As a child growing up in central Southern Africa it was always a novelty to visit my paternal grandmother in Johannesburg, South Africa. My relatively nomadic grandmother led the charmed life of someone who never seemed to ever have had a fixed abode. I am not sure whether this nomadic existence was self imposed or a matter of circumstance but in her colourful life she grew up in Hull, lived in Guernsey, Nottingham and Whitby amongst other places and then moved to South Africa. For all my life I only ever knew her as a grandma that lived in a hotel. Initially at the Mimosa Hotel in Hillbrow and then moving closer to family on Durban’s North Coast in Umdloti.
My recent relocation to London has brought home a couple of souvenir memories of traveling, living and general existence in Big Cities. I have lived in the City before, that’s nothing new, but what is interesting is that I still remember trying to recreate the ambience of city living in my little bedroom in relatively rural Rhodesia. A room with a large picture window that faced onto a small walled area of the boundary of our property that was anything but a cityscape. There was none of the road noise, none of the luminescence, none of the street gaggling or noises of neighbors, flying squad patrol cars or any of that. Just the creak of crickets, the whine of mosquitos and the blackness of the night. Recreating the light and noise was done in a variety of ways, flashlights, transistor radios, you name it I did it. I dreamed of once living the charmed life of my grandmother, in a residential hotel in a busy metropolis.
That aspiration didn’t linger, in fact as I have grown older I’ve yearned for a more rural existence, rolling fields and hills, distance from ones’ neighbors and a long drive way with a house set back far from the road, so far in fact that it cannot be seen. Old school and university chums have that. They live in the Karoo, in a kloof, secreted behind craggy stone strewn hills. To get to them you have to take a 30 minute drive up their undulating and stony driveway, a sheer fall-away down the kloof on one side and a towering wall on the other. The cutting winds through the contours of the hills on their farm and eventually you find yourself in their little paradise.
A farming life isn’t for me though. I like the idea of the country but I like the city too. As I sit here at my window that looks down onto a busy arterial road that cuts from Wandsworth through Putney to Richmond I can see the shopkeepers preparing their stores for the day, I see travelers traipsing up and down the street to wherever they are going and I see some of the residents in the apartment block that faces my window, periodically appearing at the windows, opening and closing them, opening and closing curtains, surveilling the street below while drawing on a mug of tea or coffee. It’s all good.
On my first night I thought that the street noise hurtling down the front door corridor was incredible. I wondered if I would be able to sleep. In fact the noise was reassuring, it meant everything was normal and as it should be – I slept like a baby.
This morning, my eyes were open at 5:45am – pretty much normal for me, the gentle glow of sunrise touched the windows and I lay for a moment and listened. It was all quiet. Eerily quiet. It’s Sunday, the day of rest. It seems that London, where I am at least. Is resting.
