When you look back, it’s like looking into the sun. I squint, to focus better.
Or a dream: it’s like trying to reflect on pieces of a dream, the sequential elements that slotted into place jigsaw-style to form a picture of coherent shape and sense. Already, though, I don’t recall exactly which bit goes where, what happened when, who said what, who laughed hardest?
That’s the thing about holidays: they pass in a blur. A car going too fast so that the view slips past my window, a smear of colour, fingers through paint.
It’s the same every year. Every year since my children were grown and flown and a precious two weeks collected each year to spend at home, en famille.
The anticipation is heady and I am drunk on plans, my head spins with flight arrivals and taxi schedules and who’s coming when and at what ungodly hour of the morning. And virtual baskets are stuffed full of stocking fillers and my search engine history bears testimony to my gift selection as I look for precisely which item would best suit a person’s wish-list.
I am giddy with the wanting and the waiting and the counting down of days.
Don’t wish your time away, I hear my mother’s voice in my ear. She used to say that to me when I was little and Christmas couldn’t come fast enough.
The quicker it comes, she warned, the quicker it will be over.
I bat the warning away again.
And then they are here, my children, one by one, arriving in taxis at 2am and I whisper hellos so that I don’t wake the whole household up.
And breakfasts are long and leisurely and lunch is three hours later and we all pat our girths at tea time and laugh at how plump we’ll get and then we look forward to supper.
And fourteen fat days are fed with a frenzy of looking forward and looking forward so that there’s nothing left and no need to look back. Our hunger is sated.
My hunger is sated. The lean hunger of a mother who doesn’t see her children for months and months and months on end, who knows that the swim of a face into a screen is never, ever going to be the same as the holding of that face between the palms of my hands, the rest of that head against my shoulder, my arms raised to encircle the necks of the young people who are far taller than I.
Mother Hunger.
And I am home now and they are grown and flown and back to work and there is no trace they were ever here except for the photos on my phone. The swim of a face into a screen.
When I brought the binoculars to my face and the elephants swam into near view, I imagined I could hear the sounds of slaking a thirst, a firehose gush, a filling of bucket-empty-bellies. The smaller of the herd – and half were young – marked the depth of the dam; they waded out and used their trunks as snorkels, disappearing clean beneath the surface.
But when I lowered the glasses to my lap, the sound was silenced as the view filled my vision.
The valley spills away beneath me, tips towards the savannah which is scorched by drought; I can see the ribbon trails of the tread of game. Sometimes they fray with dust behind the weary walk of a herd of zebra, a trio of eland who hang their heads and whose haunches are growing sharp.
The blur of hills that cup this valley, like a hand to an ear, funnel the sounds, an amphitheatre cast to amplify acoustics. I hear birds and the boil of cicadas whose buzz simmers through the bush.
Later, when the day tips to evening in the galloping way it does in Africa so that you must locate a torch earlier than you think for you’ll need it; when that curtain drops, there is just a blackness punctuated by moth-holes of brightness punctured by a trillion stars. If only cloud would extinguish their light, you think. If only there could be rain.
The near grunt of a lion makes me jump. Later it will be joined in argument by the the rest of the pride so that I know they are fighting over the best place at a kill. Soon stereo sound is all around and will roar into my sleep and prey on my dreams and I will wake thankful that my tent is firmly secured and not flapping open to the black (and big cats) as I dozed.
And in the morning, in the valley, where the water is a looking glass to the sky, there will be a fresh litter of bones picked bright white and clean. The lions are done with whatever remains of a buffalo. And the vultures almost are.
And as we drive home, threading our way through the bush on ochre-roads whose edges are laced with thorn frilled in bridal white I think that in this secret, still place, where the shrill sound of the ether can’t penetrate, I think that in that brief silence I could collect thoughts?
We’ll go across the vlei and up to the reservoir and down the hill where they’re harvesting avocado so that Jip can pinch one for a snack.
Jip begins nudging me out from lunchtime onwards. Tails me around the house. To my office, the kitchen, the loo. Watches hopefully for signs of shoes instead of slippers which I am forced to wear at this time of the year – in the south – for the chilly pinch of cement floors.
