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.