A cake of hay on a snowy day, with an oat mix chaser if you insist, for me. He likes it straight from the horse's mouth.
There are climate change cycles within climate change cycles, the climate is always changing according to these cycles, in some places at a certain point in time the water rises, the grass gets greener, and the ice melts, in others at a different point it’s the opposite. Generally, warming is better than cooling for homo … More Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est le Climate Change
After 3/4 of a bottle of Red Label, and interpreting Ed’s silence like me, Brian must have come to the conclusion words were becoming about as useless a means of communication between us as they had been between Mugabe, Carrington, Nkomo and Soames during the Lancaster House shenanigans. He switched to an analogy that was … More Crocodile Farm
In 1982, Smith visited America and Britain, and told reporters that Mugabe was turning to totalitarianism. For some reason, Mugabe later went on to choose the Marxist Leninist flavour preferred by Nkomo’s ZAPU, over ZANU’s Chairman Mao Chinese flavour, perhaps to sideline Nkomo. That was when he sent his Matabeleland Massacre brigade to North Korea … More The Courage Of Ian Smith
The door to door mishap coincided with the timely return of another good Cargilfield friend, Ed Douglas-Miller, from a stint working on a game farm with the well-known conservationist Clive Walker. Ed was the source of the flawed intel that had landed me in trouble at Jan Smuts; he had arrived in South Africa a … More Motorbike Trip To Matopos Hills
The discovery of diamonds on the border of the Orange Free State opened up the interior to prospectors from abroad, many of them British. The Boers had no alternative, they had neither the skills nor resources to control the new market, and before long were outnumbered by the rapid influx of immigrants, or uitlanders, which … More Rhodes, Slavery And Diamonds
So I took a risk, and it seemed to have worked out fine. And that’s when I should have gone straight to university, off the back of a successful warm up in Cambridge, but all my friends were taking a year out, so when it came to filling out the application form, I did the … More An Early Brush With Insurgents
More often than not a farfetched or absurd aim is a sign that a previous realistic aim hasn’t been met. It’s easier to hide failure behind some unattainable dream than come to terms with and correct flaws that saw a more modest goal missed. My favourite current example in Sport is England Rugby Union coach … More Billion Dollar Bet
In a modern world connected by the internet most things can be researched or acquired just by going online. Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn provide desired leads and contacts, Google the rest. When it works, this saves time and money when compared with on the hoof reconnaissance, a welcome development that should open … More Origins Of Opal Oceans
I’d always thought not much could beat turning up unannounced on someone’s doorstep for shock value, until I turned up unannounced on someone’s doorstep to hear that they were dead. It’s definitely the higher card of the two. I’d like to play it myself some day, but turning up unannounced is somehow not so fashionable … More A Mountain Too High? PART ONE
Some events are supposed to resonate so deeply in a country’s collective psyche that we all remember exactly where we were when we received the news, and for a long time after. For example, despite having recently returned from a two year recce of the Turkish emerging market mountains by pack horse that meant I … More Small Beer For The Boys