Consummately driving in all the wrong directions

Easter weekend, still: March/April 2013

Of course one of the problems of being on tour and being on holiday at the same time is that everyone around me is on holiday while I really do need to be getting on with some work. Part of this work is getting flyers printed and the posters to the venue.

My maternal grandmother was an artist, a painter, watercolourist, oiler, pastel maker, portraitist - for a living. Two of my aunts have made clothes for a living. My mother can draw, her doodles by the phone, in the days when the phone was fixed, were of the faces and the dancers from her mind. Turns out Mother's mind is full of beautiful stuff no matter the brickbats life throws at her. And the drawings were good, so good you could tell what they were - please bear that in mind. My sister qualified as a civil engineer, a fabulous draughtsperson, and my brother can draw, though he doesn't. (More of my brother's legion talent another time, sometimes it's too much even for me to dwell on). Me? I have to leave an explanation under an image of a stick person. I understand the theory - you don't grow up with these people around you and not understand the technical requirements - but I cannot make anything look like whatever it's supposed to be. Worse than that, I cannot even pull something out of my imagination and make it look like anything others might understand or even simply recognise.

And I've got to make sure the flyers and posters look okay. I mean, we have a great designer, but while Martin is out of contact, I need to sign them off. For anyone who can make something look nice - not only can I not draw but I cannot tidy anything up - this sounds like a doddle. But I'm rubbish. On top of the not being able to draw or make anything look good, I regularly leave the house looking as if my arch enemy from the comic-book version of my life has dressed me.

As if that weren't enough I also have to get the posters to the venue, which means driving into central Johannesburg. On the Saturday afternoon I leave the family in the garden and head off for what the satnav tells me will be a one-hour-or-so round trip. I've communicated with Hayleigh, one of the women who runs the venue and she will be at PopArt to meet me. Perfect. It's yet another beautiful Johannesburg day: it really is the best climate in the world, and I am driving, talk and tunes on the radio, heading for central Joburg for the first time in..... about fifteen years.

As my new best friend tells me which way to turn, on a part of the journey I actually know - the first bit - I reflect on the last time I was in central Joburg, long after it had become something of a no-go area for middle-class white folk from the northern suburbs, before it became an utter no-no for the likes of me. I had been heading to Durban with my friend Caroline just after graduating and my South African aunt had dropped us at the coach station. She had been very jumpy, the jumpiest I had ever seen her, and she kind of threw us and our luggage out onto the street and hurtled off in her dust of terror. It was... out of character.
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Which is odd, and had been at the time, because the centre of Joburg is fabulous... if you like cities, and I love cities. I like urban and shiny and mixed and big and grotty and unpredictable... but not this unpredictable. The satnav keeps losing its connection to the satellite, or at least I think that's what keeps happening: big oceans of grey and silent and asking me to wait while I become increasingly nauseous. It's the same nauseous I experience whenever I get lost, which is often, irritated at myself for not preparing well enough, as if more preparation would help - I know it would not - but I cannot help feeling it might, that one day I will be able to find my way. I won't, I know that, but still. And I resent Martin, and where the hell is he? And why should I be dealing with this alone? And why did some man in Cape Town seem to like me and all of a sudden not? And why was Kate killed? I would not be in this predicament if she were alive. I cannot believe my aunt is still dead - she could have navigated for me. Massive, unrelated emotions start to overwhelm me as the toddler inside unleashes her fear and fury. None of which helps me get any clearer about the rather mystical one-way system. I know that. Why can I not keep a stopper in this and just have a good rage later?

The beginning of the sunset is incredible. There are huge reflective buildings in the CBD and they are all around me. And people are out and about. I am reminded of... Harare? Bulawayo? Durban? Nothing as big and shiny as Joburg, but something metropolitan and African and hot and from my past, from happier days, all at once great and terrible to experience. As well as the phallic shinies there is massive urban decay, gatherings of folk who look like drug addicts or muggers or both. Every so often the satnav springs into action, only to leave me in the lurch at the vital moment, like and internet datee who loves to text but won't quite commit to the date of a date. I need to stop to read the map - I keep getting onto the road where the theatre is but not finding theatre, as in those fearful, frustrating dreams. Then I lose it entirely emotionally, spinning out towards the unknown, panic grabbing and shaking me. No tears, just panic. The story of Johannesburg, the one you are constantly told about violence, is something I assiduously ignore and I am furious with myself that I am now so afraid. Kate would not have been this afraid: she was so much braver than I. Damn her and her stupid bravery.

