Ruppell’s Korhaan (Eupodotis rupellii)

Dear Readers, when we got back from Sossusvlei, Hano our birder guide announced that he was heading back into the dunes to look for Dune Lark – this is an endemic bird, found only in Namibia. The birders were off like a shot, but those of us who had had enough of sand dunes for one day hung about to see what we could see. 

Andrew, the other guide, showed us a Tenebrionid beetle – these are desert adapted beetles with long legs, and are probably most famous for standing at the edge of dunes with their bums in the air to catch the water droplets in the morning fog. No beetles were harmed in the making of this photograph! The little guy scuttled off after we’d had admired him.

Then we discovered that, as per usual, we were being watched by a lizard – this is, I think, a Cape Skink. It was great to see so many different lizards while we were in Namibia – they must be delighted to have so many flies and mosquitoes to eat!

But then, we noticed this chap heading towards us.

This is an Oryx, or Gemsbok – he wandered past us completely unconcerned. We kept our distance and stayed quiet so that he wouldn’t be disturbed. What a magnificent creature! Both male and female Oryx have horns, but those of the females are more slender. They are desert creatures, and get most of their moisture from plants.

Gemsbok are the quintessential Namibian mammal – they feature on the country’s coat of arms . Interestingly, they were imported to North America, where, in the absence of the lions, leopards, cheetahs and hyenas that usually eat them, they are threatening to become an invasive species. Although not dangerous, our guide reported that sometimes people attempt to feed them or give them water, and one irritable stab from those horns can be fatal. As with all animals, it pays to be respectful.

Oh, and the rest of the group did find a Dune Lark. I’m not sure if it compensated for missing this oryx encounter, though.

Dune Lark (Certhilauda_erythrochlamys) Photo By Yathin S Krishnappa – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59833418

Acacia tree with sociable weaver nests

Dear Readers, after a night at a reserve close to Windhoek, we head off towards the dunes at Sossusvlei and the Namib desert.  What a shock it is after the grey of London to be surrounded by such enormous expanses of sky and sand! We stop off to admire these sociable weaver nests – from a distance they can look as if someone has thrown a duvet over a branch, and indeed sometimes the nests are so large and heavy that they bring the tree down, and the birds have to start all over again. The birds are completely unfazed by our presence, disappearing into the nearby grassland to pull out some plant material to repair the ever-growing nest.

Twenty metres away is a signpost showing that we’re crossing the Tropic of Capricorn, so of course we have to get a photo. I feel a bit like a Christmas tree festooned with cameras and binoculars, but there we go.

Off we go. We’re headed to the Dead Valley Lodge, which is a ‘tented camp’ though not as you’d usually imagine it. The advantage is that it’s inside the national park, so we can set off early to be at the Sossusvlei dunes before it gets too hot. It means a 4 a.m. start but hey, we can sleep when we get home.

A typical room in the ‘tent’ at the Dead Valley Lodge.

Entrance to the Dead Valley Lodge

Food in Namibia is very meat-heavy, with a lot of game on offer – you can munch on every kind of antelope if you want. There is usually a vegetarian offering, but I suspect vegans would find pretty thin pickings, though where there’s a buffet (as here) you could probably find enough to eat, and the salads were always fresh and tasty. I developed a liking for ‘rock shandy’, which is lemonade or ginger beer, soda water and Angostura bitters, a most unusual combination but very refreshing after bouncing around in a jeep for hours, and a nice change from the local Hansa lager.

Rock Shandy

As the sun went down, the colours of the surrounding mountains were, well, undescribable…

Off we go at 4 a.m.! There is already a queue of vehicles waiting to get to the dunes at sunrise – many will stop off to climb the nearest, most accessible dune. We’re heading a bit further away, to Dead Vlei, a dune system with a dead lake in the middle. This has been the scene of many car adverts and feature films, and our guide Andrew, who was also a bush and microlite pilot, had often worked with the film crews.

