ARCHIE - IN MEMORIAM

This will be a short, but poignant blog.  I had intended it to be focused on my adopted feline friend Archie (named before I actually realised that she was a girl).  I took a series of photos of her last weekend (oops, I've just noticed that I should have posted them then as I am week behind) and was going to add to them during the week, presenting a light-hearted look at Archie's antics.  Sadly, the day after the photo shoot she failed to turn up for breakfast and I haven't seen her since. 

Whilst she has disappeared for the odd day or two before (and of course was absent for three days during the 'Charlie's Sock Cupboard Incident' as it became known at school) she has never been missing for this long.  The mean streets of Kampala is a tough environment for a small cat, especially one as trusting as Archie, so I fear she is no longer with us.  I am obviously very sad about this as she was very sweet and we had grown quite close, however, as I pointed out to Ronnie yesterday, it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.  Now I have to say, I was left with the impression that whilst she sympathised with my loss, she felt that I was over dramatising it.  Well, I will leave it to all you true cat lovers out there to decide for yourselves.

So, below is a series of shots of Archie, well, just being Archie.  She rarely stayed still for more than a few seconds so a lot of them are blurred, but hopefully you will get an idea of what she was like ...

Always curious :-)

Very loving :-(

And finally ...

On a lighter note, there is a railway line that runs from Uganda to Kenya, which when it was built around a century ago was a marvellous feat of engineering.  However, like many other things in the country, in the seventies and eighties it was allowed to fall into disrepair and is now a sorry shadow of its former self.  It hasn't carried passengers for many years and even the freight traffic is very infrequent.  In fact it is so infrequent that, despite travelling over it almost every day I have only twice seen a train!  Most of the time is is a very busy pedestrian thoroughfare as it is straight and flat and hence good for walking on.  However, on Friday I actually spotted an enormous train that extended out of sight in both directions.  Admittedly it was only doing about 5 KPH, but it was there.  Although I was driving I managed to get my camera out and take a fleeting photo (this is Kampala so my curiously erratic driving was barely noticed).  Below is the result - not a great photo, but a rare one nonetheless: