I had jotted down, as I always do, a trickle of thought, one I wanted to capture. I wrote ‘I love the quiet people’. and there is more to write on that. However, inside my ongoing of a day of preparation and my departure from my beloved island on transit to another beloved place which currently is racking up 40 degrees, I confess to Q. Questions for others, for myself. The facing of the awful Q through check-in, security, passport control. So I decide to find Q in my trusty and ancient Thesaurus. I find Quiddity. It’s an old word, you will know. Not one that finds a place in ordinary conversation, but one that intrigues me for its meaning.

Quiddity is the ‘whatness’ or ‘Who-ness’ which makes something or someone distinguished from others, the universal nature of that thing or person, including quirks and eccentricities. I know why Q came to me today. And in the Thesaurus, it’s in Section 1. ‘Existence’. I have never, in decades of writing ever been wheeched back to Section 1, but as I read down the lines of the first page on Abstract Relations, I feel I have landed. I am Q. So is everyone but most of us don’t get that, until we do. It’s all about the questions and the quirks and the quiddity, but not just that. The Q person has to recognise themself, or is it ‘selves’? A Question for the rainbows.

Packing for Africa whilst I shiver under a panoply of thixotropic cloudage is extremely tricky. Shorts, skimpy frox, teeshirts I have completely forgotton about and which give me some grief as I pull them from hibernation. They’re all laid low right now, swacked and contained, rolled and suppressed and somewhat sat-upon and my case is not full of the ‘right’ clothes. It never was. I never looked as they did. I was a Q although I didn’t know that, and didn’t want that. I wanted to be any other letter of the alphabet, whatever got me into the inner halls of Them. I know different now. When you are a Q, you learn to be one. It’s lonely as hell. It’s dark and unfriended. But if you want to be who you want to be, Own the Q and find support. You’re a Q. You know the way.

I’m in Heathrow now and watching a gazillion people flow by, all joined up in line like a very long and colourful caterpillar. I am not comfortable at all around crowds, fast-movers, noise, cities, people in excess and yet I am calm. I won’t be, of course, once my gate is on the board and I have 15 minutes to get from A1 to Z46 by train, but I have done this before and still arrived in Africa for Breakfast with another Q. My son.

Talk soon from the Spring of Africa, among the Quiet people.