goodwoodenship

A couple of weeks ago on the subway I watched a man create his own humiliation. He was a professor type, in that a stereotype of a professor is a type. He had his hair semi slicked back and a battered old leather briefcase with various papers in it, a suit that was new enough to seem smart but crumpled enough to seem like he was trying.

He had a coffee in his hand and he was trying to read and drink it when he spilt a little on the floor. And it was only a little. But still he put his papers back in his bag and used a paper napkin to try and mop up the very little bit of coffee that was already subsuming itself into the filth of the carriage floor. Only as he leant a bit further to catch the last drop by someone’s foot he tipped his coffee cup in his other hand and it spilt properly this time all over the floor.

The lady next to him lifted her heels in distaste, managing to look at the scene in order to avoid the coffee without quite looking or acknowledging him. I thought at this point he’d give up, his napkin was already coffee stained and the pool on the floor was beyond the absorption of the rag but he put the coffee cup down to one side, carefully put down the briefcase that he’d had on his lap and crouched down onto the floor and started mopping, incredibly patiently from one edge of the spill to the other. Trying to contain the lake from hitting other people.

When the carriage lurched he move to catch the coffee as it ran in one direction. At one point, when it was obvious that his napkin was beyond inadequate one girl near him threw down her paper towel, and then a guy sitting next to me threw his, nobody quite looked at him even though everyone was watching. Even the people who threw the towels seemed to be only half acknowledging the disaster that was happening to him without quite understanding why to him it was so necessary to clean it up.

He thanked them and carried on mopping with the towels, even beyond the point where a normal person would have stopped. And he managed it, what had seemed like a unmanageable amount become become just a wet stain, and still he patiently cleaned it, turning the napkins to find a slighter dryer spot with which to wipe. He’d done what he set out to do despite the fact that I’m sure he realised that everyone was wondering why he was even bothering. That, for them, his effort had gone beyond the initial reaction that most people would have engendered in order to distract from the clumsiness that had triggered the moment.

A woman on the other side of me leant in and said “I think it’s enough, it’s a dirty train anyway” and she meant it kindly and he sort of responded in a gesture of acknowledgment and started to gather together all the coffee sodden paper towels he had on him. He lifted the lid of the coffee cup but obviously there was still coffee in it so he seemed uncertain as to what to do with them, he put them in the cup, felt that it wasn’t working so took them out again and looked to his left to see if there was somewhere he could put them. And, as he looked left, his arm moved to counterweight the gesture, knocking over the coffee cup, flooding the remainder of the coffee over the carriage floor.

I grabbed his briefcase out of the way as it spilled and he said thank you immediately in the same way he had thanked the others, he groaned at what had happened and took the briefcase off me and moved it to his seat. And then he started to try and clear up the new mess with the old sodden now useless napkins. A couple of seconds in, we came into a station, he picked up the coffee cup, the towels, the briefcase and left the carriage.

He left behind a pool of coffee that spread up and down the carriage with the train’s movements as the train pulled out of the station. I thought maybe he had given up because he had come to his station but as we pulled out I saw him sit down on the bench to wait for the next train. For a couple of stops on there was this sense of community, we were divided between those who stepped on the train and grimaced at the coffee mess as they avoided it and those who knew where the coffee had come from.

So it’s been a while since I posted a blog, mainly because whenever asked why I keep one I always had the sinking feeling that the only answer would be vanity. Three months in New York has cured me of my reticence, in New York vanity is relative. Mainly, I think, because when you’re competing with a city, ego is the only real weapon an urbanite has. Originality is paradoxical since it is the in thing, stature cannot compete with skyscraper, fame and wealth are too common to be sufficient, and absolutes are short on supply so external measures are impossible to find - in the end surviving New York requires believing in yourself to a point that touches on insanity or faith (if you make the distinction).

