What's So Special About 2013

You might be wondering why the blog got a re-design and why I now have a tumblr account and a facebook page filled with links to my writing work. Maybe you're not. But 2013 is the year to be serious about my career. After all, 13 is both a prime number and a Fibonacci number, so it doesn't get more geekily auspicious than that. Especially since the next year that will be both a prime number and a Fibonacci number will likely be after I die.

The schedule of events is as follows: I will be celebrating Tell A Fairy Tale Day on the 26th February by putting a fantasy short story up on Kindle Light, and finishing the current book in time for people to take it on summer holidays in August. The book is about a cat. Well, the cat thinks it's about the cat, as cats tend to; it's really about the family who adopted the cat, but don't tell the cat or he'll be offended and give you a sanctimonious stare. 

Those two projects are, in relative terms, simple. Adjusting to the technology needed by writers in the 21st century is less so, but I'll survive it I'm sure. So please bear with me while this African girl (you can take the girl out of Africa, but you can't take the Africa out the girl) adjusts to publicity tools that leave me baffled most of the time. I hope you have a great 2013, and we get to interact often over the coming months!

Brij x

The End of the Epic Bike Ride

I made it to the end. The last few days involved battling miserable weather between Lincolnshire and London, struggling with...well...London, and finally making it down to the coast. In the process, I managed to take a caterpillar 60km - no idea how, he just crawled onto me in a bus stop and I only noticed him when he crawled up my neck in Peterborough. London, as usual, was the source of much heart-ache for me. 

I stayed with my brother and sister-in-law-to-be, who graciously offered up their couch. However, London's bumpy roads managed to pull my bike rack off twice - something that hadn't happened previously on the trip - and getting lost trying to find my way out did little to improve my antipathy towards the city. I've discovered that the only Londoners willing to speak to a stranger aren't Londoners at all, since the only ones who gave me directions were northern or foreign. Londoners, it would seem, have two responses to "google maps has got me lost; how do I get out of this city in the direction of Brighton" - "Brighton's far," and "oh, you'll never get there." Thanks, that's really helpful. 

Brighton, on the other hand, is easy to navigate and has friendly locals; the only possible hindrance is the proliferation of what my aunt calls "bastard hills". The last thirty-odd kilometres on the A23 is enormous hill after enormous hill, peppered with road works for added challenge. So much so, I had to stop and eat the last of the plumpy nut bars (not their official name, but they taste reassuringly like Plumpy Nut, the fortified peanut goo that UNICEF gives to malnutrite babies) that Mum had sent me just to get over them.

I'll write about Goodwood later, because that's a piece for another website. Have a great week, everyone!

Bike Ride of Epicness - Day Eight

I have now made it as far as Louth. Yesterday was an easy day in terms of distance - 90-odd kilometres - but I still managed to get hopelessly lost. Google Maps tends to send me by the wiggliest-windiest route, and none of the roads it suggests are signposted in a helpful way, for example "Louth - Right - 10 miles." Most of them don't have signposts at all, so I've got pretty good at getting directions. For future reference, people under the age of thirty are useless for directions, as are old ladies. Winner of the day was a farmer - slim, older man with an Einstein hairstyle - who stopped his tractor to chat to me as I stood on the side of the road looking confused. His directions were "follow me; the field I'm going to plough is just before the road you want." Towards the end of the day, I had found a farm road that looked like it went nowhere - but had been reassured that it went through to an A-road - and sat down for a cry. The sun was going down, there was no mobile signal, I'd almost run out of water, and I was tuckered out. A guy rode up - turns out he was a beat cop from Grimsby who was out testing his new road bike, and a very nice bike it was too - gave me a 150mL Coke and refilled my water bottle from his spare. He then rode with me to the nearest town with signal to call for assistance. 'Twas a good day after all. Today's mission is to get to Harlow - about 200km. No getting lost today!

P.S. Blogger seems to think I live in Hawaii. It's 6:20 a.m., not 10:20 p.m.

Bike Ride of Epicness - Day Six

Day six and a rest break. I'm at a friend's house, and what a luxury it is to have a bed and a bathroom with a door! I did 150kms yesterday; I was scheduled to do 100, but Google Maps was vague about which left I should take. Needless to say, I took the scenic route down the A19, around the York ring road, and then left to Hull. I did try find a shorter route, but the consensus was that the A19 would be best. This morning, I'm struggling to stand. 

Beans, beans, good for your heart,

The more you eat, the more you fart;

The more you fart, the better you feel.

Beans, beans at every meal.

A few observations:

I know James Hunt thought Marlboros were the breakfast of champions, but he didn't know about the turbo-charging properties of baked beans. Seriously, I think NASA JPL should look into this.

People turn into complete morons when they have a car-full of kids. The ring road around York was torture with people jostling for position, cutting people off, not paying attention to cyclists, etc.

150kms is too far for one day. I'm very glad I had scheduled today off!

BIke Ride of Epicness - Day 4

Another quick update.

I crashed (as in, got too tired to carry on) at 70kms on Wednesday. Thursday dawned with a blustery gale - between 15 and 25km/h wind - which I pushed against as hard as I could. At around the 45km mark, I almost got blown under an eighteen-wheel truck. I decided at that point that it would be more sensible to pull off, so found a farm that didn't mind randoms camping. They let me pitch in the forest by their fowl lake (from the colour of the water, 'foul' would also work in that sentence as a descriptor for 'lake', but it didn't stink), which was nicely sheltered from the wind. I took photos; I'll upload them soon.