Kilimanjaro looms into view as I walk up the small bluff behind the house. This is the best view of her. Today, this evening, when the air is cut glass clear, she seems taller. Stretching on tiptoes up into the blue. Her southern side is swept with snow; that’s where the nipping wind is coming from. I can see every crevice in her side. I imagine, if I strain hard enough, I might even see climbers bent over poles facing into a challenging ascent.
A huge field of stubble is spread before me, bordered to one side by an avenue of trees. Sometimes, when I walk beneath them, the boughs creak like old knees and I pick up my pace in case a branch comes down. Hay was cut here not long ago. Before that I liked to watch the sun rise over it, the first bright fingerlings of light tickled their way over Kilimanjaro’s summit and spun the grass to gold like the Brother Grimms’ Rumpelstiltskin.
The other morning I saw two zebra here, grazing. They stood still as statues and stared at me as I stared back at them and then with a haughty flick of maned heads and derisive snort, they turned their tails and trotted off, their fat bottoms – which always makes me think of Brian May’s words – undulating voluptuous across the field.
I listen to stories as I walk. Just one earbud in. Circumspect, straining for a crashing through bushes. Buffalo. I often see their droppings here. Ominous splats which dry as pats and flat as plates. I could pick one up and hurl it like a frisbee then. Now I pick my way cautiously. Head up. Watching. Tipped for the slightest sound.
I listen to Annie Dillard On Writing and her words are like a song, so deftly drawn, each syllable perfectly placed: a musical score. Or Didion in Redgrave’s tones describing her Year of Magical Thinking. My best friend’s husband died. I need to understand grief again to understand hers. My own is a distant memory.
I ask mum, ‘What can I say, to comfort her?”
Mum looks devastated at the best friend’s loss. She knew her as intimately as one of her own once. Not anymore.
‘What can one say?’ She says with such touching sadness I almost weep.
She does not remember she lost her own husband suddenly too.
Didion helps to remind me of the nearness of death and the morphing shape of grief.
Kilimanjaro follows my route. Like an eye in the sky. Mona Lisa’s gaze; I am held within her sights all the way. I feel anchored with this mountain in my own. I was born just the other side of it. When I witness her on my horizons I know I am Home.
Meru glares at us from across the reservoir. The sun burnishes the water bronze. On cool days, when the clouds crowd the sky and sieve drizzle to my skin, the water looks steely and bruised, as if emerged from a recent fight. Some days I can barely see Meru through the cloud or the haze or – especially – the dust which rises in the valley on the hooves of a million Masai cattle. But today she is crystal cut, a wisp of cloud about her middle. Like a tutu. A tutu pulled too wide and too short for her girth. I cannot tell if she looks magnificent today. Or ridiculous: like a stout ballerina.
My breath has quickened from my climb and I gather it here, surveying the spill of the hills below me. There is an urban sprawl down there, corrugated iron roofs wink malevolently. But there is no sound. Just the wind. And – occasionally, especially early in the morning, the throaty rattle of colobus monkeys. I love their call. I always stop to eavesdrop on their chatter.
I walk fast downhill and turn to catch Kilimanjaro watching me. It’s as if she moves as I do so that she is always just there, just over my shoulder. I walk through rows and rows of avocado trees which are strung with a lacy veil of flowers. More than a million to each tree, to tempt the bees in. Eve and her apple, I think. Most will fall. Like Eve. The rest will end up as hipster breakfast. The odd one a snack for Jip.
At the bottom of the hill I turn right and walk beneath thick shade. I have seen huge white tailed mongoose here. Jip too. If she sees them first, before she can escape my clutches, she charges after them. She was stung here. I did not know by what but her distress was instant and evident and I feared at first that maybe it was a quicksilver snake. I watched her carefully for the rest of the walk. A bee, I concluded. Just a bee.
Sometimes I listen to my favourite essayists – David Sedaris, or writers at the Dublin Review as I walk and hope some of their literary magic will percolate into my own language, as if by osmosis. My best words come to me as I walk and have mostly vanished by the time I get home. Unless I capture them quickly in a voice note to self.
I turn and begin to plod back up the hill and the temperature has dropped, the wind at my back nudges me along in gently encouraging gusts. Even Jip is beginning to lag. I keep losing her to the avenues of avos. She knows we’re on the homeward run and time to find exactly the right piece of fruit is running out. Jackal live here. I have found their den dug into a culvert. I have looked down into the startled eyes of a pup. Jip has chased their parents and I have roared her to heel until I am blue in the face. She come back, outrun, outdone, tongue lolling and pink and I fancy I see a naughty smile about her face.
