Kenya

After two years of no rain, all colour has drained from the landscape on the farm so that by the time we boarded the bush plane to leave in the bright sun it was as if we were all snow blind. From the air the highlands were waterless and dead until we descended over Kenya’s north shore and the world went green. My late mother’s garden at the beach house swirls with bougainvillea, gardenia, frangipani and allamanda. Green ingots of baobab leaves hang wetly down over green grass and wild flowers which spill down to the high tide mark.

We walk among clouds of butterflies with lilac-breasted rollers and eagles overhead along paths crisscrossed by millipedes and ghost crabs. After dark, fox-faced fruit bats and bush babies chirp and swing about in the banyan tree until moonrise over the Indian Ocean. A lonely American Hercules roars overhead on its way to and from the Somali coast twice a day but otherwise the sounds of humans are far away, drowned out by wading birds and the spring-tide waves thundering on white sand.

It feels as if this year has been all about waiting. Waiting for rain that never comes. Waiting for the elections to be over and Kenya to stay peaceful so that we can all sleep soundly, get up early and go back to work. Waiting for probate, permits, bits of important papers to come through, for boats to come in with big pay-offs, for the resolution of quarrels and long-running dramas and sagas. Waiting in massive airport queues and listening for hours to looped messages because nobody picks up the phone. Eventually it has to rain upcountry and one day it will but I wish it would just rain now!

Since the world went mad two years ago I’ve been trying to go off grid as much as possible on the farm. Our own solar panels, our own water supply, as much of our food as we can grow. Before we came to the Coast we slaughtered a sheep and a number of fat cockerels and these, together with other rations, were sent down overland so that we would not starve if trouble followed voting day. Stock up on fuel, rice and olive oil, I said. Each day the fishermen come up the sandy path with rock cod, prawns, crabs and oysters. After a few days of this I begin to think we will never need to visit town again except to buy cheap South African wine, almond halwa from Bawaly’s in Malindi old town, plus garish Indian shirts and Swahili kangas.

On the Coast one reaches the stage when it’s difficult imagining why one should ever wear shoes again. I dream of giving it all up to just live in a pair of tattered shorts, beach combing and chewing the fat with Hassan the fisherman, with whom I am buying a sailing dhow because his sank last year. ‘We’re going to dedicate ourselves to exercise, eat incredibly well and find our chi,’ jokes my undergraduate son Rider, but yes, I say, yes! Out on the reef break hawksbill turtles swim around us while predator kingfish chase big shoals of sardines that skitter and boil through the clear blue water. Out on the horizon a Chinese trawler hoovers the sea bed while humpback whales blow fountains of water as they swim north to the island of Socotra where they give birth before migrating back to Antarctica.

I want to give it all up and become a beach bum. While doing yoga alongside my daughter, Eve (who’s doing salutes to the sun), she suddenly becomes my long-dead father, who well into his eighties used to do these same yoga moves on the veranda at dawn, looking out to sea as the sailing boats passed on their way out to the fishing grounds. I have boxing sessions with my coach named Amani, we swim at high tide and we walk along the sand at dawn and dusk. My children now have driving licences so I can ride shotgun as they drive, gripping the dashboard and exclaiming in alarm as my Dad used to do while they weave through Malindi’s traffic of Chinese motorbikes, donkey carts and loudly painted matatu buses. Rider beats me at chess these days. He’s just finished On the Road and now he’s reading War and Peace, after which he’ll tackle The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Eve is on Clive James, Natalia Ginzburg and A.A. Gill. Instead of being immersed in books, I spend my days paying bills and obsessively checking the weather forecast and news of the elections outcome.