Twenty years ago I was sat in England and somehow convinced myself that elephants were about to become extinct. That led eventually to me selling up, leaving my job, getting dumped by the then girlfriend and driving out of London, on my “Big Adventure”. This resulted in me eventually arriving, six months later, in Cape Town.

By the time, however, I arrived in Cameroon, by way of France, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Niger and Nigeria I was already convinced that the elephant was not in fact anywhere near becoming extinct, but was actually doing rather well. There were some counties south of Cameroon where no doubt animal protection came second to the need for food. Zaire for example, as Congo was at that time, was amazing but there was nothing that didn’t find itself onto a plate.

If you were to drop a cat from a twenty storey building it would actually bounce as it hit the deck, despite using up all of its remaining lives on the way down; hence the stock exchange expression, “a dead cat bounce”.

So the markets fell and bounced as the incredibly predictable and yet uninspiring politico’s in the USA come to the rescue with their voters tax money. But what a week that was! The world’s most overconfident pack of wolves lie dead and bleeding in the forest clearing and those few who survived have been caged and turned into tamed zoo exhibits!