Missing out

Laikipia

Living in the Kenyan highlands during this war in Iraq I’ve felt like those Japanese soldiers who thought they were still supposed to be fighting when they were plucked out of Pacific island jungles in the 1970s. In the middle of Laikipia we live without TVs, telephones or newspapers. Visitors bring us news, but people up here are more interested in the prospects of rain than the latest from the Baghdad battlefront. We do have a radio, a special satellite one with an antenna, but halfway through Tony Blair’s speech the other day, a vital cable got tangled around my chair leg and snapped when I yanked at it. Then we got stranded on the farm because the jerrycan of what somebody thought was petrol being poured into the Range Rover turned out to be river water. That buggered things up nicely for a bit. We had a blissful few weeks, buying red Boran cattle, dosing sheep, watching the baby zebra, oryx and hartebeest being born at the end of the dry season.