A Few Brief Notes on the Politics of Being Local

There’s nothing that pleases me more than a sense of belonging. I like when things overlap and I like when I’m at the centre of it somehow. It’s ego but it’s also human.

Take a day like this:

I am sitting in the Bodleian, staring out the window, towards the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, thinking how absurd it really is, that this is my local library, that this grand place is where I work, that on my desk are three volumes of magazines from 1908 bound together in such a fragile way.  And there I am, gazing blankly, mouth hung open in that expression of well-meaning vacancy, when who should stroll by but someone I know, who says hello in a frantic whisper.  Later I go downstairs to the Lower Reading Room and smile at a colleague as he looks up from his studies.  Rolling down Broad Street, another colleague passes, waves.  Now I’m sitting in a cafe listening to music made by friends of a friend, watching a local businessman, whom I happen to know, cleaning the upstairs windows of his restaurant.

Why does this please me?  Why do I persist in having what amounts to a village mentality, and why should any of it matter, anyway–these brushes with a sense of community, this six-degrees-of-separation thing? Why do we get off on knowing that someone out there knows us? Oxford is a great place for this; anywhere you go you’re likely to know someone, if only obliquely, or else someone is likely to know someone you know.

“The local,” William Carlos Williams once wrote, “is the only universal.” I guess that’s probably true. I guess in a way that’s why I like the overlap so much. Why, in the end, it’s so important.

Now That We’re Back

Now that we’re back there is the snowfall of dead skin. Every time I look in the mirror, I see myself fading; I’ll be ghost-white soon, just like before. The healthy glow has gone and left only a few wavering lines where a swimsuit once was.

We have uneasy memories, heavy, fragrant dreams, photographs. My bank account is empty. My card looks weary and I have debt again. I count pennies in the supermarket. I go to bed hot and wake up cold.

Of course the funny thing is, I’m home, and I feel home. I am comfortable, and happy. We make plans to rearrange furniture. We’re going to buy a new duvet. We sweep the stairs. We build fires in the lounge. We’re nesting, together. Waiting for springtime.

But the dreams. The dreams. And the way we are when we’re away.

Sat Nav Test

So today I was lucky enough to take delivery of a Mio Moov Spirit V505 from Brands2Life. The in car Sat Nav system which as a little quirk works as a built in TV as well, this isn’t something which I’ll be fiddling too much with today though.

Tonight we are driving to London, to a part of London we haven’t driven to before so an accurate Sat Nav will be a lifesaver. First thoughts on the Mio are good, the big buttons make everything easy to do, and I’m sure even easier when driving along! I have already been able to program in the destination for later which saves time, I don’t have a GPS signal in my room to plan the route however, which is no surprise as I struggle for Vodafone signal as well.

As a comparison I will also have my N97 out, to test out the new(ish) free Ovi Maps navigation support. It’s about time this service became free, could this be the thing which clinches the mobile Sat Nav marked? And probably more importantly pushes Nokia users to use Ovi services instead of Google ones… Until now I have always been a Google Maps man so we will have to wait and see how it goes. My main concern is battery life, I some what doubt the N97 can handle 2 hours worth of ‘doing’ without a charge.

So what points will I be comparing:

• Time taken to plan out the route
• The planned route
• Accuracy of route
• Appropriate warning times
• Display + Instructions
• Anything else which comes up

A Thousand Splendid Sunsets

We were constantly watching the sunset. Usually with a beer or a gin and tonic or both. Usually feeling sun-kissed, hot, beaten down in a beautiful way by the fresh air, the dust and sand, the wind or else the lack of wind. We saw a lot of sunsets. Not a thousand, but it felt like a thousand; each instant felt different from the last.

How It Begins

There’s a beginning somewhere. And here’s what I think. I think the beginning is like this:

When I was little I liked to get stuck in things. I didn’t just watch TV, I lived it; I didn’t just read books, I expanded on them in my head. I used to act out films as they were playing, as if they were just background noise. I did a pretty good rendition of Cinderella, playing all of the parts; as a wicked step-sister, snatching a plastic necklace from my Cinderella-self and tearing it to bits.

But the stories I liked best were the ones most remote to my own place in time and geography. I didn’t watch the things that other kids my age were watching; I have gaps even now in my cultural consciousness because of it. I preferred Anne of Green Gables to Nickelodeon (I was never very popular). It was almost as if I longed for an archaic world and would rather pine hopelessly than assimilate into the Mickey Mouse Club culture of my contemporaries; but I was six, and wouldn’t have been thinking like that. I just liked the impossible; the historical, the fantastical, the exotic.

