The last night at the Fairview Hotel was a good one and I enjoyed my breakfast in the garden, where I noticed that birdlife in Nairobi was prolific and that there were not only several bird species but there were also large numbers of them! I did not know their names yet, apart from the ubiquitous sparrows that I knew from Uruguay. I was amazed to see birds so tame, in particular a kind of iridescent blue ones with cinnamon chests[2] that would come to my breakfast table expecting something from me! “Cheeky ones”, I thought.

The access to the Fairview Hotel.

It was light by 06:00 hours and dark by 19:00 hours so, unless you covered your ears, it was impossible not to be woken up by the early loud bird chorus. As it is customary, a cup of early morning tea is brought to your room and…

Japanese POWs in Malaya

“From May onwards, prisoners in a terrible state came in daily,” recorded a British gunner unit in Burma, “many of them armed with nothing more dangerous than bamboo spears, trembling with a mixture of malaria and humiliation.”

British soldiers in Burma

But if some proved ready to quit, others did not.  To the end, most Japanese who lost their ships at sea deliberately evaded Allied rescuers.  On the deck of HMS Saumarez, destroyer Captain Martin Power was directing rescue operations after sinking a Japanese convoy off the Nicobars, when he suddenly heard a “clang” against the ship.

Andaman and Nicobars Islands

Peering over the side, he saw a bald, heavily built Japanese man clinging to a scrambling net with one hand, while hammering the nose of a shell against the hull with the other.  Power drew his pistol, leaned over and whacked the man’s head.

The zombie fox is back, and not only has he brought back-up in the form of three equally shouty buddies, but they have been raising absolute hell in our street at night with their part-reanimated corpse, part-Velociraptor shrieking. I have seen/heard them with my own eyes/ears and, a few mornings ago, I found paw prints on our car windscreen which were much too large and too muddy to belong to cats. It seems unlikely that the dog walkers of TW8 would suddenly decide to use parked cars as an obstacle course, so I can only assume that Monsieur Renard and his comrades are to blame. 

Needless to say, this has made our street quite an unnerving place after dark. And, naturellement, it has also made Louis Catorze more desperate than ever before to defy us and go outside at The Front.

As you are aware, he can hear the…