alert

Living in a time of cholera forces you to be familiar with details you'd normally rather not know.

When Tommy (who helps with the gardening and odd jobs) turns up at the gate and announces he's got a runny stomach, I'm immediately on my guard.

"When did it start?" I say. Bad cases of cholera can kill within six hours.

"Is it white?" Cholera can land you with watery white discharge, like rice water. I didn't know that a month or two ago.

'It' started yesterday and 'it' is not white, so I judge that Tommy's probably not got cholera. Still, I hand over six of the precious Intetrix tablets I've been saving.

When I was first sent to Zimbabwe seven years ago, a Paris doctor handed me a tube of muscle rub, a vaccination for yellow fever and tetanus, Lariam tablets for malaria (which gave me sweat-soaked hallucinations in the plush Meikles Hotel and were totally unnecessary: there's no malaria in Harare in June) and a packet of red and white Intetrix capsules. I lost the box but kept the capsules. Ten days or so ago I googled Intetrix to find the drug can be used against cholera.

They might be seven years old but this Christmas in Zimbabwe, those Intetrix capsules are worth their weight in gold.

sandwiches

"What would you like in your sandwich Audrey?" my son asks. Audrey, 6, is the granddaughter of Mai Agnes, our cleaner. She's come to stay for a couple of weeks. My four-year-old adores her.

There's a short silence.

"Rice and chicken and polony," says Audrey hopefully. Rice and chicken are once-a-year delicacies, traditionally enjoyed at Christmas by the Shona.

"We don't have those," says my son. You bet we don't. At 50 million new dollars a loaf (and rising) bread is a delicacy in this household, like most in Zimbabwe. The half-loaf on offer today is a day old at least.

Pacified with apricot jam, the pair of them are soon drawing and sticking imported gold stars at the table (on torn-out pages of old reporters' notebooks. I'm banking on Audrey not being able to decipher my very scribbled notes).

"Look, Mummy," he says happily. "Audrey and me have got exactly the same fingerprints."

fine

"Your mother's name?" the policeman asks my husband.

We're being fined. Mozambican traffic police have a terrible reputation for jumping out from behind the mango trees on lonely roads. This time though, they didn't even jump. They were waiting on the wide exit road from Beira, stopping every car in turn.

The officer checks my husband's driving licence. He checks our Temporary Import Permit. He checks the piece of paper that says my husband has permission to drive the car outside Zimbabwe. He checks his passport. In the end he runs out of papers to check so he tries the windscreen wipers. He moves to the back of the car and orders my husband to flash the indicators. The brakelights. Triumphantly the policeman returns to the driver's window: "Back brake does not work," he says.

"Bet it does," I say grimly. I'm flat on the backseat, panting in the midday sun. My son is stuffing raisins -- a rare treat -- into his mouth. "What's the policeman saying, Mummy?"

Living in Zimbabwe, it's been difficult to convince my son that policemen are the nice helpful Mr Plod-types I was brought up to believe in. I have tried. When he is older, I'll tell him (or maybe I won't) that he played with Lego on the backseat of our Toyota as riot police let off teargas near Zimbabwe's ruling party headquarters. "Keep looking at me," Mummy said cheerily as she caught a glimpse of someone being beaten yards from the passenger seat window. "Next time we leave him with Granny," I hissed at my husband.

Now in Mozambique, a policeman is fining us 1,000 metacais (about 40 US) and he wants to know Granny's name?

Come to think of it, Granny does have a theory about traffic cops and Christmas...

ps

Rhodes paid his Oxford bedder in uncut diamonds. That's what it looks like, anyway. Cecil John Rhodes (who the Tabex Encyclopedia Zimbabwe 1987 diplomatically refers to as a "businessman and politician" though any mention of his name in Zimbabwe today provokes a hiss of horror from the authorities) went up to Oriel in 1873 after he'd made his fortune in Kimberley, South Africa. According to a paper by G.N. Clark*, a former provost of Oriel, Rhodes' college bedder (scout) William Hodge claimed Rhodes used no cheque book. Instead, he financed himself by selling uncut diamonds "which he carried, after the manner of diamond traders, in screws of paper distributed among his various pockets." Apparently Hodge begged him to stop, worried that he'd be blamed if one of the diamonds went missing. "He begged in vain," wrote Clark.

*Cecil Rhodes and His College, G.N.Clark, Heritage Publication No.2, 1982, History Society of Zimbabwe.

language lessons

"I don't know how you say this in English," the doctor says. "But you must say it in Portuguese: trinta e três. And again. And again."

I have a degree in French and Italian. I did a short Spanish course during my lower-sixth year. I joined a Russian evening class for a few ambitious weeks in Boulogne-Billancourt, during a dreary winter teaching businessmen English. During my seven years in Zimbabwe, I've picked up some Shona (not nearly as much as I'd like). I know a few words of Ndebele. But Portuguese? This is my first lesson.

I'm sitting behind a screen on a doctor's couch in Beira on the Mozambican coast, stripped to my waist. The doctor is impossibly young. It strikes me that I have reached an age (mid-30s, mind you, no older) when a doctor can look impossibly young. He's from upcoast, the city of Nampula, he tells us proudly.

"You should go there, for your next holiday," he says as he taps my chest. "Maputo is the biggest city, then Beira, then Nampula."

"Trinta e três, trinta e três, trinta e três," I answer, feeling slightly ridiculous.

Apparently tickbite fever needs no translation.

implosion

We saw the wedding procession as we turned up our road. A stream of ribbon-bedecked BMWs, Pajeros, bakkies with guests crammed into the backs. Pink and white balloons floated on the bonnets. Through a passenger window, I caught a glimpse of the groom and his attendants, smiling in black suits. DJ and dance music boomed through our suburb all afternoon, shattering a quiet Saturday. Zimbabwe implodes?

crisis

Brown water = no clean clothes. "I've run out of underwear," he says. I look up guiltily. I raided his pile last time.

"Look," I say, rummaging. This is a crisis, after all. "Have my last one. At least it's clean though it is a bit - "

Bitty. And flowery. We start to laugh.

"No ways," he says. "And if I ever did, it would be just my luck: I'd get arrested with J and A and the police'll make us strip down to our underwear and J and A will say they always suspected..."

Only in Zimbabwe do you have to worry about things like that.

last bath

The black dustbin outside our Harare flat has disappeared. Caretaker George apologises. "I'm using it to keep water in," he says. It's a cheap option: taking advantage of this week's citywide water-cut, some vendors are selling small chigubus (containers) for 30 US -- a fortune for most Harare residents. The water was trickling back into our pipes Wednesday morning. It's ominously brown. Since then the pipes have wheezed and whistled as the pressure drops and mounts. In the Zimbabwean capital these days, you're never quite sure if this bath is going to be your last.

blood diamonds

These are bad blood diamonds, Mutare's Manica Post newspaper says.

An abnormally high number of gwejas (dealers) and gwejarine (female dealers) have been killed in car crashes. When a gweja died (this was before Operation No Return) the whole of Mutare came to a standstill as the surviving gwejas plus the odd ruling ZANU-PF party official drove slowly round the city centre in their Pajeros and Hummers, tail-lights flashing in a final ghoulish lap of honour.

The Manica Post says the stones are cursed.

Of course, it might just be that the gwejas (most of whom were previously economically-marginalised) simply bought their driving licences and never actually learnt how to drive.

definitions

When is a beating not a beating?

A beating, he says as we drive round the corner by the National Gallery (which is promoting a nice line in bottle-top art this week) has to be several strokes. If you just get whacked once on the back with a baton, you can't call that a beating in copy.

He's probably right. But then, if I got whacked at all by a riot policeman (even if it was just once), I think I'd feel I'd been beaten.

purple shirt

The shirt was pinkish-purple. Bright. Something a too-eager girlfriend might have bought for her man on Valentine's Day. Expensive possibly, but not a shirt my father would ever consent to wear.

He didn't have a tie. I'm pretty certain the shirt was untucked, hanging over a pair of black trousers.

Purple Shirt was clearly in charge of the beatings.

Yards from my car window, he swung his black baton at members of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). They were protesting cash withdrawal limits of just 500,000 dollars (20p).

A woman in a black leather jacket with a braided ponytail ran across the road to the truck and tried to grab hold of a male protester already sitting meekly inside, guarded by blue-uniformed riot police.

Purple Shirt turned on her, sending her sprawling onto the pavement.

Did his girlfriend watch him put that shirt on this morning?

lunch

There's enough dry bread for two slices of toast for lunch. Two between three of us. In traditional Shona culture, Tadiwa told me, Baba (father) gets served first, then Amai (mother). She was embarrassed when she came for supper and saw we serve guests first. Children are last in line, getting whatever's left.

I'm English though. My child gets the first slice. That leaves just one slice.

"I'll go without."

"No, you have it. I don't mind mouldy bread."

If there is some, that is.

choir

"Tension sets in." I catch the headline as a vendor holds up the Financial Gazette at the robot (southern African-speak for traffic lights). (No-one has the cash to actually buy the pink paper these days. No-one has the cash to buy anything or pay any bills these days. But that's another story).

In the small hours, I lie awake. The mosquitoes are bad this season. It's all that uncollected rubbish. Round the corner, the women from the Salvation Army sing. It's one of their many all-night vigils. I have been lulled to sleep so many times in Zimbabwe by outdoor choirs.

This time though I think there is something frenzied about the clapping.

cake

"Black tea," he says. "No milk, no sugar. And yes I will have a piece of cake."

He hands me the photos in silence. Purple, bruised buttocks, a red gash from a whip just below his shoulder. There were four people holding him down and two lashing him.

"They're very precise," he says. "There are people monitoring. They say, no you mustn't hit there, lower down." After 20 lashes you don't feel the pain anymore.

I have seen photos like this so many times this year. But they still have the power to make me feel sick. I should be at the christening of my university friend's first baby. Instead I am in this room with the curtains tight shut against the daylight. "I just want justice," he says.

clear and present danger

If you are charged by an elephant*, ex-farmer A. says, you must run. As you run, you must strip off your clothes. The elephant will stop and trample each bit of clothing, giving you desperately-needed seconds.

(*Elephant Oliver aka the Father of Mana Pools had his leg repaired after an extensive operation involving an overseas appeal for funds, an aborted flight, a successful flight, probably imported antibiotics and lots of pushing, the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force reports this week)

mrs haddow

I fear I will turn into Mrs Haddow.

