Fool on the Hill

My Jack Russell Milo looked up at me with his “Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into” face on as I scanned the scene to reappraise it. We were both sitting on top of a dead elephant; a leathery grey kopje of cold flesh starting to stink and bloat and effervesce a pink froth […]

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Fool on the Hill

To kill a horse all you need is a little love, enough not to feel like a complete swine. And a handgun of a medium calibre, say a 9mm, if you don’t want too much thrashing about afterwards, which tends to upset the owner. The love, this helps both the horse and you. Although I […]

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Fool on the Hill

In an attempt to be glib, when asked if I went to boarding school as a child I would always reply “No, my parents loved me”. Inverted snobbery played a part in this answer but mostly it was a defence mechanism because although I started my school life, in Hong Kong as the son of […]

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Fool on the Hill

There are no ghosts in our house, though it is built for haunting. Moorish by design, it’s more of an architectural beaux geste to Bunny Allen the former refugee gypsy White Hunter who washed up on the shores of Lamu in the 60’s and built several rambling castellated houses, than to the courtyards of the […]

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Fool on the Hill

In what, despite any amount of cynicism, can only be interpreted as a victory for conservation, Zambia has suspended all Safari Hunting (SH) in Game Management Areas (GMA’s) for 2013 and has placed an indefinite ban on the SH of Lion and Leopard.   At the end of December 2012, scant hours before the results […]

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Fool on the Hill

How are those New Year’s resolutions going? Chances are you are somewhere in mid-January 2013 right now having relented against your better judgement and bought a Lowdown, just to try and find the Jaylin Restaurant’s number and see if they’re open for a slab of steak on Monday. You might still be going strong and […]

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Fool on the Hill

When they throw down the last shovel of red dirt on my box, or preferably kick the remaining splinters of hyaena gnawed bone under a combretum bush, I would ideally, like someone with a large handlebar moustache in a voice not unlike that of Sam Elliot playing The Stranger in The Big Lobowski, to spit […]

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Fool on the Hill

Following on from last month’s rant on escalating security problems … in addition to installing all the normal precautions of alarms, motion detectors, Kevlar PJ’s for the kids, response teams and a rather natty shark pool under the new glass floor of my office, it was decided that we should supplement our aging trio of […]

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Fool On The Hill

Oh dear. It was two years ago exactly that the Fool on the Hill column was all about crime and keeping yourself safe inLusaka, and here we are again. Certainly in the New Kasama / Leopards Hill area there has been at least one armed robbery that due to good luck and cool heads concluded […]

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Fool on the Hill

It’s always a gamble booking a holiday to somewhere new isn’t it? And when the only way to get there is on Easyjet with herds of real-life British budget package tourists then you start having misgivings pretty early on in the proceedings, spoilt as you are by Indian Ocean beaches, wide open spaces and good […]

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