Laikipia
My mother’s house on Kenya’s coast in August is my favourite place to decompress. After a month in London and Edinburgh, it was such a relief to kick off my squeaky black shoes, discard my trousers and wear nothing but a kikoi wrap for a few days. This time my old friend Eric, who is over from China, joined me. We ate only fish and rice and drank a lot of ice-cold Tusker beer. We surfed on a reef break a mile out to sea where the waves were clean, big and blue. We went deep-sea fishing, tagged a sailfish, saw turtles mating and gasped when the great spangled flanks and fins of a whale shark surfaced alongside the boat. Eric stayed at home in his Shanghai apartment to hone his cooking skills during the Sars epidemic, so I taught him my recipe for whole kingfish, packed in a paste of salt and lime juice and roasted on the coals of aromatic myrrh wood.
On the way up to the friends’ ranch where we live on the Laikipia plateau, I bought chewing tobacco and khat leaves for the cowboys and shepherds. I arrived bearing other gifts for the workers from my parents-in-law: everything from jerseys to bedroom slippers. One dreads the news of a farm from which one has been absent and I discovered all the usual stuff, like lame cows, a few sheep with their legs in the air and a papyrus thatch roof that leaked heavily in a recent deluge.
All these came as no surprise. More disconcerting was to find a delegation of Samburu neighbours, looking alarmed, standing outside the house. When the pleasantries were over I asked what I could do for them. They explained that their father had not been able to urinate for the past four days.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in