goodwoodenship

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.