Looking back (and forward)

I never finished this blog post on Wednesday, 5th November: Guy Fawkes day:

I took this photo of the twelve apostles on the winter day I arrived to live in Cape Town last year. It was the 3rd of July, the day before Independence Day, which has always been, symbolically, an important day for me over the years. It was also on 4 July 1995 that I threw up a job at a media house run by a dictator to go freelance as a journalist, a space I've more or less occupied up until now.

Taking the mycitibus between Camps Bay and Hout Bay and back on Sunday afternoon reminded me of this photo, also of the jaw-dropping and inspirational beauty of that stretch of coastline.

I leave for Prague this evening. Already, even though snowed under, I'm in a retrospective frame of mind. More than anything about this trip I'm looking forward to some perspective, from another continent, on my city and country, as well as a lens to look back at how I have lived, how I've occupied my 'new' life and work over the last sixteen months.

For one thing I know that I've burnt myself out, badly, also that I have seeped into a quagmire of listlessness and low-level depression; that I've taken too much on in the last four months and the result is that, again, I've (temporarily) lost my joie de vivre, that currently I'm a husk of myself.

Nevertheless I have to pack my and I've a flight to catch.