Ngorobob House: Life From The Hill

a rat tale.

2012-02-10T09:06:00.001-08:00

i've been busy trying to slow down time people and it's no easy task, as y'all know.

for fear of boring you, oh random but worthy reader, with tales of hot classrooms, in which i have been kept prisoner, i shall instead lambaste you with tails of another kind.

mid week. school day. routine. up and at 'em. stumble downstairs with a sleepy mashed potato head. with thick fingers i put on the kettle and slice the bread, reminding myself of granny martha's wise and true advice "let the knife do the cutting" only after demolishing the first slice into a crumpled (or rather crumbled) ball and the loaf into a diamond shape. stumble back to bedrooms and en route, catch my reflection and give self fright. berate myself for doing nothing about it but remember that it's all rather too late. continue to harangue myself with mum's "it's no use crying over spilled milk" and other irrationalities like the children are starving in somalia and isn't life a blast you lucky lucky person while i shout " rise and shine. rise and shine" to my sleeping army who shout back "stop shouting ma!" i soon realize that i am becoming not the sweaty German man but rather Dahl's Mrs Twit.

shuffle back to kitchen, carefully avoiding any encounters with reflection, light a cigarette and watch the kettle wondering why it hasn't boiled yet. second born stomps in. i growl " check the toast" and realize he can't get to the oven (we don't own a toaster) because i am rooted to the spot staring at the kettle and Thinking Things. so i open it. he says, "it isn't ready ma." i continue, smugly, " oh but i think it is. it LOOKS like it isn't but on closer inspection you'll find that it is." whilst leaning down to poke it and demonstrate a self righteous wisdom to second born, i see a grey frilly thing lying below the toast on the lower level. i am not wearing my glasses. so i say to second born "what's that?" he says matter of factly, "it's a rat." i say "no. no! Oh. My. God."

its tail was curled and crispy and its incisors exposed in a toasty, deathly grin. it was very dead. and i promise you, oh bestests, it wasn't there when i put the toast in. who will believe Mrs Twit then?

we ate the toast, with long teeth. you can eat anything with nutella.

even the cat refused toasted ratatouille for breakfast.

cats these days just aren't what they used to be.

tsk.

Kitchen Board: a few days ago just after The Rat Incident: Feb 2012

thank you pam, for your ratastic contribution to the kitchen board.

toodely ole toot, oh bestests, and bisous X.X.X. jump in your arms there's a rat in the oven ones x. j

slowing time...

2012-01-09T06:52:00.000-08:00

i almost feel embarrassed stepping out onto this stage because i haven't been here for so long.

remember me? don't blame you if you don't.

oh yes! (holding hand above eyes, and peering hopefully beyond the single spot light into a dark auditorium) i see three of you out there. oh my! hello! (waving prettily) tap. tap. tap. is this mic working? hello? dipping hat graciously and gratefully in your various directions, hello.

i've flashed in and out of zanzibar on a small plane, skimming precariously over the Pares Mountains - green jungled slopes sliced with silver, thread thin mountain streams and water falls, surrounded by the blood red tapestry of a hungry humanity closing in. wild monsoon storms swept over the old spice island, curling bone deep thunder shaking the ground and giant lightning forks electrifying the sea. back inland, up on the northern highlands, we sped bumpily into the dark bowels of mt meru, my friends and i. i spent hours staring wide eyed at the ancient ash cone, listening to sweet forest rain drip onto my canvas tent roof and the grey misted mornings echo with the eery howls of the invisible colobus monkeys. we drove high up through the avataresque mountain forests as far as we could go, my friends and i, hanging out the windows and feeling fresh and high on love and mountain air.

after my friends left for zambia, i wept inconsolably for 2 and a half days and thought, excitedly i must confess, that i might need 'help'. i mused whimsically on the hill, for the last week of the year, feeling ever so small and contemplative. the new year slid in quietly, peacefully, prettily, in fact, as johnnie, sue and i (actually johnnie. sue and i watched.) lit a chinese lantern, heroically and flagrantly ignoring all danger warnings in the instruction manual. we watched it float a marvelous unwavering and glowing course southwards as though the Southern Cross were its compass, our hearts it's wake.

so? who's made their proverbial resolutions? i have. i'm going to slow time down which, if you think about it, makes more of the evasive stuff. it's my secret...it does not involve dangerously strapping myself to Big Ben's arms, if you're thinking along those lines. i know i'm a big girl and it'd likely work, but no. no smarty pantses. i can hear you laughing with disbelief. tsk tsk. if you want to know how, you're going to have to pay me a lot of money. if i miss the train, i'll catch the next one and if there isn't another one, i'll walk and if, by an unfortunate chain of events i'm cripple, you'll piggyback me. somehow i'll get there and it won't matter how or how long it took.

i'm going to say 'no' without apologies. i'm going to do, say, sing and wear the things i love most, regardless. anyone who makes me feel bad, i'll shoot with my silver pistols. anyone who makes me feel good as in happy, as in giddy whooping leaping into the air happy, i'll love to the end, truly, madly, deeply. and that's a fact. i'm trashing obligation and guilt. i'm sending them into the shredder. every time.

"i'm sorry? what was that? did you say i HAVE to? i've GOT to? into the shredder with you." ah. there. nice. how very satisfactory.

my heart shall remain open, true, forgiving and curious. i am training my mouth to remain curved upwards like mona lisa's, even when i cry. (wrinkles are worryingly permanent things these days, it seems.) in which case, i shall start to learn to accept the inevitability of my wrinkles and the disobedience of my unruly, thinning, hair. and, above all, i shall continue to raise my children the best way i know how until...until i rest my weary head amongst the daisies

forever.

all of this takes time, you see. so i'm slowing it down and making more.

what are yours?

ps: and the cushions are going to be re covered. i tell you. once and for all.

kitchen board: january 2012: ngorobob hill house (crappy) kitchen.

my kitchen needs a revamp. clearly. the grater is so blunt it couldn't even shred an over boiled, limp carrot. but some of the crunchiest potatoes this side of the equator still pop out the old oven and remain a hill favourite. so then, it ain't all that bayaad.

toodely toot, y'all and a happy new year to all you bloggin' firecrackers. bisous X.X.X. smack on yer lips slow ones and for a long time. yeah. x j

gone fishin'

2011-12-27T21:02:00.000-08:00

happy christmas y'all.

i am out of words presently.

they swirl like pretty whirlwinds in my head, snaking, curling, racing and will out, likely in the new year.

but for now, we head, like a band of gypsies, to the mountain for camping.

toodely pip, oh bestests, and bisous X.X.X. marzipan laced ones x j.

how you see things.

2011-11-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

presently i am feeling a little bit like how i imagine a nearly empty toothpaste tube feels being squeezed and squeezed.

i don't want to sound needy or anything ghastly like that. i would hate stephen fry to despise me...you see, i want him to like me. i want to invite him to stay and be my friend and mentor forever. like when i was 10 i wanted to invite olivia newton john to come and stay on the sugar farm in zululand but dressed as Bad Sandy. my mother, naturally, encouraged me to like Goodie Goodie Sandra D but i wasn't having any of it. i wanted to be bad in those black tight clothes. i wanted high heels, red lipstick and cigarettes. and a rebel to love. i would muse for hours in the pool about it, watching the water scorpions circling lazily into the murky, luke-warm green depths. dreaming up possibilities. . .there was definitely something in me that simply, bravely and delightfully stupidly, knew it could be real.

i love stephen fry and wish for everyone to listen to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pscjBGTr_o

on days like these, best you take a ride in the twilight zone under a silver moon, laced in wispy clouds with kilimanjaro shyly between the hills, her melting glaciers in the twilight. take deep breaths of the wind and the smell of the injun hoss's dust as he spooks at the dik dik darting through the shadows on the hill.

on days like these, best you love your rebel, make secret curses and write dark gypsy songs.

on days like these, forget about impossibilities and know that anything and everything is possible....high heels, red lipstick and cigarettes to boot.

Kitchen Board

don't ask.

it involves first born peferring to walk home (up tenacious hill) than stay in the car with his raging mother...

must remember milk.

must try harder.

toodely toot y'all, bisous X.X.X. ragin' sad ones..just there. x j

beautiful things in october

2011-10-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

(new twinkly sparkly)

a long time ago, when i lived in a city and i was sad, it seemed easily solvable. get out there and buy shoes, girl. but these days, these older, more womanly days, these sobering, grown up days, i live far from the long gone, coffee scented, smith street arcades. the thought of rummaging through mitumba's dusty piles of old shoes exhausts me.

all the news from the north of here makes my skin creep: the drought, the camps, the kidnappings, the kenyan defence force in somalia, the french navy bombing kisimayo, american drones, dead soldiers and the unblinking threats from al shabab breathing retaliation:

"...The Kenyan public must understand that the impetuous decision by their troops to cross the border into Somalia will not be without severe repercussions. The bloody battles that will ensue as a result of this incursion will most likely disrupt the social equilibrium and imperil the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians; and with war consequently comes a significant loss of lives, instability, destruction to the local economy and a critical lack of security..." Mogadishu (17/10/2011)

(http://www.pureislam.)

...it makes my skin creep. it makes me stare out the window for a long time.

a cloud covers my sun.

the breeze stops and my bird song is quiet.

there's a deathly hush. as though you're holding your breath.

my eyes blink in slow motion.

it makes me mad.

and very sad.

instead of shoes, these days i look for twinkly things that tinkle and sparkle and enchant. . . twinkly lamps, green glass wind chimes and other pointless pretty things. they make me happy. they make me fuss where to put them. i lie under the thorn tree and listen to the green glass tinkle, watching how the sunlight dances from ring to ring. i see us on our mountain top, you know, flags brave and unfurled, our arrows glinting silver in the sun, breathless.

' foiled by carbon..'

2011-10-15T23:44:00.001-07:00

at my age one doesn't take too well to public humiliation. or being back at school, it must be said.

i had been time tabled to invigilate a psychology re write exam on a late bruised thursday afternoon. invigilation is not as simple as it seems. you might think you merely hand out the exam papers and say "On yer marks, get set, go."

no. the blue, officious plastic envelope, all the way from Cambridge, arrives sealed. a student has to open it and sign a document to say everything is tickety boo and there's no monkey business going on. fine. sign. sign.

then you ceremoniously hand out the papers, with a flick of the wrist, implying "i know this shit", write up on the white board start time, end time and warning time....which i always get wrong. then you say "you may begin," in your best accent, after checking no one has phones, or iPads or books or anything that may help them cheat. this applies to you, the invigilator too. bin "Psychology For Dummies" that you've had in your bag, just in case. then you're supposed to sit there. just sit there. no reading, writing, marking. nothing. these rules are stringent and must be adhered to. sometimes the British send out an inspector for a surprise visit, to check the center. you can see 'em from a mile off. white, spectacled, stern, looking unflappably lost in pin striped suits and toting Downing Street styled black brief cases and brollies.

before i continue, i must share details on monsieur X, our examination officer and french master. monsieur X is my most favourite member of staff. he is handsome and brilliant. efficiency has never seen anything like it. he speaks 6 languages fluently. he dresses the best too: flamboyant ties worn on deep purple silk of a day, white kaftan robes with matching turbans, perfectly cut tailor made coats from kanga, which he has made himself. he tailored his way through university. another impressive achievement. he knows what it takes. i have awarded him, every year without fail, The Best Dressed Teacher. period. the students love him. he says terrifically inappropriate things in class to make them laugh. my sons have since developed an alarming love of French because of him. i pay my sons to learn the conjugation of "etre" and "avoir". he is eccentrically efficient. so you see, i desperately want his approval to match my fervent admiration so therefore, as you may have concluded, he is the last person i want to disappoint.

so there i was, on that bruised rain promising Thursday afternoon, my mind on safari to sunnier climes. one student was rewriting. i smartly ticked all the boxes. corrected the end time, thanks to the student for pointing out that i had unthinkingly given him a paltry 30 mins to complete a psychology paper. i sat down and sighed. stared out the window, chin in hands and thought, fuggit, i cannot, under any circumstances sit here and do nothing. i left the door open, to keep a sharp eye out for said inspectors and monsieur X, grabbed a piece of paper and began writing. ya know, free flow. i grabbed the plastic envelope from Cambridge to press on (can't press on a wooden desk). this is more of less what i wrote:

Fuchsia flowers tremulous in a still, grey afternoon. They remind me of India, of Zambia and childhood and the rippling call of the coucal. The rain in Africa is an artist – leaving great splodges of pigment in its wake, across brown barren landscapes. It lifts my heart.

I should write Morning Pages and be more patient in poetry classes.

Apparently, as an exam invigilator, I am not allowed to do anything. Not read. Not mark. Not write. Not draw. If it were possible, the act of thinking would likely be banned too: Under no circumstances is thinking allowed in the examination room . This is entirely the prerogative of the students.

Imagine monitoring Thought? Is that what they call Meditation? No. That’s more clearing your head of thoughts and words, a serene quietening of the mind, so there’s nothing in there – an impossible task considering how curious and busy mine is. Maybe there’s a drug you can take that gobbles up thoughts. Temporarily, of course. Thoughts become words, words become things.

“ Be – come.”

“How becoming you look tonight, dear.” Does that mean you’re going to turn into something? A cake? Something edible?

“How fetching/ delectable you look tonight, dear.” Fetching. An interesting word too. I’m so glad I know what a palimpsest is. According to the dictionary a palimpsest is “…1. a parchment or other surface on which writing has been applied over earlier writing which has been erased or 2. Something altered or used again but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.”

I’m wondering if I’m allowed to write about wishes and desires. Why do I even make up rules when all I want to do is write? The words are queuing up like angry bees in my head and will out! Out! If they sting or make honey, it is not my fault. They will do as they please, these words. Some people are scared of bees. Not me. I think they’re magical. I have a hive in my roof and a hive in my head.

Oh. My. God. I have been pressing on the exam bag! (the plastic bag with all the exam sheets in them….now all these busy words are carboned onto the carbon copy…Oh. My. Word. Thank God the bottom copy stays at the center. Mr X is going to be very angry…..

Well. I was just letting some bees out, ‘as all.

And makin’ a palimpsest. . . .

you see. i had forgotten that inside the plastic envelope is a form with carbon paper in it. the top copy goes back to england the bottom copy stays with Monsieur X. i gingerly removed it and sure enough, there were all my words madly scribbled everywhere on the bottom copy. with a sinking heart i quietly put the form back and fled, leaving a palimpsest of proof.

i am marvelous at forgetting about impending doom. i AM the ostrich with her head in the sand. i have been known to stick match boxes over empty fuel gauges in cars and keep driving. i can make things go away and pretend they never existed. for real. which is precisely what i did here until the staff meeting the next morning. once the headmistress had finished her say, she politely asked if anyone else had any announcements. monsieur X cleared his throat, and in his delectable accent said, "Indeed yes..." i wished for the earth to swallow me. " The Person Who Was Invigilating Yesterday, " he began, (i went puce. everyone knew it was me.) " broke the rules, putting the examination center at risk. You Are Not Allowed To Write While Invigilating. I discovered GRAFFITI over the carbon copy of the examination form. This is not allowed." i squeaked from the corner " Oh, um, yes, that was me!" graffiti? GRAFFITI? my carefully construed words? good lord no. i was suitably humiliated. i felt hugely obliged to write him a note of apology, a desperate measure to claw back some small smidgen of his approval.

Dear Mr X

Lashings of profuse apologies for being a rubbish invigilator yesterday. If you must know, I was keeping a sharp eye out for wandering British examiners in the corridor but am happy to report none were seen. If only I had not pressed on the exam envelope all would have been fine and I would have escaped my suitable humiliation in the staff room this morning.

I find invigilating one of the most tedious and boring tasks imaginable. But please don't hesitate to use me again. I shall try my damndest to sit still, think of nothing and stare poignantly at examinees.

I must confess, I was slightly offended at my writing being labelled as graffiti. Should you be interested in what I had penned, please see attached. It's curiously ironic. Perhaps "Unintentional Graffiti" would be more apt.

Please accept my most humblest apologies.

Yours, in disgrace
Mrs Doria
(English Department)

I await, in terror, for his response. So far, there has only been a thunderous silence.

I am sure I will now be banned, which in many ways is a good thing.

Kitchen Board: Sunday Mornin' sometime in October on t'hill.

monday looks interesting. i think amneey meant fix the brake lights on the green landcruiser. monday actually has a sad addition. the landrover is to be used to take veronica's father's body to the cemetry. . . .but those sad things are not to be listed. they cannot be forgotten.

toodely y'all. bisous. X.X.X. deliciously disgraceful ones x j

lost for words

2011-10-03T10:46:00.001-07:00

i love it how you find things when you're supposed to, ya know, without realizing it.

i haven't written anything because it's all been too much. the pressure. what have i got to say? what about this? what about that? lord no. usually when you don't know what to say, you talk about the weather. at least, i do. and i have a genuine love obsession with the weather, just in case y'all were wonderin'. i've given up guessing the weather 'round these parts, though. mountains generally mess with weather. it's always a surprise. or insufferable. either way, it keeps you on yer toes. i like it that way. generally, i like life that way.

it rained on saturday night. i thought i'd burst from my skin with sheer relief and happiness.

glorious squalls raced and slashed the hill. from no where. i had walked over to Tati's for dinner with the italians. i love sitting listening to their words like music, with a sort of don't worry about me i can understand what you're saying stupid smile on my face, even going to the disturbing extreme of periodically nodding my head. i don't speak italian, she shamefully confesses, even after having spent a small fortune on a box set of How To Speak Italian. i got to ordering a cappuccino and some fresh orange juice per favore and not much further. must try harder. oh wait. i can say la ragazza del collina con spina (the girl of the hill with thorns) much to my secret glowing satisfaction.

whenever i walk the hills at night, i always stop to look at the sky and the mountain. i narrow my eyes and strain them to see if i can trace her great jagged outline in the flickering darkness. i always can. on saturday night i could easily. there were great stars twinklin' above and lightening flickered far across the steppes. the moon was ever so beautifully sliced. i could smell the rain far far away and i thought "well. at least it's somewhere nearby. it's around, you know? be pleased. be pleased." and i was. and took a deep breath - a dusty breath sprinkled with little rain smells. a deep breath of flickerin' sky and moon and stars. it felt so good. things stir inside. i laughed the entire slippery way home, rain in my face and francesca sloshin' and a slippin' in the mud behind me with lots of gloriously stormy mama mia's and cazzo's.

i fell asleep with my hair wet and snaky like medusa's on the pillow and a smile on my face. and when i got up in the morning it stayed like that. my hair. i had a head of snake hair which not even the wind could pacify. this coupled with a terrible pale faced panic at having to treat my injured horse, did not make a pretty picture. working with horses is deliciously dirty. i rummaged around for an old pair of cut off levis in the old green suitcase which always has forgotten things in it. i found the shorts and remembered why i had chucked 'em in there a few years back....the zip had bust. must fix it, i reminded myself, as i chucked 'em unhesitatingly back where they obviously belonged....when suddenly i spied something wickedly emerald under the ethiopian caftan...i rummaged, inundated with a frantic curiousity. i tugged at green plastic and found an old folder, filled with writings i had forgotten about. piles of writings.

"And you raised your eyebrows and smilingly waited for more of my marvelous fantastic bullshit," i had written. "life was meant to be fun, apparently," i continued and then an entire exam pad of absolute Rubbish, codswollop i can't believe i wrote that shit Rubbish.

the only bit i liked was " I walked the hills today. I found a moth with golden spots. And burnt orange. Sitting on a new tree and rubbing its wings, scattering moth gold dust on the world. And two barbets. And seven aloes. Which I shall steal in the morning."

even so. it was a good as opposed to a bored feeling, to find words i had forgotten about. and stories, marvelously shite stories. the folder is not going back into the old green suitcase (circa 1979) but into my newly acquire senegalese wooden trunk (circa 19 bladdy voetsek i reckon by the price i paid for it) which stores all my other writings and paints and brushes and bits of pretty sea glass.

