tidily now  (a happy symptom of a quieter mind) so that I can pin them down to the page.  My kilns will arrive with my paintings, my own bed, more of a wardrobe than 3 bikinis and half a dozen pairs of shorts, my Outpost has been pasted in the ether so that I can remind myself it wasn’t always as glorious as memory might try to seduce me into believing it was.

And Ant will be home soon.

PS I considered – should I have a brand new blog for a brand new life? But no: I am still me. It’s just the view that’s changed.

rm xx

In two days I will climb into the car and drive out of the Outpost for the last time.

It will be odd to think I no longer live here. And the decision to go, when it came, was sudden so that the packing and planning and collapsing of a life into boxes has consumed me. Until now, when there is a moment to sit with a mug of tea, Pili at my feet, and reflect as I gaze across a garden which is bushy tailed and bright eyed so that it will be sad to leave it: the lawn is green and lush; the frangipani voluptuous and the flamboyant bowed low, low with the weight of fiery blossom.

It is difficult to know what to say. How to concertina five years into five hundred words. I have hissed and spat and sworn and flailed. I have laughed and danced and learned. I have telescoped my view to render manageable sometimes overwhelming horizons. I have had time (sometimes too much time) to stop and smell the roses (metaphorically speaking, of course, no roses here). And now – where I’m going – I won’t have the luxury of a slippery commodity which slides too fast in the real world but had a tendency to plod in the Outpost so that I occasionally felt certain my watch must have stopped.  I will be reminded – where I am going – that Time is precious.

The Outpost has changed in the years I have been here. It’s had its edges knocked off; it’s softer, a gentler place to be. Some of that is because outside influence has moulded it thus. Some of that is because I have changed. The Outpost has taught me some stern lessons and lent the time, the opportunity, the excuse, the sanity preserving need to expand to fill the swallowing space that surrounded me. I will never, ever regret the – almost – five years that this has been home. In my most graceless moments I never imagined that lucky is how I’d feel for having lived here. But lucky I have been.

Without the Outpost I’d never have had the chance to teach Hat, have her glorious, uplifting, sunshine company for three years at home instead of incarcerated at school; I might never have had the liberating justification to stick two fingers up to convention; I’d never have the seen the places I’ve seen, travelled the long, lean, lonely miles with just tea and Ant for company, precious road trips together to talk and plan and dream. I’d never have written as many words or made my foray into glass (nor, granted, patronised Elastoplast to the extent I have).   Without the time my solitariness has afforded me I’d never have had the hours I needed at a time my big kids needed me to have those hours, across the ether, to research what they needed researching because they – in their faster paced world – didn’t have those hours, that time. I’d never have learned about the sex lives of chimps without that (such is the dictate of an anth/arch undergrad).

My life isn’t an extraordinary one. But, for the Outpost, it has been less Ordinary.

Without it, I wouldn’t have felt the compulsion, the need, to write, to rant, to describe the minutae to fill the space, to whisper in cyberspace that which was sometimes hard to say out loud (not least because talking to myself might have endorsed the madness the isolation sometimes nudged me towards).

In short, without the Outpost, I wouldn’t have begun to blog.

I thank you all for accompanying me – championing me – on this journey.

With love

rm x

So Hat and I clambered aboard a tobacco plane on a milky Saturday morning and we climbed high above our spilling slice of Africa and we left the always-voluptuous mango trees behind and winged our way across a million biscuit brown miles to the capital city where rain clouds were just beginning to gather so that the small bird we were in was at the sickening mercy of hotly rising thermals.

Seventeen hours later we were back at the airport. She to board British Airways to London and onwards by coach to school on the biting North Norfolk coast, I to fly west on a dawn of brushed blue silk.

I bustled Hat through check in and immigration; my flight was being called. Hasty goodbyes are better than lengthy ones. Her bright, broad smile made it easier. It wasn’t until later that the parting struck and tears pricked: her absence from my outpost is felt more keenly for her quiet, undemanding presence when she is here is utterly absorbing. Give them wings, give them wings. And so I have. Literally. Metaphorically. Wings supplemented by a battered Antler suitcase and a much loved guitar.