I do stop, I look at my map. The dark is moving in. I am aware that I look exactly what I am: a lost foreigner, or worse, a tourist. Not wanting to stop for too long, I pull out, starting to worry that my driving is less than it should be, if I'm not shot for my car and laptop then I'll kill someone inadvertently, driving into the sun, looking at street names, mowing them down, a casual, inconsequential obstacle to and in my panic. It's at least half an hour before I officially invite defeat into the passenger seat and start to read the runes for indications of how to get home. Quickly I find myself on the new multicoloured Mandela bridge speeding out of town towards more familiar territory.

Arriving home I casually drop into the conversation that I have, actually, failed to deliver the posters. There's lots of looking at watches and asking where I've been. I am determined not to worry my mother, but I am also determined not to cry, not to rage, not to make the next half hour about my inadequacies and their attached fury. This has not been the end of the world. And from the wreckage of my crazy hour and a half I salvage dignity, magnanimity and another lovely evening with my beautiful family. This has been, finally, about my being able, in the end, to contain my emotions - about which no one is more surprised than me. And obvioulsy, but no less surprisingly, nobody has died, as my sister used to say, about fuss and nonsense in her daily work.

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. 

In which I wonder at the significance of position in the family

It is Passover. I know about Passover, you're not brought up a Christian without knowing all about Passover. Well, I say that, but I am about to learn a thing or two about Passover and grains that swell, it turns out.

I made a friend at drama school and it was great to learn that she came from Johannesburg. At the time I didn't realise she lived about fifteen minutes' drive from my aunt's place. I have always had an open invitation to stay with her, but have never taken her up on it as I have family and other friends in Joburg. In the time since Kate died I have wanted to stay with her friends, spend time with them. But one of the terrible corollaries of loss for me is that although I have got access to some of Kate's mate's in a way probably impossible had she been alive, I have also found that many of those relationships were tremendously ephemeral. More ephemeral than I had wanted. Something about the desire to connect at the time of her murder to rediscover Kate, maybe to be with someone we'd heard so much about or to be with someone who was enduring something similar to our own pain.

Being a hoarder, being desperate to keep my sister, to find something, someone who would, basically, I suspect, be my sister, I had wanted to continue those relationships, but mostly they have fallen by the wayside, which in itself has caused me distress. I think this is my problem, not theirs, that they are just doing the right thing and what comes naturally, and I am misguided, needy, mistaken. Thinking about it, it all sounds rather..... well... barking. And I'm loathe to write about it really, but two months in and now confronted with Johannesburg I am feeling pretty.... peeled-back skin-wise and I have a desire to be honest. And so, I think I have been blinded by grief and fear, by a terrible knowledge that without my sister I am nothing. I always knew I was rather an insubstantial creature, but the severing and expunging of my other self, my better self, my sympathetic, loving, resilient sister, has left me over-keen to find or make life and love and understanding on the barren territory of surprise and loss and desire for the utterly gone.

Add to this the fact that some of Kate's mates are no longer in Johannesburg and my familial homes are full, I find myself with the chance to take up my friend on her open invitation.

She is full of apologies as I arrive, late into the evening for parents with a baby who is not fond of sleeping. She's sorry because it is Passover, and so there is very little food in the house, she says, food of the kind she clearly thinks is right for a guest. I do not know how to reassure her: I've come to stay for... up to a few weeks and just a bed and somewhere to wash is enormously generous. I admit, being far less knowledgeable about Passover than I'd thought, I didn't realise that there would be unusable crockery and many un-eatable swelling-grain-based foods in the house, but there is tea and there are matzos. And boiled eggs. And salad and fruit, mountains of fruit and, as I mentioned, tea. AND the warmest welcome. Actually, it looks like a pretty healthy diet, to me, this Passover diet, especially when you add the lovely people with whom I'm about to stay.