As an aside, if you're ever driving up the A1 to Edinburgh, stop at the Cook and Barker pub in Newton-on-the-Moor. It's a lovely, lovely place. Best service and nicest chips so far this side of the border.

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Day 2 - Bike Ride of Epicness

Mini-post, because of time constraints.

Wow, there are so few places in small towns that have wifi! I thought there would be one or two places per day to stop and rest that would have wifi...apparently I was mistaken. The first day was lovely until the last fifteen kilometres. I got hopelessly lost, so didn't get to see Duns - there was a Jim Clarke museum I wanted to explore. As a result, I ended up 15km north of where I needed to stop yesterday, so I started today lost and behind. I'm currently 30km south of Berwick-Upon-Tweed and am going to push another 15kms or so. Will update properly when I next get wifi. Have taken photos, so will share those in due course

Four Days to D-Day

I'm terrified. One of the highlights of my day is dragging my exhausted body to bed, curling up on the thick, squishy mattress, and wrapping the bulky duvet around me. On the road, I'm going to be pitching a tent, rolling out a thin foam mattress, and crawling into a sleeping bag. One of the points of riding was to spend less than the £150 it would have cost me to get there by train; I can't get my budget to work out if I sleep in hotel rooms. 

In old-school adventures, the discomfort of sleeping on the floor is glossed over. However, I've been camping enough times to know that hips and lower backs don't take well to sleeping on hard surfaces. I've also camped in the UK enough times to know that it's always cold. Even in mid-summer, it rains, blows a gale, and freezes the backside off any camper foolhardy enough to venture outside. 

I'm hoping that, by using hiking tricks - changing out of the sweaty clothes as soon as I stop, adding dry layers as my body cools down, and using a sleeping bag liner - I can avoid hypothermia. I'm not sure how to avoid the constant body-ache, but I'm packing heat lotion to try counter-act it. Oh, and a daily stretching routine to work the kinks and aches out of my muscles. I'm going to look ridiculous: wearing a dress while riding a bicycle, and stopping to pitch a tent and do a full round of stretches. But as Steve Jobs once said, "stay hungry, stay foolish." This trip is probably the height of foolishness, but I'm hungry for what I'll learn.

Lessons on a Bike - Training Part 3

This ride is starting to take on a life of its own. It's doing things to me, changing me, in ways I had not anticipated. It's as if I'm paying my spiritual taxes in blood, sweat, and tears. Yes, I do mean 'blood' and 'tears' literally - it's been painful learning lessons like how high of a pavement edge I can ride off sideways, and which bushes are pricklier than they look. However, I haven't had the disposable income to be as generous as I've wanted this year, so I willingly make the sacrifice now.

Despite the pain, it's enjoyable. Not all of it is physically pleasurable, but I like the thought that I will have achieved something of significance by year's end. For too long, I've been stuck on a hamster wheel of simply earning money - it's a basic survival thing, I'll grant you, but I don't want my life to slip away unmarked to an unremarkable end. When I die, I want the officiant at my funeral to have a full life of subject matter to draw from in the ceremony, not a nondescript "she was nice enough."

Just for the record, no, I'm not planning to die soon. The contemplation of my legacy started after the murder of a friend when I was eighteen; that was the first time I realised I had to do something with my life if I wanted a funeral with interesting stories. The quest has been on-going since, but I haven't yet reached the point where I feel I have nothing left to do. Given that "go ice-diving on Neptune" is on my bucket list, I don't anticipate ever feeling that way. But training my physical body and finding its natural rhythm is focussing my mind on the task of amassing a body of meaningful work.

I'm almost tempted to get a cape and wear it during the ride. Much of my reading of late has been Tolkien-centric, Tolkien's characters set out on long adventures wearing capes. They carry provisions - something I'm going to do on the bike - and set out, ill-prepared except for a cape that protects them from wind, rain, and cold. Also, it's after The Year Two Thousand (remember when we all called it that?), and people after The Year Two Thousand were supposed to wear capes. Alas, I fear it would be impractical on a bicycle, but would add to the feeling of being on an adventure. Even if I don't reach my fundraising target, I'd just like to get there and back again, bonus points for having someone else's Postsecret wish (pictured alongside) come true for me too.


With that in mind, I'll leave you now to go back to transcribing a first draft. The transcription needs to be finished by the time I leave, so it can rest while I'm on the road. When I get back, I'll have the second draft to work on, and the first six months of this year will not have been wasted effort.

Lessons on a Bike - Training for the Epic Bike Ride Part 2

I didn't cycle the 200kms I had planned to do last week. I could pretend it was because of some major life event, but it wasn't; a few small things brought me down - a puncture that was beyond my skill level, a flooded kitchen, writing a risk avoidance strategy for the trip (my grandmother has major concerns about me riding so far on my own), and suchlike. In the end, I only managed about 120kms. 

