An Englishman’s Home is.........

8.00 in the evening and we have washed up the dirty plates and saucepans from dinner. Dinner itself is often a technological triumph. The oven in our cooker has ceased to function in the proper way. It insists on going out at regular intervals. But we’ve discovered the solution! A piece of wire wound around the spindle of the oven-knob and tightened to hold it in place once the oven is lit works well, and usually results in a well-cooked meal. So far there have been no explosions, but time is probably not on our side and we think we might need a new cooker.

Of course for washing up there’s no running hot water – and indeed, sometimes there’s no running water at all. In that case we resort to the jerry cans Lucy has (hopefully) filled. But after dinner, provided we remember to put a pan of water on the gas to heat up whilst we’re eating, we can get cleared up pretty quickly and have a couple of hours to relax.

Sometimes one of us might decide to have a ‘pour’ (the local equivalent of a shower), in which case another pan of water has to be heated up. It’s a bathing process you get used to after a while; pouring boiling water into a bowl and mixing with cold water to achieve a reasonable temperature. Then, with the aid of a large margarine tub you can wash your hair and have a general, well, pour... It’s quite effective really, with the only attendant problem being the possibility of spiders or crickets jumping on you (see earlier blog for details).

But more often we’ll settle down to read, or watch a DVD, or listen to an episode of ‘This Sceptred Isle’ (we’re up to 1815 and the Battle of Waterloo), or even (sad people that we are) listen to the latest episode of ‘The Archers’. Sadder still, we have even been known to watch the odd episode of ‘The Weakest Link’, but don’t tell anyone!

It’s usually in the middle of a DVD that the power goes off and the DVD dies. That’s the cue for falling over the furniture in search of our solar lamp. Provided we’ve remembered to charge it we can at least read or do a Sudoku, or chat (we do talk to one another occasionally). At intervals we have to spray the lamp with Doom to annihilate the multitudes of flying insects that tend to colonise it. This results in a mini-graveyard which has to be cleared up after the power has been restored between 15 minutes and an hour later.

Bedtime is usually around 10.00 pm. A cup of tea in bed (old habits die hard) and a half-hours’ read, then the mosquito net is deployed around the bed, we turn off the light and are ready for sleep. Often we go to sleep pretty quickly, unless we’ve used the mozzie-net to trap a mosquito inside to share the night with us. It’s extraordinary the way they manage to discover where your ear is in the dark. They sound like light aircraft when they get that close. Then, it’s on with the head torch to hunt down the little beast, but they usually manage to hide very effectively. And so to sleep – until the water decides to return and we are woken by the sound of a mini-Niagara from the cistern in the roof as it fills up.

One other addition to the Kuluva day and night experience is a bell that has recently (yesterday) been installed in the Chapel clock tower. There’s no clock as such, but every quarter of an hour the bell strikes. Once at a quarter past, twice at half past, three times at a quarter to, then four times on the hour followed by the number of strokes to mark which hour it is. At midnight that’s sixteen strokes of the bell. This new arrival which so wonderfully and accurately marks the passing of time is the gift of a German expatriate – I doubt that he can hear it from his house, and in any case he’ll soon be going back to Germany. I don’t know if the Africans appreciate it, but for myself I may indulge in a little vandalism in due course.