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Published: March 5th 2007
I’m still pinching myself to check that I’m actually here.
Here in Windhoek.
Here in the friendly internet café on Fidel Castro Street where the PC has crashed on me twice already this afternoon, my flashdrive appears to have gotten bent in my travels and I’ve discovered that I’ve brought the wrong cable to download pictures from my camera .
Here, a couple of blocks away from where I’ve parked the Old Duchess, leaving her in the tender care of yet another diligent attendant - no impersonal parking meters and draconian traffic wardens for us in Namibia; the Old Duchess who is gently reminding me of her little quirks (Keith, if you’re reading this, she’s STILL IN ONE PIECE, honest!), and who could hardly be more different than the little “toy car” I’ve been driving in London in recent months.
Here, where His Excellency Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe (sic) is on a state visit, celebrated - I use the word with caution, though the Namibian President, Hifikepunye Pohamba, is known to be a Mugabe sympathiser to some degree - with flags and photographs hanging from lamp-posts on the main roads. (I was wryly amused that the rapist and genocidist of Zimbabwe, days after his eighty-third birthday, still requires a thirty-year-old photograph to be used in his publicity; Hastings Banda-like, do we assume that he does not age? After all, only this week, he dismissed speculation about his succession with a sharp “there is no vacancy in the position of president of Zimbabwe” and has promised - threatened? - to stay in that role until he reaches a hundred.)
Here, in the muggy warmth of summer where the threatened rain never quite materialises to the consternation of the locals and my secret, selfish relief (I feel as if I’ve had my fair share of the Namibian wet season in October/November last year: the embarrassment of getting the car stuck in mud in Etosha has still not yet faded).
But even a week ago - less than six days ago - I doubted in my heart of hearts that I’d make it back so soon.
My clients never caused me such angst. Sure, I often consulted them in advance about the timing of holiday plans and/or business trips, and I’ll admit that, increasingly often, I had to call the office and/or even actually do some work while I was away, but I never had to cancel a flight booking for a client. My good fortune, I’ll admit.
So what happened this time? Surely, you may ask - at least those of you who haven’t lived through the agony of the last few weeks - this shouldn’t be an issue in my new life? Well, you see, I couldn’t escape the long arm of the Law entirely: it was my turn to polish my halo and assume my civic duty…. of jury service. In fact, Colin had had to negotiate with Her Majesty’s Court Service during my last sojourn abroad as I was originally called for the last week in November. After discussing my 2007 plans with me, he offered the Courts a four-week window from the middle of January. Hence, Monday 29 January saw me first walking through the hallowed portals of Southwark Crown Court.
Everyone I’ve known who has done jury service talks of the boredom factor: take lots to read and do, and music to listen to, I was urged. So I did what I was told, and went armed with travel books, a large notepad and my iPod on day #1. At 12.30 pm, just when those of us first-week jurors still in the waiting room, as yet un-summoned to our duties, were audibly starting to consider lunch, thirty of us were called into the Corridor - the gathering-point for potential and actual juries (woe betide you if you were lurking there for any other purpose!). This, in itself, was strange. Usually, only fifteen people are called forward, and a jury of twelve is selected in the Court from them. However, this trial was scheduled for “two to three weeks” and the Court had asked for additional potential jurors in case more than three of the original set had immovable commitments in the third week.
I have been asked time and again why I didn’t mention my flight to Johannesburg. Booked for 19 February, it fell on what would have been the first day of week four of the trial. Yet the Judge was clear in his directions to the silently-gathered throng: it was “unlikely but possible” that the trial would run into a third week; there was “a chance” that it might run into the middle of the third week; and there was “a very remote possibility” that it might run until the end of the third week. What was I going to do? Put my paw up to talk about a flight the following week? It would only have sounded as if I wasn’t listening to His Honour. So I didn’t.
