The House

Welcome to the palace/botanical gardens! Well, maybe the house in Mazabuka is not quite that big but Judy and I have five bedrooms, not enough furniture to fill all the space and guava, mango and lemon trees in the garden which will be great when they in season (currently only the lemons are on the trees so they go well with drinking gin). The place is slowly feeling like home as it gets filled with colourful chitenge from the local market, which make great curtains. We also have various pets – some welcome and some that refuse to leave. There are plenty of harmless geckos, too many cockroaches despite attempts to kill them off, the odd frog, something – probably a mouse – that scampers across the ceiling, and a quite a large snake (longer than a metre so it looked big to me). The snake was killed by a neighbour after he found it creeping into their house which is within our compound during one night; a lucky escape.