lions

It’s all about rivers here, these African days of heavy rain, unheard of they say, even those who have lived here since childhood. Times are a-changing and that’s for sure. I wonder how the river life is coping with this abundance. Crocs will have more room in which to pretend they are rocks with eyes and the hippos, well, they can go anywhere, land or water and I’m sure they do. The mudslide turns a river bank into a skitter and many a zebra, impala, bushbuck, eland, nyala, to name but a few of the deers, giraffe, wildebeest, buffalo, warthog, person is at more risk than usual, when the bank stopped at the edge of the river and the river stopped at the edge of the bank. Roads have been washed clean away, gardens too and yet the ebullience of flora and fauna, the sudden rainbow blooms along the way sing a glorious song, thanks to this rain. The birds above the floods are spectacular. Even the dull looking ones back home are flamboyantly coloured up like disco lights in the tree canopy. Waterholes are full to bursting. I have only ever seen them dry, staring red-eyed at the sky, offering no relief to those thirsty wild ones who may have walked miles for succour and hydration. In my minds eye, I watch elephants flumping in the swollen pools, squirting each other, the little ones scooting along the bank trumpeting, or, rather, tooting, for they have to learn the trumpeting technique as they grow, much as we humans do when learning to play an instrument. I, we, haven’t been able to get to the camp, the one beside the river, the one around which all of the big five and more wander without reservation just whenever they fancy, because all the tracks have become, let’s say, rearranged over the past week. Ridgebacked and sluiced by deep rivulets, vast quantities of red sand washed down or pushed to one side, the track becomes trackless and most certainly does not allow traverse for a vehicle. So, the water controls the land, it seems and that makes sense to me. We can build all we like, the best house, the best road, fixing our human flags into a tract of land we call our own, and then the sky opens her maw and vomits for days, for nights until she is quite emptied out. Another week, they say. But, in between the thunderstorms and the deluge of rain, the sun is afire. Sitting in the sun lasts about 4 minutes, for the burn is ferocious. You don’t sunbathe in Africa unless you want to turn into brindle at best, biltong at worst, which I do not. I wander about in the garden doing this and almost can’t bear to stay for ‘that’, so hot is it out there.

Back to the river I have yet to see for real. Water is my element be it a river, the sea, ponds, lakes, tarns and puddles. I am drawn to them all in fascination, feeling the pull, loving the connection as if they are my birth mother. In the turbulence of my adolescence, wherein I felt like a zebra surrounded by lions, I imagined a river and saw it clearly in my imagination, watched all those fish going with the flow without independent thought and I could feel the disappointment. Why are you all following each other? Don’t you know we are all as unique as snowflakes or the stripes on a zebra’s back? It’s hard going against the flow, they burbled, and we feel better going with it. Pshaw! I snorted. Not me. Each time I was upbraided I was going against the flow. At times it was dreadful and I longed to be like Penny and Marion and all those other fish I met inside a school uniform or in the work place or later as a mother and wife. I even changed my writing to look like Penny’s and Marion’s, following them, following the flow. Yes, it did make life peaceful but the schisms in my mind, my heart, my soul had voices loud and demanding. In fact they were disappointed in me and that is the very worst thing, to be the disappointee. Certain I was born into the wrong family, a stork off course thing, I couldn’t not swim against the flow, not all of the time for real but all of the time inside my vulnerable heart. Instinctual behaviour was not encouraged and that’s the only way I could be. That way, they said, may lead to madness, at worst, a reform home at least. Well, I managed to dodge both thus far but it thinks me a lot when I consider this fitting in thing as if it is an essential requirement for life.

The ones I relate to now in my older life are always the ones with a twinkle in their eyes. Oh, Hallo You! You have run amok at least once in your life and you enjoyed it, didn’t you? Yes you aged and yes you learned how to balance the imbalance in your heart, your soul, your mind in order to fit in, I get that. Otherwise you would be either mad or in a reform home or worse, but tell me about those times. How did you get there at all when so many, constrained and for-your-own-good fettered folk just give up on their inner voice, their intuition. and have to spend a fortune and a zillion hours in later life re-learning that which came naturally at birth? I see the others, the conformers, in the river, conforming, going with the flow, going nowhere at all and it is all I can do not to scoop some of them up for a time of Q and A because they have not challenged what appears inevitable. So many, stuck in silent desperation, going to work and back again and loathing it, wondering Is This IT? Well, yes it is if you keep on keeping on with the same old routine. So turn around. Try it. It is definitely tougher but there are only a few of us and there’s so much light, so much to feed on, so many empty coorie-holes to safety in, and such a thrilling rush as the river pushes by and my goodness you’ll grow so strong.

