Zambia World Wide

I still feel guilty about my time in Livingstone. Not because I embarked on a crime wave or started a series of race riots or condemned the earnest activities of the local Caledonian Society, but by failing properly to appreciate the place until it was too late. I can be forgiven for this, for, in 96 hours, I had moved from Glasgow through London to Lusaka and now Livingstone. It was a little like compressing an entire Life, from birth to geriatricity, into the same period.

As I stepped down from the unending mobile incarceration, that had been the tedious rail journey down from Lusaka and, without regret, watched the RR carriages set off for the next leg of their Bulawayo odyssey, it occurred to me that I had been transported back to Dodge City, circa 1880. The station itself was no larger than a village halt in Lanarkshire, as if to remind the ghost of the town’s eponymous sponsor of his country origins, yet different in so many ways. A cocktail of scented warmth, mixed with clear, fresh air and sharp sunshine settled around my shoulders and it felt good. All I required was a six gun on my hip and a hat with a decent brim and the transformation would have been complete, but I didn’t have long to absorb the fantasy.

‘Err yeow Jirrrry?’ enquired a southern African accent from out of the camouflaging sun. For I moment I thought that weasel-features might have followed me from the train, but, on admitting that the ID was close enough, a lean, blonde, hard-looking guy in uniform thrust out his hand and grasped mine in a bone-crushing handshake. ‘ Emm, Toammy Fin Der Vallllt end dees is moh fiancée Treesha’ he said, indicating a not unpleasant looking, simpering, wobbly girl in ridiculously out of context heels and hooped dress: ‘Willkum ta Leevingstun’.

(At this juncture, I should re-assure my no doubt rapidly diminishing band of faithful readers that I will desist from future attempts to phonetically describe the peculiar accent of the native white southern African; and, simultaneously, offer grateful thanks for their indulgence thus far. Fresh off the inbound plane, however, it was a most odd encounter with this English language variant, although, as close to the end of my allotted span as I am, I’ve heard weirder: the white Bahamanian, for example, who speaks in exactly the same dialect as his black neighbour. It might be a logical by-product of sharing the same environment, but it ain’t half odd to hear a white guy sounding like Vivian Richards, even now. Anyway, henceforth, straight quotation will be my guiding style. Promise)

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 fiancée 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.