Não chore para mim Argentina

The lady at the petrol station had a name badge that said ‘Argentina’, when I popped in to buy water, cheese and chocolate. I had worked late so took a taxi back with Vitoria, the trusty driver who I usually call in such situations. A dishevelled homeless man asked for money for bread as I got back into the taxi and Vitoria noted she’d seen him before asking people, and that she suspected he was a drug addict. I told her that in the UK this is common too, and she empathised. I asked whether she had family members who had fallen into a homeless situation and she said she had a cousin living on the streets somewhere in central Maputo, close to where we were driving.

The Netflix natural history documentary Our Planet has received rave reviews, principally due to both its willingness to tackle the challenging subject of human impact on nature, and the coup of getting my old mate Dave Attenborough as the narrator. I watched it to unwind when I finally finished working and found it much more balanced than the typical documentary of its type, which presents nature in a completely undamaged form. Which is rarely accurate and misleading to promote as the norm.

The footage was staggering. Dolphins barrelling around shoals of anchovies off Peru. Wildebeest babies outpacing a pack of wild dogs in the Serengeti (which was a very gripping sequence). How these scenes are shot is staggering and frazzling for technological simpletons like me.