Awaiting interview with Our Man in Uganda as President Museveni is sworn in – from ‘Lost in the Reptile House’

After the terror under Amin, the carnival mood in Kampala was hard to ingest as we dogged the dusty footsteps of President-elect Museveni and his personal escort, a teenage girl wearing two pistols at her hip while tottering gamely on diamante-encrusted Come Dancing slingbacks as they toured the Battalion HQ of his disparate, ragbag guerrilla army – some so small they choked on cigarettes or tripped on their over-sized uniforms.

Yet this man and these boys had conquered a murderous regime and for the first time in twenty years people were walking the streets in safety and gathering to talk politics; for the first time there was food in shops and the drums were playing across the city.

That evening, the Manager of the Diplomat Hotel led us through the bar past a drunk with Bo Derek braids bending ears on the New Dawn of her Nation, to our Super Suites which, after the dog-eared accommodation of previous visits, verged on the hallucinatory.

Here, in the hour before Drinkies with Our Man, there was time to admire the reporter’s conversation-stopping, tangerine-flaked sunken bath, his tub-side ivory phone and watch a video on one of Kampala’s few working televisions. Uganda cuttings could wait.

But in that flush of anticipated luxury, The African Factor had been forgotten. When his hot tap refused to turn off, we sought help from the Manager – at the time on all fours whacking the television to rid ‘Shaft in Africa’ of its snowstorm – whose solution to the problem took a form of lateral thinking unknown to Edward de Bono in which he stuffed the plug up the tap, resulting in a light blanching of his torso, a soaking for my Miami Vice pale blue suit saved for the diplomatic party, and a soggy end to my clutched cuttings.

A summonsed plumber was on the verge of success with a giant spanner when Bo Derek burst into the room wailing incoherently, banging her head against the wall and lashing out at anyone who approached, so the Manager rang for the barmen and they grabbed an arm each while the plumber coped with the flaying legs and all four wrestled their way to the lift in a torrent of tribal abuse, while I left for the Drinkies in a saturated suit and an embarrassing ignorance of Uganda’s New Dawn.