The light is softening and distilled whiskey gold. In the west, at Meru’s feet the sun is sinking fast, a giant tangerine tipping off the edge of the world but making a holy show of its rolling exit, streaking the sky pink and lilac and orange.
This is where Africa sprawls carelessly; as if there is still so much wild space, she can afford to throw herself with abandon from horizon to horizon. She fills my lens, the tip and spill of her, hills and valleys and a scrambling blur of sage bush threaded with the red ribbon of a road.
My home now is to the west, the other side of Kilimanjaro – it’s as if I am looking at the mountain the wrong way around. But the home where I grew up is just north of here, close enough for a day out when I was little. And sometimes we did just that.
But more often we packed a coolbox and a bag and we came here, to where I am now, the same camp, almost unchanged except for big box mozzie nets – to replace the tight little tuck around your bed tent type I grew up with. And the kitchens – now I must suffice with a tiny galley and a two ring burner where once we had the use of the now locked outside kitchens complete with Dover stove.
Whenever I come here I feel nostalgia tug at my heart and memories overflow. The cottages bear a reassuring pared back austerity, just like when I was little (those nets aside) so that I can briefly imagine nothing has changed. I sit and look at a view dad would have watched, binoculars to hand, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth dropping ash. Mum fed us a supper of Rice Crispies as the western sky pinked and pencilled my mountain’s profile blacker. I open my beer now and raise a silent toast to dad. Is he here? Do I drink amongst ghosts?
When I go home mum will not understand where I have been.
Tsavo, I will say.
Tsavo – whose name is synonymous with big tuskers and Finch Hatton’s affair with Karen Blixen. Tsavo where man-eating lions terrorised the labour building the railway line, the one that ran through the farm I grew up on just north of here. They were particularly ferocious, those lions, on exactly our bit of line, picking off the haughty Englishman who’d been dispatched to dispatch them. So that forever we could refer to our man-eating lions even if they came decades before we did. Once, game driving in this park, not far from where I sit now, we came upon a lioness on an anthill keening.
“Why is she making that noise, Dad?” I wanted to know.
Perhaps she has lost her cubs, said Dad.
The lioness fixed an amber stare upon my little brother sitting on mum’s knee, wearing a lion-cub coloured sweater.
“Perhaps she thinks Robert is her baby,” said Dad.
“Perhaps she might eat him,” I suggested gleefully. And mum spun round to give me a stern look.
Mum will say, when I relate my Tsavo stories, ‘The name sounds familiar’.
But she will not remember dad here. Or the spare little cottages and the flocks of greedy, beady eyed superb starlings who hopped – still hop – about the verandah for crumbs, or the patient vigil I embarked on aged five to feed a squirrel with my hands and which I finally succeeded in doing, many patient, sitting-still hours later – an encounter dad caught on Cine so that forever afterwards I could watch myself, gappy toothed with pig tails, still as a statue, a smile splitting my face as finally that tiny animal took a corner of bread from my small fingers. I could watch it all the way to the end and then watch the blister and scorch of it as the film skittered in the reel and stained the white wall sepia and black.
I try it this time, a steady hand held out to a squirrel and she inches forward and rises to take the slice of banana I hold out to her. Either the squirrels are tamer or I have learnt to sit still (“See that, Dad?” I want to smile).
I want to take the picture home, show Mum, remind her of the last time. But she will look blankly at me and shake her head.
No. I do not remember.
And I think: that’s what has happened to this memory for mum. It’s scorched to white-nothingness.
I count the number of houses I’ve lived in. I start: two at Kima; two in Naivasha and then later, much later, a young girl in London … Elizabeth Close; Upper Brooke Street; Finlay Street (seven in the end, in 3 years). I partied too hard in some, spent too much in most and had my heart broken in one.
And since I’ve been married – how many since I’ve been married? I run out of fingers. Fifteen. Sixteen. Nineteen? And almost half of those in six years.
House.
Home.
Even onomatopoeically they are different. The words. House speaks to me of straight lines and sharp corners, of bricks and mortar. Of functionality.
Home is entirely different; I can sink into it. Snug. It fits. Home speaks to me of belonging.
