Plum pudding on the beach

Laikipia

My favourite Christmases are in Nairobi. This is how it goes. We gather in the suburbs, at my sister and brother-in-law’s hotel, which they close for the holiday. It has giraffe and warthog on rolling lawns under the shadow of the Ngong Hills. There are butlers, a genius chef, and it’s the only place that has enough bedrooms to fit all of us under one roof. As December progresses, friends and family disembark from British Airways with offerings of walnuts, cherry brandy, gravadlax and Stilton from the Harrods food halls. On Christmas Eve, the turkey turns up still alive, blinking, riding pillion on a bicycle pedalled by a man in car-tyre sandals. The tree is a casuarina festooned with cotton wool, or it’s a whistling thorn, Acacia drepanolobium, all covered in swollen galls that are ready-made baubles if you spray them gold or silver. Since nobody on the roads is sober, we avoid all travel and the Daily Nation, with its chronicles of mass death on the highways.