Zambia World Wide

S' amazin' innit? One day you're sheltering from rain with the bone-shattering velocity of a WW1 carbine and the next you're 7000 miles away, watching the warm sun go down behind baobab trees and feeling the power of the day's rays still rising from the puzzlingly red earth beneath your feet; the whole transforming experience accompanied by a chorus of crickets and gawd-knows-what other insect life, chirruping their bloodthirsty welcome to Africa.

A mundane experience for Old Africa Hands, but, to a tyro post-colonialist whose only understanding of the Land of Livingstone began and ended with a Western SMT red bus trip to the explorer's Scottish birthplace in Blantyre, it was truly bowel-gripping. And if I could be imbued with such geographical romance, whilst standing in the shabby veranda of Longacres hostel, what other wonderment would await me when the next day commenced and this foreign, yet oddly familiar, country came to life?

Young men tend to take whatever Life throws at them more or less in their stride. After all, being cool was (is) what's most important. So, confronting complete nightfall at 6pm in summer and encountering frenzied negroes, wearing dark clothes and furiously riding unilluminated, ancient, black bikes down dimly lit, narrowly tarmaced strips of road flanked by perilously deep, unfenced ditches, was a matter of no concern to this Scots lad - apart from encouraging me to scurry back to the relative safety of the single storey hostel, without venturing too far into my new surroundings.

Bryson, the surliest, most inadequate meeter and greeter of any government service in the world, had driven me, at some personal cost (to me), around a single corner from the colonial airport to my temporary accommodation and dumped me and my ridiculous baggage, unceremoniously on the entrance apron. I found out later that they gave him two hours overtime pay for his pickup duties, so, naturally, he regarded it as a matter of honour to short change the time devoted to the subject of his snide attentions and whizz off to superior revenue-generating opportunities elsewhere.

Therefore, instead of a friendly, informative, half-hour tour of Lusaka, with, perhaps, a welcoming beer at the Ridgeway hotel and a casual briefing on what to expect from my new employers, I was brusquely uplifted from the airport, shaken down for cash, then abruptly abandoned to wander, the long night long, the institutionalised corridors of a construction that so very closely resembled the sombre, dripping, grey blocks of the mocked up Albanian prison from The Ipcress File.

No matter. I was used to being, how shall I put it, contained within such establishments. We novices from the provinces routinely were housed in crammed hostel (although 'hostile' would be more like the proper description) environments, once winkled from our caves, scrubbed clean of woad and delivered to the Civil Service in London. I had been fresh from maternal overload in Glasgow (I'm being circumspect, since she remains stubbornly extant and may read this, but excessive control and unwarranted & very nosey interference was more like her style. Still is), so it was a bit of a shock. My misfortune was to be placed in the London Hostels Association's very own Dotheboys Hall, located behind Finchley Road Tube, in a homely building whose attractive, suburban architecture belied its sinister interior.

There, in the impure air of the metropolis, I was confronted by many new experiences. Like the quotidian frustration of adjacency to so many (out-of-reach-on-£8-a-week wages) nubile female shop staff from the nearby John Lewis store. Like chaste and not inexpensive confinement in a shabby, malodorous sub-monastery room, shared with six (other) dedicated onanists, each enthusiastically plying his disgusting trade every evening. Like, and this was worst of all, shrill control by an omnipresent, Mrs. Squeers trained, grotesquely obese, Ozzie, near-female warden, who specialised in offering half a fried egg as the protein part of the breakfast menu.