Living for Disco

I have a problem with cockroaches at the moment.  I blame a friend of mine for this catastrophe; when I was at his house the other evening, he warned me to be careful about opening the bin because he usually finds a few cockroaches skittering about in there. He then confided that he often gets up in the night with a canister of Doom, to try and catch them on the hop.  They come out at night, he says, while he is asleep, to breed, and swell, and eat things, and to dance a dance of roachy triumph around his sleeping body.  Getting up in the night with Doom is futile of course, as everyone knows that Cockroaches Cannot Die.

Anyway, I expressed surprise at this, because not once in the last year or so have I seen a cockroach in my house.  I admit that I had a revolting maggot infestation in my sofa, and I did find a number of gnarled spider corpses behind my squash racquet yesterday, but cockroaches to date have left me alone.

The very next day I spotted a cockroach crawling out of the plughole in my kitchen sink.  There is something about watching a cockroach crawl out of a plughole that is deeply disturbing – as if it is scrabbling out of a mouth, or another human orifice.  It made its depraved, scuttling journey across my plates, and then disappeared when I ran to get the Doom.  Ran like a girl, I might add, while going “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew” in a voice that only dogs can hear.

Then I went to spring clean the house on Sunday, and realized that there were cockroaches living under my sofa.  Every time I moved the chair, they would blink in shock at the daylight, grab the kids, and scurry for comfortable gloom.

What is going on?  I am a living embodiment of fucking sod’s law.  I say ‘ha haaa!  No cockroaches on me mate!”, and the next thing you know they are establishing a thriving community, with schools and a public transport system, under my sofa.  And while I’m at it, what is it with my sofa?  What am I going to find in it next?

I am upset. 

I have just noticed that the visa application form for Mozambique, which I downloaded from the ever-helpful interwebnet, asks me to sign at the bottom. It indicates where i should sign, by saying ‘Signature of applicant or applying entity’.

This is handy, as I am in fact a sentient succulent from the arid desert planet Xygron. I have long yearned to kick back and photosynthesise on the gorgeous Pacific beaches of Mozambique. I do not have a signature, as such, but my unique leaf print will identify me from my fellow plant-people.

I like it that they don’t discriminate. It makes a change from the Namibian visa form, that requests you specify whether you are ‘physically defective or mentally deficient’ before they’ll stamp your passport

I am clearly doing no work.  Bad.  Very bad.

I am having a beer with my friend Tariq when he casually mentions that the cost of a visa for Mozambique has been put up from 60 rand to 750 rand. This is approximately 65 shiny British pounds. I can barely afford my holiday as it is, and so this is a giant blow. I may have to sell a kidney.

I decide to phone the Mozambique High Commission to find out the truth, but however much I scour the phone book I can’t seem to find it. This is because, helpfully, there is no consulate for Mozambique in Namibia.

I steel myself for yet more financial pain, and call the office in Pretoria. As they confirm the awful news, I picture my Christmas beer money dribbling into airtight official coffers and begin silently to weep.

“Thank you,” I sigh. “And I can get it at the border, right?”

I don’t know what angel of light prompted me to ask this question, but…

“No, you must get it here.”

Oh. My. God. Now, I’m a pretty seasoned traveler if I do say so myself. I’ve traipsed without mishap over most of South East Asia and half the Middle East. I’ve skipped happily across India, and sunned myself silly in the Caribbean. You would think that it would occur to me to check out the visa situation before booking the bus tickets, yes? Ha haaaa! No! I am too clever for that! So clever, in fact, that I have made sure that the one day we have in Johannesburg is, in fact, a Sunday, when the consulate is shut.

During the remainder of the conversation I dribbled, and said ‘b…b…b…b…’ a lot, particularly when she told me to send my passport to Pretoria, where I could pick it up. I did point out that I would need it to get into South Africa, to which she said “Hmm” as if I was intentionally causing her unnecessary mental anguish.

