Settling Dust

 

 

 

 

 

Well.

 

We are here.

 

In our new house.

 

We moved on Friday. Finally. After half-heartedly shifting half-loads for weeks, we got out our big stick and herded ourselves off and out. Five lorry loads ensued. Me piling the final dregs into bags and boxes as the truck drew out of the gate for the final time: wash bags, sponges, almost empty bottles of shampoo, the Leaning Tower of Pisa pile of books beside my bed and armfuls of back copies of the Spectator.

 

We just had time, once the last load had been packed, transported around the corner and unpacked, to hastily erect enough beds, sling the appropriate number of nets over each one and fall gratefully into them.

 

My eyes are gritty from too little sleep and too much dust – the house is full of it.

 

Our new home is still a building site. What was completed must, it appears, be rebuilt: we are learning which taps drip or don’t turn on/off at all; which wall sockets don’t work (most of them) and which doors won’t shut/open. We provide, I am sure, around the clock entertainment for the askari who peers in through windows naked of curtains as this little family scuttles about grazing on peanut butter sandwiches and bananas whilst unpacking boxes and cursing the lack of book shelves.

 

The garden is devoid of much except for a spectacular flamboyant in front of the verandah. I long for it to ignite into fiery blooms which will bleed all over the dust beneath it. Nor can I wait for end of year rains so that the sandpit that masquerades as a lawn will support the grass I plan to plant. When it rains. Until then we must endure the dust beneath bare feet like talc and try not to mind that nothing looks clean: Daz-White must wait til Christmas.

 

The dogs have ceased to tail me anxiously, from room to room. They have stopped trying to clamber into my car every time I go out. I think they have begun to understand this is home. The cats, incarcerated in my bedroom for a week, have lost their wild-eyed stares and are curled into peaceful balls beside me as I write. Under normal circumstances they would not tolerate being in the vicinity of one another but these, they have clearly agreed, are not normal circumstances. They’re not talking. But they have obviously, judging by their proximity on the duvet, made some kind of space-sharing truce. For now. No hissing or spitting or swatting each other crossly.

 

Whilst literal dust hangs choke-thick, eye-stingingly, skin-sloughing heavy in the air, the metaphorical kind is settling: I managed to find something clean to wear this morning; the television is working; the internet is up.

 

And the fridge is full of cold beer.

 

 

 

 

The Benefits of Hindsight

 

 

 

We have been away.

 

We probably oughtn’t to have gone. That’s what husband said. I told him Hindsight was wonderful stuff. Had we known, with the hindsight that was not afforded us when we left home on Saturday morning, how the weekend was going to pan out, then, no, absolutely, categorically, we ought not to have gone.

 

Especially so far.

 

Particularly given that I had malaria.

 

Diagnosed the day before we left, I feigned stoicism and told everybody I’d be fine.

 

They believed me.

 

When are other people, husbands predominantly, going to grasp that ‘I’ll be fine’ translates as I probably won’t be, cue unseemly amounts of TLC and radical changes of plan. 

 

Why are men so literal?

 

So we went. At 5am on Saturday morning. Me curled up with head on pillow. Children armed with the necessary to entertain themselves for the eight hour drive their father assured them was ahead of us.

 

I couldn’t pretend to be anything other than Fine. We had planned this trip months ago. Long before we realised we would be mid move. Certainly more distantly than we knew I’d be enfeebled by malaria. Definitely before we remembered how valuable Hindsight can be.

 

Our road trip to Katavi. One of Africa’s last great wildernesses.

 

 

 

The 8 hours morphed into ten.  The family ate breakfast overlooking the Malagarasi which gave Livingstone perpetual headaches during his expeditions inland as he and his porters were mired in its high waters when the river was in spate. I – with my own perpetual headache – lay prostrate across the bonnet of the car wondering why I’d got out of bed.

 

We arrived in Katavi in time for a cup of tea. And an early night.

 

Our first foray into the park the following morning began well. I felt brighter. Things were looking up.

 

Until – two hours into the third biggest and first loneliest wildlife conservation area in the country – we developed Car Trouble.

 

Car Trouble comes in a million different guises. It is at its most ominous when you are in country thick with buffalo, lion and hippo and your cell phone registers no network coverage.

 

Especially given the size and the solitude of our chosen weekend get-away.

 

 

 

We looked at one another forlornly.

 

‘We are in the S**t’, announced husband succinctly, as if we were all too stupid to have gleaned severity of situation for ourselves.