When I see her husband later, he looks me in the eye and tells me, essentially, that his home is my home and that I must simply treat this house as such, he'll have no standing on ceremony. He and I have only met twice before, both times pretty fleetingly, and as I go up to my room I do, indeed, feel at home. And I feel happy that my friend has married such a very lovely man, a man who put me at my ease and who is genuinely happy for me to drink his beer even tough he can't - it's Passover.

And yet there's an 'and yet' in the mix. Will I always live he life of this single woman, the interesting, perfectly pleasant (if you like that sort of thing), woman, with a good sense of humour, who will eat anything (anything I tell you! and love it) and be a houseguest in the homes of her friends, in their couples, maybe with their children in tow? Will I tramp around, never fixed, always looking for whatever it is that's missing?

It's Passover. And I think about the first born in my family, the oldest brother who died before he was born, and the oldest sister, who died as she was starting to live the life she'd hoped for. And I remember I can get very maudlin indeed if left to my own devices. Maybe I will always be itinerant, but if the homes I visit have matzos, or similar, and fruit and tea and boiled eggs and beer, maybe it won't be so bad.

I can feel the love wrapped round my neck

Firsts are the stuff of childhood, obviously. As I age, though they come thinner and slower, still they come, and I notice them a lot more than ever I did when they were the stuff of life.

We are driving into Johannesburg. I have never entered Johannesburg for the first time on any trip like this before, I have always flown in. I did fly into Johannesburg, just over two months ago, but I flew straight out against to Durban to begin the tour, my feet never touching the outside of OR Thambo International.

Two months ago. That's, like, two months. Two of them, for crying out loud.

Now, Mama, my Littlest Aunt and I have been on the road about eight hours. We are about to drive to my cousin's house but currently we are in a bit of the city we do not recognise and after eight hours on the road we are calmed considerably by the gentle ministrations of Tracey's satnav. It would be a whole other ending of wrong turnings and stress and extra hours of snappy panic without it. All hail satellite technology, plastics and microchips in general, and this particular stanav in particular.

The thee of us got on the road this morning, slightly later than intended because we were staying in a fabulous place. Nieu Bethesda is a tiny settlement located, roughly speaking, somewhere between Oudtshoorn and Johannesburg. Mum, Auntie and I have overnighted in the loveliest of little cottages and in the morning we visit the very famous Owl House and Camel Yard. We buy gifts in gift shops and look at the second hand bookshop. I rue the chance we have lost to do the show here, for despite a population of only 1,000 souls, 900 of those living in the township nearby, there is a theatre and the woman in the bookshop tells me that they love to go to the theatre. I'm not surprised: this place is bijou in the extreme, no sealed roads and only in existence because the local farmers not that many decades ago needed somewhere to build a church so that they didn't have to go all the way to Oudtshoorn to worship. Any entertainment whatsoever must be welcome, even if it is a woman doing a show about her own sister's murder.

Seven of us, plus my tiny roommate, had celebrated my birthday in a very idiosyncratic self-catering place, run by a German couple, in Oudtshoorn. Their living quarters, their kitchen, the contents of their fridge mingled with ours as Martin eeeeeked out the story of their being here. Buying the farm without ever having seen Oudtshoorn, previously never having lived in South Africa, never having run a farm, they gave up having a manager for the farm and started, in their late fifties, to learn to be farmers. He speaks no English at all, or Afrikaans, or Xhosa. He speaks German. They are welcoming and solicitous and interesting and.... individual.

On these few days' holiday to celebrate my inexorable age journey I had a trip to the caves, some ostrich visiting, eating out, eating in, a spectacular electric storm with angry rain and blood-curdling sound effects, a power cut which lasted and lasted, tickling a cheetah, lying by the pool, finishing the antibiotics for my infected ear and enjoying Precious the boa constrictor round my neck, amongst many other fabulous activities. I am loved, I can tell. I could tell before, but, well, a boa constrictor! Round my actual NECK!!! It is as wonderful as I hoped it would be when I did that (very poor, as usual - I am no researcher, no academic) project on snakes when I was eight.

