April 2007
→ Spice
(29th April 2007)
Yesterday I wrote nothing because I, er, got bored. Bored in Zanzibar. It's possible, if one is alone and spends all day tramping round the mostly picturesque but also tout-ridden streets of Stone Town. It's a bit much when Batman becomes light relief. Today I decided to be active and took a spice tour. I generally avoid organised tours because they're awful. This one looked like ...
(27th April 2007)
In 24 hours, two strange encounters with short-statured people. First: I was lying on my rather splendid Tanzanian four-poster bed yesterday evening watching a dreadful film called Mindhunters by Renny Harlin and "starring" Christian Slater, who gets iced in half by liquid nitrogen, Jonny Lee Miller, who demonstrates perfectly clearly why he has never become more famous, the bloke who played Webster in ...
(26th April 2007)
I have been tramping around dirty places all day and am now sitting in front of a computer in a well-aired room off Old Bagamoyo road wearing a crisp white shirt and clean jeans and thinking I've got no idea what to write. This will probably be true even if I do write something so with that in mind I offer the option to look ...
→ Idiocy
(25th April 2007)
Lucie Blackman's murderer has been acquitted. I call him her murderer because a blind, deaf, dumb and colossally developmentally challenged person could see that he murdered her. A year or so ago I interviewed Lucie's father for a piece for Glamour Marie Claire Generic Women's Mag about young women who get killed abroad. He sounded like his ego was in place - and he ...
(25th April 2007)
It is simple to scare a Tanzanian child. It's so simple, you can do it accidentally and inevitably. The technique is easy: Be white. Usually, my skin colour here provokes the Muzungu Double-Take: child looks; child looks away; child looks back and says "Muzungu!." Muzungu is translated as "white man" or European but I have a feeling it means more than that, or used to. ...
(23rd April 2007)
I am in Tanzania. I realised, as I arrived yesterday in an overpriced taxi from the airport, and saw normal street scenes and no UN vehicles and no scared people in their heavily fortified Corollas, that this is the first normal, stable African country I've been to. That's because the others have been Liberia (just after a big war), Cote d'Ivoire (just before a little ...
→ Routine
(21st April 2007)
A day in my life:4.45 am: get woken up because someone left the alarm function working on the clock radio in the EXtreme hotel Cape Town room with a tiny window with a view of Table Mountain8 am: get re-woken up9.30 am: arrive at Robben Island Nelson Mandela Gateway. Look at bucket that served as a toilet for prisoners up to the ...