The typhoon downgraded to a severe mistral but enough to rip away our lunchtime salad on the lawn so we decided on tea in her reception hall, the wind still whipping through the open doors but merely upping the Mandalay factor. As Alex read on the chaise longue, I knelt to pour the tea from the tray they’d placed on the decorative floor mat, (this being Bali).

“Read this about her,” she said, passing a magazine in which Linda extolled the life-enhancing qualities of bamboo; as I lent back to take it, a bamboo pole snapped that had been supporting the six-foot centrepiece lampshade of ceramics and latticed bamboo lathes which smashed down on the teatray, missing me by a foot.

It was a lucky escape as it took two men to carry it away; when Zissou arrived from his evening run he checked its weight and pronounced it wouldn’t have killed me but probably broken bones.

All that aside, Linda Garland is inspiring but sadly in the throes of selling the estate through ill-health and is desperate the buyer will continue her research work – no it isn’t Richard Branson, yesterday’s Evening Standard got it wrong.

Herewith a snap of the centrepiece as a workman awaits his colleague to help lift it – not  pin-sharp but my hands were a little shaky.

As for today, it ended with us holding onto valuables as Cyclone Lua ripped through our open villa in Canggu but we are now Bali-proof, finally recognising that this isn’t Henley on Thames where a stiff breeze can make the local paper.

Time for Bonzu to get wi-fi’d up – and sharpish.

Zissou awaits guests, sitting on his unwrapped mattress….

If you see this when cutting his lawn, it’s time to turn the mower round…….

Zissou relaxes with the last guest gone, comforted by the cheap bar bill…..

Surprisingly few American tourists are deceived by this subtle retail ruse in Panjim…..

Urgent re-branding needed for this Mumbai water supplier….

Exclusive shot of Goa’s prototype solar-powered motorcycle….

Delivery men await first bread batch of the morning at Mumbai’s Hygienic Bakery Company…….

Steve Jobs’ sister Mona Simpson, commenting on his demise, says, “Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it,” which must surely cap all other outpourings that were about to canonize the man till the timely arrival of Walter Isaacson’s biography which reveals a seriously flawed genius who combined aesthetics, science, showbiz, bizbiz and the trick of maximising minimalism to create products we never realised we wanted so badly.

When you’re so ugly that Wikipedia describes your mouth as shaped like a lawnmower, it seems justifiable to exact a subtle revenge on humanity. And wildebeests do just that. They dither.
Once the well-heeled wildlife tourist has ticked off Africa’s Big Five, they only need to witness the annual migration of wildebeest crossing Kenya’s croc-infested Mara River and the job’s done.
But now it’s payback time for the wildebeest. It’s they who decide the date and time to cross the Mara, not Abercrombie and Kent. So you track them for days, thousands upon thousands of them blackening the plains. To keep up spirits when the sundowners fail, guides will say they’re definitely moving towards the Mara River. Then just one critter – not a born leader, not an alpha male nor Mensa member – but just your everyday gnu, (as Scrabblers prefer to call the wildebeest), turns away from the Mara, the whole bloody herd stops dithering to follow, and the 4×4’s return to camp for a subdued dinner.
By Day Three we’d been following our four thousand-strong herd for so long I could virtually name each one. Tortured by their illogical path and ho-hum attitude to destinations, datelines and return flights, I was ready to drop our guide my last dollars for us to circle from behind and stampede them over and be done with it, but he pointed to game wardens hovering to fine any off-road excursions.
So when the herd started another meander towards the water and the guide said this could be the moment, we exchanged glances and thought of dinner round the camp fire. And sure enough, just one changed its mind and we’re back to square one, but this time they’re met by another odd thousand coming towards them and they turn again, this time gathering on the banks for a mass dither, only for a lone hippo to appear from the bush and spook them into another hour of debate. By now there were around thirty 4×4’s lined up in hope, engines off, under the steely gaze of the game warden who ensures any decision to jump is the wildebeests’ alone.
And then it happens, they’re actually going for it. You’re catapulted back as all thirty engines burst into life, snaking through the blinding red murram dust like a blanket finish of the Paris/Dakar Rally as the guides race for the prized front row on the river bank and a life-changing tip. As the dust clears, there’s the hypnotic sight of five thousand wildebeest leaping from the banks and rocks, creatures never designed for swimming whose thrashing hooves churn the water white as they struggle for safety; a watching hippo turns tail at the mayhem but a croc’s head slinks closer to the main column, but this is a young one who needs four or five attempts before a black head rears back and then is sucked below.
It’s all over in minutes as they shake themselves dry on the opposite bank and begin the same slow follow-my-leader as if it’s just another day at the office. And you may think they’ve finally got their act together, become collectively decisive at this moment of truth. Ugh, ugh, that’s not in their DNA; they’ve been known to swim back across the Mara, munch a little, dither a lot, and wind up the tourists before they decide to cross it once more. Looking at their faces, with mouths like lawnmowers, you’d never guess they’re getting the last laugh.

Tut, tut, eighteen months since the last blog. No excuses.

Well….yes. In August last year my stomach pains were diagnosed by the first two doctors  as a bug which would go but didn’t, so I tried a third doctor who prodded like the others but this one ordered a scan next morning and an operation that afternoon. Clue.

“Great news,” he said as I came out of intensive care, “the op. was a complete success, we’ve got it all out. You were lucky, the intestines had developed two loops like a garden hose on the lawn and the base of each was fusing together, impeding the flow. Well done old chap, the oncologist will be in on Wednesday.”

