A Shoplifters will be prosecuted' sign on a pillar in a totally empty supermarket.
It astonishes me even more that some keep up their sense of outrage when we've only see the tip of what this regime can sink to.
A fire engine in a Harare suburb fills a military chef's domestic water supply. But someone with balls and a sense of outrage takes a photograph.
A friend, home in Harare for a couple of weeks to see family says in an email that the maximum withdrawal from a bank is a third of what she paid for five bread rolls. But you can again fly from Harare to Victoria Falls for US 20 cents.
When are you coming home? asked Busi my housekeeper on the phone. But the resignation in her voice suggests that were our roles reversed, she wouldn't bother.
Her son came from Wedza, desperate for help for his wife and child. She gave him Z$300,000, the RTGS system worked then; but his bus fare home took a third and a bucket of maize the rest. He hoped food aid would come that week but that was a month ago now.
The teenager we look after is not well and her GP, a wonderful woman who helped so many people, died suddenly. Â
Why aren't you at school? I asked, it was a Friday morning.
There are no teachers, she said of her well-known Harare girl's high school.
It's a situation ripe for her to get into some serious trouble, warned a friend, too overloaded to assist as much as she would like.
The gardener wanted to speak to me:
I am very, very happy to speak with you. There are those little tomatoes you like ready in the garden. But who is going to eat them? Thank you for that money for my son.
I was so sorry to hear that he had died Sekuru, I said.
What can you do? This Aids is everywhere, everyone has got it.
I said I was sorry about the political situation and he replied,
Ah they are very crook people, very crook.
Busi said, Ah they (the crook people) will destroy the country then just leave it. We are all going to die.
If we're lucky the crook people will do a runner to Gabon or somewhere now that the milk cow is dying. (And doubtless return later to live respectable lives in Zimbabwe when the murky origins of their fortunes have been forgotten.) If we're unlucky they'll stay and keep on kicking the carcass. Â
While these political shenanigans go on it is reported from Bondolfi Mission in Masvingo province that five children have died from severe malnutrition-related illnesses. And I can hardly bear to think about what is going unreported.
An old school friend, who is rather conservative, went back to Zimbabwe recently to bury her father. He'd managed to survive well into his 90's in a Harare old age home but his daughter lost twenty pounds because she lived on spinach and pumpkin for the two months it took her to get his body cremated – finally in Mutare.
She's lived all her adult life in the UK and as I listened to what had been a traumatic experience for her and her sister I realised how much more difficult it was for her because her sensibilities have become so exquisitely British.
She was shocked that they were permitted' to see his body before any cosmetic work had been done. She found it offensive that the man in the mortuary had dreadlocks, and intrusive that he encouraged them to be brave. She has no understanding of Shona custom and her attitudes remain stuck around the time when Ian Smith declared Southern Rhodesia unilaterally independent from Britain. Yet here she's head of administration at a multicultural high school.
I've seen this before in a doctor who grew up in Malaya. He was a kind man who did a lot to help rural people but Malaysians remained natives and terrorists! Â
If I pop my clogs when I'm in Zimbabwe my daughter knows to bury me in the garden in a shroud. Without make up, and if she can find a couple of burly dudes with dreads to lower me in, that would be good.Â