Recently we went shopping. Not surprising you might say, even though it took four supermarkets to gather the few items on our list. The longer we are in Addis the less unusual life seems. We crossed an unmade road to reach one shop where a ditch had been excavated to lay sewage pipes. As I picked my way across the broken paving slabs I looked in the direction of some rather loud crying noises. I wasn’t really that surprised to see a goat, all four legs trussed together, being thrust into an overfull, dilapidated blue and white minibus taxi.

Astronomy fascinated me from a young age, so in my early teens as soon as I had saved enough of my paper round money I bought myself a telescope (a 60mm refractor if you must know). My incredibly tolerant parents managed to fit it in the car when we went on holiday and I could be found outside in the dark on the cliffs of Cornwall stargazing to my heart’s content. (I overstretched myself a bit when I decided to create my own star cataloguing system). That self-same telescope showed my family the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter and is still wrapped up and stored away in my St Albans lock-up – it was one of the few things I couldn’t bring myself to throw away when we moved to Addis.