A couple of years ago, Haddow House was a flourishing little eatery just opposite the Trauma Centre in Harare's Avondale suburb. Besides the cafe, there was a scrapbooking outlet (yes - in Zimbabwe), a curios place, a tiny secondhand store and a cage full of petting rabbits (you could buy carrot tops).

Haddow House has closed down now but the legend of Mrs Haddow (c. 1920s) lives on. She had 80-something cats (according to Dusty Miller of The Standard newspaper)

We have five now. This time last year we had two. We did the responsible thing and had the male neutered. We decided to wait for a couple of months before getting the female done because she was "so little and fragile". Now, three kittens later, it's almost impossible to get her fixed. The local government vet managed to kill seven cats in a row who'd gone for spaying. The private vet who replaced T. (now firmly in the diaspora, like the family doctor) managed to do away with Susie, the dog from down the road (also in for spaying).

For now, our female is still suckling her kits. But a Heat Problem will loom soon. What can we get? Contraceptives? An acquaintance recommends using human ones, but for dogs only. A large cat cage? Where do I get that kind of a thing from in Zimbabwe?

A bucket, says my mother-in-law who is made of sterner stuff.

diamond snapshots 4

Plainclothes police officers are pulling people out of Spar supermarket, S says.

"They're watching who's paying with large amounts of forex."

"Then when you've got all your groceries, they stop you and ask where you got the money from. They're taking some people straight from the store to Chiadzwa (diamond fields) to fill in holes."

drought

"It's too hot," he says angrily. "It's never going to rain."

Every year it seems as if the dry heat will never break. The rainy season is supposed to start in October. Like last year and the year before, we're into December and there's been precious little rain.

Everyone's ill: stress colds, mumps, temperatures, tickbite. My son's friend fainted in the Christmas Play but the doctor (who's moneyed now he treats political violence victims) is in the US. Cholera is spreading its spiderweb across Harare: already it's reached the better-heeled Westgate suburb, where the cinemas are. The health minister has banned Zimbabwe's three-stage (thumb in front, behind, in front) handshake. Tempers fray. At night we toss and turn, too hot to sleep, scratching at bites from mosquitoes that have weeviled their way inside our net.

"The desert's going to creep up from Buhera," he says.

visit

11 o'clock, Sunday morning. There's loud hooting at the gate. I am expecting a woman to drop round with vouchers for a short trip we've planned. I run outside, squeeze through the gap and... it's a police car. Inside are three policemen in luminous vests.

They're aggressive. "Where's Mr B?" they say, naming a local store.

Not here. "Why don't you know? Aren't you a resident?" the officer in the back says.

I look him in the eye, something a good Shona woman (especially a young one) does not do.

"We've only had this house for two years," I say. Immediately I regret the words: the police are looking for anyone who's acquired wealth in the shape of houses and cars since the diamond rush started.

That was two and a half years ago.

"Let me go find a number," I say. I close the gate before they have a chance to stop me, rush inside, try to make a 'phone call, fail, grab the telephone directory and run outside to the car again.

"Is this guy Indian?" I ask.

"No, black," the officer in the driving seat says. I see he has a clipboard. The infamous list?

I page through the directory and find a number for the store, at least. Eventually the police drive off.

My hands are shaking when I go inside.

black boots

These days when I go into town, I look for the army girl. Aged about 22, he said she was. She was the one who lashed the females. "She loved it," he said. "She was relishing it." She beat one digger -- unlucky enough to be found with a tiny electronic diamond scale on her -- until she screamed. A policeman's wife from the nearby bivouacs sneaked into the cage later, to bring the victim water.

He says he's seen the army girl in town, near the Holiday Inn Hotel. It was on Friday, a day after he was released. "Must have been her day off," he says.

There are soldiers in camouflage dotted on the streets this Friday. In Spar I see an army woman. Under the black beret, her hair is freshly curled. Her trousers are tucked into black boots. She's browsing among the imported baby nappies and aqueous cream. She approaches me. "Excuse me, Madam," she says. I look at her face, my heart pounding. Early 20s, I'd guess. "You don't have change for 50 US, do you?" No, I don't.

Of course, it won't be her. I know that.

But what has to happen to a young girl to make her enjoy beating another woman?

face cream

In the end, it all comes down to face cream. I would like to live in a place where:

a) it is possible to walk into a pharmacy during your lunchhour and buy a decent pot of face cream (impossible in Zimbabwe now)
b) buying a pot of face cream would not be an unimaginable luxury requiring a trip across the border to South Africa
c) just thinking about buying a pot of face-cream wouldn't be a thing to be ashamed of given the overwhelming human misery all around.

racing

"Shall we leave?" I ask for the hundredth time (this week? this month?). Zimbabwe always looks worse in the dark minutes before sleep.

"Don't keep saying that," he says. "It's like running a race. Every time you say that it's like we're slowing down and stopping for a second."

"It only makes it worse."

decisions

When do you stop sending your child to school? When cholera has reached the next town (which it has)? When it's reached the high-density township of Chikanga near the school? If I pull him out now, he will miss the Nativity Play they've been rehearsing for all term. ("We three kings of GLORY AND TAR", he chants).

There is likely no treatment for cholera in the local private clinic. A classmate's father was supposed to be bringing in cholera treatment from Mozambique but not till this weekend. Cholera kills in a few hours. You need a simple rehydration solution to treat it. I should stock up on Coca-Cola. But where do I find it? I went to the forex shop two days ago, but there was little for sale. The truck with provisions on wasn't due from South Africa till the end of the week.

Cholera needs no transport, it has no passport, the head of the Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights Douglas Gwatidzo said today.

Better safe than sorry?

radio ga ga

Our four year old has been brought up to the sound of the ZBC news jingle ("news on the hour, every hour"). Now he's getting tired of it.

"Switch that radio off," he says when we sit down for whatever it is I've mustered up for lunch (toast but no spread yesterday). "All they say is Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe. It's so boring."

"I want to eat my lunch peacefully."

So do we, boy, so do we.

operation no return*

"There are lots of children away," the headmistress at the preschool says. "We don't know why." Chickenpox? That was last month. The owner of a Montessori preschool across town has more of an idea. "It's the diamond dealers," she told C. "They're in hiding. Lots of kids are absent now. And the kids that are left are being picked up by different people." Obviously they've been left with friends or relatives until the dust has died down and the dealers judge it safe to return.

* Operation Hakudzokwi (No Return) = brutal army/police clampdown on gwejas (dealers) and diggers in Chiadzwa diamond fields and nearby city of Mutare. "After this operation, no gweja will think of going to Chiadzwa again," official close to Hakudzokwi told local Manica Post newspaper

into the jaws

She's a student at Africa University. It's the end of the semester and she's desperate to go back to see her family in Harare for the Christmas holidays. There's just one problem: the family live in Budiriro township, the epicentre of Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic.

"Don't go," I say immediately as I hand her a cup of soup (Super Chicken Noodle sent by mum -- should it be this watery?)

It'll be fine, she says ("and this soup is great"). There have only been two cholera cases in her area (Two? Isn't that two too many?)

Her part of Budiriro is the part near Glen View, the old part. They haven't had running water for a matter of years now: her father brings containers of water from the office every day at lunchtime and in the evening. Paradoxically, the lack of piped water makes the cholera risk a tiny bit lower. "There's no sewage," she says delicately. Residents have long found their own "solutions" to human waste disposal -- pit latrines etc. The real problem comes in the parts of the township where there is occasionally running water. Then people flush the loos but the sewerage pipes are overloaded so they burst and flood. Mix that with no rubbish collection, no schools (kids playing outside in the flooded streets), poor immune systems and what do you get? Cholera.

"You know in our area now you're not even allowed to hold funerals now," she says. "You have to tell the police when someone's died, their officials come, they wrap the body in a blanket and then in plastic and the body is buried straight away.

"In our culture funerals should take three or four days. Everyone comes to your house. You eat and drink together. But the officials are saying that's how the cholera will spread."

Africa University is organising a bus on Friday to take Harare students back home, she says. "I can't wait."

tickbite

The reason I got tickbite fever and she has never got it, says A., is because she's "a sturdy Mashona" and I'm not.

The reason I got tickbite, my mother-in-law says (and she's never had it), is because I should have stuck a match on the tick's tiny bottom and burnt it off me. Or smothered it with vaseline so that it suffocated and fell off.

Not scratched it, like I in my foreigner's ignorance did.

earwigs

remedy for ear-ache:

Crush a cockroach ("it has to be a large one") until "the white stuff" comes out. Mix in a small amount of cooking oil. Pour down ear. "It really works," T says.

diamond snapshots 3

Philippa and Mel were minding house for two foreign diamond dealers in Mutare's Toronto (?) suburb. The girls were employed as cleaners, paid good money (because that's what the diamond dealers had). But the plainclothes CIO came. The girls lied that the men weren't there. The officers started to beat them ("with iron bars, Mel couldn't sit down for a few days, it was just last week") and went through the house, trying every door. One was locked. "Open it," the officers said. "We can't, there's a key in the other side," the girls said. They beat them again. "We will keep beating until whoever is in there comes out," said the officers. The dealer did come out -- eventually. But the answers he gave to the questions weren't the same as the answers the girls gave. "I used to envy those people with diamonds, the ones who had new clothes for school while we could barely make ends meet," T. says. "Now I don't."

no they don't

Tadiwa's mother remembers being out in the fields in Mutare a long time ago. She was a child at the time. There was a mother with a young child there, ploughing. It was a strip -- Tadiwa measures with her eyes -- from this table to the fence round the swimming pool. What mothers did then when they got to the fields was to dig a small hollow to put their babies in while they were working. This way a child learned to sit up on its own ("though I think it's awful, leaving your baby like that," Tadiwa says). When this mother got halfway along her strip, she dug another hole, sat the baby in and carried on. She looked round.... and saw a snake coiled round the child (a python?). She started to scream, wanted to yank the child away but she was stopped by an elderly man nearby. "Leave the snake," he told her. "If you grab your child the snake will squeeze." The mother did as she was told and eventually, the snake slithered away. Snakes do not bite babies, the man said.

so they do bite

L. has a story about boomslangs. Her brother-in-law was bitten one Christmas. He was walking under a tree with a chameleon balanced on his forearm. It's an easy thing to do: adults and kids alike are fascinated by a chameleon's slow movements. What the brother-in-law didn't realise was that on a low-lying branch a boomslang had spotted its prey. It reached down, missed and bit the man instead. "Fortunately it was a dry bite," L. says. "But it caused a bit of stress for a short while."

luna park

Luna Park is Zimbabwe's travelling fair. In the midst of Zimbabwe's worst-ever economic crisis, it's still operating. The rides are exactly the same as they were in the 1970s, my husband confirms: the Joy-Ride, Vroom-Vroom, Boats, the Sky-Ride, Shells.

The Octopus is still operating, even though it lost a leg mid-ride some years ago, my mother-in-law says darkly.

There's even a rollercoaster, wending its way in the semi-darkness at the edge of Meikles Park. When my husband was eight, he was so terrified he made them stop the ride. His two brothers loved it, of course.

Teenagers and young black families throng the fairground this time round. The local Manica Post newspaper says even nightclubs are feeling the pinch: patrons prefer the fair. Streetkids beg for money for a ride. We have no Zimbabwe dollars. You cannot ask a four-year old to just stand and watch the merrygoround, I realise.

"Auntie!" It's Mai Sean (Sean's mother) in a T-shirt and tight jeans. We exchange news. Her father, a prominent charity worker, is back from a trip to Uganda. Her beauty studies are going well, how it's impossible to get cash from the bank: the little nothings that make up a conversation, knots in the net of community. Sean stands on tiptoe, clasping his arms around my legs.

"It's my birthday," he says. "I'm 5."

Mai Sean's brother slips off quietly to change our 2 US somewhere behind the ticket shack. I watch two small boys sharing a pack of pink and white marshmallows as the jet planes whirl and the fairy lights flash onto their faces. "Time to go home", I say at last.

For now, this is the home we have.

boomslang in the bathroom

The cat sees it first: a snake, a metre long, vivid green, swaying on the blue tiles in the shower cubicle.

"Snake!" I shout, "Nyoka!" (one of the first words I learnt in Shona). I bundle cats, kittens and protesting child into the pantry.

It's a boomslang, a bright green tree snake. I saw one earlier this year just outside my study window, raiding a nest. Boomslangs are highly-poisonous snakes, but they're back-fanged which means they won't strike out at you like say, a cobra will. You're only in danger if you're actually handling the snake.

Still, I'm afraid I subscribe to the general Shona feeling: a snake within the house precincts has to be a dead snake.

Showers will never be quite the same again.

diamond snapshots 2

The police came to S's house in Greenside suburb one morning this week. Her husband had already left for the shop. "We want to see your husband," an officer said. There were two carloads of police waiting outside. "Who is your husband?

S. gives his name. The officer consults his list. "Sorry, wrong house," he says. The police drive on.

The helicopter leaves Mutare early in the morning, six-ish, they say. Known diamond dealers are rounded up during the night, pulled out of their flats. The police are checking big cars on the roads, asking where they've come from. The first thing the dealers did was to buy big SUVs, Prados. They cruise the streets, numberplate-less.

We've heard the hooting at the gates, loud and persistent, early in the morning. Too early for the school run, which is normally around 7. This is earlier, 5 or 6 am. It's not just black Zimbabweans they're arresting. They've taken in a white businessman (C.W?) too. An Asian guy (Mr E.) was taken out to the Chiadzwa diamond fields and made to fill up a crater dug by the illegal diggers "with his bare hands," a member of the Asian community says. What if someone's given the police the wrong names out of spite? I lurk by the kitchen window, worrying when vans go too slowly past the gate.

There are whispers of beatings and worse. Our gardener has heard of seven bodies with gunshot wounds brought to the central police station from Chiadzwa last Saturday. "Ask anyone at the Holiday Inn, they saw them," a rights worker says. (Holiday Inn is opposite Mutare Central). A policeman from R. came to collect the body of his brother from a private funeral parlour, a senior MDC official says. The brother was a digger killed in Chiadzwa. The policeman doesn't want to talk.

"They shoot you," says Mai Agnes, whose friend Mai Alfred has just come back from Chiadzwa. "If you take two steps forward the soldiers shoot you."

diamond snapshots 1

The last time I saw Shamie, she was living in a maid's cottage with her husband, two boys and newborn baby Ishe (God). I squeezed into the building one grey morning, edging past sofas turned on their sides, overflowing boxes and dining room chairs stacked several high.

They'd been turfed out of the house they were renting in Palmerston suburb. The owner's relative was coming back from the diaspora and needed a place to stay. Before going on maternity leave, Shamie had been working as a lecturer at a local polytechnic. She was giving the job up, she told me, to buy and sell.

They moved out to Fern Valley, to a house with a plot where Shamie would grow vegetables. I texted, 'tried 'phoning a couple of times. Shamie called me once, I remember, when she was in town with her wares. We didn't meet up.

Then, out of the blue months later, she sends an sms. She'd love to see me. "We've been blessed with a car -- two cars actually." She's learning to drive. I'm intrigued. Her husband was studying for his exams (accountancy, I think) when last I saw them: has he passed and got a great job? I do a little bit of sleuthing.

Mrs D. has the answer. Her granddaughter goes to the same school as Shamie's boys -- or did, when the teachers were still teaching (Now they have "study groups", where teachers give lessons to a select few whose parents are willing to pay in forex, say 200 rand a month. Mrs D can't afford to). One of the teachers asked her class one day who'd seen a diamond. Shamie's boy -- the younger one -- put his hand up. "Bring it to school so we can all see," the teacher urged. Shamie's boy did. He's a nice kid, brought up to obey without question as Shona children traditionally were. Mrs D says the teacher (daily pay = 1 million Zimbabwe dollars: daily bus fare to and from school = 2 million dollars) took the stone -- and disappeared for a month.

So that's where the windfall came from. Shamie's husband has done a few diamonds, like so many others here. Who can blame them?

I invite Shamie and the boys round for tea and a swim. I presume she doesn't know that I know. On the 'phone though, as we're firming up arrangements (3 o'clock on Saturday, I'll make a cake, she'll bring some cool drinks) I make a terrible gaffe. She asks after Mai Alfred, a cleaner I once employed and she was keen to take on after me.

"She's not around these days," I laugh. "She's in Chiadzwa, doing diamonds."

Shamie doesn't respond. A few minutes later, she calls back. Sadly she can't make it on Saturday. "Another time, perhaps?"

yoghurt

Hannah can barely contain her excitement. "Look," she says, handing me a tiny covered plastic pot. "Golddust!"

I'm wary. Golddust? The pot weighs virtually nothing. Has my neighbour branched into the illegal mineral trade that's wreaking havoc in eastern Zimbabwe?

This afternoon a man approached me at the supermarket in the border city of Mutare. "I have an item to sell," he whispered. Did he mean corn-meal, cooking oil, bread, jam, a tray of eggs -- all of which are in short supply in Zimbabwe?

"A diamond," he said impatiently. I told him that wasn't the kind of item I was interested in buying.

Now Hannah is offering me golddust.

"Not real golddust," she says affectionately. "Yoghurt culture, of course."

She and I have been plotting for weeks to get some yoghurt culture so we can make our own yoghurt.

Like many other foodstuffs, yoghurt isn't readily available in Zimbabwe. In the early days of the economic crisis, the state Dairibord milk company still managed to pump out sachets of pink, green and yellow drinking yoghurt. Those sachets are hard to find now, much to my four-year old's disappointment.

I’ve never been too keen on drinking yoghurt.

To me yoghurt is the voluptuously-smooth veloute I used to eat late after work in a tiny Paris kitchen in my 20s. Sometimes it was topped with a velvety prune compote. Better still, yoghurt is the thick and creamy stuff my mother made when I was growing up in eastern England.

Dad bought Mum a yoghurt maker for Christmas one year. It was a small brown glass tank. Six glass pots fitted snugly inside. Every few days Mum filled the pots with her yoghurt mixture, snapped the lid on the tank, wrapped it in a blanket and slid it among her freshly-ironed pillow cases in the airing cupboard, under the hot water tank.

For a few hours the yoghurt matured in the gentle heat of Mum's sheets. Then Mum unwrapped the tank, pulled out the pots and stacked them in the ‘fridge, ready for breakfast the next day.

My father liked to stir in spoonfuls of dark brown Muscovy sugar. The granules never dissolved properly so the yoghurt had a speckled look, like birds' eggs.

Hannah has managed to get her hands on some Greek yoghurt from South Africa, which we'll use as a culture. We have the other vital ingredient: a litre of milk. But now a new problem presents itself. Neither Hannah nor I have an airing cupboard. And Zimbabwe's shaky power-supply means hot water tanks rarely stay hot for long. How are we going to make our yoghurt?

We ask around. An elderly friend suggests putting the yoghurt in a polystyrene box to mature. We'll need to wrap the box in towels and leave it somewhere warm for the yoghurt to be a success, she says.

Mum has a brainwave.

"Use a thermos flask," she says in an email. "Make only a small quantity at a time so you don't have to worry if your 'fridge isn't working."

YOGHURT

Rinse out a thermos flask with boiling water.

Bring 500 ml full-cream milk to just below boiling point. Take the saucepan off the heat when the first bubbles appear, otherwise you'll get a "burnt milk" taste.

Stir in two teaspoons of yoghurt culture. Pour into flask. Leave for six hours. Pour into four (pre-sterilised) cups, reserving two teaspoons of yoghurt to make your next batch.
Refrigerate overnight. Serve nature or with honey.

lizard

My son has caught a blue-headed lizard. Actually the cat caught it first and he and the Rottweilers confiscated it. The cat has to fight to keep his prey these days: recently our cleaner's granddaughter told me with relish -- not registering my guilty horror -- that Gogo had taken a bird from the cat to cook for supper.

They're not cute things, blue-headed lizards. Jack Russell-size, prehistoric to look at. I can see their attraction though, for a four-year-old dinosaur lover.

"Look, Mum," he says, poking the lizard with a stick. (Why do small boys love sticks?). "It's bleeding everywhere, even from its eyes."

"Let's keep it as a pet."

fireworks

Cars line the dark verges, bumper to bumper. St John's private school is holding its fireworks display and le tout Harare is here.

This is an annual event apparently, though we've never been before. Commemorating Guy Fawkes has never seemed the right thing to do, not in a Zimbabwe still so furious with its colonial past.

There's little sense of unease tonight though. There are teenagers with blaring stereos and halter-neck tops that can only come from South Africa and cellphones that glow in the dark. (They are not all white, these kids, by the way). Brisk mothers in tight jeans with long blonde hair trail pre-teens. An expensive sound system is in place. Little Luke has lost his parents: can someone come to the front to collect him?

The rich and the want-to-be-seen go through the gate. Tickets are 20 US a head and they've sold out, B. tells us. Twenty US would buy a bag and a half of mealie-meal.

We sit among the rocks in the ditch beyond the fence, our friends and I. Our boys, both four, press their noses to the wire. They will see just as well from the outside.

B has the offer of a job in Botswana, which is -- as we say over and over again -- only a car ride away. "Not the other side of the world." But it is a long car ride. B and his wife are good friends: we met shortly after our boys were born. I had banked on us growing middle-aged in the same place, two couples comfortably swapping stories of our kids, the books we're reading, our leaky roofs.

"We have no option," B says sadly. They can afford to live in Zimbabwe no longer. He has a good job with a local bank. By the time he's paid -- every week, at least his company has the courtesy to do that for him -- his salary amounts to no more than cents. "And Botswana is the only door that has opened." They will leave in January.

From my spot in the ditch, I watch the showers of pink and blue and green stars reflected in the windscreen of a parked car. Beside me, B's wife nurses her three-month old.

This is the picture I will take from Bonfire Night 2008: two little boys, hands locked together firmly, eyes heavenward, shouting joyfully at each fresh bang. I still believe Guy Fawkes has no place in Zimbabwe, still shudder to think of what that money should have been used for in this desperately-hungry land.

And yet, and yet..

in a time of cholera

The man on the verge is mouthing something as I close the gate.

"Some sugar," he croaks. "Please."

We're staying in a cheap boarding house in Harare's Avondale suburb: the flat we normally rent has no running water. There are piles of rotting rubbish outside the shed where my son plays with his friends Tino and Tino. Terrified of cholera -- I regularly receive cholera alerts on my cellphone -- we've temporarily relocated. This is not a licensed guesthouse: in a sign of the times, an impoverished bachelor is renting out a wing of his home and a converted garage to bring in some extra income for himself and his ageing parents.

I run inside. This is not my house: what do I put the sugar in? I find the top of a Nescafe jar, pour in some spoonfuls of South African Selati I was given a week ago. I hear the gate rattle with impatience.

By the time I get outside again, the man's collapsed on the verge. Already a small crowd has gathered. Three men have taken charge.

"Can you dilute the sugar?" one asks and I run inside again. I fumble around to try to find something to put a drink in, measure out precious pre-boiled water from the plastic water containers that go everywhere with me. I must look as if I'm taking my time, uncaring, an irritable white madam.

Out on the grass -- the owner keeps his verge lush green, using precious water from his well -- the man is now conscious. He wants milk. There is almost no milk in Harare. The state-owned Dairibord is barely selling a drop now. Any milk you get is from private sources: a few brave dairy farmers taking a risk by "side-marketing" their supplies. I have milk in the guest house fridge. But there's less than a cup-full left. My son will also need milk when he's dropped off by a friend any minute now. I don't know when I will be able to get more. Feeling guilty, I split the milk: half for the man, half for my child.

The crowd thins. The man gets up. He will survive, this time. He is in bad shape, diabetic probably, poorly-fed like most Harare residents. Except for the very rich, we have all lost weight.

name and shame

It's a hard thing for us murungus (whites). We tell people to call us by our first names as soon as we strike up a friendship. In Zimbabwe, once you become a parent, you lose your first name. You become mai (mother of) and then your child's name or baba (father) and your child's name. After a few years here, I see now how Zimbabweans wince before using a white person's first name. It's such a foreign concept. Even the shop assistant down the road, an unmarried youth in his early 20s, isn't plain Harry to his co-workers. He's Mukoma (brother or cousin) Harry.

"Imagine calling an old lady by her first name," E. said to me once in horror. We were talking about an 80-year-old mutual acquaintance, a white woman who I know as Bet. E's in his 50s. "I just can't do it."

It's only occasionally that you see black Zimbabweans referred to by their first names. Like in the election campaigns. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's running his campaign under the slogan Morgan is more ("You deserve more for your life"). Former finance minister Simba Makoni is using sunflowers and the shout: Simba KaOne (Simba is the one). Only Mugabe's campaigners never ever talk of Bob. Now that would be disrespectful.

sweeteners

"Did you see those buses in town?" H, a young Shona school teacher and mother-of-two, asks. "The new ones with the Zimbabwe flags on the side? They're coming in from Beira."

Mr Mugabe handed out 300 buses at the weekend. Last week he was pretty prolific in his gift giving, doling out hundreds of computers (to schools without power and teachers who are on strike), 500 tractors, a drum of diesel per traditional chief, generators, an indigenisation law that'll mean locals will get a 51 percent in foreign and white-owned businesses, ox-drawn ploughs and lots of ruling party regalia.

"C's dad works for Red Star (Holdings, a major local wholesaler). He says there's no sugar. They (and we all know who They are) have taken it to the rural areas." Deputy Minister of Information Bright Matonga this week accused the opposition of vote-buying with money and food. Vote-buying's an offence punishable by a fine and/or up to 2 years in jail, according to Zimbabwe's Electoral Act. Obviously the rules don't apply to everyone.

"They've lost it," H says. "Totally lost it. They don't know what they're doing." She fans herself. It'll be 33 degrees today, the radio says. It was hot in the car on March 11 last year, I remember. That was when police were beating opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his supporters for trying to attend a prayer rally.

"We just want someone new who'll bring change," H says.

and the winner is

Zimbabwean writer Olley Maruma is a ruling party diehard. In Coming Home, a book he published last year, he speaks scornfully of whites' "wishful thinking" ahead of the landslide victory of the Patriotic Front in the country's first independent elections in 1980. It was a traumatic experience for whites, he says. "For them, the victory was made all the more stunning by the fact that both the local and the foreign press had predicted that the Patriotic Front (PF-ZANU, led by Mugabe and PF-ZAPU, led by Joshua Nkomo) would win no more than 50 percent of the seats." He quotes an Australian reporter: "How could a sane people do this to themselves?"

Twenty-eight years on, and everyone's talking about what's going to happen in two and a half weeks' time. "Surely," my mother-in-law's white friends say. "Surely, this time?" and they recount conversations with domestic workers, the man behind the till at Halsteds, anyone who'll bolster their hope that change is finally on the horizon.

At a party at the weekend, I watch an animated American NGO worker. She is telling a black Zimbabwean -- his kids are somewhere in the garden -- that she just can't understand "these people." "These people" are the ones you see on TV on ZBC News Hour (one agency reporter calls it News Horror) every night -- waving, toyi-toying and chanting at ruling party rallies. You can drive people to rallies. But you can't make them dance with smiles on their faces. That comes from the heart, surely. "I mean, you tell me why," she says, exasperated. In the local Shona culture, women do not look men in the eye. They do not wear short skirts (Agonita, 58, once told me off for wearing a "mean" skirt). Some men even object to unrelated women smiling at them. Traditionally, a woman smiles for her husband only.

The man shifts uncomfortably on his seat, looks away from her. "The war, you know," he says. "People remember that war."

The war for independence is only half a lifetime away for people like Ellias, a college lecturer. He remembers when he and his wife weren't allowed to buy a house in the "good" suburbs. They quietly saved up their cash and bought as soon as independence was declared in 1980: a bungalow with parquet floors, a well in the garden, maid's quarters round the back. There were atrocities during that war, atrocities that state TV is making sure no-one forgets, showing grainy footage of white soldiers manhandling a black during News Hour advert breaks. Defence chief Paradzayi Zimondi has warned there'll be war again if Mugabe doesn't win. "We don't want to go back to that," Ellias says. He explained a Shona proverb to me recently. "If you're ploughing a field and there's a tree-stump in the middle," he said, "you don't stop what you're doing and try to pull the stump out. You plough round it." You make a plan. You don't necessarily have to uproot the problem.

"People are really fired up," a local cafe-owner tells me. "They're fed up. They say, this time we're going to win. Things are going to change." Yes, but they said that before elections in 2000, 2002 and 2005, didn't they?

The opposition's in a bad way. Not only is Tsvangirai's MDC split in two but there's been a fair amount of dirty linen-washing that's had the ruling party rubbing its hands in glee. News Hour showed a press conference last night with an MDC candidate defecting from the Tsvangirai-MDC to the Arthur Mutambara-led side. He says some in Tsvangirai's party are "dictators". There's friction too between Tsvangirai and new-man-on-the-block Makoni. Tendai Biti, the Tsvangirai-faction secretary general described Makoni as "zhing-zhong", slang for a cheap, Chinese imported good that won't last. But a sitting MP from the Tsvangirai faction says - privately, of course - that though he'd "love" Tsvangirai to win, he thinks Makoni would make a better transition.

Outside Nolan's Electronics, I watch three men. One of them's jabbing his finger at a newspaper and they too are talking animatedly. "Better the devil you know," he says in English. There's only one campaign poster near our house and it's for Mugabe.

I may be wrong, but...

power to the people

We stand in a roped-off queue inside the state power utility ZESA banking hall. Patiently, or sort of. A man considers pushing in in front of me, decides not to. "I was going to," he says. "But I see you have the kid, madam. It is hard for kids to queue."

They joke that Zimbabweans have the highest IQ in the world. I queue, therefore I am in Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans queue for sugar, for bread, for milk, in queues that snake round the back of supermarkets and in sanitary lanes, queues patrolled by police and Alsatians. They queue for passports (my mother-in-law's just got hers after 10 months of waiting), they queue for milk round the blue Dairibord milk cart. Come March 29, they'll be queueing again.

My son spies the ZESA security guard, with what looks like a pistol in his holster.

"Kids always want to be policemen," the would-be queue jumper says. "But here" -- he checks to see who's listening -- "you only become a policeman if you're desperate."

There are rumours of growing discontent in the police service and the army, despite threats never to salute an opposition victory from two top defence chiefs, Paradzayi Zimondi of the prison service and army commander General Constantine Chiwenga. A report in the UK-based Zimbabwean newspaper quoted pamphlets allegedly circulating within army headquarters urging members to "vote with your consciences" and "remember your kids and your parents are dying of hunger."

"Is he at school?" the queue-jumper-who-didn't asks. He's a burly guy in a suit. A businessman of some kind, I'd guess.

"Nursery," I say.

"How much was the top-up?"

Where I come from, top-ups used to be something pleasant, something you got in a cafe when your coffee cup was empty. Here they're a demand you get handed when you go to pick up your child. You pay your school fee for the term and then you have to top it up regularly because of inflation (100,580.2 percent at the last count in January). "We reserve the right to turn your child away from school if the top-up is not paid by March 10," the letter I got last week says.

"500 million," I tell him.

"Not too bad," he offers. "I've just written out a cheque for 6.6 billion for my kids' top-up."

"How much?" the woman behind him nudges him in horror. She shakes her head. "Zvakaoma," she mutters. Things are bad. I heard the assistant at the zhing-zhong clothes shop say the same thing earlier as she leaned on a pile of gaudy flip-flops. Flip-flops, by the way, that cost more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

"I saw this South African film," the man tells us. "The guy in it was saying: I feel like a million bucks. Zimbabwean bucks."

I read the vision statement on the wall next to me. ZESA (or its parent ZEDC Holdings) vision is, apparently, "to be the best and the most dynamic electricity and energy services provider" in the country. Today we have no power at home. Down the road at the bakery, there's no power either. "No power, no bread," the woman behind the till sings out when I poke my head through the door. There are bills to pay and top-ups to find, a phone line that keeps going down, a radio signal that keeps disappearing and cellphone networks that keep dissolving. Zvakaoma, yes.

primary colours

In the dark grocery shop at Halfway House, the assistant weighs my pears and rings in my wild blueberries on a calculator. There's no power to get the till working. Everything's normal. Or nearly.

"We saw people back there," I say quietly. "Walking along the road. Where were they going?"

Until Headlands, there'd been no sign to suggest elections were on this month. No campaign posters, no trucks full of noisy activists (singing's been banned in the eastern city of Mutare in the run-up to the polls, the Manica Post says). Just miles and miles of straight empty road. The road (unpotholed here because there's less traffic) stretches like a white-grey ribbon, bordered by shimmering rust-tipped grass and pine and bottle-brush trees so green they're speckled with black. After a few years here, I know now that these are Zimbabwe's primary colours: roadline grey, black-green, rust. And blue, the well-washed and faded blue of the sky without a cloud the size of a man's hand.

The women walk slowly but purposefully, in groups of two or three. Doeks on their heads, babies on their backs. It's mid-morning. The sun is already high and hot. There are several dozen of them, probably somewhere around 80. Very few men. A church service perhaps? Men aren't so keen on church-going here, not traditionally. But the faces that turn to look at our car are closed, not like the ones we drove past a fortnight ago flocking to an outdoor service in eastern Honde Valley, where the tea grows.

"It's a rally," the shop assistant says. There's a pile of gooey koeksusters next to the till. "It's Didymus Mutasa. He is having a rally in the location." He gives an apologetic half-smile.

I know why. Mutasa is Mugabe's state security minister and - despite the koeksusters (an Afrikaans delicacy) and the colonial style Cape Dutch gables at Halfway House -- Headlands is a ruling party stronghold. Like Macheke, a few miles further on. These are bad places to be opposition supporters or white farmers. Ouma and her late husband used to live somewhere near here. He was Polish. They took his farm even though Ouma is black. "He had a heart attack," Ouma says. "It killed him." Mutasa's the one who said back in 2002 that Zimbabwe would be better off with only six million people (ie half the population) as long as they were supporters of the ruling party.

We climb back into the car, shaking the sand from the car park off our feet. So often Zimbabwe looks as stunning as a picture postcard. Scratch the surface though, and the fear, the politics and the old hatreds are never far away.

strike

"The bad news," Kimmy says, "is that the teachers are on strike."

"Yes," Mai X says. "The bad teachers. The hungry teachers." (She was one herself before she took an extended "sabbatical").

I scan the kids' faces. Five-year-old Joe is in the front row. His mother's a state teacher too, out in the rural areas in the east of the country. She came back home Wednesday this week because of the strike. ZIMTA, the main teachers' union is fed up because soldiers got massive cash injections -- more than one billion dollars, though it's not clear if that's a pay-hike or just a one-off cash injection -- ahead of the polls next month. Teachers weren't so lucky. "I'm going to be calling round your place," Joe's mum whispers. "I've got lots of free time this week."

"There are no lessons," Kimmy says. She's bright like her mother, who was once a government school teacher but got out a couple of years ago to work for the central bank. "There are just two students left."

"Ah," says Mai X. "The student teachers. They are not allowed to strike. Their lecturers say so. But the lecturers are also on strike, so..."

Nicola puts up her hand. She has a new orange T-shirt today, with straps criss-crossed over her back and a rich auburn weave in her hair. She makes scrunchies to boost her pocket money. "Our teachers are not on strike," she says proudly.

"Ah," says Mai X. "That is because it is a private school. You pay your teachers nicely. But you, you others, what do you do at school then?

Amos puts up his hand. "We play," he says. I picked Amos up Thursday on his way home from school. He was wearing an immaculately-ironed uniform even at 3 in the afternoon: big floppy-brimmed margarine yellow hat, a brown pullover. Amos is always worried about his mother.

"What, the children are on strike too?" Mai X says in mock horror. "No, no, that is not good. You must take your books and study. See, the teachers will be on strike all this week too. So you must not use bus fare to go to school because it is wasted. You must see if there is a girl or boy next door and study with them."

"And," she says, warming to her theme, "because ZESA (the state power utility) is also on strike, you must study while there is light. Have you seen how much moonlight there is these days? You can even use the moon to read your books."

shoo fly

"Keep your voice down." She edges her chair closer. We are metres from her garden hedge. I can't see anyone but there may or may not be rustling. Four weeks to an election and we're all a bit paranoid.

"The guy next door is ZANU-PF. He's something to do with food distribution," she mouths. There's an unfamiliar stink from the bottom of the garden: ah yes, the hanging flycatcher. No rubbish collection for nearly three months means we all have to devise ways of getting rid of flies. You might burn your rubbish every morning, but there's no saying your neighbour will. In the towns, there are huge mounds of festering banana skins and cabbage leaves under the posters urging us to vote for our land and RGM. A popular local flycatcher is a bottle filled with a mixture made from dried kapenta fish, tiny papery minnow-like things with eyes. They sold by the packet in the grocers, next to the dried caterpillars. Kapenta is poor man's food in Zimbabwe, the sort ZANU-PF bigwigs have been heard to scorn. Not flies though. They swarm to the smell and stick to the bottle. Disgusting but effective.

"There was something going on last night, lots of unmarked BMWs and big cars," she says. She wraps her arms round herself protectively.

snippets

Things are never as black and white as they seem.

"Where's Mai X?" I ask. I'm in a sitting room again, barefoot. I have handed over my basket at the door as you do, inquired after everyone's day, assured all present that my husband and my child are fine. I like these slow unhurried rituals. Speed begets tardiness, the Shona say.

"She has gone to a funeral. It is her aunt. In fact, the aunt was like her mother. Mai X's mother passed away so the aunt, who had no children, brought her and some other children up."

I like Mai X. She is careful, funny, gentle and she treats me like a daughter, buying me a huge box of soap powder for Christmas. When I injured my head last year and had to have a cyst lanced at a local hospital, it was Mai X I turned to.

"The burial was supposed to be Sunday. But then her cousin-brother said, no, it could not be Sunday because he had business to do. He's that boxing man, you know? Stalin Mau-Mau. Well, Stalin Mau-Mau said there were relatives who wanted to come from England...

I've stopped listening, trying to digest what I just heard. Stalin Mau-Mau was a ruling party bigwig back in 2000, before he turned into a UK-based businessman. White farmers say that he -- backed up by war vets -- played a part in the early wave of land invasions in Harare (though he claims he was merely "negotiating" with farmers to help alleviate a housing shortage).

Mai X was brought up with Stalin Mau-Mau?

********************************

Illegal gold panners are an increasing problem.

"They wreck all the greenery," says a friend whose parents -- by hook or by crook and most probably because the powers that be have realised Zimbabweans need minimal amounts of milk -- have managed to hold onto their dairy farm. Gold panners are panning in the stream that runs through their farm in eastern Zimbabwe and there's absolutely nothing her parents can do.

"My mother never used to have any problems in her garden," she says. We're sitting round a sparkling pool, eight or nine mums, munching coffee cake and watching our horribly-privileged preschoolers splash around with rubber bazookas imported from South Africa. There is no power but no-one notices that anymore. "Now she's got monkeys and pythons. They come because it's the only bit of greenery left. She lost the whole of her lychee crop and then last week a python took her dog.

She takes a breath. "My little boy (aged three, approximately goat-size, just right for a python) was playing with the dog three minutes earlier."

There's silence, white coffee mugs stopped staccato in the air. We do live in Africa, girls.

***********************************

In the morning, I drive past the Anglican cathedral with the huge red AIDS ribbon painted above the entrance, under the flamboyant trees, past a nursery school. Through my open window -- it's going to be a sweltering 30 degrees today, the radio says -- I hear the sweet sound of childrens' voices, one adult voice leading the song: "...everybody here, in His hands/He's got everybody here in His hands." Nothing could ever happen here, surely?

The police chief appears on the eight o'clock TV news bulletin. His officers are empowered to use "full force, including firearms," against protesters before, during or after next month's polls, he says.

mrs mugabe, I presume

The first time it happened I was shocked.

"Hello, Mrs Mugabe." I'm walking down the street and a passer-by shouts out a greeting.

Mrs Mugabe? Surely not. Mrs Mugabe is older than me by a few years (she has a teenager who's taking her A-levels), she's glamourous and she has a penchant for shoe-shopping in luxury boutiques around the world. Judging by the battered flip-flops I wear every day (my mother's cast-offs), we're not in the same league. Oh yes, and I'm blonde and not married to a president.

It happens again. I'm reversing out of a parking spot and a woman taps on my side window.

"Mrs Mugabe? Have you had the baby yet?"

The baby? I haven't had a baby for ages and neither has Grace, as far as I know. And I do tend to keep my eye on these things. She had at least one baby before she and His Excellency were married while Mr Mugabe's first wife Sally was dying from a kidney complaint. There were a few raised eyebrows though the First Couple still held a lavish wedding in a Catholic church.

"I'm not Mrs Mugabe,' I say carefully.

The woman looks at me. "Now I see that you aren't," she says with more than a hint of disappointment.

