Ta da! First new look cottage: Futa. Almost - but not quite - there. Kitchen stripped and refitted with terrazzo counter and beautiful sunset pink stucco walls, great big new double nets fitted over the beds, new fabrics, new mattresses, new lamps, new pillows. All made in Kenya. New towels and sheets to follow month end, ditto cutlery, crockery and kitchen utensils. One down. Almost. Six to go.  Papa has had most of its innards ripped out and reshaped and Kasa is missing a roof as we extend the verandah and the bathroom.    By June we should be done. But which time we'll need a holiday!

Anybody recommend anywhere good?                             

The rest of the country is underwater. Awash. Upcountry snailtrail traffic splashes slowly to work. Roads are rivers. Gardens hammered by heavy rain and hail. But here, here at the beach the skies are huge and blue and tangled only with the skinniest tease of ribbon cloud.   The breeze shuffles the leaves and the sun shines. I need the rain for the garden, for seedling trees, for the orchard, but the guests don't. They hope they've left all that behind.  So I work whilst a beautiful, beautiful day spills all around, I tap keys and print invoices and do the filing to the industrious rhythm of banging and knocking and saws cutting their teeth on new shelves. We're mid renovation, this is the sound of a cottage facelift …

An enormous moon rose over the sea. An orb of perfectly round light ascended with silent and splendidly illuminated grace. This is the moon in sync with size and space: an awesome and eye catching concidence of full moon and proximity to the earth: 15 000 miles closer and it was no wonder it seemed bigger, by 14%, and brighter by 30. Somebody had turned the lights up. So we sank back on the verandah and watched a bright night descend, watery horizons glowed and the ocean was strung with silver. A huge tide curled its way up and over the beach, the sound of the small-hours surf contended with the birds who thougth it was time to get up, such was the brightness of the night at its deepest.

They flare each year, at this time, in the soft hiatus between highhot March and cooldamp June.  The pretending-to-be-winter bit of Africa.  I don't know what they're called. I've scoured Google images to try to put a name to these fire lilies with their pompom heads of crimson.  Nothing is revealed. They have erupted all over the bush, in the deep dark shade of Figs and Neem, their scarlet throws the lush green that unfurls around them as unseasonably Festive.  Great Balls of Fire. Whose flames will abate with the rain so that their heat recedes to damp soft earth again. Until next year. But for now, each evening, I walk and watch their colour ignite in the fading evening Golden-syrup light.

Mill Pond days and a sea like a looking glass have given way to blissfully, blustery ones. The wind races across the ocean and up the beach and shakes the Borassus Palms so that their parchment fronds rattle as if an irritated Judge was getting his papers in order before a hearing. The odd coconut falls, the surf pounds, all Omo bleached and laced against the reef and shutters not secured whine and slap with every gust. The ocean runs with white horses which in high, hot february ran in unison up the beach on an afternoon breeze but which now race wildly amok.

Somewhere in the high, hot hiatus between Christmas and coming rains, the sea at sun up settles to the satiny smooth surface of silk, no wind to even create the tiniest crease. Not until lunchtime, when the breeze begins to sigh and the palm fronds rattle and then - in the evening - the wind chases a million white horses across the ocean as tiny furled waves.

But, in the morning, it's mill pond calm. Good fishing weather says Anthony longingly. But there is work to be done say I.