Kenya coast
A loud crash woke us in the middle of our first night at the beach house. ‘Robbers must be trying to break in,’ said Claire, kneeing me in the back. ‘Go and see.’ I was groggy. It had been a 12-hour drive from the Rift Valley to the coast, with several near collisions involving Congo-bound juggernauts. The children had rioted in the back of the car. I tiptoed into the dressing-room, from where the explosive noise had come. Our clothes were in a heap on the floor. The wardrobe had imploded. On closer inspection I saw that in the year since we had last been here termites had eaten the entire thing, leaving only the ghostly form of household furniture in paint and slivers of wood.
And so our holidays begin. The fridge doesn’t work. The septic tanks are bunged up with roots from the banyan tree so that vegetable tendrils actually grow out of the loo. The beach house is like a picturesque Swahili ruin. Every hinge and metal fitting is rusted and seized. Monsoon winds have torn off windows. Strange smells lurk in bedroom corners. There are only three spoons in the kitchen. As I showered, a centipede nearly as long as my forearm, disturbed in its fetid tropical realm by human visitors, snaked its way towards me. I had to leap across the bathroom naked and wet to bomb it with half a can of Doom spray until it died on the tiled floor in a puddle of poison.
As you all know, holidays are exhausting. We do not relax. I certainly do not read Wordsworth’s poems nor the beach novels I brought, such as Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys.
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