Living for Disco

This is what I did with my weekend.

I wish I could show a picture of the sunset I saw on Saturday night. We were ensconced in a lovely, shady camp spot, boerwors and lamb chops at the ready under the tree, braai ready to fire up. We put everything we needed into my backpack, and then we climbed for a while until the Landrover became a speck far below, and the whole world was laid out before me. The sky is so vast here, the horizons so far away. Mountains gave way to mountains that gave way to a limitless expanse of blue. The half moon burned brighter as the earth turned, and slowly hid the sun from view. A kestrel flung itself out into the thermals and drifted, keening, until we could no longer see it.

In the shade of a small cave, we sat and poured the wine, and then we sat and watched as the sky became a canvas that you wouldn’t think could be real. Soft greens and impossible blues merged into pink and purple, like a fantastically complex cocktail before it’s shaken. The plains stretched away, seemingly empty, but alive with countless invisible lives. In my mind I populated the landscape with ostriches running and zebras grazing.

When it was over we climbed down, before the light went, and finished the wine by the fire.

No photo could do it justice, and my writing certainly can’t. I just hope I never forget how it looked.

I met my new landlord for the first time last night. He is a lovely old gent, big shock of white hair, friendliness seeping from his pores. He moseyed round last night, brandishing a bottle of some kind of cream liqueur made from the sap of a palm tree that veldt dwellers have been using as an aid to bare-knuckle lion fighting since the mammoths roamed the earth. Exciting stuff.

“My name is Janni”, he said, informatively. “You may call me Uncle Janni.” He grinned at me, and pointed to his hair. “Because of the white hair”. Glad we cleared that up, then. I was starting to worry.

He handed me a piece of yellow paper and asked me to write down the names of his new tenants. There’s only one of me, so I simply wrote down the two names, and hoped that putting ‘not a tenant’ in brackets next to one of them would go some way to explaining that, contrary to all appearances, the unidentified young man who was lurking round the back taking my laundry off the line is not actually a resident.

He moseyed off again. I went inside, and we toasted ‘Uncle’ Janni.

Come to think of it, I do feel up to a little lion wrestling today.

Oh, I don’t know what to do with this. I felt empty of inspiration, and sick to death of this blog. Now I’ve done some other exciting stuff that’s made me want to write things, and here we are again, four days later, and I’m tapping away.

I’m still planning on making a fresh start, but for now, if anyone’s still reading, I just shove stuff up here.

Thank you to everyone for all the kind comments. You’re all fab.