I say 'about' because I got lost a few times. Google Maps tells me how far my planned route is; it doesn't calculate how far one has travelled down the wrong path before realising that it wasn't where one wanted to be. My brother assures me that if I had an iPhone, I could have an app that calculates my route distance, and speed, and time splits for each kilometre. Alas, I live in the technological Dark Ages, and the most useful thing my phone can do is unlock my bike (I attached a lanyard to it; my bike key is attached so I don't lose it).

Those [approximately] 120kms were a useful training exercise, however, so I don't feel too bad about not meeting my target. I've learned a few more things about life with a bicycle, the first being that you can pump a tyre up too hard - one should stop before the valve detaches itself from the inner tube. The second is that there are two kinds of people in the world that literally do not care where they stand or who might want to use that piece of real estate for travel - people with prams, and people catching taxis. If you cycle for more than three hours in a day, you will be hungry no matter how much you eat. Also, Rosslyn Chapel is beautiful, and the glenn (that's a valley with a forest and a river; if it was just a valley, it would be 'glen') next to it is enchanting. 

The last thing I learned this week is that I need a shopping list. The shopping list goes as follows:

- an iPhone (or other suitable smartphone with Google Maps and the bike workout app my brother uses)

- a decent camera (bonus points for good quality video recording capability)

- a sewing machine (have you any idea how hard it is to find '50s fashion in stores?)

- a co-rider or travel buddy for the trip (as much for my grandmother's peace of mind as it is to stave off the loneliness of the road)

- a superpower, preferably mind-control, but I would settle for super-speed or super-strength

(And as always, if you would like to sponsor me, click here to donate to Care International. It will be much appreciated)

The Bike Ride - Starting Training

I have learned the meaning of a euphemism this week: "you're looking well" = "have you lost weight?" It surprised me how many people said that to me this weekend. I've started training for an epic charity bike ride, and have been doing seventy-five kilometres per week to ease into it (that increases to two hundred this coming week). The four kilograms that evaporated since my last visit to the nurse simply escaped my notice.

I should probably point out that before the start of this year the last time I rode a bicycle was more than a decade ago. I used to ride home from school every day to save petrol, but stopped after a taxi knocked me down. After developing an irrational fear of other road users - something I only partly overcame when I learned to drive - I embraced the sedentary lifestyle and ignored anything that could hurt me.

In January of this year, I met up with an ex lecturer who spends his retirement going on cycling holidays and suggested we ride out to see the Falkirk Wheel. We didn't end up cycling there; we took the train to Falkirk and then rode from the station to the Wheel. It was still an enjoyable day out, so I started to go for the occasional afternoon ride along the Union Canal, only about twenty kilometres each and spending as little time on roads as possible.

Then I committed to doing the Bike Ride of Epicness (click here for the route) for Care International, which requires me to cover between sixty and eighty kilometres per day. Another confession: when I rode home from school, I wasn't a very fast rider; the ten kilometre trip averaged forty-five minutes. While fourteen kilometres per hour is an easy pace in terms of calorie burn, Google Maps thinks each day's ride will take about five hours if I ride at my old speed. Riding around town - yes, I've conquered my fear of being run over enough to ride the streets of Edinburgh - I've been averaging twenty kilometres per hour, including time slowing for traffic lights and people pushing baby-chicanes (you know those three- or four-wheeled things that take up most of the cycle path and house a tiny human along with all its paraphernalia) along cycle paths. Thankfully, bike routes have an unspoken hierarchy: give to faster traffic. I'll report back next week with a progress update...hopefully, I won't have sacrificed the speed for the increased distance.

Update

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned...it's been more than a year since my last blog post. This is largely because I couldn't admit online just how tough I found the job market here in Scotland. As it turns out, everyone applying for the jobs I want have more degrees and more experience than me, having been sacked when the recession hit the science research budget in '08. The journey has been entertaining - I shall, no doubt, fill you in on some of the more colourful moments in the fullness of time - but only being able to find minimum wage work dented my pride. 

Allow me to share some lessons I've learned in the past year:

- saving money for a rainy day is a good idea when you live in a country that rains a lot

- a yellow rain warning in the UK means it's going to rain a lot, not that yellow rain is going to fall

- it's physically demanding to do seventy-four hours of work in a seven-day period

- Spaniards and Poles are fun to party with

- Spaniards and Poles swear a lot; if you learn words in their language, look them up in a dictionary before repeating them in polite company

- it is possible to live on minimum wage, provided one is a creative cook

- waitressing can cause a wicked set of Madonna arms

However, I have decided that £6.08 (£4.73 after tax...yes, the UK taxes minimum wage workers) is below me; I have now taken up writing professionally. I suppose the truest sign of this is that I'm blogging again, and have a window open with a proper (read: for money and my CV) writing assignment that begs my attention. I'm on the second day of my first official work week; the shine hasn't worn off...yet.

The Disadvantage of Language-Geekery in Public Fora

I'm a geek; I have no problem in admitting that. As a geek, I read writers' guides to composition - a pursuit that includes the list of overused words. Because of the sheer volume of time that I spend trying to perfect my craft, the need to always structure sentences and paragraphs properly has spilled over into every aspect of my life. I'm quite sure this has happened to other people, mostly because I've met lecturers who looked baffled when someone didn't understand them.

This presents a conundrum.