And you lie there doped with drugs, skimming all the crap channels of the world and wondering why an oncologist would want to visit. Then it slowly sinks in. It’s their gentle way of telling you it’s bowel cancer.

But Wednesday brought good news – it hadn’t reached the lymphs and I was given six months of chemo pills and a long list of possible side effects. In the event there weren’t any, just the nagging wait for the one-year-later tests to see if it had returned, during which blogging somehow lost its appeal, (and to hell with the evaporating fanbase), while even photography failed to ignite.

Then came the all clear and a week later at a family picnic in Snowdonia I heard a whistle, far-off and faint, but so evocative it took me back seventy years to Ealing during the War where we’d bought a semi by the GWR track where it crossed the Underground line, a double whammy for passing German bombers, (that’s why it was so cheap), and the image of my brother and I under the bridge enveloped in smoke as God’s Wonderful Railway thundered past and we’d slide down the embankment to find the pancaked pennies we’d left on the line.

Another whistle, louder now, and coming into view was a lone Snowdonia steam locomotive chugging through the heathered hills and only when its driver spotted the cameras and obliged with a burst of steam, did I finally feel my charmed life regained.

Watching the children from thirty two nations being taught in their all-bamboo Green School – eating only what they grow -  where Zissou volunteers, listening to his eco-savvy circle at dinner talking of the practical ways to redress the world’s pollution excesses, seeing his daily beach runs, meeting his yoga, art and ceramic teachers and surf coach, spending a day at his black bamboo home in the jungle which he shares with a cow, two kittens and a male monkey with an attitude problem as he works on his design projects, hearing of his forays with friends to other unspoilt islands in the archiapeligo – some so wild that cannibalism was only eradicated in the 1980’s – and of his diving with manta rays, returning from snorkelling with him over coral reefs escorted by flying fish, watching him surf at Balangan and sharing his fresh papaya juice before wandering home along the beach, backed by one of the Hollywood sunsets he’s written about during the year he’s been here, buying food and fuel at Fifties prices, and you start to wonder if maybe in life’s great order of things, he might just have got it right.

On landing in Bali, Zissou revealed he’d been working on a three week off-route itinerary for us that would exhaust the senses; the bad news was immediate confiscation of our laptops, iPads and phones for 48 hours in an experiment to bring us a little closer to Mother Earth and create a zen-like karma to our lives. No…. seriously? Yes, seriously. His year volunteering at the local Green School has created an evangelical thrust that spells trouble – an early clue is a sulking reluctance as if our sole possessions were being tagged and bagged prior to a prison sentence.

Such deprivations, however, are soon forgotten when faced with the local smile which is like an infection, virtually a reflex reaction to eye contact. Others may smile, but in Bali they mean it. Couple that with a sow-and-stand-back fertility from their tropical climate bringing an abundance of food and you struggle to think of anywhere sweeter on Earth.

That’s till you hit the southern coast tourist strip, its creep limited to an extent by the corruption which holds back infrastructure. The year-round traffic gridlock of course is meaningless to the gentle Hindu population who spend up to 50% of their meagre earnings making intricate offerings of food, flowers, etc. to numberless gods in the ubiquitous temples and shrines. Despite the dollar-laden tourist boom, there are no drugs, (a curiosity which may be connected to possible 25-year sentences for possession and beheading for pushing).

Did we say deprevation of electronics was soon forgotten? Within 36 hours we had successfully begged for our toys to be returned; Zissou, (who denies them himself once a fortnight), is horrified at such parental failure. And the first news item springing from our laptops was a survey finding 80% of students suffered cold turkey when subjected to a 24-hour media blackout, with one quoted as saying, “Media is my drug, without it I was lost.” We’re with him there.

Now, thanks to the miracle of instant communication, we learn that Britney Spears may be a man in drag, that archaeologists have found a 5,000 year-old gay caveman, and soccer shinpads have been invented to detect attempts at penalty dives. We’re back in the real world at last.

With all double rooms taken in Saigon’s Park Hyatt across the road, these two wisely chose a Mercedes 500 SE with its wide boot lid for a more comfortable night in a city where real estate can top $15,000 a square metre, fuelled by rural migration to the cities.

(That’s why Vietnamese urban architecture can prove so ugly; stuck with these land prices, they build only one-room wide but as high as their budget allows, at a pace that looks like some game show. Boy, can they shovel).

When the boot-lid duo eventually get their 7 a.m. wake-up call from the police, they move to a coffee stall to shake themselves awake. Vietnamese grow coffee but whether they can actually make it is a question of taste. Coffee aficianodos might be tempted by the exotic local blend ca phe chon composed of beans eaten by a civet rat for its fleshy fruit before being passed to be sun-dried and lightly roasted, (the bean, not the civet – lets not give them any more ideas). It’s highly prized, very expensive, but save your dong; all coffee here tastes like it’s been through a civet anyway.

Better coffee comes during last night’s Bangkok stopover where the sex trade is all-pervasive, from the Barbie dolls parading the tourists spots and the double-pack strawberry-flavoured Durex in the Conrad Hotel’s mini-bar, to the ageing Brit in the French Bistro who may not realise the companion sharing his lobster is a ladyboy.

At midnight, a note is slipped under the bedroom door advising my airport pick up will be at 05.20 when I must be ready in the lobby; it is signed by Ms. Supaporn, the hotel operator. Yes, but what sort of operator? The Cricket World Cup is reaching a climax on TV but curiosity leads me to check.

When Reception confirms Ms. Supaporn is in fact a member of staff, I suggest a name change might bring her a quieter life.