How I long for the distant tape recorder

March into April 2013

Martin and Jacques have been doing quit a bit of holidaying, making the most of being here in South Africa and enjoying their many-tyred trip to Namibia. For now they are.... somewhere else. I'm not even sure where they are. When Martin and I are together I can feel where he is and we are wont to communicate via facebook (his preferred method) even when simply on different floors of the same building or across the table from one another. But they are.... somewhere else in South Africa. Lord knows where - Martin is not one for having his phone on, or if it is on, having it with him, or if it is with him, bothering to answer it.

So I begin the Johannesburg part of the tour with Mother, my Littlest Aunt and lots of my South Africa family. In fact, our first full day in Joburg is Good Friday, followed by Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. I do no realise it at the beginning but we are about to get the chance to spend most of four full days with my cousins, their kids and my uncle. This has not happened since the 1970s . Food is prepared, eggs are painted, we all gather.

I have long known that I get far too fond of people far too quickly. I don't mean romantically, stuff things romantic... maybe it happens romantically (see earlier miserable blogs) but I mean all the other loves. I feel connected, I fear, to folk far too fast. And I have often felt that I love my South African cousins in an exaggerated fashion for people I have spent no more than fifteen bursts of time with over my years on the planet.

My South African aunt, Jane, who went and died on us nearly ten years ago now had three children just like my mother did, girl boy girl. My cousin Lou is my age. Well, she's a few month younger than me, months that become more and more important as I age, and she follows me far too slowly into these lengthening-shortening years. We had met a few times before, but when we were 13 my aunt Jane brought her to the UK to visit family. My mother, Jane, Lou and I went to London together, including Madam Tussaud's, spent time with my mother's cousins, travelled to The Channel Islands to see our grandparents, aunts and cousins there.

And it is there I fell for Lou. Lou was beautiful, and worldly in the ways that matter. Sure, I knew far more about global politics - this was the 1980s when a South African child of whatever stripe would find it hard to find out what was going on in their own country, let alone anywhere else in the world. But who cares about human rights abuses in Turkey or the Amazon rain forest when there are boys to know about, actual boys: 13 year-old-boys, 14-year-olds and - whilsper it quietly - 15-year-olds? Pointless, pointless education and political awareness! Interestingly - or not - I fear I still suffer from the same problems I had then: too much understanding of what it is men do in parliaments and not enough understanding of how they function in bars. 

Lou was the kind of 13-year-old girl who turned heads when she walked down the street (Just to let you know, I have yet to reach that stage of my life). And we bonded. This lovely, witty, learned woman-child wanted to be my friend. We talked and played and did sophisticated things, like listening to Phil Collins and Genesis on my grandmother's cassette recorder. Lou wore make up, for crying out loud, and it looked great. It occurs to me that it is only about now that I am genuinely ready to understand what Lou had to teach me about boys then, but it's too late. The moment has passed, zooming into history, several other me's ago I was there, but I cannot be redeemed now and I was just in no place to learn any of that stuff then. Like Alice in Wonderland with the small door and the shrinking potion: now that I have the key to the door I am way to big to pass through it.

I guess we complimented each other. Me with my gawkiness, still metaphorically - and often actually - up trees with so much to learn, but far more aware of - and able to articulate things about - the political world in general and the UK in particular, where we happened to find ourselves. And she with her suave ability to chat to anyone, look right, behave appropriately, explain Everything Else in the world.

We have spent quite a bit of time together over the years for people living on these two continents and my love for her has never waned, she is still rather magical to me. These days she is married with two children and all kinds of professional success behind and ahead of her. Over these Easter days we are together with her kids and her husband and everyone else and we just are. No desperate need to grab time together, as can so often be the case for me on my trips to Joburg. I start to realise I am going to be doing very little work over these four days, and despite being rather obsessed with achieving things, I begin to come round to the idea of hanging out with my fabulous family and start to feel it's time for the cassette recorder.