On the one hand, one could try and speak like a normal person instead of mentally editing and analysing the grammar of the people one is speaking to (it was an effort to write it like that, and not say the stiff, grammatically correct "to whom one is speaking"). It feels strange, as though one trying to be someone else. On the other hand, one could speak like Sheldon. That means one come across as a verbose moron - something that generally gets worse when one has had a bit t drink.

So, to all of you who out there, please feel free to give me your opinions on whether using the extent of one's vocabulary is a good thing. Whether people with good vocabularies should make a conscious effort to sound more like the average, for example.

Building a pedestal

In 2004, I spent the year in the Greater London area. When I first arrived, I stayed with a relative who lived next door to someone who lived in a big house and drove an obnoxious 4x4 (it should be noted that the most hazardous thing in that neighborhood was the leaves that collected on the verges in the evenings). The pretentious neighbor had landscaped their garden to have a "natural" pedestal on which the Discovery was parked every night. There were also some subtle garden lights around the little knoll to show their 4x4 in good light overnight. I snorted at how flash they were trying to be 1) for living in that neighborhood (there were only named houses on that road, not numbered ones), 2) for driving such an obnoxious car and 3) for displaying it so ostentatiously (seriously, do the words "living green" mean nothing to them?).

Skip forward to today. We've been having electricity trouble of late (as in, a maximum of six hours per day, usually in the wee hours of the morning. We're told it's because the main power station has died from lack of maintenance. The official line from the power company complaints line is that it "should be fixed by the end of the year"), and Mum was complaining about the power-cuts and our inability to afford a generator to a friend at church. Said friend (read: angel) told Mum that he knew of someone who was selling a generator. Long story short, we're getting a genny...not a big one, not one powerful enough to run the fridge and freezer or geyser, but enough to keep the lights, laptop and TV/satellite dish going. It's ot a wind or solar powered one (I'm working on a design for one that combines both for when my parents move house), which is unfortunate, but we'll take what we can get at this point so a diesel-powered one it is.

Mum and I were sitting in the lounge chatting this afternoon and she asked where we were going to put the generator. My first instinct was to say "In a shrine, framed by mirrors so we can fully admire it, in the front garden, with space to kneel before it and chant 'Oh magnificent giver of power, we praise God for you' whenever we need to use it." Then it hit me that I'd be doing exactly what the pompous neighbors in Surrey did with their Discovery. Yes, I know, we'd need to put the generator somewhere near the electricity mains box where it's protected from the weather, but allow me to dwell on the point for a moment. Perhaps what we choose to display in front of our houses says a lot about our priorities. Our family's priority is obviously not looking cool, but surviving. As fossil fuel reserves dwindle, we're going to need to switch to more sustainable ways of meeting our energy needs. When we get a wind generator (I've already got one picked out. It's adorable. It's called a Turby and it doesn't mind turbulent wind), I have a suspicion that I'm going to plant pretty flowers around the base to decorate it so that the neighborhood can also admire the beauty of wind power.

Dear Zim

Dear Zimbabwe,

I'd like to ask you a question: why? Sure things were awesome in the '80s - our dollar was one-on-one with the British Pound; we were the largest exporter of maize and tobacco in the sub-region; we all wore the same trainers (because there were economic sanctions and apparently only one shoe company existed in this country back then); we had Bovril (which is a less awesome version of Marmite made from dead cows not yeast, so it's lower in the vitamins B); you couldn't tell who the rich kids or poor kids were (because there was also only one carpet manufacturer, ceramics company, swimsuit manufacturer); our moms all had crazy lions-mane perms; we were all super-proud of our power station that was fuelled by the largest open-cast coal mine in Africa (I'm leaving discussion of the Gukurahundi massacres out, because that's not really the point of this post. Also, that was one of the not-awesome parts of the '80s, so shouldn't be listed here) - but that was more than two decades ago.

Since then: America has invaded Iraq (twice); other countries have had elections and changed presidents; we've found out about the down-sides of burning fossil fuels for energy; we've started driving cars that were not assembled in Zimbabwe with mostly-the-same bits as their overseas counterparts; we've discovered the joy of Marmite on our morning toast; scientists have proved that margarine is bad for you; nutritionists have repeatedly demonstrated the benefits of a varied diet; the population of the world has increased exponentially.

Yet here we are. I should probably mention that it's 4 a.m. as I'm writing this, because that's the only time when the electricity is on (I've been awake since my bedside light blinked into life at 11 p.m.). Sure, I'm all for living green, but I do need electricity to achieve things and (finally) finish a remunerative piece of writing. We're still being powered by the open-cast coal mine, and the generators at the power station regularly give up the ghost. In addition, we're sending electricity to Namibia (y'know, because, like, we totally have enough to spare), so we're upping their national carbon footprint as well. We gave up using our own dollar, because inflation was exponential, not incremental (no word of a lie: a few years ago the same bottle of cooking oil in the same store was $12,000 when the store opened, $24,000 at lunchtime and $48,000 by the close of business). Now we have American dollars, most of which are so tatty that you need to squint to determine which denomination it is. A number of times in the past decade, our economy would have failed if it hadn't been for people who had left the country sending money home to their relatives. Our municipal water is virtually non-existent, and when it does come through the pipes, it's got something in it that gives us all diarrhoea (I'm not counting the cholera outbreak we had a few years ago in this discussion. Nobody ever proved where that started). We need food aid just to keep our population alive, and now the government are considering planting genetically modified crops just to keep the food down.

