My old colleague and his wife came for dinner and, of course, my wife laid on one of her Cordon Bleu meals, one suitable for colonials on leave from Africa's Copper Belt. My friend was full of his experience and I was enjoying his company but his gas light was put on a peep and he and I were silenced when my wife started to ask questions about the price of bread and butter and eggs and milk and were toilet paper and things women needed once a month available. I had thought it would be just a pleasant evening but realised there was a second agenda and started to ask about his job underground. You don't crawl around for a start, he told me, the ore bodies are massive and you can stand up everywhere. It sounded attractive, especially as work in Method Study, which should need imagination had become routine (I was to discover that all big organisations turn things that nee imagination into routine so that they can control the things that should be uncontrolled lateral thinking). We were late in bed and next day I was writing to the mining houses asking about employment in Northern Rhodesia, which would shortly become Zambia and we were off like gypsies.

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