"She savoured it like when you steal the last chocolate, the last swig of the tin of condensed milk. Chocolate and condensed milk are, by nature, communal."

i wrote something.

so there.

kitchen board be damned.

toodely toot, y'all and baci X.X.X. remembered ones x j

the bus

2011-08-31T07:51:00.000-07:00

( first day going to boarding school in granny's garden. liane, me and rayna. and ma)

i swore i'd start writing The Book today. and did i? did i?

i did not.

ideas swirled through my head, slow motion faded polaroids...

my mother's 1970's datsun, sports car delux. once in a blue moon, she'd race to rhodesia, a day's drive at least, stopping to buy peppermints in karoi. i remember her bringing me ballet socks one afternoon, at boarding school. i was five and a bit, a bright wee silver fingerlin'...and i remember her laughing when i read "bullet socks" on the plastic wrapper... i was never much good at ballet, preferring to spin around on my bottom, counting how many circles i could do without stopping...i remember her coming once, and they couldn't find me and she left. without seeing me.. how i wept inconsolably. when i was maybe 6.

i remember my 6th birthday at boarding school. the matron, miss hall, a grey haired rigid spinster, brought me my wrapped up present from my mother. i was so excited. i opened it. inside was a puzzle with a little green rhinoceros. plastic. but if you held the puzzle box at an angle, his little legs would move and he would trot down hill. i loved that little green rhino. i can still remember him. and i ordered a chocolate log cake from mrs sherman, in her office, under the stairs to the dormitary, where the black phone was.

i remember my mother's letters...she always drew funny little pictures next to her words in case my reading wasn't that hot. i knew i couldn't write 8's without taking my pencil of the page. i did two circles joined in the middle. i remember once writing a letter home, which the matrons always read, "dear mummy. is daddy in jail yet? love janelle."

i remember the smell of boarding school trunks and the pine trees of salisbury lingering on the crisp night winter air as our bus sped into town.i felt so small and so very far away from home until we arrived at school, where the matrons would whisk us inside, donning out hot cups of cocoa and lashings of ham and tomato sandwiches. and where there were lots of other little girls bobbing about in the same boat as me.

i remember pressing my face against the bus window in lusaka, her waving bravely back at me, smiling, stark under the white midday zambian sun. perhaps the wind blew her hair over her face and she lifted her hand to hold it back, waving, waving with the other hand. how i raged and bawled but nothing could stop the bus going away away away from my mother. not even her.

i remember winning the running race on Rhodes And Founders' Day. i knew my mother was somewhere out there watching. i said to myself, "i'm going to win this!" and i did! i ran on my toes. i ran with wings at my heels. i ran until i thought my heart would burst from my burning 8 year old chest. i remember how everything was so shiny afterwards and i felt like The Champion Of The World and everyone loved me so much. oh and my sister's secret garden, near the tennis courts....it was quite the most magical garden i had ever seen. i felt overwhelmingly privileged to have been shown it. i was sworn to secrecy or else... all manners of the darkest awfulness would befall me...it was hidden deep under the pines, near the hedgerow, where nobody went, with mini mountain ranges and pebbles and tiny cactii....

i remember rainbow ice cream on saturdays before riding lessons and seeing grandpa sitting in granny's fiat, with his brandy bottle hidden in a brown paper bag, watching me in his gary larson styled emerald green glasses. he was a man of few words. that afternoon, under the whispering gum trees, he said " you can ride. you can ride. never buy a hoss with white feet.." and then simply drove away. we clambered back into the landrover which bumped us back to school and chapel. i quietly glowed the entire way back. and never forgot his words.... i remember sundays at granny's house in borrowdale...having to spell 'chocolate' after pudding for granny if i wanted one, with my middle sister slyly and so kindly, mouthing the letters to me behind granny's back. we'd wait until we thought they were asleep and raid the sweety tin from the dark pantry for more Turkish Delights. we'd hide them under our pillows and forget about them until bed time. i remember the time i tried to throw a stone over the purple VW outside granny's gate. afterwards, i ran and hid in the dahlia beds behind the house, the same dahlias where my big sister made me take all my clothes off, and hold dahlias over my mosquito bite sized child breasts to fulfill her latest photographic project. i think i preferred the wedding photograph sessions we held in the garden in zambia. she was always the bride, though.

i remember staring out of the dormitory window at night, watching the army helicopters flying back, maybe 2 or 3 in a messy formation, maybe coming back from some borderline encounter, the stars so high in the dark, inky blue rhodesian night sky, and thinking, somewhere out there, somewhere about as afar away as those stars, were my mother and father... somewhere far far away.

i realized today, that all in all, i only spent 8 years with my mother before she died. that excludes the long holidays, in between the long long terms away. even now, 27 years later, every now and then, i'll dream i'm on a bus, somewhere between chirundu and harare, climbing the zambezi escarpment, racing along, and i'll see her standing on the side of the road waiting. not waving. just standing there staring back at me. and the bus won't stop. i'll rush to the back. i'll be shouting "stop! stop! stop the bus!" panicking. but it never stops. not even i can stop it.

close quarters

2011-08-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

phew. that feels better. nice cup of tea. sorry about below little side track .but sometimes they can be pretty. those side tracks. sometimes.

i live on a hill, as you must’ve surmised by now, but have i ever told you that the trees grow at 60 degree angles, all leaning west west south west? like truffle trees from a dr zeuss book. because of the winds which throw themselves at the hill. no one has a chance of growing straight up here. not a hair, not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a heart. everything leans. even the house. screaming in from Kilimanjaro, the winds pick up extra twists and howls as they sweep past Meru and hurl and hurtle themselves at the little pink leggo house of ngorobobs with no repent. mustn’t count my eggs , But (intended), this little house has withstood earth quakes, one of which measured 6.1 on The Richter Scale.

even our hair sticks out at right angles from our heads. permanently, in a simsonesque grotesque sort of way. from facing gale force winds on a regular basis. (what a load of rubbish. utter poppycock.) still. there really is no point in having a hair style ‘round these parts. no sirree. girls just grow their hair long and let the wind have its way with it. so do boys. smelly boys. with dusty thatched rooves for hair. wriggly things live in thatched rooves. i’ve grown wary about hugging my boys for fear of being infested with their lice. oh come now. I’ve been told england’s much worse…

my heart gave way earlier today when first born actually tore himself away from The Screen, walked straight up to me and gave me a hug. for nothing!? sweet nothing! truly alarming. really. what’s he done? whilst pondering all manners of awful possibilities, i hugged him back as he nestled his head against me. what mother wouldn’t, you say. what should have been a sweet moment in anyone’s book, took a nasty turn when the rude thought that he might potentially have lice, struck like an arrow into my left temple. what was even worse, and palpitatingly, pulse-ratingly shocking, was that I remembered he’d grown tall, so his head no longer nestled on my chest, it was now absurdly level with mine and ON it.….but, hey, I held that hug as long as he was giving one to me. my boy. and that takes guts man. so does love.

you see, these lice aren’t normal lice, i assure you. we’ve been well acquainted, to put it politely, over the years (she embarrassingly confesses). they are hardy little bastards. they laugh and get drunk on tea tree oil and stoned on anything stronger. they’re tough, back stabbing little addicts and don’t give a shit about anything except breeding, eating and partying.

“ oh, but haven’t you used the lice comb?” i hear you smugly chortle.

“but i have!” i shoot back, looking you straight in the eyes because i’m telling the truth. i’ll have you know, they’ve become exceedingly cunning over the years, learning, with Houdini dexterity, to slip through the pin thin gaps of the lice comb teeth. i should harvest the eggs and make mini omlettes in the morning then, in little mini frying pans on little mini fires. at least i’d be getting something back, after the liters of olive oil i’ve chucked on childrens’ heads. you know, lice HATE oily heads. well. not these ones. they use it for their dandruff fry ups. i’m sure of it.

damian and i always argue about who is exposed to the strongest wind. i was going to write “suffers” but the wind is sometimes exciting, maddening, insane, wild, beautiful. not a thing to be suffered. he, naturally, reckons he does. because the wind determinedly, he conjectures, squeezes and compresses itself through the little valley between the hills and smashes into their house. i disagree. naturally. and even more fervently since t told me about the Wendigo….google it. this is his playground. with these winds? if the Wendigo whirls by, you’re in BIG trouble. he will appear to you as your worst fears. since chatting with t, i reckon he’s been around here before, but left smartly and furiously because of the dust or lice or something. thank christ for those pesky little mites then.

you see? there’re always two ways of lookin’ at somet’in’, ain’t it?

Kitchen Board: Wednes The Day The Bakers Got Back From Turkey day 17 August 2011.

toodely toot, y'all. if you happen to swing by, wear a swimming cap. bisous. X. X.X. lots and lots of little ones, just behind yer ears. x j

let it be

2011-08-13T03:37:00.000-07:00

Truth and love are such pesky, unwieldy things. Like astrophysics, I should leave these unfathomable subjects alone, really. But fuck it, sometimes one needs to try and grasp them, in some unfashionable way. As Lawrence Durrel so aptly penned:

“ …The best lines of English poetry ever written were by Coventry Patmore. They were:

The truth is great and will prevail

When none care whether it prevail or not.

And their true beauty resides in the fact that Patmore, when he wrote them, did not know what he meant…” - The Alexandria Quartet.

Know this, as far as truth is concerned, there isn’t one. There are as many as there are souls alive and dead. That’s why I despise evangelists and fundamentalists. Everyone has their own truth and perspective. Allow it, why can’t you? How can you be so startlingly and unashamedly clear cut? Does it make you feel safe, hanging onto certainties when, no matter how incomprehensible it is, everything is an illusion? And that perhaps, by some wicked and amusing trickery, there isn’t actually a God? How can you be so certain? The only certainty on this sad, slow twirling blue planet of ours, is its, along with our own, meaningless death.

I am intrigued when people smugly shape their world with big black solid straight lines, with a Rolf Harris speed, precision and ingenuity. How, without knowing someone, or those glittering overseen details which, like the star constellations, etch the shape of each person, can you attach, with such glib certainty, such tags, solid lines, grand statements and truths? Every single person has their very own truths and no one should deem to know them. It’s, well, unkind. You can be interested in someone’s truths. I am, intensely. They are the colour of life. They are why I love people. Gently discovering their truth reveals gems and poisons…it’s who they are. It’s the very reason why I love people, unconditionally. My life is my dream struggling itself into reality. I am its weaver. Don’t poke your sticks at it please. It breaks the delicate pattern of my particular web, woven with uncertainty and heart. Let my little Black Widow be.

Which brings me to my next Big Thing Point: Love. There isn’t one. There are many kinds. But in the make up, the essence, it’s the same thing. Carefully construed and constructed to be a spinning, fast flying curved ball to side wind you, bonk you on the side of the head. Wake up, it says. There are no words for it. Call it folly, call it what you will. It makes you helpless. It’s disarming. It’s bewildering. It’s uncontrollable. It’s a Catherine Wheel burning wildly through the sky, spinning, tearing, goddamn beautiful, burning itself out, killing, in fact. The love that blossoms wildly, thick jungle vines dripping in giant wax deep purple flowers wrapping themselves around you, as you stare bewildered into the creased pathetic face of your new born child. The love that is born from sunrays in mirrors, making rapacious fires from a distance, burning bushes from the sky. It is extraordinary and unique. It is not flippant. It is not chosen. It is inexplicable. It goes beyond the physical. It transcends itself physically but sits it out with the stars and falling comets. Let it be, as the Beatles so aptly and succinctly sang. Why can’t you?

I think the easy option is to turn away from it, if you can. The treacherous option, the one that will, and it will, break you, is to follow it. Indecision creates stagnancy. Norman always said that if you were unsure which way to go, always choose the hardest route. It's likely to be the correct one. I am sure of it but I am no guru. No. Not at all. In fact, I know sweet nothing. I only know the soul recognizes and yearns it. For reasons we will never know. So people, don’t be smug, be afraid, in a way which makes you alive. Walk the line. Don’t point your fingers at it, tying your monochrome labels on it, burning witches and wizards at the stake as you froth from your priest’s pulpit. You don’t know. You Don’t Know, ok? And that's fine with me too. For those poor souls, at which this extraordinary love has never struck, I wish with the entirety of my tired, broken-but-still-beating, patched up ole heart, that it does. Because that, my friends, is life and love at its best and its worst; and that, oh bestests, is where your truth lies. Being safe and unruffled isn’t, in my humblest opinion.

Be scared. Be lost. You’ll see.

Kitchen Board: on a grey, cold Ngorobob afternoon:

and next time i post, oh bestests, i shall weave tales of zanzibar and sweet papaya. bisous x.x.x. unfathomably tender ones x. j

back home on t' hill...

2011-07-26T08:39:00.001-07:00

i love travelling and i hate it at the same time.

i hate saying good bye. i really really hate it.

i try very hard not to remember it when there are joyous reunions but there it sits like a ghoul, in the dark corner of embraces, hissing menacingly that this is is all going to end....with a desperate hug, rivers and lakes of tears and inevitability.

anyway. home now. and it ain't easy.

after a lightening edged trip to south africa, where i saw my sisters, their children, my father, who turned 80, my loved friends - it was onto plane after plane. i sat, dumb, staring out the window, watching the crinkled blue continent below me, taking me further and further away from everyone i love. . .oh. and second born found six bullets in his bag in jomo kenyatta airport. that'll teach him to borrow his father's safari bag....it was a tense moment. at least he discovered them BEFORE we went through security. and at least they were empty cartridges. still. a sweaty moment where i think i lost 5 kgs in one second from the adrenalin rush. i am a resourceful mother and dealt with the bullets swiftly over a cappuccino and croissant....

yet, when i stepped out into the tepid winter twilight of kilimanjaro, heard the crickets in the dark fields as we drove slowly home, saw the Southern Cross hanging sweetly, sadly in the sky and smelt the dust, i knew i was home. still. i haven't quite settled back 'in'... i'm hanging onto holiday polaroids in my head.

travelling gives you perspective. and steals it right back. it makes you see things differently. then hurls you back into how things were and are. with pictures in your mind. it's, well, unsettling. so. i'm still half in and half out, if ya know what i mean?

tanzania is still in the dark...and getting worse. there is no power left apparently. in 40 days we might be plummeted into total black out. . . it's a truly disgraceful situation. i loved being south, where you switch a switch, and 'bling!' a light comes on. hot water gushes out like victoria falls in flood, up to your chin if you like. AND you can drink the water straight out the tap. it's glorious. now i want that. i want all of that and some. all the cars are shiny. roads are straight and smooth as silk ribbons. sigh. and i know i am a snaggle toothed hill billy from the back countries, when it comes to paying for parking into a machine, buying a train ticket from a machine (where the children pretended not to know me), racing away from people on the dodge cars instead of into them, scared as a cat is from an enraged, fierce bull terrier. but still. what fun.

comin' home wasn't helped by my first shopping trip into town, where i drove straight into riots. all the dala dalas (the taxis) went on strike because the police keep on harassing the drivers. six or eight of them were thrown into jail. for parking offences? i noticed the roads were emptier than usual...the traffic actually flowed....on rounding the corner, i saw ahead of me, a mob of about 500 people, toy toying down the main drag of mbauda, straight towards us....i couldn't move anywhere....stuck. as they jogged past, people bashed my car, tried to open the doors, shouted things at me, ah, ya know, like "mzungu!" and shit, while i stared doggedly ahead with a stupid smile on my face.....yes. a smile...anyway. a gap appeared and i raced ahead and got the hell outta Dodge, not funny, just before the Field Force (government crack force) arrived. apparently lots of plastic bullets were fired, tear gas and stones were thrown. miranda took shelter in beate's ice cream parlour. not a bad place to hide in, mind.

and then two days ago, there was an horrific armed robbery at a nearby coffee estate. it was pay day. lots of cash to be had, you see. one of the managers was pangad (sp?) (attacked with a machete. google if you don't know what a machete is) so badly that they cut through a tendon in his leg. the other was axed on his head (52 stitches needed) and one man was shot dead. horrible.

but this is home. and mama paka (the cat) and bella the dog and the horses are happy to have us back, i think? and there are friends. and the mountains. and ridiculously beautiful twilights. and the wind blows at night while i lie cuddled under my hyrax rug (which c hates because he says it stinks and i look like a viking) and early in the morning, the owls land on the green tin roof and hoot in the dawn. things could be worse, i reckon. and, oh bestests, i'm still on holiday and i see zanzibar inside the crystal ball....

the sun keeps risin' and the world keeps spinnin' ....

Kitchen Board: July 31 2011: Ngorobob Hill House: goddamn Monday.

toodely toot, y'all and bisous X.X.X. riotous ones just where your neck meets your shoulders x j

headin' south...

2011-07-08T02:56:00.000-07:00

(pic from: http://awmusic.ca/2010/04/30/paper-aeroplanes-the-day-we-ran-into-the-sea-album-review/)

we' re taking off today...from the hill. how exciting is that?

we're headin' south - where you can switch a switch and a light comes on and open a tap and water comes out.....where there are highways and byways....and trains and rollercoasters and zoos and macdonalds or wimpies...i don't know. i hate that plastic pig trotter food but the kids can't wait for it.....and cinemas and mr price (cheap clothes shop).

we're headin' south loaded with coffee and rice and cloth as one does....we're africans....we're only taking hand luggage and a coop of chickens.

we're headin' south and we've been warned that it's freezing. we're sorted with retro corduroys and beanies from mitumba. and one pair of old cowboy boots which fit the girl (if she wears VERY big socks).

we're headin' south and avoiding pea soup dar es salaam. we're going via nairobi...let's see if that's any better....kenya airways...

we're headin' south and we're SO excited i don't care about anything but the sky and being in it.

so best i finish packing. grab the passports out the safe and put this machine inside it. i must kiss the very dry, very cold, powerless ngorobob hill good bye until next time... i shall miss my horse, my dog and my cat...i shall dream of them. i know it... but there ya go.....even the birds fly south in winter time. they know that.

toodely toot y'all! bisous X.X.X. deep sky blue ones x. j

excuses....

2011-06-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

gosh.

i think it's time to change my profile picture, it's been that long...into a grey haired lady who prefers gin to tea.

my mother's words echo in my head "The more you do the more you can do..." well. the less blogging i do the less i can do.

you see, i'm trying not to slather you in all the Real Reasons why i haven't been here. but fuck it. there really isn't much else to say but:

1. i have been working like a dog at school. the school year is almost complete. i have been up to my eyeballs in reports and marking exams. reports. hideous. really mr wamvita, find robert a job at the post office licking stamps and save yourself some money. he is genuinely crap at english. of course i can't say that....no....so therefore, this is where much of my creative talent has been recently sunk. it doesn't leave much for lyrical words here.

2. i have been raisin' children. and ten chickens. and ridin' hosses... i kid you not. everyone has been sick with this snotty cold from school. the entire campus is heaving with it...except me. iron woman. i glare at people from a distance and mutter "come no closer" wide eyed and clasping my hand over my mouth. this has worked. our house sounds like the mosquito net factory of a night - spluttering and coughing,..which brings me to my Next Big Thing Point. TANESCO. it's because of TANESCO, she whispers covertly.

there is no power to the nation, people. none. (and the rains failed dismally so there is not much water around either. all the maize died. this is not good) this is being typed powered by my generator. TANESCO (Tanzanian Electrical Supply Company) sent out a message saying further drastic cuts were to be introduced. it is clear, from the sporadic nature of the power supply, that no one is sticking to the schedule sent out. it is also clear that this might be a problem with no end. TANESCO has not said for how long these cuts will persist. oh well. as long as there's fuel.....roland said "everything will be fine when the americans come. they will bring power." when will the americans join? those filthy foreigners. lovely, when you need them, eh?

ANYWAYEEEEE....

this ain't hyde park corner, no sirree....this is a blog. this is place where i Must Not Diarize.

kitchen board is not possible. it has run itself into the ground and safari craig has gone on safari with tous les cameras...everything will be down to memory now. a risky business....

so, bestests, i am still rattlin' 'round in the cupboard along with all my skeletons..

toodely ole toot y'all..bisous X.X.X. dark ones, on yer lips...hang it. x j.

devil moon...

2011-05-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

(not my find. not my picture. found on http://www.peoniesandpolaroids.com/)

so it's that blissful time of year...the changing of the seasons....when winter sneaks in...all crisp and shiny. that's how african winters are. and the yellow flowers: deep blue skies in twilight and perfect hovering midnight blue butterflies delicate on yellow flowers. i love it. everything in me stirs accordingly. i eye the fireplace feeling sorry for the spiders all happily ensconced at the top of the chimney.....but not for long.

whoever said red was the colour of a heart or love? it's yella, i'm tellin' ya.

with this whimsical shift, come others. i've been told that i post too many pictures these days. that i write for an audience. that perhaps i should be writing a book instead. that perhaps i'm ignoring an audience. go figure. all said very kindly, you understand. and in many ways, i agree, naturally. but the truth is i don't feel good enough. i don't feel Wise enough, really. but then do you have to be Wise to Write a Book....? perhaps it's more to do with courage. i think you have to be courageous enough. and cut through all the bullshit. think of all the writers you love. their bare assed skeletal writing....those lines that you wished you'd thought of because they're so perfect?

i think you need a good enough story. a conglomeration of perfect ideas.

i love the idea of forgetting the kettle's on. i love it that it was a chore to walk outside, into the dark cold night, to feed the black dog, bella, and when i looked up, there the moon was. there was a reason behind the chore. something made me see the moon. all crooked and yella. and i felt very alone. which didn't matter either way. but i felt it. that's what matters, isn't it? and that's the truth.

sometimes i drink not to feel. ( and this isn't a postsecret situation.)

(or an unhappy one...or a lie.)

so if i post about frivolous things, that's ok too.

i want to eat pasta and cream and mushrooms.

and you.

Kitchen Board: Thursday 19 May 2011: Ngorobob Hill: (no TANESCO. generator pumping the power. )

oh and bestests, there is the biggest power failure in Tanzania to date....check it out... http://allafrica.com/stories/201105090340.html

hopeless situation all round....but onwards and upwards...just like that ole yella moon...ooo yeah.

toodely pip, y'all and keep on rockin..one can't be too precious about these things... bisous X.X.X. sneaky winter ones, behind yer ears. x j

marie antoinette's birthday...

2011-05-12T06:26:00.000-07:00

(all photographs by annabelle thom. www.annabellethom.com )

as one will logically conclude, she hopes with narrowed eyes, school has started, hence my sporadic writing. so there.

still. a LOT happened in between. since zanzibar, i mean.

and school starting.

arriving back on the ngorobob hill, in a suitably soporific dazed zanzibari state, i had to sort out, in due haste, a marie antoinette outfit for my friend's 40th birthday party. she was hosting it at the opulent Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. if you haven't heard of it, google it...it's a sort of maasai meets versaille lodge perched on the edge of the world's largest caldera. read as Definitely Not Cheap. it was so incredibly gracious and entirely generous of my dear friend. and an apt surrounding for one as beautiful and as gorgeous as her kind self.

the view...

the bath tub ... and rose petals...(remember you are at an altitude of 7500 feet so its really cold...hot baths with a view are a luxury)...

she expected us to all "make an effort". considering the effort she was making, it goes without saying that we should too...tales filtered down from nairobi that people were ordering theirs from Penny Winter. again. read as Not Cheap. sue smsd me from london "shall i get you an outfit and a wig? 195 quid?" i balked.

to find the appropriate outfit is harder than one thinks, in a town like arusha...you don't have fancy dress shops. you could go, if you had the time and inclination, to mitumba, about which miranda and i have written ad nauseum (the 2nd hand clothes market) but this needs Time, a Diligent Creativeness,a Keen Eye and Patience, of which, at the time, i had none. not a jot.

i mused about going as a 1970's afro haired gangsta, toting an AK 47 and booga mina booga wena shades, a large joint and platform boots, the look rounded off with a jaunty swagger and a more than petulant demeanour, with the excuse that i had misread the invite. i could've stolen one of the golf carts and roared around Ngorongoro Crater Lodge firing shots into the air. i can relate to that sort of stuff...but marie antoinette...? all frou frou and feathers and bodices and hair and fuss...? good lord, jamais!

as luck would have it, i met T, our salubrious hair dresser, in town on her only day off. she has a Keen Eye for these sort of things and an effervescent enthusiasm. she whisked me into Jam Boutique, a sort of African Bridal Shop, packed to the hilt with sparkly ball dresses and brides maids outfits, the kind you might have seen on Dynasty or Dallas. as i was carefully peeling off a strawberry hued creation, all set about with silver streaks, T shouted "Oh My God! I have found IT!" indeed she had. i squeezed into a dusty pink and ivory affair, appliqued with shiny little beaded floral arrangements. "squeezed" being the operative word here. over a salad lunch we vowed not to put on an ounce more weight....no more pasta, booze, chocolate blah blah bleh...diet pills and well, water should do it? box remains unticked to date...more on this later if at all.

i envisaged tackling the Crater drive looking like one of the Simpsons, wind blown and dusty she hastens to add, paying my park fees with a blue lopsided very high wig....the park rangers knowingly ignoring me sort of sighing "mad mzungu..." needless to say, i never quite got round to procuring a wig at all and relied on my frizzy hair to do the job all on its own. what a to do it was. what FUN! and oh my. everyone made "an effort". my outfit managed, by some bizarre twist of fate, not to split and i ignored the little rolls of back fat. i couldn't see them so that was fine. out of sight out of mind. everyone was quite splendid.

madame de la roi...

the birthday gal...marie antoinette herself...waiting for her cake...

messieurs...rather dapper, i'd say...

musketeer and his masked madame...

la noblesse entiere...

and finally, the beautiful photographer herself, annabelle...you must see her website. http://www.annabellethom.com/she makes beautiful bags and shoes in kenya and can sing opera in russian, chinese, cantonese and italian. with great gusto and aplomb naturally.

needless to say, a good time was had by all. so. happy birthday nibs! she is presently walking from the Victoria Falls to Namibia, via the Caprivi Strip, a wild wild strip of land, guiding some paraplegics....not for the faint hearted.

oops. no time for kitchen board today....dinner to prepare....guests arriving in less than two hours...toodely toot y'all and bisous X.X.X. french ones, obviously x. j.

jambiani easter, zanzibar...