 

‘How often do you suppose a vehicle comes down this road?’ I mused

 

‘Couple of times a week?’ Husband said, scouring the ground for signs of tyre tread. There were none, just ours indicating where we’d come from. The direction we’d hoped to continue in was marked only with the tread of game. And it’s droppings.

 

With 3 litres of water, 7 naajis, a bag of stale popcorn and three swiftly blackening bananas, things looked dire.

 

‘We are all going to die’, wailed Hat miserably.

 

We didn’t. Obviously. For otherwise I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale which my darling children urged would make good blog fodder as we sat in the heat and dust feeling sorry for ourselves.

 

Finally, for there seemed no alterative, Husband and Son decided nothing for it but to walk for help, armed with a cell phone which they hoped might bleep into action at some point along the way.

 

The girls and I cowered in diminishing shade, carefully sipping water and wondering whether we ought to be saving our pee in plastic bags. Isn’t that prescribed prophylaxis to perishing from thirst in desert?

 

How bad was this going to be?

 

The air was silent but for bird call and the gentle whisper of the bush in response to the faint sighing of occasional breeze. The sky was huge. Huge and empty. No clouds. No planes. No nothing.

 

The longer we sat, the more I worried I became and the proportionately greater volumes of Rescue Remedy I squirted onto my tongue.

 

Had I sent the boys in the right direction, I fretted? How good was my map reading, really? Be honest here.

 

What about buffalo? Katavi teems with huge herds of them. 1000 at a time, great big black hulking brutes with sulky expressions and mean beady eyes.

 

 

 

And hippo. The mammal responsible for more human fatalities than any other in Africa.

 

And – oh God – what about the lion?

 

My friend Tash, member of Big Cat Diary crew, recently described to me the aggression and determined hunting technique of the Katavi lion.

 

They’ll bring down a buff, she said.

 

One man of 6’2” accompanied by a lean teen would be easy pickings.

 

Amelia was remarkably relaxed. She lay in the sun and read her book. Amelia never goes anywhere without a book.

 

‘Chillax man, Ma, it’ll be cool.’

 

I hoped she was wearing her Lucky Pants.

 

Hat massaged my shoulders, ‘Away worries, away!’ she demanded.

 

Almost three hours after the boys had vanished into the scrub and out of sight, a park vehicle – alerted after a call from them – came barreling over our dusty horizon and we were rescued. We picked up the boys minutes later, trailing back to us, through the bush, sunburned and thirsty and coated in dust.

 

They had been neither gored, trampled nor made mincemeat of by a pride of hungry lion.

 

They had seen nothing.

 

Except for a cobra, ‘as thick as my arm’, reported Ben delightedly.

 

The rest of our weekend was spent trying to ascertain how we could get home given our car could clearly not.

 

We managed a lift yesterday. We arrived back in the Outpost last night travel weary and filthy dirty.

 

And full of reflections on the benefit of hindsight …

 

And now, if you will excuse me briefly, I must move house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Empty Drawers

 

 

We’re living in a weird twilight zone: somewhere between this, our old – of only a year – home and our next one, still something of a building site where the loos don’t flush and the taps don’t run but which is where most of our furniture awaits us.

 

Some of our conversations reflect our present half-lit half-life.

 

Asina, who has been away for a day, gathers the necessary to lay the table for breakfast and returns looking bemused, ‘it’s gone’, she says, ‘the table’. It has. It did. Yesterday. We’ll have to manage on our laps for now.  We remain with just our beds and boxes full of clothes in lieu of wardrobes. The children dig for whatever it is they need to wear. Or don’t bother and make do with pajamas all day.

 

Amelia insists she needs mine and Hat’s help sorting and packing her underwear as she empties final drawers. With slyly captured audience, she subjects her little sister and me to a running commentary on assorted knickers:

 

‘These are my mountain climbing pants.’

 

?

 

‘They are roomy and comfortable.’

 

Ah right. Of course.

 

‘These are my fat-day pants.’

 

I have some of those too.

 

‘These are my radical pants.’

 

?

 

‘See, it says Radical here’ and she indicates the label.

 

Hat wants to know what Radical means.

 

‘Girl power’, says her older sister.

 

‘These’, and she picks up what appears to be a brand new pair of Tesco’s Best, ‘are too good to wear. You bought them for me Mum’.

 

I did. Because she insisted she needed new ones.  That without them her life would fall apart. As she swore all of her knickers had done already.

