Progress is coming to our remote corner of Kenya

The principal of the local polytechnic was waiting for me in the kitchen. Frequently in the kitchen there is a chief or a surveyor, or geese, or the cats Omar and Bernini, the dogs Jock, Sasi and Potatoes, foundling lambs or calves gambolling about hoping for milk, or stockmen with news of a sick cow, or armed askaris clumping in after a hard night to lay assault rifles down on the counter before slurping mugs of sugar-loaded tea. Bees try to swarm behind the fridge and one day Milka, the cook, primly announced there was a big snake coiled on the shelf of pots and pans. In her Cold Comfort Farm Miss Stella Gibbons talked of ‘clettering’ the dishes. You should have seen the clettering of kitchenware as I went after that snake, which rose up out of the Le Creuset, an 8ft Ashe’s large brown spitting cobra with a head the size of my fist.

But I hadn’t met a polytechnic principal in the kitchen before.