2011-04-25T22:49:00.000-07:00

there was no sign of easter in zanzibar....or any mention of that hippy revolutionary called jesus, come to think of it. no. i suspect this is what happened to the easter bunny on arriving . . . (we know what happened to jesus).....hence there were no eggs to be found....but we got to lick the empty nutella jar clean instead, with our fingers...before breakfast.

this is generally what happens to most people when you head to the zanzibari coast....it is a soporific sort of place. but i did read 5 books in 4 days. i was meant to re read Julius Caeser, which i love by the by but found too many other ones in the way. the only book i had to stop half way through was John Peel's....i didn't know who he was but came to the personal conclusion that i didn't really like him much so had to stop. the best book by far was The Other Side Of You by Salley Vickers. the little house where we were staying had the best books ever.... shelves crammed full of delicacies...like in a chocolate shop or something.

it's rainy season, not so much here on the hill but definitely in zanzibar. the monsoon squalls came in every two hours or so. it was glorious.

it didn't stop us wallowing about in the silky sea. the zanzibari sea is so warm and soft. you can float about for hours. in the sun. in the rain. who cares. it's bliss.

every lunch time we'd wander up the beach to a little hotel called The Blue Oyster for pizza and the obligatory two glasses of white wine. me. not the kids. you sit up on the blue verandah and sip and take in this view...

watching the sea weed farmers comin' in with the tide and their harvests...

after lunch, we'd stroll home, stopping to chat to the fishermen....boat loads of big fish....

me: wow. where did you catch all these?

fisherman: in the sea.....?

we'd pop into the Star Fish, a little rasta bar, and play an appalling game of pool....i made the triumphant start of completely missing the triangle of balls and sinking the white ball. first hit. the rastas were very kind and didn't laugh or roll their eyes but slept, rather like the easter bunny at the top of this page. we'd spend the rest of the time floating about in the high tide...then around five rubin would stroll up the beach for a game of footie with the team from jambiani.

there were three teams. whenever one team scored, the loser team would sit out and the next team would step in. he was invited to play in a tournament on the friday with his team but we were leaving, much to his chagrin.

after footie he'd sit on the old coral wall amongst the crumbling ruins from a long time ago, chillin'...taking in the world. i would love to have known what he was thinking or talking about....maybe nothing... just friends after a game of footie...

we did some time in stone town, but only after visiting zala park, a snake park where we were taken around by a young fella called ramadan. the snakes are kept in old round coral pits under coconut palms with pretty hibiscus plants in the middle. the first snake he grabbed to show us is called a Vine Snake, highly venomous. after the ethan incident, we all leaped back agog and said "no no no! don't!" he smiled and said "its fine! he only bites if you squeeze him. he has bitten me before. actually twice. but i just cut the fangs out, put some dawa (local medicine) and drank milk and i was fine!" after that, we approached the other pits very cautiously, not quite knowing what to expect....there were three green mambas in one...they are, as we know, one of the most poisonous of snakes, like its counterpart, the black mamba, but not quite as aggressive. ramadan happily told us he was bitten by one of these too....! he said he was a lot sicker with this bite than from the vine snake....he said he vomitted a lot, his legs could no longer work, he walked like an old man, shuffling along. drinking milk didn't help much either. he was soon taken to a clinic in stone town. and he survives to tell the tale.

zanzibar drips with green mambas. we found this one en route, dead on the road. juma was made to screech on brakes so we could all hop out and take a look.. if you look carefully you can see its fangs....the green mamba is a lovely iredescent green, especially against the grey of the tarmac. . . and dead. the other part of its body was sort of writhing on the road, as snakes do....

stone town was as taudry and beautiful as ever in the monsoon rain. and quiet. not as many tourists. although there were a few. there was The Naked Man. so there we were, sipping our sundowners on the corniche, where everyone gathers as the sun sets. young boys playing foot ball on the beach, chipati sellers, the young 'uns diving off the jetty, the ferry being loaded for its trip to the mainland...

and along comes this very strange man. tatoos, a cold hard mad look in his eyes. we imagined he was a mercenary or someone recently out of jail or someone high on heroine and alcohol. he staggers to the front and drops his pants, takes his shirt off and swaggers stark bollock naked into the sea for a swim. the uproar was immense. zanzibar is strictly muslim. our little family fled as he stepped out the sea, shaking the sea off his willy....we're not sure what happened next....!? we strolled through the zanzibari twilight, admiring lattice white verandahs, which made me think of dylan's "up on the white veranda, she wears a neck tie and a panama hat..."

...losing ourselves in the higgeldy piggeldy streets, perusing the sonaras (goldsmiths), singing in the old persian baths (the accoustics in that museum are incredible, angelic soaring sounds)...

eating italian ice creams and waiting patiently for the rain to stop....

we ended up in an indian restaurant, alight with strange bright murals depicting rubinson crusoe island scenes, walls painted in creepers and hibiscus plants with a congolese juju mask in one corner, old treasure chests and indian puppets glinting in dark corners....

so yes, oh bestests, we think we've done the right thing, (and our hearts are bursting with it), by buying that little shamba in jambiani under the coconut palms, just near the old arab tomb ruin, where we will build a little swahili beach house...sweet sweet times ahead i reckon, oh yeah...oh yeah...
sometimes dreams do come true....

toodely toot oh bestests..bisous X.X.X. zanzibari sunkissed, frangipani scented full ones on yer lips. there. x j

How To Jar And Pickle A Black Necked Spitting Cobra (naja nigricollis)

2011-04-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

(this picklin' process must, be accompanied by George Thoroughgood's Who Do You Love but change the rattle snake bit to " Got a Cobra Skin For A Neck Tie" or Townes Van Zandt's Snake Mountain Blues or Darlin' Ukelele by Jolie Holland or anything suitably snaggle tooth hill billy like... and under no circumstances should this be tried alone. the whole family must be around, no matter what age.)

1. take cobra out fridge onto lawn (if you could call it that) so no snake blood and drippy venom drops on kitchen floor. lay it out so everyone can go "oooo" "sis" "Oh. My. God." and such like. stand really close to its head in bare feet to freak your parents out for fun. and because you get a kick out of standing next to a cobra head which just MIGHT still have bit of venom dripping about the place.

2. hold cobra to see how heavy it is. "hurry ma! quick! it's slipping out! it's heavy!" safari c: "YOU hold it." me: " no fucking ways man. it's DISGUSTING."

3. see how long it is by holding it against last born. it is about 1.5 m. not the biggest i've ever seen. but big enough. imagine THAT slithering into your bed while you're fast asleep?

4. start twisting it into jar. rigormortis has started to set in. ever so slightly. still. don't let this stop you twisting and turning it into the chosen jar. remember to choose the right size jar from your nearest supermarket. in this case, shopright, arusha.

5. fitting it into the jar might prove difficult. do not give up. be careful to hold the head carefully.(see below)

6. take dramatic photograph of the head because it's so evil and vile before the next part of the pickling process.

7. squash head in with naked thumb. with caution obviously. not just sommer, like below.

8. liberally pour formaldehyde into jar on top of cobra.

9. once again, squash head INTO formaldehyde for full preservation and for fun.

10. close with air tight lid and hey presto! Pickled Naja nigricollis

toodely toot oh bestests...no kitchen board today because the internet is so slow, there is no power, the generator is on and it takes HOURS to upload photographs. so next time. when i'm back from zanzibar...(yessss!) bisous X.X.X. ahem, snaky kinky ones, yeah! x j.

the red dress and cobra story

2011-04-12T22:44:00.000-07:00

(taken by last born cleaning up after party at 8 this morning after cobra situation)

you'd imagine life would be a breeze when hols start, now wouldn't ya just?

not so.

never a dull moment.

the term finished like a boeing jet coming in too fast for a landing, all pale faced and white knuckled assuming breach position.

when the bell went i got the hell outta there and fast. i could still smell the tyres burning.

which meant that i haven't quite cleared the decks which means i shall have to pop back into school and do a few little extra things over the hols....tant pis...what else to do?

i took my class away to the highlands of karatu for two nights. they are divinely beautiful my class. they kept me entertained the entire time. this was us at the lake manyara view point...which was rather stunning....better show ya.

this is what we had all been oohing and ahing about....

ngorongoro farm house, where we stayed was more like a beatrix potter haven but in the highlands of northern tanzania.

(http://www.tanganyikawildernesscamps.com/camps/ngorongorofarmhouse/)

my little house had a view across the rolling green hills (of Africa as 'Papa' so famously wrote) which creased up to the misty rim of the ngorongoro crater. it was bliss to be up where martial eagles hunt, and owls flutter around the rood tops at night and the mists come down, making everything so silent. oh and we had an earthquake the one night. i woke to my bed shakin' around the room and the hangars rattlin'...they always scare me - not the rattlin' hangars but earthquakes. very humbling when the earth starts shaking about the place. my one student said "oh miss i thought it was gorillas on my roof..!" she IS from mali... nevertheless - she SHOULD know that there aren't any gorillas anywhere near karatu....in fact anywhere in tanzania. i had a large amount of fun scaring the girls (all around 16/17) with ghost sightings. i take delight in things like that. i made them walk up into the hills, flushing herds of reed buck, the sun on our back and the wind in our faces...it was scintillating and made me feel alive. cheeks flushed and the wide open spaces stealin' my heart and making it fly for a little while.

back to real life.

i am still in my red dress from last night, in my long riding boots and a tassely jacket...i haven't changed from last night and i haven't slept much either. sleeping across the two front seats of a landrover IS uncomfortable and looks odd outside the gates of the snakepark. i threw a dinner party for eleven people last night chez nous. lots of candles, red wine, guitar playin', laughter, stars twinklin, and a distant storm shooting lightening far out across the steppes...a truly incomparable combination....you get the feelin' that someones making magik. someone really really big and beyond... just as i was staggering to bed, around one this morning, jules - dear friend and neighbour - who had been at the dinner called me to say ethan had been bitten by a black necked spitting cobra in tarangire...tarangire is a national park about two and a half hours away from arusha and was being rushed to meserani snake park where they have a snake bite clinic. so donned the boots and the tassely jacket and hopped into the landrover and dashed out there. the empty road in the early hours of the morning - forcing your eyes to stay open, clinging to the side. and hoping hoping hoping it's going to be better than you imagine.

we arrived at the same time as their rough old open canvas roofed landrover pulled in around 2:30am..... ethan was still in his pyjama shorts with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, pale and vomiting a lot. he vomited on julie.

the story: back in camp, he was in his bed and thought he felt a mouse bump his knee. then he felt the "mouse" bump his thigh until the black necked spitting cobra bit him just above his elbow...he is now on a drip with anti venom from pretoria...but he is reacting badly to the anti venom and is covered in a horrible fast spreading rash. help is there though....i think he will be ok....it's just very painful. and those fang marks look mean....one can only hope that those fangs were half full and he didn't get a full dose of poison. i think he'll be ok. imagine a snake IN your bed. in the bush ALWAYS check your bed. and zip your tent up. ALWAYS check your shoes too. for scorpions.

needless to say, oh bestests, i am very tired. i sorta 'slept' stretched across the two front seats of the landrover which is very uncomfortable - with the handbreak poking into your ribs, and the seat belt thingys poking into i dunno, your shoulder? waiting to see if ethan would be ok....julie has showered the vomit off and they've gone back to check up on him. the other surprising thing was that the little snake bite clinic was FULL of people...which means lots of people are getting bitten....nice.

Kitchen Board: Some time in early april 2011 ngorobob hill.

that's rubin. he went white water rafting in kenya. first born scaled the peaks of mt meru. last born explored the shambas of kisongo comparing the farming of the ancient egyptians on the nile. yeah. me neither. in fact sometimes i think the ancients were way more advanced....? but i haven't done the research so i speak from inexperience so ignore. for now.

time for me to sleep and change out of this red dress, take these dangly earring off and wash my face, brush my teeth and pretend everything is normal and that i've slept plenty and that ethan never got bitten. and i have just received an sms that ethan is doing fine. he is doing just fine and all will be well in the end. don't you love happy endings? i do. indeed i do.

toodely toot oh bestests. bisous X.X.X. sleepy red dress ones brushed like wind on yer cheeks. x j

waitin'....

2011-03-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

i thought about you this morning...when i heard the guinea fowl calling down in the ploughed field below the house. lucas has begun planting...and there are loads of guinea fowl that move in early in the morning and peck out the seeds, i think. hearing the guinea fowl in the mornings always takes me home to a place i know...

and the rains have arrived. and they're thunderingly glorious. god i love 'em. the wait, as painful as it was, was truly worth it. i love the nights, watching the storms flickerin' far away across the plains. sometimes raging around the old tin roof and the rain, the rain on the roof as i lie cosy under the hyrax rug feelin' safe and warm and dry...

last week end we headed out into the maasai steppes to visit bram on his farm for his birthday. he farms out near lokisali mountain which you can see from the ngorobobs far out across the plains... in the morning there were torrential rains. we thought should we? shouldn't we? those mile long black cotton soil plains become impassable...the sun appeared around noon and we thought, hell yeah, why not. so away we headed. the road looked like this from the very beginning...you can't see him properly, but that maasai man only had one leg. he was travelling from loliondo which is hundreds of miles away, up the rift wall, to visit a healer who has become hugely famous here in tanzania. here he is on his way home. still with one leg. not the sort of place where lifts come by too easily, it must be said.

so we made it through this tricky bit. and all the next tricky bits until we arrived at the first karongo. a karongo is like a dry river bed which only runs in the rains. there are loads of them around... and here we had to stop.

and there we sat. the rest of our friends (another three car loads) arrived...and more landrovers full of maasai arrived...some the other side, some this side. and there we sat...there was much discussion about how long it would take for the water to subside. some said two days. some said one hour. some said three hours. we all sat and sat and discusssed and watched a rock on the other side to see if we could see the water levels changing...

and we sat...and sat....waiting...

and waited and sat...
the sun marched on with the time...more cars arrived. more people. until there were 14 cars...mostly landrovers and one tractor.

yes. all those people came from inside that one landrover.

these landrovers were on the other side. waiting. there was only one thing for it. open the champagne meant for bram's birthday, get the guitar out and sing, watchin' the sun start to sink along with the water, which by now was slowly subsiding. there was something which made it all ok to wait...there was no where else to go...sitting there was where we were all meant to be. we were all heading in the right direction somehow....the wait was temporary. stories were told. ideas exchanged.

as twilight snuck in, two brave people decided to check how deep and strong the water was but they turned back. the full watery moon had started to rise...we weren't givin' up, no sirree...

after waiting for 5 hours we made the crossing, with great excitement and trepidation, at 8 o clock that night. the water had dropped to a safe crossing height... successfully. there was something so magical, racin' 'cross the plains, the rainy moon high, lighting the road, the crickets and frogs in chorus, insects flyin' into the windscreen, lightening flickering far away. bram was waiting with roast lamb, roast pork, fine wine and lashings of chocolate cake. we sat late into the night, watching the water silver on the big rock behind the house. we felt alive and didn't think about the journey home, until the gentle rain woke us early the next morning.

but that's another story.

Kitchen Board: 26 March 2011: lazy saturday afternoon. ngorobob hill.

umeme is electricity...not sure how this got onto the list? there simply isn't any to be found in the entire country, it seems.

being saturday afternoon a siesta is in order and then a ride on the spotty hoss before it rains again. life is sweet.

toodely oh bestests. bisous X X X sexy rainy hot sun ones on yer lips. x j

stars 'n physics and all that jazz....

2011-03-07T09:13:00.000-08:00

some things are easy to understand. definite. like, um, 1+1 IS 2. and don't anyone start getting all clever here. you're definitely going to die. fact. even though chuck berry doesn't think he will. he's 84 and still doing gigs. completely understandable.

other things are not quite so easy to understand. in fact, they're inexorably, exhaustingly, tantalisingly goddamn tricky. but if you give yourself enough time to think about them, you'll be able to choose an option. there are always at least 2. if you have the mental strength of a hermit and the patience of a bird stalking cat, then you could wade through endless options of understanding. and end up in lovely nothingness apparently. quite. go figure. and feel awfully good about yourself in nirvana. noddy badges all 'round.

not sure i buy into that theory of if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to hear it, has it fallen? or if you're a man and a woman isn't there, are you still wrong?.....well maybe. i mean if a great big fuck off 200 year old baobab lies snapped and broken it has definitely fallen, hasn't it?

most things just are. and you'll never work them out. like stars. and fallen baobabs. like coincidences. like secret patterns in life. like the way books fall out of the shelf at you in libraries or book stores. the very ones you need to read. or the pages fall open at exactly the right place. and you sit down then and there, plonk in the aisle and start reading. they can steal your bag, pull tongues behind your back (i love pulling tongues at kids staring out the back window, when their ma can't see. i do a real vicious one) or sigh heavily as they have to step over you. people are usually ever so polite in book stores. at least the ones i've been into. everyone's ever so efficient. and studious. i love seeing who's reading what. matching people to sections. i used to like all the esoteric sections, the African sections, biographies, photography, psychology sections. i am so bored of self help sections. they ALL say the same thing. believe me. and they don't work. smug bastards ripping us all off 'as all. i'd like to see them all shiny new and perfik.

so there i was a few days ago sitting in the library at school wonderin' 'bout thangs. as one does. the "well dear, you'll wonder and wonder until the crows build nests up your bottom and then you'll wonder how they got the sticks up there" sorta wonderin', when my eyes wandered to a book called Illustrated Dictionary of Physics. i think, if i rightly recall, i was contemplating Option 2 Of Present Conundrum #482, which made me realize that i know nothing about anything at all, when, quite suddenly, i spied the book. snug between the encyclopedias britannica (how anarchic is our library?). hell, when you know nothing you might as well try and learn something. anything.

the titles read like romance: energy. motion. dynamics. turning forces. gravitation. density and pressure. magnetic fields (Fields of Magnetics! how glorious is that?), reflection of light. sound waves. transfer of heat. temperature.waves. electric current. static electricity. perception of sound. and suddenly i thought i could begin to understand love. why on earth haven't i ever studied this shit before, man? i suddenly understood why aeroplanes drop out of the sky and that breech position is NOT going to save you. (another definite). and that the "rear rotor blades of a helicopter apply a moment to the helicopter which prevents it from spinning...". naturally i've always known something stops it spinning (thinking screw or iron rod) but a MOMENT? pg.14 under the title of Turning Forces. ...and suddenly it gave the whole idea of moments another meaning. i've taken the book out. i'm drawing delicate little pictures of atoms and molecules all lined up and boxed and arrowed and coloured in, in all their various "physical states". all i know is that i like doing this. i like reading this.

so i've searched more. and i've found a beautiful orange book on astrophysics. i think... i wasn't allowed to take it out. but i wrote down my favourite quote. it made me think of people: (i'll make it small so i can fit it all in and sneak past being labelled laborious)

"...roughly half of all the stars in the sky are found to be in binary systems, in which two companion stars orbit their common center of mass with periods ranging from hours to many thousands of years. According to Kepler's Laws (still to be leaned about), the wider the separation between the stars, the longer their orbital period. Binary stars may be born together from a rapidly rotating protostar that split, or one may capture the other in a close encounter after birth. some may eclipse each other, causing variability in their observed brightness. Binary stars are important for determining information about stellar masses. Some binary stars are so close that transfer of material can occur between the components affecting their evolution and producing variations in their light output..."

i'll be reading about dead stars next. you can still see them, you know.

i'll let you know if i become a guru at the end of it all. or maybe an artist. and i'll write a self help book but with poems and pictures of little atoms and spinning helicopters which lost their "moments" and aeroplanes falling out of the sky with straight blue arrows indicating the downward direction.

Kitchen Board: Early March 2011: 10:40pm Tanzanian Time...

and it has rained oh bestests. twice in the last three days...we can always do with more but i ain't complainin'. it's more than deliciously charming, i tell ya. bruised skies over the maasai steppes. the smell of rain all sexy and coolness in the air.... my best. oh and before i go. here are some pictures of liza's ancient triffikly expensive broken violin which we tried to fix with super glue and leggin' (inner tubing which basically holds the entire african continent together). it broke while we were rehearsing for andre's funeral. i have since heard it broke again and frankie operated on it using a special animal glue and lots of clamps. the entire finger board lifted off. but oh i shouldn't be telling you this in case anyone wants to buy it one day. AND she'd just spent around US$ 2,000 getting work done on it in NYC....oh dear... she said her violin mender would be spittin' snakes....well. it worked for a while. and we have another gig tomorrow. cross fingers. pray for one of those "moments" eh?

toodely toot oh best beloveds, bisous X.X.X. musical spinny momentous ones. x. j

death. again.

2011-02-26T04:53:00.000-08:00

oh dear oh dear....i'm not writing enough am i? and i honestly have so much to say. usually.

it's just that, well, i trap myself in the conundrum of "do people really want to read all about that?" and . and. and. my friend died. this death stole all my words again. i don't feel alright.

death is random. death is very present. and i hate it. i know death is what colours life and makes it all deeply tenuous and extraordinary. but i still hate it. i hate it. friends try to say the right things like "but this happens all over the world." i know it does. but in this last year i have lost three friends to guns. three friends have been shot dead. is that normal? we don't live in a war zone, ya know?

he was driving with his clients on safari, as one does, at nine o clock in the morning - enjoying the views, the wilderness, when they ran into some ivory poachers by mistake. they opened up with automatic weapons immediately and he was killed. quickly, thank god. it's just terribly terribly sad and i miss him already. he leaves his wife and three children.

i can't write about the ivory poaching just yet. but i will one day. and about the chinese colonization of africa. not now though. my anger is too white hot.

he was my riding pal. he was the one who inspired us lot to get on, jump and ride for our lives. he was the one who always made everyone laugh. he was the naughty one. he was the one who lived with no regrets. he was the one who cried at his 60th over sambuka shots because he didn't want to get old. he was the one everyone loved. he was the one who said "the only reason i started riding all those years ago was so i could be surrounded by girls all the time." and i am very very sad he has gone. when you get that phone call it makes the world stop. it crunches you up. your mouth gapes into a silent scream no. birds fly in slow motion and the sunlight becomes sharper than ever and you stare at a blade of grass and feel frozen inside. sadness creeps like ink on blotting paper and suddenly you have no words for anyone or anything. just sadness. which sits in your throat. it grows, like a vine, from your stomach, through your throat and blossoms out through your eyes and your mouth, feeding on your words. i think.

so tomorrow we will be brave. i will sing at his memorial. it will be hard. but i will look at words and think of hitting the notes from above and i will not look at anyone...

i will not cry, inshallah. at least not there. you can't sing and cry at the same time.

Kitchen Board some time in february 2011

oh and it rained oh bestests. but then stopped. it was apparently because there was a cyclone off madagascar. but at least it's a little greener in any case. the power, as in TANESCO, is still more off than on and frankly, i wonder how the country keeps running.

bye bye then. bisous X.X.X. deeply sad ones which make you feel alive x j

lights out...