And so she flew north and I came west and for the first time in nearly five years of flying this route and in the astonishing clarity of the morning I saw Mt Meru and Kilimanjaro which straddle the northern border of the country hundreds of miles away; they stood as if facing one another in duel, their shoulders swathed in cloud, their summits sturdy profiles against a rising blue. A small award in recognition of a longer-than-most school run. Once, a long time, and one another school run, in a different part of the country, the children and I spotted a cheetah and her two cubs sitting atop an ant hill right by the road; that was our prize for what was then an eight hour run.

And I touched down on the dust and drove the three hours home. For a cup of tea and a swim with Pili.

The day is newly, newly rinsed. Full fat rain fell – two whole inches of it so that the ground wasn’t just pitted with the tiny fairy steps of a lightening shower but puddled with the pools of water left by a proper storm which took out the power and felled the bougainvillea so that it lies on the ground like a muddy veil. The wind tossed flamboyant flowers into the pool so that when I swim later I shall surface with fiery petals in my hair. The earth is steamy, breathing warm and wet, sated, and the cicadas are pressurecooked hissy and the frogs in the pond sang of their delight into dawn – amphibious Louis Armstrongs (with laryngitis?). I can almost see the lawn unfurling and I watch the terminalia leaves shiver with the thrill of an overdue power shower, long dormant lilies throw young green heads up and nod agreeably in the freshly washed morning light. And my high whitehot skies are gone as glowering clouds hulk on a grainy, grey horizon.

Hat’s gone back to school. But the rains are here. And where I live, that’s a gift too.

A Skype conversation between my eldest daughter and I:
 

Her: I got my targets to assassinate; one is in my anthrop class.
 

Me: yes?
 

Her: So I have made a dagger and will take him out today
 

Me: what do you mean targets to assassinate (I am still assimilating the first bit, I haven’t taken cognisance of the homemade dagger and impending homicide yet)
 

Her : I joined the assassins guild, where you get given three targets and have to kill them
 

Me: (this is quite alot to assimilate now) not really kill them?!
 

Her: yes mum, REALLY kill them. Duh.

Such are the traditions at Cambridge apparently. The dagger will doubtless join the plethora of evening dresses that were evidently imperative to life at university too, ‘do you know how many formals there are?’ she demanded in Primark (for my budget, especially given the half dozen required, only goes so far). No. I do not. Nor did I know what tubbing was (rowing, if you didn’t either). Though I do understand debating, stand-up comedy and volunteering for the elderly, all of which she has also engaged in. One must wonder when the academics are going to happen: today, presumably, when she takes out her victim in her anthropology class.
 

I walked around Trinity in awe. It is a beautiful college in a lovely city. It was broiling white-hot day that day: a melting 30 degrees. In October? The college porters, in their bowler hats, wore short shirt sleeves and were delightful. One engaged us in a lengthy conversation about a previous student who’d had – at his disposal – a lear jet on a near by airstrip. My daughter will have to use the bus.

Husband and I didn’t even pretend to be cool, we snapped away and made our daughter wear her new gown for even more pictures, ‘oh god how embarrassing’, she said.
 

I wrote to her afterwards. Keep a journal I instructed. Write everything down. Save every single ticket for every single occasion. Partly so that I might enjoy her experience vicariously but mainly so that she remembers because when she’s old and addled and embarrassing like her mother, she might not.
 

And then we came home. 9 hours in a plane, 12 in a car and were jolted back to Outpost reality.

And skyped conversations about imminent assassinations.

dis·com·bob·u·late

to confuse or disconcert;

The children are gone and I find I cannot settle. Cannot settle so keep moving and flailing. Discombobulated. Disorientated. Dislocated. There was so much movement when they were here: movement and noise and flapjacks for tea. Now there’s just me.
For ten glorious days all three were home. My son turned 20. I don’t feel old enough to have a son that age. Until I regard my reflection in the mirror; she looks old enough to have a son of 20 I think. And scowl. So that she looks even older.

I’m ok though. I’ve done this for a year now: been treading water without 24/7-motherhood as a float. I can keep busy I tell myself. And I do. But not in the directed and driven way I’d like to. Not until I settle. For now I skim the surface and write lists and wander mostly aimlessly between my desk and my workbench. Scratch a few words. Cut a bit of glass. Glower at the filing. Wonder what to cook for lunch, for my girls are not here to appropriate my kitchen, take it over with glorious messy abandon so that the place looks like a bomb has hit it for the ash scattering of icing sugar and flour on table tops and sugar shrapnel on the floor. But oh what delicious smells emanate.

