Nairobi, Joburg, Cape Town, Lost

I've recently found myself flitting between African cities. The big names; Nairobi, Joburg, Cape Town. I feel I am a fleeting flirt. My heart has been wrenched away before I've had time to fall in love with any of these.

Falling in love is breathing in the air and seeing the little things one sees as one walks the streets and pavements, skipping down the terraces outside other people's houses, peering in on windows of other people's lives. These are the lives of people who live there, who have put down roots, who have mortgages and nick-nacks and do not think about boxes and how many it would take to shift them to another place.

My little suitcase is battered and worn and I am a little tired. My heart is not big enough to love everything at once.

A new South African day

We strolled out in a bright Joburg morning, warmer than it should be, sipping Seattle cappuccinos from a garage which have become something of a tradition.

Wits is grey-brown dirty classical, a Teutonic pillared presence. In the winter sun, corners are sharper, edges brighter, brown palletted, Vaal beautiful.

We joined a collection of society to protest the Secrecy Act, grannies in twin sets and pearls from Hyde Park sat next to grannies in polyester skirts and head scarves, not from Hyde Park. A mixed gathering it was indeed, several mentions of ANC credentials though with a noted absence of an ANC rent-a-crowd. The leader of COSATU but none of his followers. Nadine Gordimer, who announced she and Andre Brink had written personally to President Jacob Zuma in July, but received no response.

We toyi-toyi-ed through downtown Johannesburg and up to the Constitutional Court, raising posters to passing vehicles and singing snatches of half learned songs and learning new ones quickly:

"My mother, my mother was a kitchen girl, and

My father, my father was a garden boy, and that,

That is why I'm a socialist, a socialist, a socialist."

Coming home, we walked through the inner city. Buildings towered above us, seemingly a monument to the 1970s with little windows concealing big secrets. More browns, more winter beautiful. Down Jan Smuts, we paused to look at rock seams in the roadside embankment and found a placard explaining their importance which we would have missed but for being on foot.

We stopped and asked for help with taxi signals down toward Emmerentia. "After robot!" landed us at a Bollywood Men's Hairdresser where R30 and 10mins will get Lionel a haircut and a head massage and me an opportunity to observe Bollywood music videos shot in snow.

We had to change taxis in Randburg to redirect to Rosebank. Sitting on the back seat, we encountered an everyday South African marvel which I love; everyone passes their monies forward, asking for change, which is passed back by other passengers. The traveller at the front ultimately collects everyone's fares on behalf of the driver. The transactions are done entirely on a system of trust. Woe betide the whitey who doesn't pay attention to the R8.50s and gets it wrong.

We stopped for beer (South Africa's anti-alcohol legislation requiring us to stockpile in order to drink on Sunday) and got into an emptier taxi to continue on home. Here, no one passed their money forward, presumably because they were all travelling to Alex or further and had much more time to pay. Yet a "short right!" took us only 3 or 4kms down the road to Rosebank where we hopped out and, to our consternation, were roundly shat on by the taxi driver for violating the trust and not paying.

Embarrassed at ourselves, tired and holding our beer, we strolled between the high walls and electric gates of Rosebank-inner. We passed two black women, walking their dogs along the pavement. The dogs suddenly began barking at us furiously. What the new South Africa looks like, with us in it.

Cows in Nairobi

I spent five days in Nairobi in early August. I did not see much of the city besides the airport, the Silver Springs Hotel and the road between. But, sitting in traffic and crawling around-a-round-about, I did not miss the Marabou storks perched in the thorn trees, the sinister "Valkyries of Nairobi".

I learned a valuable lesson in Nairobi, presenting a Water Footprint training session to an important and sophisticated audience who made me sweat and challenged me in a delightful yet damp way. The lesson I learned was: I may have an Masters in economics and above average mathematical abilities, but I know very little about cows.

This become problematic when one has sensitive numbers and is presenting a case study off the cuff to people who know lots about cows. It turns out a 2 tonne animal is approximately a rhino and cows are more in the range of 0.4-0.8 tonnes.

As I attempted to use the weight of a 2 tonne cow in my denominator to correct my too big, uninteresting numbers, a very polite hand was raised and a gentleman asked :

"Is that realistic?"