Only a couple of days after my abrupt ageing, it had been, suddenly, time to say goodbye to my tiny roommate and his fathers. It's tough. I've been with them for two months and Mark is.... was, after all, Kate's best friend. There is something about the nature of our relationship which incorporates her without us speaking about her that much. I am lucky to have a brother whom I love and loves me. On top of this I have these extra brothers who have had me in their home for two months: count them. That's love, or at least amazing tolerance.

And I am aware that the heartbreak I'm trying to metabolise about that man is inextricably linked to Cape Town. In spite of all the wonder of the place, every metre I get away takes me from what now feels like a terribly embarrassing mistake, or at least that seems to be the current coping strategy adopted by my psyche. So it is partially with alacrity that I put everything to do with the city behind me. I cannot imagine never going back, but neither can imagine ever being able to face it again.

Johannesburg, on the other hand, looms large and lovely over the whole trip. This is a bit odd as it is where Kate and my now dead South African Aunt lived, it is the place I have been coming to since I was seven. I resist the idea but there is no denying that it is one of the places I call home, though these days it is irrevocably marked by loss, nausea and fear. Not the usual Joburg fears of carjacking and brutal burglary, though. My more prosaic fear of simply unravelling emotionally stalks me hard and close in Joburg, although on previous visits I have outrun it. But then maybe that is partially what home is for me. I've never properly understood the relaxed comfort which the idea of home seems to bring some of my acquaintance. Maybe one of the reasons I am drawn to doing things that scare me is that home is not a place of safety. Why stay home, full of fear, when one could be out there experiencing the real thing?

But I'm not into the real fears, things that might bring me genuine misery, which is why I am very happy when I realise the three of us are nearing Linden in the northern suburbs of Joburg, the end of our journey, at least for now; the safety of my cousin's place and the promise of some good times to come with my South African family. And the Joburg shows. The location of the heartbreak, all the great new - and old - friends, each Cape Town show, the lovely moments with my tiny roommate, are behind me and what is left is the here and the now and the whatever comes next.

Why can't *I* have a wife?

I remember travelling to Spain, at the beginning of 1995, when I lived there. I got as cheap a flight as I could, which meant that it was at a very ungoldy hour in the morning when I had to get up off my brother's floor in north London, get the first tube and make the journey through the dawn dark across town to Gatwick.

I remember driving myself to school, in the summer of 1989, while my mother was away on holiday for two weeks. She had left some food for me, but I was definitely alone in the house - Mum had gone on holiday with her cousins to Italy in the days before mobiles or the interweb.

I remember getting on the train alone, saying goodbye to Kate, leaving her on the platform in Manchester, where I'd gone to stay with her at university for the first time. I was 14.

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There is nothing like leaving alone. Nothing. It can be devastating or exciting, anticipatory or tearful, but it is always exhilarating. That luxurious feeling of alone when you are indeed by yourself, but you have a gorgeous lattice-work of friends and family somewhere in the world, keen to know about you, loving, familiar, your invisible shadow. There are other alones that are not fun or cool or things I want to know about: a fully, vertiginous aloneness where there is no one who will offer me a mattress for the night or lend me a fiver. No siree. I've read about those alones, had them described to me, but I do not need to experience them.

I am about to leave Cape Town alone. Martin and Jacques help me get my stuff to the car. I've been packing for days, I've kind of been packing forever. I'm always in and out of one bag or another. I love packing to leave, even when I don't want to leave, I love the packing. I think it's probably got something to do with owning too much stuff: packing to leave, the kind of packing where you know you can get the stuff in your suitcase/rucksack/handbag because that's how the stuff got here in the first place, makes me relax. Not the packing to go. I hate initial packing to leave home as much as the next person who always carries too much stuff and has to take multiple bras, even for a couple of days away. Packing to go is one of the few things that makes sense of the Christian idea of purgatory, of hell, of the very devil himself. He's imaginary most of the time, but Lucifer is sitting on the end of my bed tossing paperwork and tights at me when I'm packing to go.

