Isithwalambiza

There is this thing my brother does, his wife tells me, when she feels sick; he lies in bed next to her and massages her hands until she falls asleep. There is something about this that makes me ache a little bit inside. I can’t quite put my finger on it, I can't quite pinpoint the exact cause within the actions, but there is definitely something about it that makes me hurt in some hazy way, as if suffering from pains in a phantom limb. She feels sick a lot these days, waves of nausea rising in her at regular intervals. A few months ago we went to a spa and a praying mantis jumped on her cream towelling gown. The ladies massaging almond cream into our calves laughed and laughed as she tried to swat it away, telling her, “You know this means you will be pregnant soon. A Praying Mantis is always a baby.” And we in turn laughed at the quaintness of the folk lore, the fertility equivalent of ice cream leading to nightmares or playing with matches causing you to wet the bed. A month and a half later, my brother cleared his throat in that way he does when he has something of consequence to say, and told us, “So guys, a bit of news… Corlia is pregnant.” and then there was much hugging and congratulating and sly tears that leaked from the corners of our rapidly blinking eyes and Matthew hurrying to the freezer to retrieve the bottle of champagne he’d previously secretly stashed in order to quickly chill. As we sat and talked about it, laughing at the sheer absurdity of this age old occurrence that is completely and utterly miraculous with each happening, she said to me, “Remember the praying mantis?”

And now she suffers from morning sickness, that is really also afternoon sickness and night sickness and when she does, my brother lies in bed next to her and massages her hands until she falls asleep.

We went to the coast last week and at night, when I lay in bed down the hall from them and I could not sleep, I thought of who that house harboured. It was no longer just us; there was the tiny thumb sized (thumbnail sized?) human they are bringing into the world too. And I thought about how something was fundamentally changing. I can’t fully describe it, I’ve yet to find the words, but now when someone asks me what is happening, I want to say, “Everything. Everything is happening.”

LHR to JhB

(a delayed post...)

The Evening Standard Final vendors and deadpan delivery piped through speakers on the Tube have stopped mocking me. No longer do I have to hear of ash clouds and airport closures – no, the skies have been declared open and one week late, to the minute, I boarded an aeroplane and skipped over the equator, to a Johannesburg I find unseasonably cold.
As is customary, the travelling itself was fine and the carrying of stuff was miserable. I opted for a wheelie bag this time as to not want to top myself by the time I arrived at Heathrow, but found my mood only marginally better than the last time I had to carry stuff. I bought books at the airport with grand plans to read on the plane, but as usual found myself napping on takeoff, eating the cheese and biscuits from the evening meal, watching a movie and then falling into restless slumber. The temperature on the plane was akin to high dry desert heat and it’s the first flight that I’ve ever managed to not shiver all the way through. On the flip side of that, my t-shirt was distinctly damp and I couldn’t help but think of those trips I used to take in the car when I was a kid, where I’d fall asleep and wake up with my face stuck to the leather seats. Needless to say, the glamour of travel has always been a near mythical beast. The best thing about the flight was managing to sleep through breakfast and thus escaping the waves of nausea those little tin foil boats of congealed egg and black pudding invariably inspire.

Highlights so far:
x1000 bottles of champagne.
Corlia and warwick’s birthday lunch at Nice in Parkhurst. A long lazy meal in beautiful surroundings, fillet steak, bone china tea cups, crystal flutes and cake, cake, cake.
Being woken up at 3am by the ruckus of the boys returning home and getting up to watch hours of shit TV with them.
Jacques de Savoy 2002 Cara
The frat house. I love these boys.

(A more up to date account to follow soon.)

In which I go FUCKIN' NOWHERE!

There’s a great scene in the Boondock Saints, where a detective stands over the heavily bandaged and previously bleeding body of a dead Russian mobster and yells in his thick Boston accent, “He ain’t goin’ nowhere! He’s goin’ fuckin’ nowhere!” He leans down, “Where you goin’? Nowhere!!”

Right now, I should be in South Africa, eating a steak and drinking red wine from a glass the size of my head. Instead, I am in London. I was supposed to fly out on Thursday night but all the planes in the UK have been grounded. There’s a giant ash cloud floating somewhere above me, the spit and guts of some bad tempered volcano in Iceland. It was my birthday yesterday and I should’ve been home for it, but like Detective Greenly so eloquently put it, I’m goin’ fuckin’ nowhere.

I don’t usually get too riled up either way when it comes to my trips back and forth and all over. I don’t get all that excited when I am heading off somewhere, just as I don’t get teary at airports when I leave. I don’t get excited when I book tickets, I don’t count down in calendars. I don’t pack a week before. I wake up on the day of travel, sort my luggage out, get a train to get to my plane to fly off to wherever it is I am going. It’s just easier that way. I just go. However, this time was a little different. Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen my Mom, Dad, Brother & Sister for a few months more than I’d like. Maybe it’s because we’ve been dealing with some pretty hectic family stuff over the last few months, almost all of which I’ve had to do remotely. Meltdowns over electronic devices are hard to contain; the constant crashing of the latest (shitty) version Skype and repeated lapses in cell phone signal makes for frustrating communication. Needless to say, there is a dire need for some face time with the family and sentences that run on without long radio silences. Maybe it’s that I moved out of my last permanent residence in February and have been house sitting since then and my sense of permanence has become permeable once again – I ache for roots. So for the first time in god knows how long or how many trips, three days before I was due to fly off and away, I packed my bags. I sorted my goods into essential and non essential items, hauling the non essentials up precarious ladders into dusty loft spaces, cob webs tickling my nose, the groaning beams sounding like ghosts, scaring me more than I knew they should’ve.