I recommend at least a try. I also know and can see how incredibly hard it is to call a stop. There are others to consider, they depend on me, this is the shape we discussed and agreed upon and what would I do instead? An understandable dilemma but with one life, isn’t it worth deep consideration, a turn around in the river just to see things differently?

The river flows in one direction, always moving towards the ocean, always claiming land back along the way. Underground, overground the river flows. Think of the river as life. And then decide whether or not you want to remain with the flow.

When I first began blogging, I couldn’t even have spoken that word without a schoolgirl snigger and now look at me, tapping across the querty board like a sea bird over rocks. Knowing how to do something affords me the opportunity for a back flip or a pirouette, a chance to show off, although my back-flip days are long gone. For example, if I’m singing something I already know well, I can afford the odd contrapuntal hold-and-dash, curving up at the rise and down at the fall of a phrase for maximum effect, although who I am ‘effecting’ is probably nobody but next door’s hens. If I am cooking, and find I only have half the cream and none of of the grappa, I chortle a bit and adapt, even if the panacotta would be more use as a corner stone. In my book I describe such culinary adaptions, and it was daily, and it was sometimes disastrous but in the end, everyone got fed and it was never on a ready meal.

Tweeting confounds me a little bit with all those hash tags and @s that other people, who do know what they’re doing, seem to employ all over the shop. I am never quite sure where to land those symbols inside a sentence, but I will learn and, for now, I just blunder on, pinging symbols onto the screen and counting my characters like the rest with a modicum of confidence.

On the subject of characters and what they say or ‘tweet’ brings me neatly in to land.

In writing my novel I am a woman at the beginning all over again. I have absolutely no idea if I am writing tripe or something astonishing. Oh, I know bad writing, can spot it immediately, but my own bad writing? Of course I couldn’t could I……write badly?

I wonder…….

I could decide it’s all too scary, this ‘what do you think?’ question that keeps peeking around the corners of my days and nights and asking to be given a place at the table. Look at it sitting there booted and suited before me every morning and growing more confident every single day. The flaming cheek of it. And see it grow, and grow, until it towers overhead and fills the room so that I struggle to see the telly screen of an evening.

I could hide my ‘novel’ under my bed or clasp it to my chest within the dark folds of my old woolly jumper, saying to the world that I and my great story are zipping along like Road Runner on blades, allowing nobody to see it at all until the very last minute, when it’s finished.

But now it weighs a whole country.

Now I am upwind of the lions. And they are hungry. Hungry for all those big dreams we dream and then abandon in our desert because we think we are not enough to walk them out.

Well, all I need is myself. And who says I’m not enough? Oh, of course……I do.

It is at this point I remind myself that I am not a famous author, nor a queen, nor the sole hope of a desperate people. I am just a woman, a writer with a big personality and a great sense of humour. I can rise and I can fall like anybody else and should get on with doing so, or the False Evidence Appearing Real will consume me and lose me in the place where failure is a real threat.

I am nobody’s hope, nor disappointment – just my own. Paws for thought.

So, I hand it over, the draft, now up to chapter eleventy three and a half, to my husband of a thousand years and he begins to read it. As he leafs through the sheets of A4, lowering each, when read, onto a growing pile, I see the chapter numbers rise and rise, and he says not a word. After 30 minutes, whereupon my indigestion level has caused me to locate and swallow a double dose of liver salts, he removes his half-moons and says……..

It’s great.

I want to know more.

I am ecstatic for about half a day. Then I remember that for him, or anyone else, to know more, I must dance back onto the querty rocks and begin to tap again. No back flips, no pirouettes, no contrapuntal gymnastics for me, for I don’t know this well, not yet, and nobody can run before they can walk except my little grand-daughter who never slows up enough to walk anywhere. I watch her take off, her little legs pumping with enthusiasm and energy and I watch her fall. And then someone lifts her up, dusts her down and within seconds she is off once more, running into her life with a thrown back giggle and all our eyes upon her and I think to myself that even if she did come upon a lion, she would probably wrap her arms around its neck and bury her nose into its mane, confounding it completely.