So I ask you, why? Why are you content to sit and let s**t happen to you without so much as a squeak of protest? We're all (well, not all of us, from the looks of the mealies [that's maize for the non-Zimbos] that are growing on verges and in green belts around Harare) doing the Foundations for Farming mealies for the nation project to keep ourselves from starving this winter, and that's awesome, *hi5*. But nothing else is improving. Everyone is working so hard at damage control (whether it's buying a new generator, digging another borehole, or whatever) that nobody's even stopping to think what can actually be done. There are almost no solar panels or mini wind turbines (which, let's be honest, would be so much more convenient than having to find diesel to run the gennies), and we're all content with the bog-standard "it's load shedding" reply that we get whenever we call the electricity faults line to find out why we don't have electricity for another day. Why? How have you not all gone stir-crazy from being thwarted at every turn? Or maybe that's the answer - you're all so busy trying not to let it make you insane that you have nothing left to give when it comes to making progress?

In the arms of the Mother City

Some of you may have noticed a lengthy silence from me over the Christmas period. Let me start from the beginning. My brother and his girlfriend were invited to a wedding in Stellenbosch (a wine-making university town near Cape Town. Surprisingly, Maties [Stellenbosch University students] have a less raucous reputation than Rhodents [students at/from Rhodes, my alma mater]) that was happening just before Christmas. Given that he lives in the UK and we rarely see each other, the family decided to convene in Cape Town for December. This was also the meet-the-parents trip for my bro and his girlfriend (about which everyone was nervous – well, Mum and bro's GF were).

So, a (tiny) holiday apartment was rented and we all flew down to the Mother City. Now, we've all been to Cape Town before, so many of the touristy activities – taking the cable car up Table Mountain, visiting the V&A Waterfront, etc. – were now old and boring. Well, the V&A is only really fun once; my fear of heights was the main factor in vetoing another trip in the cable car. The car swings from its cables; the floor of the car rotates; the cable car driver objects to people hanging onto his little cage in the centre (what I did last time to avoid the terror of being spun around near the glass walls). Thus, we moved on and did more interesting things.

Noordhoek beach (pictured right) was visited many, many times. It's the least crowded beach in the city, and it's long enough to get a decent exercise walk. The wind on that side of the mountain is rather strong – and the Mother City was having a particularly windy spell in December – so there were a number of picnics with very sandy sandwiches. Incidentlly, sand doesn't negatively affect the taste of wine. It does, however, make sushi a rather off-putting texture (we found a place that did take-out sushi. Unfortunately, they didn't provide dipping bowls with the food, so we sprinkled the soy sauce over the maki. Sacrilege!)

My brother's girlfriend, as her Christmas present to our clan, took us to the Kirstenbosch Carols by Candlelight. It was truly delightful. There were thousands of people in the ampitheatre section of the botannical garden, each with a candle and a little paper bag to act as a wind-protector for the flames. As it happens, Capetonians are very proficient at burning paper bags, so there were a few minor fire incidents (nobody was hurt), but I digress. In the last song, they got us to wave our candles in unison. Imagine three thousand people sitting on the lawn, surrounded by beautiful flowers, waving candles like fourteen year-old girls at a Backstreet Boys concert while singing Silent Night...it gave us goosebumps.

We went to Stellenbosch a few times on wine tasting trips. The first trip was toute ensemble . We started at Waterford Estate (where I'd been in 2007 and seen a formula kit-car, pictured right) for their wine and chocolate tasting, which was lovely (and worth the price tag, if you're going tasting in Stellies). Many photos were taken in the tasting...well, I can't call it a room - it's a Spanish-style courtyard. Thankfully, the high-thirty-something temperatures weren't too bad in the shade.

After that, we went on to Rustenberg Estate (owned by the father of my predecessor as chair of the wine tasting society.). They do an award-winning Bordeaux blend and a truly spectacular straw wine (tasting room pictured right). Since I last went there, they've sold the Brampton range (it was their second label, with most of the grapes being grown off-site. Now that the recession's hit, they're focusing on the premium wines that earned them their reputation and won them the awards)

Mum was resistant to the idea of the second time around, so they stayed in town while Barns (a friend from uni, and my co-chair of the wine tasting society in 2009) and I went on a little toddle on our own. Mum and Dad went for a walk around the Stellenbosch Village Museum, which I had wandered around when I visited with friends in 2007.

Barns and I started our trip at Zorgfliet (tasting room pictured right), intending to hit a few estates. The pourer finished a bottle on both Barns and I (wine superstision holds that if you finish the bottle on someone, they'll have good relationships for a year), so it was an auspicious start to the first tasting trip of the new year. However, after five wines there – and what lovely wines they were too (I bought the viognier, which is delightfully off-dry. I would have got the pinot noir as well, but I thought it would need to be set down for a few years to reach its full potential and I'm going to be moving countries too often to make that viable) – we moved on to Hillcrest Berry Orchards for a cup of tea. If you ever find yourself in the Stellenbosch area and in need of a good cuppa, head on out to Hillcrest. Their scones and jam are wondrous – all the jam is made from fruit grown on the farm and their rose geranium lemonade (the temperature was in the mid-thirties, which is far too hot for tea, especially after five wines) is very refreshing. Also, the views from the tea-room (pictured right) are spectacular.

