Sounds dodgy, but only if I consider mind control as to be in someone else’s hands and not in my own. But the key, I am learning, is for me to control my mind all by myself. That way nobody else ever gets access. As a creative I am hyper sensitive to my own self-doubt, particularly when it is reflected in another person’s opinion clearly stated, sounding, at best, as a confirmation of my own lack, and, at worst, the truth, one I sincerely hoped was nothing of the sort.

A creative, and there are millions of us, may not realise that this is in their DNA, in their very heart and soul. If such a creature has had the crazy knocked into shape over decades, perhaps from childhood on, it is quite understandable that the process of natural development has been stopped with the dam of authority, each little trickle of escape allowed to dry up under the fierce sun of control. We think we are dangerous because that is what we have been repeatedly told. We are possessed by some evil genie, unable to guide ourselves, untrustworthy if left to our own devices, something we are rarely left to, if at all. No surprise, then, that we default into adulthood wearing all the wrong clothes, learning the wrong things, thinking conflicting thoughts and always exhausted at the fight of it all.

However, there is good news. If a creative can find just a teensy bit of self-love and build on it through careful and mindful study and research, it is entirely possible to regain the self. I know because, even at 66, I am doing just that. I have found a wonderful guide in Daily OM (Google it) and am discovering that the ‘naughty’ and ‘difficult’ child I was is still available to me and still looking for affirmation and support. I had learned long ago about the importance of re-loving that little girl and had brushed it away as so much nonsense. How on earth can re-loving a girl, long lost to me, bring me fulfilment and peace of mind? I think, as is so often the case, that I imagined it to be hippy fluff and candles and essential oils burning in grates with no real application for the now. I know, now, that it is simples. What I was doing was bringing the same critical assessment to the thought of such a process as had my parents, friends, teachers, husband and the rest of the world. But if I just let that little lonely girl walk into my mind whenever she wants, merely observing her, then all I want to do is play. In other words making it fun, light and fresh and spontaneous.

We take the world, ourselves, way too seriously, as if life is a test and as if it matters more than anything that we impress others, look good, sound like a success, know exactly where we are going. If I throw all of that out the window, how do I feel now? A bit like a weirdo at first. After all, here I stand on the inside of me having just chucked out everything I ever learned from the guides in my life. I stop and look around. There is no clutter holding me back from forward motion. But which way is forward? If I walk this way, is this forward, or it forward behind me, beside me?

I don’t know and saying I Don’t Know, doesn’t sound all that scary. Allowing myself to begin again might sound like that’s my last marble lost and it may well be true. But if all I need to do to free myself from the mind control of others, and, if I have never done this before, then I need to give it a go because it is high flipping time I found out who I really am beyond the reflection of myself in others’ eyes.

Sounds like delicious chaos to me. I am going to walk back along that river flow until I find my source, not the one I was told was mine, but the one that frees me once and for all, the one that lifts me in a burst of sunshine fun. It will have nothing to do with worldly success or worldly failure. It will bear no relation to my financial state, the shape of my body or the way I eat spaghetti. It won’t be aggressive, defensive or compliant. It will be kind and loving to others as I always want to be and as I believe I am deep inside my core. Instead of saying ‘I have no chance, I will now say something like I have no socks, or I have no bananas. Everything changes with one word.

But, first, it will be me learning to love me. Me and that little lonely girl.

This is how life is meant to be lived. Up with the sun, the sounds, the rise of life in the African Bush, and, then to bed when the almighty dark floats softly down like a mantle. Well, not quite then, to be honest because the dark time is for relaxing after all that fierce heat. That’s the time for conversation, for wine and food and music. It is also the time to hear the sounds of the night creatures, the predators. But, we are safe inside the wooden railings of the stoep, and there are candles and oil lamps flickering to say We Are Here, we humans, we of whom you are always afraid, unless, that is, we break the rules and decide to go for a walk into your domain, which, needless to say, we don’t. Not in the dark.

Spring is holding back. Around some of the homes, green shoots look almost unreal. Watered ahead of schedule, they bring giraffes loping through the acacia to browse and munch a piddling snack. Most of them stay beside the river for now, but one just wandered over here, it’s head higher than any tree, eyes on a small patch of green, one that was stripped in seconds.

Like the high walls of a fortress, the Blue Mountain range shoulders the clear blue sky. Ridges and lines of ancient sediment show me pinks, greys, terracottas and a peppering of low-lying trees. It looks like an easy climb from here but I know different. I could be lost forever and within minutes, not to mention flattened by heat exhaustion and baboons. But I can watch them from a safe place, see how the light changes their flanks as the sun lifts higher. A catch of crystal, a softening of green in new shadow, the dark pock marks along a ridge, caves where creatures rest and wait in expectation of a badly timed passing by. Badly timed for the passer by, I mean, not for the expector.

