And you want to bang your head against walls (yes: multiple) and you know that both the head banging and the annoyance is pointless - the computer is still going to say no. Wanting to shout at the person on the other end of the phone, who doesn't understand that you live in Malawi, doesn't even know that Malawi is a country (maybe she imagines it to be a town on the Big Island of Hawaii?!), is pointless. Wanting to explain that every time she puts me on hold because she can't answer my questions (because I live in Malawi and my questions seem so outlandish) it is costing me the equivalent of an hour of her salary, is pointless. So despite it being so pointless, I still think I am allowed to

The weather was pleasantly cool but sunny when I set off this morning and nothing too scary to put the dogs off. I thought I would do a shorter version of yesterday's run as I wanted to record the location of the "big rocks" so off we went with my watch now working: we went up the road to join road number 3, then left towards Bonwell's field and still further until the road peters out. The views are amazing as you walk/run along here as you walk west and are looking down into the Shire Valley. Once at the end of the road, there is a T junction, right goes up to the rocks and the mysterious beyond ( I have never followed it to the end) and left takes you back down in to the cultivated area, s

It is a thing, I am sure it is. How many of you have had an electronic item that all of a sudden stops working as it should do? Yup - I knew it! It happens more often than we think and it is intensely annoying. The bodies of our dead electronics feed the capitalist beast: grrrrrrrrr!!! And we ask for more: GRRRRRRRRRRR!!! So, in my case, I didn't initially suspect suicide, rather I thought that my lovely mother (whom I had lent my sports watch to), had somehow fiddled with it (fiddling with things runs in the family, the outcomes of the fiddling are often suspicious :/), and post fiddling, the watch no longer saved my run history, so I did some fiddling too, to no avail. I soon realised that

Well actually...Tom didn't think he saw, he positively saw.... a leopard. Yep, a spotted yellow and black job, lounging on a rock, casually looking back at Tom. It didn't stick around though and eventually skulked off to find a more remote and peaceful spot to lie in where no rogue humans (and dogs) were going to disturb it. One of our watchmen had actually told us a few months ago that he had seen a very large tiger walk into the property... we asked whether he might mean a "kambuku" (chichewa word for leopard I believe) and he agreed, that yes, it was indeed a kambuku. We had seen droppings that we were pretty sure were leopard but there is nothing quite like seeing one in the flesh! And a

It is presently 2pm, it is 15C. This morning the temperature struggled to top 10C - this is October, what the locals call "suicide month" as  it gets so hot and sweaty... I am wearing 4 layers of clothes and my body isn't even close to thinking about sweating, I am even considering a fifth layer, or better still: I am going to bury myself inside my duvet!