I've Danced the Adumu
By Matt Bailey
I've danced the Adumu with the Maasai in Tanzania and they were hugely impressed by the height at which I could jump. I was a lumberjack up in Oregon for a season and a white-water rafting guide on the Zambezi. I ran with the bulls in Pamplona and have a four-inch scar on my left leg for the effort, I worked on an oil rig in the South China Sea and have fished salmon in the icy waters off Alaska where I grew a beard a foot long to protect against the cold. I caught a wild vicuna llama in the Bolivian Andes and made a hat out of its fur. I learnt to play the djembe drum in Mali, after a marathon three day session during which my spirit supposedly became one with the tree and animal of which the instrument was made, they made me a djembe of goat skin and dimba wood as a parting gift. I used my new found skills to good effect as a drummer at the Rio Carnival five years running.
I spent two years with an Mbuti pygmy tribe deep in the Congolese rainforest and I went walkabout in the harsh Australian outback tracing the aboriginal songline of the gecko. I played buzkashi in Afghanistan and just managed to get the headless goat-carcass over the line despite the determined efforts of the horsed opposition. I played the jew-harp amongst the cycad trees in the courtyard of the Queen of the Balobedu and I was captured by swashbuckling Somali pirates in the dangerous Gulf of Aden, despite being partially attracted to their lifestyle I decided to escape and managed to do so on my fifth attempt.
I joined a rebel brigade in Libya and fought for freedom, such was the fearlessness with which I strode into battle and such were my mighty deeds that I became one of the Seven Lions of Libya. Scorning any weapon I wrestled a polar bear in the freezing Arctic snow because he tried to steal my fish, I crossed the vast Sahara desert with my camel Jamaal and had to carry him on my back half the way because he couldn’t, so he says, take another step - I only just made it myself. I traversed the wild Atlantic sea in a small skiff and fended off countless sharks with my broken paddle and a piece of rope, I befriended a blue whale on the journey and had some stimulating conversation which, to be honest, is what kept me going.
I wrote a book entitled ‘The Many Exploits of Huxley Jeffcot-Jones’ - it was a bestseller in sixty-two countries and it’s still going strong. I’ve been arrested in fifteen countries and been given awards in twenty-one. I speak eleven languages. I’ve done and been through so much I can barely remember half of it. They say Hercules has nothing on me.
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