July 2

In the morning we go to a friend's house.  She is a maths teacher, although she does not work at the  moment, and she helps Sian with her maths whilst I help her children with English.  Her children are very bright and do not need help with English at all, but it makes me feel better, thinking I am doing something for her in return for the help she gives Sian.  

My friend is very generous and gives us two bars of chocolate when we leave.  One is a bar of chilli flavour Lindt and the other is a bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk.  I cannot even recall the last time I ate good quality chocolate.  Sometimes I buy a Pascal Nut Log or Mint Crisp (the ones apparently made with pigs' blood) and that is considered a treat.

In the afternoon, I take Sian horse-riding and afterwards we go for a bit of a drive.  I have had this yearning to carry on down the road to where we used to live at How Mine, but I know it's too far and a bit pointless, so we just drive to what we used to call Wagon Wheels.  Just near here there used to be a small cricket club called Stragglers.  It was very busy at the weekends and people would come from town to play.  Now, it appears to be part of a farm. There is a turning to the right which my mum always used to say would go to Hope Fountain, one of the oldest missions, although I don't ever remember going there.  My French teacher lived on the corner and she invited us to her house one Saturday.  I don't remember much about it except that it was winter and she had horses.  We drive past the farm and it looks very run down.

I reckon that if we take the turning to Hope Fountain we will eventually get on to Bulawayo Drive and then be able to take the Burnside road back home.  However, the road becomes narrower and narrower until it is just a track.  I really don't feel like having a puncture or being lost out here so we turn around and come home.

The road seems to be crowded with memories.  At one turn, I can remember my dad going to fetch my grandparents to stay the weekend with us; on another piece of road, I remember an accident we had on the way to the drive-in.  Petrol was not a big issue back in those days and we would often drive from the mine on one side of Bulawayo to Matopos on the other for a picnic.  When we were in school plays, we attended every rehearsal, whatever time it finished.  

So many memories but so much has gone.  Sian cannot believe my French teacher lived in what now looks like a ruin and that people actually drove out of town to play cricket in what now appears to be a field. Sometimes it is better not to revisit the past.