Five yellow flowers floating on a pond

A veil of sadness has trawled behind me this entire day. Just enough of it to steal my joy. Unexplainable. Now, I'm home, hollow, and the promised rain has arrived: there's been a 100% chance of rain promised since 2pm. Juicy wetness and puffs of pigeon-grey fog finger my window-on-the-world as I try to work; the lamp on my desk on is a warm and welcoming glow. From six stories up I can clearly hear the splatter of overly ripe fig raindrops on the inky tarmac below.

I walked a long but favourite route to my bus after my last lecture. Via the Company Gardens at Cape Town's heart. Where I go to saturate my soul. It's a few extra but welcome kilometres of solitary wandering in a busy world.  I wonder where the many homeless folks that were sleeping on the well-clipped lawns are resting, waiting now as a soaking wet and cold winter's night's being served up.

Egyptian geese - which I grew up surrounded by in the far north of the country, which I too got to know via my solitary wandersings - confidently strutted about while protectively showing off the feathered clumps of newly-born chicks. Tiny. The old garden was vibrant with their unique calls.

I've spent much time in many gardens in this country, this one is the first, the oldest, the most filled with lingering ghosts. The first ground here was was readied for sowing seed on 29 April 1652. It's 364 years old. The oldest cultivated tree, a Pyrus communis (Saffraan pear) planted around this time still exists, protected and supported like a very old woman who's not all there, in the garden.

Someone had thrown five yellow hibiscus flowers on to the surface of the large pond.

Walking slowly, peacefully to console me of the unexplainable, I soaked up both the greyness and the homelessness around me. Only the pigeons bathing, showering in my favourite fountain seemed unperturbed as I picked myself through the garden and it's less travelled paths and walkways.

This was so starkly different to my last visit just short of a week ago. Then the city was bathed in bright winter sunshine beneath a champagne sky. Those days I adore: it's when the very oxygen molecules seem to individually vibrate and shine with exuberant life. It lends days like that an awesomeness, a surrealness that leads you to believe you're living in a miracle.

It's 17h29 as I type these words and dusk is upon me as I cocoon myself in this post, and in my mind, and in my apartment. Although I've a night of work ahead me, I'm grateful to be both home and for this home. Even so, I can't but help thinking about what life would be like tonight on the cold, wet streets as another Antarctic cold front ghosts, not unlike the reaper, across this province and deep into the interior.

Amongst idlers and dawdlers, like myself

When the city bowl gets this unbearably hot at summer's height, there is nowhere better to cool off in, and relax, than in the Company Gardens, next to Parliament and just off the city centre.

I love days like today: when I thoroughly regret not having a pair of shorts with me; when I have not a single doubt as to the African essence, through the intense and heavy heat, of this most southern of the continent's cities.

There's not much to surpass the pleasure of people watching on a wooden bench beneath an ancient and verdant canopy.

Slipping into the gardens via a semi-secret and scorched lane - not surprisingly named Gallery Lane - and along an unpopular, less public side of the national art gallery, the most glaring and heat-ridden piece of my brisk stroll is the hurried dash across the gallery's lawn.

Then past all the garden crockery, statues from other ages cast in stone, and a 'sho't and rapid right' into one of the garden's top entrances.

Only then, in shade and surprising scents of the garden may I relax; it's the abrupt cool and instant hand-braking of my afternoon: I'm amongst my own now, idlers, dawdlers, people happy to pass their time 'unproductively' watching the world go by, also the seasons wonderfully-grindingly-slowl on their axis', reading barefoot in the shade, listening to squirrels' secret and acornic conversations.

But beware the endless stream of chancers and hustlers, the master dawdlers.