LAST week, I showed South African friends around London. Tim and David, father and son, had come to celebrate David’s 18th birthday by watching Liverpool play Man City at Anfield. It was the first time either of them had been to Europe and David had never been out of Africa at all.
I remember a dinner, thrown for the Dragoman Society, at which lecturers and tour guides came together to swap hair raising stories of desert storms, sweeping norovirus attacks, jungle banditry and, in one case, the horror of leaving a slow-moving American tourist locked alone, in the dark, in a tomb at the Valley of the Kings. The assembled company had dealt, inter alia, with heart attacks, feuds and a large helping of pride, sloth, gluttony and envy, with…
