The perils of being a Kenyan farmer’s wife

As the train pulled into Victoria my wife Claire, back home on the farm in Kenya, revealed that a buffalo was charging her. ‘Oh dear!’ she exclaimed as the phone line went dead. She called back minutes later, out of breath, to explain she had been walking our three dogs when the beast came thundering across the savannah and chased her half a mile. It later turned out that lions had injured the buffalo, which put it in a foul mood, gave it a bad limp and — thankfully — slowed it down. That was just the first drama for Claire, when she put on her gumboots and ran the ranch for me while I was away. Normally she works in the movie business, but for two months she oversaw all the daily dramas of farm life: livestock births, mongooses biting off chickens’ heads, staff visits to hospital and the planting of 350 avocado trees.

Had it caught up with her, that Cape buffalo would have flattened my spouse of 21 years. Disappointed with her speed of flight, Claire took up jogging with the dogs — a mongrel bitch called Potatoes, a collie and a labrador — in the valley, far from the horned perils of the plains. As she approached a lone thorn tree, a lioness sat up abruptly in front of her. After two decades of bush living she knew not to run, as the lioness would decide she was prey and simply eat her. So Claire nonchalantly turned around and burst into what she says was a bad rendition of Abba’s ‘Mamma Mia’. ‘I am as poor a singer as I am a runner.’ She told me that on the phone — I dared say nothing.