I turned thirty this year, which remained for me an unimportant milestone until I made the mistake of mentioning it to others. After a couple of weeks of "I cried on my thirtieth, I went over all the things I thought I wanted to be and realised what i was" and "how are you feeling? body falling apart yet?" (which slightly lame joke would have been easier to ignore if I hadn’t started, quite recently, to rely on handrails more when going down stairs due to the horribly consistent knee issue) and "Do you feel old? I can’t believe you’ve reached that stage" with an emphasis on ‘that’ in a manner that made me think yet again I’d missed out on some crucial piece of social knowledge when daydreaming about walking on ceilings or trying to teach my rabbit to climb stairs - as I said after a couple of weeks of this I began to wonder if there was some ceremony necessary to effect a proper transformation between carefree twenties and official and depressed thirtydom. Some sort of physical castration to go with the verbal one would probably have been apt.

Instead I asked my mum to come out to New York (if in doubt ensure the presence of someone who helps you regress to twelve year old mentality) and decided on a quiet dinner with friends. During dinner mum made the mistake of mentioning a German tradition that applied to single women turning thirty, emphasis on single. I think it was some early version of online dating (also big in New York), any woman in such a cursed state was required to go to the local municipal building (town hall, local toilet, whichever was bigger) and sweep the steps in a becoming (and presumably efficient) manner until a male, (any male, human preferable) came and, having perused and found her to his liking, kissed her.

What obligations he had afterwards mum wasn’t sure. If the rules were anything like those in New York he would probably be required to release an income tax statement with dependents and tax breaks highlighted in green, red if under a certain amount. Any which way I had been searching for a suitable marker to another decade successfully completed with only a bare minimum of pratfalls and the socially accepted modicum of mistakes and this seemed about apt. So at about roughly midnight anyone searching for me on my birthday needed only look in the vicinity of an official set of steps for a slightly deranged half asian fulfilling german tradition with a broom made of restaurant napkins in one hand (they’d broken their only functioning broom the night before and new yorkers don’t seem to throw their brooms away) and a bunch of balloons in the other.

Ramadan ended a week ago and with it ended the fear one can only feel when late for an iftar, driving full speed towards a junction with a hunger crazed taxi driver, racing with the mirror image of your ride coming from three other directions all intent on reaching the junction, their turning and subsequently home before sunset hits.

During ramadan the drivers in Khartoum drive as if the pregnant woman in their car has not only just burst her waters but just asked them to deliver her baby. Survival is ensured by either going home early or walking in incense filled deserted streets post sunset, the only sign of life being the large gatherings of food road stops for travellers who need to break their fast. These walks have the same atmosphere as going out alone in London on christmas day, the party is elsewhere, if you’re not at home you’re not anywhere.

Eid on the other hand is supposed to be a much livelier affair, I wouldn’t know having committed to a week long boat ride in the Red Sea starting just before Eid and ending yesterday. The boat was booked, seven of us were going, most relative strangers, and five Italians were booked as a separate party on the same boat. Everything was arranged, scuba equipment, two dives a day, conversation topics, food, berth, coral reefs pre-prepared. Utterly organised except the small matter of getting the seven of us to Port Sudan where the boat was docked.

The dillemma ran thus - drive a relatively unknown route, face roadblocks and a desert road where breakdowns could be fairly dodgy or fly via a Sudanese airline, in the full knowledge that the US embargo meant that Sudanese planes replace their worn parts with equally worn rejects from Ethiopian airlines. The flight from Khartoum to Port Sudan on the other hand was only an hour, the drive a full day at least. But then, as someone else pointed out by email, landing in Port Sudan involved flying over the wreck of the last plane to crash there, a couple of months ago, which the airport authorities still hadn’t gotten round to clearing up. Another email was sent shortly after, listing Sudanese airline urban myths floating around included one where the pilot, bored halfway through the flight, went to talk to someone in the back of the plane before returning to find he had locked himself out of the cockpit. This email debate between car lovers and plane fetishists became increasingly polarised and personal, smear campaigns were started, outrageous stories spread via bcc, houses set on fire.

