Easy Lazy Days

Still feeling a little high on the weather because dull grey has given over to bright colours and a deep green everywhere you look and that's reason enough to trigger the memories of what good summers feel like and yes I know I go on and on about the season but you cannot underestimate how much it lifts the spirits and it's fine to wander around naked from keyboard to kitchen for the coffee and back to keyboard and when folk ring to say how about a drink you don't invent a thousand reasons not to step out into the cold and the rain and watching movies indoors with the windows open is a holiday feeling. Knocking off a few more pages of words and happy with the progress of the creativity I'm beginning to think I still need to keep an eye on the day job and I'd better ring up and pitch like a motherfeeler before the summer runs out of pennies and purpose.

Early in the week I work the phone all over Africa well the Africa I know and ask what the stories are. I know which stories I'd do and who wouldn't be interested in the events unfolding almost every month in the Indian Ocean off the horn of Africa? Yes the Somali Pirates are at it again and I'm becoming hoarse trying to explain to folk who say flippantly they're getting tired of these pirates what can be done about them and get up on the soap box and say give them back their peace their seas now completely depleted of fish by international fishing thieves fix their broken country and pay them for using their waters as a great big freeway for the transportation of billions of dollars worth of weapons or luxury cars and stop the human traffic where boats filled with the desperate capsize near the Yemeni coast without a whisper from the headlines do that and there may be no need for them to kidnap international sailing vessels and hold captains to ransom. Over in Mombasa a filmmaker we admire says she loves the idea of the pirates and as it is a friend has just interviewed one in a Mombasa jail and yes folk in Nairobi's Eastlea district can get me to the pirates villages and we should research it as fiction. I think this is great access and pitch a one line to my friend the foreign editor but all he says is No I don't want you to become shark food but let's lunch.

I don't know how many diaries I've kept over the years not the ones with personal foresights and records of the heart but the other variety with dates and times for meetings and holiday plans I'm crap at those and the last one was a Christmas present which is still blank and I could save the planet a few trees if I'd just stop buying them I never fill them in and who has the patience to set the gadgets and the gizmo alarms to remember a dinner date and a good memory is best employed to remember stuff but when you don't remember you tend to piss a few good peeps off. And so I totally forgot to meet my writer chum and there are a series of voice mails which I've missed too because the phone is off coz I need it off and the messages go hey I cancelled dinner at the Ivy for you I thought we were hooking up and I call late in the night and feign amnesia. We do lunch in the Southern Indian restaurant with the pink exterior and interior and probably the best Indian fish in town on Charlotte Street and she's sweet and hectically creative. Sure I'll write those chapters. You have to and send them to me do you have any idea how hard it is to write well and you write well and you have to get your act together I'm not even resenting her teacher attitude but admit I'll do it when I'm ready. I got tired of saying I want to be a writer she tells me and wrote a novel and twenty two short stories in one year I just locked myself away and decided this is it. It's like a Damascus moment I know and I only get that with film scripts never with literature and I don't want to do the novel right now but I feel it scraping the walls of my head like a caged prisoner and ofcourse I didn't say it like that but she gets it. And as befits people whose personal tales inform their writing we talk openly about these journeys and she's utterly listening to my journey and I say it's some peoples' assumption that I fear normal life and even the sangomas say who ever has my heart should know it will take time to keep. Whatever's meant to be will surely come to be despite the years and the distance. We head up to her hotel room because she needs to change shoes and we discuss stories and agents and publishing and wander down to Waterstones so she can see if her book is placed where it can arouse interest and she takes it off the shelf and places it on the pile of 'three for two' and that hassling spirit will carry her far. The literatti lifestyle must be fun she's off to Ireland then New York then Zim and a hundred parties in between.

People watching is the thing to do now and it's immensely satisfying to be on a pavement as the seasons change. The Doc tells me I'm not dying yet and I should think about giving up smoking and I say I've done it before well the thing to do is pick a date and stick to it so I say how about the end of September that's too far away so I choose May and then wander down to the pavements in Somerstown and have a coffee in the café and notice the Lebanese place has closed down and reckon it may have been a money laundering exercise for some dodgy Arabs and then walk over to meet the foreign editor for lunch. We go for the pasta place and sit outside on the pavement and talk news only for ten minutes and it's a sign of a growing relationship that we swap children's names rather than talk about Somali pirates because I won't make it there I'm told I don't look Somali and yes they can be a bit jihaadist and so we settle on another tale that's closer to home and I'll do some research.

The weather's good enough to meet two more old friends this happy couple did Uganda and that was the last time I saw them and then Ghana and they're off to correspond in Nairobi and once upon a time we shared a job so we do have much to catch up on and I meet her first over in Victoria where the pavements are certain to be entertaining what with schizos muttering to themselves and the women showing off new summer fashions and I could sit here all day. We order food and a beer and Ghanaians are odd she tells me what with their religion and their superiority complex and the way they imprison everyone with mental problems and if you smoke a splif they think you mad and she's happy to be heading back East and she's full of stories many of them so cinematic and a little later her other half joins us and we drink another and I promise to hook up with them before they leave London again and I think they'll be happy over in Nairobi.