Kenya believe it

'This is the only city with a national park.' Tricky for a pedant to accept without doing a full global analysis, but the purser's point upon landing was fair: given its growth and the pressures of development the fact that Nairobi can boast impressive wildlife is testament to doing something right.

I was due in a meeting at 10am, fixed because traffic in Nairobi is highly unpredictable and the same journey could take one hour or four. In fact it took 30 minutes... I arrived at the cafe four hours early and before it opened. The staff took pity on me. Then our meeting was postponed until later so the cafe hosted me for a total of 8 hours and today may have seen the greatest amount of coffee consumed of any day since I've been alive.

Amongst coffee shop clients I had the misfortune to sit next to the ex-chair of the Salisbury branch of the British National Party, which he revealed when we had recognised each others' accents, had struck up a conversation about politics and I bemoaned a time when Stoke was coming under the influence of the BNP. He was so thick skinned that it was barely awkward.

When I've met xenophobic characters away from the UK, their value systems confuse me. I am not labelling him xenophobic just because he's a BNP supporter, but because of his unsavoury comments about Islam. Racist is perhaps a more fitting term for what I heard. He agreed that Nick Griffin was odious and was bemoaning the inability of the far-right parties to mobilise themselves into a cohesive unit. I am glad that incompetence reigns supreme. He was entirely offensive about African women and as with people I've met like him in the past I struggled to reconcile his value system with his long-term presence living somewhere as a minority.

According to the taxi driver who took me from the airport, I look 42. For the sake of peace at 5.20am when quizzed about my situation, I conjured up a wife, but alas no kids yet. She and I are too busy being young at heart forty somethings to get tied down. Instead I was able to experience child rearing directly by sitting next to a boisterous toddler on a plane and being screeched at and/or pummelled by limbs for the duration of a journey. I was able to break down the shackles of British reserve and inform the mother that the child was causing me a restless journey. She always remedied the child's position for temporary respite but it was like fighting an inevitable screeching ooze that always reverted back to limb pummelling.

Through fatigue time lost all sense of meaning but at some point we ended up visiting our colleague Josephine who is on maternity leave. Her newborn son, being cradled by another colleague Patrick, restored my faith in docile non-screechy children.