And somewhere in there was this made-for-TV movie about a pair of kids who go to visit their parents in Kenya. The parents are researchers of some kind and the brother-and-sister duo spend most of their time in the company of a young Masai boy, who freaks them out by drinking cow’s blood but also teaches them cute little proverbs and how to play mancala. The real point of the story is that the kids adopt a baby cheetah, which is subsequently stolen from them and taken to Nairobi, where it’s made to race against greyhounds. But I liked the sound of this place, Kenya, which was so different from my place, Orange County. I didn’t much mind about the cheetah–I thought it was a little foolish of them to try to tame a wild animal in the first place–but I liked the sweeping stock-footage views of the Great Rift Valley and the chaos of Nairobi and the long dusty roads, the acacia trees, the manicured lawns in the middle of this vast wilderness.

You can’t blame a compulsion purely on one childhood image; I saw films set all over the world, and their impact was transient at best. But sometimes, if you see something, it makes you feel something, and then, over the years, that something grows. You start to notice other things. At a bead shop in Laguna Beach with your mother, you buy only beads imported from Kenya and then have the shop girl string them into a necklace which you wear tied round your neck and which, fifteen years later, you still have. You read things and research things. You develop an undeserved, irrational passion for a place you have never been and can never fully understand. You close your eyes sometimes and imagine yourself there. You’re like Flaubert, but less eloquent, less able to understand how similar we are to the needle of a compass, how arbitrary the points that attract us are. Something small–an imagined quality of light, maybe–gets under your skin, and you can’t get it out.

I’m not saying that this particular point, this random place, this name in the atlas that I decided at such an early age to like, means anything more than any other place might. I’m not saying that I am satisfied or dissatisfied with my two weeks there, that they meant more or less than they would to anybody else, that they were enough, but neither that my hunger is insatiable. I’m only saying: every journey has pre-history, begins long before we think it begins. I’m only saying, this is where Kenya begins, for me.

Valladolid – Spain Day 3 Roasting The Stadium

Oh yay its Sunday, the day of rest, the day built for relaxing and doing very little. I don’t know why they have Sundays in Spain, every day seems like a Sunday…

The day started off in a similar way to which the last had finished, with a nice beer. After getting up and stuff we headed to a local Tapas place for food. More details which I can’t remember about, the name of the place we went to and the name for the drink we had. It was basically lager with a load of lemon cordial in it. Very refreshing, perfect for that early drink. The Tapas here was also better than the stuff from the day before (did I mention we had Tapas the day before?), highlight was definitely the croquet style yummyness.

After foodage we wondered down to the Valladolid football Stadium where Nicko and Vicko are season ticket holders. Poor them I say.

The other reason to head down in the direction of the stadium was to check out the traveling zoo… well that’s atleast what it called itself. Turns out this is code for caravan with a couple of donkeys, which charges you an arm and a leg (I think maybe this is how they feed the animals?). So we skipped that and headed back into town to hit one of the locals for the end of the rugby, which of course Jefffo loved…

After the rugby we headed to pick up some more beer and a couple of bits and bobs from the garage whilst Vicko went on home to start preparing the roast dinner for the evening. And what a roast it was! I wish I’d taken pics of it, but was too busy scoffing it, definitely a 9/10!

Snapshot of Naivasha: Evening

At Crater Lake, we sit around the remnants of a camp fire, staring out at the vile soda water lake, the line of dusky-pink flamingoes, whilst we drink Tusker and discuss the problem of corruption in Africa. Then we drive back and have dinner and sit under candle and star light.

Phoenix

I’m glad I saw it now, because in a way, this country is dying. It’s what people say and it’s what you can see in their eyes. There’s something shifting, and even if you’ve never been here before you can feel it. There’s an emptiness. People aren’t staying in the lodges and hotels anymore; everywhere feels as if it’s bleeding, or been bled already. “The US Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the risks of travel to Kenya”. Unpredictability turns men wild-eyed, and now, with wild eyes, we witness the demise of a place.

Or not a place. Not exactly; for the soil remains, the infrastructure (or some of it), the cities and roads. It’s the demise of an era, a certain Kenyan state of mind. The reign of the white Kenyan is over, of course–it has been for some time but now it is surely on its very last, trembling legs. It’s strange to be here now, to hear the Europeans say with such certainty that their place is gone. Even the buffalo know it; they’re slowly encroaching, staking their claim, chasing the humans into smaller and smaller spaces, emboldened, made fiercer by their successes.

It’s a poignant place in time, for an outsider who had a dream of the place, rooted in antiquated ideals, and who has been lucky enough to catch just the tail end of how it was. Everybody talks about how different it was even five years ago; never mind the Happy Valley nostalgia, which is like a drug–this final stage of sickness has been so sudden, so powerful, that parts of Nairobi are unrecognizable to even old residents. Here on the edge of Lake Naivasha, there are the flower farms, which sprang out of nowhere; the thousands of employees, the projections of thousands more to come, the light from the city at night, which gives off a dusty glow of change.

