Running

Usually I go running by myself and sometimes I go running with K. Usually when I tell people I go running looks of disbelief befall their faces. Women ask me if it is safe to run alone in Glenwood. Until this week I have always answered, "Yes it is, I have been running in Glenwood for 15 years and nothing bad has ever happened to me." I say, "sometimes if it is dark and I need to run, I take my dog, Lucky." I say, "my sister-in-law usually runs with a fork." And we all laugh, ha ha ha ha ha.

I tell them the story about when a man decided to run with me for some of the way, and although I was initially suspicious and not keen, there was nothing I could really do about it. I was actually grateful because when we got around a corner we faced a crowd of people seeming angry and singing Umshini wami. But no one brought them any machine guns, and the man eventually found my pace slow, and said goodbye lady, see you later.

I tell them that when I have got into bad situations where I have been scared of men, it has been of men that I know, and that the statistics support this. I tell them I have demons in my head and running helps me fight them. I seem to have a malfunctioning hippocampus, I say, that needs to be regulated. I am confused about what I am thinking quite a bit of the time.

I tell them about my forefathers and mothers most of whom were not strangers to institutions for the insane, or who have walked into the mountains forever, shot themselves, died of broken hearts. We must be careful in my family, and not neglect to run. You will find the same thing in your own families. You should run. Sometimes I need to be so tired in the day after running that I don't think about bad things, like Brexit. Sometimes its like the relief of putting your hand inside boiling water to get perspective when you feel you have done much more washing up and making school lunches than anyone else in the whole world. 

When I run with K, we have the best time. We run faster because K has Long Legs. We tell each other things that we don't ever tell anyone else. Our secret crushes, our mistakes, our elaborate plans to save ourselves in the end. And we talk about how we are not ever afraid running around Glenwood.

We wonder together whether we are running in order to have better bodies and thinner thighs and wedding day arms and whether we are doing this for ourselves or for the ones that look at us. I tell K that she is a goddess and I wish I was her. She tells me about her aunts and cousins and friends and how they always notice if you have lost or gained 500g. I tell her that I am always in two minds about looking pretty, that even a necklace makes me feels too showy. She says, come on Jess, be more showy, be more flaunty. I would love to, I say, but I have reservations.

This week on my run, I stopped, because I was tired. Stupidly I stopped just where there was a man. And he called me over to tell me something which I could not hear. Stupidly I moved closer. Stupidly I was polite. Suddenly I was in a bad situation. I didn't have K, I didn't have a fork. I didn't have a dog. I pushed this man away with all my might and then I ran as fast as I could.

We went to watch the African Championships Athletics this weekend, to see the runners qualifying for the Olympics. I saw these incredible women sprinting their legs off. I saw Caster Semenye get three gold medals. I thought, I want to be like them. I want Caster's legs and the forearms of a shotputter. If I was them, I thought, there is no way I would ever have to stop on a run around Glenwood. There is no way anyone would ever catch me. I would have no boobs left, and lose my softness, but that would be a bonus. I give up the dream of less thigh and skinny wedding day arms, now I want more. More Muscles. 1000 lunges an hour and the hugest legs ever, to run and kick and stamp with. I wouldn't need a fork or a dog. Run even more, I reckon, do lots of squats.

 

the best morning because it involved talking

John says I wouldn't last 15 minutes at a 10 day silent retreat. He is wrong. But there is nothing really better than talking to someone kiff. I can't really do another post this week, because that would just be saying too much. But I can say more, by using someone else to say it. I had a lovely morning talking to my sister and Elda at the Bakery for quite a few hours. We talked a bit about Rosa and her writing. Rosa has written very well about talking and falling in love, and many many other topics. This is my favourite essay about talking EVER. For more go to rosalyster.com

Essay 9: The Language of Love

Here is a young man on the verge of adulthood. White, educated, adrift. First person narrator. He is usually between the wars, but he doesn’t have to be. We can find him contemporary novels without even trying. His name is Charles or Henry, or at the very least, Michael or Nicholas. Never Mike, never Nick. If he has to be a Catholic for some structural or atmospheric reason, his name is Patrick.

We are given to understand that he is clever. He has a severe father, also clever. The mother is not what you would call Book Smart, but we see that she has a certain something. She is still the most glamorous woman the narrator knows. Her legs are honed from many years of tennis playing. She was a celebrated debutante and had the choice of the finest men in the city (“my mother’s beauty was a thing that happened to her, and it governed every decision she made”). Most of those fine men are then eliminated from the running (wars, madness, they die of the flu, money troubles), and so the mother had to settle for the severe father. The severe father is devoted to his wife (“my father was the most uxorious man I have ever known”), who accepts his attentions with a kittenish good humour. We are given to understand that they still have sex all the time. The father is always getting his hand up the mother’s jumper.