The rest of the holiday was spent hiking and eating. Coming from Zimbabwe, my dad (an ardent foodie) went bananas in the shops. He has developed a passionate love for Woolies food (as has Mum, but that's largely because they have a coffee shop in-store that makes a good brew and serves awesome cakes). The hiking trails around Cape Town are amazing – the fynbos (the natural vegetation of the cape) has been restored across most of it (the colonists, damn them, felt the need to plant thirsty aliens like pine, wattle and gum, which have become invasive and are wiping out the natural beauty of the place). We went to Tokai Forest (where the aliens are allowed controlled reign and there are a number of hiking and biking paths) and tried to find the Giant Redwoods (Sequoia sempirivens) to no avail. It's possible we got lost and gave up before we reached the spot (I had patellar tendonitis, so walking up and down hills ranged between uncomfortable and excruciating).

The missing sequoias aside, we had a great time. Next time, we will continue our quest for the Giant Redwoods! Also, I got out-voted on visiting the Jewish Museum (or rather, whenever we had free time and someone said “Shall we go to the Jewish Museum for Brij?” it was Shabbat), and I resolve to see that next time.

The Unbearable Pointlessness of Being

There are more than seven billion people in the world. Every morning, we wake up, feed ourselves (well, not necessarily, but if you're reading this you have access to a computer and I assume therefore you can afford to feed yourself), dress, rush around making money and giving it to various government departments (the tax man, the vehicle licensing folk, the local council, etc.) or service providers, then we feed ourselves again, watch pointless TV, and go to sleep. The next day, we wake up and repeat the cycle. Endlessly, this goes on. Basically, we're nothing but hamsters who get up each morning, run on the same wheel all day, and then go to bed. Why?

Some of us have families; some of us have a partner; some of us have house mates. Most of us have people with whom we interact on a daily basis and have some kind of emotional attachment to. One would hope that these people have some kind of reciprocal emotional attachment. I suppose the point of earning money is to put food in our mouths, and those of our dependants, and to put a roof over our head.

But I still come back to this: why?

I'm aware that, as a bipolar sufferer, I feel the futility of existence more acutely than others, but riddle me this: what makes me (or you or, for that matter, anyone else in the world) so special? What do I have to contribute to the world that is any different or more special than what anyone has to contribute?

We feel a biological imperative to propagate our kind, but there are so many of us that, if half of us didn't breed, the planet would actually be better off. Yet we seem to view the reason for our existence as finding a partner and making a flock of little greenhouse gas producers to carry on running on our hamster wheel when we die.

Some people choose to contribute to the world through studying something. Some of those people do actually contribute – Einstein, et al. – but most are just running on their little hamster wheel. Very few people make discoveries that change the course of history or alter the fate of the world. Even fewer change things for the better. (No, I don't consider people who make more efficient weapons as having changed things for the better, despite my objections to the size and unsustainability of the human population.)

Some people choose to devote their lives to humanitarian work. Some of those people make a positive change in their community; some simply teach the people that they're “helping” to be dependant on someone else to solve their problems.

So what's the point? The Christians will tell you that we're here to worship God. Maybe they're right. However, they also believe that if we don't worship God, all of creation will do it for us, so it seems a bit redundant.

Perhaps we're here to make money. Really? Is that the point of being here? Are we all pumping infinite amounts of toxic crap into the environment to accumulate a vast amount of stuff that we just leave behind when we die? Are we here to become better people? Well, in light of the “life's a bitch and then you die” thing, becoming a better person is an ultimately futile pursuit: you become the best you can be and then you die and all your effort is wasted.

We look to other people for our examples – asking what would Thomas Jefferson/Andy Lally/Ellen Degeneres do – trying, all the while to be better. Granted, some people abandon the quest to be better people and become sociopaths and/or serial murderers, but I'm assuming none of us are in that group. However, the people we choose all have some areas of failure in their lives – whether in their personal or professional lives, they've all fallen short of the ideal.

Thing is, I don't want to believe that there's no point. I'd like to believe that somewhere, somehow, something we do changes the world for the better. Thom Hartmann (incidentally, the author of a book titled 'What would Thomas Jefferson do') suggests that, through small acts of mercy, we change the flavour of the soup of the collective unconscious. So maybe that's the point: to go about life taking opportunities to do anonymous good deeds in order to decrease the misery around us. I don't know about you, but that sounds far more pleasant to me than being a hamster funding a government that makes decisions that will ultimately destroy the earth.

2010 Review Part 1 – Personal

This has been a year of dizzying highs and devastating lows. In church on Christmas Day (yes, I went to church with my family. Due to time constraints [we needed to drop my brother at the airport], we ducked out before communion [to my mother's relief, since I was about to launch into a “modern Christianity has got it wrong” diatribe about the sacrament of communion]), the minister talked about how it's important to look at where we've come from in order to chart where we're going. Since it's the end of the calendar year, I felt the need to write a review of what's happened this year – a highlights and lowlights reel, as it were. I'll start with the lowlights, so that the post ends on a happy note. Part 2 of this post will serve as the Hi5 Awards for 2010 (I had wanted to do them in a separate post, but I'm on holiday in Cape Town at the moment, and internet facilities in our accommodation are sorely lacking).

