3November1997

3 November 1997
My dear folks,

It’s turned cold. The temperature gauge on the car hovered between plus and minus one as I returned home one weekend dawn. Mavis, who’d insisted on being let out of the flat the previous evening, came dancing down the freezing pavement to meet me, his tummy swinging beneath him in rhythm to his stride. He must have spotted the car. He clearly felt it had been a tough night because he assailed me with a chorus of squeaky complaints as we ascended the stairs together. Strange how his voice rises in pitch when he’s feeling hard done by. Nothing that some instant breakfast & a huggle couldn’t cure!

Right now he’s curled on a blanket at the end of Chris Jones’s bed in the study, snoring away, having spent an hour, bum on couch, watching the wind tossing the leaves on the trees outside. Chris – spending tonight elsewhere – is in London for a week en route to RSA after a tough stint in Guyana. For all the ills he’s lived through – disease, deaths & constant strife - he’d looked much the same as he arrived with an armful of luggage on Friday. And judging by the calls I’ve taken for him, his arrival has not passed unnoticed by his admirers.

I have been working & walking in that order. I took myself out into the country towards the end of last week, acquired two ham & salad rolls & half a bottle of wine from an anxious-to-please mini-café proprietor and then got a few miles under my belt. (Mother the air-heel shoes you bestowed on me remain wonderfully comfortable & as suited to Thames walks as to night shifts at the Beeb.) I’ve tried to get in at least an hour each afternoon after waking, mainly in the last hour of sunshine. I finally found a car wash to blast the grime off the Rocket. I’ve taken the car to work these past few nights rather than the bike. Fri/Sat were easy going but Sun brought with it all the opt-ins & outs & joint bulletins with News-24 that have bedevilled our lives this past week. It’s a hamster wheel that’s spinning ever faster.

Our poor correspondents in the field these days have absolutely no time to discover what’s actually happening. They no sooner arrive on station than World Service Radio, World TV, domestic TV, News-24 TV, Radio 5 Live & Radio 4 all jump up & down for live interviews followed by despatches or tracks for TV packages. The correspondents are forced to act like printing machines, just rolling the stuff off for innumerable outlets until their eyes glaze over. And since they all carry mobile phones everywhere there’s no escape. Anyhow, that’s their problem, albeit one that’s increasingly being aired as they’re harried half to death.

Jones has had a hard time of it down at the Quinta, faced with some quick turnarounds & a bout of wind and rain that did nothing to encourage the outgoing guests to move in time for her & Maria to prepare the cottage for the incoming ones. I shall add a few choice paragraphs from her recent faxes. I also had a letter from a retired SABC colleague of mine who lives in Zimbabwe & is spending much of his retirement on visits to (mainly remote) game parks. He’s recalled some close encounters but try the following for a close call – this while reflecting outside his tent in an unfenced visitor area one evening:

“I was seated in my camp just staring in space…when suddenly I got the feeling that all was not as it perhaps should be. Then followed the immediate feel of something just touching me, followed by a gentle zephyr – the almost sensuous blowing of the air on my neck…. I brushed away what I had thought was a fly or some other insect. You can imagine my astonishment when my hand encountered a rather rough heavy hindrance… Unfortunately or, perhaps, fortunately I was on my own so there was no warning of what was to come. Having felt this heavy weight on the back of my hand, I froze and suddenly over my shoulder appeared the tip of a trunk which then proceeded to feel its way down my chest to my navel and back up again around my ears and then – nothing. I sat still, for I feared to make any sudden movements, for what seemed an age; after neither feeling nor sensing anything else I turned around and there was nothing there. For a moment it was as if I had imagined it all, but then people from a nearby camp came over….they had witnessed the whole thing &, fortunately for me, done nothing but watch in total amazement.”

Sufficient unto the hour!