Beach urchin

It's silent in my home. Except for the strong and constant wind, outside, tearing at the building as if it were a flag or an old sailing ship at sea.

The Mountain is stark and large, also reassuring, against the morning sky. It fills my vision.

The windswept streets of Woodstock are quiet and whimsically sparse as if they were in a typical Western before a shoot-out, sans tumbleweed.

I'm grateful it's not Saturday morning with the usual throngs heading towards the Old Biscuit Mill amidst the shrill, often piercing whistling of self-appointed car guards parking their short-term investments.

I know that it will be good for me to get outside today.

My street urchin of an orchard has three magnificent and hope-inspiring blooms, that have all opened in the last week. Another orchid, that I rescued from someone's sun-beaten patio, is in bud. It's not flowered before under my care and I'm curious as to what the flowers will look like.

I'm on the couch surrounded by the books I'm currently reading, nothing's really holding me, also an empty coffee cup with a sludge of coffee grounds at the bottom; they escaped the French press.

I'm thinking of walking into town, I need to stretch my legs, then on to Nerona's at the top end of Buitenkant street for a chicken salad and chilled glass of chardonnay. And a change in scenery.

I'm hoping that the wind won't be blowing there.

I think back to last Wednesday's dawn walk along Muizenberg's long stretch of beach; I'm sorry now that I didn't take a chance - despite the cold - to swim and to jump-start myself alive again.

When an owl calls your name

Then in the last of the dusk, with bats silently on the wing, the icy wind stilled, the traffic on the main road that is the peninsula's spine lessened, we walked home in the descended peace alongside the demure lagoon.

I'd missed the last train back to the city and would spend the night here. In a house filled with passionate art, unfinished canvasses on easels, candles and books.

Muizenburg has not an uptight nor pretentious bone to it, although that's not always been the case. Yet, even while I'm told that danger lurks in its streets, I don't feel even slightly threatened, nor at risk. Perhaps it's the heady combination of red wine and the joys of an old and robust friendship that flood my veins, arteries, making me more unhindered than I should, perhaps, be.

I'm excited for the change in my routine that this welcome but unanticipated night in Muizenburg will afford me: other smells, sights, sounds; the moon too is different; another bed; foreign coffee.

While I'd left Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' at my bedside, I had brought along his 'Speak, Memory' for the train ride (I'd finally gotten to Nabokov). Even so, once in the house, Kleinboer's 'Midnight Missionary' grabbed my attention and although I'd been resistant to reading it for years now, I took it to bed.

Also Ryk Hattingh's 'Huilboek'. Hattingh had died earlier in the day of a heart attack, in New Zealand where he and family had relocated to. Merely two week's ago he'd visited SA to collect an award and prize money for this, his latest novel. The novel, in Afrikaans, he had written in-between working as a cobbler and locksmith in Auckland.

My friend, she'd worked with him, recounted stories from his life, their life moments together; this was in-between fielding calls from the small circle of friends who were also recounting shared tales in-between expressing their grief, their loss.

This as my lids slid lower and bed beckoned.

When an owl calls your name...

Salt spray

With a water bottle, my notebook, pen, and my day pack hugging my back I took the southern line train to Kalk Bay late on Tuesday afternoon.

I read for most of the almost hour-long journey, a relaxing and favourite train ride of mine, despite the bad, sad state of our railways

Cappuccino and a slab of carrot cake over my notebook. This while sitting right up against Olympia Cafe's shopfront window. I was avoiding the icy chill of the cold front, which had dumped snow on the mountains in the country's interior.

To sporadically look up from my notebook and cake - with cappuccino foam on my upper lip or nostrils - at the colourful fishing boats in today's quite and docile harbour is another priceless joy.

Then, the only person in the shop other than the bespectacled manageress who peered over the top of her frame when I greeted her,  I wondered around Kalk Bay Books; they've normally got an array of unusual and difficult to find fiction and non-fiction carefully chosen and exhibited on the handful of tables on the shop floor.

On my last visit there were at least six titles I had scribbled on my list and would loved to have purchased. But I didn't have enough money with me for even one. This time, with money in my pocket, there wasn't a single edition of anything that caught my eager eye. That was a first for me.

Then, taking the coastal path between the ocean and the railway line, I walked the approximately four kilometres to Muizenburg: I needed the change of scenery, the tangy saltiness of the Indian Ocean in my nostrils and lungs, also to feel the adolescent summer sun on my skin. Also, the time to process things, me and my life, which walking briskly always seems to coax.

It was good to unwind and to consciously shrug off the anxiety that has been dogging my ankles like a persistent street dog for days now.

I was walking towards a carafe of red wine with old friends in a bohemian bistro/bar in quiet but for the skateboarders York Street: Oroboros. Friends of many years and much water under the bridge; another of life's priceless gifts.