He was too polite to ignore. I caved and my rhino-cow and perfect, "indicative" results were sacrificed to the God of Average Case Studies. The cow we used was skinnier and told a less useful story.

Bujumbura in a heartbeat

Sitting in Bujumbura International Airport, shaped a little like a bra, it is 10pm and I am sweaty and tired from a lack of sleep and tired from what will be a long night of still less sleep.

Earlier I had dinner and a beer on the terrace of a hotel looking out over Lake Tanganyika. In the distance, the lights across the water showed where Burundi ended and the DRC began. Presentation done and client happy, the beer was watery and the night was warm. I had lots of energy and I was having dinner with interesting people.

Now I am dog-tired and I dare not go to sleepo on bench because I am the only blonde little umzungu in the building, but for 10 sinister looking francophone soldiers and a cleaner. My flight only leaves at 0125am and will not open for another 2 hours.

A group of gentleman from the Central African Republic arrive, a little worse for wear (maybe their beer was less watery) but I reason: better one flirts gently with a friendly drunk in the light than disappears into the Burundian night with an unfriendly unknown.

It's amazing how long flirting takes in broken French and English. Two hours to check-in just flew right by.

Monkey's Winter

On a monkey's winter day in Cape Town (24 degrees and humid), I took a stroll around the block to clear my head. On the corner I found a second-hand bookshop I hadn't known was there and, inside, a book I hadn't known I was looking for.

Down tools and upload

I am tearing up inside with creative energy. I had Friday-afternoon-drop-off until I downed tools, donned my sound cancelling headphones and turned up the volume. I've never collected music but when I find a song I love I beat it to death. I listen to it inside out, dance it, love it, feel it beating in my chest, close my eyes and drink it in in its repetition.

I am operating at a wonderfully resonant level, here and now. I feel not enough of it has been expressed through this medium. This, which has been an outlet for many things; which has become an episodic record of my times of loneliness but also my wonder, not to mention a documentation of the places I have been to and loved.

I am not even bothered by the winter, which prevents me from wearing strapless tops and going barefoot in the sun and rather forces me into jeans and boots. I lie under my warm goose-down duvet in the mornings and wait for the sun to appear (late in these latitudes).

I feel unblocked, unbowed, excited. I dance.

The Early Elephant

His birthday came early this year. I felt the loss, the grief, the day before the 26^th of May.

In hindsight I always recognise the signs but never as they set in. Some years are worse than others. I’m always determined that I’m ok, that this elephant does not need to be dealt with. I always get out of bed and try to begin the day.

I walked down to work with in my head in stitches. I couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun nor could I smell the morning. My mouth was dry and my eyes saw only grey and drain water.

The little things that set me off are always so little. I find myself weeping, gently and continuously. I wipe the tears from my face as if they are not there until the great, tired emptiness engulfs me. Until I acknowledge that I need to completely stop, to take time to remember, to feel, to miss him, to be sad.

Being sad takes energy. You have to stop everything else and stare the sadness in the face. You cannot multi-task sadness, it waits for you and it is impatient.

I came home and slept and slept the afternoon away. When I woke up my cheeks ached and I felt old like an elephant but whole again.

He would have been 59 and would have hated it.

London, briefly

London is a mercurial lover.

She seduced me for a week with her spring sunlight, her yellow flowers and bright streets. She tickled me into skirts and scarves. I stepped along her the pavements in a wash of colour.

I visited her museums and her largest theatre, I saw her majesty. She might have wooed me with her buildings, her antiquity and her power. But, instead, she gave me a glimpse of her silk petticoats, offered to dance with me, smiled.

London can be, has often been, a cold hearted bitch. When she is cruel, the North Wind can tear at your face and whip out your eyelashes. It can cripple your fingers into defenceless claws. I have felt lonely, in a population of more than one million, as I have turned my coat up to shield my neck, put my head down rather than look about me and hurried home to an apartment which is grey and light-less.

But, in this April, she laughed with me. Her voices trilled with the leaves of Battersea Park. She waved in the bunting. She hugged me in bookshops.