‘Big Daddy”

One of the dunes is called ‘Big Daddy’, and some people will walk up it to see the ‘sand sea’ that surrounds it. Our party didn’t, it already being 30 degrees (it got up to over 40 degrees while we were there). Walking on shifting sand is very tiring, what with that one step forward and one step back feeling.

As you might expect, the dunes don’t have a lot of obvious life (though a later ‘Living Desert’ trip showed how deceptive this could be). However, where there are bushes there’s a surprising amount of bird and mammal life. This Nara plant (Acanthosicyos horridus) was providing shelter for a whole community of Xeric Four-Striped Rats. The plant is unusual in that it’s given up developing leaves altogether, to protect itself against water loss, and photosynthesizes via the stems instead. The roots of this plant can go down 100 metres in search of water. It’s a member of the melon and cucumber family, and the fruits are most unexpected – the pips are used to make an oil and are also tasty and widely eaten, giving the plant the alternative name of ‘butterpips’. Nara is also the name of the local people who live in this area.

Nara fruit (Photo by By Falcodigiada – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73116227)

Xeric Four-Striped Mouse (Rhabdomys pumilio)

Off we go, up a smallish dune, to get into Dead Vlei.

The route ahead!

Dead Vlei is a clay pan between the dunes, created when the local Tsauchab river flooded, leaving a series of lakes. These persisted long enough for camel thorn trees to grow, but as the lake dried up the trees died, probably about 1000 years ago. These days, just the dry stumps remain, and very atmospheric the area is too.

People come here to have their wedding photos done, trudging up the dunes in white lace or while wearing dinner jackets. There’s nowt so strange as folk.

As you might expect, there are a few ‘do’s and don’ts’, which a few will always ignore…

This really was an extraordinary place. Everyone managed to get this far, and we heard tales of how people used to land their small planes in this place, get out for a walk and then fly off somewhere else. Flying safaris are still much favoured by those rich enough to afford them – Namibia is a big country, and we certainly spent a lot of time on the road. But for me, travelling by road, at a relatively slow speed, means that you have a chance to appreciate what you see, and how the landscape changes.

And then, we sit under a tree for breakfast, and are joined by a whole flock of Cape Sparrows. They are particularly pleased when our guide Hano makes a little water bath for them out of a plastic bottle, which they then follow up with a dust bath. I suspect that most of us are feeling the need for a shower by now, but I have been bowled over by the sheer strangeness of the landscape that we’ve seen, and by the adaptations of the plants and animals who live there.

Female Cape Sparrow (Passer melanurus)

Male Cape Sparrow (Photo By Derek Keats from Johannesburg, South Africa –  CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34314295)

Sand dunes at Dead Vlei

Dear Readers, Namibia is a country with a wide range of diverse landscapes. To the north and west, it’s all about sand – the red dunes of Sossusvlei and the yellow dunes at Swakopmund. Inland there’s the Etosha national park, with acacia forests and ephemeral rivers and lakes. You can bake on the sand dunes, where the temperature is sometimes in the high 40s, or shiver in the damp of a coastal sea fog.

Namibia is one of the most sparsely-populated countries in the world – there are only 3 million people, giving it a density of less than 4 people per square kilometre. You can travel for hours without seeing another person. It also has the lowest rainfall of any country in sub-Saharan Africa. We were in the country at the beginning of the rainy season and saw two massive thunderstorms – I’ve never seen storms as impressive as those of southern Africa. But it is hard to take advantage of these downpours. We saw a fair amount of solar panels, and electricity is more reliable than in South Africa, where ‘load-shedding’ creates all sorts of problems for the people who live there.

Namibian Flag

Namibia was colonised by the Germans from 1884 to 1920, and their massacre of the local Herero and Nama people is considered to be the first genocide of the twentieth century. After the First World War, the country was handed over to South Africa, who applied the same apartheid regime that was used in South Africa itself. In 1991, Namibia gained its independence, and in 1994 the South Africans pulled out from the last remaining military base and port at Walvis Bay. Today, the country is considered to be a stable democracy but has extreme levels of inequality, with more than 400,000 people living in ‘informal housing’ aka shanty towns. Tribal people move into the towns in search of work, and some find employment in tourist areas – two Bushmen helped move our luggage at great speed when we were in Etosha, and there are often people looking for a few dollars at petrol stations and shopping centres.

