Processing time

Road trips are always a time to process. I've just come across an email on my phone that I'd written just after Christmas in 2006: I was in London visiting my mother, also contemplating what then seemed a shaky career as a writer and freelance journalist. Especially because I just could not bear the thought of sticking out for much longer my well-paid but loathsome high-stress big-city media job. I had also just heard that my home in Johannesburg had been broken into:-

I already know this is going to be a rambling email, a smattering of
thoughts as i try to capture everything going on in my head! My apologies in advance.

I was on the South Bank on Saturday and had a stunning lunch at a funky restuarant called Giraffe. i'm still going to get to the Tate Modern again later, the most wonderfully overwhelming art gallery I've EVER been to in my life, in the world.

I'm having such a dilemma about continuing to live in SA: I'm finding that i'm so overwhelmed - most horribly - by MY HORROR at the constant pressure of the crime there... And it's only when I'm here do i realise how it affects me, how it invisibly exerts pressure on everything that I do and think.

I'm seriously considering all sorts of options. Because to see women walking and jogging - alone - through Hyde Park - in the dark -and to watch an entire nation come to a halt over the murder of five prostitutes emphasises to me that life has value here... not to even mention the art & culture, the magazines & newspapers, the literature this nation is soaked in.

Right now I confess to being completely overwhelmed, disorientated and as a result sometimes quite tearful... not sure if this is just a reaction to an awfully pressured year? Or maybe this is the beginning of my existential mid-life crisis - ha-ha?

And, of course, I cannot stomach the thought of going back to my life as it is.

Since I was last here coffee has definitely come to London! What a relief! My favourite Starbucks coffee shop is in the Hampstead's high steet. This morning I sat there reading & writing & taking photographs from my table (the only one in the window!) of the passing world... a whole memory card full again. That was before losing myself in the adjacent Waterstone's book shop.

I'm busy reading a John Betjeman biography, Erich Fromm's 'To have or to Be' (you can see where my head is! ...even weighing up becoming a vegeterian! ..I really want to have as little impact on this world, this planet as possible - the guilt ha-ha! - and I'm finding consumerism / materialism appalling!) and - finally! - Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road':

"...in the bar I told Dean, 'Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do i really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict." - p.9

And I love this excerpt...it's BRILLIANT!! And it makes me think of you... of us...:

"He told him of Roy Johnson, big Ed Dunkel, his boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sex-parties and pornographic pictures, his heroes, heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes 'awww!'" - p.11