Living for Disco

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.

I’m writing about cheese. This absolutely cannot be interesting to anyone. I feel that after a year, and a move abroad, this blog as it is has reached its natural end. Something else is now required, so I’m going to move along, and wave goodbye to everyone. I’ll probably start blogging again at some point, but it won’t be here, and it won’t be for a while.

So thanks for reading, everyone. It’s been a blast.

Does anyone remember the whole Parmalat fraud scandal a couple of years ago? I was quite confused when the big news hit the papers. I’d never heard of Parmalat, but by all accounts they were close to ruling the world from behind the façade of their dairy product business, until the management in Italy let slip that they’d ‘lost’ 3.5 billion euros.

Anyway, I forgot about it pretty quickly, because frankly, Parmalat didn’t feature large in my life. Until I got here.

I love cheese. I’ll eat any kind of cheese, at any time of day, preferably until it’s all run out, and I’m supine on the sofa, cracker crumbs resting in drifts on my swollen belly. A nice melty brie – yes please. Crumbly, creamy wensleydale – bring it on. Give me a good chunk of Cornish Yarg and I’ll give you anything you want.

Namibia doesn’t get cheese, and for a nation so rich in goats, this is a travesty. All you can buy in the supermarket are blocks of pale, flaccid battery-cheese. Those cheeses are miserable, I tell you. They look like they’re raised in perpetual darkness. I’m sure they torture them before they’re taken off to the cling-film machine for wrapping. They arrive at the supermarket in foot long bricks that could give you a nasty injury if one fell on you while you were innocently buying milk. They all taste like shit, and they are all made by Parmalat.

The global giants have won. Obviously their billion euro fuck up didn’t stop them from trying to foist inferior products on an unsuspecting nation.

I could cry.

It started with a vague burning sensation on my right shoulder. After about five minutes I mentioned it. Within ten, I felt as if I’d been flayed alive. From the back of my neck, down to the backs of my thighs was an expanse of fiery red, the heat warming through the cold towel that had been thoughtfully placed across my back. When it was peeled off, it felt as though my skin went with it. I imagined that I lay there, muscles and sinew exposed to the elements.

I had a very fitful night’s sleep, not helped by the extraordinary amount of tequila rushing through my bloodstream. I dreamed that I had mushrooms growing out of my skin – flesh coloured lumps and bumps so huge that I couldn’t get my clothes on. I woke up this morning feeling shockingly bad, unsure as to whether it was a hangover, or because in patches I still felt as if I’d been branded.

I think I might be allergic to crayfish. It’s a fucking tragedy.