After 'Darkest Africa' we have darkest winter. Only four weeks to the solstice then the days start to get longer again. That should be good.

I need to build up some enthusiasm to return to the garage in these dark and damp times. The Aprilia needs its fuel injectors cleaning, a job that needs good light which means good sunshine. Something a bit easier might be to give the Dominator a once over and take it for an MOT test. Maybe during the week, rain permitting.

So I've spent a little time with that other universal pastime (even more universal than working on five MOT tests per year), the ubiquitous box in the corner, the television.
I was disappointed to find, having settled in enough to locate the plug for the TV, and the remote control (it was four or five days before I reached that, like finally arriving at Lake Tanganyika again!) that when I pressed the 'Go' button, it actually worked. There was a picture!
I was rather hoping there wouldn't be. I had resolved some while ago, that if it didn't work, I wouldn't bother with a new TV licence nor TV and dispatch the whole lot to the final resting place of expired junk and domestic entertainment. It's an old TV and there was a good chance it would have ceased to function during its year of idleness, like the batteries in the remote control, my car, the front door bell, the bath taps and temporarily, the bikes in the garage. But no, it lives!
Is there anything to actually watch??
Are there men living on the sun??
About the same chances of both of those I think.

But there's always a DVD or two and I have plenty of time to find the remote control for that and the hefty instruction book.

(Margin note: being in a bit of a daze for quite a while, I found myself bouncing between jobs, wondering "what can I do that doesn't involve unpacking or going out into this strange dark weather?" Well, from time to time in the distant past I've looked around to see if a DVD of Cannery Row has been released. I always thought it a bit strange that there wasn't one.
And what do you know? While I was away, a DVD was released in the UK! (Early 2009 in the US). So I could take a break from all the unwelcome unpacking work and watch that. And memories of Lambert's Bay flooded back.
Which leads me to point out, that the 'best restaurant in Lambert's Bay' that I mentioned, on the corner of the fish-meal factory, was definitely a restaurant. You need to have seen the film to understand that........)

I had bought a Nick Sanders' DVD a short while before departure last year, about one of his many round-the-world motorcycle journeys, the one he calls 'Parallel Worlds'. This one was an attempt to make some sort of sense of all his travelling and record attempts by undertaking a RTW trip that was neither the fastest ever nor the shortest distance. It was the opposite, zig-zagging around the globe to make the journey as long as possible.
I bought it because his Egypt to Cape Town route was similar to ours, but on a Yamaha R1 sports/racing bike, with sports tyres rather than the more conventional (many would say essential) off-road knobblies.
The Cairo to Nairobi section was entertaining, as was the description of his luggage (tiny, and 80% of it being camera gear). Also, the scenes showing exactly how he does all his filming while travelling completely alone with no back-up whatsoever.
One result of my purchase was, I now receive emails of his current exploits. The latest being an attempt to beat the record for the fastest journey from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, South America. Unfortunately, and unusually, this ended in failure. But on his blog he says that his blow-by-blow account of the attempt will become a bit autobiographical, to make sense of things.

So, as its dark outside, already, at 4:10pm....................

Yes, we have scaffolding up the outside at the moment, to replace all the external timberwork.

Compare that with western Kenya, in its winter:

Is that summer, somewhere in the world, that I hear calling?

............................ and there's no motorbiking activity to report on, that's a cue to ramble about a manager I was sent to see during the early days of my apprenticeship with the telephone company. He ran the workforce charged with repairing underground cables, and I was sent there for a couple of months to learn about it.
"Look," he said, instead of telling me about the work and skills of his team.
"I'm writing a book about my time in the GPO. Let me read you the latest piece I've written. Tell me what you think of it."
I couldn't really make head nor tail of it, having only just left school a few months before.

But I learned in those early days that writing an autobiography was not an uncommon pastime amongst many older telephone engineers.
But they had one significant, if ironic, advantage. They had been telecoms engineers during the War, and that IS an interesting story.

