Japanese cars. Thousands of bloody cheap Japanese cars in pastel colours all called things like ‘Big Horn’ and ‘Yakult’ (well…possibly) have been flooding into Zambia and now in the capital Lusaka the traffic grinds into grid-lock twice a day every day. There is much building work too. Many of the derelict sites that had been there when I left 4 years ago have been bought up, tarted up and stuffed with glass. The supermarkets have almost everything (bar pork pies) […]
Mosquito blues
Today on the news they were discussing the very British method of keeping teenagers as murderously miserable and as isolated as possible. The method, invented to keep the teenage riffraff away from ‘volitile’ areas such as street corners and shopping areas in case they run riot and graffiti everything or stab everyone or, god forbid, demand some kind of loving respect and equality, is called ‘the mosquito’ and is a sonar weapon that a Bond villain would be proud. It […]
Da Da Day!
As I have a British passport I feel I must comment on the weather. Today, Feb 9th, I went out in a T-shirt. The sun was actually warming, the sky bright blue and everything glittered as if embedded with mica. Potentially climate changetastic but still so lovely. This is how gorgeous today was:
‘the Blind’
On Monday I was asked to review a play for the Radio 4 programme ‘In Touch’. It was called ‘The Blind’ and featured 6 blind and VI actors. (there is a theme methinks…) Turns out the opening night was in the depths of Stoke Newington near no station I have ever heard of. The studio theatre was outside, round a corner and down some raggedy ass steps and in a basement. The irony being this whole trip would have been […]
Urban Unbinding
The first law of dynamics states that for a thermodynamic cycle the sum of net heat supplied to the system and the net work done by the system is equal to zero. More simply, (thank God for Wikipedia) the First Law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; rather, the amount of energy lost in a steady state process cannot be greater than the amount of energy gained. This rather makes the ‘Urban Rebound’ class at the gym a […]
This is a miserable post but have to get it out of system. Sorry.
Several people have asked me if I am looking forward to my trip back to Zambia. Well yes, I love Zambia, the light, the beauty of the country, the wit and wisdom of the people, the life, the soul of it all even given the appalling poverty, tragedy and corruption (insert Miss World speech here) but, for me, there is this: Macular cystic oedema. I have it badly today. It hurts and it blurs my vision and it comes and […]