Living for Disco

It’s very, very cold here at the moment. For the last three days, everyone’s been wandering around in woolly hats and scarves. I’m currently wearing my coat and scarf in the office, and I would wear my gloves if it didn’t impinge on my typing. It’s down to -2 at night, and it’s even colder in my flat, with its ceramic tiles, poorly insulated windows, and inch high gap under the back door. I bumped into Uncle Janni stoking the braai yesterday, who just laughed at my clothes and said “Ja, your flat is very, very cold, you know”, before scurrying back into his centrally heated, carpeted abode next door. I’m lucky to have such a caring landlord.

I went out on Saturday for some much needed retail therapy (there’s nothing like spending a lot of money on Stuff to make you feel like a strong, independent woman), and suddenly noticed that all the trees have lost their foliage. Everything looks wintry. Even the fig tree in the garden, the figs from which I have been waiting forever to surreptitiously harvest while Mrs Uncle Janni is not looking, has suddenly become bare of fruit and leaf. I don’t know where the figs went. Maybe Boris ate them, hence the recurrent vomit-fest that he currently undertakes nightly outside my back door. I feel cheated.

There has been no interim season. It’s simply gone from rainy to winter. There were no drifts of golden leaves to kick through, no whirling autumnal flurries as the last vestiges of greenery gave up the ghost. It’s as if I blinked and missed an entire season.

Bearing this extreme cold in mind, I went to two outdoor showings of films at the amphitheatre in Zoo Park on Saturday night, as part of the International Film Festival, Windhoek’s one annual attempt to pretend it’s not a cultural desert. I nearly froze to death, even under six layers of (brand new) winter clothing. Almost everyone turned up with blankets and sleeping bags. The gluhwein and hot pea soup ran out. We sat beneath the stars as the arctic breeze whispered through the palm trees. Everyone was speaking German*.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in Africa at all.

It’s guava season. I went into the supermarket last night, and the smell of guavas hit me like cheap perfume. It’s a sweet, high stink, redolent of a glass of Sunny Delight that’s been left out in the sun too long. Cloying. Sickly. It hits you in the back of your nasal cavity, and dribbles down the back of your throat, distributing headache spores along the way.

It’s funny, because when I lived in Malaysia, I grew to love the smell of durians, and they smell like foul drains – so bad that people are banned from bringing them into posh hotels and offices. Even now when I catch the scent of a durian, it’s as if I’ve been whirled through time and if I close my eyes, I can imagine that I’m standing in the market, jostled and pushed, amid the shouts and the hustle; intense nostalgia in a spiky green package.

Anyway I managed to get the smell out of my nostrils before I got home. On arrival at my front door, a puff of putrescent Eau de Guava greeted me from a carrier bag hung from my gate. It’s the second time Mr and Mrs Uncle Janni have donated a crop from the tree in the garden. I haven’t the heart to tell them that I loathe guavas, and that the stench of them in my house makes me feel physically sick. I put them in the cupboard under the sink. Tonight I will give them to David, the security guard next door.

I drifted off to sleep to the sound of Boris vomiting enthusiastically outside my back door.

I knew just how he felt.

I have business cards! It’s all very exciting. Since I’ve been here I’ve really lamented not having business cards*. People give them out all over the place: ‘That was a great salsa class – here’s my card’; ‘I’m very drunk, and have no idea who you are, but here’s my business card’; ‘Isn’t the weather at the pool great today? Call me. My number’s on the card’.

Invariably I find them scattered around my flat, or under my chair at work. They fall out of pockets, or become mangled and irredeemably fluffy in the wash, or mired in the piles of small change that gather in the dark recesses of my handbag.

I’ve started sticking them in a school exercise book now, because they are piling up in useless drifts against other useless items on my desk (currently – two empty water bottles, one bottle of spunk liqueur, a pair of shorts, two hundred damp tissues & a packet of ryvita). However, until now I have had nothing with which to reciprocate.

In the UK I was hopeless at the business card game. I’d go to meetings, rarely, being that breed of trust fundraiser who lurks behind the phone, and spends most of the day with her head buried in the filing cabinet in case someone notices she’s not ‘networking’. Anyway, the meetings I did go to, I’d invariably forget my business cards, of which my charity had had about 1,000 printed up. This was wildly optimistic – I don’t know 1,000 trusts. The only way I could conceivably get rid of them was to staple them to applications, which seemed a bit pompous [Hey, look at me! I have business cards, and am therefore very important] and a waste of money. So they just gathered dust.

I couldn’t then believe it when they changed the design, and we all got new business cards – another 1,000 to dispense in a mere two months before my departure. Madness.