On Thursday morning I woke up ready to fly the same route I’ve done countless times. And then, at 9am, my sister called me. “Have you seen the news? You need to check your flight, there’s volcanic ash in British Airspace.” What followed was a flurry of phone calls between South Africa and England, The SAA help desk and constantly checking for updates online. No one was saying anything. I was still holding onto the hope that I would be able to fly or at worst, be delayed for a few hours. I went to go and say goodbye to Laura at her shop up the road and on my way back, stopped to by something to eat. I looked at the time on my phone. 13:01. SAA said that they would release a statement at 1pm, finalising their flight plans for the day. 13:01. I dialled their number, now imprinted in my brain. An automated voice service crackled across the line “Due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland, all SAA flights departing London today, the 15^th of April, have been canceled. We apologise for the inconvenience.” And I don’t know if it was because I was dead set on being home for my birthday, or the fact that I was slightly shaky with hunger and had an express train of PMS related hormones bulleting through my body, but I just burst into tears; big, shaky, hiccupping tears, right there, in the sandwich aisle of Marks & Spencer.

I did what anyone in my position would do. I went home, ate a sandwich, picked up my bags and went to Shelley and Paul’s house in Chiswick. When in doubt, go to Chiswick. This is a failsafe option that has saved me many, many times. Sad? Go to Chiswick. Drunk at 4am and unable to get into your house? Go to Chiswick. State of occasional pseudo homelessness? Chiswick. Hungry? Chiswick. Lonely? Chiswick. So when I found out that my flights home was canceled and I was in crying in the sandwich aisle territory, I knew I needed to go to Chiswick.

The birthday that I had planned fell by the wayside, and instead it was that I woke up in Shelley and Paul’s spare room with the phantom beast that is the occasional April sunshine streaming in through the windows. Lunch was a cheeseburger at Sam’s Brasserie, quite commonly known to the very best burger to the found in London. In the evening, Magpie traipsed through to Chiswick bearing gifts of Falke tights and Mac eyeliner and we went to Sam’s (again, sometimes once a day isn’t enough) and drank rhubarb cocktails and Sgroppinos and ate plates of cheese and helpings of lamb koftas with harissa yoghurt. It wasn’t a total bust. In fact, it actually turned out to be a really good day.

I’ve rebooked my ticket twice and at the moment I plan to be flying out on Sunday night, but as it stands the Volcano continues to spit up into the sky and the wind continues to blow over England and since I’m quite safely out of the crying in the sandwich aisle territory, I’m not holding my breath. I doubt the airports will open by then. I hope to fly sometime in the next week. But until then.... I’m going fucking nowhere.

An open letter to my sister

Dear Corlia

It started with long winded emails that invariably described in unnecessarily loquacious detail the exceptional turn of a hair pin bend in a winding road in yet another far off place that I had gone to; another place to lay my hat in some vague attempt to find my home. You said, 'Write this stuff online.' So I did. And so, sometimes when I am somewhere between here and there, I write down small bits and pieces of my fragmented days; the funnier things, the things that don't tell too much about the long and lonely hours and the gaps in time and the large cold question mark that follows me to bed, sleeps with me like a lover, its cold bones pressing along my spine. I am the small spoon to my own self doubt.

You said, write it online. So I did. As if I were telling you the story. Just like all those emails I'd written you. But it's not quite the same. My computer is a battered piece of weathered goods and if it weren't for my withering detest for the carrying of stuff, I'd get my typewriter out of storage and work on that instead. There is also the small issue of being unable to source ribbon for the antique. The last time I wrote on it my prose was blind embossed into the page. I prefer letters, real ones, written on paper, sealed with wax. They are tangible. Handwritten letters, like typewritten prose, exist in a way these words on these screens do not. If it exists on paper, I treat it differently. I am a fastidious writer. But I don't consider this real writing, this internet thing. I leave spelling mistakes as is. Grammatical errors. Missing words stay lost, clumsy sentences continue to clunk along, tripping over their heavy feet. I'd prefer the paper mail and wax seals, but in truth I am not a particularly dedicated letter writer. I begin with the best of intentions, but after several courses of correspondence, I find my dedication flags, and the one week response rate slows to two then three then a sluggish four and soon the letter and the blank paper and the unaddressed envelopes and my very intent is buried under a pile of debris on my desk.

