An Elephant Returned A Ranger’s Reading Glasses Undamaged. Jock had been studying a herd of elephants around the Limpopo region of South Africa for some time and hadn’t noticed his missing reading glasses until he returned to the lodge as usual one evening. He vowed to scour the bush for them the next day, not…

I don’t have a Go-Pro, so I strapped my phone around my head with a fitness band to get footage of a large monkey mistaking my feeble attempts at fitness for spectator sport. I had just begun my routine lock-down run, when a male vervet appeared out of nowhere, grabbed an apple from the bird-table,…

We were relaxing by the pool at a hotel in Johannesburg when we noticed a particularly noisy weaver bird dismantling the nest he had built, ripping this strand and that strand with such fury that the whole thing fell from the tree – plop! Into the pool. The bird’s frustration was palpable. It paced endlessly…

My friend Ben said he heard I wrote a book called The Frog theory. He told me his mother studied frogs in the Russian mountains where her hosts produced fresh, cool milk with the tea. As she stared at the milk she wondered how they kept it cold with no electricity or fridges when a…

I used to share a workshop with a girl from Zimbawbwe, long before I had ever even thought about going to Africa on holiday, let alone living there. I said wasn’t it a scary place? She said not half as scary as Croydon where she had already been mugged – Twice! Me. Enlightened. I loved…