Sir Wilfred Thesiger dies

They got on well until Thesiger saw them inflating airbeds before retiring. "You must be a couple of pansies!" he said.

Occasionally, Thesiger returned to the flat he kept in Chelsea; but England was an unfamiliar country to him, and he hoped to see out his years in Kenya, with his corpse being left on the hill for the jackals. But after the death of the two Kenyan men whom he had treated as sons, he reluctantly returned to England for good in the mid-1990s, living out his days at the retirement home in Surrey, where he coped valiantly with the effects of Parkinson's Disease.