The Tinku Gallery opening was lovely. Lights, flowers, smart people and erudite conversation. No, really! My friend, A looked very glamorous and elegant in a crafted little black number and just the right earrings. She had lent me a dress that had a neckline that plunged so dramatically it was just managing to cling precariously to decency. This would have been fine had I the confidence to carry it off but I kept having to glance down at my own […]
Barking
Cambridge did itself proud today, bright and sun full and sharply chill with high, blue skies. It felt a little treacherous looking out of my window at it all, sitting with my headphones on and listening to play back of the interviews I had taken one night on the banks of the Kafue river in Zambia. The bush is noisy at night. Tree frogs, crickets, night jars, jackals, hippo and a far off lion sing, hoot, shriek, giggle and call […]
Zambia 2. Munali
I am standing in front of eleven blind and visually impaired teenage boys. Watching my clumsy attempts at warm up jolliness is the PEO…the Provisional Education Officer (Special Needs) who has accompanied me on this venture on behalf of the Permanent Secretary for Education without who’s nod I would never have got to do these interviews at Munali Secondary school. This was a school of note and was set up in the 50’s with a resource centre for disabled children. […]
Zambia Trip Part 1
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) […]
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 […]
Detox
It was a good party thanks to the lovely S and her feats with a saucepan and yes, at midnight in kilt and accompanied by a surfer dude on an Irish drum, my buddy the piper led a surreal, random crowd of drunken dancers into the soggy night. We collected about 30 people from various houses in the estate – mostly holding fags and tins of larger ( and that was just the children) and wound our way leaping and […]
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