Howlonghasitbeen?

So I took a year off from blogging and it's been amazing to put a bit of distance from my thoughts and to see if I could get certain things out of my head but who can tell if the shock treatment worked? It was a bit like going cold turkey or whatever recovering alcoholics call the moment of lucidity but I did miss telling you all about my utterly boring life and my pining for impossibilities. So 2010 finds us all a little older with a few more babies amongst us and the usual anxieties and I for one have been stuck in so many different parts of the earth I wonder if I ever had a past or if I begin each day like a virgin soul imagining who I'll encounter. The world has changed utterly in just one year - the kids are bigger the politics the same and yet different and old jobs I used to love bore the tits off me and I think of people knowing the next time I meet so and so they'll have spread out like all the rest of us and I have a weakness for white wine because somebody mentioned it's better than the whiskey for one's health and the novels are no nearer to being finished and projects are postponed and we rush on to another year knowing these years go so very quickly and it's later than we think. Enough, just to say I've got my blogging mojo back and there's much to discuss.

August finds me in my third favourite city holding on to world cup memories and watching my creative friends in that permanent struggle to keep heart and soul head and inspiration together and the Jozi winter just won't die a natural death when days are steaming hot and the nights freezing and the world has really moved on from all the attention lavished on this country during June and July but it's just a very difficult city to leave. I've fallen in love countless times, with the city and its folk with Soweto and her endless renewal with the confusion of liberty versus poverty with the music the styles and all manner of dreams all to do with this teenage nation but I reckon I'd better leave it alone for a while longer and come back when I'm better prepared. But like I said, it's a difficult city to leave and the stories the city has to tell are too many to be covered on a tourist visa. I should really catch a bus up to the broken country to catch up with blood and buddies and then settle down to more of this, but even the kids think I'm wasting my life traveling on a bus for 18 hours but I bet they'll be doing it too very soon.

My head is crowded with the same thoughts as before, but those thoughts that say what an amazing continent this is still rule the heart and I'll hang around until I can't afford breakfast.