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.