Off to Nairobi, not, as some friends suggested, to appease Somali Al Shabab town grenade throwers with a case of Greek government bonds I found on the road side

Kenyatta Airport. My driver Kennedy tells me the place is noticeably more quiet since the publicity about the cross border Somali pirate attacks and retaliating Kenyan army charge. During the subprime crisis collapse of tourism, Kenya had decided it should forthwith be open for tourists at half price, so the visa fee went down to $25. A few months ago the united lobby of immigration officers, according to all decent standards of corruption the rightful pocketers of the money, got it back up again to $50. The Al Shabab scare has not yet managed to halve it again, so I pay $50,- since in Euros it is 40. a bit more than $50. Immigration has its own off-market currency conversion rates based on round numbers to limit the reception of small notes. That is because African banks give bad rates for small notes when an immigration officer comes in to change his daily booty for local shopping cash. So I make sure I always carry 50 $1 bills when travelling to Kenya (picked up from the public in Uganda bidding slightly higher than the local small notes bad forex rates).
Remarkable: between the airplane exit and my driver Kennedy no one (no one!) tried to cheat me with anything!

All seemed peaceful at the golf club, until I heard about last Sunday night. There seems to have been an animated atmosphere among the members sitting on the veranda. But then from the 18th hole there appeared some twenty men armed with two guns and all got robbed of their cash and cell phones. Totally uninteresting as a feature for Nairobi newspapers of course. I also found one of the glass doors of the reception splintered and provisionally taped, but have not yet found out whether this happened in the same incident. Meanwhile the course has improved vastly with new bunkers (I mean sand bunkers) and ponds. Nobody gets an additional shot though, may be because the greens have also been improved. After two months of frantic dhow carpentry my game should be awful.
It was. I was playing with a Kenyan mother teaching her 15 year old daughter "look how you hold your club, you lifted your head and were standing on your heels..." etc. etc. Mother is pro, daughter has handicap 5. Mother has just about my distance of drive (250 yards), but hers is always straight. They are relaxed and kind. The daughter (top 3 Kenya amateurs) decently observed the code of not mixing with adult conversation. But no smiles between them: dead serious practice (I learned a lot watching!). Only when the daughter hit an over 300 yard uphill drive to the edge of the green of a par 4 and I sing "Birdie time", a King Kong size double row ear to ear blinding white smile bursts for half a second from down under that little golf cap.

My chair at Lydia's

Last time I had donated a chair to Lydia's house, out of gratitude for the hospitality and to compensate for a chair that, giving off earthquakish sounds, irreparably collapsed under my modest 0.102 ton weight. On request of the management I had, between carving crocodiles, taken time to engrave the donor's name on a dhow's left-over piece of mninga wood.

Lydia's daughter Jessica and Koco

Of course Lydia and me continued our preparation for our jazz career, and considerably improved. Due to peak work pressure in power plant planning, however we had to postpone going viral on the internet.
Between short bursts of practicing our repertoire on the house's keyboard my brains, for lack of a dhow environment stimulating to the carpentry I got thoroughly fed up with, for some reason got agreeably fixed in an old book by Evelyn Waugh. In the 1930s right after an economic collapse like the one we live in, he wrote a comic satire about an African country coming under black rule. The startling thing is that in the 1930s neither he nor anybody else in the entire world believed such a thing would ever happen. It was solely to have a good laugh and absolutely nothing else. Where did Waugh's inadvertently futuristic novel have it right, where did he misfire? 80 years after Waugh, 50 years after the African independence, I thought: why don't I sit down and make up the balance? Reading his novel, loads of recent pictures of African scenes, signposts, posters popped up in my mind, nice illustrations for his funniest passages! I did. ^{[Read the draft]}

