While sitting on the stoep moaning about life’s difficulties (after a communal reading of the Sunday newspapers with each other’s reading glasses and acid commentary on its content, and especially the price of food nowadays), our old friend’s eyes closed as if in prayer. We respectfully shut up, thinking that he was in conversation with the Higher Order, but then he opened them up and said with a heavy sigh: “I so long for my mother’s lightly curried tripe!” I replied that I would rather eat freshly mown kikuyu grass than the organs and other odds and sods just before the tail end of any food animal