Anyway, now the three of us must DHL our passports to Pretoria as soon as humanly possible, so that we get them back in time to travel. Because I was in a state of advanced brain-melt, the question of how to pay, what forms we must fill in and how long it will take did not occur to me at this time, resulting in a further three expensive phone calls to the consulate in Pretoria.

The situation is complicated by the fact that one of my traveling buddies is living in Opuwo. The post leaves Opuwo once a week, and frankly, I would trust Nampost as far ooh, say, the distance between me and my computer keyboard. Either they are a bunch of thieving bastards or there is a sucky vortex type portal to another dimension situated in the main sorting office. The only other option is to wait until someone is traveling down to Windhoek – there is no telling how long this might take. Sometimes, I miss the Royal Mail.

I call the high commission in Pretoria for the fourth time to ask them about the information they need to issue the visa.

“Oh,” she says vaguely. “just write down your name and address on a piece of paper”.

“Anything else? What about the dates we are traveling?”

“Oh, yes. Write those down too.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes. Oh, maybe you need to tell us how you are arriving.”

I’m feeling the fear.

Imagine you are an Elizabethan sailor, spending months at sea in a stinking wooden galleon.  You don’t know where you are, you’re riddled with scurvy and you’re running out of grog.  Don’t forget – you believe that baths are unhealthy, and try to wash as little as possible. 

You hear a cry – land ho!  It appears to be a shimmering stretch of untouched beach.  Little do you know that you have washed up on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, so named because no-one embarks on the journey across the pitiless desert into the interior and lives to tell the tale. 

But you and your shipmates brave the glaring heat and stagger, sweating and delirious across one of the world’s most inhospitable stretches of land.  And lo, miracle of miracles, after a couple of months you come upon a shining city, filled with oddly dressed people, and noisy horseless carriages.   You are completely disorientated, not to mention a bit bloody hot, seeing as the temperature in the strange city is around 34 degrees C (93F for old skoolers).  The thing you fancy most of all is a drink, and maybe a bit of a swim to cool down, which is handy, because look!  Here is a sparkling reservoir.  You all cast yourselves fully clothed (because you haven’t removed your stained and flea-ridden apparel for about a year, so why start now?), and joyfully frolic about in the clean, clear water until it is a sea of murk.  You probably fart in it quite a lot too, just for the bubbly fun.

From the colour of the water gushing from our taps today, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this had actually happened.  I try not to drink unfiltered Windhoek water anyway, even though supposedly you can, because it gives me a stomach like Clapham Junction, and tastes as if rodents have been marinated in it.  However it will do at a push – usually, at least. 

But now?  Now I just can’t shake the image of scabby sea-dogs scurfing into MY drinking water. 

We stood in front of a classroom full of 14 year olds, talking to them about rape.  We asked some questions, and received some well thought out answers; the class was a mixture of boys and girls, and they all enthusiastically joined in the debate.  One commonly held view seemed to be that if two adults have consenting sex, it is still rape if one is much older than the other.  We managed to sort out the confusion surrounding this, and move on.

“So”, asked Charmaine.  “Do you think that a husband can rape his wife?”

When the shouting subsided, various kids were allowed to speak.  I was more interested in the ones that said no, honestly, and so I pointed to a short, cocky boy in the middle.

“Why do you say no?”  I asked.

“Because they are married” he answered, predictably.

“But she still has the right to say no, doesn’t she?”

“No, because her husband is working, and paying for her food and everything, and she has to have sex with him whenever he wants because she owes him for that.”

“So, what you’re saying”, I said, when the shouting died down, “is that a wife is basically a prostitute?”

He was at pains to say that this was not what he meant, “because the wife does not sleep with many different men, only with her husband.”

“But, you’re saying that he pays her, so he has the right to force her to have sex, even when she doesn’t want to?”  I asked.

More shouting originated from a group of outraged girls at the back.

“Yes,” said my little interviewee, as if explaining some obvious fact to an imbecile.  “Because if a wife does not give her husband sex whenever he wants, that is why he turns to his children instead.”