A good job.

Do you think your parents did a good job with you?

Mine did. So it might have been the '80s and Eastlands back then was not the slum it is today, but my parents - my mother, especially - did not with a permanent anxiety that my brothers and I were going to be hurt in some way or worse. As soon as we could spell our names in a straight enough line, she got us off to school - pre-school, but school still. On our own. No handholding on the way there. Where other kids might have been bigger and meaner. We didn't die. Or anything.

I don't remember them coddling us either. If your bad, your ass would smart for a couple of days. If you were having a conversation, there were none of those ridiculous infantilising sounds that seem to animate young parents these days. By the time we were being exiled from pre-school, we might not have been Shakespearian in our grasp of syntax or the finer points of grammar, but my brothers and I could spell shit - and use it contextually. If were bullied, so what? If he pushes you, push back just as hard, she would say, with our father nodding sagely in his seat with his nose buried deep in the Weekly Review.

They both taught us how to cook. I still don't know what magic she uses for her chapatis to come out that round, that soft and that sweet. How our father makes omelets that thick remains one of those mysteries that we hope he has had the good sense to commit to film for our future benefit.

The '90s were not a bad time, not in boarding schools anyway, and when I was banished to the rather comfortable Machakos School it was not some sort of Darwinian social experiment. It was what we all wanted. And Nairobi was forty-five minutes away anyway, should the need for a quick getaway ever arise. Which it did only once and only because some assholes decided they wanted to set the principal's 504 on fire. Idiots! That stupidity cost us two weeks - and a mid-term holiday. I came out fine - the only vice being a penchant for smoking BAT products near the water reservoir.

Off to university and back again. Yes, they did a relatively good job with me, us. Ambition tempered with humility. Greed tempered with reason. Curiosity that might one day lead us astray - but I don't see how. Work ethic - there are no free lunches, son. Honesty - when needed. There is no fear of failure; even geniuses get it wrong every now and then. Patience - with the right plan at the right time and the proper effort, everyone's ship eventually comes in. You just have to know when.

Do you think your parents did a good job with you? Mine did.