2011-02-11T20:40:00.000-08:00

how this country keeps running is quite beyond me, oh bestests.

it's not through love and it's definitely not money. oh no. sheer determination and lack of choice, really. there is no more power as in TANESCO which is our electricity supplier.

it's definitely more off than on. thanks god (as everyone says here) for our little shiny red generator, which has been working its pretty lil ass off lately. my funky key rack keeps the light shinin' when the lights go off when everyone's at home...

i salute habari.co.tz, our faithful internet provider, who has doggedly maintained our internet connection throughout all these power cuts...how they manage is beyond me. biscuits and medals all round, i say. it's a shameful thing when a government fails to provide clean water and electricity to the people. i wonder what happens in the already understaffed, over crowded hospitals? it's a terrifying and deeply worrying thought. water is a problem now. we are fortunate enough to be able to buy our water on the hill. the horses have drunk what was left in the tanks from the last rainy season which i can barely remember. so we have to order big lorry loads of it, ten thousand litres at a time. the big blue maji safi (clean water) trucks now arrive at night, sometimes after eight o clock, trundlin' slowly up the ngorobob hill, the headlights orange in the red dust, because there is never any power in town or at water points to pump in the day. sometimes it will take three days for a water truck to arrive. i think of people living out on the Maasai Steppes where there is nothing - really nothing. maybe a stone eatin' ostrich or three...? and fields of dry stalks which used to be maize? i see the herds of donkeys plodding back loaded with water containers, followed by maasai women, holding their long sticks, their beaded necklaces twinklin' under the drought sun, slowly trudging home, with tired faces. home to what?

the cattle are starting to look skeletal, heads hung low as if their crescent moon horns are too heavy to bear for much longer. the only animals which still look fattish, albeit dusty, are the fat tailed sheep. (i think they are eating stones and termites or something.) and all the pretty horses, of course.

and there is no rain. still. i think the wind has given up too. it seems to have done a sly exit when no one was watching. given in to the sun who Rules. everyday is torpid, white, baking. the ground is bare and cracked and the heat relentless. sometimes it's hard to feel motivated. a little drink never did anyone any harm at all, no sirree. little vodkas spiced up with orange and mango juice, ya know? the ice making happy, tinkling music in my glass as i stare at an orange storm on the other side of the mountain, far far away, which simply won't blow this way. like the ngorobobs have a sign in the sky which says "NO RAIN ALLOWED HERE"... got to keep the majik goin' somehow. got to keep finding it. even the red dust stars seem spiteful these quiet, so quiet, dark nights.

must try harder.

Kitchen Board - Ngorobob Hill - 12 February 2011

my friend m says that TANESCO is officially a swear word now...ewkay.

toodely pip, oh bestest bloggie babes, bisous X.X.X. hot dust laden ones x j

but.

2011-02-04T04:17:00.000-08:00

this is where i need to be...out There. cracklin' leadwood fires, an old kettle and the morning star ridiculously bright, the smell of dust and wood smoke. yes.

BUT (chantal always said whenever you put but in a sentence it deletes everything before it) i have to be here. driving to and fro from cricket matches, rugby matches, tennis matches, cowboy parties. this is only achievable with music. i plug my iPod into my ears and away i go and the rest of the world becomes like a movie.

sometimes it ain't so pretty. like last week end when i saw a motorcyclist spread all over the tarmac (yes, another toyo daladala incident) in the headlights, blood deep purple pool around him and wide eyes in a flash as we passed. i can't remember which song i was listening to. it wasn't Dawn's Highway...the polaroid is in my head though and in my children's heads.

' Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.

Me and my -ah- mother and father - and a
Grandmother and a grandfather - were driving through
The desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian
Workers had either hit another car, or just - I don't
Know what happened - but there were Indians scattered
All over the highway, bleeding to death.

So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time
I tasted fear. I musta' been about four - like a child is
Like a flower, his head is just floating in the
Breeze, man.
The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking
Back - is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead
Indians...maybe one or two of 'em...were just
Running around freaking out, and just leaped into my
Soul. And they're still in there. ' - The Doors

this is going to be short and sweet, oh bestests. i am here BUT back at work. which is like a wet rag to anything creative. school sucks all of that up. but i am here, being terribly distracted by the outrageous blooming blood red of the bougainvillea in the dry. how is it possible? how is it possible i have cartwheels in my heart after everything? and i have written two new poems. one is funny. one is not. not at all. in fact, the latter demands that i see a therapist, i'm sure. get my head checked out. or maybe it's my heart? he'll tell me. anyway (this is different from but) i think we all tend to take life far too seriously - so what the hell - i'll kick my heels at it all and keep on rockin' in the free world, what little is left of it.

it is still very hot and dry. white days which burn everything in their wake. no rain. nothing at all. when the wind picks up from the north, the sky becomes yellow and pink from maasailand dust, a wall of it, like an haboub. at night the stars are red, fat and dusty. i don't even climb under the sheets anymore but lie awake on top, watching the mosquito net flutter and dance ghost like in the wind and the shadows of the windows like rib cages on the ceiling, startled by the whoop of the maasai young 'uns running over the hills, wondering how they make that particular sound and why? no counting sheep on this hill. until it all merges into dreams. until the white morning wakes me again, the owls scratching before dawn on the old tin roof, their hooting old and other worldly. and its back to school and the brilliant blood red bougainvillea.

maisha tu, as we say here. that's life, eh? and i ain't puttin' no but here...no sirree.

Kitchen Board: Sometime last month. January 2011.

toodely y'all. bisous X.X.X. firecracker red ones,yeah x j

wishes...

2011-01-12T04:37:00.000-08:00

and so big fat january rolls around, all hot and smug and the new year begins all over again. just like all the others.

life pretty much stays the same on the hill apart from all the auspicious numbers naming the days like 01.01.2011 and 10.01. 2011 and 11.01 2011. i can't wait for 11.11.2011 and will most definitely make a wish at 11 minutes past 11 on that day. i have already made a wistful wish at precisely 11.11 am yesterday, along with the rest of my diligent little class of year 7's. i'm not sure that it came true though. how long do wishes take, i wonder?

the bloody goat, who is this close to getting eaten (holding her thumb and second finger a millimeter apart), has taken to raiding the fruit bowl on the dining room table. if caught he dashes out, shoving the bananas into his greedy little mouth as fast as he can. drives me nuts. as does the lack of rain, which makes thunder and great displays all round us but never ON us. added to the menagerie on the hill is one python and one poor guinea pig. the python was rescued from the stubb's farm on the other side of the mountain. it had taken to eating their fowls and finally caused its own demise (imprisonment) when it attacked the pet rabbit who squealed horrifically in the dead of night and traumatized the smaller members of the family along with their mother. i certainly never rescued it. safari c did, with first born. it's his specialty, snakes. presently it sits in a glass tank of the veranda, turning its scaly nose up at the fat guinea pig which periodically gets tossed inside in case he gets hungry. nice. i won't watch. i can't. the Born Free ritual will be imminently played out...i think in the forests of monduli mountain. tati ( a neighbour and best friend) won;t have it released on the hill because it might eat her small puppies, which is a very real possibility.

other than that, i suspect i am suffering a mild to stern form of depression which i know is completely linked to a lurking mid life crisis, which, i have decided, is about the same as being a teenager again, without the pimples. full of anxiety, not sure of identity, quaking at the thought of love. love? what was that now? ooooooh yeah (like baldrick says it) that giddy wobbly feeling which steals all your words and makes an utter fool outta ya...oh YES!? i remember!? how silly silly silly silly of me. glib but persistent thoughts run through my mind, like a chopped up cine, of escaping my life and galloping off into the sunset, like a gypsy, on my spotty horse, and playing tambourines around a fire under a gnarly old tree and making my money by telling people's fortunes. how terrifying is that? best i stick to the safe job of teaching (and make rebels and revolutionaries out of the lot of them. oh i have decided that fidel castro should've got a few more spanks when he was a little boy...reading his bio presently) and training my horse to win the dressage in nairobi. at the end of this year. hopefully i shall compete against the 7 year olds and beat them.

must stop beating the kids at rummikub. i can't help myself. no one will play with me now..."but ma you always win"...so boring. (that no one will play with me. i LOVE and ADORE winning meaningless little games against the children. it makes me feel clever like a Champion of the World. these moments are rare in my life and winning rummikub was one of them. )

yes. best i stick to the old teaching job at school and get a buzz out of smoking behind the bus in the hibiscus forest, take some happy pills and forget about love and gypsies and things like that.

....or should i?

i'm still going to make wishes though. i bet they come true.

Kitchen Board: 12.01.2011

bombas are pipes...oh and i forgot to mention that things are rather tetchy in arusha presently. the opposition party is rumblin'..things are tense...maybe if the rain decides to come, tensions will ease? but this time, i don't think so. it'll take more than rain to ease the situation i'm guessing.toodely old toot, oh bestests, bisous X.X.X. wishful ones x j.

resolutions plesolooshuns from the hill

2010-12-31T23:41:00.000-08:00

happy new year y'all. i'm glad i made it. just. you? i've been thinking about the year ahead and i definitely want to dance more. i also want to sing more...and remember the words. which will mean i will never have to wear specs at a gig. they say (you know those expert Thems) that if you learn a poem a day, as in ALL the words, this will keep your brain fit...i used to know ALL the words of ALL the songs on carly simon's LP No Secrets.

"we had no secrets / we tell each other everything / about the lovers in our past / and why they didn't last / we share a cast of characters from A-Z / we know - um - a, um - a - dammit/" you see? gone. i THINK i can still do You're So Vain. but not here. it took me months to learn Blake's Tyger! Tyger! yes. so. learn words and sing. must find this LP again. it is intrinsically part of who i am. it brings back childhood memories. good ones. 1970's lilac suede tassels and singing to the blue distant hills in the lounge in lusaka to carly simon. and nancy sinatra...a very handsome italian tennis player gave my mother the carly simon LP outside OK Bazaars on Cairo Road. i sat in the car waiting for her. all she said to me when she got into the car was, " Don't tell Dad who gave me this record, ok?" i don't think i ever did...and i LOVED the LP. i still do. i kept the secret and the faith.
i intend to spend a lot more time in zanzibar...hangin' outside old doors, taking pictures of scabby old cats in stone town and eating at the market in the evenings on the sea front.

because zanzibar obviously means beach, i intend to look like this (starting from today):

oh. and i shall try and be more patient this year. i am the world's most impatient person...with everything...from queuing to love....i am too immediate sometimes for the world...which, i don't think is a bad thing but i mustn't expect everyone else to be as immediate as me...

and i shall continue to believe in majik, no matter how mad people think i might be...i shall make some wickedly good spells and visit a gypsy lady from time to time...i shall have no shame and believe in my convictions, which admittedly waver a million times a day...and change...well. nothin's permanent is it?

i shall try my hardest to accept myself for who i am...this is a difficult one because half the time (or maybe more than half the time) i don't know who i am. i change with wind and the angle of the light... i shall continue to love people deeply (and sometimes inappropriately) for just who they are...

(above pic by sam walker. it's delightful)

wishing y'all a stupendously wonderful 2011...may it be the best one yet. live it.
bisous X.X.X. deeply inappropriate red plum ones. x j

gorillas in the christmas tree.

2010-12-22T06:15:00.001-08:00

the tree is finally up and sparkling, all thanks to my ever watchful god.

it's enormous. a refreshing change from the usual stark sisal branch nicked from someone's boundary fence. safari c drove for miles, unwittingly it must be said, up the slopes of mt meru to buy one from the forestry department. he said it looked tiny there. it takes up most of the lounge and almost reaches the roof. in fact, it needs an entire shopping mall of decorations and a work force of about 50 men to fill it. it would be completely suitable for Times Square, i reckon. this dubious, yet joyous task, is taken more seriously by last born, alias clingy beetle who also happens to be my god. ya know, as in, whatareyouwearing?whatdidyousay?don'tsaythat!saythis.whyareyousmiling?stopit. doesthislooknice? iamwatchingyoueveninyoursleep. I WANT THE CHRISTMAS FAIRY AT THE TOP OF THE TREE. NOW! I'LL NOT SETTLE FOR ANYTHING ELSE. safari c swiftly followed orders and found the tall ladder and perched her high in the sky. god was happy with what she saw.

first born decided to take god on with a 3cm high plastic gorilla. as she sat staring up at her twinkling creation ( most of which was taking place in the lower third of the tree), first born slyly added his gorilla to the ensemble. he clung precariously to an old maasai beaded ball.

god was none too pleased with this and showed it by a stream of high pitched yelling, going very red in the face retorting that gorillas had absolutely nothing to do with christmas but the pink beaded pig actually did. it was removed and when god wasn't looking, too busy making light, the little gorilla was once more replaced but this time clinging furiously, god forbid, onto one of her little christmas angels, trying with all his little might to steal her trumpet or whatever. not funny. no not funny At All.

things were not made any better by god's mother rather enjoying the game of Where's Wally or rather Where's Gorilla In The Christmas Tree. and the fact that god was so livid because of a little innocuous quite sweet plastic gorilla. god growled and threatened all manner of wrath upon her older brother, who was now skulking irritatingly around our Times Square tree. it was removed only to reappear two hours later peeking cheekily through an attractive yet cheap turkish styled christmas bally. this time first born and i ended up in a fearsome argument over who was going to take the picture. i think he won. whilst god cried furious tears on the couch.

first born delights in the fact that god is very short, at least much shorter than him, which he pointed out. not funny. no. not funny at all. the little gorilla was whisked away and appeared thirty minutes later hanging happily in a soda green tinsel nest high up in his 'forest', with first born taking pictures of him and god lying prostrate with anger beneath him.

the day has ended up rather badly with second born getting involved. a huge row ensued between first and second born, with first born deciding to leave home, only after wounding his brother by calling him names: faggotgayyoucan'tevenreadi'mleavingbecauseofyou. this of course reduced second born to a heart broken vomiting spurt. (burger lunch on lawn). lovely. i am not sure where the little gorilla is now. i am waiting with baited breath. i sit on the couch and search for him amongst the greenery, drinking my tea, thinking that none of this was really in the spirit of christmas. and i have quietly filled the higher two thirds of the tree with the kind help of my now contented little god..... don'thangittherehangitherewhydidyouputitthere? i made the light you know?

indeed you did. indeed you did.

pfff. . .

Kitchen Board: Ngorobob: 22 December 2010.

god (definitely in control of light switch and who clearly can't spell christmas) contented, almost smug, now that the little gorilla is in his very own miniture, leafless string tree, all by himself (see him at the top?)....i dare say he will find his way back into the big tree.....

merry christmas y'all wherever you are. bisous X.X.X. under the soda green mistletoe ones x j

sleepless

2010-12-19T17:38:00.000-08:00

the very still early hours of the morning woke me up. they did. too still. too muggy. and the single bark of the old dog in the inky darkness. or perhaps it was the whining drone of the mosquito tangled up with the dreaming - someone, something always just beyond my grasp. flights in twilight and passing just beyond reach. whatever. i woke up and couldn't sleep any longer. no matter how hard i tried.

i lie half in half out of the twisted sheet. my inner mind list starts rolling relentlessly stealing my sleep: christmas bonuses for staff, bank accounts, christmas and who's going to cook the ham? in fact, HOW do you cook ham? anxiety about the horses's eye which was swollen like a balloon yesterday. manyara bush? cobra spit? i need sawdust. what happened to the money i left last week to buy the sawdust? gosh. bank today. queues. flip and a christmas tree! i forgot to buy crackers in nairobi. the horses distracted me. washing dishes on christmas day. i don't want to do that. i don't want a mess. the year ahead slides in front of me. already holiday times are being filled without my wanting them. people coming at easter. my father's 80th in july. august is free. yes august is my slot. august is it. august dreams. i close my eyes tightly trying to dream how august will be. sometimes it scares me. school starts in two weeks. must read hamlet. first born has his checkpoint mock exams as soon as school opens. he's rubbish in maths. i must help him. must get old papers. i don't want to go to town and do the shopping. i want to ride. but someone's got to do the shopping. buy the crackers.

i squeeze my eyes shut. i want to squeeze my mind shut. i want to dream the pictures of my august heart. a mosquito whines silver lines around it and my eyes snap open. my feet are sticky. it's too hot to sleep. it's hopeless. so, oh bestests, here i am.

the cat sits quietly at the window, as still as stone, staring into the inky darkness which is imperceptibly changing into dawn. or is it? i cannot see the outline of the hill yet, or the spiky whistling thorns. not yet. not yet.

A black eyed dog he called at my door
The black eyed dog he called for more
A black eyed dog he knew my name
A black eyed dog he knew my name
A black eyed dog
A black eyed dog.

I'm growing old and I wanna go home
I'm growiing old and I don't wanna know
I'm growing old and I wanna go home.

A black eyed dog he called at my door
A black eyed dog he called for more. - nick drake

kitchen board: sometime in december: ngorobob hill:

this board is rubbish. i shall immediately add:

1 truckload of sawdust.

2 tubes of terramycin.

bank

fix cushions (this is still on list from last year if you recall)

2 boxes of crackers.

1 pocket baby potatoes

a large bunch of mint.

1 jar cranberry sauce

countless christmas pies.

1 quiet mind.

oh god.

toodely y'all. bisous X.X.X. crumpled sleepy ones. x j

as i was sayin'...

2010-12-10T04:00:00.000-08:00

hello.

i used to be here a lot a long long time ago.

i really won't be cross if everyone's gone away, having given up on the old woman who lives in a little weather beaten pink house on the top of a tanzanian hill called ngorobob.

she made the mistake of becoming an English teacher. this has sapped away all her time and energy but she is now on holiday and has returned, gingerly it must be said, to blog land.

so. lots to catch up on, eh, oh bestest blogging beloveds.

the goat, called albino (remember the one a chief from lake natron bestowed upon safari craig many moons ago? who was destined for the pot?) is still alive. he managed to make best friends with everyone in one day so no one can ever eat him, no matter how annoying he has become. he has discovered his reflection in the mirror and has been found ON the dining table, daintily tip toeing amongst the glasses, to collect his friend from the mirror. he has shown an unswerving determination to enter the house at any given chance. one is reduced to sprinting, as fast as hussein bolt i imagine, to beat him to the front door and close him out. but no, we can't kill him.

instead, i managed to kill tigger, our beloved dog who has been with us forever. i ran her over by mistake after which the vet advised it would be kinder to put her down. this of course was devastating and reduced me to a mass of snot and tears and sent me on a downward spiral of depression. i know she was only a dog, but what a hole she has left. she is buried next to toffee the pony and tintin the jack russel at the bottom of the hill.

and of course, school is to blame. it was hideously busy, culminating in a production of Arthur Miller's dire Death Of A Salesman. i sold my soul to the devil and to god (a little competition never did anyone any harm) for a storm on the opening night (we have an open air ampitheater at school) - not just any old storm, i specified, but a definitely time to build an ark type of storm. it didn't work. i even cajoled someones spinster, christian sister to pray for this monumental storm of all storms. it didn't work. needless to say, the students were fantastic and pulled it off with great aplomb, making me quite emotional and teary with admiration and gratitude. the headmistress of course now thinks i'm brilliant which is a bad thing. it only adds pressure to keep up the lie. i am not brilliant. well. i'm not going to actually admit this. who would? but its exhausting maintaining this facade of faultless brilliance so thank baby jesus christ it's holidays!

and since that night, it has rained. the cloudscapes are wildly beautiful and everything is just as it should be. am just not sure who won my soul, though. i'll have to wait and see. the devil ain't so bayaad and i'm used to the heat, in any event.

and that's that blogging babes. i'm back. for a while. and it's good, it's good. i have decided to bring back the kitchen board too. its without its pretty flowers though. tant pis.

kitchen board. friday 10 december 2010, ngorobob hill.

things were rather tetchy these last two weeks. it shows.

toodely toot, y'all, and bisous X.X.X. deeply blasphemous ones, yeah x j

no rain.

2010-11-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

(the bleak road to school)
it's that time of year, oh bestests, when the rain is supposed to arrive and doesn't.

it's baking hot. white relentless heat. the earth is cracked and brown and the grazing is finished. the horses wander far from the little pink house in search of sweeter grasses and return listless and thirsty for water, which we are now trucking in. the tanks are empty like the skies. the nights are laced with an eery chill which is always a latent sign of no rain. i hate it. i am so scared of droughts. they make me think of those zululand days, when my father tried his hand at sugar farming and all my friends thought he was an onion farmer.

our farm was in the rain shadow of the ngoya hills. the storms would come but with no water - only lightening - which would make fires all across the vallies. we would sit on top of the hill and gloomily wait for the fires, my father all edgy with the binoculars and the tractor pulling the water cart at the ready. cane fires are terrifying. i remember after the first year of no rain. i was swimming with my father in the pool - all green and warm from the heat - hiding water scorpions and giant frogs. i made the mistake of pointing at a single giant cumulus cloud in the north and said "look dad! a rain cloud!" only to make him happier. he became quite agitated, nearly angry, retorting, "never never EVER point at the rain. you'll chase it away!" i wilted. we had a seven year drought after that. every time the bank manager popped around we hid the silver tea set and the range rover. i think my dad was trying for another land bank loan. . .

i am trying to ignore the pathetic wispy build ups which spurt weeny sprinklings of snow on top of mt meru and then dissolve into white heat. everyone is unconsciously tense and snappy and the maasai cows are skinny and the goats are sucking stones. there are mutterings that the rain will come after the next full moon, at least that is what our askari nyamuhanga says. he should know. he reads the wind and the skies....hurry up moon will ya?

toodely toot oh bestests. bisous X.X.X. burnt orange ones. x j

blinking...

2010-10-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

zanzibar has sunk beautifully into my bleached bones.

being at the sea, the zanzibari sea, makes me travel far from myself.

as far as the moon,

which rose every night,

fortunately fat and full;

of histories and futures and majiks.

we were transfixed.

this moon led me to thinking about how people blink in life.

like little lights.

like stars.

sometimes they blink louder

sometimes fainter.

sometimes smudgy.

but blinking.

twinkling.

it led me to thinking, with certainty, about babies being born.

new little blinking lights.

blinking fast like foetal hearts.

it led me to thinking, with dead certainty, about people dying.

little lights going out.

like dead stars.

you see them but they aren't there.

lover's lights being marginally fatter and brighter

-(than everyone else's)-

moving unknowingly,

across great continents of darkness,

this way and that.

souls moving closer to their cluster.

the lights grow brighter

blink faster.

this zanzibar moon confirmed everything.

i have to be there.

there.

toodely toot, y'all. do not adjust your sets. yet. bisous X.X.X. mercurial ones x j

zanzibar yearnings..

2010-10-19T00:52:00.000-07:00

hurrah hurrah!

i've finished my work

and i'm off to zanzibar!

where i'm going to lie like this.

and watch the children in the blue.

and eat coconuts in a hammock and dream things...

i'll listen to the wind in the palms at night and ghost whisperings. and pretend everything is real.

i'll draw hearts in the white sand.

we'll find treasures on the beach and build fairy castles for the tide to feast on..

and i shall make up tales to scare and "delight" the children again. (and worry the father.)

yes. i shall. when we sit in the zanzibar twilight, facing into a frisky wind smelling of cloves and jasmine, a cheeky little wind which tears at our hair, when we stare silently at an early baleful moon rising over the sea, with apple calm minds, i shall regale them with the tale of the ghost man from paje. who cycles by after midnight. all you see is a pale figure, almost like a host of fireflies, as you hear his bicycle tyres crunch over the shells at low tide. he only rides by when the moon is high, looking for his lost love, calling calling calling, "fatima, fatima, fatima". sometimes, if you listen hard enough, you can hear it above the wind.... and if you're brave enough to peek out onto the pearly white beach, barred with the moon shadows of the coconut palms, you might just spy the glint of his silver bicycle flittering through the shadows....i think i saw him once, last time i was here. i did. i did. i did......well, of course i did, why would i lie? and sometimes, even, he will come knocking on your door...(okokok only if the first part does not have desired effects....)

i shall make time to wander through stone town, stopping in dark dukkas which smell musty and hide treasures from old india; old sabres from oman and giant keys for giant hearts; finding treasures and twinkling twirling skirts and beaded slippers.

and my heart shall feel so full with love, again and again and again. and again.

toodely toot, y'all, i'll be seein' ya. bisous X.X.X. spicy ones from zanzibar x j

dead lines

2010-10-16T05:23:00.000-07:00

(little sukari (3 and a bit years) in school last week)
its a bruised and hot saturday afternoon and i'm listening to a little song called "charmed life" which i love . once more, i have dead lines. i am the only person who hasn't done their homework. it's half term so i am the only kippie working like a mad thing when i could be:

1. sleeping

2. reading

3. riding (which i am still managing to do. nothing can keep me off my hosses, no sirree)

4. getting drunk

5. staring at the sky and thinking nothin' in particular.