We drove to a beach, as wide and a white as a whale’s skeleton. Two days it took. When the iPods ran flat the conversation took over and we ate yesterday’s egg sandwiches for lunch. My daughter caught a fish – 20 Kgs with teeth like razors – which, she said, for I was not on the boat, cured her sea-sickness, ‘for a bit’, she said.

And Hat played her sax and my son asked ‘how many weeks until Christmas?’
 

Sixteen I said. Only sixteen.

Safari for me is synonymous with canvas and campfires, woodsmoke and dust, yesterday’s shorts and things that bump and bark and growl in the night.  

Ours recently took us south west to Katavi where we pitched our tents overlooking the wildlife arena of the Katuma River, fatly swelling with hippo as the water receded.

We watched two male elephant wander up from the banks where they’d drunk and sat in silence as they meandered through our camp to take a dustbath beneath a Tamarind tree; you only know they’re coming because of the snap and crack of branches, their footfalls are kitten-soft.

I was glad the buffalo didn’t wander through though. Mean-spirited and quick-tempered, they don’t make good bush companions.

We kept a watchful eye for crocodile – a veritable rash of them swarmed the river’s edge or hid in hidey-hole caves dug into the bank. What’s the collective noun for crocs, I wondered aloud. Nobody could tell me: a float I discovered, or a bask. Both apt though rash seemed best in the case of Katavi’s huge congregations.

And then it was time for sundown and sundowners and a supper of stew. And the wine tasted better and dinner richer, ‘why is that?’, I asked Husband, ‘that everything tastes better outside?’

And we slept and woke and slept and woke to the crack of elephants moving around the camp, their soft pachydermic purrs indicative of contentment; we heard the gutteral roll of lions’ grunts and the near-growl of the impala and the bark of zebra and so I mused, faintly, thrilling afraid, what eyes might be watching?

And we caught the dawn with steaming mugs of tea made on a fire encouraged to life with the jab of a stick and a few hearty puffs.  And we watched the hippo go to their watery beds after a night of feasting. Cross and overtired, they eyed us grumpily. 

And from Africa’s big beasts to it’s really little ones: a host of aquamarine butterflies, a bejewelled lilac breasted roller so that in flight it looks as if gem has been cast to the air. A saddle bill stork reflecting deeply and quite unperturbed by its dangerous neighbours when there was fish to be had.

But the impala must be mindful of the river’s sharp-toothed, quick-witted inhabitants, they drink skittishly and cross the river in six foot high bounds. Even the lion that we saw crossing the same water as we sat in camp looked warily about and then traversed in giant leaps.

And back to camp for a brunch of ash scorched toast and eggs the colour of sunshine.  Before a drive across the blonde savannah where the elephant raised their trunks as periscopes and the giraffe stood looking on.

And after two days we packed up camp and headed further west, deeper south to where Lake Tanganyika stretches to the Congo, down to Zambia, up to Rwanda, an inland sea: that’s what early explorers thought when they first stumbled across it, such was its size, so dust laced the air that they could not see the other side where precipitous mountains soar but only in newly rain-rinsed light. You want to put your hand in to taste the salt such is the sea-green clarity.

So we swam and we fished and we snorkled and we ate sushimi and I drank a beer looking across an inland sea stained the colour of vin rose. And I thought my grandmother was right: safari is any trip that involves escape, the canvas and the campire are added perks.

(She had just finished reading Kathryn Stockett’s The Help; as have I).

It’s an awkward question; it’s especially awkward when the interrogator assumes you might be as nasty as one of the novel’s chief protagonists, Hilly.

If I say, ‘Why? Should I?’, I sound defensive.

If I say, ‘Not really, I have never known anything different’, I sound like the bladdy colonial of the media (exploitative and out-dated). I sound spoiled. I sound as if I don’t know how to cook, clean, iron.

If I say, ‘It’s just what we do here, it’s what my mother did (shy Agnes’ lap was broad enough for two fat babies and her patience as generous), what her mother did (Pishi harangued my grandfather for a job after he cured Pishi’s wife of syphilis; my grandfather capitulated and my mother went to school with Pishi’s homemade crisps which made her the envy of her peers)’, I sound like I come from a long line of spoiled, ironing-resistant, colonials – memsahibs, indeed.