The narrator has no siblings. He has had one relationship with a girl he found tiresome. She read either too many books, or not enough, or else they were just the wrong kind of books. She is shrilly political, or else she is discarding all sections of the newspaper except Property. She is either too serious, or not serious enough. Her laugh is somehow wrong.  There is sometimes a bead of moisture hanging off the end of her nose, and the narrator is always looking at it and wishing that he was dead.  She has lipstick on her teeth, or else she is playing the cello in a way that speaks of a terrifying morbid sexuality. She is either a cutter, or else has never had a day’s trouble in her life and is oblivious to the suffering of everyone around her. She tires the narrator out with all of this, but the main thing with her is that she talks too much. She talks about everything, all the time. It is all the narrator can do not to get her into a lake and drown her so that it looks like an accident. He consoles himself with dumping her in a way that seems astonishingly cruel. The bead of moisture at the end of her nose wobbles as she cries and, finally, falls onto the fabric of her dress. The dress is the wrong colour.

The narrator is waiting for something, but he doesn’t know what it is. I do, though. I know fucking exactly what. It is a strange, silent relationship with an older woman. Get ready, young narrator. Here comes your sexual and emotional reckoning, and not a moment too soon.

They met at a pre-war garden party, or on the deck of an ocean liner. It was just the two of them and the spray of the sea air. Inside, a whole party where everyone is drinking and waltzing across the waxed ballroom floor. The floor under the dancers’ feet rocks with the movement of the waves in a way that is like to make you vomit, but the dancers do not mind. They are too busy talking, talking, talking. About? Nothing, of course. We are reminded of the tiresome first girlfriend. The older woman is married to a callous bon vivant who doesn’t love her, and the young man knows all this without having to ask. The best thing about the older woman, in fact, is that she doesn’t want him to ask. She puts her elegant hand over his mouth, in fact, and says, “Don’t speak, please.”

The young man is always going to the house of the older woman and she is Wordlessly opening the door for him. She is just standing there in a silk dressing gown with an unreadable expression on her face. They don’t talk and the man can’t even read her face, but they have an understanding which surpasses speech. This extends to a tacit agreement that talking is for the weak. They are making ferocious love in every part of the house. The older woman is wearing suspenders and you will not believe the calm compassion with which she guides him inside of her. Still no talking, ever. He is in love with her bony articulated shins, the shining diamonds of her kneecaps.

Their relationship runs its course. They mutually agree, without speaking, that to everything there is a season. No talking. They go their separate ways, and the narrator hears nothing of the older woman for many years. In the second to last chapter, we find out that she has killed herself. Pills.

I made up this particular book, but there are plenty of real ones to choose from. Even if a writer doesn’t embrace the narrative arc in its entirety, he picks out certain elements of it. The older woman doesn’t have to die at the end, but she does have to be quiet a lot, or at least speak only when there is absolutely something to say. The young man doesn’t have to have a sexual mother, or even be young, but he does need to pine for silence. He does need to despise idle chatter. There does need to be at least one scene where the narrator describes people talking by using a descriptor like “braying’, “screeching’, “howling”, “talking avidly without sense or mercy”. Both Amises have done this, as well as Evelyn Waugh, Edward St. Aubyn, Joyce, Nabokov, Updike, Coetzee, Richard Ford, and Lawrence. There are definitely others.

It is important to say now that I love some of these writers. So much so that I can put aside all the weird stuff about women, as well as the occasional creepiness about money and class. I just pretend it’s not happening. I skip over the worst bits and then google “Evelyn Waugh did he get divorced”, and I am satisfied. I can forgive, also, their idea that there is such a thing as being Too Intelligent. I am fine with all of that.

Really, it’s just the talking thing that gets me. It is the one thing I cannot excuse. What is all this about hating the sound of the human voice at full cry? Why are all of these characters so thirsty for quiet? Why don’t they ask each other any questions at all? Why do they pretend that you can know someone even slightly without talking to them for a long time? What is this nonsense about the language of love being anything other than words? When people in real life stare wordlessly at each other, it’s not because they are grooving on a telepathic level. It’s because they are boring, or on drugs, or scared.

I have never fallen in love with a person for any other reason than the way they talked. Talking, for me, is what does the trick. What they said, and how they said it, and then how they made me laugh. What else is there? Talking is what separates us from the higher primates, and we should all be heedful of that.