In the balance of things I decided to go by car. Unfortunately I don’t have a license so it was more of an academic decision dependant on other’s compliance. After killing the beloved pets of half of my rivals I managed to force three others to brave the journey with me, Sergio, Audrey and Sam; all young and tired of life. We arranged to start on Friday morning along the longer route to Port Sudan with a night stop in the mountains of Kassala and two eight hour drives to look forward to. Seeing as we agreed on this 8.30 am start as I stumbled drunk out of the car Thursday night, being dropped off from a party at 3am, happily proclaiming I was off to pack, it was a huge surprise, both to me and the three people I tried to wake up with an 8am call, that I managed to keep to to the bargain. At 11am we eventually set off, hungover, haggard and racing through our two day supply of water as we perused towns, landmarks and palm groves on what seemed like a map of fairly well developed roads in Sudan. Well developed until we realised that the road marking key contained entries like “dirt road, unfinished - main road, un-tarmac-ed - mountain road, here be dragons”.

An added element of uncertainty to our journey that none of us had planned for, having unfortunately omitted to add it to our list between ‘extra rations of water’ and ‘make sure there is a spare tire’ was the decision by the SPLM to leave the GONU. In non acronym terms, the separate government in the south decided to leave the joint government of national unity that had been the main prop of the peace agreement. As we drove out of Khartoum it was still uncertain whether this was a political gambit or a precursor to the renewal of civil war. It says a lot for the pace of news and life in Sudan that while the capital was abuzz with the news, an hour out of Khartoum there was next to no impact. Anyway we reasoned that were the shit to hit the fan there was no better place to be than 20 metres under water with reef sharks.

The journey went pretty much as predicted by our rivals, the roads were at times so worn and hole ridden that it seemed safer to drive on the desert sand. Buses would rush by with the speed only attainable when the drivers are paid per number of trips logged in a day. Dead tires littered the sidetracks, splayed in tragic poses where they had expired, innards ripped out by cruel roads whose jagged chasms had compounded the injury of the impossible heat and insane speeds. Occasionally the tires would be dismissed into the background by the skeleton of a truck or coach, spilling its innards of grain sacks and cargo out onto the roadside where it had fallen. Sometimes the drivers would still be sitting by their trucks, like farmers with their dying prize breed, having set up a bed and warning triangles around the wreck, (usually a useful two paces away from the original crash site). At one point we overtook an eighteen wheel truck (or something along those lines) just as one of its wheels broke free and ran happily off into the desert crying out something about camels and the life of nomad free for him. As we pulled in in front of the truck we could see the driver looking in his rear view mirror with a look of confused disbelief. I don’t blame him, tires don’t usually talk.

It was inevitable that our car should somehow join this list of road trip casualties and it happened just at the peak of our optimism, our ipod dj-ing had resulted in relatively few executive vetoes, the sugar high from the car snacks was at its peak and the car games had been mercifully short lived. We were an hour from our first night stop - Kassala and its rounded peaks and soft cricket ridden beds of the UNDP guest house, when suddenly the car started clapping along to the music. After initially criticizing it for being out of beat we clocked that something may be wrong and we stopped the car to find a small ropey portion lining the treads of the tyre had sprung free and was flapping around with happy abandon. Being practical types we cut it off and decided to advance at a steady pace of 40 km/hr instead of 120. Twenty minutes later as I gazed out at the nomad tents and herds of goats clustered under the lone desert shrub I was treated to a firework display of flying rubber dancing past my window. Luckily Sergio, who was driving, was quicker on the uptake than me, as I was cooing at the pretty display he already had the car at a halt and was heading to the back to get the equipment to change the tyre.

This however was where our practicality and efficiency ended. It turned out half the equipment we needed wasn’t there or if it was was well hidden. A four way debate sprang up about how to get the spare tire off the back. It rested with a man named Abdallah who crossed the road from the tent where he had been celebrating Eid to sort out the situation. He quietly took the jack off me that I had been alternatively shaking and then examining and had it under the car and was prising the worn tire off as the debate was still ongoing “I think we need a long pointy thing to get the jack to work, Yoshi can you please tell that guy he can’t get the tyre off that way … no, not that sort of long pointy thing, a shorter long pointy thing, it should be grey, can you see one in the boot?… Yoshi please tell him thank you but we’re ok… What do you mean there’s no pointy thing? Have you tried under the seats? Yoshi can you please tell him… oh” We left still shouting thank you from the windows and waving sheepishly until he fell out of sight and Kassala came into view.

