Living for Disco

I walked into the car hire office.

I was slightly apprehensive, as I’d heard all kinds of things about vehicle hire in Namibia. It’s supposed to be hideously expensive, the excesses on the insurance are astronomical, and if you don’t go with a reputable firm, you should probably expect your wheels to fall off, or the engine to catch fire on day three of your trip.

I could easily imagine this happening in Etosha National Park. We’re sitting there at a waterhole, surrounded by a well-camouflaged collection of large and toothy predators, vultures circling hungrily above, when bang! Our engine starts smoking ominously, and three of our four wheels gently plop sideways and lie uselessly in the dust. Would it be better to get out of the car and be savagely mauled, or to stay put and take loads of photos before being consumed in a Toyota-fireball? How to choose?

Fortunately, not fancying this situation, I’d found somewhere that I thought was probably reputable, despite the rates being inexpensive, and including all mileage. Seeing as the pair of us clocked up a whopping 2,853 km in our ten day trip, I’d say this was a bonus.

After a couple of false starts, which saw me enquiring about car hire in a law office, and a beauty salon, I found the tiny office hidden away behind some old wire fence. The albino guy who appeared to be running things smiled at me as I sat down, and folded his fat fingers under his chin. He was very friendly and nice. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to know a hell of a lot about the conditions of my hire. We had some minor altercations over various bits of insurance, and the fact that my quote seemed to differ from what he had in his system.

Then I asked how much they were in the process of wresting from the feeble grasp of my credit card.

“9,000 Namibian dollars”. (That’s about 900 quid)
“OK. What does that include?”
“The car hire, and the excess.”
“What’s the excess?”
“$1,500”

This is staggeringly low, and for about a millisecond I was tempted to shut up and leave it in case they had made a mistake.

“But the car hire is $2,900, and the excess is $1,500. That comes to $4,400. What about the other $4,600?”
He smiled, triumphantly. “Ah, but if you see, that is why I have only taken $6,000 from your card.” He waved the authorisation slip at me.

This unexpected tangent derailed me, but only momentarily.

“But that’s still too much, if it includes only the excess and the car hire. What about the other $1,600?”

He stared at me, looking slightly hostile. He looked at the computer screen and pressed some buttons, with no apparent result. He picked up my contract, looked at it with pursed lips and put it down again. He pressed some more buttons. Then he seemed to come to a conclusion. He looked at me, and put his hands palm down on the desk.

“Now you are asking me difficult questions.”

After this, I have to confess to becoming somewhat impatient. It is my the bank’s money after all.

All of this made me so much more embarrassed when we locked the keys in the car (still in the ignition) on the Monday evening of our return from our Grand Namibian Adventure. The car was almost unrecognisably filthy, both inside and out*, and the presence of empty drink cans and a pair of (dusty) socks on the back seat topped off the impression that we’d thrown a raucous party in it and failed to clean up the mess.

The same guy turned up with a screwdriver and a coat hanger, and spent an hour and a half of his evening in the car park at Wernhill Shopping centre, sticking them alternately into the (dusty) window casings, while his two year old daughter ran about in the traffic.

The holiday was great though. Our wheels didn’t fall off, and we saw some lions. These lions:

*Namibia is very dusty.

I’m off on holiday for a few days with a friend from the UK.

So I won’t be here. Until a week on Friday.

Ta-ta.

I live next door to an organisation that needs 24 hour security. I’ve become quite chatty with David, the security guard, who seems to spend all day in a fug of boredom, listening to his radio, and occasionally popping his head through the fence, and making me jump. The first time he did it, I nearly wet myself; the sound of a disembodied voice floating eerily through the bougainvillea was unexpected. My reaction resulted in his asking me whether there was a war on in my country.

We had a chat yesterday while I was waiting for some friends to pick me up and take me to the pool for a bit of sunbathing. We chatted about Namibia, and independence, and then he said:

“When did your country get independence?”

I was totally flummoxed. When did we get independence? Have we always had it? Did we have to wrest it from the Romans (vague images of woad-covered warriors and Bodicea and her lethal chariot popped into my head), or did they just get fed up with the rain and the perpetual cold, and leave voluntarily? Did they leave? I started to feel that my grasp of history is shakier than it should be.

I wondered whether Henry VIII’s departure from the Catholic church could be considered any kind of independence – again, I suppose, from Rome. What about William the Conqueror? Did the Normans ever leave? Or the Vikings? The Saxons? The Celts? My head was full of large, red-bearded men galloping around the countryside, waving swords and shouting a lot, or arriving on the shores of Eastern England in strange, large-prowed boats, waving swords and shouting a lot. I was getting confused.