So it seems that no means of correspondence suits me quite completely, but we continue in whatever form of it we can lay our hands on. These are the breaks when you live across oceans from your family. On a Monday, I'll send you an email. You'll catch me on skype for four minutes three days later. Sometime before the weekend, I'd get a facebook message from you. I'll respond in a text message. So many words that don't exist. No typewritten letters, the x always a little low on the line, on ivory coloured linen paper. No wax seals or personalised stationary or calling cards.

In some ways though, these words that don't exist do have their benefits. The ability to instantly connect. The way that when I'm walking down the street in some dilapidated European city and see a foreign language magazine in a newsagent with a brooding australian actor looking painfully serious on the cover I can pull out my phone and send you a quick message and within a few minutes you'll be agreeing with me that the beast does indeed belong on the list of those whom get their dark shipped all the way in. And so it will be, momentarily at least, that I don't feel we are quite so far apart as we really are. And then there is the way that I can write a letter like this one, and put it up here, in the space where words don't really exist.

This is the way it is for us. Everyday I make a choice, and that choice leaves me with phones and wires and cables and screens and shitty wifi connection. And that's the way it is. Those are the breaks. But I wonder if one day I'll be able to write small notes, in quink, on thick linen folded cards, my initials embossed subtly in the corner and drop them through your front door when I am passing through the neighbourhood and find you're not home. Or send you handwritten invitations to dinner, or thank you cards. I wonder if we'd live close enough that these words that don't exist ceased to be, and instead it would be my looped handwriting in a day planner and a glass of wine and something tangible, and I'd say, "Let me tell you about this thing I saw today...."

And I don't know if that's how it will ever be... But I hope so.

xx

The Impoverished Writer's Survival Kit

My cousin Shanna is a rock star. I went to go have a glass of wine with her last night and she presented me with this:
Which I opened, to find this:
"It's your survival kit," she told me. "as it's only a matter of time before you run off to some far away city and can't afford to eat.... again."
In the little suitcase (which, by the way, belonged to her as a pre schooler and I have coveted since we were 5 years old) was some Sanctuary bath soak and body butter
a bar of micky mouse soap
a nail file and band aids
an easy open tin of baked beans
for which this fold up spoon was provided
and naturally, a packet of rice.
No writer can ever be without a pocket sized bottle of whiskey, complete with teeny tiny hip flask.
For when I am in need of something sweet, there are shortcake biscuits on hand
and bite sized rolls of sweets
Just because I will not always be in a position to drink Chateau Lafite, does not mean that my carry on wine stopper should be anything less than crystal
and obviously I will need to keep a bottle opener at hand for when I need to open beers. (You know, when the crystal stopper is in the in the Lafite.

And of course, a lighter with which to light my Marlboro Reds.
and most importantly, the piece de resistance of the writer's survival kit, as rice, whiskey, body butter and biscuits can only get one so far......
my beloved moleskin notebooks
As I said, my cousin is a rock star.
Thanks Shan. YOU ARE THE BEST.

(there was also a tiny bag of chocolate coins. I must confess I molested those before I even found my camera. But know, they existed.)

A not altogether comprehensive festive season activities check list:

Family Invasion.
Check.

Food prep in West London. 5 courses being prepared and 7 bottles of champagne consumed. First Bottle: Krug. Second bottle: Vintage Bollinger. Third Bottle: Ohlson de Fine MCC. Similar fashion to continue until all involved pass out drunk at 10pm; starchy fingers marking the sheets with potato dust.

Check.

Christmas Eve dinner party in formal wear with more champagne, roast marrow bone and tiny, perfect portions of confit duck shepherds pie. Unfortunate incident involving mulled wine reduction that looked like blood on the dessert plates. 100% my fault. I’ve been stripped of my pastry colours.

Check.

Vicious, brutal to the point of injury game of Yankee swap. Robin ended up with a maglite. Shelley got a Jamie Oliver cookbook. I was landed with a pink plastic shower cap in the shape of a pig. Gift FAIL.

Check.

Cheese scones on Christmas morning surrounded by cups of coffee, family and mountains on presents. End of the gift fail. Signature scent in pink box, rabbit hair oversized jerseys, zippo lighters, luxurious soft bed socks, Massimo Dutti sleep sets.
Check.

Christmas lunch at Kyle and Amy’s Christmas grotto of a living room. It was like a holly jolly santa ate too many Christmas cookies and exploded in there. In a nice way. Incredible gammon. Lots of wine. Feeling a bit sad about not being with my parents, brother and sister and upon (rather unexpectedly) seeing photos of them, bursting into floods of tears and dealing with an unattractive lip quiver for several hours. Followed by more wine.

Check.

Boxing day with puy lentils and pork chops, wine and old musicals. There was a lot of couching involved. See also: Sofa surfing, sloth, indolence. Inability to button up my Acne jeans.

Check.

Retreating to the countryside for the black hole between Christmas and New Years Eve. Marshmallow couches, listening to far too much Queen, drinking copious quantities of red wine and dancing to said music in the living room, rare roast rib of beef, The AGA, house shoes, teaching the parents about Jurassic 5.

Check.

All in all it was a festive season well spent. Tomorrow morning I must traipse back to London at a reasonable hour as I have a gig tomorrow night. And then, this year will be gone. See you all in 2010. xoxo