6. making music.

7. making all manners of things, come to think of it.

8. um, Blogging....yesssss.

but no, i am effing working (until i decided to have a break and blog) because i have left everything to the frigging last minute.

when will i ever learn? i hate myself for it.

i hate using the blog as a dumping ground. so i won't.

i hate using the blog as a diary too.

but i must use it...it's been a while. again.

so i thought i'd share something i wrote in a dead boring meeting at school yesterday. which culminated in dead lines.

i began an ink marathon.

i wrote what i heard:

" it doesn't make any sense that sentence"

"again. it's a bit of a repeat of that other one."

"it doesn't make any sense"

"children with learning difficulties...?"

"let's just leave it at that, then."

"next"

"i just don't know how much they have?"

(why can't anyone say anything? which made me think of a line i love which my students wrote for me once: we might have accents but we speak your language which made me think i'd like to make a poster with this scrawled across it.)

then someone started speaking about The Roses which are now seen in the front office. my ink marathon continued.

she thinks that having bunches of roses in the office is ' professional'.

"it's professional," she said, "it's professional."

i don't think so. i love the scent and how they look so charming in their little cheap plastic bucket vases - so surprisingly charming. and pleasant. but no - not 'professional'. actually.

good morning. we're professional. see. we have bunches of roses in our office, yes. and then we spend bright summer days - which were made for holidays, made for watching emerald sunbirds flitter amongst the lilac flowers and red hot pokers and aloes, made for contemplating worker bees collecting pollen from the big, old tree at the swimming pool - inside stark, dark, stuffy classrooms talking about health policies and protocols and whether 'key words' should be on a lesson plan or not. we're professional. we talk about things that will kill an inherent curiosity about life. things that are duller than last night's dish water with cold old rice and greasy chicken bones floating around in it. we're going to bend and change everything that's african, original and fresh and MAKE RULES and FILES so we can fit into some foreign ideal of what an acceptable CIS school is.

what does it matter?

i hate it.

so that's why all i can do is sit and write things in splodgy blue ink and sketch stars and flowers and planets.

it looks like i will be reading jane austen's Mansfield Park on the zanzibar beach, when i finally make it out of here. ordinarily, i would've sighed but now i admire her language. it's beautifully constructed, perfectly punctuated and strangely delicate. although fanny's passivity is already annoying me. odd that i write about jane austen when before i could only write about hibiscuses in the rain, fish markets in mozambique, gypsy camps and the fact that he has birds in his eyes. . .

cathie interrupts my dreamy thoughts in this dead dull meeting. every time she says "don't you agree janelle?" i nod prettily and cleverly and say, "why, yes yes yes!" convincingly to what i don't know but it must be good because she is. and then i return to my ink marathon.

i am full of vegetable samoosa - i ate them from sheer boredom - pasty, tasteless - like chewing cardboard.

i remember telling you i ate to stop sadness and you felt sorry for me. i felt embarrassed.

back to work, oh best beloveds. if i don't finish this i won't be able to go to zanzibar and i ain't missin' that for nothin' - dead lines schmead lines.

sigh.

toodely old toot, y'all and bisous X.X.X. hot storm scented ones x j

another roadside attraction...

2010-09-27T09:33:00.001-07:00

(pic taken at lively lady liza's violin, my guitar and bag che bag from zanzibar 0810)

life is speeding ahead....i don't think i have quite caught up with my body. i have this sort of astonished look on my face most of the time. well. an expression ranging from astonishment to a brazened stunned to misdirected mental grinning to point blank. my mind is presently preoccupied with growing a tangled jungle of twisting vines, pushing their way to the sun dappled above in the canopy. roots slowly but purposefully delving their way through my throat towards my heart. ja nee, things are not plain sailing but marvelously hectic and extraordinary. yes. i am definitely on the edge. but isn't that where we're meant to be? isn't that when you feel most alive because you feel close to dying? in the best possible way, naturally?

oh.

i feel just fine though. so i mean it when people say (and i close my eyes in my mind because i know what's coming) "so. how ARE you? the kids?" and with great courage i say "oh i'm fiiiiiiiine, yes, we're all fiiiiiiiiiiiiine. you?" it's exhausting because they don't know that fine means jungle vines growing out of my ears. vines intermittently bursting with great waxy deep purple sweet scented flowers.

i have been playing music again. like, you know, real gigs. like in The World. like at Lively Lady, like at the Hotel, like at the petrol station. like at the airport at sunset on friday. and i can still manage to read my words sans lunettes, thank god. that just wouldn't be ok, ya know? singing with my specs on? through sheer and extreme luck, i am managing to squeeze the music in between 3 kids, 6 horses, 3 dogs, 1 cat, 1 goat and a full time teaching post. something's got to give, i tell ya....and sadly it's been the old blog and my back car window.

i was bumping up the ngorobob hill, which is notorious for damian's sleeping policemen bumps. they're essential to save the track in the rains. but they are, well, bone breakingly annoying, if you're not resigned to them. they work a treat in all ways. they make you slow down. they make you think when you're late because you have to turn around at the bottom and go all the way to the top again because someone left their PE kit. they make you think, "oh well. what is time to a pig?" you see spiderwebs and the tiniest white flowers growing on the bank next to the road. you see the horses far away on the other hill. you see the buzzards hanging motionless in the wind above the house. and slyly notice the clouds changing shape over the mountain, in the north toward kenya which you pretend not to. you certainly don't say anything to anyone. so you don't chase the rain away.

and before you know it, you're at the top. so there i was, doing exactly that, bumping home from one of the aforementioned gigs. all the bastard heavy kit was bouncing noisily around in the back, particularly the speakers, jostling around with the spare wheel over Damian's Bumps. i was looking at the dreamy moon and stars, lost with music in my ears and vines in my mind when SMASH! the speaker broke through the back window. i really was going slowly.

my favourite place to play is at mohammed's petrol station, fondly known as Space Oil. it's just around the corner. my dear friend k has opened a funky little arty etsy shop (aptly named Exhibit) next to the store and petrol station. it has little pink lanterns hanging outside a wall painted with giant bright red hibiscus looking flowers, with shiny little jewels stuck on them to make them twinkly in the twilight. inside is a treasure trove of paintings, vintage clothes, jewels, one hell's angels jacket from chicago, teas, wild honey and chandeliers made out of recycled plastic and and and and...everything magical is in there. all of this is very close to the local mosque, which is jade green and shaded by gnarly old fig trees. space oil is slap bang on the main road, just outside of arusha, amongst the laki laki coffee plantation en route to the serengeti and ngorongoro. read busy road. buses, daladalas and an endless stream of safari vehicles. it's a teeny weeny little venue. when the muezzin starts calling i give it a break but am now musing on a tinkly little tune to accompany the call to prayer. the maasai askaris dance slow motion around the petrol pumps. mama mohammed pulls up a plastic chair outside her shop and sits heavily and silent in the dark. but i know she's enjoying everything. i know everyone in the little crowd. a little crowd of magnificent friends. people trip over the music "stand" (an easel) and tom and i tangle ourselves up in the wires. it's so real. and i get paid with a bottle of tequila, which i must sip from a beautiful yellow and red tea cup, because it's near the mosque. (i think?)

so yes, oh bestests, that's where i've bin. i ain't makin' any promises of writin' more regular here but ya never know, ya just never know and ain't that somethin'?

toodle ole toot then y'all, bisous X.X.X. deeply musical ones, with due respect x j

daniel

2010-09-10T22:24:00.000-07:00

today is a good day. today 14 years ago, first born arrived...after a long and incredibly hard birth ....which i would never write about here....(how do people share their giving birth photographs? eeeeeuw) he was born in a little clinic in marondera in zimbabwe. i remember flying from luangwa valley in a little cessna 206, over mozambique, just me and the pilot and a very very heavy belly. i remember looking down and not seeing any sign of life, just miles and miles of bloody africa and thinking ooooh noooo we don't want to crash here....we didn't.

i spent those last days with micky and myrtle (sister's parents in law) on their farm outside marondera. i spent pastel days picking mulberries, walking the dogs to the dam and reading stories of victorian women explorers late at night in the bath with a candle while i waited and waited for the arrival of baby number 1. in the early hours of the morning, en route for the umpteenth toilet run, i would stop and marvel at the fat zimbabwean stars and listen to the gentle tinkling of the chimes in myrtle's courtyard, head cocked, where the jasmine grew profusely. strangely, i was overwhelmed with something so sad yet universal in those moments. this memory has stayed with me ever since....the smell of the jasmine and the tinkling chimes and the stars and that particular strain of sadness.

micky would weigh me on his maize scales once a week, after bets had been made at the breakfast table. honest. he did. he also made us all take bets on whether it was a boy or a girl. the little chits would be kept in a box in the dining room for future payments. in the evenings i would help myrtle with the dinner trolley, which would be wheeled into the lounge where micky sat in his kikoi, surrounded by farting dogs next to the fire, watching mugabe rant on the telly and bark out suitably abusive expletives at the screen. i would loll quietly in the corner playing an extremely complex game of patience (as in the card game). micky couldn't help but get involved in it, passing witty and humorous remarks, mostly pertaining to my intelligence, or lack thereof. every now and then they would say " dear, don't you want to go and hang out with The Young People?" i did a few times but i much preferred their company. and anyway, at that stage the only things which fitted were a pair of old track suit pants with holes in them and a pair of hideous dungarees. one hardly wants to be seen out, if you know what i mean? it's not that fun being a public spectacle.

i loved hanging out with M&M. tea times were always taken in the courtyard, with micky and i shooting quelea with the pellet gun, taking bets who would get the most, in between sips of tea and nibbling home made biscuits. the jack russels would eat the dead birds, of which, oh bestests, there were never many. if we went out anywhere, myrtle would always drive and micky would tell her how to. he would always blow his top. she was so patient "yes dear i know dear". they dragged me off to the Harare Agricultural Show. i was taken with the Brahman bull with the blue sash and gold ring in his nose. completely. with his dark, wise eyes and wrinkled face and snowy white coat. i watched the clay pigeon shooting. i lunched at ranches, went with myrtle on her egg runs, watched micky dip the cattle. and waited and waited and waited. safari c arrived about a week before first born made his dramatic entry into the world. the day before we went hiking into the hills where i was literally pushed and pulled to the very top of a giant matopo styled rocky koppie.

it was no easy birth and danu pops was almost dead on arrival. it was 17 hours of pain and struggle. eventually at 21:00hrs, on 11 September 1996, he was born. he hung lifeless, like a dead fish, upside down, for a few minutes. i could hear the doctor saying " come on my boy, breathe, come on my boy breathe" and the noise of the oxygen machine. they kept him that night, away from me, in a little glass box. i cried in the dark. quietly. he was so little and impossibly fragile. i was utterly bewildered and clueless. my dad flew up from south africa and visited me with bright yellow daffodils from the hogsback mountains in the eastern cape. yellow has always been daniel's best colour. he was registered as an "alien zimbabwean".

after a week, we put him in a little wicker basket and drove back to lusaka, through the zambezi valley, across the same chirundu bridge, through a baking pre october heat with the mopane trees stark and naked. he slept star spangled and tiny the whole way home. he was the most perfect thing i think i had ever done. my chest could not contain the love which blossomed and bloomed and nearly killed me.

if i think too much about it, i could die from the enormous, insurmountable love for my boy.

happy birthday precious precious daniel. 9/11 has always been a good day for me.

chirundu crossings.

2010-09-03T11:48:00.000-07:00

(gabriella and kasha with nkhasis, west kilimanjaro, august 2010)

everyone's back at school. away from the wilds and neatly stacked into a classroom.

everyone's back from holidays.

except me.

i never went anywhere, technically speaking.

okokok. i rode horses in maasailand but that's just up the road.

i never went more than 50kms outside arusha. i am not sure this was an entirely clever thing.

i need to pinch myself.

still. it's fine. my car couldn't have made it all the way to the coast this time.

the winds have started again. from the mountains at night. they are still fairly gentle but i know how menacing they can become. screaming like a boiling kettle through the cracks. the windows are beginning to rattle and it's becoming dry again. very dry.

my horse has become tetchy.

back to school. it takes me back to those bus trips from lusaka to salisbury (harare now) in the 70's. when i was five and a half and still losing my milk teeth. i would press my face against the window and scream my head off. my mother would smile and wave bravely as if i was coming back tomorrow. it would be weeks before i saw her again. sometimes months. we would catch the school bus from lusaka....an entire day and half a night away, across the border which was only open to school buses. the zimbabwean war of liberation was picking up speed and nobody else traveled that road. only the school buses had right of way. and invisible soldiers from both sides.

i remember the zambian bus would reverse up to the rhodesian bus half way across the chirundu bridge which spanned the zambezi river. we would all pile out and leap into the little bit in the middle which was No Man's Land...this made us happy and we all pretended it was ours. we would dance into the middle gleefully shouting "no man's land no man's land!" staring down at the river below through the iron grids of the bridge. until one day the tired war torn stoned soldiers got cross with us and waved their AK 47's and shooed us back. after that we would wait until we were told to cross the little 10m piece of hot tarmac to The Other Side. in single file. quietly. where were the teachers? i can't remember any. there must have been someone.

i remember customs and immigration, the scary bit. and the health desk. they would check our little yellow health books for cholera and yellow fever then pretend they weren't up to date and that we would have to be injected. we would be sick with fear. they even went so far as taking rusty old needles out and cotton wool then laugh rambunctiously at our pale, pinched white faces. i remember the soldiers rifling through our suitcases which were filled with mostly clothes and the odd treasure of flour (for our mothers because you couldn't get it in zambia) or chinese checkers for christmas which would be immediately confiscated.

my mother taught us how to lie. she would give us pocket money to buy fizz pops at karoi, the first stop on the rhodesian is super side (sweets and chocolates were unavailable in zambia at the time). the customs man in zambia would bark, " have you any money to declare?" and we would squeak " yes. two rhodesian dollars," of which he would happily and speedily relieve us whilst mumbling something like "absolutely not allowed. illegal. blah blah." after that my mother sewed our sweet money into the inside pockets of our school blazers and taught us how to lie with poker faces. we became very adept at it.

it would take hours and hours to cross the border. hours and hours after baking hot hours and warm coca colas (on the rhodesian side). we would leave as the sun was edging near the western sky and the bus would wind it's way up the zambezi escarpment. winding along the empty road and through miles and miles of mopane forests dotted with baobab trees. game was plentiful. wild dogs. elephant. herds of buffalo. impala. zebra. giraffe. it was the only sign of life we would see along the way. there were no people to be seen. we would reach the outskirts of salisbury after dark late at night. i could tell we were in the highlands, near to school, because i could smell the "christmas trees", the pine trees. the air was cold and crisp. and the stars stark and bright and i would start to cry in the dark because then i knew i was very very very far from home. the matrons would meet us in the school car park with sandwiches and hot cocoa. they tried to be kind but you still felt little, desolate, scared and far away.

i can't believe our parents trusted the journey. i mean that no one would blow up the bus. it happened one year. not to my bus. but the other one. after that we flew to school. when the war became hot.

here, school is a ten minute trip; down the ngorobob hill, round the corner, past the effing factory and bingo. it's a dead cinch. dead cinch.

toodely toot, y'all. bisous X.X.X. earnest ones tinted with mountain winds x j

the joker.

2010-08-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

(maasai boy laughing monduli chini, maasailand. pic by craig doria: www.craigdoriasafaris.com)

game over, oh bestests. the joker's been slapped onto the green velvet covered bridge table. holidays are officially over and it's back to school for all the naughty wicked people. it's come as rather a rude shock, it must be said. the last two days i have sat staring at paper after paper in a blank way in long school meetings. it felt like staring into an old landrover engine which needs fixing. haven't a clue. can't. not interested. get a mechanic. yawn. which reminds me of the time when i did my safari guide's licence in zambia many moons ago....part of the course was Mechanics. god forbid.

question 1: how does four wheel drive work? (4 marks)

(how easy does this get, she mused, clapping her hands happily in her head)

answer: well. you pull the littlest gear lever back to where it says 4WD and make sure the hubs are locked if you are in a toyota and not a landrover.

question 2: describe the workings of an internal combustion engine. (2 marks)

(wtf? sinking feeling. bewildered and sweating palms followed by resentful anger directed at all males of our species. in her head.)

answer: sdfhwoeihwefzcvw8e3r50237owindefmanvw0ierruw0hjwsoidnvkjhso98eurwer

i surprisingly passed the exam, believe it or not. (do you know what a dendrocygna viduata is, people? i do. it's a white faced whistling duck and dontcha forget it, you hear? it takes you places in life.) i did not pass the walking exam. i didn't even try for it. only the driving one. you need to know how to shoot a .375 for the walking one. and you need to be able to shoot down charging buffalo or elephant in the walking one. i can't shoot a gun which is a super sized confession for the daughter of a professional hunter. (well. i CAN shoot a lever action .22 so there) anyway, i always preferred taking the old ladies out who couldn't walk anymore (why on earth had they booked into a Walking Camp then i hear you say? well quite.) i liked the old people with hip transplants and dicky hearts who had a perverse interest in mopane trees and squirrels. i remember once seeing a herd of kali cow elephants cross the track way ahead. i stopped the landrover and said to the dear little old lady next to me, "we're going to go the other way, ok?" she nodded her head happily, replying " whatever you say dear." you might think i was chicken but i wasn't. i had a keen sense of self preservation. those elephant on the 05 were kali as hell. they took no prisoners. i stayed well clear of those bastards....(i have just asked safari craig if he has any pictures of charging elephant. he sniggered, " i have more pictures of charging elephant than you can poke a stick at." i said: "i want a vicious one." he said: "i can give you vicious. lots of vicious."

(charging elephant, lake natron area, pic by craig doria: www.craigdoriasafaris.com)

i have poked my head into my classroom once. i have searched long and deep inside of me for that old spark of inspiration and am happy to report that way down in the ashes i see an ember glowing. it just needs a little bit of wind, some twigs and fear to get it firing again. where is that charging elephant when i need him?

toodely toot oh best beloveds, bisous X.X.X. sparky, red hot ones, on yer lips x j

PS: magnificent magdalena in rwanda

2010-08-20T22:17:00.000-07:00

this post goes with my post from yesterday. i received this email and these photographs from Dr Mags yesterday:

You are so sweet and it was great working with you, sure it was all joking!! I am attaching few pics of my patients in Rwanda and DRC - also quite cool people they are!
Big hugs,
M

if anyone is interested for more check out the website: http://www.gorilladoctors.org/

the work these people do is fascinating. and these creatures are mind blowingly magnificent. just like magdalena.

(all treatment has to be done with a dart gun)

two brilliant people and why i'm tired

2010-08-19T22:33:00.000-07:00

days flip past like cards in a card game.

i'm waiting for the joker. i forgot to remove it from the pack.

the school term is approaching. closer and closer. quite suddenly i think, " i can't do this! i can't i can't...wail wail etc.." let's see. i'm terrified.

in the meantime, back at the ranch....

i have been traipsing after my friend, mags, who is a vet. so DOCTOR magdalena. she's not just any kind of vet but a vet for gorillas and chimpanzees. and horses. and dogs and cats. she lives in rwanda and treks into the forests to check up on mountain gorillas. she's awesome. and full of energy like a whirly gig. it's exhausting sometimes. she never ever stops. oh and did i mention she rode dressage for poland many years ago? she knows stuff. so while she was here, on holiday, training my horses so they are machines, it was decided we would geld my little colt, sukari. (chop his balls off, in other words.) we borrowed The Emasculator. dot dot dot...

quite suddenly the little hill house is empty of all male members. two boys have headed into losamingora mountains on safari (for 7 days bird shooting and doing bally boy things in the mountain forests) the silver back (as in safari c) baulked and disappeared back to maasailand. sadly mwali had to hold the colt whilst this gory operation was happening. he and mommedi were very interested at the beginning....

this is what he looked like as the first ball was coming off....

precisely after this, he dropped the rope and shook his head and said " i can't watch this anymore..." and i suspect went to get sick in the loo. the little horse was tranquilized and doped up with pain killers, people. so he couldn't feel anything. i promise. but OWEEEEE. it was quite challenging to watch, it must be said. i have decided not to post the picture of the actual removal. beppe, our fabulously charming vet, hailing from southern Italy, held the emasculator while mags did the stitching etc....

beppe is another wow person. another vet. he travels to places like somalia, pakistan and afghanistan where not many people like to travel and works with people and goats and sheep and cattle and writes long and interesting reports on projects. he is very funny. in true southern italian style, he cracked jokes about eating horse balls. which made my toes curl. he was charmed by the beautiful magdalena. they swopped notes, as vets do. it was decided that the following day the goat would be de-balled too. so mags could see. she has never de balled a goat before. (is this how vets flirt, i wondered?)

i was duly convinced, by my doctor friends, that indeed it was time for Beano (the little white goat which a chief in natron gave to safari craig because he's so nice) to be de balled. " he will start to get very cheeky if you don't," they told me. and regaled me with a tale of someone being knocked out by a goat head butt. ok. convinced. when Beano arrived, i was definitely going to eat him. but literally in two days he became a fast and firm friend. goats are clever like this. so the following morning, beano lost his balls too...well actually, they're still there but apparently will fall off. a little elastic is neatly and very tightly tied around them. he seems fine, actually. . . .

and as if this wasn't enough, the next thing on the agenda was Teeth Filing...for horses....and we all know, oh best beloveds, what i feel about dentists and teeth....oh my. positively foetal at the best of times.

all the older horses with long teeth were led out and one by one had their teeth ground by an electric drill type file thingy. it was nerve shattering to say the least. but essential. i asked if i could also have some horse tranquillizer but my doctor friends just laughed at me. i was being quite serious.

mommedi is looking the other way because of all the tooth enamel flying everywhere. after the teeth, we had to lance a horse hoof to drain an abscess.

magdalena was magnificent obviously. we all thought so. and so was beppe. she has left for rwanda and gorillas and left me to do all the after care....which i am taking very seriously. here they are after everything... guilio is another trainee vet on the LHS. beppe is in the middle and Magnificent Magdalena is on the RHS.

here is an email i received this morning:

Dear Janel,

Nice to read you and get news.

I never had a so relaxing working time in my life. Could you please ask Magdalena to come back for me to go fishing to Lake Turkana?

Nice to know Sukari is better. Please tell Craig that I took the emasculator with me but I left the elastrator.