As someone who always has too much stuff I feel great when I can get things in a bag, everything I have that needs to go in the bag goes in the bag. This is not true of any other part of my life: draws are overflowing, cupboard doors are forced shut, things spill off.... other things which teeter on the edge of furniture I have half painted/sanded/mended, and land in great drifts by the things which fell there seven weeks before.

I'm as happy as a sandboy packing to leave. Marvelous. And we've had a top fairwell do. Luckily the last few days in Cape Town are so busy, so eventful, so interesting that I find myself suddenly at a play reading and then suddenly leaving the play reading and suddenly preparing the flat and then people are arriving, talking, meeting. My mum and my aunt are here. I've been thinking about these Cape Town people meeting them both, especially as they appear in the play, for a while. Luckily Martin and Jacques have been very good at getting things ready for the party too. I find myself horribly wanting as a hostess, not through lack of wanting to make people feel happy, at their ease. But I fear I am so much not at my ease that I have no sense of proportion and find myself frozen with worry that I'm not cutting the celery into the right shaped pieces, that my gin and tonics are too tonicy (making me stingy) or too ginny (making me something far worse), that there's too much potato and not enough salad cream.... in the cheesecake. Every decision I make is surely wrong.

God, how I wish I had a wife. We should all have a wife. Lots of my mates, even now, in 2013, have lovely, old-fashioned wives, who produce drinks, souffles, children, while my mates get to chat to guests and shelf-wrangle. Why can't I have that? Oh, yeah, it's because I can't have anyone: nobody wants me. Yep, yep, I remember now, there's  no need to go on about it.

Martin and Jacques make it look like a party and the guests make it a party and I treat it like a party, so it's  party. And it's so hard to say goodbye that one guest comes the next morning to wish us bon voyage, birthday gift for the impending day in hand. She was a friend of Kate's. It is unexpectedly difficult to let go of all this, never mind we're off for a few days' holiday, never mind I'll be in wonderful company, never mind we have some shows to look forward to in Jo'burg, I just don't want to say goodbye. As the opportunity that is Cape Town finally closes down on me I want it more than anything else I can think of, more, even, than that darn man.

I hug Martin and Jacques on the street, even though I'll be seeing them later, and I drive out of the Mother City. I'm picking up Mum and My Littlest Auntie on the way, but for now I am alone, beautifully alone, as if this were my natural state, and, with all the farewells done - for now, fleetingly - I can pretend that Kate is beside me and that we are off on one of our adventures.

If I'm looking right at you why am I missing you?

