I know that I seem to have regressed to a time I was twelve and living in Swaziland. Please allow me one last nostalgic anecdote.

The village we lived in was in the middle of a huge forest - apparently the second-largest manmade forest in the world. For safety reasons, the forest was strictly out of bounds, so when a ranger spotted Antony and his mates larking about one afternoon in August 1977, he gave chase. Antony's friends ran one way, Antony the other.

He wasn't home in time for dinner that night. My mum phoned his friends, who claimed not to have seen him at all that day. There was a great deal of speculation at a teenage party that night - eventually a tearful friend admitted that they'd been playing in the forest, and a search party was sent out to look for him. They returned the next morning, empty-handed.

We received news of a death that morning - Elvis. It felt like an omen. The radio played Elvis songs all morning as we huddled together, waiting for the phone to ring.

Around 11am, it did. Antony had been found, and was fine. He had spent all night wandering deeper and deeper into the dark forest. Some time in the middle of the night, a thick mist had descended, and Antony had had to stop where he was, not daring to walk another foot.

A good job he hadn't - when he woke up the next morning, he found was right on the edge of a steep precipice, a boulder-strewn river far below. Yes, I know that sounds like exaggerated melodrama, but that's what he told us.

He spotted a couple of huts and made his way there. The villagers welcomed him in, made him breakfast and walked him to the nearest forest station. He arrived home in a forestry fire truck, blasting the foghorn and grinning broadly.