Africa

 Kenya I met Dr Tom Catena in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains — the site of an African war and famine few have even heard about — in a hospital overflowing with children. I saw bombs had ripped away their arms, flying shrapnel had taken out a baby’s eye, anti-personnel mines had shredded legs to jagged bone and ribbons of gangrenous flesh, infants suffering kwashiorkor and the other horrors of malnutrition. Inspired by St Francis of Assisi, ‘Doctor Tom’ has worked almost every day, all day, since he arrived as the only surgeon for the Catholic hospital in Nuba nine years ago. I asked him: ‘Why do you stay?’ He replied: ‘There’s no

After he left the Blues and Royals in 1981, the young Tristan Voorspuy drove a motorbike from London to Cape Town. Thus began his love of Africa. He also learnt to fly, and arranged to travel alone to Kenya from England in a single-engine aeroplane, using only a schoolboy atlas. Luckily, his brother Morvern, a professional pilot, heard of this plan and prevented it. But Tristan reached Kenya by other means, and became a Kenyan citizen. For 30 years, he was a leading conservationist there and set up and ran the accurately named firm Offbeat Safaris, which allows guests to ride among the great beasts of Africa. Recently, armed hordes

After he left the Blues and Royals in 1981, the young Tristan Voorspuy drove a motorbike from London to Cape Town. Thus began his love of Africa. He also learnt to fly, and arranged to travel alone to Kenya from England in a single-engine aeroplane, using only a schoolboy atlas. Luckily, his brother Morvern, a professional pilot, heard of this plan and prevented it. But Tristan reached Kenya by other means, and became a Kenyan citizen. For 30 years, he was a leading conservationist there and set up and ran the accurately named firm Offbeat Safaris, which allows guests to ride among the great beasts of Africa. Recently, armed hordes

 Laikipia plateau, Kenya My great-grandpa Ernest Wise was an engineer who sailed to South Africa towards the end of the 19th century to build Cecil Rhodes’s Cape-to-Cairo railway. Although that project never took off, he decided to stay on in the continent — and he prospered. A cousin recently sent us a photograph of Ernest and his six children, taken in the 1890s at his home in Pretoria. Ernest wears a humorous expression and he looks as if he is about to speak to me, still in Africa 130 years later. I imagine him saying, ‘What, my boy — still there?’ The Wise family image is among the photographs and

‘If life is a race, I feel that I’m not even at the starting line,’ I said to the doctor in French. (I’d composed, polished and rehearsed the sentence in the waiting room beforehand.) She was a sexy piece in her early fifties with a husky voice. She listened to my halting effort to describe my depression with a smile playing lightly over her scarlet lips as though I were relating an amusing anecdote with a witty punchline lurking just around the corner. I further explained in French that I had been properly but briefly depressed once before, about 15 years ago. Here my tenses let me down badly, and

We had my parents-in-law Gerry and Jean to stay with us on the farm over Christmas and being in a remote place in Africa, things often go wrong. A few days into the festivities the solar-powered electricity broke down and so did the solar water-heater. As we sat in darkness, after cold showers, Gerry said, ‘It reminds me of Ronnie and Doreen.’ In 1968, Gerry said, he was working for Kellogg’s, selling cornflakes all over the British Isles, Jean was raising two children and they lived in a semi in Billingshurst. Ronnie next door used to fiddle the electric meter. He offered, ‘Shall I do yours, Gerry?’ ‘No thank you,

I’m sitting by the pool in a lush Moroccan garden playing chess with Nigel Short, and I feel like an amateur boxer who’s stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson. This is the man who took on World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov. He could destroy me in an instant. Actually, there’s no need. In a few moves I’ve destroyed myself. After this chess weekend at Ezzahra, a chic retreat in Marrakech, I’d hoped to show Britain’s greatest grandmaster how much I’ve learnt. Instead, I end up playing like a complete idiot. Thankfully Nigel is a perfect gent, accepting my abject resignation with good grace, and my humiliation is soon forgotten

A ticket to paradise comes very cheap in Gambia — as long as you’re headed in the right direction. Thomas Cook charges just £230 for the six-hour flight from Gatwick to West Africa, and in the cheaper hotels along the cream-white palm beaches, a week’s stay costs even less. For the 100,000 Europeans who flock here each year — half of them Brits — it’s a much loved, if slightly tatty, African Benidorm, where donkeys can be found not in the souvenir shops but grazing rubbish on the streets outside. For the equally large numbers of Gambians seeking desperately to go the other way, however, the ticket is far pricier.

 Aero Club of East Africa   The world looked so clean and untroubled during the flight in Bob’s light aircraft to George’s memorial at the Aero Club of East Africa. It was a relief to get away from the farm for a few hours. On 27 October a mob of 300 Samburu warriors armed with spears and knives cut down our boundary fences and invaded with 10,000 cattle. Since then they’ve hurled javelins and rocks at us, flattened pastures to dust, destroyed 15 kilometres of fencing, smashed windows, demolished huts, robbed what they could, cut water pipes, broken machinery and threatened our staff with murder until half of them ran

Kenya A woman’s bottom cheered me up recently. The lady was walking ahead of me in a Kenya street and she was wearing a kanga — a local garment worn like a bath towel and printed with colourful geometric designs. A kanga is traditionally emblazoned with a Swahili proverb or scrap of esoteric advice, making it a bit like a wearable fortune cookie. This one had written neatly across it: Huwezi kula n’gombe mzima halafu ukasema mkia umekushinda — which roughly means, ‘Don’t eat a whole cow and then say you’re defeated by the tail…’ Persevere! Never give up! That was the message I took home to the farm. I

‘We have fallen upon evil times, politics is corrupt and the social fabric is fraying.’ Who said that? Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders? Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen? It’s difficult to keep track. They sound so alike, the populists of the left and the right. Everything is awful, so bring on the scapegoats and the knights on white horses. Pessimism resonates. A YouGov poll found that just 5 per cent of Britons think that the world, all things considered, is getting better. You would think that the chronically cheerful Americans might be more optimistic — well, yes, 6 per cent of them think that the world is improving. More