Blantyre

Nigh is 2007.

Sweaty day today, cycling the 16km to the Pottery (and back again), where after brief instruction I managed to 'throw' some bowls. I tried to make some fancy shapes but they just turned into either a) splatters on the walls or b) bowls, all different sizes but the very same shape. Tomorrow I shall heave my lardy frame and unwieldy bicycle back there to paint these creations, with naif representations of crocodiles/fishes etc. Someone back home will be the lucky recipient of a beautiful piece, attractively moronic, and yet deep enough to stop milk falling out onto the table.

Christmas came, and it went. I dstracted mself from the lak of turkey to gobble by squeezing myself into a tiny minibus (despite it already being full) and sat in it for four hours, reading my book and pretending that my buttocks did not ache, until it delivered us all (chicken included) to Blantyre, the town of my childhood. It didn't look anything like my memories, and what was there seemed to have moved around in a very disjointed fashion. The 'Hong Kong' restaurant, for years one of the few places that served edible food, and whose napkins were always damp and very worn, was still there, as was St Paul's Cathedral (a bit smaller than the London one. I still knew the way back to our old house (left 14 years ago)or at east tought I did - the 'shortct' I arrogantly decided to take leading me totallly astray. Nowhere could I find the broad street, lined with tall airy jacaranda trees,that we used to live on, until suddenly I realised the narrow, pockmarked road I was bouncing alng was it (Mahatma Ghandi Drive), and the tiny dirt road by that shabby drain was my old turning... and there it was. Our old home, the place where I played as a child, the garden in which I had many adventures - each tree was still there, my parents rockeries and raised flower beds, built so carefully out of brick were still flourishing. The house looked a bit faded but really just the same. The oddest thing was seeingthings I had no clear memory of, that were strangeyet familiar, nd that evoked so many memories, tiny things like seeing flying termites for the first time, making a tiny bow and arrow out of bamboo skewers to shot giant moths (don't worry I never hit any), burning my radio controlled car (the love of my life, aged 12) aroud and around for hours - nothing terribly exciting i guess, but it was there, soid and real, and no longer a past so distant that it felt imagined. It was quite overwhelming. Then I pedalled off to see the old primary school... won't bore you any further but it did make me cry, not least because I realised what a happy childhood I had had, and how good that place was, full of creativity and fun. It still smells of pig, the responsible beast wallowing in mud in the school farm - I think it probably a different one now, but seems to use the same eau de toilette as his predecessors.

Malawi time nearly done now... two weeks to go. Pedalling back through the muggy dusk air, the sun throwing my cycling shadow wide across the road, as I received countless greetings from folk going about their business as I passed by, I felt that I should try to soak up the experience in my memory (to be used later in defence against the cold or the drudgery of commuting when ack in London) - the low light and the pinking high clouds, the dark green of the trees, the way the reddish bowrn earth of the fields, lyng between livid green shoots of maize, seemed to extend sideways, upward, to form the brown houses topped wit ragged thatch, where children sit on the porch, singing songs. The road would endlessly divide this world in front of me, and trucks piled high with goods and people would roar by, cycle-taxis, carrying women riding side-saddle clutching goods and/or babies would drift past me (slightly embrrassing seeing as i was propelling only my own weight), and the people on their way home or to the local market to hang out or have a beer always by the roadside, ready to turn hteir heads and stare a me and maybe offer a greeting (with varying degrees of sincerity). By the time I was back in Nkhotakota the sheet of cloud above was lit red and orange, and Iwas ready for a cold shower and a colder beer.