I lived in a House in Lusaka. Ant knew it was the wrong one when he saw my face. Newly arrived from the airport, I didn’t mean to look crestfallen. I certainly didn’t mean to cry. I knew how hard all of this had been for him: change and separation and new jobs and finding a home for us both in my necessary absence: he woking in one country, me in another.
‘I can’t live here, Ant’, I said.
All glass and chrome and drawers that slid shut silently, doors that closed with polite little clicks. No draughty corridors that made every portal slam when the wind got up so I knew a storm was on its way.
It was a beautifully built house.
I tried to make it home for the briefest six weeks.
Until I found something that fit our shape better: a little dog-eared, mostly badly planned, plenty of slamming doors and sticky drawers but a garden that spilled chaotically and a kitchen that looked out onto it so that sunshine poured in.
I have an urgency to nest as soon as I arrive somewhere new. To put down little roots that might worm their way deeper and ground me even when everything else feels upended. As it often did in those six years. I have arrived in new places long in advance of containers full of furniture with two dogs, a cat, (twenty quails once, cheeping and crapping anxiously in a box) and always, always dozens of framed photographs. So that I can populate my space with the people that make me feel anchored.
I have stood with Ant in derelict houses and said, ‘this will do’. And then we relish the resurrection of what was once somebody else’s home and I wonder about them then as I run my hand down aged wood or unearth a garden planted with such love so long ago which has been swallowed by a scramble of hungry weeds. Did they love it here too, I wonder? Raise families here? Fight, love, laugh? Did they sit in the garden – which spot in the garden? – and watch clouds bump up against Kilimanjaro’s crown as mum does now, remarking every few minutes on how fast they move or change shape?
There is something necessary, of course, in renovating a house as home. But some I have rebuilt have not lasted. I look miserably upon a tangle of bush where a beautiful home once stood, reduced now as rubble and dust and a stubborn foundation. I only know it was mine for the flare of a bougainvillea I planted.
Who planted the avenue of Bird of Paradise in the home I love now? Great clumps of them down the drive that have burgeoned over the decades so that I could greedily pull them up and transplant them.
There is generosity in planting a garden and belief that something at least will last: no matter what happens to the house, those little bulbs, those determined, resistant roots, will spawn year after year after year; you will always leave something for the next person if you plant a garden I have found …
I wonder why this happens. This deep, sweet, settling peace that descends when my children begin to fill my home up. Two are here. The third arrives in a week and then we are full fat five for the first time in two years.
It is a physical, visceral thing: I can feel the pace of my pulse begin to slow, am aware some invisible weight is beginning to shift from my chest. The anxiety that lurks when they are far away is dissipating. There is a quiet warmth blooming within me. We take ages over breakfast at a table. Gone is the mug of muesli at my keyboard. I feel as if I have been steeped in some syrupy elixir, a balm. I feel sated.
I was a very young mother to my first. Expectancy unexpected and I was unpicked by uncertainty and impatience and unknowingness. About how to do this job. About the new shape I was trying to fit. I thought I must conform to routines and rules and I made myself unhappy in the process. And my small son too, I think; I could sense it in his fretful mewling and unsettledness, when he refused to sleep, to feed.
My youngest is almost the age I was then. I am seasoned and lined now and all the sharp contours of my younger self have gone, softened with age or blunted by experience and something which could sometimes, just sometimes, be loosely tied up as wisdom.
When I described myself back then, a new wife, a new mother, newly unemployed, I admitted my position like a confession, with something like shame, ‘justamum’, I mumbled. For where was my career? My job spec was defined by the man I lived with and the little boy I was trying, in vain, to settle to sleep.
I wish I had known then what I know now: that I would ease into it, that it would simultaneously get easier. That there are no rules except your own. And that I would love it. Love being a mother to small people. And later, big people, these big people who are sweetly patient as I cluck and fuss.
Who obediently bend to fold their mother, smaller than them, in a hug.
Is the intoxication I feel, the headiness, the satiety, is it because my children’s nearness – so near I can indulge in the luxury of an arm draped around a shoulder, a hand to tousle their hair, skin to skin not face to screen – is it because it swamps my brain with a flood of hormones – oxytocin and dopamine? It is cerebral or primal or is it simply the satisfying fullness that comes with knowing when a gap is filled. A jigsaw done and reassuring in its completeness? The full picture.