Interestingly, while English is spoken widely, Afrikaans is the true lingua franca, spoken by both white and black people. One of our local guides spoke the ‘click’ language !Kung, which was fascinating to hear, and there are 11 recognised official languages. Our guides, Hano and Andrew, were both white Namibians, but they had good relationships with all the black guides and staff at the many places where we stopped, and were happy to bow to other people’s expertise. Namibia has recently gained its first ever woman president, and the people that we spoke to seemed optimistic that she would be able to address the issues around inequality, corruption and infrastructure that dog the country. I hope that they’re right!

The Chinese have been heavily involved in Namibia, as they have in many other parts of Africa – they seem to understand that virtues of ‘soft power’ in a way that the US and the UK have forgotten. There are a number of. major roads that have been built with Chinese help, and our plane from Windhoek to Johannesburg had lettering in English and Chinese. Namibia is rich in copper, uranium, diamonds and other resources, and offshore oil was discovered recently. Tourism accounts for about 15 percent of Namibia’s income, but trophy hunting accounts for about 14 percent of ‘tourism’ – many game parks are set up to allow people to shoot species such as various antelope, black rhino, lions and leopards and even ‘problem’ elephants. Driving around the country you can see the high ‘game fences’ which keep animals in, and the lower cattle fences which keep the cows in the ‘fields’. These also stop animals from moving about, which has resulted in some areas being inaccessible to elephants, the ecosystem engineers of the country. Andrew pointed out fields which had been completely taken over by acacia trees, which the cattle can’t eat – these would previously have been kept under control by elephants and other large grazing animals.

Acacia with oryx/gemsbok

So, we arrived in Windhoek on 5th November (after an overnight flight to Johannesburg and a two-hour flight to Windhoek), and, after an overnight stay at a very pleasant lodge where we could watch the weaver birds, we headed off towards the red desert at Sossusvlei. There were sixteen of us, plus guides, from all walks of life – a coroner, some teachers, someone with a PhD in plant ecology (hooray!), a catering manager, two farmers, a breeder of Fell Ponies, two people from Yorkshire, and lots of others besides. We had two land cruisers between us, and we were raring to go. So, tomorrow, let’s head off into the sand dunes and see what we can find….

Southern Masked Weavers outside the door (the dangling nests protect them from snakes)

Dear Readers, Dad died on 31st March 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic. I was allowed to stay with Dad in his room until he died, something I am so grateful for when I consider how many people couldn’t be with their loved ones to say goodbye. 

And from tomorrow, normal service will be resumed…..

Dear Readers, so here I am again, the only passenger on a train heading west to Dorset. As you might remember, my Dad was released from hospital to go back to the nursing home last week, and it seemed as if he might rally. But since then, things have gone downhill. Dad was heavily sedated in the hospital to prevent him from wandering around on what was, after all, a Covid-19 ward. The staff at the home were hopeful that when the sedation wore off he might be a bit more able to take his medication and to build up his strength. They wanted to give him a chance, because my Dad is a great bull of a man, and has been a fighter all his life. But the chest infection is not responding to antibiotics, and Dad is becoming more and more breathless and agitated. As you might know, breathlessness and anxiety can form their own circle of hell – you can’t breathe, so you become anxious, so you become more breathless. They have tried everything to break this cycle, but yesterday I spoke to the staff nurse, and we took the decision to return to morphine. Dad is no longer eating or drinking, and it seems as if all we can do now is make him comfortable, and ease his passage.

Having witnessed my mother’s passing, I know that dying is hard, physical work. I wanted the chance to sit vigil with him, to be there as a witness, but that’s unlikely to be possible, as there’s nowhere to stay overnight in Dorchester. Still, the home is letting me visit (once they’ve taken my temperature and gowned me up), so this is an unexpected boon, a second chance to see Dad and be with him. There is nothing left to say, but the chance to sit with a loved one on this last, longest journey is a privilege, and a gift.

