I have been reading, or re-reading- because it's one of those books that one reads so much about that I can't remember if I ever read it-, Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. Amongst other timeless perceptions and descriptions of attitudes in Africa, I particularly loved this:

(Marlow, having reached the Congo, sets off on foot to meet his steam boat that will eventually take him up the River Congo.)

'Next day I left the station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp. No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut.

The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would be empty very soon."

My father used to work in the docks at Gravesend so it's a particularly amusing image to me. I also like his descriptions of being under the weather a lot of the time, calling it "the playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course."

This morning, serious procrastination while oranges fall from the tree outside my window.