Best wishes to your Dad!     Cruel to say, but a broken clavicle is probably the least worst bone to break!  Joh 

Oh dear. That’s very unfortunate . Which Somerset hospital are you dealing with?

On holiday in Somerset with the two kids and my parents, roped my aging dad into a gentle tennis match with self and 14-year-old. Up until last year dad was very active but time caught up with him abruptly, and now he's on all sorts of pills which may or may not do more harm than good. Anyway he reached for a shot, overbalanced, tried to correct by running to catch up with himself, and gathered enough momentum to crash to earth on his shoulder and break his collarbone in a plainly visible way. Bollocks, should have stuck to the ping-pong and pool table. 

Modern Abuja is not somewhere you would let your 6 year old play nowadays. Mind you as a 6 year old I went about with my pal  unaccompanied in central Nairobi. Again not something to be recommended these days either. Armed escort to worksite, and a fair bit of live ammunition expended from time to time in the 'safer' locale where he lives.

Assuming you mean Nigeria's official capital, we went there on one of Dads road trips in about 1973.  They had literally just started building the new city.  Nothing but bulldozers and mud pies.  It was an eventful trip, not least because they hadn't bothered to build any decent roads to it and the original road was suffering badly from the construction traffic.  Epic corrugations were really not enjoyed by our Mk1 Cortina or it's unfortunate occupants - enough to collapse the plates in the battery to the point where it produced too little voltage even for a push start.  Three punctures..... exhaust fell off.  Top of the carb kept coming loose..... and the rest house we were meant to be staying in burnt down two days before we got there.  Lots of great granite hills to clamber on an old Abuja was a great pottery centre IIRC - not that 6 year-old me gave a damn about that!

Nice tip. These ones however had started to leak at the joints. Which can be resolved but as they were about 20 years or so old and the run wasn't particulalry good in places I thought I would take advantage of the scaffolding. The rones at the back are actually a bit older but get less sun, don't leak and are just fine so all they'll get is a bit of a clean.

I have a friend who is presently working in Abuja. It has it's 'challenges'. Previously it was Central African Republic. Which in local terms at least was significantly safer. Angola too. It was apparently absolutely beautiful with 99.9% of the people great.

Strangely enough I've been to most of the countries that's going to sail past, enen lived in one of them. 

If you leave the plastic ones weather in, then original hamerite keys to it and makes it look original 😉

Roof fully stripped of the old slates. And six pallets of new slates (for the approx. 170 m2 of roof) arrived this morning, in the tipping rain. Fortunately the roof now has a full breather membrane over the wood sarking that it never had previously. I have been taking advantage of the scaffolding to do a bit of maintenance. The plastic rones (rain gutter) at the front were getting a bit past it so I replaced them and I am about half way round painting under the eaves.