Relatively speaking

How do two-and-almost-a-half months pass without me putting down a single word here? I shy away from here; the desire to remain invisible usurps my desire to be creative, to celebrate life via words and photos: a terrible and constant tension exists within.

I'm long-time returned from Uganda, it was an enormous success on countless levels; I've not written a word about it. Neither here nor anywhere else. Nor have I written a word since in terms of the story ideas that were flourishing in me and my notebooks while I was there, and on the flights back.

Today, I weakly resist bleakness overcoming me... it's the same bleakness inherent in the photo, above, that I took on 27 May. It was the city hall, the side of the library, the autumn trees on a bleary winter's day when the days were drawing in.

Today: It's a magnificent sunny day and the roofs of Woodstock are bright with summery sunshine, there's - unusually - not a breath of air. A woman wearing taut shorts and sandals, her oiled hair glistening (noticeable from even from this far and from this high above) in the sunlight, walks languidly up off one of the roads off Lower Main. She has a plump child fast asleep on her back, tied to her in reverse-Kangaroo style by a bright and cheerful pink blanket. I long to be next to her and her child, feeling the warmth of the late-approaching summer on my face,  on my skin.

Instead, I'm indoors with winter and wearing pyjamas suited to the cold of the last long week; winter is in my heart: I'm again working from home because my university where I teach has been beset by violent student protests, a minority of a minority; there's been attempted arson and the cars of staff have been vandalised. Last night, in the darkness where deeds like these take place, the doors to my department were pulled off their hinges and offices broken into: stuff stolen, glass broken. I've been on campus only three times since 1 September, choosing instead to teach via means other than the luxury of a classroom.

Then there's Trump, Brexit, climate change, the oceans soggy and overwhelmed with plastic, greed, capitalism, consumerism, the extreme and strangling corruption that pervades swathes of our government: billions of rands that could be exchanged for free tertiary education, also that the lives of countless disadvantaged folk could be transformed. Not to mention our deep, cloying and hooded Drought, which stands behind us all with his shining, razor-sharp scythe.

Then, I look upwards so as to count my blessings: I've six buds on an orchid that I rescued from the side of a street dustbin two years ago; before me and up right up tight against my retinas is the magnificent and inspiring Devil's Peak; not to mention that I had an awesome night's sleep in a warm bed; also I'm most gratefully not in the likes of storm-torn Puerto Rico or earthquake-ravaged Mexico City and still have a roof over my head.

It's all relative.

I'm still capable of compassion, kindness and generosity to those less fortunate than me. I can still choose to smile.

Also to make the choice to immerse myself in the miracle of this very day... because the past does not exist and I sure as hell have not an iota of control of tomorrow.

Meat Bomb

Thursday last week: On a beautiful winter's day that feels as if I, with a tiny bit of effort, could climb up somewhere, high, I would see to the edge of the earth, even beyond; it's one of those champagne days where the very ozone bubbles and sparkles.

I had a 9h00 appointment at a travel clinic in town; I did not even feel the prick of the needle that was inoculating me against yellow fever, nor did the malaria tablet regime seem anything but straight forward.

That was followed by a quick breakfast and both excited and anxious thoughts about my upcoming trip.

Then a languid and stop-start minibus taxi ride along the Main Road vein to UCT. Then my favourite: the long, taxing but magnificent walk from where the taxi spat me out in Rosebank - across the street from the Baxter Theatre - all the way up The Mountain and to the doors of the library. It's in here, right now, and in peace, because it's still the vac, that I type these words. This is a calming space that motivates me to work, also to browse the shelves.

I've long wanted to read W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which I've just searched for in the cool and windowless basement, which holds the dead quiet treasure chests of the literature section. Ironically, this is the one library section I have no reason to visit while currently studying what I am. But both my spirit and will are weak.

"In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work."

I had to put Sebald's book down after the titillating first paragraph; I have to work and can't be distracted, despite how much I desire right now to be just that.

I'll be leaving for Kampala, Uganda on the 15th or 16th of next month. That's where the winner of the non-fiction Koffi Addo Writivism prize for nonfiction will be announced during the course of the writer's festival. On the last night, Sunday the 17th. My story, Meat Bomb, is one of the three short-listed stories.

Right now: Spurts of rain slash my bedroom window as I work on my bed, as I mark assignments, as I re-read the above and berate myself for what feels to me like insipid and lifeless words. Despite the rain I know it's having no impact whatsoever on the terrible drought we're in the middle of, despite that this, Winter, is supposed to be our rainy season. We're each allowed 87 litres of water a day: I shower every second day and strive to wear my clothes for much longer so that I only put the washing machine on, once, every two weeks.