I want to read a book where the older woman asks the younger man a whole lot of questions. She is not shrewish, or shrill, or strident. She just has a few things she would like to know. She asks him, for instance, what his problem is. She makes him explain why he thinks he is smart. She asks him why he thinks it’s fine to wear that shirt with a Nehru collar. His answers are unsatisfactory, and he leaves. She goes out for dinner with her best friend, and the two of them talk until their whole faces hurt.

four trillion reasons to hate boats

OF COURSE THE MAIN REASON: you can't get off and leave whenever you want to.

Especially a problem when, as I have done TWICE (repeat your mistakes) you agree to go to a party that is called a booze cruise, sometimes called a booze cruize.

You should know straight away that this is not right. You should know in advance that it will be boring and the music will be terrible, and you won't be able to get off and go home whenever you want to. There are no french exits on boats, nor is there any ghosting. The only getting off will be with other people's boyfriends, because you don't have one of your own. I absolutely know that this is not a good idea. Nothing good ever came from it. Not even having a laugh, came from it.

Another time you agree to go to a party called a booze cruise, because you feel you have to. And you feel you have to dress to the tropical island theme demanded on the invitation; AND OF COURSE nobody else feels they have to. Perhaps one other person wears one hibiscus necklace, another maybe a pair of jolly trousers. But nobody else wears coconut husks and a grass skirt because nobody else feels quite as compelled to please the host. Nobody else believes it to be their very own responsibility and duty to make the party WORK OUT. Nobody else exhausts themselves with talking more nonsense than has ever been possible, because no one else has quite the same terror of awkward silences on boats. Not at all. 

OF COURSE THE SECOND MAIN REASON: vomiting

You don't only vomit when you are on the boat, but you vomit when you are looking for your flip-flops which you put in the supposedly water-tight cubby hole, so that you can walk on the boiling hot sand when you get out of the boat. When you open up the cubby hole after going paddling you realise that this place has never really been free of water; and one of your flip-flops has floated down to the middle of the under-section of the boat and you cannot get it out. Putting your head in to try and see where it is stuck makes you vomit because the water in the supposed-to-be-dry part of the boat is disgusting. 

THIRD MAIN REASON: you have to go to the DUC

If you want to go kayaking in Durban you have to hire a kayak at the Durban Undersea Club. If you are not a member of the DUC this is very tiresome. You will eventually be granted the exceptional right to go on a boat on a Sunday (a day reserved for only members to hire boats, although no one does because one of the main reasons to become a member is because you want somewhere to stash YOUR OWN BOAT. ) If you are not a member of the DUC you cannot go to the toilet or buy any drinks, not even water. Getting other people to buy you drinks isn't too hard, in fact I like that, but asking strangers to help you go to the toilet is demeaning and horrible.

4. Going to the DUC makes you feel like you are still living in Apartheid.

5. Going to the DUC reminds you how much you hate jet-skis; water-skiers and people on motor-boats, especially people on motor-boats at Port Edward. 

6. If you go on a sailing boat you trip over all the piles and piles of ropes that are constantly getting all tangled up. You are in a lot of danger in that you may at any moment be struck off the sailing boat by the sail itself.

7. You know someone who offers to take you on a trip on their boat. This doesn't feel at all right to you and you don't want to, but you don't have the toughness or power to say no thank you, because you are still a child.

8. You know someone who was a journalist for the Rand Daily Mail during Apartheid, although usually most of his sentences were blocked out with black marker pens by the government. In his spare time he makes himself a yacht. It takes 20 years. Then when he goes off to Singapore to buy the sails, the last thing he needs to do, the Special Branch burn it down. Nothing is left. So he moves to Australia forever.

9. Horizontal navy blue stripes are not slimming.

10. So many many more reasons. When I am stuck for something to write about I will revisit this issue easily. For now, I do just want to state that Rafts are not the same as boats. Rafts are for people stuck without boats, so they are fine. In case Georgie reads this. 

 

 

happy birthday my mum

How hilarious is this picture of my sister? This was taken forty years ago, when my mum was 30. 

When we were growing up my mother did everything she could to prevent us from being in Apartheid. My father has always been in the public eye, but it was my mum who taught him about what was really going on. They got into trouble, and their friends were murdered and banned, and some were never to leave their houses, and my father was on a hit-list. But my mother guided us bravely and seemingly effortlessly through these years.