After a cricket infested night in Kassala where going to the toilet involved vying with the insects for standing space ( I found most of the time I lost the argument “we were here first” tended to stump me ) we set off again for Port Sudan. As we came closer to our predicted time of arrival in Port Sudan (roads being unsigned and routes becoming a matter of guesswork and shouted inquiries to the inevitable groups of people who gathered round roadblocks (to get out meant possibly being singled out and properly stopped)) we would take it in turns to lean out of the window and try to smell the sea. “I smell sand” said Sergio excitedly until we pointed out we were driving through the desert. The variety of terrain in Sudan is unbelievable. On our journey we went through desert, farmland, mountains, desert again and then came into the port on the edge of the Red Sea. It took us two days, approximately 1300 kms and we had barely covered a portion of Sudan’s width. We passed nomadic tents, Eritrean refugees, camel herders, small villages and bustling cities mingling slums and Hilton hotels propped on the tip of prosperity and development. Whatever the discomfort of the journey was worth it to finally get an idea of the expanse of Sudan as opposed to the petri dish of Khartoum where all Sudan gathers to become a representation of what is Sudanese.

Electricity in Khartoum cannot be bought on a trust basis. You pay first and use later. Payment is made in a large white tiled air conditioned room with hints of off green on the peripheries of your vision to create a sense of an unclean hospital room, (eerily similar to most decor in Khartoum). Two woman sit in next door cubicles in  the centre of a row of twelve or so empty ones, they are among the fastest typers I have ever seen either side of the Atlantic. Every time I have been there (which admittedely is less than my flatmate duty dictates) there has never been a need for more than this island of two. Rush hour is when the office closes, at 9.30pm. This is usually the time you see rickshaws, cars and taxis swoop up onto the pavement and sand banks only to gurgitate out a frantic punter clasping their cash to their bosom as they sprint for the door. Or in my case hobble (my knee again - this time from rugby and volleyball) from down the road where we live.

Payment is made in cash only (as with everything for foreigners here due to the american embargo and the subsequent moratorium on visa and mastercard) you hand over your numbers (everyone’s a number here) to identify your account and then reluctantly your cash and watch their fingers fly. They print out a receipt with how many KWh you are now the proud owner of and with a special code that only you, you happy few, possess. Off you trot back to your flat, happy at the thought of all those electrons waiting to bounce around in your building, where a little white innocuous box awaits you and your new twenty digit code.

This is usually where the story ends, there are variations on the theme, your walk back to the house may be populated with images of a stray dog being licked by the donkey that is tied to the rubbish heap next to the building site where the IDPs work. You may be accosted by a security guard practising his english, you may even trip over a rise in the sand and narrowly miss a tree because you were trying to work out where the moon was but couldn’t see it for the clouds that have finally come with the beginning of the rainy season. But for the last you’d have to be a bit of a space cadet.

But usually the story ends happily, you get home, you plug in the code, the numbers flash and rise magically and you go to bed, safe in the knowledge that tonight your ac will be working, tonight your fan will helicopter gracefully above your bed, forever populating your room with air currents. Last night however things didn’t work out quite as expected. I had people round to play risk, my flatmate (who was staying at a friends) had bought the electricity and texted me the code. At 12.30am the risk game ended. By about 1.00 the minimum obligatory cleaning was done, by 1.30am I had hunted down and killed as many of the mosquitoes that I could find that had gotten in with the smokers from the balcony. Life was good, all was as it should be, by about 2am I was ready to doze off. I turned off my lights, dimmed down the music on my ipod, cuddle my 10 or so pillows and slowly drifted off to the caress of the cool air from the ac behind me.