 

‘These’ as she carefully folds another pair, ‘are my party pants’.

 

‘Why do you have to have party pants?’ a confused Hat demands, ‘nobody’s going to see them’.

 

I hope not. God, I hope not.

 

‘Because if I look nice on the outside, I like to think I look nice underneath as well’.

 

I do not have the heart to tell her that when she has been married for twenty years she will only care about looking presentable on the outside, that her grey washing-machine fatigued M&S undies will be the least of her concerns.  Providing, of course, she has remembered to put them on. I hope that between now and then - tired, sagging, absent-minded middle age - my daughter can indulge in Myla and Agent Provocateur and Bodas

 

“I iron my knickers before I go out’, she tells a very impressed Hat who is clearly taking mental notes

 

I’d like to be able to iron my face before I go out, I think to myself. Sod the bloody undies.

 

‘And these’, as she sifts through the last of the heap, ‘are knickers that look better off than on’.

 

??????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

My daughter is fourteen. This is not the kind of thing you want to hear your fourteen year old daughter say.

 

She obviously takes note of the alarm which is quickly suffusing my expression.

 

‘Look.’

 

And she demonstrates.

 

The knickers look tiny: narrow-hipped, skinny-jean, size-zero tiny.

 

Abnormally tiny in fact: the waist measurement is about 7 ¾ inches.

Amelia stretches them to a more realistic 27 ¾ inches and they mesh out unattractive and transparent.

 

Indubitably: they look better off than they probably would on.

I’m relieved she explained.

 

 

Rolling Dough

 

 

 

Pastry cutters.

 

Dozens of them.

 

Rattling around jostling for space amongst the cake tins and cooling racks that I have tossed, because I am mind crushingly bored of packing now and impatient to be finished with the job, so that they lie higgledy-piggledy, one on top of another, bare of a muffle of bubble wrap, in a huge cardboard box.  They will complain bitterly once we get moving, I can hear their clattering complaints already.

 

I stop throwing for a moment and eye them. I feel a bit guilty. They’d wink at me, the pastry cutters, if I used them more often; they’d be shinier if I did. As it is they’re crusted with a tired coat of rust.

 

I am going to use them more in my new home. I make a promise to myself. And to them. They’d smile back if they weren’t so lacklustre, so jaded by the tedium of dark back-of-drawer living, dejected, apparently long forgotten except by the cockroaches that scuttle between them in the middle of the night.

 

They hold, you see, in their scallop-curled-corners, such sweet memories of childhood. 

 

Mum made pastry on a board. She cooled her hands before she rubbed the butter into the flour; she ran the cold tap over the inside of her tilted wrists, to chill the blood to her hands, she said: the cooler her palms, the shorter the pastry, she explained.

 

We watched as she rolled the dough with a wooden rolling pin to smooth sleek sheet, our small flour dusted noses just peeping over the top of the kitchen counter, we watched as she deftly pressed down into the dough with a cutter and twisted sharply so that it gathered the perfectly executed shape between its edges and she could drop it into the soft hollows of a muffin tin. She wasted little; each cut made as close to the last as possible. No gaps.

 

When the muffin tin was full of shell-shaped pastry cases, my brother and I were given the scraps from which to fashion whatever we liked. We rolled and tugged and pulled until our own little piece of dough was grey from the grime of small hot hands.

 

“See, Robert, I’m making a snake, see, see? Ssssssss! It’s going to BITE you!” My brother squealed and rolled his own piece more energetically.

 

Mum filled the tarts with a careful teaspoon of strawberry jam. Glossy, fat red berries cushioned in scarlet jelly which slid from the spoon lazily. She filled the space perfectly so that it bubbled caramel but never boiled over or burned bitter black at the edges. We baked them and ate them hot with a dollop of farm fresh cream heaped on top.

 

Nobody made jam tarts like my mum did.

 

I am going to teach Hat how to.

 

As soon as we’re there. As soon as I’ve unearthed the pastry cutters I’ve made my silent pledge to.

 

 

Packing Memories

Packing continues. In short fits and abortive starts. I am roused briefly, seized by some sudden energy borne of guilt, fuelled by too much tea, which dissipates quickly with the tedium of the task in increasingly dusty hand or because I have become distracted.

 

By an envelope stuffed full of assorted family members’ x-rays: a set ordered by Hat’s orthodontist; she’ll need a retainer, he said, Hat looked appalled and promised to stop sucking her thumb; too late said the dentist, but kindly. And he smiled.