She fought the government, she got old people pensions, she educated the unions and kept everyone schooled in the rules of English grammar. She didn't flinch when the police came to arrest us for watching cricket, or when tonnes of toilet paper was delivered to a Black Sash and ECC meeting at the Diakonia Centre, just to freak us out. I was freaking out, but she kept calm. 

All the while she kept us safe and loved, taught us manners and how to wear halter-necks. We learned how to be good swimmers and play tennis. We did horse-riding, played the piano and the violin. We climbed the mountains to the very top, we went to Malawi and Zimbabwe. She took us out of school and we travelled around Europe. She explained to us about being Irish. We went to England for a while. Our life in South Africa was cushy safe suburbia, but there were always a couple of stowaways in the garden cottage. 

We were naughty and got into our own kinds of trouble, but we knew she had our backs. When my sister rode her bicycle into a car and had to be in Addington hospital for two months while her leg repaired, she went to see her everyday, sometimes twice. Once our windscreen wipers weren't working and it was raining so hard we couldn't see our way to the hospital, but undeterred, she showed me how to wipe the glass with raw potatoes so we could get there. Another time, my sister was very sad, so we smuggled kittens into her ward under our jumpers. We took charming men along to distract the nurses and give them champagne. 

And when I did the worst thing ever, which was to put my head under a bus and get it run over, my mother did not freak out, well not in front of me. She washed the blood out of my hair and put it into plaits so I might look a bit prettier, a little less squashed.

At 70, she still does all this. When Jack broke his arm at the game reserve and I tried to wrap it up with what turned out to be an eye-patch, she bandaged it practically and properly, but in a kind way, without snorting at me. The children of Chesterville and Cato Manor understand Macbeth thanks to her. They understand Yeats and Keats and can write in rhyming couplets. You can say any line from any poem in the whole world like "You who are bent, and bald, and blind..." and she will tell you what it is and say the rest of it. She gives interviews and goes on marches. She travels and writes and looks after us all. How lucky I am. 

The perspective hospital

I missed the Russian athletes at the Comrades Marathon yesterday. I had been thinking about them in the run up (sorry) because of the current debate in our household as to whether to download War and Peace, the series, or finally actually read it. I have always wondered why so many Russian runners enter this race, whether it has anything to do with it being called the Comrades Marathon (even though it doesn't have an apostrophe). And I really like the twins, Elena and Olesya, who usually win.

I think about twins a lot and when I see these two running together with torsos and ponytails jumping in exactly the same way, I am fascinated. Do they decide beforehand who will win that year, and take turns? Is that match-fixing? Do they secretly actually use banned performance enhancing substances? I've watched them pretty carefully when they are on telly and I've never seen them dart off for a quick blood transfusion in a van, like the cyclists in the Tour de France. They claim it is unfair they have been banned this year, but are looking on the bright side. According to a newspaper interview, they see it as an opportunity for a holiday; to spend some time with their parents and do a bit of farming.  

Is this stoic and positive attitude in the face of such disappointment and hardship, a particularly Russian characteristic? Or perhaps the characteristic of an ultra-human who has pushed them self (and their other self, running next to them) to their physical limits? More importantly, how deep does the sibling rivalry run? So do they encourage or discourage one another along the way? How do they deal with the victory for one, and not for the other? Does anyone even know who is who, and therefore it doesn't matter who wins? But nevertheless, what is the best thing to say to each of them afterwards?

I was discussing this problem with Al, who ran the race yesterday. He said his worst is when you don't do as well as you intend to and then you have to endure kind eyes from your friends and obvious encouraging phrases, like "at least you tried" or "there is always next year" or "you are lucky you could run, I had to drive from 'Maritzburg and it was such a hassle with all the roads being closed." Even someone saying "well I think you're amazing," when you yourself know you are not amazing, doesn't help. So I asked him what I should say, should this situation occur.

He told me about when he ran the Sky Run the first time and how he cried along the way, because it was so hard and he was very lonely. He told me about a friend of his who was running a marathon and was also crying a bit and feeling lonely. Then a beautiful young woman came along and tried to encourage him, by running alongside him and chatting in a motivational way. This wasn't helping. The exhausted man just kept saying stuff like, "I can't make it" and "I am too tired and useless" again and again. Eventually the woman gave up and went ahead. After a few minutes, she stopped and ran back to him. Then she said, right in his ear "Just Man the Fuck Up". Al said that this is what I should say.

Perhaps Elena and Oleysa say this to each other along the way to make sure they get there in time. Or maybe Caroline Wostmann said it to herself yesterday as her legs buckled uncontrollably under her for the third time, and Charne sprinted past her without even a small sorry-about-this tap on the shoulder.