Earlier I had this thought about the nostalgic places. Oxford is one; here is another. There must be others still. I would like to write about this. I think there is something in it. Every place has its own nostalgia but some seem to thrive on it, build themselves around it, up out of it, become what they are because of it. So here I am in another of the nostalgic places on Earth hearing people saying “This is Africa. It’s different. This is Africa.” And yet the nostalgia transcends even that; and even that cannot save it now, and even that cannot let us see what it will become, and though whatever it is now is something mired in corruption and memory and shock, and so whatever it will become will be rooted in that, you do get the sense that the buffalo maybe are right, and it’s about the land. It’s always been about the land, in a way; it’s always been about how, in a place that seems to go on forever, in a place where land looks like an infinite resource, space is actually limited. Property has been claimed and reclaimed a thousand times by a thousand people. As if something in the soil infects everyone who comes here; it’s never enough just to be here, but you must also own it, as it owns you. And now what will happen, now that the memory of it owns so many, while the reality of it breaks their hearts?

Seeing this place, you know: it’s dying. And simultaneously being reborn. In the end you can’t possibly know what form the rebirth will take. But here it is anyway. A phoenix, just before it bursts into flames, turns to ash.

A Strange Kingdom

On our way back from Naivasha, we stop by Elementaita, once an impressive outlet for pottery and woven goods. Their looms and stock burned in a fire a few years ago and their recovery has been slow and unsure–maybe they will never regain their former glory, and maybe, to hear the whites talking, in half-despondent, half-satisfied tones, it won’t matter anyway. Things here are dying; things like this,becoming unnecessary and extinct. We buy some blue-painted doorknobs and a finely-shaped coffee mug. The men are kind, but I imagine a kind of sadness into their bright eyes; we’re the only people in the shop, maybe the only people to stop by all day, and if you think about it, even if the rugs are overpriced, our custom is paltry, useless, like shaking the hand of a beggar but leaving it empty. Outside a few drops of rain fall and thunder claps in the distance, and suddenly, briefly, on our way to the car, we are deluged.

We drive to Sanctuary Farm, to meet old Francis Erskine. The farm is not like anything I have ever seen before. It is sprawling, green, full of trees and pastures and horses and game. Driving down dusty tracks, we see wildebeest. zebra, impala, dikdik. There’s a racetrack, a rusty starting gate, stables, a polo field complete with an elegant, incongruous red pavilion.

Erskine himself lives in what appears to be a crumbling palace (one corner even has a concrete turret). We meet him on his terrace; the deckchairs are covered in a film of dust, the paint is peeling, the floorboards are cracked. He’s a small man with tufts of white hair and sideburns. He resembles a mad old king reigning over an abandoned and beautiful kingdom and in a way I suppose he is. He asks me if I ride, and seems pleased when I say I do. He offers us tea but we’re in a hurry to get back before dark, so he shouts inside to his staff to call the whole production off, and it’s just as well, he says, as he hasn’t any cake to offer us.

He shows us his study instead, which is infinitely better than any cake I could possibly imagine. It is decorated with historical photographs of his family. On one wall a huge painting of a pink-faced young man in uniform hangs; a great-uncle, killed in the Boer war as he went to place a white flag in the earth. “I’ve never liked the Boers,” Erskine says, turning away from the painting, showing us another, this one of a racehorse he rode to victory once, an elegant bay beast portrayed in all its spindly-legged thoroughbred glory, a fragile, highly-strung animal whose owners gave Erskine the painting as a gift in thanks for his success as a jokey. His desk is huge and covered with carefully arranged piles of things; it looks both chaotic and highly organized, and looking at him, I’ve no doubt he knows exactly what’s there, even if no one else does.

Then the mad old king bids us adieu from his dilapidated terrace. He is at once intensely vulnerable and fiercely, wildly independent; he’s so small, so fragile, so fearsome and storied. He says I should come back and see his horses, but we are going to Nairobi soon, and then back to England, and then this kingdom will seem more than just remote, it will seem as it is: impossible, anachronistic, poignant.

I imagine, as we drive away, that I can literally see the whole scene fading before my eyes, that, like a stage set, it’s being dismantled, dismantled by the years and the rain and the heat and that by the time old Erskine dies it will have sunk more or less right back into the earth from which it came, and then all that will be left will be a herd of zebra grazing on a polo field next to a red pavilion.

A Reflective Aside

Infatuation. That’s a good word for our dizzy relationship with places we feel particular affinity for. I’ve often thought this–that our relationship to, say, a city, has the same qualities as our relationship to a lover or a partner. I feel that with Oxford–this is what I keep trying and then re-trying to represent in The Book, The Book which has become like a beast in my mind. I keep trying to over-complicate it, as if I don’t trust myself, when really it is all very simple. Really it is only a manifestation of a love affair with a particular place.