Hot desk

With Gugs away on leave this week, the feelers I put out to others about working around the same desk have paid off. I spent the afternoon working at the house of friends Sophie and Gildas, both marine conservationists who met when Sophie went to live in Madagascar, where Gildas is from. Sophie is my colleague and we share an exact birth date. Birthday buddies, which I informed her mother about once, perhaps too evocatively.

Of course after the working day was over and because dreaming about travel is occupying any spare brain cell at the moment, I mined them for thoughts on Madagascar as we drank cold beer in their garden and tried to stave off sweating in the very warm evening air. If I manage to get back to Southern Africa by the end of the year (please lawd say it will be so) I shall not be travelling far from that region for the foreseeable. Madagascar jumps out as a place to visit if we’re all using up excess leave over Christmas, or if I fancy some wild 20-hour bus journeys (which I do).