The New Forest

I'm standing outside Soup Vintage in Lymington - it had just stopped raining, and so I'm a bit rained-on and windblown. Didn't find anything to take home with me (lots of 70s polyester), but it was a lovely shop. We had a cup of coffee at The Buttery down the road, where the scones were like little boulders. We gamely swallowed them down anyway (stiff upper lip and all that. They could easily have been used as battle scones by Discworld dwarfs), and I think they might lodge in our small intestines until we are very, very old.

LOML was much better today (thanks for the get-well wishes), and so we meandered about the New Forest, stopping at various little towns along the way: Lymington, Brocklehurst and Beaulieu, among others.
We saw dozens of New Forest ponies grazing at the roadside, and stopped to photograph a few. I tried to entice one to eat from my hand, but it ignored me. Rather ostentatiously, in fact. It kept turning its back on me and looking away, as if we had had an embarrassing one-night-stand several months ago and it was pretending it didn't recognise me.


P.S. Happy birthday to BestFriendAlly! She is twenty-two today. Sorry I can't be there, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Rambling about England

Another day in England! It has been so lovely spending time with my family, and it's so good to be back in the country that is really the closest thing I have to a home.

This is where I was born. My mum moved in with my grandparents after my father died, and they are like a second set of parents to me. We moved back to Zimbabwe when I was four, but we visited every year.

I lived here again for a few months when I was fifteen, in 2000. My parents sent me overseas when the violence against whites in Zimbabwe was at its height. They stayed behind. I had almost no notice - it was the school holidays, I remember, and I was still finishing my art portfolio for the next term. Another white farmer was murdered, someone we knew, and my parents booked a ticket to England for me the next day. I said a hurried goodbye to all my friends, was pulled out of school, and left the country. At that point, I did not think I would be coming back. I lived here with my grandparents, calling my parents whenever I could (and whenever the phone lines were working). Despite all the worry about people back home, I remember it as one of the happiest times in my life. I wrote my first 'proper book' here, the one that was published in Zimbabwe a couple of years later. I had much greater independence, as well, because it was safe for me to walk into the village and take buses (in Zimbabwe we were very much confined within our security fences, and it wasn't safe to go out on one's own). I did go back to Zimbabwe, in the end, but to the International School instead of the local one. My family stayed here again for a couple of months in 2002, when we left Zimbabwe for good. It was a chance to rest and catch our breath before we left for New Zealand.

Anyway, this country has always been a safe haven for me, and I feel more comfortable here than anywhere else in the world. Even Zimbabwe - although I spent thirteen years of my life there, it was as unpredictable as it was beautiful, and I didn't feel the same sense of security. It's really good to be back.

The other Christchurch

Looking a bit awkward here - passers-by were staring! Today we drove into Christchurch - the sister city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Even the rivers that run through both cities have the same name - the Avon. Christchurch is one of my favourite places, and it's where a lot of my early memories are set. One of the things I love most about England is all the history, and Christchurch is a great example of that - the Priory is a thousand years old. I still can't quite wrap my mind around that. Every building, road and hedgerow in England is criss-crossed with myths, poetry, history and legends. You can read the landscape like a book. In a way, as a writer, this is intimidating. How do you write about a landscape that so many others have littered with their words before you, over thousands of years? I greatly admire the British writers who have brought something new to the literature of the islands, but I'm glad to be from a place that is still relatively new in artistic terms. Well, Zimbabwe and New Zealand both are (comparatively).

I explored the eight or nine wonderful charity shops on the High Street, and came away with a great haul of two dresses and a skirt. I'd show them to you, but they're in the wash as we speak - my grandmother was very worried about cooties. Or something. LOML and I visited the ruins of Christchurch Castle, and managed to take a couple of photos before the ominous clouds soaked us with rain.