Crater rim lunch

We did a 300m crater rim climb with the usual Kenyan Wildlife barrier charging "residents" half a dollar (500 Kenya shillings) and "others", in gratitude for their home taxpayer's money wasted on development aid, 30 dollar. Since residents are seldom questioned - passports owners are rare among them -  handling category disagreements requires some agility from the barrier officers' side. At more shady entrances, such as in Tanzania and at historic church entrances in Russia, the guards, at your claim to be a local, threateningly convene to argue about your racial characteristics, and on the final score claim to have been given power to decide what you are and prepare for brute force. But here corruption seemed to start only at higher levels and staff, not pocketing the money themselves, were not keen on detailed identification. One of us had taken enough other people's ID's to avoid the 30 tariff altogether. There was a toilet, clean but without paper, so I went for the cheapest bill in my wallet, 50 Kenya shilling, after all I never tested the proverbial softness of the currency. After use it still looked acceptable so I put it back. It was a lovely good-weather climb and the 9 year old in our company was delighted by his mother's resignation in having him ruin his trousers by gliding back down with his behind on the lava grit.

The 9 year old in our company was delighted by his mother's resignation in having him ruin his trousers by gliding back down with his behind on the lava grit.

I visited the cardiologist to report about the second three month medication test for my atrial fibrillation, a harmless irregular heart rhythm in my case on average twice every 3 months. After 1 to maximum 6 days the heart resets spontaneously. In the first 3 month test we doubled betablocker and planned to try Tambocor (flecainide) pills to reset the heart immediately after start of fibrillation. The number of incidents tripled to 6, but the reset pill worked so the total time I spent fibrillating reduced from 5 full days normally in such a period to only 24 hours. Excellent! But to cope with the spike in frequency we decided in a second test to stop alcohol completely. No drinking. 3 months. Admiration all around! I was now on my way to report the result: 4 fibrillations, still double of the past, but the the reset pill consistently refused, so the total time spent fibrillating had spiked up to 11 days, double of past. For me the obvious conclusion was: the Tambocor reset pill significantly increases the frequency of fibrillation incidents and works only when you drink, and my prediction was that the cardiologist would not go with me all that way, nor would I succeed convincing the producer to put the politically intolerably incorrect message of my body on the pill box insert. For the coming three months test I thought of trying my old way, to see if at least the old low frequencies and durations would come back. Not that there is any suffering or danger. It was simply what I am the most curious about. Unsurprisingly the doctor was more interested to test a pill recently on the market. He made me curious so I agreed happily - at least until I heard the price at the pharmacy. I decided to buy for one month only, to stop after the first fibrillations, fraudulently reporting some additional ones, then continue as I did before our experiments.
While up to date cardiological wisdom was thus struggling not to be worse than that of 15 years ago on which I based my strategy (albeit with the heresy of every time simply waiting for spontaneous reset), the doctor was a resounding success with my skin problem, which everybody in Kampala told me was ringworm, a fungus. On the spot he called a colleague dermatologist personally, who waited for me before heading for lunch. I ran a block down, jumped in an elevator, and was received in an empty lunch time office ("I cannot refuse David anything"), less than 10 minutes after raising the issue! Entering his room I got some doubts, for one entire wall was covered with PhD certificates and declarations of affiliation with just about every top medical university in the world. Was the guy relying too heavily on his placebo effect? He looked less then two seconds at my spots and said:

Granuloma Annulare

Granuloma annulare.
Is that a fungus Sir?
No.
Then is it a bacteria or a virus?
No.
Then what is it?
An infection.
"An infection"...That was a hard one to be sent away with, but at least it was no ringworm, not even a fungus so there was an explanation for the total failure of earlier treatment. He injected the worst spots and gave me a recipe for an aggressive steroid cream. Solved in five minutes! Coming home I Google: Rare skin disease consisting of ...circle or ring...usually seen in otherwise healthy people [aha!].... cause unknown ..... health care providers may erroneously think you have a fungal infection when looking at your skin [!]...causes no symptoms, you may not need treatment...disappears without treatment within 2 years. Very strong steroid creams or ointments are sometimes used to clear up the rash more quickly. Injections of steroids directly into the rings may also be effective. An aggressive steroid! How exciting! Doping! I will have to decline for the next Ryder Cup.