Somehow, though, I don’t want to just remember Dad how he is now. So I thought I’d share a couple of memories of him in earlier, happier days. My earliest memory of Dad is of me washing his back when i was about six years old: we didn’t have a bathroom in our house when I was growing up, and so we took it in turns to wash in the kitchen sink. I remember how enormous his back seemed, and how he was always caramel-coloured: unlike the rest of us, he tanned in the first glimmer of sunlight. It was a shock when I washed his back more recently and I noticed how pale it was, and how the vertebrae formed little mounds in what had previously been a great prairie of brown skin.

At one point when we were growing up, Dad was working three jobs: at Fords, as a part-time postman, and running a market stall at the weekends. He also had an allotment, and some of my happiest memories are of helping him clear the waist-high weeds. He seemed omniscient to me: there wasn’t a plant that he didn’t know, a bird that he couldn’t identify. How an East End lad learned all this I have no idea, but he set a spark of interest in the natural world in me that has burned ever since. How proud he was of his cabbages and tomatoes, his strawberries and his runner beans! He would produce the food, and Mum would freeze it or preserve it or give it away to neighbours. Mum and Dad felt as if it was the pair of them against the world, and they turned to face it together, armed with nothing more substantial than a garden spade and a gigantic saucepan.

Dad left school at 14, and yet his intelligence and hard work was recognised at United Distillers, where he went from being a clerk to the dizzy heights of Overseas Distiller. This meant that he went to a country and made up a batch of ‘flavour’ to Gordon’s secret recipe (kept in a safe) which could then be diluted with spirit to provide gin for the next few months. His first job was in Venezuela, which he flew to in the teeth of a hurricane, and where he realised that the crash course in Castilian Spanish that he’d undertaken in London wasn’t a lot of help in South America. But still, he flourished. My grandmother was dismissive when Dad came home and said that he might be going abroad – she told my mother not to worry, as such jobs weren’t given to ‘people like Tom’. But there he was, and for the next few years he travelled to Spain, Jamaica and Venezuela. My cousin said that, when he was growing up, he thought of Dad as being a bit like James Bond, heading off to all corners of the world with his suitcase. Dad certainly made me think that a job with travel might be fun, and I followed in his footsteps with my love of jumping onto planes and going to places that no one normally went. He faced down his fear of flying, and had more adventures than I can remember – he was in Jamaica during a state of emergency, was knocked over by an earthquake in Venezuela, and would sometimes get stuck for months at a time if the ingredients for the flavour didn’t turn up. If you asked him, though, I think his favourite memory was of travelling First Class.

‘You can’t beat sipping a glass of champagne at take-off with Peter Wyngarde’ he used to say.

Dad was such a company man that if a pub didn’t sell Gordon’s Gin, he would walk out and find somewhere else. The highlight of his career came when he was fifty, and was put in charge of the Heritage Centre at the brand-new, state of the art bottling plant at Laindon in Essex. He would take parties of people from all over the world around the gin ‘museum’ that had been created, and then take them to the boardroom for lunch. He had a team of three young women working for him to act as guides, and he was never happier. Imagine, then, how heartbroken he was when, after the takeover of United Distillers by Diageo, he was taken aside for a ‘chat’.

‘Tom’, said the corporate raider who had been brought in to deliver the bad news, ‘How would you feel about taking early retirement?’

‘Don’t fancy it’, said Dad, who was no fool. ‘I’m enjoying my job, and there’s a good few years in me yet’.

‘You don’t understand’, he was told. ‘I’m not asking you, I’m telling you’.

In some ways, Dad never got over the shock, but he made the best of a bad job. He and Mum were pretty well provided for, and he started to make plans to move to Dorset as soon as he could persuade Mum.

Before they went west, however, there was a brief period when Dad and I used to have outings to a tapas bar at Liverpool Street. After a gin and tonic and a few glasses of wine we’d actually start to discuss things: how Dad felt about the job that took him to Spain and Venezuela and Jamaica, and the adventures that he’d had there. Then we’d round off with a couple of carajillos (strong black coffee with brandy in it) and stagger gently back to our respective partners.

