Laikipia
Our farmhouse is at the finishing stage and Wachira, the electrician from Large Power and Control, is advising me on aesthetics. ‘A spotlight in the garden is a beauteous thing to behold,’ he urges. I reply, ‘Fine, but can we talk about house lighting first?’ ‘Yes, but we must illuminate the garden path in a way to be admired.’ ‘No spotlight,’ I say firmly.
After three years in tents and having spent a fortune we still have not moved into the house. Our Kenyan farm is a white elephant leaning on my chest. The way we have spent money causes me to have ghastly visions of wrist slashing, serious illness without insurance, falling towers and a runaway crack-cocaine addiction. We have constructed a railway that emerges from and goes nowhere in the jungle.
At this instant, the water boiler — an old oil drum modified to be heated over a wood fire — ruptures with an explosive hiss of steam. I rush across the building site to find Rufus the plumber, spanner in hand, looking unhappy. ‘What’s going on?’ Rufus explains he took his mind off connecting up the boiler because since arriving at our remote and wild farm he has become severely constipated.
To help pay for the building I have had to opt for the most dangerous journalistic assignments. Surviving an ambush on a hillside in Congo got us an Ariston gas cooker and a bush fridge. A sojourn in Pakistan’s NWFP covered the windows and doors. I managed to steal a couple of old iron baths from the backs of old colonial houses, fantasising that Happy Valley-ites had once played together in them, but in the end I still had to visit Raju, the Nairobi agent, for ‘genuinely British’ Twyfords.
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