Tom Mutyabule may or may not be a brilliant dentist, that’s not the kind of call I could make, but he is certainly a charming one and an accomplished salesman.

For over a month corporate sponsors had swamped TV screens and city billboards with sumptuous advertising that celebrated ‘the first World Cup played on African soil’ more vibrantly than much of the football. ‘Africa United!’ was the upbeat slogan of telecom giant, MTN. But the cracks rather than the unity were ruthlessly exposed when, on July 11, three bombs ripped into crowds watching the final match in popular Kampala nightspots.

Palm Sunday and I find myself invited to assume management of Cologne Football Club. The North Rhine city of Köln must, I imagine, have some sort of team of its own. My prospective lads hail, by contrast, from Cologne FC of Bbira—an outlying Kampala township—whose captain and crew I meet by chance on a soggy patch of ground just off the at-last completed northern bypass. I am drifting about in uncertain temper taking photographs. They are standing in a purposeful huddle in the pouring rain, serious in their yellow strip, reviewing tactics while waiting for a local derby with Kasubi FC, who haven’t turned up for the fixture.

Two Friday nights ago my son Jack, 18, was swilling beer with a group of friends in Fat Boyz, a cheerful, crowded but quite well-appointed bar not far from us, when uproar broke out as a crowd of angry customers set upon a man they suspected of stealing, or intending to steal, or being the accomplice of another guy who was stealing or intending to steal, purses and mobile phones. Nothing was found on the man but he was given a sound beating anyway and crawled off drenched in blood. The bar’s armed private security guard stood by watching.

Uganda is making global headlines again, this time with a proposed law to execute citizens found guilty of ‘aggravated homosexuality.’ Appended below is an op-ed that I contributed to a local newspaper, The Monitor, on the broader gender implications. (This seemed the most useful issue to raise with a Ugandan readership, and the editor I spoke to felt that the ‘cultural’ and ‘religious’ aspects of the subject had already received enough attention.) Before getting to that, though, it is worth reflecting on the comedy of errors that led up to this and which now, tragically, leaves Uganda internationally branded once again as a place of crackpot dictators and murderous Christian loonies.

The G4S security guards contracted to protect us had an anxious few days during the riots that shook Kampala six weeks ago, leaving 27 dead and auguring none too well for the 2011 elections. There was no need for anxiety on our account since it would take a most extraordinary riot to penetrate the haven of Kololo hill, where foreign diplomats, aid workers and the local elite shelter behind bougainvillea and hibiscus. But there were grounds for anxiety about what might happen to the guards at the end of their shift when, along with Kololo’s domestic servants, shop girls from the local plaza and the beggars who ply their trade outside, they melt away home to their lower quarters in the mud and jumble of Kamwokya.

One of British colonialism’s minor legacies here in Uganda is an odd way of talking about travel outside the capital city. Londoners, if they go away for the week-end, always go to ‘the country.’ Could be Berkshire, Devon, Norfolk, doesn’t really matter, if it’s not London then it’s just ‘the country.’ (Come to think of it, New Yorkers talk the same way about ‘upstate.’) Ugandans too have adopted this cosmopolitan, syntactic mannerism. New inhabitants of the steadily expanding capital soon learn to divide this complex, multi-ethnic country, with 32 million people speaking 30 different languages, into just two parts. There’s Kampala and then there’s ‘up country.’

Last week I went up country—to Lira District in the mid north. This seems to have settled down now after the long rebellion by the Lord’s Resistance Army and the government counter-insurgency campaign. My main interest on this trip, though, is in what is happening to Uganda’s farmland, the country’s primary, and almost sole, natural resource. But war and its aftermath are the ‘back-story’ that keeps jumping to the fore.

My son, Enrique, 19, passed his Ugandan driving test today. He is a fairly proficient driver but would have passed anyway, however bad he was, by the simple—and apparently routine—procedure of handing the examiner a tip of 30,000 shillings (USD 15).

In the early hours of yesterday morning fire engulfed the outdoor Owino market, Uganda’s largest, in a walled enclosure hard against Kampala’s city centre. The dense labyrinth of stalls covered an area the size of two football pitches and provided a livelihood for thousands of small traders in cheap clothes, shoes, household utensils and other goods, all now gone up in smoke.

On Saturday we finally got round to visiting the Muammar Gaddafi Mosque and Namirembe Anglican Cathedral in Kampala Old Town.

This began as purely accidental tourism for the mosque was the chosen site of an assignation with two mysterious young men who had accosted me on the street a few days earlier. “We’re from Liberia,” they had announced, seeming to think that this information would convey to me much more than it in fact did. So I just said “Yes?”