Ahem I shall never forget the date of 12 December 1998. It was one of the best days of my life along with perhaps three or four others. 21 years ago my brilliant daughter Gwen Fern was born at the Princess Grace hospital in Haywards Heath. She was underweight and premature. The umbilical chord was […]
Category Archives: 2019
2026 Ahem
SCUDDED PROPRIETORIALLY TRIMMINGS: January 2026
Ahem, During this interminably long month of heaving weather, our far south-east corner, ancestral home [...]
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02
Feb
Feb
2025 Ahem
QUERYING PAKKELEG CONVULSED: December 2025
Ahem Our Christmas celebrations normally start after we celebrate Gwen’s birthday on the 12th, when [...]
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01
Jan
Jan
2025 Ahem
FOODELICIOUS WASHBOARD BELEAGURED: November 2025
Ahem, Richard and Marie, from Cholsey in Oxfordshire, where Alli and I lived just after [...]
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01
Dec
Dec
2025 Ahem
HYENA FUNGI HALLOWEEN: October 2025
Ahem There is a village close to the Toleza Farm in Malawi that goes by [...]
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01
Nov
Nov
2025 Ahem
SPIRITUAL CONTINGENT GONGS: September 2025
Ahem As August turned to September, I was with my Kiwi friends Ramon and Colleen [...]
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01
Oct
Oct
30
Nov
Nov
Ahem Alli’s difficult and frustrating work selling our house in Leymen has finished with the transaction formally concluded at the beginning of the month, after some brain-cell and wallet-reducing last-minute hitches. The sale took place almost exactly ten years after we bought it (we beat the national average by 3 years). Kind-hearted brother-in-law Anthony drove […]
01
Nov
Nov
Ahem Recently I described a visit to a traditional healer who had diagnosed an ailment affecting an Ivoirian friend of mine whose hand was inexplicably painful. The healer had also suggested that a curse by someone nearby might be the cause. The plant medicines prescribed for the hand had worked well but my friend Benedicta […]
01
Oct
Oct
Ahem I had a party at my house one night and my mobile phone must have been stolen since I could not find it in hours of post-party searching nooks and crannies. I had to go to the local police commissariat the following Monday to register the loss and obtain a document verifying this. My […]
Ahem A friend of mine decided to visit a traditional healer in order to remedy an unexplained pain in her finger after conventional medication and clinical diagnosis had not worked. Fascinated, I came with her and some knowledgeable companions to see the healer, who lived in a small isolated community near the village of Anyama. We […]
Ahem The idea of a leisurely tour of southern middle England took shape after I was presented with four separate and fortunate opportunities taking place within two weeks of each other. These were the celebration of my niece Fleur’s wedding to husband Almero in the Temple Church (see masthead); the kind offer of my cousins […]
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Jun
Jun
Ahem Ramadan ended in thunderstorms and rain, which took some lives and left more without homes as floods damaged or washed away many precarious shanty domains in which millions have to live, work, and bring up children. The rainy season has been unforgiving, and for the first time in nearly three years here I could […]
Ahem Modern global media seems to destroy more than it creates. In Africa, cable TV pushes its normal fare: international sitcoms and films, the Simpsons, Premier League, Brazilian soaps, porn channels and detective series, while local content is dominated by Nollywood, national football matches, and urban music videos. By contrast the pan-African oral traditions of […]
Ahem At work, I have been grappling with an administration that had difficulties in comprehending that I had both retired and immediately become a consultant, officially impossible but allowed thanks to a special waiver signed by the President. Apparently I am the first employee in recent history to have achieved this feat, for which force […]
Ahem The annual reception for the staff of the African Development Bank provided a suitable curtain-raiser for Alli’s first visit to Abidjan for two years. Within three hours of her landing in Abidjan, we were arriving at the reception just in time politely to applaud the last of several apéritif speeches. The dress code was […]
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