Anyway, I have a whole pile of 500 to get rid of now. My name is spelt correctly – a miracle! Praise be! They are nice and shiny, and look as if they’ve been laminated and chopped up by a small child with its first pair of training scissors. Professionalism counts for a lot in these parts.

As ever, for reasons as yet unfathomed, my boss is obsessed by capitalizing the surnames of everyone in all his correspondence, so I am Rachael JOHNSON, Fundraiser. I don’t know why I find this disconcerting. It’s as if my surname is shouting at me.

I can’t wait to start dispensing them in the bar later.

*This is creative storytelling at its most creative. I haven’t really.

Woe. Loss and pain, etc. I will spare you most of the gory the details of my current emotional anguish. I wish it was about something worthwhile, like the imminent extinction of the cheetah, or the plight of London’s street pigeons, but no, it’s just over a stupid man*. It’s pretty grim though, and I’m costing the office a fortune in Kleenex. Thank god I now have my own office, and can cry in relative privacy.

It’s a strange old process, this break-up lark. I seem to have gone from ‘Oh, goody, I’m over it. That was reassuringly quick. Pass the ketchup’, which was the state of play midweek last week, to ‘Every second of the day is an exercise in mental torture. Bring me a variety of classified pharmaceuticals and a trough of vodka immediately.’ When will it end?

On the upside, I’m going to see Mission Impossible 3 tonight. I’m quite excited. I haven’t been to the cinema for a while. Also, the Da Vinci Code opens on Friday. I have so much to look forward to.

Right. I’m going home now, to clean up the half pint of cream I accidentally sprayed all over the living room furniture/my clothes/the bedroom door this morning, after shaking it enthusiastically without checking the lid was on. Can’t wait.

That is all.

*Not that the man in question is at all stupid. Just men as a whole.

“…anyway, the cheetahs aren’t endangered. The cheetahs are doing fine.”

I put my hand up. After spending 2 days at the Cheetah Conservation Fund, I was somewhat skeptical of this pronouncement, made as it was by a farmer who runs a hunting lodge.

“Erm. Ahem. [I am very good at public speaking – everyone knows this]. You said that you have personally killed about 150 cheetahs, over how long?”

“In the last six years.”

“Right. And your neighbour has killed about 30 or 40 cheetahs recently?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re just two farmers. And there are farmers all over Namibia killing cheetahs in these numbers.”

“That’s right”.

“And if there are only 3,000 cheetahs left in Namibia, it’s not going to take long for all the farmers to kill them all is it?”

“No. That’s right. The cheetahs are taking a hammering. Which is why I’m trying to get the government to allow trophy hunting of cheetahs….”

Quite how he can stand there and say the cheetahs aren’t endangered is beyond me.

I don’t want to get into detail re my views on trophy hunting. Suffice to say that if someone achieves personal fulfillment by shooting an endangered animal, and returning home in a blaze of glory triumphantly bearing its severed head, or it’s flayed skin, then they should be consigned to the first circle of hell immediately, without trial, and spend eternity being chased across the bush by toothy predators with a penchant for live flesh. The flesh would have to regrow daily, obviously, after the toothy predators have had a good feed. I have given this some thought.

I have to concede, however, that he may have a point. If a farmer kills a cheetah, and gets however many US dollars for it, this will then compensate him for the loss of his game. However, if you get paid that much for cheetah hides, what’s to stop you killing as many as you can and reaping the rewards? When people were being offered compensation for lions kills, they used all kinds of wily ways to lure the lions onto their land, where they then poisoned them, and many scavengers as a consequence (including the endangered Cape Griffon Vulture, of which there are only about 25 in the wild in Namibia). It seems that people will do anything for a bit of cash.

Anyway, Namibia is the stronghold of the world’s cheetah population. It is estimated that there are between 3-4,000 cheetahs left here, of the world’s population of 12,000. Unfortunately, there are a lot of farmers here who don’t give a flying fuck about the cheetahs and their imminent extinction, and are killing them off at a staggering rate. 150 cheetahs in the last six years means 25 every year, just snuffed out by that one farmer. Anthrax is also killing them off, although not quite so effectively, I don’t think. You do the maths.

So, I would say come to Namibia and have a look at these gorgeous animals*, because at this rate, in ten years or so, there won’t be any left. Failing that, go to their website and read about all the fascinating things they’re doing to try and stop the cheetah’s decline – I especially like the Anatolian guarding dogs.

It’s a wonderful world, isn’t it?

*I’m sorry the photo is so blurred. For some inexplicable reason, I turned the autofocus off.