The floor of the bush is sand yellow and littered with stones and fallen thorns. Yesterday we walked the new puppy a short distance in what passes for shade and my eyes needed to warn my feet to go canny. Those thorns are long enough to go right through a foot and out the other side, however dead they appear to be. The car was like a furnace on our return and yet we had only been out of it for 20 minutes. I watered the house plants this morning, ebullient in their early growth and promising to burst into a storm of colour and density as the Spring moves ever closer. It feels weird, as it did last year, to have left a garden dying just two days ago, only to arrive in one about to be born, so connected am I with the natural process of a seasonal rise and fall. However, I have always been able to adapt and this sunshine sure helps. When I was packing, unpacking, packing and unpacking, it was very hard to think sunshine and warmth. Laying out shorts and swimwear, skimpy frocks and sandals just shivered me. I can’t tell you how many times I dressed, undressed, dressed again for the flights. I even idly wondered if there was a dress code for business class. My daughter put me right on that. Who cares Mum? she said and she was right. I saw many different assemblages of clothing on my fellow passengers and nobody looked at me or anyone else for that matter. Long journeys tense the calmest of us it seems and all we think about is ourself, about whether or not we will manage the fifteen miles between gates, be delayed enough to miss a connection or get sick on the plane. At 0400 in Dubai airport, we are all islands moving together and apart in a communal sea. Who, indeed, cares what anyone is wearing? But the foolery inside my head managed to bother about that until I almost missed my ferry.

No matter, I am here now and here long enough to re-root in the one country I would live as second choice. It bizarres me that this Africa, so rocking with corruption and fear, with huge warm hearts and welcomes regardless of colour or creed, could ever call to me the way she does when rain is in my blood, mizzle mist, stout boots and the familiar call of seabirds canting slight on a westerly breeze. But she does. Africa does. Somewhere in my veins there is a remembering, an ancient call home. I like that.

And for a few weeks I will watch Africa rise into her Springtime before returning to my little homespun bubble. And, I might just pack a thorn to burst it.

We all need to do that now and again, for there is a huge world out there if we just keep our eyes and our hearts open.

Right this minute I am sitting on a soft comfy chair in a vast expanse of lounge with a load of friendly staff being silent but vigilant in the peripheries and a seriously marvellous cold and hot buffet at the bows. The Ladies, alone, proffers facial creams, fragrances and enough room for a private shower, plus real towel and real flowers in the corner. I idly wonder if the Gents proffer the same.

I am, unbelievably, at the airport. Glasgow Airport. My first time in Business Class. I just know the whole experience will change my travel plans, my long haul travel plans, for ever. Not only was I collected by a delightful chauffeur in a grey Mercedes from the door, but, then, he saw me, all flaky and wrong-footed and everything shoved into a basket, through security, where, to my astonishment, I was not sent home with a report marked COULD DO BETTER.

After a couple of miles gently, and politely, gliding through an immovable concrete shoal of group travellers, I found myself walking into silence. These people went left. These, right, until there was just me with my overfilled basket and jump shoes looking like (yes I did) an ageing and displaced hippie. Finally, Emirates ~Lounge. The doors opened and my name was mentioned with a welcome. Flip me……..I showed my ID and that was that. No matter how much my basket overflowed I was welcome. The well-cooked food, the smiles, the space, the peace and comfort….well none of that I have ever experienced before and I am glad that, this time, I have.

I consider the word Traverse. It actually means ‘crossing’ like a rock face or something you need to cross but sideways, like a crab. If I think of caring for dementia as a traverse, it makes perfect sense. Although the strong rock face of a relationship, long term, is, well, strong and rock-faced, I now need to traverse it, like spiderwoman because otherwise I would fall into the cracks and be lost. I must keep versatile and adaptable. So I move to the outside of something I have always been deep in the inside of. It has felt like abandonment at times, that pulling backwards, that moving outside of the rock base, and, at times, I had no idea I was doing it, but, now, I see the sense of it. I want to survive this, and not because I can see a new life ahead, but because I can’t. And I need more wildlight for looking; a red dawn, a stomp of grumpy grey, a rise of snowhills, a lazy stretch of maybe clouds, a moonface, backlit, upsetting my sleep.

Tomorrow I will land in the bush, in Africa where my son will spin me round in his big strong arms and I will be safe as houses for two glorious months of crazy insects, colourful birds, a new tattoo and loads of warmth and space and reading and dance and music and Spring.

Bring it on Glasgow, for you and me…..we begin the traverse from here.