A Gentle Brush Against Fame's Elbow

On Thursday, I had the honour and privilege of meeting the great Tracey Emin: esteemed artist, general London socialite, and patron of one particular school library in Uganda. I was rather excited about the prospect as I’d cited her work many a time during my A-level art studies. I wondered what it would be like to meet such an icon of art history – Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Van Gogh’s Waterlilies, Emin’s Unmade Bed. She’d always been top of my list of historical figures to have dinner with.

Sadly, this being a web publication open for the whole world to see, I feel that it’s prudent to exercise a degree of self-preservational censorship. This sadly prevents me going on with the story, and I’m sure you can work out why.

The sorry truth is that all my juciest stories from Uganda are the ones that you never get to read about because the associated risk is simply too great. Once time has dampened the sensitivity I promise to publish ‘Nigel in Uganda Uncut – The Bits They Didn’t Want You To Read’.

Office Hours

There is a particular brand of coffee available in Uganda – Tanzanian, as it happens – that is so tasty I’m convinced it’s not really instant, even though no filters, cafetieres, funny Italian pots or Expensive Electronic Equipment are needed to make it. It’s quite hard to track down, so when I found a tin of it in a supermarket the other day I became unduly excited. Having achieved an almost total abstention from caffeinated beverages for the past two years, this stuff has regressed me to a stage where I frequently indulge in two mugs of the stuff at breakfast every morning. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of this extravagance the other morning when I was due to make a long, long journey on public transport to our most remote and rural school.

Nature came knocking only minutes into the journey. I held on tenaciously but as the caffeine got down to its diuretic work, the discomfort only intensified. It was when the minibus turned off the highway onto the unsurfaced country road that things became unbearable. Every bump was a test of my resolve. In the end, much to the vexation of my fellow passengers, I had to ask the driver to stop. I’d have done so sooner if it wasn’t for the fact that I was seated right at the back of the bus, so getting out involved moving several mothers, children, chickens, suitcases, sacks of flour, etc. out of the way. (I’d already considered climbing out the window but it proved unfeasible).

I ran to a nearby bush but when it came to the moment of release, the stress induced by the barely concealed disapproval of my co-passengers reduced what should have been a whitewater deluge to a lame dribble. I managed to squeeze enough out to reduce the intolerable agony to a dull ache, but within ten minutes the intolerable agony was back. Just where was all this liquid coming from?!

It felt like I’d never reach my destination but when I eventually did, I enjoyed the catharsis of a lifetime.

Close Encounters of he African Kind

Anyone who has stayed at my humble abode here in Uganda knows only too well the vexing state of the ‘shower’. This is a great misnomer: the word suggests a capacity for merciless saturation, whereas this particular ablutional device provides more of an apologetic dampening. It would be better described as a ‘trickle’. Upon my parents’ visit only a month ago, me and ‘DIY Dad’ discussed how to remedy this sorry situation, which tended to double the length of my morning hose down and rob me of time in bed.

For some reason, late last Sunday afternoon I decided to get to work on the pipes. What led me to such a radical course of action? Perhaps it had been my Dad’s mistaken assumption that I knew about plumbing. Perhaps it was my good friend Miss Billy Crombie, at whose Manchester home I spent many an hour busily wielding hammers and saws while she delivered endless cuppas, and who massaged the handyman segment of my ego to such proportions that I felt like a DIY superhero. Or was it the company of my girlfriend, to whom I was attempting to demonstrate some sort of manly ability to get my hands dirty and fix stuff? Or maybe it was the imminent presence of my boss from the UK, who would also be staying in the house, and who I wanted to dazzle with how much things had improved since his last visit.

Whatever it was that sent me into such a frenzy of activity, things slowly went very, very wrong. My first mistake came quickly – I sealed off the tank outlet with an upside-down mug and then disconnected the pipe, but the mug proved an utterly inadequate seal and for the duration of the ensuing saga I was constantly aware of the disconcerting fact that at any moment, about 500 litres of water could come hurtling inexorably down onto my head. I realised I needed to work quickly, so proceeded by enacting my Dad’s great idea to connect the taps to the mains instead of the tank. Despite snapping all the exisiting pipes in the process, I was successful, but the result was that the toilet cisterns flooded and an unstemmable tide came from the overflow pipe that went up through the roof. So I had to turn off the mains tap altogether. By that time it was dark and late and I was left significantly worse off: no water whatsoever coming from the shower and a considerably grumpier girlfriend.

I wasn’t at this stage about to pay a professional to put the mess right – I’d spent too much time and money buggering it up to do that – and besides, my status as ‘Mr DIY’ was at stake. So the next day, I browsed through the various pipes and connectors in a local hardware shop, chose a few that looked feasible, and reconnected the pipes, sealing them off with bits of plastic bag. I turned the mains tap back on and needless to say they all leaked. So I turned the mains tap back off. By this time there was no water left in the tank, either, as it had all leaked past the mug. I had managed to impose a full-blown drought upon the household.

As if to add insult to injury, when I finally succeeded at getting the whole thing back to how it was when I started, the mains had been shut off altogether by the water company, so we *still* had no water. By this time my boss had arrived. I hope he doesn’t read this as then he’ll realise that his enforced inability to wash on arrival, and for two days hence, was entirely my fault.