Muchinga, the name of the escarpment which runs the length of Zambia’s eastern side, but now also the name of our latest Province, with Chinsali as its headquarters. Travellers to and from Nakonde and Tanzania would be forgiven for not knowing where Chinsali is, nestled as it is the hills sixteen kilometres off the […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the '2013' Category
An Hour of Dark
It’s that time of the year again when citizens of the world are asked to spend one hour showing their support for climate change action, by turning off their lights. We all depend on energy, be it for cooking our food, charging our phones, running our computers or getting our morning cup of tea. […]
Read the rest of this entry »Fool on the Hill
There are no ghosts in our house, though it is built for haunting. Moorish by design, it’s more of an architectural beaux geste to Bunny Allen the former refugee gypsy White Hunter who washed up on the shores of Lamu in the 60’s and built several rambling castellated houses, than to the courtyards of the […]
Read the rest of this entry »Groundee Rent
Come September every year is a task that must be done, however irritating. The ground rent has to be paid. This is a comparatively small amount of money but, if you do not pay it, there is a chance, pretty remote, I must say, that your property can be taken away from you. The reason […]
Read the rest of this entry »Can You Handle It?
A few months ago, I had the sad task of choosing a coffin in which to bury my father. No matter how long someone has been ill and, as he said, ‘in the departure lounge’ when the time comes and your loved one does pass on, it is still a shock and a highly emotional […]
Read the rest of this entry »Road Safety – An Oxymoron?
‘Fifty Three Killed’ screamed the headlines. And everyone rushed to the scene, shocked! Yet I am only shocked that it has not happened earlier – these passenger coaches that tear up and down our roads at full throttle, screaming past cars and trucks as if they are on the Formula 1 track. Granted, in this […]
Read the rest of this entry »Human Types
In my younger days I worked in Fiji; one of those tiny Pacific Island countries. Being young, I wanted to understand the various cultures obtaining in this idyllic research resort of anthropologists. Needless to say that the first book I bought was Bronislaw Malinowsky’s The Sexual Life of Savages of North-Western Melanesia. It was a […]
Read the rest of this entry »Insurance Scam or Genuine Error?
The scamming insurance salesman cartoon is well known to us all, as is the second hand car salesman, and it seems that this is not necessarily a misnomer. One of our readers recently went to purchase the legally required insurance for her vehicle. The existing insurance expired three weeks after the end of the quarter, […]
Read the rest of this entry »A New Dawn
The long awaited New Years Day arrived and the new dawn heralded the revalued Kwacha. KR was finally here and overnight Zambia’s billion and millionaires disappeared, their bank account balances becoming easily readable numbers. The run-up to KR-Day was only slightly chaotic with the likes of Zesco being closed for the last few days of […]
Read the rest of this entry »Lions on the Line
Every once in awhile we all like to get away, get some good old R&R. Rest and Relaxation, with maybe a hint of adventure was my intention when I jumped in the van and drove the 7 hours from Lusaka to Livingstone. It seems I was given more than I bargained for when I arrived […]
Read the rest of this entry »Mother Tongue
We have long and often expressed our concerns at the English language skills and especially the English comprehension skills of many of our citizens. Thus, we were interested to read recent press reports that language tuition should be in local languages as English is a colonial hangover. The first question to ask is why English […]
Read the rest of this entry »Our Man at Le Dakar
Over the past few months we have been reporting on the progress of David Reeve, our man at Le Dakar. ‘The Team’ consisting of David, his riding mate, Ingo, from Namibia and the mechanics and support persons left at the end of December, arriving in Lima in good time to get the bikes unpacked […]
Read the rest of this entry »The Holiday from Hell
A few weeks ago a group of enthusiastic bridge players decided to enter the annual Manicaland Bridge Contest held at Nyanga in the Zimbabwean Eastern Highlands. To get there it was decided to hire a bus for, as someone pointed out, you cannot fly there unless you have your own helicopter, and the roads […]
Read the rest of this entry »Fool on the Hill
In what, despite any amount of cynicism, can only be interpreted as a victory for conservation, Zambia has suspended all Safari Hunting (SH) in Game Management Areas (GMA’s) for 2013 and has placed an indefinite ban on the SH of Lion and Leopard. At the end of December 2012, scant hours before the results […]
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