Best regards to all of you from Giulio and me (Lieve is in Dar).

Dear Magdalena,

I am really disappointed with you. The only work (?) I did was the X-rays and...........you say that only one was less than acceptable, you disgraced me. Nobody will ask anymore for my services.

Thanks for the excellent description of the lesion and way forward. I am available to trim the hoof and help to make the bar-hoof up (I need the shoe first). X-rays, it is not a problem, however VJ should come next week and if Janice wants, we could try to organize a visit and make “good x-rays”. Otherwise you have to keep-up with mine.

We will send you the feed-back and photos of an excellent ray.

All the Arusha animals are missing you, please come back soon.

Keep well and in touch

Beppe

toodely toot oh best beloveds and bisous X.X.X. ones with balls. x j

maasailand dreamin'

2010-08-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

(mwali on rhino)

i don't feel like being back on the hill.

i don't.

i am sulking.

i am spoilt for life.

people, the best way of traversing maasailand is on horse back. and that's a fact. walking is slow and long. driving leaves tracks for years and engulfs you in clouds of dust. it jolts the spine. whereas on a horse, you can pick your way through thickets, silently, flushing lesser kudu. you can play with zebra, if you have the wind right. you can sneak up on gerenuk, with their strange long necks and giraffe wander out to get a closer look at you. sand grouse or yellow necks fly suddenly from the horses feet. you can stop and watch the mountains and the clouds edge across the sun. and you can never get lost on a horse. they will always find their way back to camp. always. it's the only way. more than anything, the horses love it. the place matches their wild spirit.

northern maasailand is a vast wild area, tangle wood drear, lying between tanzania and kenya, belonging to no one, through which the maasai still wander following their herds. it stretches out like an ocean, undulating and changing light with each minute. you can sit and stare at it like you would at a fire. it rolls away in front of you, leaving the impression of gentleness. but once you step off into it, it's anything but gentle. its a sea of dust and acacia. waterless. a desert. the thorns try and grab you as you squeeze past the crooked acacia branches. squat snake tracks lie on old dried up lakes. you think of them as you pick your way through long grass. the wind is ceaseless. sometimes raging, sometimes gentle but always there. at midday, as you sit in camp, sheltering from the sun, dust devils twist and turn far away into the white sky.

it is so silent out there at night. the silence is punctuated only by the mournful whoop of hyaena or the staccato yelp of jackal. lion are silent in maasailand. they are clever. they know to keep quiet. they share their space with maasai and their cattle. maasai do not like lion. they poison the cattle carcasses. and i dream in maasailand, oh best beloveds. its a land of dreaming. clear and vivid dreams, as alive as the waking hours. the lines are thin between dreaming and wakefulness. sometimes you think you can hear the stars creak on their axis, it's so silent. the wind on canvas lets you imagine you are in a little boat far out at sea. camping in maasailand makes you feel very small. and right. it reconfirms that no one can own africa. you want to. you dream of it. you pretend it's all yours. but if you try, it'll kill you in the end. you can only pass through it. momentarily.

we packed the landrover high, bales of hay, horse food, hooch, nyama, fruit and vegetables. safari c took his holland & holland, not for hunting but in case we had to shoot a horse... we loaded our fine steeds onto willie's little blue canter truck, aptly named The White Horse, painted in curly red letters above the windscreen and trundled northwards.

to make the horse camp, we tied a rope from branch to branch, high up in the crooked tortillas branches, and attached the horses on halters to this, long enough rope so the horses could lie down and couldn't tangle themselves up. amneey, mwali, mammedi and steven made an askari rota to keep watch on the horses through the night. hyena circled the flickering horse camp fire at night. nosy jackals snuck in close. my horse, the legendary apaloosa, De La Rey aka The General, lay down each night and perfectly ignored these pesky predators. he knows the bush. he ain't afraid of nothin'. the other horses snorted and pulled at their ropes. it was only on the last night that lion called from far away. i think the little spotty horse would've stood up if they had come closer. . . .

the day starts early. good tanzanian coffee is delivered with a gentle "hodi hodi" from claus or juma to your tent around 6, at first light, when everything is still cool, pastel and gentle. you stumble out your tent, barefeet, stepping on a misplaced devil thorn (those teeny little "mibas" with three spikes). you drink your coffee, thinking of your dreams, smoking a sportsman, eyeing your dusty boots from yesterday, staring at the view.(coffee, early morning and dusty boots of spanish of leather)

two hours later, you sit down to a sumptuous breakfast of fried eggs (2, naturally), bacon (crispy), lashings of baked beans (heinz. some things never change.), tomatoes (fried), toast and strawberry jam, paw paw (the sweetest you'll ever taste) and more coffee just in case you never had enough at six. the horses arrive from their camp, sporting bright yellow boots of pi grease, to thwart the maasailand ticks. you saddle up and ride out, drifting this way and that with the wind, distant cowbells tinkling. you stop to watch a line of zebra in the distance, wandering below a post card picture of kilimanjaro, the snow like icing sugar. two or three hours later, you're home, sipping on a cold vodka and tonic, prettily laced with sliced lemon, or a chilled glass of the cape's finest white followed by a salad lunch. siesta time follows. more dreaming. four o clock tea time and another ride. riding in the late afternoon glow when the grass is gold and the mountains are blue and you know you never magicked this up....

( de la rey with mt meru back drop)

the smell of acacia wood smoke welcomes you back home, at last light, and we sit and watch the african night swiftly arrive, throwing her net of stars across the sky. we munch on bitings of biltong, drawing nearer to the fire because the wind has an icy edge to it now. it blows from behind your back. from the mountains, across the empty ngaserai plain, cold tendrils creeping around your neck.

( mohammed and sybil first home at last light)

the best thing are the piping hot showers. the water is stingingly hot, making your skin steamy pink. the smell of dust, sweat, leather and horse mixed with jasmine scented soap is heady. dinner at a long table, dressed in stiff white linen and the children chattering like monkeys, begging me not to regale them with my finest ghost tales yet secretly wanting me to. the winding sandy path to bed and dreams, following the "nyali" (paraffin lanterns) hung delicately in the tree branches all the way to your tent and the wind, the wind, playing in my hair....

you see, that's why i don't want to be here, oh best beloveds.

i'll be dreaming of maasailand for a while.

toodely toot then, bisous X.X.X windy desert ones x j

smoke and feathers: love on the plains

2010-07-26T04:49:00.000-07:00

there's always something wickedly exciting about packing the car and headin' west. out of town, past the airport, past the sunflowers and seeing kilimanjaro loom ahead of you, towering and glinting in the clouds. take a left turn just past sanya, where the road becomes narrow and quiet, winding and climbing between dry maize fields and lush forests. before you know it, you're on dirt red roads, listening to a stretched cassette of michelle shocked singing memories of east texas....everyone singing (well. actually just me) "i learnt to drive on those east texas red clay back roads...". the wind hurls the dust through the open windows. brushing hair is a thing of the past and our hearts float crazily and happily outside the car.

we were on our way to woodstock in the bush. a groovy hippy wedding, out on the windswept plains of ndarakwai, a wild ranch beneath the western breech of kilimanjaro.

flags fluttered prettily around the campsite, announcing ceremony and place.

as night fell, a massive bonfire was lit to ward off tendrils of cold and night monsters. the bride's sister, from australia, danced with her "fire balls"....(like fire dancing except with balls lit up by lead lights which changed colour all the time - orange, blue, green, pink, purple, red, whirling colour dervishes which really hurt when they smack you on the mouth or the head if the swirling gets out of control, as i discovered)...under the stars. glacial winds off kili kept the fire fairies spinning up to the moon whilst i chatted to the groom's mother all the way from moscow. i also saw my first ghost. a pale faced woman. with long dark hair, a high collared white shirt and a black long jacket. she floated out from the tree line, out of the silver star speckled night, straight behind irene. the mother said, " who are you looking at?" and before i knew it, the ghost had gone. i said, "i've just seen a ghost." she said " vat huff you been smoking?" but she saw it on my face. her dark russian eyes don't miss a thing. she took another sip of her stolichnaya vodka as a cloud slipped over the moon. i know a goddess when i see one so i followed suite and drank like a russian. (must learn not to peak so early.)

the groom arrived on a black horse called storm. they cut a dashing pair, prancing across the plain, towards the circle of friends, who were being "cleaned" by shaman rani with specially concocted incense, whisked up with guinea fowl feathers. my boys were terrible. giggling and wrinkling their nose at the smells of india and whispering things like " who's that witch mama?" with deepest respect, oh best beloveds, seeing they know one already. their mother. i sternly looked my long nose at them. they shut up smartly.

last born was a flower girl of sorts. she was perfect for the part. she wandered around the circle, handing out roses, her tangled hair, knotted with bougainvillia. a flower fairy to boot.

the black horse stamped his feet and held his head high, neighing. we stared across the plain and there came the bride, side saddle on a white princess arab mare, haling from the royal stables in spain. she sat perfectly on the horse, her dust orange silk veil, blowing prettily around her, being lead by my friend and vaquero par excellence, carlos. who looked ever so handsome. and from a safe distance, a herd of eland stood eloquently etched.

as she stepped so sweetly off her steed and gathered up her silks, i sang angel from montgomery with baab strummin' an out of tune guitar. it didn't matter. the wind tangled up the music.

my neighbour, bram, acted as the priest or guru or ceremony master or nini hii. (we kept some konyagi hidden in the basket just in case he needed to settle his guru nerves). but, i must confess, he was rather good at it. he married the man to the man initially. he really is rather a lovely guru, though. i'd let him marry me if i did it all over again. the shaman had to "clean" him, or probably bless him, with her smoke and feathers.

i sort of sniggered and thought golly, she'll have to do a lot of cleaning there. don't get me wrong. i'm mad about bram. completely. anyway. the exchanging of vows was beautiful. moving. and made me believe all over again in love, baby, love. the best kind. bram made us all do more oms. my boys embarrassed me again, snorting with giggles when everyone was supposed to be omming. it does tickle the lips though, i find. louise was excellent at it. at one point i thought he'd holler," and one for holland!" (he loves his football).

horses. love. spikey stars. a full moon of magic. smudgy sunsets. smoky fires. guitars. feathers. ghosts. music. mountain winds. russian vodka. fire dancers. what more could a cowgal ask for, eh?

you tell me.

toodely toot, oh bestests, bisous X.X.X. blazing red hot poker off the saddle ones. x j

toyos and swing cutters.

2010-07-18T23:48:00.000-07:00

(the swing cutter being an arse on ngorobob hill)

good lord. it's holidays and i haven't written for a week. . .apart from signing cheques. i have also discovered, that left to my own devices, i am crap at managing time. or actually achieving anything. i feel pressured without deadlines. how fucked up is that? three weeks later and i am still wondering if lisbeth salander killed everyone? i cannot get to the end of the frikken book. perhaps its the thought of starting the next one, which i know is gruelling. a True Story about an abused girl who spiralled into schizophrenia.

i have found myself at a complete loose end. or stuck on a hamster wheel of coffee, cigarettes, riding and OPK's. (other people's kids). why do they keep coming back? i am so horrible to everyone. added to this is my startlingly new and menial (to the point of wanting a satellite to plummet down and kill me) task of being a taxi driver for sub adults. for free. because i have to. i drive around arusha town, from A to B to X to C squared, which is treacherous at the best of times. now made worse by the The Toyo. http://toyomotorcycle.com/the toyo is a cheap Chinese chromed monster motorbike recently imported into tanzania. (remember when china bought africa at the beijing conference for a song? what a day that was. whoopee) everyone has one. a toyo. except me. i have adamantly and loyally stuck with a toyota.

the toyo is the new taxi in town. cheap, shiny, fast and infinitely mobile in heavy traffic. which would be perfect except that not many people have any experience in riding a motorcycle in these parts. a ward at mt meru hospital has recently been re named Toyo Ward because of the frequency of casualties caused by the irreverent use of the Toyo Motorcycle. they are not bicycles. but are ridden in a similar carefree fashion. driving in town, managing The Toyo Factor, has taken on a whole new dimension. rather like a computer game. i'm still "in" though. no hits taken, yet. my friend natasha isn't. she hasn't been quite as lucky. she was hit on the streets on friday whilst crossing the road to the doctors with her friend, who, we discovered yesterday, has tick bite fever and not an urinary infection, as diagnosed. (warning: everyone here has urinary infections which sort of eventually morph into malaria, tick bite fever or tryps). she was fortunate. my friend natasha. she escaped with two stitches in her lip, a graze on her elbow, a bump on her head and a rather bruised foot where the bike rode over her. still. she's "out". (the toyo game. game over. new game? new level?)

she made quite a sight, it must be said, wandering marginally dazed around the car park at shopright (affectionately known as shoplift), looking like Dracula after a good feed. pale with blood streaming down her chin, onto her pretty shirt and smiling grimly.

hill life has become as treacherous as town. there is no where to turn to. i am sharing the space with two pre pubescent boys and one seven year old girl who is obsessed with fairies in jars and acts like my god. i can't do anything wrong without her knowing. it's exhausting being watched all the time. where are you going? what did you say? who are you talking to? you have a message on your phone. you can't say that. wear this. what are you going to wear? what are you looking at? why? where? perfume. now.

i. am. watching. you.

even in my sleep.

in your face.

to top it all, at a hill dinner precisely three nights ago (my god has insisted i am precise. i am not allowed to say "the other day" EVER.) i was informed by my gracious and divine friend and neighbour that My Boys Had Cut Her Boys Swing Down, with knives, when everyone was away. their little sister aka my god spilled the beans. "oh yeah. my brothers cut your swing down. they told me." when the perturbed (understandably) mother challenged them, my sons made a weak, transparent and thoughtless attempt to try and blame The Poor children. so not only did they do this ghastly deed but then lied and tried to blame the innocent, defenceless impoverished masses. good god! whatever for, for christ's sake? i became so preoccupied with this news that i had to leave the dinner immediately after death by chocolate pudding. i remained calm on entering the home, where they sat with flat caps and pimples listening to preposterous music. i magnificently managed to thwart the wild, screaming witch mother, who was growing like the green Incredible Hulk inside of me, bursting through its T shirt. through devious and extremely sophisticated methods, i managed to wangle out a tearful confession from second born (as pictured above). on being asked "but why? why this pointless act?" his answer: " because they annoyed me." oh. so if someone slightly annoys you, just go and damage their lovely things while they are away? right. i see. makes perfect sense. should i be worried?

they are now demanding spray paint for graffiti. the bakers are away. i fear for their house.

it is precisely half past ten in the morning and they are STILL asleep. apart from my god who is away visiting. doubtless i will have to report, in detail, everything i have said and done, if she hasn't already psyched it out of me, when i collect her. best i start making notes then. yay. a dead line. i feel safe.

toodely old toot, people. bisous X.X.X brave and flamboyantly long ones smack on the lips x j

The V Incident....(TVI)

2010-07-10T22:30:00.000-07:00

why oh why did i even mention it? The Vibrator Incident? ( TVI to which it shall hereafter be referred.) where do i even begin? it seems a quagmire of pitfalls....i cannot win. either way. why didn't i say perhaps i should write about maasai marriage rituals? or elephant poaching in maswa? or Life In Tanzania? or 10 ways to make fairies in jars? no. i had to mention TVI in a momentary, undisciplined lapse of reason.

anyway. not to let all you hopefuls down, there i was one saturday afternoon, buried deep in my novel when "it" caught my eye, lying forgotten in a curtained cupboard next to my bed. (i think the last time it was seen out was by second born who accidentally arrived too early in the morning and picked it up and said "what's this?" holding it next to his ears as if it was a telephone.) it was hurriedly packed away, with me muttering things about de hairing legs whilst slipping seamlessly and purple faced underneath the hyrax rug. it must be said that from that point on it developed a technical hitch, so to speak. it became temperamental, switching itself off at the most poignantly wrong times then waking up at three in the morning, humming happily on the floor. the problem with it, is that it is completely sealed. terribly modern looking. (it has three speeds) you can't get "in" anywhere. to conclude, it hasn't been behaving quite as it should. well. not according to the manual.

so yes. where was i? saturday afternoon, nose buried deep in book ( a detective thriller, just in case any of you start wondering what on earth made me reach out for TV), when i saw it lying there and thought, eh, yeah, well why not ? let me give it a twirl, as a girl does. i pressed the on button. nothing. i pressed it again. nothing. then without warning, it roared into life, speed 10, sounding like a Cessna 206 in a furious nose dive. WTF? it was VERY loud. and dangerously fast. not quite what i was needing just then. i pressed the button for low speed. nothing. i pressed off. nothing. i pressed off again. nothing. did i mention it was VERY loud? in a dead panic i leapt off the bed, my thumb pressed urgently and desperately on the "off" button, on the "slow fucking down and shut up" button. nothing. by now, with a sinking feeling, i realized i had A Situation on my hands. it was furious and buzzed and shook with evil intent. it had a life of its own. it had gone independent. it wanted to shout out from a mountain top: look what SHE does on a saturday afternoon mbwahahahah...

red faced and desperate, i started hammering it against the stair rails to break it. i repeatedly thwacked it against a shelf. nothing. instead it seemed to roar even louder. i wanted to run to the edge of a cliff and throw it away but i couldn't get out of the house. never mind down the stairs....imagine?

"ma? what's that? what on earth are you doing?"

no. no options here but to shut this effing thing up.

i raced downstairs, leaving it barely muffled amongst my socks, dancing horribly around my knickers, to find a hammer. i was going to smash it to death. well. hammer the off button. which i did. but nothing. i then thought of throwing it in a bucket of water but feared electrical complications. nothing for it but to wrap it up in my thickest jumpers and bury it deep in a basket, and pile bag after bag on top of it, the put the whole thing deep amongst my clothes. which i did. i sleep in a loft. on a mattress on a wooden floor. the "wardrobe" is above the bathroom. i rushed downstairs and stood underneath it. an evil hum prevaled, overriding the bee hive in the eaves. but i thought if i opened the window of the bathroom, you could mistake it for a noise from the factory. ....? yes? (hopeful) head cocked and listening........no. no. no. NO. bad idea. when eliza or vero came upstairs to drop the mozzie nets and spray they would hear it and FIND it....i sped off to the kitchen and ever so nonchalantly told them that they didn't have to do my room today. no. no. i would. and shouted at the children to all leave the house immediately and go and play outside for godsakes... you've all been hanging around doing NOTHING. get out get out get out!!!! shoo shoo shoo.

they looked warily at me and said "ma why are you in such a bad mood?"

"i'm not i'm not just go OUTSIDE! now!" i went back to the horror ten minutes later and it hadn't lost any momentum. it was howlin' and a buzzin' and a hummin' with a frightening persistence. what kind of bloody battery do these things have? then i thought " Oh. My. God. it's going to get so hot in there, all wrapped up in wool, It Could Catch On Fire!" i checked it. no. the temperature seemed stable. i muffled it again. if i could have, i would have choked it with my bare hands. instead, i would leave it until the life ran out of it. let things run their course. by now, it was starting to stammer, ever so slightly, but then would roar back to life with an insane revenge. terrible. terrible.

i fled for my daily horse ride, leaving it humming menacingly in the wool jumpers. an hour and a half later, i gingerly stepped underneath it, into the bathroom, and listened. silence. nothing. THANK GOD. i walked upstairs expecting to find a lilac, molten plastic lump but instead i found it perfectly formed but thank baby jesus and angels of the world, silent and still, to my enormous relief.

and that my bestests, is that. i shall NEVER use it again. i shall revert back to simple old fashioned ways.

i now have to find a way to get rid of it. i am not climbing meru or kili. (to throw it off a cliff like in The Gods Must Be Crazy) in any case, if i did throw it off a cliff, i am sure it will be discovered when the aliens come and take over the world a million years from now. they will pick it up and ponder, "hmmmmm. Bozoid Two Six, look what i found? what do you think This is? a telephonic brain reading device?" and mistakenly press the "on" button with their froggy suction fingers. . . . . .they would, in all likeliness, have to laser beam the fuck out of it, while giving each other the "V" sign...

toodely old toot, y'all. bisous X.X.X. thunderingly real ones. x j

vuvuzelas and evil clamping men...

2010-07-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

tan ta rah!

i'm back, blogging babies, from out of space. and it's good to be back, like gary glitter sang.

and did you? did you hang my picture on your wall?

blah.

i survived the tsunami. just. almost in one piece. flaked out on an empty wind swept beach near an empty town, sort of wrapped around a sturdy piece of driftwood, like sea weed, staring dumbstruck around me. and one white kikoi stained for life with ceasar's purple blood lying carelessly next to me.

i am sitting on the hill contemplating eight weeks of holidays ahead. how glorious is that? it'll be like all the others. fires at night. riding in wintry mornings and lilac twilights. drinking more hot milo than is sensible and thinking thinking thinking until i fall asleep and before i know it, i'll be back at school and the cushions still won't be covered.

having not written for a while, this might take some practice. do not adjust your sets.

you'd think i'd have a stack of things to say. . . as high as the stack of books next to my bed which i intend to read over the hols. delicious.

maybe it's easier to just make a list:

1. we have a goat. a chief from lake natron gave it to safari craig for a present. lake natron is where the wild things are - wild and windswept and remote. the goat is little and white and bleats. a lot. i suspect it isn't used to this cold hill. it comes from desert country. safari craig isn't here, obviously. the safari season is in full tilt. but he did have the sense to send a message on a cleft stick (ok from his sat phone) warning me of its arrival and saying to please not eat it until he gets home in when, september? daughter is appalled at the thought and would've quickly become heidi on the hill in no time. so i have moved it to the otherside of the hill. near nyamuhanga's house. in order to save it from sure death - by wrapping a vuvuzela round its ears. oh that's next item.

2. the vuvuzelas. . . what hideous inventions. i confiscated the yellow one today with more than vague threats of violence to the next sub adult who sounds one on this here hill. anyway. the vuvuzelas can be buried now that bafana bafana are out and ghana. who cares who wins now.

