What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.