nothing changes

Ian Mills, a veteran correspondent who once (he said) rode horseback over the hills of Manica Province, had strings with just about every conceivable outlet at some point - Reuters, AFP, BBC, you name it, he'd worked for them. He died a couple of years ago. When I got to know him in 2004, he was a talented musician, edited a church magazine, was bringing up two vivacious teenage daughters with grace and gentleness -- and still managing to file a bit.

Visiting foreign correspondents (these days local papers call them parachute journalists -- they jet in for the drama and jet out again just as fast) swarmed his office in Robinson House on Angwa Street to use his filing machine. "You've got a filmmaker's lifestyle," an editor out from Britain told him once, wistfully comparing the lawn, the patio and the swimming pool to his own basement flat in London.

Once, after a press conference with the Rhodesian government, Mills went outside to find his tyres had been slashed.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

(Our tyres were slashed once outside Bon Marche supermarket in Chisipite suburb. But that was -- less excitingly -- the work of would-be muggers, who'd seen the baby chair and the wide-brimmed hat on the back seat in the middle of a weekday morning and presumed I was a woman driver on her own. I wasn't.)