At 6.30 am this morning, Khartoum was blessed with the sight of me clutching a bag and a pillow, wild eyed and delirious, stumbling through empty streets unwitnessed save by the crowded early morning buses that drive by with their doors perpetually open and packed with people leaning at perfect angles towards the air giving windows to the point where they look like an experiment with internal perspective. As I said, at 6.30 am this morning I made it to my office before writing the below email to my flatmate and landlord :

Advantages of living in a slow bake oven:

No wait for hot water. Cold water from the water tank on the roof comes out at boiling temperature.

Shower efficiency, you step out you’re dry.

Melting baking chocolate for cakes just requires leaving it on a plate for twenty minutes.

Disadvantages:

Dessication.

My friends in Khartoum have a puppy that could possibly qualify for the Tufts Idiot award, if there was such a thing. Perhaps there should be. It’s less a puppy more an awkward adolescent and in the time that I’ve spent with it, which has been extensive since I am their local dogsitter, it has continued to impress on me it’s considerable lack of neurons required for basic canine survival. It’s one saving grace is it’s considerable charm, it’s a beautiful dog and extremely friendly. Still there have been times, mainly when trying to explain that the reason I am trying to remove the razor from it’s mouth is not because it is extremely edible and I want in all my selfishness to be the one to eat it but because it was cutting its mouth, when I have begun to wonder whether the world is really evolving into a higher level of lifeforms. Today was one of them.

I have just been told I have bronchitis, which is annoying, I was wiped and unable to muster the energy to make it home from work and also needed to get some work stuff done so instead I expired gracefully at my friend’s house (complete with adolescent dog and internet) which is next door to my office.

When I arrived her dogs greeted me at the door, the puppy, Tuffy, exuberant as usual, and the adult, Nat, slightly chastened with a long suffering look as Tuffy placed her paw in Nat’s eye in her attempt to reach and digest the left corner of my laptop, my hand and my oh so out of reach sunglasses. Tuffy gets insanely excited when in the presence of people, to the point where she becomes uncertain as to what position to take or which direction to point in, she shows in these moments all the grace and intelligence of a pinball on heat. In the middle of her indecision I leant down to pat Nat on the head, in solidarity if you will, it was at this point that Tuffy decided to race between my legs from behind and jump. I was coming down, she was coming up.

I am now nursing  a split lip. When asked I am forced to admit I was headbutted by a puppy, she is unmarked; my street cred and dignity however are shot to pieces.

These last two weeks have been spent flying from DC to London to Khartoum to Istanbul to Ankara to Khartoum to Juba and today back to Khartoum again. It’s a tough life I lead.

I was in Ankara for a close friend’s wedding. For the signing of the wedding contract the guests gathered in a room decorated with a bower down the middle and two thrones on the centre stage. As we sat gossiping and frantically trying to revive the batteries in our cameras (me, my camera, "the brick", dates from the 1900s) the lights went out, suddenly, dramatically. Music started to swell, and the pathway through the bower shone in the new darkness with a soft blue light radiating from below it’s pristine glass surface. Mood created, the doors opened to reveal the bride and groom, they entered and a smoke machine began to billow forth. On the wall behind us a slideshow appeared; photos showing their slow evolution from childhood to coupledom. The point of the smoke machine soon became apparent as the couple proceeded through the bower, a laser show danced over the billowing smoke guiding their way to the dais at the centre of the room.

The whole thing had a rather understated feel to it.

Despite this beginning the actual wedding itself was very simple and very touching. Seeing a very close friend getting married is strange, regardless of how mature you feel it seems like you are watching them leave the life you know to become something more serious than you are, more committed and slightly alien. Or at least if you are as immature as me that’s how it seems, their world is now a world in which the general compact is an acceptance of shared living arrangements, a mortgage perhaps, children are now in the equation and their partnership is no longer an aspect of their social lives that they shared with you but is the core of the life they have chosen. It’s like a club that I never thought I wanted to join but now that my friends are all becoming members I’m slightly affronted that I haven’t been asked.