 

Another collection of misty celluloid images – quite stuck together now – show my husband’s spine. They were taken in the KCMC Hospital which lies sprawled in the shadow of Mt Kilimanjaro. They had to be ordered after he had fallen from a tree and lay sprawled on the ground beneath it (alarmingly close to an enormous rock) on Christmas day 13 years ago: he’d shinned up the trunk to retrieve a little boy’s Santa delivered boomerang. He lost his grip after posting the present back down to earth. He spent the rest of the day flat on his back (we managed to move him from lawn to bed) I administered arnica, pain killers and the odd stiff whisky (and spade loads of increasingly inebriated TLC; it was Christmas day, after all).

 

The following morning I drove him to hospital. We waited for hours before we saw the Orthopaedic surgeon (and whilst we waited we encountered a patient who had died in the corridor lying upon a stretcher; I hoped we didn’t have to wait as long as he). The surgeon pronounced husband perfectly alright and suggested he take a couple of aspirin. Weeks later, and still almost immobile, we finally sought a second opinion in distinctly more salubrious Nairobi Hospital over the border. The orthopaedic surgeon there ordered new x-rays post haste: ‘’I can’t read these bloody things’’, he said in frustrated annoyance, squinting at the originals and frowning at me (presumably for not doing better first time round and securing my best beloved better care), “the quality is far too poor”, he explained. The new set revealed husband had shorn off the ends of three of his vertebrae. Nobody could find them though.  And he was apparently, given a few weeks bed rest and rather more concerted TLC on my part, no worse for wear.

The third folder of pictures stuffed into the same giant brown envelope which is crusted with mud, testimony to a hornet’s house-building, holds my attention for much longer: the ultra sound photographs taken when I was 25 and my son a 23 week old foetus. I look at them now and am no less overcome by the emotion that attaches to those first glimpses of our babies: indefinite fuzzy outlines that we gaze upon for hours, tracing the gentle curve of tiny spines with our fingers, and trying not to cry.  

 

 

Where are the Wombles when you need them?

We are packing up.

 

Again.

 

The second time in year.

 

Only this time we’re not going as far: this time we’re not trekking from one side of a large African country to another. This time we’re merely moving across town.

 

Our new address is laughably ostentatious testimony to the snobbish hierarchy of British colonial administration:

 

House Number E8

Cheyo “A” Senior Officers Estate

Ulaya Road

 

Ulaya – in Kiswahili – means Europe. Anywhere in Europe. Anywhere from where white men may hail.

 

The houses on the dusty little lane all vary in shape and size. The one we’re moving into clearly wasn’t home to anybody of terribly high ranking; it’s too small for that.  Nor is it as well positioned as others which face the view to the east and the sun rise.  The Regional Commissioner lives in one of those now. As does the resident judge.

 

I hate packing. I hate facing the accusing clutter I have accumulated: rubbish which laments my failings as anything approximating domestic. I’d rather write than pack. I’d rather read than wrap china up in paper. I’d rather any challenge than that of securing the safety of a piece of glass in a sheet of crumpled tissue.

 

Why do we collect so much stuff?

 

Ben says, because I have bribed him to help me, ‘I’ve never seen you use these glasses, Mum, how long have you had them?’

They were a wedding present. So almost twenty years. They are Waterford crystal whiskey tumblers. Nobody in our house drinks whiskey. One still bears a sticker.

 

‘Why don’t you sell some then?’ enquires my practical son (whilst I make mental note to give him a cheque as a present when he gets hitched, not expensive glass).

 

‘Where?’ I ask, ‘who’s going to buy cut glass in the Outpost?’

 

Once I wouldn’t have considered selling the stuff because I’d attached all kinds of sentiment to it. Now it’s just packing fodder because I can’t think what else to do with it as we trail from house to house (our 6^th since we got to Tanzania), possessions which I realize I only remember I own every time I unpack or pack.

 

I’ve packed it up again.

 

If I have to pack anything, it’s books. They’re easy to pack. They don’t need wrapping first. And they provide such happy distraction from the job in hand: you can’t examine a glass with the same joy that you can the back of a book. I have packed twenty boxes so far,  I’ve barely scratched the surface, I pulled them from shelves and watched the dust motes dance in the sun, indignant at being disturbed for the first time in nearly a year.  I watched the clouds of snoozing mosquitoes come to life and swarm in a cross crowd about my head, whining that I’d woken them up. I took satisfaction in that: vengeance for the fact they keep me awake often at night. I watched the occasional gecko tumble from the pages of the odd tome and scurry quickly for cover, its small rubbery body wriggling in agitation, sometimes leaving a tail behind.  

