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. We sing carols to the accompaniment of tree hyraxes and bullfrogs at night. And year after year, my mother will forget that I’m no longer 12 and will give me the latest Guinness Book of World Records.
As the flaming pudding arrived at Christmas lunch last year, each of us hoped to find the Kenya shilling piece and the good luck it promised. Twelve months later, has it done whoever found it (because it wasn’t me) any good? I’ll say that we’re all healthy, I hope happy and, touch wood, this year we’ve been spared the tragedies that beset life in the Tropics. But we’re all skint. To be sure, I don’t know anybody in Kenya who isn’t broke, thanks to the hangover from Moi’s dictatorship, together with the damage inflicted by fears of al-Qa’eda attack and the war in Iraq.
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