What about Wales and Scotland? – they’re no longer independent. And as for Northern Ireland…

My mind boggled, and I just looked at him and decided on the simple answer. “Errrr… I think we’ve always had it,” I said, unsure of myself.

He clearly did not understand.

“You don’t know when you got independence?”

“Well, no. We’ve always had it.” I didn’t say that we seem to be the ones from whom people in recent times have forcibly reclaimed their right to self-governance.

“You mean there was no war in your country?”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, there is a war, I mean, there was a war, but…” The arrival of my friends rescued me from unwisely departing on a hopeless tangent and trying to explain the hideous complexities of the Northern Ireland conflict to a man who clearly did not know anything about the country of my birth*. Thankfully.

But the question is still troubling me.

*And why should he? I didn’t know anything about Namibia until I came here. And people I told about coming here almost universally did not have a clue where it was.

I forgot to mention - Namibia itself gained independence from South Africa 15 years ago, except for Walvis Bay, a strategic port in the middle of the west coast, which became part of Namibia in 1994. I found it interesting that I have as little idea what it’s like to come from a country so recently free, as he had what it’s like to come from a country who’s tabloid press still bangs on about the bloody empire every time our global significance is questioned. Another thing taken for granted.

Now seems to be a time of bugs*.

I don’t know why, but over the last couple of weeks, my small flat has become the Place Where Bugs Come to Die.

I stepped on a largish, yellow-mottled specimen gone belly-up on the bathroom floor when I was getting out of the shower yesterday. On waking this morning I found that an attractive green, pea-sized beetle had peacefully departed to the big bug palace in the sky and left its mortal remains on my pillow, legs immodestly akimbo.

Whenever I sweep the floor (more often than you might think) I notice thin wisps of wings in drifts under the coffee table, or behind the phone. To start with, I thought they were leaves, but then I realised that there was no tree or plant in the vicinity that might carelessly shed leaves of that shape. When I picked one up, before it crumbled between my fingers, I saw the delicate cross-hatching of veins.

I don’t know where these elusive insects hide, because I never see them when they are alive. I don’t know where they leave their bodies either – they are nowhere to be found, and I’ve looked. They leave only their wings in the dust as evidence that they were here at all.

There are, of course, plenty of live specimens. A troupe of tiny ants spends all day patiently fetching and carrying specks of unidentifiable treasure in a long military column that stretches from my sliding doors, skirts my bike, and ends up in the corner by the security bars that protect my small patio from burglars. I woke up this morning to find that they have invaded my kettle.

A tiny, enchanting insect that looks like a baby praying mantis lives in the locking mechanism of my patio doors. A shiny millipede has ventured indoors, but spends most of its time immobile and curled tightly behind the leg of the coffee table.

The other night, a clumsy moth, confused by the sudden extinguishing of the light as I went to sleep, collided repeatedly with my left armpit until I switched the light back on and dispatched it to the bathroom. Clearly, in the absence of anything else, my pale skin renders me identifiable as a source of celestial light.

There are the strange wasp-arsed flies with the extraordinarily long waists, and the wild buzzing, cumbersome fat beetles that seem to career from pillar to post. You can almost see them gasping with relief that they’ve made it without crashing into something, or falling out of the sky.

Lightning-fast carpet spiders cling flatly to the walls, scuttling behind pictures and cupboards at any sign of life. They entwine the striped day-biting mosquitoes in light, invisible webs that leave their slowly twisting corpses hanging from the ceiling tiles.

As I hang out my laundry in the mid-morning sun, a pair of swallowtail butterflies flaps around my head, casting monstrous shadows. I stood outside the other day and watched flashing blue-winged swallows dive and catch foolish flies in the early evening calm.

I quite like sharing my home with these other creatures. They are interesting and unobtrusive (except for the ants in my coffee), and there aren’t very many of them.

I could really do without the mosquitoes though.

*City bugs, obviously. Not country bugs of the ilk that Claypot has to deal with – I’ve never yet had to brave a wall of termites to get to the loo. We live a tame life here in the bustling metropolis.

‘Tis a Christmas miracle. I have my CRB clearance. I won’t go into all the nonsense I had to go through, desperately phoning random Lewisham estate agents, my old boss, the CRB and VSO, sending snarly emails about the exercise in stupidity that is the Data Protection Act, and generally feeling stressed and teary, before everything finally resolved itself, because its too ridiculous to even talk about in more detail than that.

As long as it doesn’t go astray (touch wood touch wood) between Cambridge and the VSO offices in London, and as long as they send it by courier to VSO in Namibia, and don’t lose it, torch it, lock it away for a thousand years, or tear it up and use it as the labels for the office secret santa presents, things will be fine, and I will be allowed to stay here.

Which would be nice.