 

Hat reports from her own packing up.

 

‘’You would be very proud of me’’, she says, ‘’I have even thrown some stuff out.’’

 

Hat is a worse squirrel than her mother.  I blame my maternal grandmother, Alice, after whom Hat is partly named and from whom I inherited not only my tendency to hoard but most of my books too. Granny A couldn’t throw a thing away: it meant her cupboards were chock-full of the most delicious treasures including the original press cuttings from the Errol murder which threw Kenya’s Happy Valley into a state of scandalous turmoil.  When I found them, they were quite jaundiced with age and curling at the edges like parchment.

 

‘’What haven’t you thrown out?’’, I enquire

 

‘’Bits and Bobs’’, she says.

 

Bits and bobs worry me; bits and bobs morph into rubbish quite quickly.

 

‘’Like what?’’

 

‘’You know: like that really long pencil I’ve got …’’

 

The sort of thing relatives give children as souvenirs of cities they’ve visited, the sort of thing you can never find a sodding sharpener for so its useful life is remarkably short.

 

‘’When did you last use it?’’ I want to know

 

‘’I can’t remember’’, she admits and wanders off.

 

I know the very long, utterly redundant pencil is going to find its way into our new home, just like my idle glass will. And I know that we will have precisely the same debate several years from now when we pack up again.

 

And I bet  the same clutter follows us then too.

 

 

 

 

Mother knows Best. Sometimes.

 

Hat and I are nearing the end of our first academic year at home school.

 

It’s been ok. Better than ok, we agree.

 

‘’It’s been good’’, says Hat.

 

Not perfect, not ideal, not always. But good. And good’s fine.

 

Hat’s school has been a motley amalgam of a formal correspondence course which we have worked at on the verandah, frequently accompanied by cats and dogs and the occasional lizard scuttling across the wall seeking the sun; regular forays back to Arusha where she was reunited with old friends in the international school she attended for six years and field trips conducted by her father: at the sea side when she stroked the octopus he caught in his hands so that she could feel its suckered tentacles against her skin and when, with her little fist firmly folded inside her dad’s much bigger one, he took her swimming beyond the reef – I watched them: her arm draped across his broad, brown shoulders. She was a bit scared, she told me later, ‘but I was so glad to have done it, Mum, I felt so grown up’.  PE has taken the form of bike rides along the dam, long walks, afternoons in the pool when Hat has insisted I race aginst her or dive for pennies to see who can collect the most. Only our guitar lessons disappointed: Hat hated those, George from the church came six times and taught the same song over and over until she wept with boredom. ‘And he sends text messages during the lesson’, she said, ‘and picks his nose’, as if I needed any more conviction that music lessons probably ought to be abandoned.  School has happened on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in an abandoned refugee camp near the Burundi border and on board aeroplanes hanging high in a big sprawly white hot African sky.

 

Yet I still find myself defending our decision.

 

I have described Hat’s learning experience to numerous people who enquire ‘but where does she go to school?’ I teach her, I say, a bit. Mostly she teaches herself; she has produced a project on Dr Livingstone, has a map of Tanzania festooned with ribbons and post-it notes indicating where she’s been since we got here, she has designed a game to combat the spread of malaria, she is currently immersed in an investigation into India and Hinduism, simply because she wants to go there: India

 

Yes, yes, they say – as if to indicate that’s all very well. But. There is always a But.

 

What about her Social?

 

Ah yes.  That old chestnut.

 

By Social, of course, the sceptics mean the Social life I am denying my precious little girl: ‘what about the missed opportunity for playdates with children of her own age? Her own colour? Her own background?’

 

Socialising with whomever happens to be around apparently isn’t good enough.

 

That she chats happily to Asina and Salma, Sylvester and James in a funny vernacular spun of Kiswahili and English isn’t deemed socialising. That she accompanies her father and I to everything we go to here doesn’t count either. 

 

But why not? 

 

Hat is a friendly little girl. She understands, and she grasped this very quickly after we got here, that she needs to grab every chance to engage with other people.  Regardless of age, colour or creed. As a result she has bartered for a bunch of bananas at the front gate whilst the African ladies selling them to her giggled. Hat didn’t care; she was elated to have made her solo into the local business of biashara. As a result, Hat has played pool with a kind African man in a bar whilst her father and I enjoyed a beer close enough to watch. Playing on her own, he asked if he could join her.   I watched her smile and say, ‘of course’, and I watched her little face all serious in concentration as she lay her cue across the table to take her shot.  As a result Hat has attended barbeques and conversed with such an interesting cross section of people: a miner in his sixties; a mechanic from New York; a beauty therapist from Wales.