Perhaps it was this that led to events later in the night. After the marriage ceremony we had all decamped to change into our evening gear and parade ourselves to our best advantage at the wedding dinner, held at one of the Ankara hotels. Thrones were again in evidence, as too was a live Turkish band. Most of the night was spent ullulating (on my part, I have to admit very few people seemed to know what I was doing) and clicking your fingers together in the air in gestures of approval at the mass dancing that broke out (my ineffective attempt at this combined with the ullulating led to me briefly being a pariah until I clocked on and stopped). The wedding was unusual from most other weddings I have been to in that no-one made any speeches, which had a direct correlation with the high energy levels of the guests. The dancing and drinking went on for a considerable time until at last, in the early hours, people began to drift off, either in couples or in marauding hoardes heading for the late night bars to find opportunities to eventually couple off.

As the last core group of fifteen or so of us were beginning to say our goodbyes the bride realised she had forgotten to throw the bouquet. For some reason the groom, my friend, felt it incumbent on him to point out I was one of the only single females in the room, "Yoshi will catch it". They lined me up alone, though however disconcerting the moment was, my solitude was brief. Uncannily, the room that had been almost empty two seconds before, suddenly filled with females. "Throw it my way" was the general cry. This again was completely different from British weddings where in general admitting you actually wanted to catch the bouquet would be feasible only among the truly desperate.

I was standing next to a girl that I had sat next to at dinner; an incredibly sweet, young student who was hoping to do a masters in international relations because she wanted to help people. A sort of genuine Miss World candidate if you will. As the bride turned her back to us and you could feel the anticipation in the room become something tangible, she turned to smile at me. The bouquet at this point was airbourne and was sailing roughly in my direction, my competitive instinct started to kick in, almost in response to the obvious desire of those all around me to be the ones to catch it. I don’t know, perhaps it was partly this, maybe I just felt it was about time to be part of the club, but as the bouquet soared through the air and started to fall, now quite patently in the direction of the smiling girl next to me, something in me baulked, it might have been adrenaline. Disregarding entirely the propriety of it, forgetting for a moment that I was surrounded by people, being watched by old friends and new, all I saw was the bouquet and as she raised her hands, madonna like, I stepped forward, did a neat side step and caught the bouquet from in front of her, pulling it in to me with all the finesse of a cricketing legend fielding a fast leg slip.

There was a moment where I was triumphant, I had won, I had caught it, but that was fairly quickly subsumed with a realization of where I was and what I had just done. I spent the next couple of minutes salvaging my conscience by giving out the roses from the bouquet.

The next day I flew home, back to Khartoum.

It was at a certain moment last week after arriving home in Khartoum to a room subsumed under two inches of haboub dust (after three sweeps this was reduced to around half an inch), due to fly to Juba at 6am but unable to sleep because of the loudest and most elusive cricket in Sudan, that I realised something. The realisation came sometime around 3am while in chase of the cricket who had escaped by jumping at me as I was about to catch it in a glass, (causing me to squeal, jump backwards into the wall, knock my side table only to watch the last bottle of water I had in the house on it anoint the area around me). As I said, it was at a certain moment at 3am, sitting on the floor in the wreckage of my bed which I had broken whilst moving it, certain that the cricket was mocking me with it’s chirps from behind the headboard — it was in that moment while I was struggling with the archaic joint mechanism of the bed’s slats, hoping to mend my bed in the last couple of hours I had before I was technically supposed to wake up, as I gazed at the Hanzel and Gretel trail of dust free footprints around the pool of watered dust (mud) on the floor and their mirror image of dust laden ones on my sheets, (some even on the wall though for the life of me I don’t know how they got there), it was this particular moment that I realised that handing out flowers was just not going to cut it; karma has its own measure of what constitutes sufficient punishment for snatching away a young girl’s dreams of romance and this was it.

My only hope is that this, plus the blinding cold I have caught from too much travel and too little sleep, will have been sufficient.