Grace, the president's junior by around 40 years, is an object of national fascination. She was the president's secretary when she became his "small house", Zimbabwean slang for mistress. (A wife is known as a man's "main house.") Grace was on the front of this weekend's Sunday Mail, sporting a filmy green turban and wraparound sunglasses. She was cutting an enormous cake for her husband's 84th birthday. A cake, I notice from the red and blue logo, which was kindly baked by Lobels Bakeries. Lobels has been having a few problems keeping the nation supplied with bread for the past few years. Price controls and critical grain shortages following the land invasions can make bread baking a wee bit tricky. Cakes are still available but their prices push them way out of the reach of most: a small round party cake cost 35 million Zimbabwe dollars in Spar supermarket last week, more than what a low-grade employee with the national ZINWA water company earned in January.

Grace looked fairly happy at her husband's 3-trillion dollar party in Beitbridge on Saturday. It's not clear if she'd seen the banners on the South African side of the border, hoisted by exiled former opposition MP Roy Bennett and other party supporters. "Happy Bye-Bye Bob," the banners read. "No half-baked elections in Zimbabwe." That might have wiped the smile from her face.

I met the real Mrs Mugabe in a cafe a few days ago. She's tall and blonde-ish and she's married to a Mr Mugabe who isn't the president. He's a plumber.

mealies

"When can you come to my house?" she asks on the 'phone. "I've got something to give you."

It's a short conversation. The state TelOne phone company has just hiked its charges by 200 percent. E is minding her money. A grandmother, she used to run a church creche but left last year when her monthly salary barely stretched to a bottle of cooking oil. Now she minds neighbours' preschoolers at her home in the mornings, using a cardboard box full of toys and books. And she works in her garden. Much more profitable.

When I arrive -- having negotiated potholes big enough to hide a baby giraffe in -- she's waiting, her three-year-old granddaughter skipping beside her. There's another child too this time, a boy. "Sean," she says. "I've taken in his mother. She had a problem with her pelvic bones." Mai Sean turns out to be her sister's grandchild's wife, if I've followed the family relationships correctly.

We sit in the sitting room, which is like so many sitting rooms I've sat in here. Minimalism certainly isn't in in Zimbabwe, not if you are or ever were middle-class. You cram everything you've got into a small space so knees are touching coffee tables (plural) and antimacassars graze the wall. There are glass-fronted cabinets and family photos and trophies and religious pictures. A DVD player in pride of place amid the crocheted doilies. Everything is scrupulously polished. Outside is a swimming pool with a few centimetres of brown water in and an open fire with a black saucepan on. There's no power, of course.

"When we have power, I get up at 1 in the morning to make some bread," she says.

(The minister of energy development insists today the reason there's no power has very little to do with sub-economic tariffs the goverment insists on maintaining so as not to anger voters. Our bill for a bungalow with security lights but no washing machine came to about four pounds last month. Power cuts are because the World Bank stopped financing Zimbabwe's energy sector some time back, the minister says. That and investors who haven't fulfilled their "recapitalisation obligations.")

"Do you want to come and see?" she says. We push through a sidegate and what I see is a field, no, two fields and the far banks of the stream full of mealie plants, all tall as -- well, baby giraffes. "These are all mine," she says proudly.

When E's sister last came (from the UK), she brought no presents. "No perfume," E stresses. Perfume is a favourite gift from relatives in the diaspora. But when she got here she bought a bag of maize seed and gave it to her sister.

The sun is about to set. Night falls fast in Zimbabwe, around 6 to half past, whatever the season. This is my favourite time, five o'clock, when the light is soft. I look at the fields of mealies, months worth of mealies, mealies as far as the eyes can see, in front of me and behind the backs of the neighbours' houses and my heart lifts. There are not just mealies. In the sun by the wire security fence, there's a big pumpkin, orange and green speckled. We decide it is not ripe yet, not quite. If it was, I know she'd insist I take it.

She presses a plastic bag (they call them packets here) into my hand, full of plump, milky cobs.

"Don't ever buy any," she says. "Come back here whenever you need some more."

my friend the inventor

Will's full of great ideas. He thinks that soon we'll be able to pop a tablet that'll mean we don't have to waste time sleeping. Will's big thing is saving time. Ten years ago he launched the gwatamatic, a machine that makes your sadza for you. Sadza-making is hard work, lots of stirring and sweating. With the gwatamatic, you put in your mealie-meal and water and the machine does it for you. He gave us a couple of freeze-wrapped packs of his sadza to try at home, large slabs of what looks like dense creamy-white mashed potato. What you do is you dunk the packet (do NOT pierce the bag, whatever you do) into a saucepan of boiling water and you simmer for 20 minutes, maybe a bit longer. What you get is great-tasting, no-lump sadza, no stirring involved. My mother-in-law loved it.

Will's gwatamatics are used in universities and factories here. The thing about his sadza, he says, is that it will always have the same taste.

"You've immortalised your mum's recipe, Will", I told him over boerewors sausage one lunchtime. He looked pleased. His mother hosts orphan parties in the town of Marondera, an hour's drive from Harare. She sounds like a good person to immortalise, even if only in mealie-meal.

Will stood for president last week, or tried to. Last month he launched the Christian Democratic Party at the Jameson Hotel (third poshest in town, after Meikles and the Monomatapa). The men in dark suits were there, complete with ancient video cameras. Will says he filed his nomination papers at a Harare court last Friday "for the kicks of confronting the dangerous." Not surprisingly, he was disqualified. His papers were not in order, the Herald said: Will blames poor quality nominators and a suspect voters' roll. A couple of days later the authorities said they'd soon seek constitutional amendments to bar "presidential chancers" in future. In the end the inventor of no-stir sadza caused quite a stir.

And he did get to register as a parliamentary candidate.

be my valentine

The assistant bends over the bread counter conspiratorially.

"So I heard you are going to Victoria Falls on Valentine's Day?" he asks with a sly grin. Last month he told me his wife was "causing me trouble". She's pregnant, a first-time mother and she's grumbling, he says. He wants to send her back to her rural-based parents, as husbands can here. "Vic Falls I wish," I say in the most matronly manner I can manage. Oops, forgot the wedding ring this morning.

This week it's Valentine's Day and not the Makoni factor (the unexpected electoral challenge to RGM from his former finance minister whose first name Simbarashe means -- scarily for his opponents -- power from God) that's on everyone's lips I meet, though some foreign press reports say otherwise. Zimbabweans are obsessed with Valentine's Day. Bare shops are suddenly stocked with red things: there are zhing-zhong red knickers in Husseins clothing store and red diaphanous nighties that wouldn't last a nail-rip on sale in the new boutique. In the newsagents opposite, plastic heart boxes lie next to the furry mini-Santas left over from the last holiday. "Are you ready for Valentine's Day?" the shop assistant giggles in Biggie Best furnishings (I'm not: she is). The pavements are dotted with people wearing red. Elections might be next month but Valentines' Day is one of the main items on today's morning news bulletins, with the reporter praising the "lovely" Valentine's Day outfits he's seen (Zimbabwe state media breaks most journalism school rules). One of the presenters reads out a selection of love poems and there's even a list of videos we should be watching today.

The bad news is that the annual inflation rate's reached a staggering 66,000+ percent, but today no-one's taking any notice. Hang economic crises and elections, just watch Casablanca

million-dollar tomato

Bata used to be Zimbabwe's main shoe chain. Until the price slash in August, that is. Now, in the store in the arcade, there's not a shoe to be seen. There are banners saying: "Latest arrivals" but the display shelves are white and bare, matching the mopped floor. A worker sits on one of the benchers examining his own -- highly polished, I have to say -- black pair of loafers. In the window there's a badly-typed sign: "We buy second-hand gum boots."

Next door, in OK supermarket -- "where the nation shops and saves" -- there's not much shopping to be done. No milk, cheese, cooking oil, mealie-meal, baked beans, sugar, yoghurt, loo rolls or flour. There are -- now let me see -- some bottles of pink and yellow Propose Hand and Body Lotion and there's mixed spice and a couple of lurid green rakes and some loose ginger and chicory coffee. And -- glory, glory hallelujah -- there are about 20 chickens in a freezer, which everyone's steering clear of because they're 30 million dollars apiece. The lowest-paid worker for the national water authority (ZINWA -- aka Zimbabwe No Water Available) gets 34 million a month, the main trade unions body complained yesterday. (When our neighbour phoned the ZINWA office about a municipal pipe burst he'd spotted last week, he was told the workers wouldn't come to fix it "because they are hungry." Our neighbour took his gardener and his tools and they fixed it themselves). I buy a chicken (we got money yesterday, before that our cupboard was bare) and squash it quickly into my shopping basket. I realise now that the advice the aunties gave at the kitchen tea I went to last month was spot on: "a woman must have a basket with a lid on," one of the Shona women said while instructing the bride-to-be in front of us assembled guests. "You don't want everyone to see what you've been buying." (The bride was under a frilly table-cloth with just her magenta-varnished toenails poking out, but that's another story). These days people look at you sideways if you've got more than a handful of tomatoes in your bag. After all, a tomato costs one million dollars.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that petrol stations in Zimbabwe do not usually have petrol in them. There may be cars parked by the pumps, but that's only so their drivers can sit in the shade. But when I get to the garage at the bottom of the road this morning -- they sell bread at the illegal price of 2.5 million a loaf -- I think I see a pump pumping petrol into a car. This is so strange that I challenge the man behind the counter. He admits there is petrol in the pumps. How much? He looks around him. A dollar, he says quietly. A US dollar, you mean? It's illegal to charge in foreign currency in Zimbabwe (although a ruling party MP's sons were picked up a few weeks ago in Chitungwiza for doing just that, selling fuel for forex). You have to go to our office in town and get one of these, the attendant says reaching into his top pocket for a fuel voucher. I see the company selling the fuel is called Praise Petroleum. As in Praise the Lord there's petrol, I guess.

green jackets

There's a knock at the gate and a flurry of barking. The limegreen jackets beat a hasty retreat. "Those are big dogs," the two women say when I reach them.

They have luminous waistcoats on with the words Zimbabwe Electoral Commission in black capital letters. ZEC is the government elections body. The independent one is ZESN, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network.

"I'm Alice and this is Rumbi. We are doing voter education," one of them says. She's middle-aged with a pleasant smile and a big tent dress. A teacher, I'd guess. M. -- one of my teacher friends -- is manning the voter registration desk at the local convent school today. Many teachers are on strike anyway this week over abysmal pay (recently hiked to somewhere around 140 million Zimbabwe dollars = £14 a month or seven if you use the Fair Value Hard Boiled Egg exchange rate), so it makes sense to earn a bit extra. Whichever side you're getting it from.