 

If there had been other children of her age about she wouldn’t have had those conversations. I am not suggesting adult company ought to replace those of her own peer group eternally, such a scenario wouldn’t be ideal either. But it does discount the accusation that is frequently levelled: ‘what about her Social …’

 

I am reading Robyn Scott’s Twenty Chickens for a Saddle. It’s a good book to be reading when you’re a mum in the bush suffering guilt-riddled anxiety attacks about your daughter’s Social.

 

When I’m not reading that, I’m flicking through the Spectator. Rachel Johnson suggests in a recent issue that some parents no longer see enough of their children. That makes me feel a bit better too; Hat definitely sees enough of me. Though she’s far too polite to say so.

 

Hat is sometimes an anxious little girl. She worries a lot. And before the critics react with an ‘Ah yes, well, bound to be some backlash with all this touchy-feely, tree-hugging home school nonsense’, I should tell you that Hat’s worrying has been a feature of her life for much, much longer than home school has.  If she were at boarding school she wouldn’t be able to articulate her anxieties like she does to me, and they might crowd her little head and would likely counter whatever advantages the Social of school was supposed to be lending to her young life.

 

This year at least, our decision to keep Hat at home and muddle along with our happy, faintly feckless, always versatile approach to her learning has unequivocally been the right one.   Whether it will be next year remains to be seen. 

 

But this year has reinforced what I thought I knew anyway: sometimes mums really do know best.

 

 

 

 

 

Pretending? … Maybe

 

 

I like to pretend. I suppose it’s one of my hobbies. Anything can happen when you pretend. Sometimes I sit in the garden and pretend. Maybe I sneak around the house pretending to be a spy on a mission or maybe I’m an under cover detective picking up mysteries in sunglasses, a detective hat and a long coat complete with the latest gadgets. Or maybe I’m the world’s last hope and maybe I manage to save everybody from the deadly Dr Evil, and maybe my stories are good enough to be written down and maybe I send them to a publisher and maybe they make the Top Ten Terrific Tales and then maybe I become a child star! Or maybe I live in a huge castle with 500 rooms and maybe it has an enormous garden, with an orchard, a swimming pool the size of the Atlantic Ocean and a forest and maybe that forest is enchanted and maybe Pegasus comes and swoops me up into the clouds.

 

But maybe, just maybe, I am happy enough to sit in my garden and pretend …

 

By Hat, aged 11

To Be (me) or Not To Be (me)?

 

 

 

 

Recently a friend articulated concern that my blog is not entirely anonymous. In many ways I regret that: forfeiting complete blanket obscurity. I was so desperate for readers, you see, that I doled out the blog address like sweeties to anyone who was prepared to write it down (actually … that’s not strictly true: I think I recall bombaring everybody on my contacts list with it when I sent a mail shot to alert them to my new email address, including my somewhat startled gynaecologist and equally perplexed bank manager).  And being a lazy correspondent (I know: an anomaly given the way I talk in cyberspace) I thought it’d be a handy way for anybody remotely interested in keeping vaguely in touch with this particular family’s movements at a – then, blog inception – precarious time in our lives, to do so.

 

But I wish I’d been more secretive.

 

Fellow bloggers, some despite creeping fame, manage to keep their identity firmly and warmly wrapped in the cloak of inscrutability.  Some bloggers guard their anonymity fiercely and are only called, and sign themselves off, Iota, or Potty Mummy. Some I have corresponded with outside the veil of blogland; they have sworn me to silence: don’t reveal my real name. I won’t, I promised.  I wonder if the bloggers whose notoriety has led to publishing deals and columns on broadsheets miss their anonymity?  The freedom that it lends to language and story telling? Some bloggers disguise themselves so well that readers are deceived even as to their gender.

 

My concerned friend wrote, somebody alerted me to blogger who posts as mzungu chick; she was getting absolutely hammered on her blog. Nasty nasty nasty stuff in the comments, You know I love that you, x and y talk about your lives so openly, but I worry about you and horrible people knowing about you and where you are, what you do etc.

