Richard Stupart

Hi Richard

I am you, five years from where you are now. You are about to travel to Asia for the first time – to Malaysia. I know you are excited and have absolutely no idea what you will encounter there. But know that it will be the start of a way of thinking that will come to consume you as the years pass. You will journey much more, on paths much further than that you now confront – and it is in this spirit that I am writing back to you. To give you a thought on your travels – borrowing a few pages from that other famous speech about life that routinely does the rounds on the Internet. If I could give you only one piece of advice above all others, it would be this. Read the rest of this entry »

The flame trees outside the Dar es Salaam train station are some of the most beautiful plants i’ve seen in days – more so as their orange flowers lick the deep blue of the sky, cloudless. It’s hardly fitting that here, in this loud and beautiful contrast of colours, our family must come to an end.

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Eileen from bearshapedsphere is busy a-mustering horrid-yet funny (i.e. you survived intact – mostly) stories from the far reaches of blogzakstan. Ranging from being caught in the middle of a taxi-war (a more gentle, non-South African version of one, thank god) to the epic search for the 99 bus here. So if you have a terrible, terrifying or tortuous tale of travel, now is the time to file said megaultrabad story here. Now. As for me, having written about terrifying bus rides of my own, and near-cholera-inducing accommodation, this new story (which actually happened shortly after the Laos bus ride of terror (see above link) began thus…

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I am an English South African. Henceforth called an ESA to save my poor little typing fingers (which is most of them) This means that somewhere along the line, my parents’ parents’ parents were dropped off, most likely in Cape Town, by the ships of the British Empire back in the day when Africa in general was one of the favoured playthings of the likes of Cecil John Rhodes and other plunderers for the crown. Being an ESA – as opposed to, say, an Afrikaans South African or a smaller, more connected group like Portuguese or Jewish South Africans – can make for a confusing identity some days.

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It’s not my quote – that one comes from Fight Club, so you will have to give Chuck Palahniuk credit for so eloquently expressing angst with our short time in the world.  It’s a quote that has stuck with me since I watched the movie again recently (and then felt the need to rant briefly against the world). But being all angsty about the fact that I will not be here forever simply for the sake of wanting to vent has never really been a productive pastime.

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I’m not taken too often to publishing sappy writing on this blog, and am even less prone to posting simply to show a link. But some stories are too beautiful not to be told, and pushed upon you, the reader. For the girl from Portugal I met for exactly one night and spent years learning Portuguese for, though I never saw her again. For someone loved more than she will ever realise as she goes to save the world. For every simple. honest story like those which may reside in your own life, do yourself a favour and read this damn link.

I’ve always loved that image, from Alice in Wonderland, of the rabbithole that goes on and on.  Far beyond where a rabbithole should really go, until you find yourself in a place that no rabbithole should contain.  If you pick the right rabbitholes, the whole enterprise can be rather rewarding.

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I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”  Why did I cause so much pain?  Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?  Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?  I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.  We are not special.  We are not crap or trash, either.  We just are.  We just are, and what happens just happens.  And God says, “No, that’s not right.”  Yeah.  Well.  Whatever.  You can’t teach God anything.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 30

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Last weekend was spent in Swaziland. If you have no idea where that is, then you would be forgiven. As long as you are not South African, in which case knowing the names of the landlocked nuggets of independence that constitute Swaziland and Lesotho really is expected. But I digress. Aside from such bizarre experiences crammed into 48 hours as a massage in a nightclub and watching a man dressed in an admiral’s outfit jam to the tunes in a club called House on Fire (Swaziland is landlocked. No I am not making this up), we also had a near brush with death on the first night traveling to the border.

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OK, so I have been a bit quiet of late – but for reasons that will be revealed soon enough, and which should explain my literary tardiness sufficiently for me to avoid the wrath of the reading public. Except Nichola – whose pesky wrath has hauled me out of writing laziness and back to these pages.  Wrath sent all the way from Japan for that matter. Wrath being the theme of the moment then, I will jump tenuously from that topic to an account of  irksome irritation with the Facebook generation recording their lives more than actually living them.

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