I don’t know. I don’t know what prompts this sensation. But I know I want to bottle it, distil it, keep it carefully stoppered in a glass bottle by my bed so that when they are gone again, my children, and far away, I can steal back this calm in careful drops upon my wrist.
And here I need to stop and count how many, on my fingers: twice before the Outpost, twice there, once then, and again then, oh, and then, and up here, now. Ten times. Could I really have done this ten times: taken an old home and made it new. Pulled down walls, put up new ones, ripped out plumbing, installed electrics (for none of the original inhabitants of these houses could ever have imagined the need for so many sockets – to charge all the devices that keep us tethered to our worlds, even as we float about them in the ether).
There is a sort of reverence every time I consider a new-old place where somebody once lived. Once loved. Lived in. Loved in. Did they decorate a Christmas tree in this room, I think, as I consider a wide, light sitting room, bowed windows so that the day streams in? Were there children? Did they hang stockings above that mantelpiece. Was this wooden floor, unpolished and scuffed now, like a mirror then, was is strewn with warm rugs? Did the wind whistle through its roof as insistently as it does now?
I always consider the people that came before. Why were they here? What did they do? How long was this their home? Did they love it? Where are they now? I know that sometimes I step from one room to another in the company of ghosts. I feel a chill, and I smell bats. Always bats.
When I polish this floor, for I will, will it gleam, admire its reflection in newly washed windows? Will it? Can I feel its soul now, this house, which has stood abandoned, often for years, if I stand still and silent and listen, will I respond with heart. Will I blow the life back into it?
And then I laugh, ‘a single bathroom in a three bedroom house!’ Ant laughs too – was ‘en suite’ even a thing back then, back whenever it was that somebody with hope and vision and exactly the right feel for a place so that they built this house perched where its occupants might drink in the view with sundowners, whiskey light with whiskey and soda. Did that happen here? Was there laughter? Or were there tears?
It feels like a gift, this being granted the time and space to step back into a dusty old life, look at some other family’s yesterdays through the prism of old-fashioned taps (glorious) and window winders which I want to steal and secret away like talismans.
When I walk through the garden I will find there testament to every gardener that has ever dug green fingers into bloodred soil. So that their nails will be blackened with the cleanest dirt. I find bounganvilleas with trunks as thick as a man’s thigh, knotted, gnarled, aged, but whose blossom is still vibrant and hot so that it litters a desiccated lawn like confetti. I find lavender strung with blueness and bees. And a hidden orchard where a crop of loquats are fattening and tiny peaches hard as stones. And pepper trees, always pepper trees under whose puddled shade a baby might have slept in a pram, or lain and watched the sky through a latticework of leaves.
When I leave, lock the door, will the house resume its voice – for all houses have one I have found, in the window rattles and sticky door clicks, in faucets that squeak and floorboards that creak. And every person whose ever lived in them has grown to be comforted by the familiarity of a home’s language.
Sometimes my mountains retreat. Like ghosts. They melt to nothingness on hot horizons. Are burned clean away by the glare of sun. Or shrouded in mist or haze or dust so dense they blur as invisible.
I put my flattened palm to my brow then and scan the line where heaven and earth meet, where I know my mountains stand, where, if I squint, I tell myself I must be able to see them. I must.
But they are gone. Bashful as brides, they have retreated behind some obscuring veil.
I feel untethered then, without them, my north and south, those necessary guiding points of a compass. As if some anchor has come loose and drifted off. Sometimes you know where you are. And sometimes you do not.
But some days when I walk, in the soft pearl of dawn when the world is cupped neat and ordered and sharpened with a chill, my mountains are razor cut against the ceiling of sky that the sun is just peeling back. As it slides in on the east and long fingers of light grope and feel their way towards the dark western edge, the top of Meru is pinked, a blush against the palest, palest blue. A kiss, I think.
Or in the evening, when the day has settled into itself and leans long and languorous as shadows are stretched thin and taller, no longer that shuffling squat of noon, I see them then, standing tall, heads thrown back, their profiles pencilled dramatically and black and bold.
They are beautiful.
Sometimes I see my mountains and sometimes I do not. But I need to remember, they are always there. Tall and strong and solid and sure.
My sister makes jam. She makes it with a devotedness that involves experimentation and the regular tweaking of recipes, adjustments that she records in a notebook for the next time. She cannot bypass her Syrian green grocery without slowing her pace to see what he has on offer. Blueberries for conserve, tomatoes for chutney, a plump heel of ginger to candy so that we can suck on it between cups of tea, its syrupy bite nipping the inside of our mouths.