 

I told her she was dear. And not to worry. I’m a housewife in the middle of nowhere in Africa; you’d have to really object to my fairly benign posts about pickling, dogs, kids, walks on dams and bread that won’t rise to come this far out to shut me up.  You’d have to really, really mind what I wrote about to make the journey worthwhile.

 

No, of course, I don’t wish I’d hung onto my anonymity because I fear for my life. Or my safety. Or even because I’m scared my feelings will be hurt.  Nor even so that I could rant unabated about the cows I rant inwardly about most of the time. No, I wish I’d hung onto it so that I could be a little more frank in my writing. Universal worries stalk us all: it would be liberating to throw some into the – usually very supportive and responsive – arena of a blog. But not when you know that some of the people who might read you absolutely know who you are. I don’t want to out my dilemmas or my failings as mine. I just want to out them as another invisible, un-named (at least not insofar as my own name) blogger’s.

 

There have been a few recently – of those universal worries, of those failings, of those dilemmas of keep-you-awake-at-night dimensions –  that I’d have loved to have described. To spin words about a worry usually helps to untangle it. And the unravelling is often hastened when you can throw it into the forum of blogsphere. Once, overcome by loneliness, I wrote a post which generated a – for this particular blog– huge response. Readers weren’t just kind; they proffered practical suggestions as to how to feel better. I couldn’t have told some friends and acquaintances how I felt that day. But some friends and acquaintances discovered anyway (because, foolishly, I’d handed out the blog address willy-nilly) and a heartfelt and overwhelming isolation was translated – a little bit smugly in the odd case – as ‘she’s not coping, you know’.  That I didn’t mind. What I minded was that my husband read my blog that day. And he knew it was me who felt lonely and sad and lost.

 

My friend Janelle says I must just write what I want, ‘Just write, man’, she urges, ‘who cares what people might think of you or what you say or how you say it, man!’ And she laughed and threw her arms open as if to gesture I ought not to care what anybody in the Whole Wide World might care what I blog/blab about. She’s like that: a cheerful two fingers up to stuffy conformity. But then my friend at Ngorobob House  admits a wee bit sheepishly and in mildly confessional tone, to owning a second blog. And she won’t give me that address …

 

 The thing is: it’s not what other people think about me that I mind. (I stopped caring about that sometime in 2001, when most of the people I knew had a view on an action I had taken and most felt at liberty to vocalize their disappointment and disgust vociferously). No. I don’t care what anybody thinks of me. But I’d hate anything I said about the lives of any of those I love most in the world to impinge upon them. I can spill my own secrets, that’s my prerogative and I’m big enough to cope with the fallout.

 

But not theirs. Never theirs. Because then they won’t be secret anymore.

 

They won’t be secret enough.

 

So. The question remains. To be (me)? Or not to be (me)?

 

Or you, for that matter?

 

 

 

Pickled

 

I have made a friend. 

 

I don’t know her well yet but on the two occasions that I have met her she seemed like the sort of person it might be fun to spend time with.  She is irreverent and very entertaining.

 

She’s a Tanzanian. Her mother, she told me, is from Iringa, her father from Mbeya, she spent two years in Zanzibar before moving to the Outpost. Which she hates, ‘God this is an awful place: if you had to live in the worst place in Tanzania, it would be this one’, she says.

 

She is very pretty and wears spaghetti tops (the same ones that the volunteer girls – as they leave the States or the UK in readiness for a big African adventure - are instructed not to wear lest they offend local sensitivities). She looks about 22. She is married to a man who looks about 62.

 

I ask her, ‘How old are you?’

 

36, she tells me.

 

I almost fall off my chair. L’Oreal needs a get a hold of this bird quickly. She is the ultimate walking talking un-airbrushed because-I’m-worth-it anti-aging advert.

 

”What’s your secret” I ask, trying not to move my face too animatedly as I talk so that I don’t deepen my 42 year old wrinkles so much that I look 62 as well.

 

”Konyagi,” she says, roaring with laughter and tipping the bottle in my direction. She drinks it with litres of Peach juice.  The bottle is branded with a label that leaves you in little doubt as to the punch this fire water packs.

 

 

 

 

”I don’t like looking as young as I do”, she complains.

 

This isn’t something you hear many women the wrong side of 18 say; I need an explanation.

 

”When I go to the soko (the market) those young whippersnappers just shout mambo ”(an informal Kiswahili greeting).

 

How does she want to be hailed, I enquire.

 

‘Shikamu’, she replies indignantly.