3.) some *(&^%$ tried to clamp the car in town today claiming i had parked it crookedly. there isn't even a line there, for christ's blinking sake. clingy beetle (3rd born and girl) was marvelous. as the arguing on the street became fiercer along with the swelling crowd, with me threatening to phone "my lawyer" and the shop owner hurling abuse in swahili as fast as a black mamba, her lower lip began to wobble and she began to wail. (with no encouragement from me either like at police road blocks and with border crossing bullying tactics.) the gathering crowd for once was on our side. i managed to furrow my brow and look like evita peron on the stand. and squeeze out a few crocodile tears. i furiously stammered at the crooked clamping man "now look what you've done. you've made the child cry!" the hairdresser looked out from her dukka and said "call your lawyer. call your lawyer." the evil clamper eventually relented. either because all his cronies had done a runner and he faced the crowd alone or because he had a heart. i like to think it was the latter.

we headed straight out of town after that, swearing we wouldn't ever go back, bought a teddy bear from mohammed's store near home and had a sobering few cups of coffee.

yes. so i'm back.

this feels weird.

next time i'll write about love and The Vibrator Incident.

toodely old toot y'all, bisous X.X.X. wintry by the fire ones. x j

tsunami warning

2010-06-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

i'm on a roller coaster, people. solo. but one with no rails, with unforeseen dips and curves....we are heading into the last three weeks of school. the work load is of tsunamic (is that even a word?) proportions. i tend to be like an ostrich with her head in the sand. who isn't? madame M (the french mistress) that's who. she had her reports done literally in the third week after the hols. what could she possibly write about, i pondered? accents? vocabulaire? la revolution? beats me.

i spend my days at school wandering from one exam room to the next, sort of lost. dreamy. sieve brained. finding odd (as in strange, irrelevant) jobs to do that aren't remotely linked to the on coming tsunami. like sorting out the giant chess set outside the office (which, i might add, has been annoying me for ten months). poetry flows out of me. reams and reams of it. in blue curly ink. time on my hands? write poetry. fix the chess set. oh um...sigh..what else? blog? yes! as i eye out the pile of unmarked English Language Paper 2's lying belligerently on my desk. this is not going to end nicely. there are reports, the end of term magazine, next year's objectives (NEXT YEARS? who the hell knows that already? madam m, that's who. sigh. the planet might well be spinning the other way round next year for pete's sake) not so, according to mr nyamota, who is being surprisingly kind and patient. the truth is i have absolutely no idea what my objectives will be. aucune idee. zippo. zero. oh well. i'll just wing it. make it up. and then decide next year.

reports. what to say? well done X. he must have done something good along the way, although it's not at all apparent. biscuits and jolly juice all round. congratulations Y, we're so pleased you're leaving. here's a cheap little plastic medal for you. best of british luck, old chap. or: i would advise you to marry off M as soon as possible. there is no hope. you're wasting your money.

and if this isn't enough i have decided at the very last minute to put on a Julius Caesar production...trying to teach students to stab and die magnificently. conjuring up ways to spill liters of blood (water balloons filled with watery tomato sauce?) all ideas welcome, oh bestests. we're going maasai. shukas. spears. ostrich (apt i thought) feather head dresses. beads. twinklies. car tyre sandals. all terrifically roman, really.

the fact is there is an entirely different world in my head to the one spinning around me.

oh. my. god. this is so going to get ugly. everyone else has left the beach, runnin' wide eyed, except me. and my loyal horse. the sea looks strangely empty. the reef is exposed. the dogs have fled. the elephants have run up to the high ground. yachts are spinning the wrong way round.

and me?

i'm dreamily writing poetry in the sand.

(i work better under pressure. i work better under pressure. i work better under pressure.)

(i am brilliant. i am brilliant. i am brilliant. i am brilliant. i am brill-----)

by christ, i had better get on with it or i am history.

(is that the time? oh. off for dinner at the neighbours. can't be late now)

that said, toodely old toot oh best beloveds. bisous X.X.X. extremely poetic ones. extremely. x j

borderlines.

2010-06-01T04:06:00.001-07:00

guess where i've been?

too right.

mrs pop's flowers....who could stay away?

but i stayed on the borderline, on the boundary road. it's the brightest field anyway. wouldn't you just love to run in there and lay yerself down and stare up at the blue through the pink? i would. but no no no. i stay on the tracks... life's about dreamin' in any case.

i rode there twice yesterday. hah. who wouldn't have? first time on De La Rey, aka The General, Finest Hoss On The Planet. well. the horse is south african and aptly named after Jacobus Herculaas De La Rey (fondly known as koos), a famous Boer general. I don't think it's a very popular name down south these days.

"...interest in the life and career of De La Rey has recently made a resurgence in South Africa as a result of a song entitled "De la Rey", by the Afrikaans folk singer Bok van Blerk. The song is about a Boer soldier who, towards the end of the 2nd Boer War, after Lord Kitchener had implemented his scorched earth policy, and had burned the Boer's farm to the ground and put his wife and child in a concentration camp facing almost certain death, in desperation and contemplating the destruction of the Boer nation, calls for General De La Rey, a powerful figure even amongst other successful Boer Generals, to lead the Boer Volk (people) to victory.
The Department of Arts and Culture responded to a request for a statement on the song's potentially subversive lyrics[4][5][6] saying that the song was "in danger of being hijacked by a minority of right-wingers", defending the composers' right to free speech and citizens' right to oppose the government through constitutional means, but warning that "those who incite treason, whatever methods they employ, might well find themselves in difficulties with the law."[7] The Democratic Alliance opposition party responded by saying that the song was not nearly as potentially subversive as ANC president Jacob Zuma's song Umshini wami (Zulu for "bring me my machine [gun]").[8][9] - WIKIPEDIA

"...He is generally regarded as the bravest of the Boer generals during the Second Boer War and as one of the leading figures of Boer independence. As a guerrilla, his tactics proved extremely successful. De la Rey opposed the war until the last, but when he was once accused of cowardice during a Volksraad session, he replied that if the time for war came, he would be fighting long after all those clamoring for war had given up. This proved to be the case..." - WIKIPEDIA

still. you can't change a horse's name. bad luck. and i don't mess with that kinda stuff. too much of it lurking just behind the door, in the dark corners, tip toeing behind you when you aren't looking. so de la rey aka The General it will stay. and what a fine horse he is.

the old horse is named rhino. go figure. as i said, you can't change a horse's name. no sirree. he stumbles stiffly along, floppy eared but armed with a lion's heart. he always warms up at the end. i love the sound of his shod feet cantering along the mud packed roads between the maize, wind in my hair, sun on my back. who wouldn't feel like the luckiest person alive?

so toodely old toot, y'all. hell, i might even head back to those flowers and cross the borderline this time, on The General. he ain't no coward. wouldn't you?

bisous y'all X X X "lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff" ones...x j.

ngorobob waffle.

2010-05-29T10:38:00.001-07:00

lately i have succumbed to a dizzy feeling of gratitude.

maybe its the time of year or something.

or the moon.

but really, everything is very, very shiny.

it's the yellow-flowers-in-the-green time of year.

cusp of the season.

everything seems very, very beautiful.

and clear cut.

wild flowers and butterflies and moons and turquoise twilights laced with winter crispness.

with all of africa gleaming every which way.

kilimanjaro looms large and benign, as though it's just across the valley. totally sparkling out mt. meru. typical. such a twinklin' tart.

actually it's torrid. don't be fooled. don't climb it.

i like looking at mountains from the bottom or from afar. i possess no catholic desire to get to The Top. safari c climbed it last year; via The Western Breach, people. (the hard way, in case you're wondering, as opposed to the Coca Cola Easy Peasy Route). mind you, he was just doing his job. guiding some wageni, some unsuspecting texans.

i was lying on the beach in pangani as he was about to summit, looking like The Michelin Man.

i realized i was the winner in this case. yes. biscuits all round and very large noddy badges pinned onto my winner pin striped blazer. (also noted to self in proverbial black book.) i won. i felt extremely smug by being at sea level and not in some puny, pathetic little tent, buffeted by furious mountain winds and freezing my tits off.

not much to report from this lofty abode perched on the ngorobob hill. apart from seasons shifting along with colours. mrs popadopalis's flower farm is ablaze. and she emailed me to say i was no longer allowed to ride on the farm. because, as i have recently discovered, carlos, my dear spanish vaquero friend from west kilimanjaro, saw nina recently and said oh! how stupendously marvelous it was to ride ACROSS the flower fields. or maybe he actually said THROUGH the flower fields. in his spanenglish. she blanched. between her greek english and his span-oh-don't-worry-about-him-he's-from-barcelona-english, there was a bad error in communication. i always stick to the tracks. godsakes. i am a farmer's daughter. i have since being doing some serious arse licking to no avail. i shall nevertheless persist. and carlos said he would try to correct the situation. quickly, i hope, before the flowers fade and wilt.

oh wait. news hot off the press (well. at least a week old or so): we found fresh elephant droppings in a valley not far from here. really. just outside kisongo. this is remarkable. what on earth was an elephant doing there? wandering from tarangire to visit monduli mountain, perhaps? or maybe fulfilling a deep seated need for a new view? who knows. but there the poo was. undeniably leviathan.

and people, i am on Half Term. a blissful situation. and counting the weeks until the two month long "summer" hols. (it's really winter this side of the globe).

enough waffle.

toodely toot, then, y'all and bisous X.X.X. dizzy butterfly ones x j.

let's.

2010-05-14T23:57:00.000-07:00

i want to write funny but circumstances demand that i don't.

a friend of mine just died of cerebral malaria. these things shouldn't happen these days.

the thing is that last saturday i saw her, at rugby, stoically sipping some rose wine, which she couldn't finish, recently arrived from lake tanganyika, burning with fever. i told her to take malaria dawa (medicine) but she said oh no, it's not malaria, tests are negative. i've taken anti biotics, i'll be fine. i'll be fine. a week later she's gone. just like that. fresh and only 30.

cerebral malaria. blackwater fever.

little nantus, who is nine, the nephew of my friend, looked at me with his freckled nose and sky blue eyes and said, " i thought it was a dream. but it's just life, hey?"

i was stopped by a policeman yesterday and he asked, where are you going? i said to see my friend whose sister just died of malaria and she was only 30. and he said, oh pole sana. they caught it too late, eh? yeah, i said, too late. just too late.

so not too many words today. not too many words. p'raps a poem sent by t:

The Wanderer's Night-song

On all hilltops

There is peace,

In all treetops

You will hear

Hardly a breath.

Birds in the woods are silent.

Just wait, soon

You too will rest.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

still. i'm here. i'm still here. on the little round ngorobob hill in the little pink house, y'all.

let's, as jim morrison said, remember to have our fun before the whole shithouse goes up in flames, eh?

let's. oh let's.

so toodely oh best beloveds, bisous X.X.X. startlingly real ones x j

rugby.

2010-05-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

(first born 2nd from Left. second born with black eye on RHS)

miranda is right. the rains haven't gone. at all.

but still. they've taken on a wintery tone. i can wear my snazzy little leather jacket these days. nights are nippy. there.

and the hills are scattered with wild flowers. always a sign. always. (of seasons changing, silly)

and it's sunday. i promised i would lie in this morning. but no. eyes flicked open at seven. impossible. coffee beckoned. and here i am.

the week-end began with an all out friday night. all out as in wheels off. too much blackberry vodka, culminating in uncontrollable weeping and me being particularly obstreperous and eating pork. pork? i don't eat pork. but there ya go. so i woke up on saturday morning looking like a bus had reversed repeatedly over my face. my head felt like it had a large and tight elastic band tightly wound around it. not good. oh no. not good at all. after sending apologetic sms's to very nice and forgiving friends, i dragged myself off to watch the rugby - twigas (giraffe in swahili - the tanzanian side) against the cheetahs (the best rugby side from kenya, with 16 national players). it was, once again, a total massacre. something like 67 to 0. but oh so impressive to watch. i sat on the edge of the emerald green field drinking soda, sprite and bitters, with very large dark sun glasses (to cover the mashed up face) and silly high heel shoes. completely inappropriate for marching around on a muddy rugby field. (you know, heels sinking in mud and blah). still. they match the snazzy leather jacket and look terrifically cool with my jeans and make me ever so tall. i sat lots, though.

i find that these days i actually watch the rugger. before i would chit chat, admire people's jewels, rugby player's legs and vaguely know the score. now i'm fierce about it. i tell people to go away, can't talk now, watching the game, der! but i still can't tell you which position is which. why they have line outs. why they randomly decide to scrum. who is a forward, fly half, scrum half, center or where they have to stand. and as for those coded numbers when they throw the ball into the line out, flummaxed.

BUT i know what a forward pass is (clearly the ref yesterday didn't) and i know you've got to run like hell and get the ball over the try line then kick it over the goal posts. (oh and not entirely sure of how many points you get for it.) nevertheless. i love yelling and whooping and shouting "tackle him", filled with violent intention, from the sidelines.

rugby game rules equate staring into a land rover engine for me. i just can't understand or remember them. they must just work.

first born won man of the match in his curtain raiser...(man? skinny boy of the match really.) he was completely brilliant. scoring a try and kicking accurate conversions with bare feet. for this outstanding achievement he won himself a second soda. second born scored 2 goals in his football match in moshi and swam sterlingly, apparently. couldn't be in two places at once. so all round sporting success for the picannins of the hill. all bloody marvelous. terrifically proud. third born just skipped about looking pretty and eating lots of ice creams. (for lunch and dinner, i think? also lara preferred chocolate ice cream for dinner until miranda took her away from me. what?)

oh. if you want to know why miranda hasn't blogged for ages it's because she's been cleaning her picture window....i think she's finally realized she's been cleaning The Wrong Side.

autumnal spinning

2010-04-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

i love it when seasons are on the cusp.

they're ever so illusive here. guileful. you can hardly tell.

unless you're me.

sometimes i'm jealous of the northern hemisphere spring.

it's just so definite. so obvious.

here seasons declare themselves with a japanese hint. a nudge. a slight change in light angles and shadows. a double edged clarity. african winters.

it's that time of year again....just when the rains are tailing off, the grass is green, rudely lush and wild yellow flowers dot the green, like little fallen tender stars.

and flame lillies . oh flame lillies. so overtly hand painted. they're mostly yellow here. in zambia they're red.

i think i prefer red....but cain't complain 'bout the yella.

the moon is crisp and clear cut and i wish i were her. i wake in the early hours with the dogs barking. i stare out the loft windows, marveling at the star packed sky scapes. which an hour later turn into raging storms.

the stars are spikey, irredescent and clear.....crystal.

and me. i have wings at my feet.

i'm dreaming.

i'm smiling.

a lot.

even my students are noticing.

is it that obvious?

"but miss you look so happy? why?"

just coz. ok?

coz life is sweet right now, k?

just because i see the way the clouds skud across the blue. i notice the flame lilly on the way to school next to the gnarly balanites. i notice the angle of the moon. and the sun. who is edging her way slyly north. poetry comes easily. curly sapphire blue ink words splodge simply and prettily into my secret note book.

and i have discovered the sudanese poet of love.

the sky is buzzing with swallows and swifts and buzzards hanging in the last twilight wind at the tippy top of the ngorobobs.

yesterday i was smoking outside the school gates. a young maasai strolled by with his cattle smiling happily, amusingly at me. i smiled happily back thinking "you see? it isn't just me. nice maasai man." until i looked down and realized i was standing in a big fresh cow poo.

i exhaust myself by containing myself.
no no no no you can't whoop here, man.
wrap it.

you try marking A Level coursework under similar conditions.

seriously.

toodely toot oh bestests. bisous X.X.X. moon sliced burnt orange autumnal ones x j

time musings

2010-04-16T23:33:00.000-07:00

when i woke up, easter was miles behind me, winter was edging through the door, disguised in veils of rain, but yup, that surely is her pale foot wedged in the gap and had i blogged? no. had i recorded my music? no. had i recovered the torn cushions? no. have i thrown out all my sparkly indian clothes? no. in fact, i bought more from the markets.

but yes, i have nearly finished the jack kerouac novel. he, crazy neal cassady and a smattering of other beatniks who kept the faith, have recently arrived in mexico, glittery eyed and wild.

and school is about to start. monday. god. school. monday. mondays will be Real Mondays again. which means sundays will be Real Blue Sundays again. and week-ends will be sweet relief. but then again it also means that the summer hols (which are really winter ones here but lovely and long) are only ten weeks away. and have i read julius caeser? no. and have i finished death of a salesman? no siree, i have not.

what would it be like if Time had a pause button? and a delete button. but no rewind. but you were only allowed to press them three times per life. . . and for as long as you liked? and you could press play when it turned nasty or as W.C Fields said, when things were filled with "eminent peril".

of course this would all work terribly well if other people would kindly co operate with your pause and delete too. but if not, golly, things could be even more perilous than they presently are. "gosh!" (napoleon dynamite)

i know where i would pause my time. and i certainly know which bits i would delete. retrospectively, naturally and herein lies the inherent problem with this idea. one has to think carefully about this, ya know. repercussions. consequences and all. time is no flippant thing. mostly it feels like it's on fast forward. was it only 30 odd years ago when cowboys wore tight white pants and thought it cool? ? and magnum PI was It? when we wore lee jeans, checked shirts, hand painted silver high tops, tied pony tails on the side of our heads and wore cherry red lip gloss, boogying on down to Heart Of Glass and Funky Town in crappy little backwater towns?

oh this rhetorical blathering is doing my head in.

time to move on.

taa ra then, from a rainy wet ngorobob hill, bisous X.X.X. lightening flickered ones x j

roots.

2010-04-09T23:19:00.000-07:00

not to sound dentist obsessed, but...i most likely have one nerve left in my head. ok. say, three.

i saw one of the last being pulled....a long delicate pink nerve, nicely curved around a hair thin needle. i. saw. it.

everyone always says ask for gas ask for gas. she doesn't have any, people. only lovely injections.

i will not lie on the chair without being assured that i will be injected up to the hilt. even for dead teeth. i told her, "it's not for my teeth. it's for my head."

my gums must surely look like a pin cushion.

as the root canal process starts, i close my eyes and concentrate on not frowning. i dream of the soft, velvety bits behind my horse's ears, the part i love to kiss. it works swimmingly well until the little macedonian says, " can you feel this? this? this?" and i go, " ah ah" sort of shaking my head...and then she says, "oh it's really deep now."

WHY? do i need to know this? no indeed i don't. straight away i remember the x ray image of that needle sitting deep and long right through the middle of a tooth. dentists should all take the vow of silence unless asked. unless anyone really actually wants to know what is going on. she insists i look with a mirror as i sort of cower, blanche and baulk at the idea. macedonians are an insistent people, i've come to discover.

i've decided this flourish of dentist visits is all about overcoming deep rooted phobia and fears. about mind practice. like elephant. i've grown up in africa, amongst the herds, bobbing on little chinese boats on the zambezi river amongst hippo and crocodiles, watching herds swim across that great river, their trunks above the water, like teapots; lucid memories of being chased by elephant along windy tracks through forests. i've come to learn that elephant don't need to stick to the road. they cut corners, taking trees out as they tear along behind, their blood curdling screams chilling to the core and full of serious intention. i've watched them under the moon, hoovering up muchenja fruits (their favourite sweeties), and being charged INSIDE my little hut, left cowering naked in a corner, half in half out my house, her great wise forehead resting against a roof beam, the little thatched roof wobbling under the moon; waiting with the stillness of a statue for the mouse to run. i didn't. i was frozen.

make no mistake, i LOVE elephant, the great symbol of this continent's soul. over the years i've developed a deep respect for them, not dissimilar to the respect i feel about dentists and pilots, but am naturally terrified. distance is everything. this has been born from experience: chinese, czech dental encounters in socialist states (where they use tools from the garage next door), years of elephant encounters, where revenge is fiercely waged for years of indiscriminate poaching.

so it was with a strange sense of trepidation and fascination that i visited nkhasis and raziki over easter - two domesticated elephant who live west of kilimanjaro, with their trainers dirk and ricarda. dirk walks amongst the wild herds, he reads their signs, he feels completely at ease amongst them. he is the only person i know who has bolted on an elephant. more than once. he postulates wisdoms like " never fall off. just never fall off."

i watched dirk ask nkhasis to lie down - with only his voice.

she heaved herself onto her side and lay as still as a mountain as he walked up to her. her eyes were closed, at peace, as if dreaming. i watched trust in action.

i watched him holding "hands" with her.

i watched a strange and beautiful communication which quite suddenly i yearned to know.

and finally when nkhasis strolled up to me, my heart in my throat, i had to swallow the fear, breathe deeply. i stood stock still. open eyed and smiling. (breathe janelle, breathe. oh shit i'm wearing my mother's ivory bangle. oh shit my father used to shoot elephant. ) i extended my hand out to her stretched out trunk. i blew into her trunk. she wrapped it around me and kissed me five times, loud heart bursting schmacking definite kisses, which left heart shaped mud marks all over me....it made my heart swell and roar. i felt the emotion rise, like a marble blue wave. i gently placed my hand on her forehead. she closed her eyes and sighed. i haven't ever felt such peace. such forgiveness. such union. such understanding. such trust. i walked some place i haven't ever been before.

my soul was stirred and a myriad of butterflies, stars and wings rose, fluttering around me into the still golden twilight.

toodely oh bestests. bisous X.X.X. great, schmacky elephantine ones. x j

the show must go on

2010-04-07T22:34:00.000-07:00

the rain is here. everything is plush, green and mushy.

the hill is misty most mornings.

it's bliss.

i need to sleep more. holidays have hardly been restful. no sirree.

so much to tell.

but must rush off to the little macedonian dentist for some more lovely root canal therapy.

love it.

i'll just fall asleep on the lovely rocking chair as she rips nerves from my head.

late already.

back later, oh bestests, bisous X.X.X. ephereal misty ones. x j

heavy things

2010-04-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

(warning: negative, dark content.)

you'd have thought i'd know it by now. never to be excrutiatingly happy.

but it's so hard not to be. even when you know the other side of the coin isn't quite as, well, nice. and there's simply always another side to everything.

and i KNOW it isn't rocket science, ok? but:

bad things always happen afterwards. they just do, in my experience. look what happened to baby jesus. i mean, did he see that comin'?

i think i'm getting quite good at this death thingymabob. that fella with the dark hood, pale faced and hooked nosed, casually wearing a glinting scythe. i ain't scared of him. in fact, he has much to offer so i am discovering. he's becoming blandly familiar which i am beginning to think is a good thing.

the night up on wind torn west meru was exactly how i had described it. and boy did we scare ourselves silly. a swore she glimpsed a figure in dark nun's clothes glide past the star smattered window as i was regaling the lamu ghost story, which had followed swiftly from the zanzibar salome's ghost story. i could've vomited from fear. it's truly amazing how you can scare yourself. how you can conjure up ghosts. it's too easy.

yes. we sipped vodka and shared secrets. and listened to the wind rattling the roof and sat quietly with thoughts and dreams, our heads to one side, saying "hmmmmm" a lot. it was good. almost perfect.

quite suddenly easter is here. third born lies feverish, dosed up, watching rubbish robin hood. and i am worried about her. the fever refuses to break. it's so high it melted the chocolate bunny i gave to her to try and cheer her up. it now sits hopefully in the fridge with first and second born eyeing it with evil intentions. safari c has headed south to bury his father.

things could be better. i feel a little un - moored. (sounds better than unhinged, which quite possibly i am?) yes. un - moored. drifting. sort of tossed about. ain't nothin' new, though, is it? yes but is it? 'fess up. internal windscreen wipers are on top speed, swiping away bad, dark little thoughts. i think i rest in the in between place. waiting for the new ones to miraculously implant themselves.

(my god. b is right. blogging IS self indulgent.)

i could write about the sky at night. about how the hills fall away in relief. about histories and the godless world. about shadow puppet shows under the stars and searing red aloes on a washed out zululand winter's day. but not tonight. not tonight.

and here's the strangest thing. i believe everything about love. everything. the whole messy spaghetti bowl thing of it. still.

but by god, sometimes i hate it.

(windscreen wipers on. windscreen wipers on, windscreen wipers on. windscreen wi---)

impossible things.