As an example, a colleague I worked with much later was having a clearout and found an old technical journal given to him by someone years before.
"Take a look at this," he said.
Inside was an account written by the telephone exchange manager on the island of Jersey during WWII. He was, effectively, a prisoner of war during the island's occupation by the Nazis.
At the end of the War, he unexpectedly found himself the most high-ranking 'public-service' worker in Jersey, so it fell to him to accept the surrender of the German commander and take over the government (very temporarily) of the island.
So he writes, ".....I decided to ignore my house-arrest and the guards in the street and walk past them to the Germans' HQ...... .....Having accepted the commander's salute, and shaken his hand, I went immediately to the telephone exchange (from which he had been barred throughout the occupation) where I collected all keys, documents, tools and belongings from the German technicians, escorted them all off the premises, and secured all the doors and windows. The Germans were very polite and co-operative, giving no trouble at all."

Another colleague, tasked with teaching me how to test long distance lines and how to handle the faults, had an account that he definitely considered not to be a story of any sort of heroism.
His job years before had been to repair faults at customers' premises. He was on night duty and was travelling through Epping Forest (north-east London) to an emergency call. On the deserted and dark road, the engineers' van he was driving, in all its 'GPO Telephones' green livery, was overtaken and stopped by a police car.
"Hello, hello, hello. Do you know what the speed limit is along here?"
You know the sort of stuff - and yes, he was exceeding it.
"Look," said my colleague. "There's a line fault at the Civil Defence Observation Post in the forest and there's an air-raid on. Surely you heard the sirens?"
"There's no other traffic, everyone's in their air-raid shelters, do you really need me to stick to the speed limit?"
Well, yes. they did, and gave him a ticket, a fine and an endorsement in his licence. Sadly, to that day (about twenty five years later and still working in the same telephone exchange across the road from the same police station), he never had a good word to say about the police.

Finally, I worked for a few years with another 'Ken' on radio comms services. I was his boss when he retired. So it was my job to 'introduce' him at his retirement party, say something about his career and pass on the company's thanks for all the work he had done. It was also custom and practice to dig around a little in his history to find out the 'dark side' of his career. What were the big mistakes? The wrong cable cut open? The stereo turntables and amplifiers constructed in the company's workshops, maybe in the company's time? All that sort of harmless stuff.
That required a delve into his personnel records and chats with his past workmates. But I had an advantage, because his much younger brother also worked for the company.
So I was armed with stories of Ken's career going back a long way. But could find no dark secrets.
At the retirement do I said my piece and invited others to offer their recollections of working with him.
Straightaway a young technician who had worked closely with Ken for a long time announced,
"You've left out a very important episode. One of Ken's jobs before selling fire extinguishers or becoming a telephone engineer was as a merchant seaman."
"He sailed on the North Sea supply convoys to Russia during the War. Those convoys came under attack many times in the far North!"
Well, that was a revelation to say the least. I looked at Ken's brother, who looked as surprised as me, and later I approached him.
"I never knew any of that. I don't think Ken has told anyone in the family about that, he certainly never told me!"
Learning we had something of a hero in our midst turned that into quite a retirement party.

Back to The Journey. I've constructed a complete route map from Istanbul to Agulhas, courtesy of Google Earth. Here it is:

Yes, all this shows you is that there's an awful lot of Africa still to see.

I've been having quite intense but short-lived longings to be somewhere back in Africa. Featured places include Kericho and Bungoma in Kenya, central Tanzania and Zimbabwe. But I'm still here, and have learnt that this website has had a bit of an upgrade recently. Bigger photos are now possible, so I've re-done the recent postings with larger pictures, and it seems to look a whole lot better.
The larger photos now go back as far as Namibia (use the list of countries on the right hand side to go straight there).
You can judge for yourself.
I'll continue the process, going back through the postings, as and when I get a round tuit.