#patrick marnham

Nothing reduces the internal communications of a remote country as quickly as an international airport. It limits the experience of most of those travelling there to two places, one of which, the airport, is designed to be as little unlike the place which the traveller departed from as it is possible to make it, and the other of which, the capital city, is continually attempting to resemble every other of its counterparts throughout the world.

It is the fate of any traveller through a new country to be considered for much of the time an idiot.

The hippos emerged from a day spent beneath the surface & prepared themselves for the serious browsing of the night. Once they were out of the water their characteristic sound, which had echoed up and down the bank, ceased. It was a noise that suggested they spent the tedious underwater hours repeating jokes, at which they chuckled in appreciation, slowly & coarsely & one by one, the final pause frequently being followed by the sound of the final hippo, laughing uncomprehendingly and much too late.