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Claire came face to face with a leopard last night. She was walking between our office, a thatched mud hut at the bottom of the garden, and the house. It’s a distance of only about 30 paces, but it can get dark out there. Instinct kicked in before she even glimpsed the predator and she froze. Then she saw it. He was purring in the way that leopards do, a noise like sawing, and then it jumped over the garden wall. When Claire called out I was in the house with the children watching The Sound of Music. Something about the tone of her voice made me load up the shotgun and head out, but by the time I went out the leopard had vanished. I escorted Claire back and gave her a glass of South African plonk to calm her down. ‘That was scary,’ she said. ‘Nonsense,’ I replied. ‘How many people have an encounter with a leopard on their way home from the office?’

My sense that we are living in an idyll, and one full of excitement, is that much more acute because I am dreading a trip to London next month. Claire says I need to get out of Africa occasionally, otherwise I’ll go ‘bush’. But I personally wish to be like the late Terence Adamson – an old cowboy with a jaw that had been ripped apart by one of his brother George’s lions – who taught me how to divine for water when I was a child. After the 1936 Kakamega gold rush, when I think Terence popped over to Uganda, I don’t believe he ever left Kenya until his death a few years ago.

As I write this I have a cold beer at my side.