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

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

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

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

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

The only political party with a serious chance of winning office I will ever vote for again is the one which acknowledges that in all probability and at least for a while it will increase taxes. Every party piles up promises that they will be the ones to get Britain working again. But building power stations, reservoirs and schools costs money. So does hiring doctors and nurses, filling potholes and getting trains to run on time. Some claim they will finance their plans by creating growth, some by taxing the rich. Then voters discover that the growth fairy remains elusive and the rich have been re-defined to include them: public

Rwanda It had been more than 30 years, yet I recognised the church and its surroundings instantly. Superimposed on the tidy green sward of today, I recalled the rags, shoes and corpses I saw here in May 1994. There are gaps in my memories of Rwanda. But the parts I do recall are explosively vivid, as if branded on my retina, like those people outside the church. They’d lost heads and limbs and every-body was dead, but the scene was alive. I could see and hear their last moments. A woman lay in my path, on her back with her gingham skirt hitched up around her thighs. Not much flesh

Laikipia, Kenya When I was eight I used to go fishing in the Indian Ocean beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar with Mohamed. Once we pulled out a fish with a domed forehead and a sailfin – a filusi. In Spanish it’s known as the dorado, referring to its iridescent golden flanks. As we watched the fish suffocate in the tropical air, its pigment, sheathed with a patina of stippled green, was transfigured for a brief instant like a beam of sunshine on a church mosaic. Then the dorado’s brilliance faded, and by the time Mohamed picked up his knife and sliced open her belly, removed the guts and tossed the

Billy Connolly once declared that Scotland had only two seasons: June and winter. Perversely, though, just as the northern swallows are setting their alarm clocks and checking departure times for Cape Town and Johannesburg, it has become the Oakley tradition to head for the Isle of Mull. In recent years the accompanying essentials, Mrs Oakley, a case of good wine, long wellies and a surf-addicted flat-coat retriever, have been supplemented by author Felix Francis sending me in late August his latest forthcoming ‘Dick Francis novel’.  When Motivator won in 2005 he had more owners than any Derby winner in history – 230 of them Racing’s continuance owes much to partnerships

Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.’ Ascot’s Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup, a team contest in which four teams of three international jockeys, one of them restricted to female riders, compete for points on randomly drawn horses, is going the same way. In this month’s contest the Ladies team, led as usual by everybody’s favourite girl next door Hayley Turner and including Yorkshire’s Joanna Mason, won for the fourth time in six years. Hayley herself triumphed in two of the six races and for the third time collected the Alistair

We are blessed these days with a rare stream of jockey talent including the likes of William Buick, Ryan Moore, Tom Marquand and Rossa Ryan. Well clear of the pack though in the chase for the jockeys championship is former champion Oisin Murphy, and five minutes in the winners’ enclosure rather than on the track left me convinced at Newbury last Saturday that if I still had shares in a horse, Oisin would be the one I’d want riding it – and not just because of the two trebles he notched up last week. Successful trainer Hugo Palmer wasn’t in evidence but surrounded by a gaggle of owners after the

Laikipia, Kenya This month, in broad daylight on our Kenyan farm, a lioness mauled one of my bull calves. Before she could make a kill, a quick-witted herder intervened and drove the beast off. My son Rider loaded the injured calf into the pickup and brought it home, where he gently cleaned the tooth and claw wounds, then injected the poor creature with antibiotics and a painkiller. Big cat injuries go bad fast, but we all felt cheered that the calf, to my mind a future champion Boran bull, had survived and might pull through. The next morning the calf got to his feet and suckled his mother. What a

Laikipia, Kenya By the time I set off from the farm before dawn we’d had 22in of rain in the past month. At the bottom of the valley I saw in the headlights that our lugga, or seasonal watercourse, had become a roaring torrent of brown water after yet another downpour overnight. If I tried to cross the Landcruiser would be swept away in the flood. This rainy season the land has become a sea of mud, with a thousand streams of water splashing down from the plains, our days and nights serenaded by bullfrogs. Normally I would stay put, give up on any travel and wait it out. There

Kenya Hannes became a professional hunter because, as he says in his fine book Strange Tales from the African Bush, he missed ‘the smell of cordite… the clatter of the helicopters and the memory of the blood brotherhood that few, other than soldiers under fire, are lucky enough to know’. He’s a 14th generation white African and a veteran of the famous Rhodesian Light Infantry that fought valiantly in that country’s civil war. He still loves Africa and lives in the Western Cape. When he visited our beach house on the Kenya coast, I managed to persuade him to tell me a few stories, fuelled with bottles of Tusker –

Laikipia Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat and weekend football. In northern Kenya we brew a honey mead called muratina; then there’s a millet beer and strongest of all is a moonshine, changa’a, which you can smell from several huts away and it tastes like battery acid. Our neighbour Gilfrid produced an alcohol so pernicious the hangover hit as soon as it crossed one’s tongue Booze soaks into the corners of life in the village or the slum. I’ve been in places, on paydays for example, where the scenes resemble Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s tableaux of peasants