I had just started running around the outside of the house when a large monkey came out of nowhere and grabbed an apple off the bird-table.  I thought he had run off but when I lapped again, he had made himself comfortable on one of the pillars and was watching me. Each time I lapped…

We were relaxing by the pool at a hotel when we noticed a particularly noisy weaver bird dismantling a nest; ripping this strand, that strand with such fury, that the nest fell from the tree – plop! Into the pool. The bird’s frustration was palpable – it paced endlessly up and down alongside the deep…

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, and her hosts produced fresh, cool milk with the tea. As she stared at the milk, wondering how they kept it cold, with no electricity or fridges – a live…

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 and she said, not half as scary as Croydon, where she had already been mugged – Twice! Me. Enlightened. I…

I attended a creative writing group this week at the Honeycomb Hub, new to Gaborone. Blissfully informal, we did short writing exercises lasting just 3 minutes. New friend Sam’s inventive, off-the-cuff idea for ‘your flat mate’s father turns up on your doorstep drunk trying to persuade you to do something without your flatmate knowing’ was…