Tea and Biltong with the Queen: No, don’t feed it to the corgies! That’s Kudu!
Some people, of a poetic or artistic persuasion, have suggested that a place has a rhythm, that the street has a rhythm of its own – a unique beat that people can tap into. In tales, it is often this rhythm that the protagonist is trying to find, this understanding that turns the situation to his advantage, that changes the world around for him, in whatever quest he is on…
But what makes up the rhythm of a place? Wouldn’t Cape Town’s beat be as different to Jo’burg’s one as London is? Can it be explained or quantified, like a genetic memory or spatial identity, or something more esoteric than that?
I don’t know much about that, but I know the cobbled roads of the Old Town of Edinburgh slow your pace, giving you long enough to gaze up at the medieval city towering above you. I know the sleek sidewalks of London will move you on if you don’t keep up the pace. I know Dublin encourages staggering (or is that just my friends?).
I know the dust gathers like a gritty talc in the Karoo seeping into your tekkies, building up on your socks, giving you the sensation of time accruing as if tiny Karoo towns gather time. It makes me want to slow down too, maybe sit on the stoep in the afternoon and watch the world go by.
The world feels young and feral in the coastal valleys of the Wild Coast, where people have only just been able to leave an imprint. It’s fresh, but it isn’t soft. It’s a world of aloes and dirt tracks and sharp rocks. I stand in awe of nature, but I watch my step.
The Western Cape is green and hilly in a chocolate box kind of way. It is a mix: so very French, so very Dutch, so very quaint, soooo cosmopolitan! It makes me want to frolic – if only I knew what a good frolic looked like!
Sometimes cliches aren’t imposed, they arise. A place can shape its inhabitants, and as exciting as new and different places are, you know the feeling of home the minute your foot fits the pavement – hence the saying, “it’s like coming home”. I sometimes wonder if it is this connection that expats are trying to recapture when lighting a braai in their postage-stamp garden of their digs in Southfields, London.
Yes, braais and boerie are wonderful all on their own, but isn’t there another part of you that longs for home when you do it? We’ve left home for a variety of reasons and some people sadly cannot imagine returning, but we’re still trying to conjure up a semblance of South Africa, even if just for an afternoon. I know it’s this I’m looking for when I trek to the South African shop on a Saturday and spend a week’s grocery allowance on biltong and niknaks…
You don’t know it’s there until you leave it behind, and then you don’t feel complete till you have it again. It’s in the smell and the dust and the land and the languages and the faces and the feet…
*With thanks to Miriam Makeba
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