Below I reproduce an extract from an article in the Mail on Sunday of 23 September, the full article is here. I think it is important that as many people as possible know of the tragedy which is Zimbabwe. As soon as we were back from Italy we phoned Zimbabwe to let my wife’s family know we were safely home. They too had good news, they’d been able to buy 2lbs of meat! They had to queue a long time for it but it was the first meat they’d been able to get in weeks.

“The British High Commission in Harare is currently updating its register of British citizens in Zimbabwe. My guess is it’s because they know they might have to orchestrate a mass evacuation of UK nationals.”

“I won’t be going with them. I am a fourth generation white African. I belong to Zimbabwe, it’s my home and I’m still in love with what it once was. It was always a special place, a backwater, a mixture of England in the Fifties and tropical Africa.”

“But let me tell you about it now, about the country it has become, little pockets of paradise and hell in between.”

“These days I hate getting into lifts or standing too close to someone in a food queue. You can smell their foul breath and see their mouth ulcers and you know they are the one in four who has Aids. It’s like walking among the living dead.”

“The cemeteries stretch for miles. There are no official statistics but Aids takes a lot and malnutrition takes the rest. Government-run hospitals don’t have so much as an aspirin. If you have an accident they ask you to bring your own bandages and whatever drugs you have at home.”

“My house gets water once a week and my routine is interrupted by around three power cuts a day. I went to my supermarket on Friday morning and all it had was grapefruit segments, American hot dogs and boiled sweets. There was no bread or milk, no meat, no cooking oil, salt or sugar. Nothing you actually need to live. “