Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

P.O Box 9010 Nairobi 14/3/65 Dearest Mom and Dad, Thanks for your last letter. I'm glad you're enjoying the Alan Moorhead books, I thought they were just your cup of tea. To read the Blue Nile while in hospital, the part about Ethiopia is really fascinating. What a pity Maria Callas was a disappointment, maybe you caught her on an off night or something! Glad you're both feeling well. To is fine, except for a sore thumb, which came after a day of solid writing, and swelled up, but it isn't getting better. He's on a strict diet, fruit during the day, and a steak with salads and fruit at night - very healthy, and though he hasn't weighed himself, I can see he has lost a lot of weight already. I've lost quite a bit too, because, of course, what To eats, I eat! And, quite frankly, I love that sort of food. The only thing I miss is potatoes. When To was in Aden, he bought a juice extractor, and we've been making fruit and vegetable juices - carrot j...

To Chantry wood, the  bluebells and back Up the green hill... ...past the plaque commemorating the Cornish marchers... ...down the hill... ...past the gardens... ...past more gardens... ...down to the river... ...tramp, tramp tramp... ...into the wood... ...up through the wood. Have a rest. Start again. What beautiful bluebells! It's nearly 6. Time to go home.

I was 15.  Dad was in the Congo or the Sudan or Ethiopia .  Mom was upstairs in her bedroom on the double bed chatting to Inge Neilson , our neighbour. The twins were at the front driveway playing with Jeanette and Tom and Joe and I was at the back, in the garden, feeling rather bored and destructive. I decided to light the barbecue and get it ready for lunch. I could cook something. Why not? But I wouldn't tell anyone until the barbecue was lit. I'd have to hurry because they were going to start getting lunch ready soon.  I found an open sack of charcoal and poured it out rustling onto the large metal pan. I took the newspaper -  The Daily Nation - and then I tore it and rolled it up - 4 double page spreads - into firelighters. I stuffed them into the coals and lit the wads. The sun was bright. It was around 11.30 am, and I couldn't see the flames. Perhaps the fir...

Soweto Chamber

8 Days Contributors: Geoffrey Aronson Dipak Chaudri George Coats Ed Crockett Donal Curtin Phil Finnegan Ed Girardet Leisl Graz Nicholas Hammus Dilip Hiro Marian Houk Russell W. Howe Robin Laurance Jim Muir Hamid Nazari Sundar Rajan Alan Moray Williams Chris Child Robert Cockburn Ian Gouldsbrough Akhatar Hasan Zia Sardar Tim Daley Desmond o' Grady Fulvio Grimaldi Ivor Tilney Adrian Darmon Donald Fields Peter Ward Stephen Hughes Jimmy Burns Tim Brown Russell Warren Howe Goeff Aronson Marian HoukHean Cobban Paul Barker Peter Earl Mark-Fenton Jones James Adams Fred Fisher Nic Hammus Rosie Boycott Hajir Teimourian Vivian Kinross Venetia Porter Andrew Lysett Louise MacDonald Abthony Moreton Jane Fleming Philip Knightley John Kane-Berman Igancio Kilch Thomas Land R Laurence David Lay Joseph Louw Peter Mansfield Susan Morgan Tanya Matthews Barbara Beesley Nicholas Powell Ovul Tezisler Philip Windsor Richard Trench Peter S...

  White asparagus, photo by justbecause, flickr Think of a vegetable, an expensive vegetable. Think of asparagus. What colour is it? What, to you, does a real stalk of asparagus look like? Do an experiment. Google "asparagus" images and the page is green. I have always been puzzled by green asparagus. It's wrong. It doesn't fit. It's too small. One end of the asparagus can be hard and chewy and the other mush. This is not what I remember. This is not asparagus. Asparagus is white and phallic, not weedy. And yet all we see in the shops is green asparagus. Very odd. Asparagus has always been a great delicacy, but these green stalks are small and underwhelming and they taste... well they taste too green - indelicate. Real asparagus is a thick white stalk about nine inches long and - if it's peeled carefully - 1 to 2 centimetres in diameter. The asparagus is boiled, it should be very soft and not crunchy at all. The tip retains its shape. You can buy them e...

Fight dem back Peach Dub  Bass culture The revolution will not be televised Eton Rifles Sponji Reggae  White riot Breakdown Westworld Not great men Helter Skelter Flowers of romance Oh superman Inglan is a bitch  Beside you

Franz Kafka in 1905 "Born in 1883, Franz Kafka came from a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him. He read for law at the German university in Prague and from 1908 on he worked as a petty clerk, a small employee, in a very Gogolian office for an insurance company. Hardly any of his now famous works, such as his novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) were published in his lifetime. His greatest short story "The Metamorphosis," in German "Die Verwandlung," was written in the fall of 1912 and published in Leipzig in October 1915. In 1917 he coughed blood, and the rest of his life, a period of seven years, was punctuated by sojourns in Central European sanatoriums. In those last years of his short life (he died at the age of forty), he had a happy love affair and lived with his mistress in Ber...