Africa

Nairobi Eastleigh, the Somali quarter in Nairobi, was a scene from Blade Runner but in African Islamic dress. Muezzin calls to prayer bounced off canyons of rickety concrete towers. My friends led me through the bazaar of smuggled electronics, perfumes, truck tyres, gold dealers and money changers. In this monsoon version of Harrods, I imagined you could buy whatever came to mind: Tehran’s uranium, a live Quagga, Ovid’s lost work Medea or an intact Spitfire. That great Arabist Tim Mackintosh-Smith, writing about the souks in Yemen, observed that he probably saw his old school blazers in among the piles of secondhand clothes there – and it was like that. One just has to ask in Eastleigh, the biggest market in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Kenya When a mob of Somali cattle I bought in Kenya’s far north arrived on the farm in February, we quarantined them in a remote corner. To protect them against lions they slept in a boma with high drystone walls topped with treacherous thorns, guarded by a fierce police-licenced guard named Joseph. The Somalis are great stockmen, though these beautiful beasts, known as Awai, are more long-legged and rangy than our traditional ranch Borans. My lorryload of cattle had survived a two-year drought on rocks and dust and they could walk hundreds of miles to water, yet they were randy and highly fertile. These are ancient cattle, of the sort that you see in petroglyphs and ochre painted on rock faces across Africa. I have fallen in love with them.

Kenya While we were loading two stud bulls and eight hoggets onto a lorry in my ranch’s yard in the African dawn this morning, the farmer buying them saw my bandaged right hand and asked with great concern: ‘Ooh my brother! Did you injure yourself handling your cattle?’ Kenyans are by nature warm and kind. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said standing in an honest expanse of cow shit. ‘It was no accident. Just an operation to straighten out my fingers.’ ‘Do you find it tiresome to drive?’ asked a ranching neighbour at an ebullient lunch overlooking the wilderness towards Mount Kenya this afternoon. ‘No, but it’s tricky if I try to shoot in the general direction of a monkey raiding the garden.

Cape Town As a young FT stringer in Dar es Salaam in the 1980s, I used to hang out with South African guerrillas from rival factions who, instead of waging war against apartheid, spent their energies fighting each other over stolen cars and quaalude-smuggling, or party-ing hard. In our late-night drinking sessions, these Marxist cadres happily taught me, a white son of colonialism, a chant that went: ‘One Settler! One Bullet! SETTLER, SETTLER! BULLET, BULLET!’ It was so hot on those evenings in Dar that we used to take turns climbing into our flat’s chest freezer to cool off for a few minutes. It was quite a thing to see a Zulu bursting out of it like a jack-in-the-box, singing revolutionary anthems.

Kenya An unexpected subplot in the ending of my marriage has been the loss of dear old friends. It came as no surprise that a hot flush of middle-aged women took sides, ensuring that certain west London postcodes felt like enemy territory. The end of a comradeship that had survived wars and the deaths of colleagues across 34 years, however, was a terrible blow. A friend of 30 years who decided to circulate secretly photographed images of me with my girlfriend enjoying sundowners at a bar came as a surprise. With another, a terminal chain reaction that began with a tiff over a cattle trough reminded me of Gogol’s story about the two friends called Ivan who have a lifelong falling out after one Ivan calls the other Ivan a goose.

Pop stars rock on nowadays into their seventies. And jockeys too – despite the physical dexterity and instant-decision-making required – are lasting longer. Jimmy Quinn and Franny Norton only quit the saddle in their mid-fifties; Joe Fanning is still going strong at 55. On a sweltering Ascot day recently I enjoyed a chat with John Egan, who was handling the heat better than much younger rivals and is still in demand at 56. Remembering past successes, including the Irish 2000 Guineas on Indian Haven, July Cups on Les Arcs and Passive Pursuit and an Ebor Handicap on 100-1 shot Mudawin, I asked if there was a particular race he still hankered after winning. Egan smiles easily but the answer was a pistol shot: ‘I want to win them all.