If I say, ‘unemployment is a huge issue here, it’s my responsibility to engage at least one person in my home’, I sound earnest and patronising at the same time.

So it’s a complicated question.

Asina has worked with me for ten years. Not for. With. There is a difference; she does not run my home, she helps me to run it. We work as a team. In return, I pay her a salary, I give her a home, I feed her.

But it’s not that simple (as I said: complicated). We live and work in such proximity, Asina and I, that it can’t be that simple: Asina is much more than The Help. She is company on long days: somebody to discuss a bureaucratic idiocy with; somebody to celebrate that the power has returned, that we’ve had a delivery of water; somebody to talk to about what our respective children are doing; somebody who slips easily about my home and tells me that her sons are doing well at school or that we have run out of onions. She has wept with me over the death of a loved dog; she has laughed with me at Pili’s antics. She scolds me. She reminds me of the myriad things I have forgotten. She asks for an interpretation of her blood test or questions the efficacy of her prescription.

Asina is typical of many African women: she is a single mother to two boys who go to school in the north of country and live with their grandmother. Asina did not want to move them when we moved here; her sons, she told me, had secured valuable weekend apprenticeships that she was reluctant to relinquish, ‘they need to learn to do more’, she said, ‘or they will be like all other African men: useless!’.

If there is one useful thing I can do for Asina then, it is to recognise that she values education, to applaud that, to support her in her endeavour to ensure her sons are educated well and consistently. If there is another it is to note that when she dusts, she rearranges my haphazard collection of encyclopaedia alphabetically, that she loves Soduku, that she is a voracious follower of the news.

Would you like to go back to school? I asked her, ‘to learn how to use a computer?’.

I would love that she said, ‘it would make me very happy’. So she took herself off, sourced a course at the local vocational college, the cheapest she could find because Asina can no more bear to pay over the odds for a kilo of tomatoes than she can a computer course even when it’s somebody else’s cash and began her afternoon classes three days ago.

Each evening she comes in to joyfully report what she has learned: how to turn the computer on, what the cursor is for (and she points at my screen to identify the little blinking arrow), how to create a folder and what to put in it. ‘I opened a Word file’, she told me ‘and I wrote mama’ and she grins broadly.

Her sons are lucky boys.

2 I cast my first whole bowl. It didn’t crack. Lots have. I showed it to Husband, ‘some sweat’, I said, ‘a few tears and alot, alot, of blood’.

3 My mum calls daily. She is soaringly happy-well. Nothing is too much. Her energy and enthusiasm are boundless. The sun’s shining, she says. And I can hear her smile.

4 I cook oxtail soup. It belonged to a buffalo. The tail. Delia taught me how. I don’t know why it should feel like an achievement. But it does. An old fashioned achievement which scents the kitchen richly.

5 I make alot of mistakes in my fusing studio. I burn my fingers. I shed the odd tear of sheer frustration. And I spill a little more blood. But I cut and I cast and I fuse and it makes me happy. Despite the tears and the blood.

6 My eldest daughter gets her IB results. I can’t tell how she has done to begin with: she’s crying. But she’s laughing too. She got the points she needed; to go to Cambridge. I can believe she got in. I just can’t believe she’s mine. Her dad teaches her how to open a bottle of bubbly. What a nerd says her brother.

7 My Hat is on her long-way home: Amsterdam to London to Dar to Mwanza to the Outpost. I will rise at 5 tomorrow and drive the five hours north to collect her. And then I will drive the five home again and the house will feel even more deliciously full.

The moon hung high and defiant for a long time after sun-up. I imagined she had borrowed the confidence from the spectacular show she’d delivered two nights previously: a lunar eclipse when a bruised and red shadow dragged across her surface and the stars hung extra bright all around, winking encouragement.

The sun came up in a sky stained turmeric and the rocks blushed at being caught so bare and the baobabs waggled their roots in silent greeting of a beautiful dawn. It wasn’t until almost nine that the last traces of the moon’s gauzy orb disappeared entirely, melting with the heat, vanishing into the blue.