"You mustn't be frightened," Alice says, eyeing a rotter's muzzle poking through the gap between the wall and the hedge. For locals, black dogs can represent bad things in your past, things that come back to haunt you. "You must vote. You must make your voice heard. You mustn't just talk about it round the dinner table. Your workers too, they must take their IDs and their proof of residence."

It sounds so easy but it's not. The authorities have changed the boundaries, changed the wards. How do you get proof of residence when even your landlord's renting, subletting his rooms out one by one? This weekend the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (the country's longest serving rights body) says the March 29 vote is very unlikely to be free and fair. "Cumbersome" procedures mean many people haven't been able to register, the commission says. A few countries up, more than 1,000 people have died over disputed election results. There are prayers and pleas every week -- some printed in the official government newspaper -- for there to be no Kenya here.

"No-one will get killed," Rumbi offers. She taps her wrist. "We have different colour skin but we are all the same." One of her front teeth is brown. Last year, the authorities found fake toothpaste in the shops: it caused mouth infections rather than lessening the risk of them. Rumbi looks like someone's grandma. For a moment, I'm placated. If the elections were really in the hands of people like these, it'd be OK.

inspection

At first sight the inspector looks imposing. He's wearing a dark blue uniform and a clipboard. He's from the city council, he says and he has come to check that we are cutting our grass properly.

There are all sorts of things I should say. Like: what about the verges that the city council doesn't cut, the ones just down the road from here? What about those letters of complaint about the unslashed grass on the sides of the road in the state-controlled press last month? Residents say snakes are lurking in those long weeds, that burglars use the grasses to hide their loot in.

Instead I gulp and let him in.

"I'll just roam around," he says. I think of the tottering compost heap, the gooseberry shrubs I'm letting straggle because we need the free vitamins (these are wild Cape gooseberries, spherical, sweet and orange, nothing like the tart green rugby balls Dad used to grow). The inspector must be kept strictly on the straight and narrow: the bit of lawn in front of the vegetable plot.

"I'll come too," I say cheerily.

When he starts making a beeline for the rape -- unweeded, a metre high, stalks broken by the rains -- and the bits of rotting banana branch that will earn us a black mark and follow-up visits, I try a bit of distraction.

"We have a problem. There's been no rubbish collection. The city council bills us for it but there's been no collection for more than two months."

"You are right," he says. "It is a problem. The council says there is no money. We have no vehicle now."

He looks at the old tyre swinging from the custard apple tree, my spinach bed (struggling --spinach doesn't grow with excess rain) and I feel the familiar stab of guilt. My mum sends food packets: custard, marmite, contact lens solution, dental floss, Bachelor's Bean Feast, dried fruit, milk powder, all the things I can't get here. But in this man's eyes, I'm a wealthy foreigner.

"You're alright here," he says. "You should see in the high-density areas, where we live. There is rubbish in piles and lots of flies."

I know.

I see now how his uniform is old, how it has been washed and rewashed so many times that the double stitching on his shoulders is nearly white. He has two children, little girls. One in creche, one in Grade 2.

"It's the food that's the problem. Trying to feed them. There is no money. But we are hoping things will change in the next month or two," he says.

I see how tired he looks. Once, change -- chinja -- was a slogan bandied around with such optimism. These days, the energy's gone.

britney

The kids are talking about places they've visited. They count off on their fingers. Harare, Bulawayo, Gweru...Only one of them, 12-year-old Dumi, has ever been out of the country: "I've been to USA, Canada, England and Mozambique. And Durban," he says proudly. Dumi's mum, a widow, drives a gold-coloured Peugeot, I've noticed. The rest of the kids walk, like their parents do. They may have cars but they're moored by the side of their houses, have been for months. No money for petrol, let alone parts.

"Why did you come back?" Tatenda is horrified.

Tatenda, 14, has an exit plan and it involves People magazine. You can buy People on the pavement here, along with a few other (fairly recent) South African glossies: Women and Home, Garden and Home, the parenting magazine Living and Loving. We might be two months late about it but at least we know that this season we shouldn't be upholstering with straight and narrow stripes (if there were any to be had). Glamour magazine is popular (May's free plastic polka-dot make-up bags got sliced out of the cellophane wrapping and resold). So is People. Zimbabwe might be struggling, but the masalads -- the trendy, urban, post-independence generation who were the first to adopt Western dishes like salad -- still want to read about Britney. Inside People, Tatenda's found a list of people seeking penpals. She brandishes a handwritten letter she's already received from her unsuspecting host-to-be, black ink on thick lined exercise book paper. "My favourite foods are pineapple (and something else I didn't catch). Do you have breaks at school? We have lots of breaks." The other kids listen in awe.

"If I had a passport, I'd go and never come back, " Tatenda says. Her mother has finally consented to take her out of mission school and let her go to the government school just down the road. The pupils do gardening. Regularly, instead of A-level classes. There's no money for groundsmen. "I've never been anywhere. Can you imagine, it's 14 years since I was born and I've never been out of this place?"

"When I grow up I want to be a mermaid," Tanyaradzwa, 8, says. "And then I'll swim away."

hellos and goodbyes

We stumble down the road in the dark, a lone beer bottle zipped inside a National Trust bag. At the last minute, we've been invited to a leaving party. It's at an old house built in 1948. Parquet floors, pressed steel ceilings. Through an unkempt hedge, there's a glimpse of a swimming pool, all greened over. Years ago, there were three kids splashing about in that pool. The owners -- retired teachers, private sector, the husband was once a schools inspector -- are emigrating to Worcester to be near one of their sons.

"We just can't survive here anymore," the woman says. On the floor two little girls play snap, hairslides in their fringes. She leans closer. "You know, to live here you've got to have a cushion."

Cushion is code for a secret source of foreign currency. No point having one declared to the government as then it has to be surrendered at the official rate of exchange, less than 100 times its street value. You're doomed if you've got only Zimbabwe dollars. A single egg -- they sell them singly here -- costs 1.5 million dollars this week. At the official rate of exchange that's £25.

The table in the dining room is piled high, despite the shortages. There's smoked salmon smuggled from Norway on sliced ciabatta-style bread. There are fritters, fried in scarce cooking oil. Crisps and a prawn cocktail dip, definitely imported. Chicken drumsticks in breadcrumbs. They've been planning this spread for weeks.

"People say: aren't you excited about going?" the hostess says. "Well, I'm not. I've been in this place for 28 years and I've got to start all over again."

My husband's old typing teacher is there, still elegantly-coiffed and delicately-fingered. She lives in the Vumba, the eastern mountainous area that borders Mozambique. There are still minefields on the hill slopes, left from the 1970s bush war. This woman's had no power at her home since December 17. She cooks on a woodstove. She's just been "caring" in Derbyshire -- looking after an elderly Lady (a real one) in return for food, lodging and a few precious pounds to keep her going back in Zimbabwe. "I don't think shorthand's very useful, actually," she says.

Some days it seems like everyone's off. The next-door neighbours are leaving for Zambia, taking the cats but not the boerbull. The twins' mum -- a tall, Laetetia-Casta lookalike -- is off to Australia next month. "I just can't do this anymore," she said to me when I bumped into her outside the supermarket a few weeks ago. We'd both been wandering aimlessly along the empty aisles, looking for something to buy. Her shopping trolley had nothing but gin bottles in. "My husband," she said with a half-giggle. "He's going crazy with no booze." My friend Sibo left in August for her in-law's home in Zambia. She came back briefly for Christmas, wafting in and out of my life in a royal blue halter-neck satin dress. Her in-laws are rural folk, with no power and no gas. Sibo and her husband had to spend all their savings on the mother-in-law's cataract operation. "My son wants to come back. He misses his grandmother," she said. "But at least there we can put food on our table."

Down the road, there are people still arriving, unfolding deck chairs in the shadows. People shaking hands, the pinprick of a cigarette. "I haven't seen you for years. How's your son -- he's in Cyprus now, isn't he?" We pick up our son and slip away. In the sky I can see the belt of Orion, three sharp studs against the black. Diamonds over a diamond-rich country where few can afford to live.

bathtime

I give my son an orange bath. It's the water that's orange, not the tub. The mains water started to dry up last night. The taps spit angrily when I try to fill the kettle. What little water I get is the colour of weak Nescafe. Late at night my husband takes a torch, mutters something about lurking puff adders (front-fanged, can bite through leather, 50-60 babies per litter) and goes outside to switch on our (probably poo-tainted) borehole. Zimbabwe had more rainfall in December than any other year since records began around 120 years ago, and we're running dry. The state-run water company ZINWA (aka Zimbabwe No Water Available company) has admitted it doesn't have the chemicals to treat the water.

When I first got to Harare, I took the colour of the tap water as an ominous sign. The company paid to have me put up in a serviced villa complex, just off Greenwood Park. The quilts were lumpy, the cupboards empty and a grizzled colleague a few doors down the corridor who I think expected me to cook for him sneered when I brought back some pasta shells from the OK store in First Street. There were reports of buses being torched in the townships. The moss-scented bath water was definitely the straw that breaks the camel's back (and yes, once someone did try to introduce camels to Zimbabwe. He was called Colonel Flint and he thought camels would be a brilliant way of overcoming the transport difficulties faced by the BSAP. Flint had two baggage camels and 10 riding ones shipped out here in 1903. A year later -- and after at least one public camel race -- only one was still alive).

These days I know brown water is vastly better than no water. "But mummy," my boy says, languishing in the tub with sandy grit below his tummy, "I won't get clean and shiny in this water."

"A bit of dirt never hurt anyone," I say (Mary Poppins, anyone?). "Your father says he used to bath in brown water when he was a boy with yellow hair just like you and he came out absolutely fine". Actually, his hair mysteriously turned brown a few years later.

blood on the floor

These days, you're most likely to see Zimbabwe's state-controlled Herald newspaper soaked in blood.

Like most electrical appliances in Zimbabwe, my 'fridge is an old one. The white's peeling off the inside, the handle is half-eaten away and there are streaks of blue paint left from when I unwisely let my toddler use the door as a lovely long platform for his creativity. Worse still, the seal has gone, which means the freezer compartment freezes into a solid ice drift with remarkable rapidity. Every other day I take a hammer and bash away at the ice to make a space to store my milk packets (milk comes in sealed plastic bags, like giant tea-bags in Zimbabwe, if it comes at all). Banging is bad for my freezer (and yes Dad, it's bad for my sanctification) but there's not much else I can do. At least I still have power to make ice for good chunks of time.