March 2013
People  have a drink and they say things they don't mean, do things they'll regret. It's part of being human. And enthusiastic. And, often, English - you don't want to speak your mind, best say yes for now, and get out the door.
So I was at that lecture, having had too much wines, too many wine... drunk too much and someone called Zavick is saying we should take the show to his studio - he's an artist. Yeaaaah! Let's do that!!!! That will be great. Yessssssss.
And then it's the next day and a man I don't know is trying to friend me up on facebook. Who the hell is... he's the artist from last night. Okay. Fine.
A few days later I'm walking over to Gardens where his studio is to have a look round. He really is an artist and he really does have a big studio, with other artists renting space and a fabulous thing called toilet cubicalism going on (see the attached photo). We talk about the show, about the art he makes, about his recent clear-out which has helped him get back to the art he wants to make. My gut fills with the thought of my stuff-bound flat, lots of that stuff being my sister's belongings, some of it still in boxes, and my terrible, miserable inertia, my inability to get rid of things or even move them, look at them... the way I hide from them, which is not easy as they surround me, day in, day out....
While I've been lost in thought, Zavick has made some tea is looking at possible dates on his wall planner, he's got started on making an event page on facebook.  He has the energy of a five year old. He doesn't seem even to have developed the ennui of a nine year old yet, he's in very bright toddlerdom; he has much more energy than my roommate, who's not yet eight months. I wonder whether I've ever met a person of his age with this much energy. I guess that he is, depressingly, about my age. It's depressing and impressive. He is also very dyslexic and so I take over for a bit at the computer, writing whatever copy we agree on, and we agree quickly, just getting on with it. We are both excited about the show coming to Studio41. I'm not sure what Martin will think.... but he's on holiday in Namibia, very short on mobile phone coverage let alone interweb, and I decide we'll do the show whatever and Martin will think whatever he thinks, but he'll get on with it too. I'm pretty sure he'll like Zavick.
In general Cape Town is starting to spin around me, gently at first, but with increasing urgency as I approach the date when I will be sucked out of the plughole and hurled back onto the road towards Johannesburg. It affects my sense of proportion and already pretty poor ability to make decisions. My mother and aunt will arrive before we leave, we'll do the Studio41 gig, we'll have a little gathering at the flat for a few of the fabulous people we've met on our time here. And then we'll leave.
I knew this would happen and that it would happen like this: I'll've been here two months and some of the weeks have dragged out... not necessarily unpleasantly, but languorously, as if they were going to last forever. I've known all along that they would not, and they knew it too. We have both known that time would speed up and I'd be stuffing experiences and people and sights and sounds and hopes into the vanishing hours like the burglar does into his bag in a nice Cape Town flat, fear of missing out on something great bearing down on us both; knowing that even if we do come back, the flat will not be the same as it is today. Today provides only today's experiences.
I've endured the heartbreak and confusion it threw me into, I'm starting to rise, vulture-like, from the ashes of my hope, ready to feed on the carrion of the next car crash in my life.  Feeling this raw confusion I wander the city seeing all kinds of work in the huge festival that is Infecting the City. Once a year the city is overrun with art, lots of it performance art, but also visual art. Frustratingly I miss shows or can't find venues, but I also see lots of things, some by mistake, bump into people I know, get a black eye helping someone up onto a wall - it's like any other visit to the theatre. I even get to see an UK director I know who has made one of the pieces - small performing world. It's not like any festival I've been to before and is all the more marvelous for it.
The night before the Studio41 show, four new tyres down, Jacques and Martin arrive back in Cape Town, with tales of the desert, some stones they've lifted and a pile of washing. For me the performance is yet another great experience. Zavick has brought some great people together and a few of my mates come, and it's like no other show I've done. I have to be careful not to touch the audience, so close are they, but also not to destroy the art behind my back. I spend more time sitting down that usual.
Afterwards, yet again, I meet such interesting people people who have suffered, people what feel so strongly about theatre, art, South Africa. Even though my mother and aunt land tomorrow for a three-week holiday, including a few days off for me, even though I am longing for Johannesburg, my first love, even though I want to leave this place which has broken my heart, I can feel the regret, I am missing Cape Town already. I'm still here and I'm missing it. Why can't I just be here and enjoy it and deal with the change when I leave? What is wrong with me? Naturally over-acquainted with grief, that's my diagnosis, too ready to anticipate it. My musicality, my skills as a show-off and my feelings of loss when simply contemplating something I love, let alone someone: these were all bequeathed to me by my father, the last one because he was too full of life  himself to live past 42, or at least that's how he fills my memories.
People gather in the flat on the Thursday evening, our last night in Cape Town. Mark and Ikeraam and my tiny roommate have already left for our holidayette, and so I am hosting a bit of a do in their flat. These are very nice people, I wonder why I ever wanted to leave: the sun sets and every new position it takes makes yet another preternaturally beautiful scene out of the city spread before and below us. One friend who attends has not been to this building since she tried to blow it up in the 1990s, another tells her that it's good to meet her, that she was out on the street protesting to get her released from prison.
Well, at least I'm not leaving South Africa.

The trouble with lemurs

Tuesday 11 February

"The trouble with lemurs is the same as the trouble with meerkats: they make very poor pets because they mark the house and their owners." Wikipedia

I am aware that I arrived at Mark and Ikeraam's place on 18 January, to fizzy wine, fabulous supper and a Cape Town sunset to simultaneously break my heart and make me believe all is possible.

But I worry.

