Nothing To Say Really
Indeed
 

When happiness starts, that's where the story falters. Ever tried the heaven-part of Dante? Know what I mean.

I was reading Copperfield, I must confess. The bloke can write indeed. What a vicious act of God to give him nothing to say! He is reduced to staging entertaining characters doing entertaining things. I threw in the towel when Copperfield ipse, after some 200 pages adolescent, while still, O, my God!, absolutely deprived of any sin whatsoever, starts to worry his best platonic female comrade would marry the wrong party...o shit...not that again.... But my Dutch ex philosophy colleague and fellow Africa amateur Frans saved me with a copy of T. C. Boyle's Water Music, around 1800: explorer Mungo Park hits the Niger. When no shit happens, as with me at this moment, you should read about it - if only to keep in shape. The stupid believe in the Good God and the Bad Devil, the smart feel the universe couldn't care less. The exception is Boyle. T.C. Boyle, author, if not the founder of transcendental sadism then at least its centre piece. Why the hell did the fuckers go for a goat like Rushdie? This chap fully deserves to be crucified by fatwa, lifted on the shoulders of all righteous and true war-on-terrorism believers and what not. Park the Explorer...no need of course to dwell on the lies in the bloody fart's books. Boyle heads straight for the dirty reality: caught to be tortured to death by a Moor king, saved by a smart black local repatriate "Johnson" from London - bone through his nose -  inspired by the hope thus to acquire some quality English literature to read in his Mandingo country hut, but sadly caught by a crocodile who, however!, failed to close his jaws properly, finding one muscular finger of the nigger deep in each of his Cambrian eye-sockets, know what I mean, this is literature.

Reading Boyle in the lake side morning rain (right: monkeys already stopped fearing the Muzungu).

While beating East to the Niger, leeches, malaria, hyena's, muslims, Kampala ceased to have traffic jams after five: football world cup. We have not yet reached the finals. In the Hammerkopsnest as well as at JPCuttings manager Piet's, after every goal there is frantic calculation who would get out of the pool under the current score line. I limit myself to asking the waiters in my restaurant, acting out an utter astonishment when being congratulated with a Dutch victory, claiming, even to Nigerian dismay at neighbouring tables, that I am mourning the malfunction of my favorite crude oil delta team (Mungo and all that, you know...). The sale of the dhow makes little progress but a man reported from a German "Wadden" island Borkum. Hidde, fellow tribesman (this island is at the North Sea shore right at the Dutch border of my ancestry) checked the dhow and is in for a test trip once I replaced my rotten folmali. He was accompanied by an adventurous African lady, who has seen most of East Africa, and wouldn't care running the dhow and smoking one of my strong Havana cigars. She also kept walking round my world unique camping truck asking questions until she understood everything (and I mean everything), the only one who did so thus far.

Hidde and my successor captain??

Meanwhile I have a letter of rejection of my application for membership of Entebbe Golf Club. Collector's item! They have mixed my identity with a former Jinja Club member Bart Harrmings, who somehow got suspended by Jinja Club's shady committee a few years ago ^[details]. Semi-literacy is rampant in Africa up into the self styled elites running the golf clubs. The upshot of it is that they wish to keep charging me a 10 euro green fee, instead of a monthly 100 euro subscription with a 2 euro green fee, which, at my playing frequency yields them some more money. They are welcome to it as far as I am concerned: I won't spend the effort to pester some Africans ready to put the reputation of their club at risk for 130 euros or so a month as long as it lasts.

Holland Korea at Entebbe Golf Club

I play with Koreans whose parents the war front, halting around my second birthday (today I became 59), accidentally left at the south side. Good players. A 20 year long Uganda missionary of the evangelical so-and-so, with excellent clubs and barely understandable English, and a business man, both with their wife, who also know how to hit the ball. Then there was an explosion at the Hammerkop's Nest: in a conversation I accidentally detonated my sister. Fortunately, the house did not catch fire but I was kicked out, and rightly so: one should be thoroughly acquainted  with the octane number of one's sister's blood. She is recovering. Even just phoned me for my birthday, so I might have a go as well and unwrap my fingertips to see what is left of them. Played a PR (11 over) three days ago at Mehta's golf course Lugazi while I counted 80, men moving soil and women gardening, working all day and I was the only player. O yes, I also went into the procedure of application for membership of Nairobi Golf Club. Like any African procedure, this will require continuous personal guidance, pressure and monitoring over a period of at least half a year and thus would require my establishment of a multi-staffed permanent office in Nairobi but for the presence there of Anne, who jumps the jungle path on my behalf like a hurdle-runner, steam-rolling it wherever necessary.

Mehta Golf Course Lugazi in the morning fog

Recently I started to join the warmth and company of some totally charming Kampala expats: Petra, Dutch but with German passport, kick boxer and fire spitter, master in epidemiology, working for a public health NGO, ready to host my truck on her compound any time I'm in Kampala, Tamara, 2nd Dutch Championships judo 13-May-1995 U16 The Hague Type N17 Weight Class U66, now a private clinic's head of nurses, and Driva, Icelandic embassy staff, equipped with a 12 m 400 Hp Entebbe race boat to shuttle to Sese Islands to "help the local government to reach their aims". With Petra I am in training for a one day Kampala-Entebbe trip (35 km) in her double kayak. She also promised to do a kick boxing demonstration en to spit fire, but I am still waiting for it. Tamara and I have agreed to let me have a try, from a grounded position, getting out of her hold. We had to defect on that at Petra's garden party, due to the grass having been shat under by two other of my new friends: Petra's dogs Chika and Pili, in what seemed a similar agreement:

Petra's Chika and Pili. Regular judo hold?

But Driva delivered already: I got invited on her Kalangala, Sese Island power boat shuttle.

Left: Driva set for the one hour 125 litre 44.4 km/hrs trip South over the equator to Kalangala Sese Islands. Right, arrived in her Kalangala garden facing S on  WGS 84 dec. -00.325545 32.278857, on a mattress seemingly at hand for the purpose, whatever it is.

Driva couldn't care less even who trained the Ugandan skipper of her glass fiber fishing racer, buying ten - at least - dhows like mine, with its two smoothly 200 Hp outboards, let alone she could be trusted finding the starter. After boarding it she falls asleep on her comfortable bench, her hair blowing in the wind to wake up at Kalangala island an hour later, a trip for which with my dhow I would need anything between one and four days. "Watch out for Boussa" I could not help thinking under way, but that is the Niger town where explorer Mungo Park's life ended in a rapid. "Yes" she says when I mention some of that: "modern technique is a blessing". Then the ICEIDA SUV, stand-by on the Kalangala pier drops us at her bungalow looking deep down South on the lake from the Kalangala escarpment and after a brief preparation in the garden (picture above right), she heads for her four-staff Icelandic ICEIDA office. I scrap an ounce of dirt off in the shower, head for the baffling veranda view, back to Mungo Park and Ned Rise on the lower Niger, or no: in Mungo's absence, on Loch Ness, his wife gets herself laid in a rower, the monster dives up but finds himself unable to spoil the game. No wonder, when even crocodiles with novel-protagonists already between their jaws fail to bite them out of the story. I find the espresso cooker. No ashtrays, of course, Iceland has volcano's. Or so I'm told: my Icelandic golf pals had to heap up a basket full of funny replies to eruptive jokes they're showered with 24/7 by Europe frequent flyers stranded on Kampala Golf Course. BP is reported to have retaliated in the Caribbean, but sorrily deprived of TV and Europe flights, for my news I rely entirely on the taste of my Cuban cigars. Which is as usual.
In short: nothing to say really. Greetings.