I arrived back in Khartoum this week after a two week break that encompassed my birthday, london, dc, old friends and most importantly family. I have to admit I dreaded coming back here, I’d heard nightmares about 50 degrees in the shade, haboubs towering fifty times the height of the tallest building, and worst of all, was going back to an ambiguous difficult political climate where anything can be made to seem reasonable and achievements can seem impossible. To brace myself I had smuggled in key survival tools: speakers for my ipod, hair curlers, wine, and most importantly duck pate with crackers from Wholefoods. Being back however has been a lot easier than expected. I think I was mainly dreading coming back because I had charicatured it so much in contrast to my visit to old haunts and with old friends in DC and London, which had been blissful and is something I still miss.

I was sitting relaxing in DC in Jurek’s front garden last week, my bicycle lying beside me where I had dumped it, sun on my face, nothing to do, watching him haphazardly water the plants, his car, the picket fence and all the pedestrians in between, and came to a mini revelation. Last time I remember sitting on a suburban doorstep, dappled by the leaf caught sun, unencumbered by responsibility or due payments to time I was about six or seven in my first and longest home in Muswell Hill. Shortly thereafter I was unceremoniously plucked from my haven and dumped into the mid-stream current of school timetables and uniforms (something I never got the hang of, having arrived at school in half my pajamas more than once), gcse’s, a-levels, university and employment. It seems like only recently I’ve surfaced to take breath, to survey the landscape and to decide which direction I want to swim in.

Other considerations come into mind of course, like why are you swimming, surely a boat would make more sense, if I got a boat should I let others use it?, should I stop at the shore and think about it for a while, what if I get cramp and drown, are there sharks?, who’s that swimming over there and are they drowning someone?, if they say it isn’t technically drowning is that ok?, should I try to stop them from drowning that person or should I be grateful it’s not me, would this be easier with goggles, should they be designer goggles?, etc etc. All these are key questions, most of the time you only have a second or two to contemplate them before a wave whacks you in the face. Sometimes when it is shallow, you can take your time and wade. These are the best times.

The mini-revelation that I had in Jurek’s garden though was this, I’m swimming upstream, back where I came from, to those moments in the front garden where the biggest responsibility was washing the car and the most complicated thing was wondering whether you had enough energy to move to the fridge and eat and the latest project was catching tadpoles with mum’s turkey baster (something she never forgave me for even though I thought it was quite reponsible of me to dry it and put it back in the kitchen drawer). The revelation was that underneath all the travelling, soul searching and questions of responsibility and legacy, this would make me happiest, I’m just trying to find a way to justify travelling back to it.

For a capital Khartoum is relatively lacking in opera houses, libraries, cafes, theatres, cinemas, and the usual alcohol fuelled areas that pass for packaged entertainment in other more western cities. Entertainment is of your own making, ideas tend to get a little addled under the influence of heat stroke. Hence after spotting an ice block district in the large markets in Omdurman where huge metre long slabs of ice are sold and carted off on donkey pulled vehicles, a couple of friends agreed that it would be a good idea to try and create an indoor curling rink in Khartoum out of seven or eight of those blocks. This idea is still under implementation but we’re optimistic. An equally ridiculous idea was attempting to herd together and discipline enough ex-pat brits and Commonwealthers to film a decent game of cricket to submit to the BBC world cricket world cup coverage. They’re apparently doing short skits of the more outlandish places that people are playing cricket.

Rob, an aspiring county cricketer who moonlights as a lawyer when not otherwise occupied, persuaded a bunch of us to dress up in whites, complete with county cricket hats, to do a desert cricket match. Unfortunately for him most of us didn’t know what we were doing and the atmosphere was one of kids let out for half an hour before bedtime. The first bit of footage he got started with me going in to bat. Last time I was let near cricket stumps was when I was twelve and my brother needed someone to practice with. I was fairly confident I would excel. Two minutes in I rendered the film unusable by shouting an invective string of inventive swear words at the bowler, myself and my bat as I swung and missed three times successively. Shortly afterwards Ingrid an amazonian Australian who has a reputation for being a tough negotiator in high level meetings, took the wicket, professionally tapping the ground with her bat, the Irish wicketkeeper said something derogatory about her stance, barely hesitating she swung round and gave him the finger, two seconds after that the country director of a smaller ngo who was fielding in the slips wandered into the camera shot his shorts deliberately pulled down so that he was half-mooning the camera.

