south africa

I stand on the deck above the Switsongo Boutique Guest House (check it out @www.facebook.com/switsongo) in the heart of the wildlife estate. All around me is Bush for hundreds of miles, or it looks like hundreds from here, from where I stand in the hot African wind, the sun even hotter. It is 4pm, two hours ahead of the UK, and time for a glass of wine. I can feel the desert wind, see the red sand game tracks winding like snakes through the reserve. Trees go on for ever, all the way up to the Blue Mountains, the Drakensburg range, reaching to 11,424 ft up into the sky within the border region of South Africa and Lesotho, and stretching for 1,000 km. The very thought of climbing that high peak puffs me clean out.

I search the Bush for heads, for movement, anything. A male giraffe would top these trees, easy and a scurry might mean zebra or Wildebeest or Kudu, the most beautiful, in my opinion, of deer with those stripe markings, that artistic shading, those twisted horns and those velvet eyes. Dinner for lions, but there are no lions here, no elephants, no crocs, no hippos, no danger, but wait……..I forget the leopard, but the kudu don’t, nor the impala, nor the kudu, the wildebeest, the warthogs, the bushbuck, waterbuck and all the other something bucks that nose around here pinching resident’s azaleas. About this time, a bit later, these offerings of dinner grow jumpy, move to ‘safe’ harbour, become alert and watchful, pulling in the teenagers from their raucous play, warning them. Also, around this time when porcupines are waking up and warthogs are doing this leopard jumpy thing, the termites get antsy (please excuse the pun, unintended) because it is quite the norm within this synergistic symbiosis for one of the above to make a frickin big hole, dug deep into the mound, one that can reach way over man’s head and be as wide as public toilet, sort of like a fairy castle to look at but looking is enough. Inside that mound are thousands and thousands of munchers which probably would bite your bum if you were to, unknowingly, rest it there on a big walk. Don’t do that. These ants are an inch, more, long and don’t welcome anyone much, not least a resting bum. In fact, all hell would let loose. A scout would alert and within seconds the super troopers would be on full attack mode. Although they would not eat you from the bum up, they will make sure you spend a long time regretting such contact with their fairy castle.

However, porcupines, aardvarks and those grisly chestnut warthogs don’t, frankly my dear, give a damn and one of them will, as aforementioned, dig a big hole deep into the castle, impervious, it seems to attack. During the day, the mostly nocturnal porcupine, or aardvark shuffles itself out into the night, I’m so not leopard food, just as the warthog, I so am, snuffles and grunts her way in, beckoning babies. They, it seems, are also impervious to ant attack which I’m sure they must encounter, but when I look close up at that thick skin, see a thick skin thing in their small and unintelligent eyes, I get it. It is all fight or flight for these squealers and maybe that is how they survive. I digress.

The sun is sinking, soft and slow, light dapples changing every moment, the light melting from butter yellow to a gentle gold. I see no giraffe heads above the trees but I sense they are there, out there, somewhere. Whether or not I see them seems unimportant. Just to know they might be there is a wonderful knowing. Just to hear the stories on the hot hot wind, to know that down there, down there, life is being lived and on the very edge of survival and every single night.

I am here. I am watching. I see this. I am upright, bright, lively and alive. There is nothing better. Nothing.

In the afternoon sunshine of yesterday we set off to the Fairy Woods to gather wild garlic. I had a recipe for pesto and was keen to make it. Popz on his quad, me on my feet, Poppy trotting alongside, we wound our way through the violets, primroses, wood anemones and sorrel, between the mish-mash of ancient trees, all pushing out green. Turning down towards the shore we couldn’t avoid squashing a carpet of Celandine, faces pointed towards the sun, yellow as new butter, petal perfect. The ground was crunchy, old leaves drying, finally, and as far as we could see, a wide stretch of emerald green wild garlic leaves fluttered in the breeze. I knew I had to find 150 grams and made, as it turned out, a good guess. As we wandered back home, seeing absolutely nobody, we reflected on how this lockdown is a blessing for us. And how it must be a prison sentence for so many others. It’s good to be grateful, good for the health of the person with a thank you in her mouth.

In South Africa, nobody is allowed to go beyond the perimeter fence of their own garden, reserve, township or flat. Anybody found on the streets is at the mercy of the police. One person from each household is allowed to shop alone and once a week. All sales of alcohol and cigarettes are banned. I don’t think that sort of lockdown would make me all that grateful, although gratitude is not something we feel because we have everything. Sometimes our everything is someone else’s nothing much, but we can still find a thank you, if we trouble ourselves to think and reflect and, to a degree, compare our situation with another’s.

This slowdown lockdown time is giving us opportunities to check ourselves from the inside out; to question why we feel this flash of discontent or loneliness or self-criticism. What is it that brings these feelings? Have I felt this before, even when lockdown was not in place? Chances are, I have. So let me poke around through my memories, remembering how good they are at lying. Let me stop when the feeling comes and turn to say ‘hallo’. Let me look this feeling smack in the eyeballs and ask it what it wants from me now, now that I don’t need it at all. There is time for such work these days and, if we are canny, and if we have remembered our dreams and hopes for our own future, we have the chance to find an answer. Ah, so this thing that you do that annoys the bejabers out of me and always has……yes, that thing, the one you have no intention of stopping, even supposing you consciously know you do it in the first place, which you probably don’t.

So, instead of allowing that irritation to rise in me, I will consider a different way to live with this thing in you. How about I am so busy doing my own thing that yours is just a whisper in the winds of change? Or perhaps I will notice and reflect on my own habits that I know irritate you; if I have the humility to go there, of course. It takes courage to go there. Many of us don’t bother. We want everything, not just something and there’s not a lot of gratitude in that. In fact we prefer, if you don’t mind, to grumble about ‘your’ irritating thing, to growl at it, to let it control us, for that is exactly what we are doing.

Well, poo to that. I know that I do spend much time poking about inside myself, and that for some I am a bit of a laughing matter, but it is my thing. If I want to rise from this slowdown lockdown not only intact, but elevated and forever changed, which I do, then I must adopt an attitude of non-judgemental humility and that non-judgement must apply to me too. This way gratitude lies, even for those who cannot walk as we do every day into the Fairy Woods, even them. A time of reflection is laid out before us now, like the Celandine and, if we turn our perfect petals to the light of the sun, we can all come out on the other side of this as better humans.

We never did see a fairy.