Living for Disco

That’s where I’m a goin’.  My mother arrived this morning, complete wtih books, shoes and jaffa cakes for me me me! 

Once we’ve stuffed ourselves with orangey goodness, we’re going on holiday. 

Back in a couple of weeks!  Hurrah!

[skips off into sunset populated by friendly talking lions and humorous elephants]

I’m off to my Tae Bo class again tonight.

I don’t know why, as the last time I went, it was torture for two reasons:

Firstly, I am hideously uncoordinated. As a result, during the more complex routines (step, crouch, block, uppercut, kick) I resemble a character from the Thunderbirds trying to river-dance while signaling strenuously for help. As the gym is the only place where attractive men seem to gather in Windhoek, and as the whole studio is open to the weights room, I imagine this display provides some amusement for potential suitors. Good thing I’m not really on the look-out. I’m not really up for the whole heart-crushing romance malarky again just yet, particularly not with anyone who may have seen me topple sideways trying to lift a barbell while doing the semi-splits.

Secondly, my muscles are not particularly well developed, as for years the only exercise I have done is cycling. For the last three days I have barely been able to sit down without my legs quivering in protest, or to lift anything heavier than a carton of milk.

I’m hoping it will get easier.

You step into the sucking warmth of the tiny pine room; it smells eye-wateringly of vicks vaporub. Someone’s been spiking the water bucket with eucalyptus oil again. Anti-social bastards.

Two very large ladies with impressive bosoms are rubbing moisturiser into their cellulite and talking about their work with AIDS orphans.

You lie down across from them, and half listen to their conversation, in case any interesting leads should arise, but after a while you drift into the heat-sluggish arena of your wandering mind.

You wonder if there is anyone in this town who doesn’t talk about AIDS as a matter of course, every single day of the week. In the sauna the other day, you got talking to someone who asked you if it was the same in the UK. She was shocked when you said that people at home rarely talk about AIDS in a local context, and you don’t explain that it’s generally seen as something affecting Africans, immigrants, drug addicts and gay men. For white, heterosexual Britain, AIDS is someone else’s problem.

You shift your towel and burn yourself painfully on your locker key. Why do locker keys get hot enough to burn in here, but not belly-button rings? You remember the day you went to get your belly pierced, eight years ago. The woman offered you an oscar for your outstanding portrayal of a woman in pain. You always knew you were meant for the stage.

You meant to go back there and get them to do your second tattoo, but never got around to it. Now you wonder if you’re too old to get a tattoo, although if you’d had it at the age of twenty-five, you’d still have it now, so that kind of thinking is rather redundant. Anyway, you’re only as old as the man you feel, ha ha, which means that at the moment you’re as yet unborn, empty, your life a blank slate on which everything is yet to be written. The thought of growing up, of being thirteen, fourteen, fifteen again, oh the horror, makes you glad to be thirty-two, single and sweating sleepily in a heated box.

You feel your face growing red and hot, and remember reading somewhere that (unless you have hypothermia) stimulating circulation of the blood near the surface of the skin is healthy. You feel your face throbbing, and imagine the blood in there, tackling your blackheads from the inside.

“Blimey,” you hear it saying. “Has it been this long since we had a good spring clean up here?” You giggle to yourself, and wonder if the two women, quiet now, think you’re unhinged. You glance over, but they are both sitting, heads back, eyes closed, mouths wide open, enjoying the heat.

You think perhaps if you’re starting to giggle to yourself in public, you should leave the sauna, as you’ve clearly been in here too long.

You pick up your towel, and fight the headrush as you sit up. On the way out, you burn yourself painfully with the scalding hot locker key.

You wonder if you’ll ever learn.

Finally, winter is on its way out.  It’s starting to spring.

In Windhoek, it’s surprisingly hard to tell when winter ends and spring begins.  For the last four months the sky has been a perfect vastness of blue, the only clouds the occasional grey smudge clinging to the horizon’s edge.  The trees have largely remained green; only a few lost their leaves.  The bougainvillea still splatters the city in scarlet and hot pink, as if the seasons never changed.  What reminds you is the sudden bitter cold when the sun sets, and in the mornings a cold nose and the horror of stepping on chill tiles in bare feet after the alarm has been set to snooze for the last possible time.

It’s strange to me that spring here feels just like spring at home, everything and everyone just beginning to crack a smile after the pinch of winter.  There’s something different about the way the birds sing in the morning, and how the breeze feels kind on my skin when I cycle through the city to work.  The light seems to glow in a different way.  In the early mornings a gauzy mist blurs the distant hills, and the air smells of creosote, fresh smoke and clean dust.

My cycle route takes me rushing through a neighbourhood packed with talent – Beethoven, Strauss and Mozart Strasse flash by on my way to work, and I labour up past Haydn, Wagner, Bach and Brahms on my return.  Church spires gleam clean and white in the sun, the smoke from small brush fires lingers above the jacarandas.

I pass a broad-pathed cemetery on my right, packed to bursting with new graves, the oldest ones crumbling by the roadside.  The road is lined with poplars in banks of pale baked grass that, for some reason, bring to mind the sunflower and corn fields of central Europe. I have a good view of the scrapyard to my left, men in blue overalls swarming over truckloads of rusty waste, shouts and clashing of metal leaking through my headphones.  Bakkies rush past me with blue clad labourers in the back, their heads no longer wrapped in enormous blanket turbans to keep out the merciless cold.  They point at me and laugh.

We have had no rain since April, and most of the rich grass is now yellow and brittle; but, thanks to the municipal sprinklers flouting the drought to come, an expanse of grass near where I work is still green.  Someone has taken advantage of this, and established a shabby red snack caravan, selling pies and chips, and Vienna sausages in a bun.  People come there during the day, lying with arms flung across faces, battered work boots turned to the sky, slumbering in the shade of stubby palms.

It seems that in the last few days, as the weather has started to become more generous, I have started to appreciate all over again how beautiful this city is.

Perfect spring cycling soundtrack:  Manu Chao.

I was trawling through some news site or other earlier, and came across a picture of Miss Piggy.  I used to love the Muppets - it was required viewing in our house when I were a young ‘un.  My parents actually found it funnier than we did, though looking back, I think at age 7 I perhaps didn’t understand all of the jokes.

That’s not the point though.  I saw this picture today, and the first thought that drifted up from the mass of shimmery, empty bubbles in my head was “Gosh, Miss Piggy’s looking good for her age.”