Strange Days

 Yesterday morning I ate the mango I picked on my last walk in Mali with Karen, on the 11th of March. It was hard and green then. The experiment worked and it ripened. To say that things look much different both in Mali and here today would be the understatement of the day...

Mali was able to boast  for a week or so that it was  the last bastion of uninfected Africa, but  has now joined its neighbours and has 18 reported cases  of Covid19, but not any deaths as yet. The diplomats and other expats are being evacuated back to their own countries which all have many more reported cases.  The underlying idea  must be that to catch the disease in Mali would be disastrous should one need respirators or intensive care.
Today Mali goes to vote in the legistive elections which have been postponed for two years for security reasons. Some have now questionelad the wisdom of having the whole population queuing up next to one another for hours at the polling booths in the current state of affairs when the government are at the same time telling people to try and stay at home and keep away from each other... and the opposition leader Soumi (Soumaila Cisse) has been kidnapped on the 25th of March in the Timbuktu area, most probably by Amadou Koufa's  Macina group. His URD party nevertheless wanted to press ahead with their leader in absentia and with no communication received from him.

In London we are all told to stay in of course, and we do, listening to the ambulances passing on the streets below and tuning in to the press conferences and gloomy news. We hold onto the jealously guarded possibility we have of going for one walk a day. This walk takes me to Holland Park, which I am discovering in all its springtime glory: a romantic tumbledown  sanctuary where nature is carefully manipulated into fooling us that we are lost in a mysterious fairy tale forest where anything could happen..

 And there is the wonderful Kyoto garden where the Japanese have perfected their own variety of   strictly calculated formal informality.

A flight of  doves are enjoying a get-together amongst the apple blossoms in transgressive proximity..

While one of the  peacocks  is surveying the scene with some disapproval from his solitary perch ....