Off the tar and the road disintegrates to dust as fine as talc.

The tobacco trucks are on the move. This year more than 5000 of them will haul the produce of 93 000 peasant farmers down this narrow alley to HQ. 103 million kilos. That’s a lot of smokes observes Husband.  I’m not a smoker but I’m still glad about that.

We sneak a last mug of tea and I sip and drink in the view of Lake Chaya, its waters receding quickly so that lilies jostle greedily for space and the swamp grasses are recklessly green, a final fling before they wither and die.  There are elephant prints here.  And a shy bat-eared fox sunning himself atop his burrow; he is too quick for my lens though.

The last few hours are quiet. And we then we are home. To a car that needs unloading of the detritus of more than a week on the road  - my sunshine bright everlasting flowers picked from our lonely church hillside are still sunshine bright - and two dogs delirious with delight at our return.

The thing about road trips – I reflect later - is the perspective they lend, in myriad ways: time to consider how lucky you are to see all this; time to enjoy evovling views, every corner offers a new one; time to think; time to enjoy being away and then the chance to feel pleased at getting home.

Iringa to Dodoma along the short cut

354 Klm; hours in car (including P stops; T stop; punctures …) 8

This was new territory for me; a road I hadn’t done. Husband said, ‘you’ll enjoy it; it’s a beautiful drive’.

We sank quickly from the cool heights of green-swathed Iringa, down an escarpment and into the Mtera valley, an amphitheatre framed by the Rubeho Mountains to the east, the Fufu escarpment to the north, a vast valley gouged to accommodate the passage of the Great Ruaha river which begins its journey in the Poroto Mountains and which has been halted on its way here by the Mtera Dam.

The land here is crack dry, toasted oat-sandy and cinnamon-pink soil. But the views are long and unimpeded and blue, blue. Masai and their stoic herds inhabit this arid bowl; the plains are threaded with their tread and criss-crossed by dry river beds.

The water, when we come upon it, is startling for its breadth and welcome. Nothing would thrive – or even survive – down here without it; not even the goats on their diet of thorns and plastic Marlboro bags which are ubiquitous and tossed by the wind so that they hang as unlikely blue bush blooms miles from any discernible civilisation.

Tolkien-esque Baobab stand erect and everywhere. Their roots as branches now if fables are to be believed: the Baobab was a dissatisfied tree and complained bitterly to Mungu that it wanted this colour flower or that; that it disliked the scent of its blossom, that it wished its fruit were sweeter. Mungu got sickandtired of listening to Baobab moan and up-ended him to muffle his complaints. Baobab is mute now, his silent roots waving a protest. A moaner or not, I love the Baobab for its quintessential Africaness, for its resilience, for the hundred-year history it has witnessed but cannot divulge.

We drink tea at the edge of the dam which is busy with fishermen, their graceful little dugouts adorn the shores.

We drink it again to refresh ourselves after another puncture, our fourth in a week. Fifteen years ago we drove to the Cape and back, a 10 000 mile round trip ‘and not a single flat tyre’ I remind Husband.

We cross the dam wall. The Taking of Photographs in this Area is Strictly Forbidden says the sign. I register the rules with the recklessness of a teenager at school. Why, I wonder, are pictures disallowed? But I hide my camera anyway.

The water level is much lower than last time observes Husband, which explains the far-from-the-bank canoes that we spot later. ‘And the power cuts’ observes Husband sagely: the Mtera hosts one of the country’s biggest hydro-electric schemes.

This valley was a gift. A hiatus of happy loneliness and healthy dislocation that straddles two bustling towns: high, cool Iringa in the south and pretending-to-be-the-capital-city Dodoma in the centre of the country: it’s pivotal geography the only reason for it’s lofty title.  The Italian missionaries who moved there thought the climate so like the one back home that they planted grapes and made wine. When I moved to Tanzania more than two decades ago my grandfather – who had lived here in the fifties – urged me to try a bottle of Dodoma Red when I arrived. I did. It was dreadful. Undrinkable. Paint-stripper. I told my Grandad who benignly noted, ‘oh, so it’s hasn’t changed then’.

I learn well and have given the wine a wide berth since. It was a cold beer on our dusk arrival, to slake our thirst and wash the dust from our throats.

Home tomorrow.