Category: Getting Personal

Personal reflections shared with all and sundry.

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Getting Personal

‘Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?’ Henry Ward Beecher

Brixton is just a stone’s throw out of Mayfair and like Mayfair, is an onamastic bearer of Blighty’s historically imperialist ways. Brixton is a lot like Hilbrow, squealing squalor from weather beaten balconies, while memories of its best days live on its oldest residents. But while Hillbrow is keenly populated by its own peculiar brand of businesspeople, Brixton has become the stamping ground of another breed of businessmen, Bengali, plying their trade in convenience stores, on every available corner. Between them, Brixton’s Protea shopping centre stands out like the proverbial hair in the soup. It’s never been exactly glamorous, but growing up, it was the closest thing to a mall in the proximity. I whiled away many school afternoons at the centre, often under the pretence of needing school supplies from CNA. I’d walk through, Clicks and Truworths blissfully charging whatever appealed to me to my imaginary plastic currency. I remember buying my first tub of fruit flavoured lip balm from the Mr Price for all of R5.00. The stuff of a twelve-year-old’s happiness.

 

There isn’t a CNA anymore in the Protea centre, nor a Truworths, not even a Clicks. But the Pick n Pay, remains a defiant stalwart. And so on my way to stocking up on weekend kitchen supplies for mum, I dropped the latest pair of sunglasses to have suffered disfigurement at my hands at the optometrist, and having some time to bide while my shades had long overdue surgery, I limbered into a second hand bookstore, promising myself to just look through.

 

On the heavily laden classics shelf, I found a copy of A Tale of Two Cities, a 1921 impression. Well thumbed through, a Scottish publisher, its original owner’s name neatly lettered on the inside, its pages fading, truly charmant. A throwback to a time when literature was the domain of a privileged few. As Penguin like to say, ‘In 1935 if you wanted to read a good book, you needed either a lot of money or a library card.’ And there A Tale of Two Cities stands, in a second hand bookstore in a Brixton, Johannesburg, with Kurt Darren blaring overhead and a price tag of R25.00.

 

With my more tangible plastic currency, I’ve made it my own. The stuff of a twenty something’s happiness.

 

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Getting Personal Quoting Others

Finding the moron in oxymoron

 

… I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean- except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.

J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

November really has pounced on me, in another ten days, or so, I’m trying my best to veer away from a countdown, I’ll be twenty five years old. I don’t usually make a big deal out of the years stacking up against me, the difference is often so negligible I blissfully ignore it. I keep saying a person is only as old as they think they are. I don’t feel old, but a whole twenty five years is overwhelming, I feel unworthy.

A child is born to the world every minute but my own world feels like a giant tote bag tilted precariously on its head by a rummaging old woman searching for an elusive amex card. I have more friends but fighting for space in the crowd feels lonelier. I read less but I profess to know more. I have so much to be grateful for but I want more. I concur with Bertrand Russell in that, ‘To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness’, but I haven’t had the epiphany to sit comfortably and contentedly with my present set of sullied circumstances and smile through it which is a direct contradiction to everything I’ve been telling myself these past months.

 

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life,

Is bound in shallows and in miseries;

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current as it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Brutus in Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

 

Categories
Getting Personal Quoting Others

Disenchantment

The past few days I’ve been disinclined towards blogging. I’ve met such wonderful people through blogging but now that blogging is not my only link to the great minds of the blogging world, I’m somewhat adverse to blogging. In his childhood memoirs, Words, Sartre remarks that each time he writes a book, he feels it’s better than the last then he gets ready to disown it. He claims it to be a familiar experience for all writers. I’m not a writer, too much expectation attached to that one, I prefer language practitioner simply for its bafflement inducing potential. I haven’t thought about my blog as better than anything else I’ve done, I haven’t done enough to make such a comparison, but I am wishing this blog away. I’m writing this in an effort to understand why.

I don’t like using my blog as an angstologist, if I did, I’d be at about two hundred posts already. There, I’m starting to feel better about blogging already.

Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

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Getting Personal

Lighting up a Sunday night

I light an incense candle, a gift from the spa at the gym, their way of saying sorry for lifting the skin off my face, it was all a mistake, I wouldn’t have complained, mum insisted, it’s one of those designer fragrances, nothing elementary, it’s meant to be restful, it usually stands a constant vigil in the bathroom, I’m using it tonight as an accompaniment to a spa bath, the home version, I light it, wasting three matches, it’s one of those things that have always evaded me, I should’ve had girl scout classes, I’m better with a lighter, when I was twelve I tested the flick of my thumb on my grandmother’s lighter, the thrill of the light was enough, cigarettes never did hold any attraction, the candle is lit, there’s no smell, maybe it’s supposed to be subtle, but I lean in closer anyway, expecting soft notes like classical instrumental at hotel breakfasts, if I lean any closer my nostrils will be charred by the hungry flame, I move away, content to let it burn it’s own way, I like to think I’m unobtrusive, I want to campaign, spa baths for all, the scent, whether it’s there I can’t tell but as I move into my room, I carry the candle with me, leaving it there while I join the others for the frenetic finish of the formula one season, I’m disappointed, I like the red cars, maybe it’s the fickleness of sporting fortunes that attracts me to it, I return to my room, all the nuances of the incense now fill my room like a philharmonic orchestra, maybe I was too severe, I should have given it time, but tonight I want an early night, I fear the week ahead will be unwilling to compromise with fatigue, I crouch over, reminding myself of the picture of the two year old me bent over birthday cake in the album I was meant to return, I close my eyes, summoning my own south wester, to sssh its silent passage, now, I don’t have to lean any closer to catch the smell of burn, the smell of boorish waste, hell on a candle wick, a lonely cloud of smoke escapes, very dramatic, the smell of burn permeates the room, me, it’s quicker, more enduring. It’s still here.