I admit a small tendency to be self-pitying, and usually it only helps a little to seek out someone who will look at you with sad eyes and offer words of tender solace. What generally works better is when someone from my inner circle says "Oh for God's Sake" or "Just Man the Fuck Up."

Another option is to go on a road trip to the Perspective Hospital. This is a place near Eshowe otherwise known as the Hospital for Incurables. This is the saddest place on Earth, a place anyone with any ounce of self-pity should visit. It was a visit to this place that John threatened the children and I with last Christmas, but in the end we were spared. You only have to go once. The sad irony, of course being, that you will then be cured of your noxious self-inflicted mental disease, while the 'incurable' will be left not at all cured. Only slightly cheered by gifts of books and toiletries. 

Or else, if you can't get to the Perspective Hospital, you could watch the Comrades Marathon just as the man is about to shoot the gun to hale The End, like John and the children did yesterday, until I yelled at them to switch it off. You can watch people crawling and weeping and pulling each other across the finish line, only to just miss getting a medal by a millisecond. I stopped them watching because we had already seen people at the finish face down on stretchers, being taken to the Real Hospital, not the Perspective one. But apart from at 5.25pm, I really love watching the Comrades Marathon. It was especially good yesterday when Ludwick Mamabolo did a small dance at the end, perhaps in praise of David Gatebe, the record-breaking winner. And thankfully Al who wanted to be in the Top 100, came 98th. So all we had to do was ply him with sincere congratulations.

 

Repetition

On friday night, my friend Richard, a socially bold man, advanced the argument that humans are most happy doing repetitive tasks. He was shot down by everyone. Until he started talking about rendering – then people started coming round. Rendering is basically icing a wall. Its quite challenging, and so gives you status in the world of menial work.

I still couldn't quite agree that repetitive tasks are best for us, and don't expect resolution from this piece of writing. Sometimes my work is so boring that I have to play True Love Waits really loudly, many times, to pretend that this is the reason I am crying. 

On my run this morning, I started thinking about repetitive work, again and then again. The irony that I was passing over the same ground as I do almost every morning; thinking the same thoughts about the same mistakes I repeat; having the same conversation with my friends who are guarding the same cars along the way, was not lost on me. 

I have done a lot of repetitive jobs in my life and I am glad I did them. There were great spin-offs. Where this leaves us, I am not sure, but here is a list:

1. Picker and packer for GAME stores, Banbury. My one regret is that I didn't stay long enough to take my fork-lift driving exam and get a promotion. This job allowed me to buy cost price games. One of these was a card game called Grass which is the best card game in the world, and until we lost the really really bad card Totally Wiped Out, we played it every day and every night for at least a decade.

2. Director for MAP Travel, Oxford. MAP Travel moved premises. I was employed to sit at the old premises and direct people to the new one, which was just around the corner. During this time, thanks to a cost-price game boy from my previous job, I championed Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Cart. The dexterity that this takes cannot be over-stated. Any activity that you use both the left and right hand to do is very beneficial and staves off terrible diseases of the brain later in life. Knitting, playing the piano, computer games. I know because my dad wrote a book about it. Using your left hand stimulates your right brain, making you a better, more peaceful person.

3. Greeting card cleaner and polisher, Regents Park. I have to confess that my friend Margaret and I fled from this job after one day, tearing off our masks and forensic suits as we went. We ran from a private secret garden in Regent's Park, where we had been wiping away the tears that stained the sympathy cards for the recently deceased Princess Diana, left by the public in Kensington Gardens. But the decision to run was political, not necessarily due to the task at hand. 

4. Plug point maker at Lucy's Steelworks, Oxford. At this factory, every day, I made about 1000 plug points. I counted them. The machine I operated was hot and heavy and I burnt through at least one pair of gloves an hour. I worked with three other people in my section. None of them had been there for fewer than 17 years. I left before I became institutionalised, when I had enough money to buy the man I loved a pair of second-hand levis. Next to the Lucy's Steelworks factory on the river in North Oxford, is a Lucy's Steelworks graveyard.

5. Potwasher, Parsonage Hotel, Oxford. This was hard. White South Africans don't generally wash many pots, or any other kind of dishes. So learned a new skill and developed fresh empathy. I liked being working class. I met Simon who was a waiter, who after 25 years is still one of my best friends. 

During this time I also met Colin, who did very well at school and is now an architect, just like Richard from the first paragraph. Colin confessed to me the other day that what he really wanted to be was a builder so he could lay bricks all day, but his parents wouldn't let him.