The Racer

I remember at a young age reading a book that  may have been called the Racer. The subject was the world of professional car racing but I can't remember the plot probably because at eight years old the events  were not relevant. I have always remembered one motif: when cars go wrong it is always the electrics. At the end of the book as the protagonist drives his sports into the world beyond the book he notices that the dashboard reading light has failed, he muses : It is always the electrics that go wrong.

The eye infection which had threatened my sight in the last days I spent in Zanzibar was the prelude to a decline in sight which four years later has made the outside world become opaque, with ghosted images. These are the normal processes of ageing and I am sixty now.

I had expected in all the years I spent in Tanzania to return to my discreet flat in Wandsworth, London. I did not do that for financial circumstance and other sadness.  I went instead to live in Sandwich, Kent.