2010-03-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

the big rains are here. mountains in the sky and purple storms abound. the night sky flickers with lightening, close and far. kilimanjaro is sprinkled in snow and i am glad that i'm not anywhere near the top.

camping on the hill has been abandonned because pk has chicken pox. so that's that then.

i am headed to west meru tommorrow to go and visit a good friend. she lives in a tent on stilts, just underneath the jagged peaks of meru, with sweeping vistas of northern maasailand. she's a writer and a hunter. we will sit late into the night, telling stories of love and ghosts while the wind howls outside and her dogs lie curled next to the fireplace. we'll right all the wrongs of the world and our hearts. we'll laugh about things in the past, grow wide eyed about things today and whisper about things to come whilst we sip her swedish liquorice vodka.

i will fall sleep, warm and safe, in the guest hut, with the windows jam packed with stars or storms, lulled by the wind and dream extraordinary and impossible things.

toodely old toot, y'all. bisous X.X.X. tender dream tinted ones. x j

camping yarns.

2010-03-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

(kilimanjaro sprinkled in snow)

the kids have this idea that they want to camp at the top of the hill. sounds like fun. sounds like a reasonable request. sounds marginally adventurous.

yes. yes.

oh but wait. what about those witchcraft murders? the ones where they chop your tongue out. what about the jambazis? with their knives and guns moving stealthily at night under the half moon.?

actually no. no.

no. bloody hell. no.

actually.

they can camp under the acacia near the kitchen. near the house. it'll be just as much fun....and i can quickly and easily kill baddies and save them if they're closer. going through this tedious, and perhaps imaginative, decision process made me think back to my childhood...when helen (bestest ever friend) and i wanted to camp in the garden in zululand. the garden was enormous. full of hidey holes and hedges and fish ponds and forests. still. it was in the garden. not on the top of the hill in the wilds....ish. but i remember eventually the garden, with porgy (my faithful old bullterrier) sleeping at the door, became way too tame for us.

we wanted The Dam....where our old raft was moored (marooned at one point during the seven year drought). The Dam, which hid the biggest barbel known in zululand, or so we reckoned. The Dam where leguvaans slid crocodile like into the tepid muddied darkness, where we dropped our hooks threaded with earth worms and the mud was slimy and black and squelched through your toes. The Dam where bilharzia probably thrived, where the vervets chattered in the dark shade during the white hot noon. it was our wilderness. it was where we felt most alive. because we could scare ourselves silly. yes. we wanted to camp there and move the kitchen down the hill. we were livid when my parents said no. enraged.

perhaps it was just after the time when the mad man had run through the sugar farm, naked and oiled (so you couldn't catch him. he slipped through your grip like a snake), on a moonless night, setting fire to the sugar cane. everytime the cane cutters ran to put out the fire he would attack. one woman lost an ear. someone else ended up being pangaed (slashed with the kalemba). he wouldn't come near the light and stayed in the darkness. racing over the dry hills leaving a trail of fires and blood behind him. my mother and i were alone in the house. we had closed the doors and turned on all the lights. every single one. to chase the darkness. we had armed ourselves with polo sticks and aerosol cans of doom. we could see the fires burning and hear the shouting. then the silence. then the sliding door opening. my mother called out "Ron!" but no answer. someone had come into the house. i remember how she walked down the passageway, me gingerly following behind, my heart thundering in my ears, trying to dissuade her. it wasn't the mad man, oiled and naked. it was my father who had come to get his gun and had left again.

i am not sure the mad man was ever caught. so no wonder my parents didn't really want helen and i camping at The Dam. still. we didn't think of those things then. thank god.

we stayed in the garden and told ghost stories instead and talked about camping at The Dam while porgy snored at the door and growled at my father when he came to check we were ok.

let's see if the kids wear me down until i say yes. in which case i will most likely end up camping too...and you know how i LOVE camping...

toodely toot oh best beloveds. bisous X.X.X. frangipani scented ones. x j

gone to the dogs tonight....

2010-03-04T06:07:00.000-08:00

it's been a bayaad old week. that's for sure.

it's been a bayaad old sad old week.

it's always like this.

the bad after the good. it's always wise to watch your back. not that you can do anything about it, mind.

i had a wild time in the west - west kilimanjaro - over the week-end, playing guitar, watching horse dances under the moon. singing cowgal songs. watching the stars twirl their stuff above my tent and elephants rumble far away in the silver. my head felt clean, my heart light. i didn't want the next week to happen. i didn't, no siree. now i know why.

monday rolled in, like the bad penny. reports. newsletters and thangs. lesson plans. blah. parents evening. i felt heavy. mr mugambi leaned against my desk, rolling his eyes mumbling about too much work, not enough time, parents evening. we laughed. he always makes me laugh. he was born west of mt kenya and told stories of his ma who is still alive. maybe it's something in the water there, he intimated once. we sighed and headed to our classrooms to start the long, tedious chore of meeting with the parents. i finished up at seven. francis (mr mugambi) left with ben, the ICT teacher, and headed into town for a beer in downtown mbauda, at a local bar on the barabara (main road) to chill out after a long and stressy hot day. the smell of nyama choma (roasted meat) on the air, the clink of kilimanjaro beers, laughter and swahili music spinning around the fairy lights.

around seven thirty eight the bar erupted with some heavily armed robbers. bullets and crashing glass sprayed the air.

a stray bullet hit francis in the stomach. the bar lady took one in the head. the robbers stole all the telephones. phones for fucksakes. ben managed to find a daladala (taxi) to rush francis to hospital, accompanied by some KK Security Guards. he was told that a police report is needed before they could treat him. they left francis at the hospital and rushed off to find this "documentation".

in the meantime, francis died. from internal bleeding. alone. without his family. without his friends. without anyone to hold his warm hand while he made the transition. i hate this. i hate it. he was a good man. a very very good man. africa needs good men like him.

yesterday morning the school was silent and full. only the sound of soft crying filled the corridors. everyone loved francis. he has left three children and a wife in nairobi. his body will leave for kenya tommorrow. he will be buried in meru, north of nairobi towards the end of next week. he will be buried before his old mother, living near mt kenya.

yesterday and today have been sad sad sad. i am not writing this to ask for apologies or condolences. really. i. am. not. i am ok. i am just angry. and sad. and shocked. this continent needs men like francis. it needs people who care for their family, who care for children and who think of a brighter future. as one of the students wrote - how could his own african brothers shoot him down? why? for his phone? the police do nothing. mbauda is full of guns these days.

and then mama kuku. she grew up in the shadows of mt kilimanjaro on a farm in the early 1950's. in the early days of post independent tanzania, all farms were nationalized. her family lost everything. she didn't turn into a bitter person. she stayed. she has dedicated the rest of her life here to improving the lives of street children, lepers, to those who have so little. to those who have nothing. she is now seventy. her husband died last year. last week she returned home after a fund raising evening, raising money for those who have nothing.

they were waiting for her. the baddies. the jambazis. in the dark with their guns. waiting. they dragged her out of her car. beat her up. beat a 70 year old lady up. broke her arms. broke her ribs. smashed her head with the butts of their guns. stole the money and left her crushed, broken and bleeding, crumpled on the ground, yet alive.

this town ain't cut out for lilly livered cowboys. no sirree. your heart must be strong. watch yer back. watch yer back.

i'm too tired to even philosophize about everything. about death. about anything. no words. i tend to read poetry and listen to music and watch the summer storms crack the early evening gloom. i lean my head against my horse. and i think of better things, ya know, nicer things.

safari njema francis mugambi. you'll be missed more than you ever knew. at least you don't have to write all these reports now. . . jeez. god speed, bwana, god speed.

bisous, oh bestests X.X.X. sad salty torn ones. x j

good intentions....

2010-02-18T03:22:00.000-08:00

look ma no hands....no saddle.

so it's a rainy lunch time up on the hill and i am blissfully on half term holidays.

god it's luxury....time to do just what i want to do. even if that means pressing my nose against the windows and watching this dark storm lash the hill for a good ten minutes.

i intend to watch movies. last night i bagged a documentary on the only REAL cowboys left on the planet - the los californios vaqueros of the baja peninsula. it's called Corazon Vaquero - The Heart Of The Cowboy and it's absolutely magnificent. i want to saddle up a mule and ride into this rattle snake ridden final frontier. horses don't make it there. these people are my people. i know it.

then some robin hood - only because second born insisted - which was disappointing...not even one arrow was shot and Little John didn't kill the sheriff when he had a very good opportunity to finally finish off the unconvincingly evil sheriff of nottingham. i so would've. the finale was District Nine which was brilliant. but it meant that i dreamt of prawns all night - the parktown kind.

i intend to ride horses, which is nothing new, as y'all know. it's what i do second to sleeping and eating. thank god it's raining though because my bottom needs a rest. i've been messing about with some bare back riding, trying to get centered and have a perfect seat. hmmm. i am damaged goods....my poor bum. and next on the list is to play the piano. i have already mastered first movement of one of amadeus's little songs and have bach and clementi lined up next. oh. i intend to "lie in" too.

and let's see. oh. i have a smattering of marking i intend to complete....and should probably try and read something on arthur millar if i am to teach him in the not too distant future. yes. so not a lot to do in the next 4 and a half days. christ.

so, with this schedule in mind, and all these good intentions, after toast and marmite this morning, i strolled along the road to go and visit miranda (not on list) http://thetimesofmiranda.blogspot.com/) - for a coffee, (the kind puts hairs on your chest and keeps you up for days) and a catch up session. we hung out on her verandah, listening to music, watching thousands of butterflies hovering over the acacia...i think there is a butterfly migration going on. she said that her sister in law told her there's hardly any butterflies or bees left in england. that's worrying. is it true, i wonder? i lazily watched her chasing the cows away. it's true. they come and eat her little herb garden and they're really scared of her too. we spoke about blogging and watched the storm clouds building...and we came to a unanimous decision that we need many more comments to keep us going. (nudge nudge, eyebrows wriggling decidedly and uncomfortably in your direction)

i wish i had something deep and meaningful to share but honestly. just nothing nothing nothing. my god. maybe i should just, well, Stop. ? she says in very small bewildered voice.

i could blather on about how first born is in zanzibar with his class on a school trip swimming with dolphins, perusing the spice tour, checking out prison island and the spooky dungeons where recalcitrant slaves were kept. i will confess when he left on the Dar Express to, well, dar es salaam, i said my ten hail marys, summoning up the mother of all mothers. i am not catholic but i learnt this prayer at the convent i attended for school. mary and i are like this (she says crossing her fingers) i sent her packing with all the kids to zanzibar. well. it's not like she's not busy or anything like that...humbly ironing her blue robes. looking serene and beautiful in the mirror and watering her rose garden while glowingly waiting for her next magnificent mercy mission.

hail mary

full of grace.

the lord is with thee.

blessed art thou among women.

blessed is the fruit of thy womb, jesus.

holy mary,

mother of god,

pray for us sinners

now and at the hour of our death

amen. and please go to zanzibar now and make sure the bus doesn;t crash, and that he doesn;t fall off the ferry from dar to zanzibar and please make sure a dirty arab in stone town doesn;t kidnap him and that he doesn;t drown when he swims with the dolphins and that the plane doesn;t crash when he flies home on saturday.

hail mary full of grace i love you. thank you. x ten.

or how second born is annoying the hell out of me with his mates here in the house running riot, leaving popcorn shells in the lounge...how last born left last night to go and watch those goddamned chipmunks at the cinema in njiro and has still not come home. i know where she is...just next door....probably painting her nails and watching mama mia for the 502nd time.

yeah. it's 2:30 in the afternoon. it's raining on the peely green roof and my eyes are heavy after my lunch of a piece of cake covered with lashings of butter lemon icing (not on list) .... i think i shall stumble upstairs for a snooze. (not on list)

just because i can and anyway, didn't john lennon say that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans?

so.

toodely old toot oh bestests, bisous X.X.X. unplanned lemon icing ones with all good intentions. . . x j

ngorobob hill and some...

2010-02-10T10:42:00.000-08:00

call me a gypsy (which is a very good thing in my books. by the by.) but the ngorobob hills are lately a decidedly quirky little place. maybe it's something to do with the elevation. or perhaps it's the clarity of the mornings - meru and kilimanjaro clear as crystal. white skied mornings. laced in very clear gold. it's state of the heart i'm tellin' ya. or maybe it's the way thousands of butterflies hover over the lavender around the house. sparkly and flighty. who knows.

after much contemplation through this particular looking glass i have decided that plastic bottles are out. a no no. they give you cancer (ignore the fact that i am happily smoking myself to death on camel lights. please. just this once and then you can get back up high on your Hyde Park Corner Box.) so The Order has been given that only glass bottles please, are to be filled from the precious rain water collection tank in the courtyard. the thing is, most of the glass bottles are, well, old (ish) vodka bottles....and unfortunately this morning second born took a swig of what he thought was water...and we all know what Thought did, eh?

a rude shock at 7:00 in the morning before school. teeth cleaning stuff.

the newly broken in colt, sukari (sugar in swahili) has toured the house. confidently it would seem. when i wasn't looking. the fact remains that third born was watching mama mia for the 485th time and didn't even look up when the horse walked past her in the lounge.

we have quirky neighbours too.... a transcript from an evening at their house the other night:

ma baker: so oscar (who is about 5) how was your day?

OTB: (oscar tom baker) ooooh i've had a fuckn day.

(one of the fuckn days. OTB in the middle.)

his sister, niamh, who has starred somewhere in this obscure blog because she is third born's best best best best best friend and seven. SEVEN. 7. and OTB's big sister. and because she's well, beautiful. anyway. she reminded the said OTB to apply sun block before heading out to school this morning. his retort was "shut up bitch". i asked his mother where he got this from. she has absolutely no idea. naturally.

i'm tellin' ya.

so, um, toodely toot y'all bestest beloveds. X. X. X. white skied gold laced ones. yeah. x j

singing for the dead people

2010-02-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

hardly an uplifting title for a post. singing for the dead. but that, oh bestest beloveds, is what i found myself unceremoniously doing last night. not to sound too morbid or anything like that, but in the last nine months three arusha musicians have died, corbs being the first, (http://ngorobobhillhouse.blogspot.com/2009/05/happier-days.html) then john kavalo, then xavier, the bass man who owned a bass guitar made from a solid piece of oak. and who was tres snob about music. he was a jazz man supreme. john sang the blues with the black mambas. he would always sing Dylan's caustic "You Gotta Serve Somebody" for me. it was my favourite. he wore a black hat and always had a whisky and a cigarette up on stage with him. he studied rock art in the hills south of tarangire, theorizing passionately and convincingly about shamans and dreams. and well, belted out damned fine blues. and before all of this? he was in advertising in new york city. . .

i received a phone call last week from d, the drummer, asking if i would play at john kavalo's memorial, for xavier who died in paris a few days ago and for corbs. for all the dead people. i looked wearily at my guitar which has lain quiet and still for a good nine months, or thereabouts. apart from the odd drunken tinker out in west kili. i mean, would it even be a safe and sensible thing to do, i mused, all things considered? i gingerly picked it up yesterday afternoon, tuned the axe up and felt the strings bite into my soft fingers. yeah. sure. i can do this. corbs taught me the super glue trick. line each chord playing finger with super glue. you can play for days like this.

the event had been supremely planned. a film of john's cremation at the hindu crematorium opened the gig, flickering black and white images, accompanied by a recording of The Doors singing Riders On The Storm. this was followed by liza and the cello player, treating us to j.s. bach. she said the music would talk for itself and it did.

and then the banjo man....who gave explicit instructions to the awaiting band before he perfectly plinked "Malaika" (Angel), a popular swahili song. no one knows whether it originated in tanzania or kenya. either way it didn't really matter until it became popular and there was money to be made. he was a hard act to follow.

but thank god i didn't have to come on after mama charlotte who has to be nina simon re incarnate. she awoke the spirits, no doubt about that. and told us all to look after our babies. she can make waterfalls flow upstream. she is married to pete, an ex black panther who left america in the 60's after doing some bad things. he wanted to go back a few years ago to visit his mother who was dying but was denied entry. after all these years. it must have been a very bad thing he did back then. he was once asked about his life with the black panthers and he said, " when you're young you do crazy things. crazy things. you think you can change the world," and smiled a crooked smile. i sometimes see him in shoprite. his dreadlocks and heavily embroidered african shirts and his clear, crisp american accent. it's always surprising.

arusha hasn't ever heard music like last night. i have never snapped a plectrum before. and i haven't even told you about the scottish lass, who stood alone on stage, a sophie dahl dead ringer (when she was still fat), in black, poised, brimming with emotion, who sang Auld Lang Synde with bob and the pianist. i fell like a cut down tree. along with the rest of the crowd.

the angels were happy last night. at least, that's what it felt like.

toodely, y'all. bisous X.X.X. deeply musical ones. x j

ngorobob summer

2010-01-28T10:36:00.001-08:00

i think you know everything about the hill now. well nearly everything. almost.

how the winds scream off kilimanjaro in the winter, the droughts, how the rain batters the little pink house in the summer so i have to run in between the attic windows with buckets and a cold box to catch the leaks which change depending on the direction of the wind; the black jagged mountain, the horses and the angle of the moon, how she slides over the hill, dragging the stars behind her. the rainbows. . . the flies. . .the moon on the warm flag stones in the courtyard.

yes. i think you nearly know it all by now. how it becomes unbearably hot between the short rains and the long rains. the still nights twinkling with crickets. and the barely perceptible wind-

its warm fingers twirling the end of your hair, touching your sweaty cheek, and ruffling the horse's mane. when its so hot it's best to ride after six, gallop up Bakers Hill, and watch the ember glow of a day way below you. the world spinning all around you. and i can be queen of the castle and you're the dirty rotten bah and humbug rascal. and all you can do is sigh.

but what you don't know is that lucas, our neighbour, the man with the long maize field next to our shamba (small plot of land) said that our horses had been eating his maize. no they haven't, i said. oh yes they have, he said. only one way to find out. let's ask mwali, the groom. he says of course it wasn't our horses, it was mzee william's cows. mzee william said of course it wasn't his cows. it was your horses, lucas insisted. i saw their tracks and their droppings, lucas said. well. maybe, i mused watching a bee in the lavender, but maybe it was the donkeys from the bottom of the hill? maybe? you never know. and you don't know that the little colt has been broken in and i have ridden him.

what you don't know is that different mosquitoes give you different itchies. no two are the same. you'll see.

what you don't know is that this evening in the late twilight, i found a little glow worm in between the cracks in the wall, blinking under an almost full moon in the courtyard and i still think they're magic and want to sleep in a jar ( a very large one, of course) full of them. weird, i know. "just put your feet down, child, because you're all grown up now," i hear in my head.

what you don't know is that sometimes i feel i could burst out of my skin and leave it blowing in the wind. and be gone in a flash. in a breath. i feel that alive.

and that's a fact.

toodely toot, y'all, and bisous X.X.X. warm flagstones under the summer moon ones. hooah. x j

ridin' high.

2010-01-16T23:19:00.000-08:00

this cowgirl is back on her horse.

she has remembered how joyous it is to trot and canter across the black cotton plains, with donkeys following her, the shrill greetings from the maasai women telling her to go faster and faster, the warm wind in her hair and the smell of horse. and gun powder. (ok. scratch that one out. but just pretend, ok?) yes. she has remembered this.

oh my. how simply sweet and beautiful life can be.

right. back to real life.

i have been a taxi mom the entire week-end. and it's not over yet. when one makes these sort of committments, it's best done with music in your ears so you can't hear the " that's my place" "give it back!" "thump!" "waah". every now and then you have to do a blind swipe into the back seat hoping to connect with anyone really. they're all involved you see. if this doesn't work then you have to actually unplug, stop the car, turn round and shout "WILL YOU ALL JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP! christ." this used to work. now everyone just stares back blandly and sort of mumbles "ag sorry ma." and we carry on.

so, this week-end first born is with the christians. i think he has actually gone to church this morning. i hope he knows what to do and behaves appropriately. i know the others don't.

first born RHS.

second born is with the rwandans down in njiro. miles the other side of town. both parents were in hotel mille collines during the genocide, hiding from massacre and managed to escape to belgium. second born is best friends with their son. i received an sms from the dad a few minutes ago saying "Morning. They want to continue to play. Your son is very kind. Nice day. Francois." oh how my heart swells.

third born went to a hindu princess party. in full regalia. smelling of pink icing, channel no. 19, nylon, dust pink marshmellows, stiff lace and all things sugary and sweet. of course i couldn't find the house. was forced to unplug and grouch "but you've been here before!? obviously you have NO idea...sigh sigh...." until niamh spotted the gardener hanging three pretty white balloons on a gate. third born returned home all sticky and high on sugar. then passed out on the couch, dreaming hindu princess dreams, while i drank wine with my spaghetti thing riding pal, tati, and spoke of love and other such things.

driving home yesterday, plugged into transporting music (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjec7WZ41s&feature=related . this should make you want to cry and cover you with goosies. if it doesn't then there has to be something wrong with you.) , i thought what a wonderful thing it is for the children to be so culturally at ease - how good it is that their world is so varied and extraordinary. even if it means i have to take on hour long traffic jams in the process. the music suspends you above the jam. above the world. stops you from throwing The Finger left right and center. stops you from shouting " you stupid *()&^%$ ^$&*!" and other similar pleasantries. music makes me think of things more pertinent. when you're plugged into music, the crazy mad world around you melts into a movie. and everything is fine. just fine. just.

sunday bakes outside my window. shimmering and hazy with the rain from yesterday. cicadas swallows wild flowers. a smudgy world full of potential, of things unspoken and undone. sometimes i think i can hear the grass growing. in the early hours of the morning. when the owl sits on my roof hooting in a rainy grey dawn. i hear him scratching on the tin roof. i love it that he is my alarm clock. i think it magical. most people around here don't. if an owl sits on your roof, with the alarming regularity that this ones does, it means someone in the house will die. nice.

it's sunday. and summer. and my heart is full and overflowing. unusually so, all things considered. it being sunday and all and my regular owl visitor.

full heart box to be ticked at 6 this evening.

so toodely bestest blogging babies. bisous X . X. X. hot sunday summer ones x j

spun out. . .

2010-01-12T08:48:00.000-08:00

it's tuesday. but it feels like sunday.

i have the same feeling. whoever heard of the tuesday blues?

me neither.

this feeling is not a dancing one. i wish it was. i wish it was. perhaps it's just the usual case of PPD's (post piss up depression). too much chocolate box. (this is a fine fine wine oh best beloveds. no headache in the morning. it's marvelously miraculous)

it's like an "i want my mummy" feeling. i'm 40 something for godsakes....

i'm already back at school. but at least we had a day off....the 12th of jan is a public holiday in tanzania because of Zanzibar Revolution Day, the day when lots of arabs were rounded up and killed by the revolutionaries of the African Sharazi Party. literally herded into the sea one fine day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanzibar_Revolution. if you're faintly interested, there is some alarming footage of this event, which happened on the 12th of January, 1964 - not that long ago - in a film called Africa Adieu, a deeply disturbing documentary. it's best watched in italian with english sub titles.

so thanks to this terrible day, we get a tuesday off. god is great. and works in the weirdest ways. tricky tricky little god.

life on the hill is sweet and green and smudgy. i still haven't quite settled back in with authority. with alacrity. with entire presence. the holidays snatched this quite away. i'm stunned rather. something in the air knows. the weather is being perfectly seductive. the views are trying their best to convince me that this is where i should be. little magics twirl on the rain wind, tugging at me. you see, i wanted to tell you about this:

and this:

but i am speechless. so these will have to do for now.

until i find my feet and my words again.

so, until then, toodely old toot, oh bestests, X.X.X truly madly deeply. x j