I met up with Dan and Ollie at the Science Museum where Ollie goes when he needs to leave his office and think. We sat for more than half an hour at The Listening Post, an electronic installation that is a giant curved stand made up of little electronic text screens. The screens display text fragments - extracts from online chats drawn randomly from the internet (uncensored and unedited) accompanied by the rhythm of computer- synthesized voices reading - or 'singing' - the words that surge and flicker over the screens. The sound artist programmed a voice synthesiser to create tones and sound effects which respond to shifts in the data-streams, building a musical score of online activity. It was incredible.

We then crossed Exhibition Road to the Victoria & Albert where we met Amy and she showed us around two exhibits of South African photography currently showing. One was David Goldenblatt, Life Under Apartheid: a series of prints he sent to the V&A for safe keeping in the 1980s. It was interesting to see how someone else (someone not South African) would display Goldenblatt. He is an interesting animal because he was one of SA's most successful photographers largely because his photographs weren't particularly confronting. They were more remarkable for their technique or style than for their political relevance and, although they still held political relevance, they were let through the censors net (largely).

Goldblatt is less often exhibited and more often published in a book with an essay (eg by Nadine Gordimer). He usually has a strong interplay of text and the image and it is often important to his work. Yet the V&A have policies about how much text may accompany an image and I really felt the poverty of statements such as "Man returning from the mines in Johannesburg, the mines were the economic driver of the economy". The man in this photo was black, indeed everyone in the photo is black, there is a winter mist hanging over the shacks in the distance in the dawn sun, he is driving a car, other people are walking, it is the 1950s rather than the 1970s... I really felt that many of those viewing the exhibition would just see black person and miss out on the incredible textual detail contained within the images without a bit more information.

There was, however, a set of images not usually exhibited (a set the censor's knife had previously come down upon )- Goldblatt took a series of shots of bodies and, in this case, crotches of people seated on benches. The range was wonderful, from an old boere with that familiar bulge to the left, a Xhosa person in a blanket and hands carefully folded in his lap, two old women in little shorts and platform heels (thighs which are sagging and cellulite-d but still thin with a hand holding a cigarette on one knee), a demure woman in a skirt.

This was photography exhibit No. 1

No 2 was Figures and Fictions - Contemporary South African Photography

It was a collection of people who are big in SA photography today; Zanele Maholi, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, Hasan & Husein Essop. All of them quite different and even in the limits of the tiny room there was so much to take in. This exhibition was much better curated, you came away with a stronger impression of the complexity of South African society and the multi-textual layers were really brought out (even within V&A text limits). Although, it might also be said that the new SA is allowed (indeed encouraged) to have more multi-textual layers than the old one was. It is, for example, quite interesting that photography in SA shifted to colour from black and white with the Transition.

Because there was so much more there, I am finding it so much more difficult to put it across here.

All photographied out, we then had a brief sojourn to this delightful little sun-filled bookshop-come-bar that stocks an eclectic collection of books that are an interesting find but not something you'd necessarily buy. For example: a collection of the blue plaques in London which tell you that a famous person lived here from this time to this time. We had an engrossing few minutes seeking Oscar Wilde's house, Captain Cook's, Evelyn Waugh's. Yet, in the end, did not buy it.

We met Si for dinner in Covent Garden and then crossed the Thames and fell upon the second hand book sellers on the Southbank before the National Theatre. We had tickets to see the Holy Rosenburgs at the National Theatre. It's about a Jewish family in Edgeware (West London) who's son has just died in Israel and who's daughter is a lawyer on a commission investigating human rights abuses in Gaza. The set is their living room and it was theatre-in-the-round. So you were a fly on the wall in a family conversation one evening as they prepared to sit shivas for their son and as their daughter returns home for the funeral. It is a deliberate echo on the current saga around the Jewish Community in South Africa and Goldstone (Ruth, the daughter, is being convinced not to attend the funeral because pro-Israel protesters will be there outside and will cause a scene).

Tired and bracing ourselves against the chill wind from the river, we crossed back and took the tube west from Embankment. Rocking, silently companionable in sleepiness, I watched the four of us reflected in the glass of the carriage in the neon lights.