By the end of week two I was not the only juror getting concerned. (Yes, you’ve guessed it: the stats speak for themselves. 73%!o(MISSING)f people on jury service see active time on a jury during their fortnight “on call”; mine was one of thirty names given to the Court for this trial… and my name was called. What were the chances??? I was juror no.8 if you’re interested.) We’d already been sent out of Court numerous times while the barristers argued “legal” points which it was “not appropriate to discuss” in front of The Jury - strange how one loses one’s individual identity: suddenly, you are simply part of this multi-headed Manifestation Of Justice, an institution that one defence counsel thought it useful to remind us in his closing had been going since the eleventh century (not quite sure what that had to do with his client’s case). We’d also lost a full day when one of the defendants was ill, not to mention the number of times the Judge had called an end to the day’s proceedings well in advance of the 4.30 pm official end to the day. I decided to put a question to the Judge: was he, in consultation with counsel (I was nothing if not ingratiating!), in a position to give us a revised timetable for the trial? Last thing on the Friday, he got back to us: the trial would certainly run until the end of the fourth week. Cue consternation and a hurried review of existing plans - and, yes, a couple of drinks to assist the thought process!
Come Monday, when the Judge heard about the flights that two of us had booked for the fourth week, he was Consideration And Concern in human form, offering to provide a letter that could be sent to the airlines/insurers to explain the situation, and even to speak to the airlines themselves… somehow I struggled with the idea of Judge C Smith in London making many inroads with South African Airlines bureaucracy in Johannesburg… but advising us not to re-book until the end of the fifth week. After a couple of attempts - the travel agent initially feeling circumscribed by existing and predictably rules-oriented contact points between the agency and SAA’s ticketing department - we got a result: SAA would move my flight and change my itinerary free of charge so that I could join Colin when he was staying with our friends in Cape Town… but they would not change it again: I deliberated… and opted for keeping my fingers crossed for the trial to finish by the end of the fourth week so that I could get that flight. (As a friend of mine said, when telling me of his forthcoming second wedding, it was a triumph of hope and optimism over experience!)
I left Court for the last time precisely three hours and fifty minutes before my Cape Town flight was due to leave.
Ninety minutes later - not that I was counting - I had a Seriously Spicy Bloody Mary in my hands… and a boarding pass. The emotional intensity of the last few weeks - we had had to reach twenty verdicts in respect of two related gang rapes - already seemed to be disappearing, as if part of someone else’s life…. a luxury that I appreciate the victims and the four defendants, the latter then getting used to their first hours in jail, did not have.
At last something seemed to be going right with this trip.
Otherwise, it’s been a series of question marks. Will I get to Kaokoland on the desert-dwelling elephants project in early March, or will time and/or late rains conspire against me? Will there be an alternative opportunity to get there at the end of March and/or in early April, or will I simply take up the generous offer to spend Easter with friends near Durban? (Tempting though the latter is, I’m increasingly conscious of the need to Do Something before too long - my Presbyterian work ethic must be coming through, or something.) Will the Dianne Lang Foundation Children’s Home, currently suffering a chronic shortage of funds following the Scorpions’ investigation of Dianne Lang (the Scorpions are South Africa’s equivalent of the FBI), still be open in April and May allowing me to go back and work there as I had so very much hoped to do? And finally, will the Mozambique Embassy in Pretoria be as helpful in person as they were on the telephone with regard to granting me a visa so that I can join Colin in Mozambique for a couple of weeks’ hard-earned (by him, anyway!) break on the shores of Lake Nyasa (as Lake Malawi is still called on the Mozambique side)?
When my mother asked for a copy of my itinerary for this trip, I was hard put to know what to give her!
Still, life is what happens when you’re dreaming dreams, and I’m actually enjoying the unpredictability at the moment.