One thing that he said really stayed with me. ‘I just want your Mum to be happy’, he said, one evening after a few glasses of Rioja. My Dad, my brother and I all adored Mum: we were like little planets orbiting her sun. But, in truth, it wasn’t always easy to keep my Mum happy. She suffered from depression all her life, but worse, she was one of those people who are completely unfiltered. So, if I made her pancakes, the lemon juice was always too cold. If I warmed it up, the sugar was too crunchy. If I replaced the granulated sugar with caster sugar, it made them too sweet. None of this was meant to be hurtful: what she said was just an observation, but it could be utterly exasperating.. I think Dad’s love of marathon sessions of Last of the Summer Wine were a reaction to listening to Mum’s stream of consciousness monologues, and were also a way of dealing with the helplessness that is engendered by listening to someone who is in chronic pain about which you can do not a thing.

I think that it is telling that, once in the home, Dad never watched Last of the Summer Wine again: he was much more interested in what was going on around him and, once Mum died, he no longer had to worry about her. His last year in the home has been so much better than I could ever have expected: he has been cheerful, engaged and really seemed to feel that he was at home. This, too, is a blessing.

None of this, though, is to take away from the ferocious love that Mum and Dad had for one another. For all the gripes, all the sighs and shaking of heads, they were inseparable. I believe that if Dad hadn’t had dementia, he wouldn’t have survived Mum’s passing, and there is no way that she would have managed without him. They were entangled like conjoined twins, and it was impossible to imagine them apart.

Dad could put his foot in it too – I once did a five-course dinner party for Dad, Mum and my brother, and Dad announced that he’d have been just as happy with egg and chips, at which point I burst into tears. Mum made him ring me later to apologise, and very contrite he was too. But now, all these years later, I recognise that he was right: what was important about those occasions was the chance for us to get together and talk, not the precision of the presentation or the complexity of the food. I have enjoyed meals at the nursing home with Dad as much as if they’d been Michelin-starred, because every visit has been precious. I remember thinking how grown-up I was back in the days of the dinner parties, but I wonder if we ever really do achieve the perfect degree of maturity, because I feel as if I’m finally an adult now, at sixty, and yet I wonder how I’ll feel, looking back, if I’m lucky enough to reach seventy.

Ah Dad. You did so much in your 84 years, and yet it’s never enough, is it. We fight so hard for one last sunrise, one last trip to the seaside, one last kiss. I so wanted another summer so we could go to Weymouth and I could push you along the seafront in your wheelchair, a Mr Whippee ice cream running down your arm. I wanted to find you another tapas bar and get you mildly drunk on carajillos. I suspect that you won’t go gently into that good night, and that your fight won’t make your last few days easy for you or for me. But it would be entirely in keeping with how you’ve lived your whole life, and so I’ll stand in the ring with you, for as long as I’m allowed.

Mum and Dad on their wedding day 61 years ago

Mum passed away on 18th December, 2018. 

Dear Readers I have been thinking a lot, lately, about the last things. During this past year I have watched so many things fall away from my parents, but these  events are rarely marked because we don’t realise that they are final at the time The last time that Dad was able to do the Guardian Quick Crossword. The last time that Mum was able to enjoy solid food. The last time that Mum could walk, or go to the toilet on her own, or enjoy ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. The last time that she said my name.

When I last reported on Mum and Dad’s progress, they had just moved into a nursing home, and Mum in particular was raging about what she considered her incarceration. It was a dreadful time. We didn’t have the care in place to send her home, and she was so ill that no amount of care would have been enough, but she was determined not to settle at the nursing home. On one occasion she called the police to get her out. She fought with the staff about everything from taking her medication to having a bath.

It is no exaggeration to say that I was in despair, though I was also secretly proud of her. She has a long tradition of being defiant. If there was a complaint to be made at a restaurant, or if an unfortunate scammer rang up to try to get her credit card details, she was ready for the challenge. One man who insisted that he was from Sky Television and wanted Mum to divulge her bank account number ended up calling Mum a ‘very nasty woman’ and putting the phone down in high dudgeon. Given her track record, there was no way that my mother was going ‘gently into that good night’.

