Zambia World Wide

Weekends obviously started early in the Livingstone Customs service and, as my introduction to the new job wasn�t to start for nearly three days, we all piled into Tommy�s Austin Cambridge for a whirlwind journey to the Customs Mess, a modern bungalow on the outskirts of the town. Actually, I think he felt he was showing me the town, but a single trip along Livingstone Main Street more or less fulfilled that requirement and I was so pleased to be clear of clattering railway carriages and bile-saturated Jaapies that I wasn�t complaining. This went double at night time, when I realised that I had a room to myself, implying that my days of sharing malodorous accommodation with a bunch of over-sexed, provincial perverts were at last at an end.

That said, apparently my nights of listening to the wiry Tommy bouncing happily on top of his pillow top fianc�e were just starting and the aforementioned perverts definitely topped her in the quietness stakes. Add to that some urgent, throbbing drum action, emanating from an adjacent African township, and it was like snuggling down in the middle of an X-rated version of King Solomon�s Mines. Not to worry; on the plus side, the pollution-free night sky was a brilliant canopy of unfamiliar brightness that would have begged a closer look from the exterior, had I had either the nerve or the energy to venture outside. My neatly folded laundry having been carefully placed on a chair, eschewing the instruction from Mr. Bouncy next door just to �throw it on the floor for the boy to wash�, I gratefully entered the hard world of government issue bedding and abandoned myself to deep sleep and lewd dreams.

Next morning, I met �the boy�, a man of middle years, as he scuttled around serving a disappointingly un-African meal of cornflakes and toast. I�m not sure what I expected, since my only experience of local dining was my recent confrontation with the pair of appalling boerewors on the train, but I just hadn�t considered that the Kellogg Corporation might have captured the breakfast time tastes of Central Africa as much as they had the so-called developed markets. How naive was I? I was rapidly to learn that it was probably ONLY the thought of one day enjoying Dundee cake, Tetley�s tea, Camay soap, Wall�s bacon and all the other entrenched brands, not to mention white-sliced loaves, from their home markets that drove on the first pioneers through untamed wilderness, hostile natives, ferocious carnivores and virulent insect life in the first place. Not exactly an edifying ambition, but, if it worked for them, who am I to knock it? Whatever the spur and even in remote Livingstone, the shops were full of actual British, ersatz British and knock-off South African British merchandise and foodstuffs. Excellent stuff for the slightly homesick, but not exactly the new world that I had been anticipating.