I worry that by, or before, 22 March, our scheduled date for the beginning of the drive to Jo'burg, they will be so irritated by me, my stuff, by our romantic suppers for three, by my choice of foreign language DVDs, my dull cooking, my lack of cooking (in most UK homes I'd be okay because I'm up for the washing up, but here we have Staff, so even if I do the washing up I'm ingratiating myself with her, and not with the chaps, which is not to say I'm not for trying to charm Staff....), my every-so-often managing to be caught in a state of tears due to my broken heart, the strangeness of my working schedule, my inability to turn the lights off at night without turning all the lights on first - well, actually, that's their architect's fault - and legion other smaller and larger annoyances about ME will make them want to throw me off this, the 12th floor.

I raise the issue one day:
"I've had offers to stay with other people... you know... while I'm here."
"Oh."
"How, you know, would that be? Maybe I should."
"Well, itt's up to you."
"Well, I was thinking it was more, you know, up to you guys."
"If you do go, don't go for long."

No more information than I had before, possibly, even slightly less, given a rather heightened sense of paranoia and broken-heartedness and, well, I have no idea what else in the mix.

I stay put.

Before Martin and Jacques return from Namibia, I have my lecture to deliver. My lecture about journalist safety at City Varsity. That lecture I agreed to on that sunny afternoon, writing happily with Vanessa, feeling pretty much invincible. Yeah, that one. I write it down and everything - a radical break with my usual routine of... not writing things down properly. I do put in some sections where I am going to riff, or do bits of the show, but basically I trawl my brain, the death and danger stats on the CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) website, rifle through my passionately-held beliefs about press freedom and the state we are all in, and and and....

And.... who knows what they thought of the lecture. I kept remembering to look at my notes and I covered most of that stuff, about how journalism has changed and the risks that there are and not to be bullied into going anywhere, but to remain ambitions - don't let anyone take that either; that journalists are bound to be at risk, terrible things will happen, which doesn't met we ought not to let people go if they want to, unless we really ought not to let them go; that risk assessments are there for the protection of the employer; that broadcasters, papers etc are not necessarily your friend after you're dead and they may try to close down official lines of enquiry, may threaten your family with legal action, as the BBC did to us.

But that was all so serious and I know listeners need some light relief, so next we play guess the five most dangerous countries for journalists since 1992. It takes ages, they're way off-beam. Mali is in the news, and that's one of the guesses; I make a joke about it not being there yet, but, you know, just wait.

They get Iraq, but they don't get the others:

1. Iraq
2. Philippines
3. Algeria
4. Russia
5. Pakistan

Mostly they've never heard of Algeria, so it being in the top five is a double-whammy. We are having so much fun, we look at the next five and yes, I make a joke about Kate's country of death not making it into the top five and how frustrating that is for a high-achiever like me. We find India surprising:

6. Somalia
7. Columbia
8. Syria
9. India
10.Mexico

Some of these folk will go on to be music journalists, the majority not to be journalists at all, I'm sure, if my experience of further education is anything to go by. I wonder about my relevance here. Who knows whether there is any point to me at all, this lecture or, you know, on the planet at all.

But I feel vindicated. It turns out I know some stuff, I really have become a journalist safety expertine (a small expert). It's not my career, I tell them at the outset, it's more of a hobby. I tell them that journalists and their managers have told me, have told my family, that we are not allowed to comment because we are not journalists. At the time, years ago, I was too damaged, too nauseous, too afraid to say a word. These days I'd point out to them that a journalist is someone who gathers and then disseminates information: there is no club, you don't need a certificate; I'd tell them to get over themselves.

I'd tell them that the trouble with me is that I have been touched by the meerkat of murder, by the knowledge and experience of the hell my sister went through because her employers failed to stop her thinking she had to go to Somalia to keep her job, and that it has marked my home (still full of boxes of Kate's stuff) and my psyche and my tenuous future. I have been visited by the lemur of learning and I feel duty-bound to pass it on. Because it's not about me, it's about incredible people all over the world risking their lives to get the story out: if I can't get that story out, then what am I?