Lowlights
I think the month of July, pretty much in its entirety, counts as a lowlight (that set the precedent for my final semester at Rhodes). That was the month when I lost two friends to car accidents within four days of each other. Literally, I got back from one memorial service to find out that I would be organising one for another friend. The waste of potential and the pointlessness of their deaths threw me very far off-centre. The cloud of dark grey that had settled over my mind was then compounded by finding out that, no matter how well I did in my November exams, I would never score high enough to make it into a postgraduate program.

Another lowlight came in the form of the unexpected housemate. A friend and I had arranged to move in together for the duration of 2010. However, he got excluded from university on academic grounds, so I was left without a friendly face with whom to share a house. Instead, I got saddled with The Hypochristian. It still baffles me how someone who claims to love God – who told us to look after the earth and be motivated by love – can feel no guilt about taking hour-long showers (seriously, not even a crack-whore in downtown Bangkok could possibly need that much shower time on a daily basis) during the worst drought the region has ever recorded, leaving lights on (in locked rooms, so that I couldn't turn them off) and going away for the weekend, and exclusively choosing unethical food and cosmetic products.

Highlights
Resolving the issue of The Hypochristian playing her (horrendous) music too loud (although I would debate whether it's worthy of being played at all). It would seem that right-wing religious nuts get the point when you blast them with Children of Bodom and suchlike until they turn their music down.

Girls nights. Towards the end of the year, two nerd-girl friends and I discovered that life was easier to handle when faced together. Thus, Tuesday nights became a sacred time of food, wine and geek talk. It is wonderful to have friends to share musings with and ask for creative guidance, even if the side-effect of having three scientists in the room is that every sequence of actions needs to be discussed at length in order to find the most efficient method.

Catching up with old friends. A few people have drifted back into my life this year after rather lengthy hiatuses (hiati?), and it's quite lovely rediscovering old friendships, catching up on important news, and adding new layers of memories to the bond. This is especially true when you realise that you can be yourself around them, even though you thought they would judge you for some of your life choices.

Being made an author on sidepodcast. Yes, to the relief of those of you who don't follow F1, I now have somewhere to work out the more intense parts of my Formula1-related geekery. After submitting this post, I was offered an authorship. True, it doesn't come with a paycheque, but it's lovely to know that other people think I have something valid to say.

Passing my degree. I think that says it all – I am now no longer a student; I am a graduate; I am no longer doomed to either waitress or sex worker as career options in the current job market. I want to get a t-shirt printed to that tune, just so that the whole world knows. Although, I'm not sure how seriously people take someone with “university graduate” printed across their bosom.

I have no idea what 2011 holds. I'm hoping it holds good things. However, if it doesn't, I hope I can hold it together enough to survive it. I know what I'd like to happen, but am aware that articulating these things tends to jinx them. All I know is I'm not going to be in Grahamstown, or (I hope) Harare...we're holding thumbs for Edinburgh (with trips to the south for Silverstone and the Goodwood Festival of Speed). Dad has offered to pay for my ticket over after grad, so that's looking at least a little bit likely. Anyways, I hope I'll see you on the other side.

The start of the road

The Road Goes Ever On
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
- J R R Tolkien

Technically, that should be "Pursuing it with an eager little Golf Chico," rather than "Pursuing it with eager feet," but Tolkien is always king.

Sunday was the day I left Grahamstown. I left the labs on Saturday night - logged out from my final session as a Rhodes student - and spent most of the rest of the night (save for a two-hour nap) packing and loading the car. I finally left town after the sunrise with bruises all over me, aching muscles, and a brain that was screaming out for sleep.

The road meandered over rolling hills covered in savanna grassland, through deep, craggy gorges, over low mountains caused by the last glacial period. I drove past where Grant nearly planted us in the wall when we were driving to Joburg. I drove past where we stopped for Evie to puke that time we drove to Zim together. I saw some springbok and a warthog.

I accidentally ended up in Molteno (pic to follow when I'm done with the packing-and-moving thing and can find my download cables) - Mom and Dad called (when they knew I was driving, knowing full well that I don't have a hands-free kit) while I was driving through Steynsburg and I missed the turn-off to Gariep. Molteno's the home of Ouma's Rusks, a fact I became aware of when a friend of mine dated one of the descendants of the Ouma's empire. Since then, I've wondered about the tiny town every time I drove past the sign post. Turns out, there's not much there apart from a pretty church and quiet streets.

Also, as it turns out, staying awake at road work stops is tricky. We were going to be kept waiting for about half an hour, so I thought, "I'll just rest my neck and eyes...I won't be here long enough to fall asleep." Wrong. I was awakened by a ruddy-faced, grizzly-bearded road-works marshall poking me through the open window and the roar of 18-wheelers overtaking me. You know your road trip's going well when you're being overtaken by 18-wheelers. The last time that happened was when mom put a cylinder through my gasket head in '07 and we limped the last 300kms into Bloemfontein doing 40 km/h uphill and 70 when the slopes helped our forward momentum (yes, that was a frustrating road trip).

Still, I eventually found myself in Joburg in a house with a tub so big I can curl up in it and not touch the sides. Whoever designed this house obviously didn't have water conservation in mind...not that I'm complaining about having a giant tub. Having a long soak in a bathroom-lake is an awesome way to end a road trip.

