Spent the last 10 days in Zimbabwe with the Jetset Povo. When I told people that’s where I was going, they tended to say stuff like, ‘Is that … you know … is it … ?‘ Then they looked at me enquiringly as if expecting me to finish the question on their behalf. I suspect they remembered Zim was a bad place to be but, since it slipped from the news radar some months back, they couldn’t quite remember why. Was I supposed to be scared of that bad man, that terrible disease, that collapsing economy or what?

I don’t blame them. This is the way the news works these days. There has been much recent debate about how we are bombarded with too much information to process; much comment too about the Western media’s inherently slanted reporting of the rest of the world. Of course, both these things are true. But I’m more intrigued by the nature of contemporary media attention, which manages to be both forensic and skittish all at once. 

What I mean is that the vast mass of data combined with the necessities of a news agenda have led to very detailed reporting for very brief periods of times. I imagine, for example, that MPs have been fiddling their expenses for decades. The story only became ‘news’, therefore, when it was on ‘the news’. Likewise, I would suggest that President Mugabe has been pretty much consistent over the years. He is a postcolonial leader who spent much of his life trying to overthrow an illegal apartheid regime and, since independence, he has behaved much like most equivalent African ‘big men’. And, like them, he has been in Western favour, out of it and, finally, in the news. To say this is not to defend him, simply to point out the bleeding obvious. Certainly, I don’t belittle the struggles of those who fight for change and justice – whether in the UK, Zimbabwe, or anywhere else. But I do believe that the rest of us have the attention span of a tweeny in Primark; let’s not pretend to care more than we really do.

For what it’s worth, Zim was fun. The infrastructure seems improved, there’s food in the shops and signs of economic recovery everywhere. Frankly, I suspect this has less to do with the Government of National Unity and more to do with the inevitabilities of dollarization and the peace to be found in sliding off the front pages.

I didn’t do much while I was there. I went visiting, played some badminton with Joshua and watched some cricket. I wrote a bit. I drove through the Botanical Gardens and remembered that this part of the world in the rainy season is just about as beautiful as it gets.

Incidentally, while I’m on the subject of the media, I got home to the awful news of the Togo football team being attacked in Kabinda. It was undoubtedly a terrifying event, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by the fact that every single Western news channel conflated the horror with ‘security concerns’ over the South African World Cup. Even by the usual low standards, this is hackery in the extreme. Kabinda is approximately 1800 miles from, say, Johannesburg; about the same distance as the UK from Chechnya. With dissident Republicans blowing up policemen in Northern Ireland, perhaps we should be questioning the wisdom of holding the Olympics in London in 2012. I mean, I know it’s two years away, but it’s also only 300 odd miles.