Small acts of kindness

I’ve never been much into religion. Those who know me may be surprised to hear, since I am tone deaf, that I was once a member of the church choir. My reasons for joining though were purely mercenary. Firstly, I knew that they passed notes in the back of the hymn books during the sermon, secondly, they sneakily ate Polo mints throughout the service and finally, you got paid a pound to sing (or mime along) at a wedding on a Sunday. I am, however, a firm believer in passing on random acts of kindness.

Kampala is still a cash based society and consequently my friends and I often find ourselves caught out. There is rarely a moment when I am not either owed money or in debt to somebody else.

This weekend was no exception. I wanted to have some money to go to the Christmas Bazaar to buy presents for folks at home and also needed a bit of shopping.  Typically, whenever you need money it is hard to come by. Every ATM I tried was either completely down due to the power cut or had a network failure. I was not impressed. However, a couple of things put a smile on my face that day.

•   I used my entire cash reserves and a little more on presents for myself and friends on the awava stall. I emptied my wallet and was given a hefty discount for being a loyal, returning customer.

•   When I went to saloon (as they say here) for my wash and blow dry before the Scottish Ball (precautionary booking in case there was a power cut) I asked if I could pay by card. There was afterall, a big sticker saying Visa on the counter. When I was told that it wasn’t working I was about to skulk home, contemplating what I could do with my post bike ride hair in twenty minutes without the aid of a hairdryer. I was delighted to hear the words ‘you can pay us when you have some money’.

Call it karma or whatever you will, but I like it.

Where is my prince?

I lost a shoe at the St Andrew's Ball last night; prince-like men of Kampala may apply below. Luckily it was not one of my lovely sparkly heels that I left behind, but one of the flats I brought with me for dancing. So far nobody has knocked at my door with the missing footwear. I am sure my prince is simply lost (eh sebo, you are lost!), fallen down a pothole or unable to locate me since my address lacks both a street name and plot number!

Twas a fun and slightly old-fashioned affair, with a band flown in all the way from Bonnie Scotland, our resident bagpiper and a toasting to the (veggie in my case) haggis. The ladies had a dance card and had to book dances with different partners throughout the evening. After a couple of glasses of bubbly and a few swigs of malt whisky from the passing quiach (I thought it was a wassail cup, but have it on good authority that the shared silver bowl of whisky was in fact a quiach), we 'Split the Willow', did a 'Postie's Jig' and a 'Round Wheel of Eight'. Fortunately, the evening was not interrupted by the police trying to arrest the 'Progressive Gay Gordons' though!

The experts show us how it's done with the demo dance!

Those of you who have been following my frequent rants about not being able to cook will be relieved to know that I have FINALLY been provided with a gas bottle!

I no longer have to choose between running errands and cooking or taking exercise and cooking!

I can buy fresh food again in the knowledge that it will not go off before I have chance to cook it!

Hip hip hooray! Thought it deserved a post of its own!

Acronyms and Acrostics ...

Where-ever you are in Uganda, you are never more than six feet away from a sign with an acronym. Many are associated with the multitudinous NGOs (oops - there's one already ...) or the various UN agencies.

When we climbed Kilimanjaro, we had special T-shirts printed with our school name on the back. It wasn't long before a confused Tanzanian guide asked us why we had the word 'knife' in Swahili printed on our shirts - oops! I know Swahili isn't widely spoken in Uganda, but you'd have thought that somebody would have spotted that one! I recently heard about an organisation in the North of Uganda called 'ADRA' . Unfortunately, they didn't do their research and it was later discovered that this literally translates as 'fuck' in the local Karamajong language! Just a little bit embarrassing then!

I was wondering what UMEME stands for, so I wrote a little acrostic ....

Useless

Muppets

Eternally

Messing-up

Electricity supply

Any other ideas?

I wanna be a Stick Chick!

A weekend watching polo? Why not? And this time I mean REAL polo, on ponies, not Boda Polo .

After a short while I became an expert and was talking the lingo. Here is a brief summary:

1. A match is comprised of several chukkas, or periods of play of 7 1/2 minutes. Any longer would be exhausting for the ponies.
2. A team normally consists of 4 players, or 3 on a smaller pitch.
3. Each team must have at least one player named Tristan. If no Tristans are available, then a Quentin, Oliver or Sebastian will suffice.
4. The audience may help by divot stomping during the intervals - this involves turning the chunks of grass that flew out during play back into the pitch.
5. Audience members must drink at least 1 glass of Pimm's!
6. Date a player and you can become a 'Stick Chick'!