 

This is a traditional and old Swahili greeting.  It translates – literally – as ‘I hold your feet’, and the response, maharaba, means ‘You’re too kind’. 

 

It is the way you greet somebody whom you respect. Or somebody who is clearly much more aged than you are. It’s the way the boys in the market greet me. Because I am ancient, you understand. And look even more ancient when I am squinting into the sun or frowning because I don’t like the price that’s being demanded for a kilo of spuds.

 

She is very, very bored here. She has done a secretarial course in the local college, ‘Rubbish’, she pronounced, ‘but at least it gave me something to do; I can’t watch telly all day.’

 

She wants jars, she says.

 

Jars?

 

”I am going to collect honey and sell it”.

 

The region is – has been for years – famous for its honey.

 

I tell her I think that’s a very good idea, ‘If you go into the supermarket, you can’t find Tanzanian honey, only expensive imported stuff – its ridiculous that there’s honey here and you can’t find it on shelves’’, I elaborate.

 

She laughs and slaps the table between us with the palm of her hand, ‘My dear’, she says, ‘this is Tanzania! What do you expect?’

 

I have bought the local honey before. It’s very thin.

 

‘Ha, ha’, she laughs again, ‘those honey gatherers see the wazungu coming and they dilute their honey – they won’t do that with me’.

 

No. I don’t expect they will.

 

When she is not buying and selling honey (‘for a big, big profit’, she assures me), she is going to make pickles.

 

What kind of pickles.

 

Oh I don’t know. I have never made pickles before.  

 

I am going to have coffee with my her on Tuesday, me and the 15 empty jam jars I have sourced at the bottom of the kitchen cupboard.

 

*****************

 

Salma, who works with Asina trying to bring some semblance of order to our home, has been admitted to hospital, she has malaria. She is better than she was two days ago but she will be off work for some time. 

 

Asina observes the pile of ironing miserably.

 

Mama, she says, I think we need to get Sylvester in to do the ironing.

 

Sylvester is the Wellington boot wearing (even in the midst of a drought) gardener.

 

Do you think Sylvester can iron, I ask dubiously?

 

Mama, says Asina, have you seen Sylvester, his clothes are smart sana. Of course he can iron.

 

 

Mother Hen

 

 

The children are home.

 

All three of them.

 

Hat was joined by Amelia a week ago and by Ben on Monday; he flew home from school in the north and arrived looking long haired and lanky.

 

Mother Hen’s nest is fully feathered again.

 

And the house resonates with the sound of shouts and laughter, two televisions (despite the fact nobody’s watching either), several conflicting musical tastes and – of course – the odd scrap.

 

Like yesterday afternoon, when I took to my bed with my lap top (feigning busy, important writer off to work in peaceandquiet) and was irked to discover I was unable to do what it was I’d hidden myself away to do – sleep, naturally – as World War III was evolving next door.

 

No matter. I’d rather noise than none.

 

Whole chocolate cakes disappear in a sitting. There are no longer leftovers, instead every meal is supplemented by bread (the bread machine is begging, ‘Enough, enough already!’). Or Weetabix. Or fruit (admittedly a last resort where a fourteen year old is concerned, the suggestion ‘have a banana’ is met with a look that says you just asked her to eat worms). Feeding teens is like trying to fill an unfathomable hole.

 

Conversations are loudly five-way now, bickering, bantering, bellowing to be heard above the rest. Games are a riot. Liar Dice is a mutiny of match throwing and manipulation of rules: You can lie, says the children’s father, but you cannot cheat.  

 

I suppose, I ought to, given the suffragettes efforts, given that I am meant to aspire to Have It All, want more than this: more than a houseful of rowdy kids who are hell bent on eating me out of house, home and outpost.  But I don’t. I feel replete. All my chicks in an untidy row, shuffling, trying to get comfortable and occasionally complaining, beneath my wing. A full faculty.

 

I am writing a book. A book about madness and motherhood. Do our constantly evolving roles: daughter, sister, career girl (I used to be one once – in London – sometime last century), lover, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, friend – mean that our identities are constantly under siege? Is that why so many more women than men succumb to Depression? Do our multi-tasking skills burn out? Does trying to juggle too much mean that we might drop something? Ourselves, perhaps? 

 

Does it mean that when my children vanish over the horizons of Grown Up I shall go mad?

 

My friend B, a man, says of women, ‘Your emotional intelligence is better honed than ours; you think too much’.

 

I don’t think it’s the thinking that’s the problem; I think the problem arises when there is no longer as much to think about.