This evening, the road continues. Well, I should probably switch from Tolkien quotes to John Denver, because I'll be going on a jet plane to Harare. The final bit of the journey...until we (possibly/probably) head to Cape Town for December. This coming year, I'm totally going to have to donate to a reforestation project - moving countries appears to be a pretty carbon-costly exercise!

Holidays in Zimbabwe

I'm here in Zimbabwe. Technically, I'm on holiday. Let me qualify that: I'm not currently at university (I start that again on the 19th), I'm at my parents house. As a treat, Mum booked for some time up at (what used to be) a four-star hotel in Nyanga (a tiny town in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe), so we drove up there on Friday and got back today. I'm not quite sure how I feel about some of the things that happened this past few days.

There are things that irk my inner foodie - being served margarine instead of butter in a supposedly four-star restaurant (and the waiter had the nerve to insist that it was real butter), and being offered JC Le Roux as though it were a bottle of Moet (seriously, it's not even a proper bubbly, it's a soda-stream wine).

There are things that make my blood boil - acres of pine (which was bad enough - pine was never intended to grow in Africa!) that has been deforested by land invaders and not re-planted, so it's now just stands of wattle (a highly invasive Australian plant that takes over and ruins entire ecosystems), huts erected in the middle of what used to be productive farm land, cows that are so thin and badly kept one wonders how they stay alive.

And there are things that make me wonder whether I'm supposed to laugh or cry. Two separate moments that I viewed casually from the back of the car spring to mind immediately. The first, we were shopping in Nyanga village (and by 'shopping', I mean 'driving from store to store looking for butter and bread and finding only margarine') and we drove past a corner store that had spades and wedding dresses in the window. Garden implements and wedding dresses. That's quite a combo - quite telling of the town as a poor, rural community. The dress cost US$20. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the combination and the thought of buying one's wedding dress in a corner store. Then I realised that, for some women, that's the most beautiful dress that they can afford. Now, I can (and do, given the opportunity) go on at length about the amount of money wasted by modern brides on their dresses (seriously, if you want to throw $20,000 away for a few hours of attention, give it to Medecins Sans Frontiers and get interviewed by a local news station. It'll be better for the world in the long run), but the heart-wrenching...is the word "patheticness"? "poverty"? "simplicity of expectation"?...of the image of a woman spending her savings on a $20 dress from a corner store is more than I can process. To be fair, for a $20 polyester-satin dress, it was a pretty dress, but it is very jarring to think that a garment that I demean because of its price and the fabric from which it was crafted and the shop it's being sold in will be the one some woman wears for one of the happiest/proudest moments of her life. Then, on the way home this morning, we drove past a man pushing a baby in a doll's pram. The image of a daddy and a baby will always make me go "aww", especially if the man is from a traditionally patriarchal society where child-rearing is "womens' work", so I found myself torn between the urge to giggle at a person being tiny enough to fit in a doll's pram, the urge to turn to goo over a sensitive dad, and the urge to cry because he couldn't afford a pram that wasn't a toy.

I suppose that all of the above events are all just a product of this being a very poor, very oppressed country. The crippling poverty experienced by people in this country is holding them back. Nyanga (despite being covered in bluegum, wattle and pine, which all inspire a chainsaw-and-arsen urge in me) is a beautiful place and desperately needs the money provided by tourism. However, I wouldn't feel good about recommending that anyone go there, simply because everything is so very run down. The roads all need re-grading; the buildings all need a coat of paint; the woodlands, gardens and golf courses are all in dire need of some radical weeding; the hospitality staff are all in desperate need of proper training and stern management. The one thing that I do have to say for Nyanga is this - the people are fantastically friendly and helpful.

What not to do after a memorial service

I went to Christine's memorial service this morning at her old high school. It was good to replace the mental image of her slumped, limp and unconscious, in her car with ones of her smiling and laughing. Because so few people are left in town, only about eight of us there weren't part of the school, thus I was a front-row participant. I've never been a front-row participant in a funeral before. Yes, I did the requisite amount of crying. The song they chose to make us sing was all about God taking lambs home to Him, so I sobbed my way through it instead of singing.

Anyway, I get home and Mum tells me that another friend of mine, Keziah, was killed in a car crash last night in the UK. Her and my dad are friends with Keziah's parents, so she offered to organise a memorial service here for Kez (they used to live in Harare, so people here remember her fondly. She was, after all, a kick-ass kid). It really wasn't what I wanted to hear right after a memorial service. So, I might end up organising my first memorial service. I suppose, if I do end up doing it, it'll be good practice. I know the time's going to come when I have to organise funerals for my parents (given that this is the natural order of life), so a dress rehearsal would be a good way of grieving Kez. It's not callous to say that, is it? I'm not sure at the moment. Everything's a bit fuzzy in my head, what with all this going on. I was on top of my feelings about Christine's death, but I'm starting to lose my grip a bit after hearing about Keziah. They were both younger than me and further along in life than me (Christine was about to start her PhD [I haven't even finished undergrad yet] and Keziah was getting married in September [I know I'm too cynical to buy into the whole marriage thing, but it is a check-box on the list of things that make one a grown-up...a list that on which I haven't yet ticked any boxes])...should I stay in arrested development to avoid tempting fate to ruin it all before I'm done living?