Despite two negative test results and a course of drugs I still suspect that I might have malaria. That or this train carriage is very, very hot. The woman sitting next to me looks flushed and is buying a bottle of water from the trolley drone, so it’s possible that the air conditioning is broken. However, she’s of an age when she could just be having a hot flush, so I’m not convinced that her heating problems offer me any reassurance.
Technically I am on holiday. After almost a year in Ghana, Louisa and I have flown back to the UK for three weeks to remind our respective parents what we looks like. When you’re earning a Ghanaian salary, being written out of wills is something to be guarded against at all costs. With my darling sister currently performing her one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe, now is the perfect time to pass off living in West Africa as a comparatively sensible career move.
With similar concerns in mind, Louisa pointedly asked me on the return flight not to use my usual description of Accra being ‘like Swindon but with a few more open drains’. This apparently doesn’t help bolster our reputation as fearless filmmakers surviving in the Heart of Darkness. Watching from West Africa over the past few weeks while the UK set itself on fire, I suspect that Swindon may represent more of Conrad’s nightmare than the noisy stability of modern Ghana. While glued to CNN at work, a shot of an armed rebel watching a flat-screen TV had me scurrying to Immigration to seek political asylum before a colleague pointed out that we were watching Tripoli and not Tottenham.
With police complicity in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and now the riots making international news, it’s been an embarrassing few weeks to be a Brit abroad. Ghanaian colleagues have been asking with genuine concern whether it’s safe for me to return home, and then more thornily, why the riots are occurring in the first place. For really acute middle class liberal guilt, try explaining to someone who earns the equivalent of £120 a month why their former colonial masters are clubbing each other in the street over looted trainers.
Although Ghana gained independence in 1957 it still has strong ties to the UK and, on the quiet, looks up to Britain. To see its master-turned-mentor tearing itself apart while Ghana pulls itself up by its economic bootstraps is frankly unsettling. It’s like coming home from your paper-round to find an authoritarian parent drunk and weeping in front of Trisha.
Before we left Ghana our Canadian friends and seasoned ex-pats Joe and Janine warned us of the dangers of trying to do too much during brief visits home. Cancelling our planned visit to JD Sports we took heed of their advice, but possibly not enough. We were too busy drawing up daily schedules of where we were going to be and booking our next lunch dates.
Arriving home in August should have buffered us against the shock of the change in climate. Of course since 2001 British summer now occurs during the last week of April, so we arrived back instead to what has felt like a Siberian winter. Louisa immediately went down with a shocking cold while I began to do the Malarial Sweats, a routine that has you alternately flushing hot and cold while humming Mad Dogs and Englishmen through clenched teeth.
I’m currently rattling north on a train Halifax to see my 94-year-old grandfather. Despite me frequently telling him that I’m working for a TV station, his concept of our life in Ghana is firmly based on him having seen Zulu when it first came out in 1964. During a previous phone conversation I detailed some of the hardships of our life here (no Strictly Come Dancing; over-priced cheese). His advice was for us to fall back to the hospital buildings and make a last stand there - sage advice if we were fighting off thousands of armed natives, but less useful if you’re just trying to get Skype to connect.
That said, as another wave of heat engulfs me and sweat begins to trickle down my spine, retreating to a hospital building doesn’t seem like a bad idea. I’m beginning to wonder whether North Yorkshire has any provision for treating tropical diseases when the ticket inspector bustles into my train carriage, apologising. “Sorry for the heat in here. The air-con’s broken. Someone’s coming on board at the next station to have a look at it.” As he pushes on down the aisle the woman next to me rolls her eyes and fans her face with her hand. “It’s like bloody Africa in here” she says. “Yeah” I mutter. So much for being on holiday. At least I might not have malaria.
