When Brexiter meets Catalexiter

After the hostel breakfast, I stood on the tropical grass lawn smoking the first fag of the day and mulled things over. For the past three days I had been pedalling my electric power-assisted bike up and down Rwanda’s green hills. I was bruised from falls, physically and mentally tired, and prone, as I always am in Africa, to mood swings.

Today I was not depressed exactly but overwhelmed with pessimism. Now, after breakfast, for example, the conviction struck me that before my mother died I thought I knew everything, and since her death I’ve realised that I don’t know anything. Lying on the grass a few yards away was a football. I walked up and sliced it with the outside-edge of my foot in a satisfying curve into the fauvist shrubbery.

The rest of the peloton had risen early to visit the highland mountain gorillas. The Virunga national-park permit has recently doubled in price and the Slow Cyclist adventure travel company was quite reasonably unwilling to stump up $1,500 for the travel journalist appendage to go too, and I couldn’t afford to pay for one myself. They kindly offered golden monkeys or riverine birds as alternatives, but frankly a quiet day spent licking my wounds and recruiting my strength by a wood fire in a deserted hostel lounge felt to me like hitting the jackpot. In any case I’d witnessed and been quickly bored by the gorillas’ ruminative inanition years before, in Congo.

Alberto the hostel owner was not about yet. Typical of remoter backpackers’ hostels, his was frequented by local intellectuals. Last night four of them, plus Alberto, were ranged along the window seat debating passionately in Italian. What about I don’t know. My lower middle-class inferiority complex presumed an acutely intelligent cut and thrust in dispute of some arcane point of political philosophy.