The dust was still coming back to earth as we scrambled from the wreckage. There was a discord of voices in panic. People lurched from the mangled, still-smoking mess of a car and hugged each other, thanking The Almighty and whoever else was in earshot, for the fortunate continuation of their lives. I had struggled in an upside-down fashion to release myself from the seatbelt, then crawled through the shattered glass window, to safety. Bleeding and in shock, I was otherwise okay.

It was a strange looking humanoid object, carved from dark wood with stretched neck and bulging eyes: E.T. for the classroom! I never quite worked out its purpose, but the kids adored it. This was a mysterious item from faraway Africa, unlike anything they had ever seen before. Was it a centuries old voodoo doll? We will never know. But it lay unused in my attic for several years, presiding over family strife and financial disasters.

It had been almost two decades since my unsuccessful attempt to find a father whom I had never met, only to discover his earthly life had ended, just one year before I arrived at the place of his departure. Dismayed and discouraged, I gave up the chase, though it was replaced to some extent, by a new search for my deceased father’s first-born son, a few years older than me and in reality my half-brother. Did he still exist?

So there we were, my younger daughter Alice, and I: home alone; or more correctly home together, on a bleak winter’s evening, in England. The other half of our neat nuclear family had escaped the intrigue and enthrall of endless British soaps on the box; deserting the island, leaving us marooned and at the mercy of tele-trivia.

Now, a week later, whenever a door slams or someone hits a mat against a wall, I jump, thinking … gunshot! Forty or fifty times a day - or more - I think about my ‘shopping experience’ at The Westgate Mall, in Nairobi, Kenya. I wonder when these startled jumps and crazy thoughts will go away. Time heals all they say.

I knew they were serious when I saw the street light glinting off the knife blade! Four boys in rags. One grabbing for my watch; another trying to snatch the pack. I wouldn’t be the first to succumb to the street kids of Nairobi, and definitely not the last. Suddenly a guard came bounding out of the shadows from a nearby bank, yelling and waving his truncheon: Batman to the rescue! The boys scattered. ....