Gradually, she got to know some of the nurses and to accept care from them. But it wasn’t long before Mum was sick again. She has an ailment called a pseudo-blockage, in which the whole of her digestive system comes to a halt, causing nausea, stomach pain and bloating. Sometimes this is a result of another disease such as cancer, or diverticulitis, or Parkinson’s disease, and sometimes it’s just a result of old age. Mum had five days in hospital, at the end of which time the hospital said that they could do nothing more for her, and that she was too frail for any investigative tests. She was sent back to the nursing home, and I went to visit her.

I saw one of the carers who had previously tried to look after Mum when she was at her feistiest.

‘She’s like a different woman’, said the carer. ‘She’s totally prepared to let me look after her now’.

‘Is that a good thing?’ I asked.

The carer squinted and considered.

‘No, ‘ she said. ‘Probably not’.

I went in to see Mum. Her head was bent to one side like a bud on a stalk. She was complaining about a head ache, and said that her arm hurt, and her neck hurt.

The nurse gave her some oral morphine. They were planning to use a morphine patch if Mum’s condition came back, which the hospital had assured them it would. And so, without even noticing, we were now into palliative care, which treats the symptoms of the severely ill whilst recognising that they will never get better.

Mum was still fairly lucid, but she was in pain. The doses of oral morphine came closer and closer together. There was talk of a patch that released morphine into the blood stream.

At one point, Mum opened her eyes and said

‘Someone is helping me’.

‘Who, Mum?’ I asked. I wondered if it was her mother, dead at 64 years old of a heart attack.

‘I don’t know’, said Mum, and closed her eyes again.

When I left Mum, I said ‘I love you’, as I always do.

‘I love you’, she said, and then, as I got to the door, ‘I love you’, again.

On Monday I get a call telling me that the pseudo-blockage has come back, that Mum is in increasing pain and that they are going to start Mum on a syringe driver that releases a regular amount of morphine directly into her bloodstream. The nurse tells me that this usually indicates that we are talking about weeks of life left, not months. It could even be days, though it’s difficult to say for sure.

On Wednesday I jumped onto the train to go to Dorchester to spend a few hours with Mum.

Mum hasn’t really eaten solid food since mid-July, and her face is returning to the planes and angles that it had when she was a young woman. Her skin is stretched thin over her cheekbones, and her cat-green eyes have a kind of febrile light, when they are open. Her mouth has fallen in and the nursing staff are using big, lemon-scented cottonbuds impregnated with glycerine to keep her lips and tongue from cracking. They wash her, and offer her milk which is the only food left that she can tolerate. They are like handmaidens caring for an elderly priestess. There is something stately about Mum now, something ancient as if carved out of stone.

At first, Mum is groaning, and Dad is trying to interpret the noises that she is making. The nurses come in to replace her morphine syringe and gradually the groaning stops. When Dad goes for lunch, I have a chance to sit and hold Mum’s hand.  I see her take three or four breaths and then pause for what seems an interminable time before taking the next one. I can  see the vibration of her labouring heart beneath her nightshirt.

People talk about a dying person ‘letting go’ or ‘giving up’, but it seems to me that what is going on is a tussle between the different parts of person, with some systems closing down and others wanting to hang on. It is complicated, this business, and different for everyone. It seems like hard, private work.

It is surprisingly quiet in the room – no nurses, no television, just the sound of birds in the tree outside. I tell Mum that I love her, that she is surrounded by so much love. I tell her that my brother and I will look after Dad if she’s not around. I tell her that my brother and I will look after one another too.

She squeezes my hand, though it could just be a spasm.

I tell her that I’m going to feel pretty bloody silly if next time I come in, she’s running around the room.

I cry a bit. And then all is peaceful again.

A week ago, Mum said ‘I love you’.  She said it twice. These might be the last words that I ever hear from her, because I sense that she is labouring away in some place too deep for words. But whatever happens next, those words will be enough.