She stuffs plastic bags into jacket pockets when she goes walking, just in case: in case she stumbles upon windfalls or bushes bowed with blackberries which bruise her fingers blue as she plucks them greedily, occasionally stabbing her skin so that a bud of blood swells. She has collected the necessary accoutrements of a serious jam maker: a proper preserving pan, the right sort of thermometer. She nags friends to keep their empty jars. She rescues her own from the recycling bin. Her kitchen is often heady with the treacly scent of boiling sugar, surfaces streaked strawberry pink and sticky.
I ask her, ‘Why jam? What do you love about it? Where did you find this passion? When?
‘I love it all’, she says, ‘the whole process: the finding the fruit, the deciding what to make, the trying out new recipes, the testing and tasting’. When I stay with her, I bear witness to this, these sampling sessions, piles of warm toast at breakfast as we try the latest batch and she fastidiously takes cognisance of comments and criticism: ‘this is too sweet …. this too runny’ and then – of a Lime, Lemon and Ginger Marmalade – ‘this is perfect’, exactly the right balance between tart and sweet, the consistency obediently spreadable.
‘I love being able to gift friends something homemade.’
She tells me she began to experiment with jam making when she ten or 11, ‘when we lived in Sotik’, a lonely tea farm in Western Kenya. The garden was forested with fruit trees – loquats bowed branches so that you could pick amber berries and suck their flesh clean off shiny stones, and mulberries stained bare soles black. Its warm fecundity, though, in a place where sunshine and regular rain conspired to make everything grow thick and fast – especially the tea where new growth was plucked regularly and tossed into the back borne panniers of the pickers – was in stark contrast to mum’s mostly barren internal landscape; our new geography’s isolation stripped it back to bleak nothingness; she spent long months unwell. One year six months at a stretch, no respite.
‘I did it because I didn’t know what else to do, because there was all this fruit … because I had to do something.’
She knew. She knew then, even so young, the imperatives of Keeping Busy.
My sister is a scientist. A chemistry teacher: she interprets the mysteries of matter and reactions and the Periodic Table to teenagers.
But by the time she was one, long before she stood in a lab conjuring magic in test tubes for her students, she had mastered the alchemy of happiness.
I think I remember buying the card. It seems both so long ago and so recent that the past and present bump up against one another as strangers and acquaintances simultaneously: ‘Hey! Don’t I know you?’
It was long before phone calls were a thing of such nondescript ordinariness that it meant nothing to chat for hours to somebody whose daytime meant you were in the middle of your night. No, when I bought that card, a generation ago, phone calls meant – usually – terrible news, for it is true: it does always travel fast: Bad news.
My news came a week after Father’s Day. Which is why, when we got home afterwards, the card I’d bought lay there, on dad’s desk, the envelope slit open and weighted by the paper knife that had slit it, the card propped up against a jam jar of pens.
And it came, that news, perhaps two weeks after I’d browsed the aisles at WH Smith and bought my card and inscribed it and licked the envelope and sealed it and purchased a stamp in the post office in Fenchurch Street and dropped it into the red lipped mouth of the post box. Hoping as I did so, that it’d arrive in time. It mattered so much, later, that it had.
Your dad’s had an accident, said the voice at the other end of the line when I picked up the call at work that day.
It never occurred to me it might be that sort of accident. Never. Not for a moment. I think now it would; I think that occasion, that single experience, is what prompted my habit now to catastrophize. Now I understand the possibility for tragedy is everywhere.
No, he is dead.
And then you know life will never be the same again. There will be gaps and holes and you will always know after that that life has the propensity to gouge new ones. That plans will be tripped up. That you will never share your 21st birthday with your father’s 50th because he never made it that far: he was 47.
I remember saying to somebody at the time, I will never survive losing my mother. There will never be a father like mine.
But I am losing my mother. By painful degree. And I am surviving it.
And there is another father both like mine and unlike him. I love him just as hard. He is just as important presence in my children’s lives as dad was in mine. The only difference, thankfully, oh so thankfully, is that he has stuck around for longer. He is almost 62.
So sometimes, even when you think you’re unlucky, you’re also lucky.
Reluctant Memsahib 