Later this year, my plans resume their customarily regimented style. I’m leaving the UK on 27 June (all of three and a half weeks after I get back from Mozambique) for Seoul where I will spend a few days - although I’m advised to spend those few days outside Seoul, as the city itself has had the proverbial bombed out of it in successive wars and has, I’m told, little to recommend it; I’m currently eyeing up the DMZ (pronounced Dee Em Zee, in good ol’ USofA fashion), aka the Demilitarised Zone, and the islands of the west coast - before heading on to Ulaanbataar. There I will join an Explore expedition which, over the following twelve days, will cover a small circuit (well, small in Mongolian terms!), including the Gobi and the old capital, Karakorum, before returning to the present-day capital for Naadam, the annual national festival celebrating the “three manly sports” of horse-riding, archery and wrestling (for the feminists amongst you, I understand that women do actually participate in all three… scary prospect with the wrestling…).
Just before I left London, I heard from, and then met up with, Lisa, a veteran of the Wild Dog & Crazy Kudu trip in Namibia last July. To my enormous delight, she is very keen (honestly, no arm-twisting or bribes were involved!) to join me for the Korean and Mongolian adventures this year. I’m confident it’ll be even more of a blast than life on the road with Dean and Patric, and, anyway, great to have the company of someone with whom I know I travel well.
From “UB” (the city has more spellings than I’ve had hot dinners, so I’m opting for the chummy abbreviation, even though we’re not yet well-acquainted), I’ll fly back to Beijing for 24 hours’ kip before joining an Exodus trip overland to Xi’an, Tibet and Nepal. I get back to the UK on 18 August, take my mother up to the almost-as-remote north coast of Scotland in mid-September, and then…. Well, I’m still working on October/November but am definitely heading south for a warm Christmas with my cousins in Australia!
But, for now, it is wonderful to be back in Southern Africa. Changing into shorts and a T-shirt after my post-flight shower on Saturday morning, I felt that, in more ways than one, I was now putting on my other life, my African life, my happy life, like a well-loved pair of jeans. London in December had been a huge shock: the earliness with which it got dark (if it had ever really become light), the cold and the damp, the crowds, the traffic, the claustrophia-inducing buildings crowding in on me as I stumbled, still wearing rock sandals out of consideration for the Bashed Toe, through the City, the rampant and distasteful consumerism of the run-up to Christmas. I clung on to my memories of the vast, open spaces of Namibia, of the sunshine, of being really happy, of things that matter. However, it was to see the people that I had come back and I had a complete blast catching up with friends and family - and being greeted with such enthusiasm: it’s worth travelling for a few months simply for the welcome one then gets as a rarely-sighted animal - and that more than compensated for my surroundings. Before I realised what was going on, perhaps by early January, I had become a reluctant Londoner again, taking for granted the crowds, the weather, the monochromacity of urban life.
Now I am reminding myself that traffic lights change straight from red to green, with no intervening amber; that trying to reactivate my old cell number requires four lengthy visits to MTC over three days (what would that have cost them under my old charge-out rates?!) and still fails; that the internet is slower, even in an internet café, and is subject to crashing without warning (as I write, the ‘net is down completely for the second time today, blamed, of course, on “the Government”); that pavements are a luxury rarely seen outside the town centre and hiking boots the best form of footwear for walking any distance in town; that “traffic” is when there are three other vehicles on the road and the “rush hour” is when there are a couple of cars ahead of you at the lights; that horizons are endless and blue skies the norm; that a dentist may see you on no notice to replace a filling and charge less than the equivalent of GBP50 for the pleasure, having first established in which of three languages he should address you; that every conversation should start with a “Hi! How are you?” before settling down to business…. The charm, the idiosyncrasies and the frustrations of even this semi-Europeanised Africa. I’m home.
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Ros
non-member comment
Great to have you back on line
Great to hear from you, you rarely-sighted ( - it was just lovely to see you) animal! What different paths lives can take. Here it is 6.30pm and time for an episode of Pingu and bottle of milk (well, mine would have been red wine, but I've just been informed that we have run out...Surely parenthood hasn't driven us to drink the the cellar dry!). So glad that you are home and happy. A year ago I would have been seriously envious, but tonight milk and penguins suit me just fine. We are just the proudest and happiest parents. A little burst of African sun on my face wouldn't go amiss though! Teeth cleaning time now. Goodnight. Ros