The last over, the only salvageable footage, was about the time I came back in to bat. My partner was at the stumps and had just hit the ball an impressive distance. We ran, my hat fell off, I stopped to pick it up, changed my mind, ran for the stumps, suddenly thought I might trip over it on the journey back, stopped again hesitated turned back for it, bent over, realized my partner was on his second run, and got up and sprinted for the line just as the fielder threw the ball an impressive distance back towards the stumps. The ball was flying in at a slightly faster speed than my uncoordinated run, instead of hitting the stumps it made a perfect trajectory to my head, bounced nicely off and was caught neatly by the bowler. “Howzat!” he cried.

Much as I tried I was unable to persuade Rob to delete the footage.

My only consolation is that Rob wasn’t there with his camera a couple of hours later when Olivier, a friend of mine, was giving me a lift back home. His car has a default setting whereby even if your foot is not on the gas it still rolls at a steady pace regardless of slope angle or terrain. The pace is slightly faster than a walking pace, we calculated a very well trained power walker could keep up with us nicely. We pulled out of his driveway at this speed and continued without engine through the back alleys towards my house. This wasn’t a problem. The problem started when we hit the main road and on a mutual silent consensus decided to see what would happen with the already chaotic traffic if we inserted ourselves in it at a snails pace. At first it meant that the usual three cars to one lane increased to three cars plus the optimistic fourth trying to overtake us. It’s a strange experience being in a car watching traffic flow around you, having enough time to check out what is happening at a stall at the side of the road, to wave to them and exchange pleasantries before you move on. It says a lot for the chaos of Khartoum traffic that to some degree our eccentric behaviour was just incorporated into the usual traffic flows.

The hairiest moment was when we turned off the main road, there was no break in the traffic. Olivier’s way of dealing with this was to turn anyway, regally waving and smiling out his window at the oncoming traffic. Miraculously, even though it took us a terrifying age to cross and the oncoming cars didn’t stop, we weren’t hit. This brought on a vague air of insane hilarity whereas before the predominant feeling had been of laid back laziness and curiosity. As we approached my house, passing my neighbours listening to their radio in their garden, the decision not to stop the car to let me out was taken and I consequently strapped my shoulder bag over my neck and arm and held it tight to me so that it was secure (yet looked ridiculous), opened the car door and after steeling myself up to it for a couple of minutes, leapt from the car running at right angles. This proved to be slightly stupid, which admittedly I should have already clocked, I stumbled a little, nearly ran into the wall that we were driving by, recovered and mentally patted myself on the back as I turned to wave goodbye to Olivier. At which point I realized I’d left the door open, I started sprinting after the car to slam the door shut, assuming that the rules of the game still held. Unfortunately just as I caught up, Olivier, assuming the game was over, hit the brakes, I was in the middle of crying "Olivier the door’s still op…" when I ran face front into the car door still clutching my bag tightly to me.

Like I said, you have to make your own entertainment in this city and sometimes if they’re lucky, you make it for others.

This morning, as usual, I opened my eyes around the time I should be getting up, closed them again and reasoned five minutes more wouldn’t hurt. Curling around my pillows and slothfully wrapping my sheets around me I fell asleep again. Half asleep and happy, I rolled over to my left side to make my back more comfortable. Due to some sort of deficiency from dehydration the usual brain functions that gauge where you are while you sleep didn’t work, as I rolled the bed wasn’t there all of a sudden and I rolled onto nothing, I paused mid-air for a minute to make a “oh shit” face to the camera, then hit the floor still clutching my pillow.

It’s been a good metaphor for work today.