From noisy to quiet – this aptly describes the roads adjacent to the Bingham compound that we can see from our kitchen window. Gone is the view of the river in its many guises, gone are the young men exercising in the fresh air on the high horizontal bar, and gone are the donkeys that had made the journey down to the water’s edge several times a day for the past year.

It was over a year ago that we renewed out gym membership. Faithful readers will remember the renewal process involved quite a lot of exercise. Our membership expired a short while before we headed to the UK for our summer break, and on our return we decided to research a different gym – largely because at Laphto pretty much everything was broken.