KiSwahili

Because my mother went back to working for the Tanganyika government as soon as possible after I was born, I was entrusted during her working hours to an ayah, Fatuma, who, in due course, was also given my younger brother to look after.

There seemed to be an unwritten rule in East Africa that one communicated with the servants in KiSwahili, the lingua franca of Eastern Africa. The use of the local language wasn't general in British colonies: in Rhodesia we communicated with our servant, Titus, in English.

As a result, my brother and I learnt the language very quickly, and I do wonder whether, at times, because we spent so much of our waking hours with Fatuma, our KiSwahili was better than our English.

As I grew up, and after we left Fatuma in Dar-es-Salaam when we moved to Kenya, I kept up my KiSwahili through conversations with our servants, but things started to deteriorate when I was sent 'home' to school in England, with the result that I only used the language in the eight week summer holidays. 

That said, KiSwahili did pop up at odd moments, the worst being in French lessons where I was constantly inserting KiSwahili words where I meant a French word.

KiSwahili has in common with English an ability to be flexible and to absorb new words, but its main strength is in the simplicity - certainly compared to English - of its grammar. Not that we bothered too much about KiSwahili's grammar when we were using it: the language we spoke day-to-day was called Kitchen Swahili which, while mangling the rules of its grammar, was nevertheless a very effective means of communication. 

The only person who spoke grammatically correct Kiswahili was my father, who attended KiSwahili classes when he first moved to East Africa. We always maintained that his KiSwahili was so perfect that no-one understood it.

The last time I spoke KiSwahili was on our three visits, as tourists, to Tanzania in the early 2010s. Before I went, I bought books and worked hard to repair the damage the decades had done.

I did have some conversations in KiSwahili but I struggled - and of course many of the guides and waiters and others one came across preferred to speak English.

First Daffodils

The air temperature is 5C but it feels much colder outdoors as the persistent east-southeastly wind is still blowing - and promises to wind itself up to gale force again through tomorrow.

Walking through the pine plantations near the house it's noticeable that an unusually large number of branches are down, perhaps because the trees on the eastern side of the forestry aren't accustomed to this sort of prolonged battering.

There are, however, more signs that we're beginning to crawl out of the coldest part of the year. The sunrises are now much earlier - this was the view across the Firth at ten past nine this morning with the sun well up - and today I found....

....the first of the daffodils poking through the leaf litter.

It would be nice to think that these pink-footed geese passing over us each morning are migrating north but they aren't, as they come south again each evening to their roosts around Loch Fleet.

The squirrels along Squirrel Alley are doing fine, thanks to the generosity of the householders on the other side of the fence. These are being fed by humans, but it was good the other day to see that the squirrel which harvested and buried cob nuts along the verges of our road in the autumn is coming back to find them - even though our neighbours have been putting out plenty for it to eat.

Annual Bird Count

We participated today in the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch. From our sitting room we have a good view of the main feeding area for our small birds, so we sat in comfort for an hour around midday to count how many birds we saw. It's a relatively easy process: one simply notes the maximum number seen of each species on the feeders or in the bushes or on the ground so, although chaffinches were constantly coming and going, the number that mattered was seven, the most we saw at any one time.

The process wasn't without problems. The neighbour's cat decided to count the birds too, and....

....a wood pigeon ate most of the extra seed we had put out to attract the birds, but we ended up with fairly representative numbers: seven chaffinches, two each of dunnocks, goldfinches and siskins, and one each of blackbirds, robins, house sparrows, blue tits, coal tits, and.... that fat pigeon.

The Depths of Winter

Muddy green and grey are the colours of late January, the deepest depths of winter. The wind has been a persistent east-southeasterly for more days than I can remember, bringing grey clouds and creating breakers which crash on to the Golspie shore, pick up the dwindling sand along the beaches, and move it offshore to build sand-bars parallel to the coast.

I went for a walk up into the forestry this morning and came home after an hour without taking a single photograph - which must be a record; and there's little hope of anything changing until the latter part of next week, though there are signs that....

....one or two things may begin to happen soon, for the catkins are out.

Meanwhile the pink-footed geese are still feeding in the farmer's fields down by the railway, and....

....our precious snow-strawberries in the raised bed are just waiting for a bit of sunshine to ripen them.

First Spring Flowers

With DM reporting that the first daffodils are in flower in Devon while our daffodils haven't yet dared to show a green shoot above ground, we set off into the woods around Dunrobin castle to see what we could find in the way of spring flowers, and were thrilled when we found....

....in amongst the leaf litter, our most spectacular spring flower in full bloom....

....the scarlet elf cup.

Okay, okay, so it's not a flower but the fungus' spectacularly cheerful colour is a wonderful pick-me-up in the dismal grey winter weather we're currently enjoying.

Not that all was good news. There are five elf cup sites in Dunrobin woods and we visited three, of which one didn't have a single flower, another had four, and our best site, which in previous years had thirty or more....

....only had twelve - but then it is early in the elf cup flowering year.

Happily, when we visited the site with four elf cup flowers we stumbled across something we hadn't been expecting yet....

....the first snowdrops of the year.

Many are only just appearing as few flowers are open and there are plenty of shoots only now pushing up out of the ground, so it looks as if, weather permitting, we should have a good year for snowdrops.

District Commissioner

There was a time as a small boy when my ambition was to become a district commissioner in one of Britain's African colonies. This would have involved my being in charge of a huge chunk of Africa, where it would have been my job to make sure the natives behaved themselves, that they were educated - be it as children in schools or as adults by improving their farms. I would have dispensed justice, prevented disputes, appointed chiefs, worked with the police, medical and veterinary services, and generally run a peaceful, progressive regime.

To do this I would have had to travel miles to visit all the far-flung corners of my little kingdom, taking with me all the luxuries of modern living - carried on the heads of innumerable porters.

There would have been some time - not much - for recreational activities, such as shooting game which was troubling the villager's fields.

My house would have been built almost entirely of local materials, and I would have had....

....a large staff to cook, clean, do my washing, serve at table and otherwise look after my daily needs.

At some stage, probably on one of my three-yearly leaves in England, I might have found a wife who was prepared to live a lonely life in the middle of nowhere, and help me in my job - like, for example, running a small clinic for the women. And if children came along, they would have to take the locals as they found them.

It never happened. Independence came to our colonies and protectorates, and although the district commissioner system continued, it was largely staffed by Africans. I did manage to return to Africa, not as a DC but as a teacher.

Photos from ZimFieldGuide - here.

Dismal Weather

Getting some exercise safely in midwinter is a struggle for anyone of our vintage. Yesterday I walked the forest track which runs up from our house to find any standing water - and there's a fair amount of it from the recent thaw - frozen into solid black ice.

This corner would have made an excellent ice rink but the only way for a pedestrian to get past it was to follow the tyre track in the centre of the picture.

Today, wanting to really stretch our legs after the weather confinements of recent days, we drove out to Littleferry, stopping briefly at the Golspie seafront to admire the waves, brought in by a stiff east-southeasterly, pounding against what is already a wrecked promenade breakwater. According to the forecast, this wind will rise from twenty miles an hour to gale force from around 5pm today, and will then blow steadily from that direction until Friday.

The road out to Liitteferry has been closed by snowdrifts for much of the time since New Year but was clear this morning. However, any hope of a good walk along the beach was dashed by the biting wind which blew into our teeth. We struggled out to the main beach to....

....be awed by the raw power of the surf breaking on the beach, then allowed the wind to blow us back....

....through the village to the main pool of Loch Fleet.

Here, usually, we'll see plenty of ducks, crows, gulls, oystercatchers, curlews and other shore birds, and a large colony of seals, but all we saw was a couple of diving ducks, a handful of gulls, and what may have been a pair of eider.

So we had our walk but arrived home depressed by the greyness of the scenery, the miserableness of the weather, and the scarcity of wildlife.

Aurora!

This was the view from our front door just before nine last night, with an aurora so strong that it both rose above the high forestry to the north of us and even....

....formed flowing grey-green bands across the sky to the south of us.

The stars faded in the intense auroral light but the constellation Orion is visible in the centre of this picture while Canis the Dog Star is low down on the left.

It was a beautifully clear, frosty night so we walked up the track behind the house until we looked down on the lights of the village with the auroral display flowing and moving and changing colour above them.

The Poetry Group

I well remember in the summer term of 1996 sitting down for a talk with Allan Bilby (left, at a charity event in 1995), the head of the comprehensive where I had been teaching very happily for a dozen years. The purpose of my asking for the meeting was to tell him that I was leaving the teaching profession at the end of the Christmas term as we were well advanced in the process of buying a shop in a remote village on the west coast of Highland Scotland. 

When he asked why I had decided to leave teaching I told him that my union had just completed a survey that showed that a typical male teacher completing forty years at the chalk face in order to qualify for a full pension would enjoy just two years of it - a statistic which had just been brought horribly home to both of us by the sudden death of one of our colleagues who had enjoyed even less than his two years of pension.

There was another reason: I wanted to dedicate more time to writing. I was already busy writing short stories which were winning minor competitions, and a novel which had been represented by a London literary agent, so I knew I could write. Later, in the early 2000s, I was to have two unsuccessful novels published by a London publisher, and submissions win two of the nation's top short story competitions.

In the years in the peaceful environment of Kilchoan I had plenty of time to write. I produced more novels - one of half a million words - and more short stories but they didn't repeat the earlier successes, so when I came to Golspie I was looking for a new writing challenge - and found it in a small group which meets every Tuesday evening in the village library to discuss poetry.

When I say 'small' I do mean small: a gathering of six is large by our standards. A few wanted, like me, to write poetry and have it criticised by the group which, over the last couple of years, we've been doing. We accumulated quite a body of work so we did what I swore I would never do with my novels: we decided to publish a selection ourselves, something which I had always frowned upon as 'vanity publishing'. We now have our first little book, containing ten poems by four authors, with a cover picture painted by another member of the group.

I'm not sure how good the poems are but.... hey!.... I'm thrilled.

Surviving - or not

We woke to a bitterly cold morning with freezing mist veiling our view of the village - the A9 is in the foreground with hardly a vehicle on it - which was good as we were able to walk along the gritted road on our way to the Co-Op, rather than along the icy pavements.

In this hard world a few things are daring to show life. This fungus, about 3" across, is one of the few to show its face along with....

....a small witches' butter growing, as usual, on dead gorse, not more than 2cm across and seeming unbothered by the hoar frost that is crusting the twigs around it.

There are some who have not survived. This chaffinch looked in perfect condition, lying by the side of the road, while....

....this rabbit looked as if it had met a recent and very violent end.

The Freeze Continues

It would be so good if the warm colours of our sunrises could be translated into warm temperatures on the ground but the snow that fell on the first day of the new year, and which has been added to several times in the last couple of weeks, is nothing if not persistent.

So large swathes of the farmer's fields are still covered in what are now frozen snowdrifts, the track which we follow so often is dangerous underfoot and, closer to home, our....

....garden pond is still a solid block of ice.

As expected, the village, being closer to the sea, has lost much of its snow but last night's hoar frost was still coating surfaces and making the pavements lethally slippery.

All our day-to-day grocery shopping is at the little Co-Op in Main Street where I never cease to be amazed how wide the stock range is, considering how small and cramped the floor area. It's a cheerful place but life for both staff and customers has been made more difficult by a failure in the computing system which means that all transactions are now cash-only. The problem has been continuing for several days and isn't confined to the Golspie branch.

Maybe it's a cyber attack - after all, the Marinera, the Russian tanker recently seized by the Americans in the North Atlantic, is reported to be anchored nearby, in the Moray Firth.