October 3

Luckily, our guests are quite unperturbed by the lack of electricity. They spent yesterday at the Railway Museum and are off to Matopos today.  Hopefully, the electricity will be back on by the time they return.

The weather is still grim, but it is supposed to clear by eleven o'clock.  A heatwave is expected this weekend.  Looking at everyone in jumpers, jackets, coats and thick Arctic boots, this seems a very unlikely scenario.  

By lunchtime, the sky has cleared and it is a beautiful day.  The electricity is still off at home. In Zimbabwe, I have found that phone calls fall into the following categories according to the message you receive on dialing:

1. This phone number is unreachable - This is the worst.  You may as well have phoned some random number or used a toy telephone.  The person you are dialing is not interested in talking to you but would like to make it appear that they are in a remote part of the world engaged in some mysterious activity rather than tell you to your face.

2. User Busy - Do not get too excited if you receive either an engaged signal or a message that the user is busy.  They can be busy for hours, days and weeks on end.  However, the sense of disappointment is not as brutally final as 'this phone is not reachable'.  There is hope.

3. Ringing tone - Again, don't your hopes up.  Many numbers can just ring and ring.  One imagines large, empty rooms with only the sound of a ringing phone breaking the silence.  This is how I imagine ZESA Faults on many an occasion. Ultimately, there is nothing quite like those words: 'Hello, can I help you?'

When I finally do get through to ZESA, the man I speak to, promises to find out what is going on and get back to me.  Again, he takes my number.  I mark books all afternoon.  Sometimes, I think I was born to mark books. It is my reason to be.  An hour and a half later, I get hold of ZESA again.  The man I initially spoke to has gone home (without phoning me back) and the new guy is skeptical.  He doubts that the electricity will be restored today but promises that they will 'try' for tomorrow. This is not good news, especially as the inverter is now completely dead.

At 5pm, I go and fetch Sian from school and on the way back we stop at the new Pick n Pay at Ascot.  It has recently been refurbished and is now a sea of shiny surfaces, large fridges and signs demarcating the Deli, the Bakery and the Winery.  We are unimpressed; we liked the old TM. Sian is going to Harare for swimming and waterpolo tomorrow so I need to buy her some food to take with.  I usually buy her snacks and give her some money to buy larger meals,  However, we have been told that a simple egg roll costs $50 in Harare (that's our week's cash allocation from the ATM).  As we do not have cash, and as she does not have Ecocash on her phone, I have to buy her a weekend's worth of food to take with.

On the way home, the traffic lights on Cecil Avenue flick on and off and eventually stay on.  Sian gets excited: perhaps this is a sign that the electricity is back. She's right, it's back on  - except in the cottages where it is still off. Thinking the cottages must have run out of electricity (they are on a separate cicuit to us), I try to buy ZESA online but am told that 'this page cannot be reached'.  I shout to Sian that I am going down to the shops to try and get electricity, grab my bag and am just about to jump in the car when I realise that the electricity is back in the cottages. Mind games, that's all it is.  Mind games.

John comes home.  He tells me he has a part in the pantomime.  I tell him he already has a part in a pantomime - Zimbabwe, The Musical.  At least in this one, he is a king, he replies.  Even if he does die at the end of Act two.