Cleaning!

Hi Jen and Nic, Claire and Dan - good to hear you're all so well.

Jen, it's not the cooking you have to worry about while Mary's away but the washing up, cleaning the baths and basins, the toilets, the walls and windows, etc... Hope you can get by! There are courses on this kind of thing but alternatively, get Nic to do that bit while you take the kids out for a McHappy Meal!!

When we came back to Europe after eight years in Africa the concept of doing it all ourselves was not one we relished, although Seno (our maid in Botswana) never did more than slice vegetables on the cooking side. Cooking is not the forte of the vast majority of Batswana, (though they do a good side line in dried mophane worms and termites); but when it comes to cleaning floors she was tops. We would still love her to be with us, not just because she did all the elbow work for a hundred quid a month, but because Seno was more a treasure than an employee - a real diamond of Africa. She was both a friend for us and an auntie for the girls. She could make us laugh one minute and cry the next. She always tilted our pictures to show she had dusted the frames as all the maids in Orapa seem to do if they have been in service for as long as Seno had been! Ah! Such cherished memories evoke feelings of tenderness that tears cannot wash away! Sob, sob.

Still, life goes on and its looking pretty good here too. Blue skies, beautiful mountains...it must have been 23 or 24 today and the job is proving to have plenty of challenges to keep it interesting. I have considered taking up plumbing or plastering on more than one occassion this week!

Nice picture of Nic. Are those pyjamas, ol' boy? I reckon they got you out of bed!