Blackouts are lethal if you have meat in your deep freeze. The meat goes off, just like the power. So we line the bottom of our 'fridges with newspaper to soak up the water and the chicken blood. There are no private dailies here anymore -- the Media and Information Commission still hasn't decided whether to re-licence the wildly-popular Daily News, nearly four years after it was closed down by armed police -- so what do we use? The Herald of Total Honesty, of course. Problem is: there's a Herald shortage. Price controls mean the printers can only buy 14 tonnes of paper a week when they need 100 tonnes, reports said today. Hey presto: a thriving black market for the pro-government press. In Harare you can waste precious fuel driving from robot to robot (Zimbabweans copy South Africans and call traffic lights robots), looking for a copy. If you're lucky a black-market dealer/doormat-made-out-of-strips-of-old-tyre vendor might offer you one, at, say, 2 million Zimbabwe dollars a copy instead of 900,000. Snap it up.

We need the Herald badly. We need it to know what They are saying, we need it for loo roll (1 roll very thin greyish, disintegrating 1-ply = 3 million Zimbabwe dollars this week, ie three and a third Heralds. The other local loo-roll alternatives are gnawed mealie-cobs and -- this one's for deep in the bush -- large stones).

And we need it to mop up the blood in our 'fridges.

sadza stories

I'd never had sadza before I came here. It's the staple food for Zimbabweans, made with mealie-meal (maize-meal). The maize is ground down into a white powder of a consistency somewhere between sand and Johnson's Baby Powder, if you get the top brand.

Sadza comes in different forms: bota, which is the watery porridge-form we eat most days for breakfast, power permitting. Then there's full-on sadza, a stiff white paste you're supposed to eat in pinchfuls, a wodge of sadza squeezed between the first three fingers of your right hand. Sadza tastes best with a vegetable relish made of tomatoes, onions, "leaves" (rape or spinach), salt and peanut butter, or with meat. These days in Zimbabwe though, peanut butter's a scarce luxury and price controls mean there's precious little meat. So it's sadza wejongwe (sadza with salt water) for afternoon tea and sadza nemajuru (sadza and dried termites) for supper. That's what the weekly Manica Post said on Friday in a front-page story. And that's a government paper.

I'm fascinated by the stories about sadza, how traditionally Zimbabwean girls were taught to grind it, how good Shona wives make sure there's never a pasty white lump in their husband's plate, how you can be sent back to your in-laws simply because you haven't mastered the art of sadza-making. In the past, if a man married a woman who turned out not to be a virgin -- and he wasn't the one responsible -- he could let his in-laws know by returning a plate of white sadza with a hole scooped out in the middle. The sadza said it all.

Mealie-meal's been in short supply for several weeks now, which makes tempers short. So I was elated when I got down to the grocer's shop this morning and found her workers unloading a bakkie full of white Ngwerewere super refined. A few seconds earlier there'd been no-one there -- the shop's pretty bare -- but now customers appeared from nowhere. Marii? How much?

The grocer lets her assistant Simba do the talking. His name means power, strength or authority and he's going to need every ounce of authority he's got to sell this stuff. Nine point six, he says. That's 9.6 million for just five kgs. The grocer's going to have to move this lot fast, before a gang of hungry National Price and Incomes Commission (NIPC) inspectors arrive. The gazetted price -- the one fixed by the government in September -- is just 145,000 dollars. At 9.6 million a bag, a teacher working on last month's salary would only be able to buy two and a half bags: just 12.5 kg. No wonder my teacher friend Mai Nigel told me yesterday she was "taking leave" this term. There's not much point working these days, not if your salary won't stretch to your sadza. They reckon 10 kgs will do a family a week and a half.

"Where'd you get it from?" I ask, counting out wads of blue 100,000 notes. Today I'm lucky: I have cash.

"From a new farmer," the grocer says and she looks up at me through her fringe.

New farmer is such a loaded term these days. It might mean old-style war vet, who invaded a white-owned farm, terrorised the former white owners, slashed a few cows and made off with the family silver and a few tractors. Or it might mean something different: someone a lot less violent, someone genuinely interested in a new career, someone driven to the land as a way of fending for his family in Zimbabwe's worst-ever economic crisis. This new farmer is an army brigadier's wife, says the grocer.

"Such a nice woman," she says defensively. I nod.

"Her husband's been transferred to Gweru," she says. (What, for the elections?) "I never knew an army brigadier could be so nice."

Nice is such a convenient word, despite Mrs Cuthbert's ban on it in our News books at the bottom end of primary school. "Nice means nothing, children," she said. Now sometimes that's a good thing.

cats and dogs

Edith Mabel didn't like small boys much but she did like cats and dogs.

Edith Mabel took my father-in-law and his brother in when they were aged 3 and 5. Elsie, my father-in-law's real mother died of TB when she was just 23. Her husband skedaddled, terrified by the weight of two toddlers. Nothing more was heard of him for years till Edith Mabel got the news he'd died a lonely alcoholic, somewhere in South Africa. All that's left of my husband's real grandparents now is a black-and-white picture of Elsie in my father-in-law's study, perched on the curtain rail -- a wistful girl with dark wavy hair that comes to just above her jawline. Her face is turned away from the camera.

My father-in-law doesn't have happy memories of his childhood. He remembers a big house in what was then Salisbury, somewhere near today's Mount Pleasant suburb. Edith Mabel believed boys should be occupied to keep out them of trouble. They weren't allowed out of the house in the mornings for school until they'd "performed" with the help of a spoonful of cod liver oil. The boys were often late for school.

In school holidays Edith Mabel sent the brothers to ballet lessons and had them water the enormous lawn using a square grille she'd invented. The boys were each given a watering can and square grille about the size of two shoeboxes stuck together. Their job was to lay the grille on the grass and water through the holes. Then the grille had to be moved a square along, and the process repeated. Little wonder my father-in-law says he didn't start living until he met my husband's mother, a dark 17-year-old with a waist you could fit your hands round.

There were just a few light moments. One day Edith Mabel's husband (he's always nameless) brought a cat home. Edith Mabel had a big dog, a mastiff of some kind. The husband sat in a winged armed chair with a roll of newspaper and the cat on his knee. The dog was brought in, straining at the leash. He made for the cat -- and was slapped sharply on the muzzle before he could close his jaws. The process was repeated, until dog and cat eventually managed to co-exist in -- strained -- harmony (apart from when supper was served, but that's another story).

I think of Edith Mabel when we bring home two stray kittens from the SPCA. (There is still an SPCA here, with branches across the country). We have two rottweilers (not pure, and the smaller one definitely has a bit of goat in her). The rottweilers have been encouraged to chase small furry things with tantalisingly long tails that hang around in tree branches and raid my loquat/mango/granadilla crops. It occurs to me when I settle the new acquisitions in my study with a rusty old oven pan filled with leaves for a litter tray, that kittens are remarkably similar to monkeys (but they don't have blue testicles. Will the rotters ask to see their testicles before they decide whether or not to chase them? I doubt it). So we go the Edith Mabel route. My husband arms himself with a sisal branch, truncheon-size. The kittens are let onto the verandah. The dogs watch. The big one licks her lips. When either dog advances, my husband brandishes the truncheon.

Amazingly, it works. Six weeks down the line, the dogs wag their bottoms when they see the kittens. The kittens rub themselves against the dogs' paws. As long as the kittens don't climb in the loquat tree at the same time as the monkeys, they're safe. It's not quite the Garden of Eden but hey, this is Zimbabwe.

madam & eve

A madam is not a very nice thing to be.

In Zimbabwe, The Madam is a woman -- traditionally white though these days there are black ones too -- who refers to her domestic worker as The Girl even though she's probably a grandmother. The Madam makes The Girl and The Boy (aka her gardener) a jam sandwich each mid-morning (she prides herself on having her bread sources however bad the shortages). The Madam makes the sandwiches herself: that way, she can ration the jam (which is Sun Jam, a bright-red pulp you buy in plastic tear-off sachets. The Madam wouldn't dream of eating Sun Jam herself. Sun Jam is for the povo, The Madam says. The Madam knows that povo means the masses but apart from that she speaks very little Shona. The Madam would jump at the chance of French evening classes). The Madam demands that the jam sandwiches be eaten standing up in the kitchen or, in the case of The Boy, at the kitchen door because he will make the floor muddy with his wellies (known locally as gumboots). The Madam serves her workers tea in chipped mugs she keeps specially for the purpose. The Madam likes doilies on her own tea-tray. The Madam has been known to draw a line round the inside of her sugar bowl so that she can check how fast her sugar is being swiped.

The Borrowdale Madam now, that's another story.

red dress

My husband says that if we have another baby he will D-I-E. He spells this out because we are at the table with a four-year-old with big ears.

I will D-I-E and be D-E-A-D, my husband says in case I didn't quite get the message. Zimbabwe with one child is bad enough, Zimbabwe with two of the things will be much worse. It's a definite no, darling.

So I plot and I plan and I buy a new red dress from my favourite Chinese shop in the arcade next to Wimpy. It is knee-skimming and bust-skimming and full enough to twirl in seductively. I have not had a new dress for some time because a) there are very few clothes shops in Zimbabwe b) the clothes shops that have anything half-decent are wildly overpriced c) there are cash shortages. Bad ones. The sort that should stop you buying a new dress. I have been trying to feed the whole family -- two adults (one a meat-eater), a calcium-craving four year-old, two dogs and two cats -- on around £2.50 per day for some weeks now. We eat spinach, by the way.

Next morning I float into the dining room nonchalantly, as if this were Paris and I donned a new dress every day. My four-year-old has already learnt how to twist his mummy round his little finger.

"You look SO pretty, mummy," he says. "I want you to wear that dress everyday." And then -- just in case I haven't got the message -- "I want you to throw out all your other dresses and only wear that one."

"What about when it has to be washed?" I ask.

"I want you to wear it wet," he says.

My husband looks up from his mealie-meal porridge. There is no honey today. "Did you know there are cash shortages?" he asks politely.

"It's only zhing-zhong," I say. Zhing-zhong is the word Zimbabweans use when they talk about cheap poor-quality Chinese imports. It was one of the first words my child learnt.

I am having second thoughts about the dress though. Once, when I lived on a different continent, I read a piece about riots somewhere in the East. The police scanned the angry crowds and then picked out and shot someone in a red T-shirt. Our dear leader loves the East. Note to self: do not wear red dress in public, not in the next two months anyway. There are elections in March and people are getting restless. I do not want to be D-E-A-D, not for a red dress.

"So how do you like it?" I give my husband a twirl.