I once found myself on a lonely road in southern Ethiopia with the famous Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski. We were travelling through bandit country when we got a puncture. We had a rendezvous at a bush airstrip with an aircraft that had to take off before night closed in. It turned out Ryszard had no clue about changing tyres and, whereas I was quite happy to break open the beers and sleep in a ditch, he fretted about missing tea with the lady relatives of Emperor Haile Selassie back in Addis Ababa.