Category Archives: Uncategorized

Landing

Adventures, South Africa, Uncategorized

Sometimes it’s only once you’ve gone away and come home again that a new place can begin to be home. It’s been a month now, or almost a month, since I landed in Joburg. The last week in KZN was stressful. Perhaps not as bad as it could have been. Work provided some routine and once I’d decided that what couldn’t go would just have to stay, it was easier.

The boxes went on the Thursday. The last of the packing. The last of the throwing away. The last of the leaving behind. It’s harder than it sounds.

The taxi arrives. Close the bags. Hand over the keys. That strange time between lives when you no longer possess house-keys. One last glance at the green, green valley where I’ve lived and worked these past two years and the valley of 1000 hills falls away behind me.

The flight Is uneventful. I recognize the cabin crew. I watch the colours change.

We come in through the clouds, from the deep, deep blue summer sky, sinking and gliding through the storm clouds and out over the suburbs. I look up and realize the plane is on it’s side as the pilot feathers the edge of a giant cloud – a beautiful piece of flying. To the left outside my window the Joburg skyline rises above the city. I’m excited and relieved and happy and, in a strange way, home.

I stop for a moment in the airport. Between the escalators. Between domestic and international arrivals. This is my airport. For years, this has been my transition between places; my in-between place. It has evolved and changed but it still has that same something I fell in love with all those years ago. In spite of the noise, now that they’ve introduced annoying airports radio, there is still a quiet and a space that I find freeing. The airport is a good thinking space.

That sense of being en route, in transit, is something I like in most situations. Being between homes, with all the pressure of a new job, boxes due to be delivered and a university admin to contend with at the same time, was less fun. The first week was tough. In fact, it’s been a high-pressure January. I realised when I got home from travelling last night that I really need the space to wake up in my own flat on a day that doesn’t seem overwhelming. I suppose it all seems overwhelming at first.

It’s nearly a month now. A month in a new old place. A month of finding my feet. I’m still finding my feet – and feeling like I’ll never quite get it.

But something is different here. There is a clarity, a purposiveness I didn’t have before. This wasn’t what I had in mind when I wrote this post. It wasn’t the (admittedly rather vague) plan. I begin to settle, to find my feet, to make a life. Perhaps a stop on the way? Perhaps the first part of a life less ordinary.

Window shopping

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In my first year of university, I used to go to town each Friday morning. My only lecture was later in the day but I knew if I skipped breakfast I’d be starving later and I couldn’t really afford to buy extra food. So I’d get up and have breakfast in the res dining hall and then walk down the hill.

Through campus, under the arch, down high street and into the town. I’d wander in and out of shops and occasionally buy something I needed – although usually only after careful consideration and a thorough search for a better deal. I’ve always been a window shopper. The shops were empty. There was space and time for me to consider and look and wander.

Once I’d visited all the shops (Grahamstown does not have that many shops), I’d sit in a cafe and sip delicious cappuccino or hot filter coffee. Sometimes I’d read but mostly I’d sit there writing. I wrote so much that year. These days I seldom write anything that’s not for work or studies. Then, I wrote for pleasure.

After my coffee, the morning now half gone, I’d wander back onto campus. The campus was quiet on a Friday morning. The occasional sleep-deprived undergrad tearing off to hand in a late assignment – often still in pyjamas (or yesterday’s clothes) – but otherwise quiet. I’d find a spot in the half shade near the library and read and write and people-watch.

Those were quiet times. Later in my varsity years the pressure and the parties would pick up, but those first-year Fridays were so very quiet. I think that was the first time I learnt to be alone. Of course, I’d been a normal teenager with ordinary angst but the lonesomeness of adolescence was tempered but a busy family and a home with a heart far bigger than just the five of us.

That first year at varsity was different. I learnt to enjoy the silence and introspection of alone. I learnt to be alone in public. I am always a little sorry for people who can’t go to movies or eat out or to a show on their own. Years later, it would chafe terribly that Korean restaurants wouldn’t serve a solo diner. That same year I would discover, alone, the incomparable joy of the opera. And later, learn to travel alone. How much you can see and learn in solitude in motion.

I still associate the joy of alone with shopping. Whether it’s a market in Maputo or a cafe in Korea, I’m one of those annoying customers that don’t want help. I don’t want someone to find things for me. For me, the joy is in the wandering, on my own, and looking at everything. Shop assistants annoy me. To be fair, the fact that I seldom buy anything probably annoys them, too. But I don’t care. It’s my space, my time, my alone.

I feel the same joy in a mall or a street of shops on a quiet morning. I lived in Johannesburg for a few years and there was a special magic to Rosebank in the early mornings. Shops just beginning to open. Umbrellas being put up. Menus being prepared. The newspaper seller rushing to keep up with the demand. The taste of strong coffee in the quiet morning cool over a copy of my favourite daily paper. On my way to work or meetings or brunch with friends. I’ve lived in small towns and subdued suburbia and far-flung places in more than one country. If you ask me what I love about cities, that’s it. The quiet of a coffee shop with a newspaper or a note-pad first thing in the morning. The joy of a quiet mall. That and public transport.

There are things I love about living in the middle of nowhere. The monkeys and the cows and the long, daily trek to work, to mention just a few. But I find myself longing for civilisation again. A trip to the local mall is a tantalising taste of what I long for but just a little too small, a little too unsophisticated to fill the gap. A new year creeps towards the horizon and I begin to wonder if it’s time to move on.

On Emptiness

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I miss the emptiness.

It’s pretty here. It’s green and lush and all the words that describe pretty places. It rains a lot. There is water. Lots of water. There are monkeys in the trees and so many birds.

But I miss the emptiness.

I never see the sky here. It’s mist and trees and mountains. Sometimes there’s a glimpse of the deep blue in winter or the clear blue in summer, but I never see the whole of the sky. The valley is picturesque. It’s picture-postcard pretty. But postcards are static. They’re the same picture. They stay the same. It’s that kind of pretty.

I miss the drama of empty landscapes. The road that goes on forever between rough, harsh bush, dotted with rocks and windmills and the occasional sheep far in the distance. I miss being able to see the distance.

I miss the rolling, empty grasslands with the thorn trees and the aloes and the dusty, dried-blood soil.

I miss the majesty of the craggy, Cape folded mountains soaring beyond the vineyards.

I miss the sea, the rough, dangerous, cold Atlantic with a million moods, every one more incomprehensible than the last.

My mind keeps drifting back to the summer grasslands and the long-horned acholi cattle silhouetted against the storm sky.

The green and the valley and rivers are pretty. The tree-green covered mountainsides of Korea and the big rivers were pretty, too. The same full green land and dull grey sky. Not steel-grey, blue-grey brooding storms. Just mist-grey. Overcast-grey.

The happiest places of the last nine months – places, not moments, because people can make the other places okay – but the happiest places have been just the places I’ve always loved. The grasslands of eastern Congo. The dryness of Eldoret before the rains. The Eastern Cape. My Eastern Cape. Driving past Cradock and Bedford and the winter-swept Nieu Bethesda. The “arse end of the world”, to quote Marguerite Poland, around Grahamstown. Even Stutt, with its forests, but set like a stone rippling grasslands in all directions. And those forests, like the African rainforests, so much richer and more complex.

I long for the endless, complex loneliness. The lush, green, pretty, cluttered beauty here is, well, pretty. But some days, against the backdrop of incessant soft, green rains, I wish, I just wish I was a million miles away.