Pimm's o'clock? Again!

Best dressed?

How do you get to be a chick stick?

Let's hope Customs allow me back into the North of England in December after all these posh pursuits!!

The Umeme Regime

Open any celebrity magazine and you are guaranteed to find some kind of special diet or other - Raw Food, Blood Type, Detox, Atkins and many more. For the past few months I have been following the Umeme Diet. I suspect that a few of my friends have been doing the same thing. Let me tell you about it. Principally, there are two kinds of days, power and non-power, which usually alternate. Occasionally, I am rewarded by two power days in a row, but that should never be taken for granted. Here are a few examples of some of the types of food you may eat on each of the days.

Power Days
For breakfast, you can make smoothies, have a cup of tea or even a slice of toast
For dinner, choose any hot food you desire (and can find in the shops in Kampala) - pasta dishes, soup, roasted veggies ... the list is endless
Quick snacks may include beans on toast or eggs to your liking
Hot beverages
Baking cakes, scones or desserts

Non Power Days
Breakfast is limited to cereal with slightly warm UHT milk, fruit, water or fruit juice, bread if it hasn't gone stale
Unlimited amounts of fruit
Dinner choices include salad, cereal (as per breakfast), sandwiches, or any leftovers if you were smart enough to cook a lot on a power day

Non Power days are testing and often result in going out for dinner or ordering in. Luckily ordering in is not such a temptation, since the lack of street names makes it particularly difficult for any delivery services to actually find me.

I'm living in the hope that there is an end in sight to this horrible diet, if not by non power days being eradicated, at least by the addition of a gas cylinder. I'm not holding my breath though ...

Hell is ...

Remember, remember, the fifth of November …

If I were in the UK, I would have spent this evening wrapped up in scarves and gloves, watching fireworks and crowding around a bonfire.

As no such thing exists in Kampala, I instead headed to the am-dram performance of ‘No Exit’ by Jean Paul Sartre.

Sixty years ago or so, Sartre exclaimed that ‘hell is other people’. For the past decade or so, reality shows such as ‘Big Brother’ have confirmed that. In some senses, Hell is a better place than Kampala, since there is a line about the lights never going out, because they have all the electricity they want!

After the performance we sat around and discussed whom we would least like to be stuck in a lift.  It didn’t take us long to decide that, given we were talking about all eternity; even your best friends would drive you to distraction. Trapped on my own for all eternity, I would drive myself mental too! Writers such as Sartre, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus, to name a few, have been hailed as being great thinkers, philosophers and intellectuals, regaled for their exploration of the human condition. I don’t think so. Here’s what I think really happened:

One rainy Sunday afternoon, in the dingiest corner of a shabby café on the Left Bank of Paris, Sartre, Beckett, Camus and their cronies gathered for their usual antics. Endless Gauloises were smoked, whilst they tried to impress the waitress by knocking back shots of Absinthe. Several rounds later, real conversation was getting a little tricky, so Jean-Paul (the reputation of being a brooding intellectual misery-guts is totally unfounded) initiated a little drinking game. Previous endeavours include ‘Polovember’ in which participants must wear the same polo neck sweater and oversized coat for the entire month of November. This time, the game was about with whom they would least like to be trapped in a lift. Most folks would have the chat, go home, have a cup of tea, and think no more of it. Not them. They decided to write plays to demonstrate the point. Sartre produced ‘No Exit’, whilst Beckett trumped him by producing not one, but two plays about being trapped with a grumpy old grouch for eternity, hence ‘Endgame’ and “Waiting for Godot’. Conveniently enough, for ones who spent their lives in a red wine and cigarette smoke haze, their plays didn’t really require much of a set or many props, save the odd pair of old boots, a couple of dustbins or a door.

If you would like to write an existentialist play of your own, follow my simple formula.

Characters: Keep it simple – two main protagonists, preferably old, with a few cameo visitors

Plot: Don’t bother. Stop being so conventional, will you? OK, if you insist, two characters bicker and occasionally a visitor will pass by to provoke and antagonise them further

Set and props: Whatever you have lying around – a broken clock will have the critics chirping on about the symbolism of eternity and despair for a while.

Now if you excuse me, I’m off to write an existential play of my own, which will explore human will, subversion, choices and the conformity of society. Once again it’s based on a drinking game and is called ‘Shag, Marry, Shove’!