What we secretly realise

There’s something melancholy about autumn, the leaves falling, the chilling weather, the sense of ageing and time passing, the graceful letting go. Earlier this morning I sat browsing through blogs and looking at a riot of cherry blossom and  golden daffodils and that springtime orgy of  colour and beauty and renewal going on in the northern hemisphere, feeling slightly envious. I love autumn, but the melancholy  gets to me at times.

And leafing through folders last night, I realised that much of the best writing I have done this past year has been unpublishable. There is no market for so much of what I write, for what interests me so passionately. And book publishing out here is done on a shoestring with  no money for risky ventures. So I have to sell to the First World where  African or foreign issues are of limited interest. It makes me feel sad. But if I were not sober, I would not have written so passionately and with such effort. Sobriety gave me back my passion for  all kinds of things, and without passion there can be no creativity.

How important it is to live deeply, with passion and feeling, with focus. The Catholic writer and mystic Thomas Merton:

“When we live superficially … we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions … we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives.”

My farmer’s wife arrived for her French lesson this morning and said that she wants to learn French without ever having to deal with irregular verbs. I sympathise, but she will have to learn verbs ending in -ir and -re even she if she dies trying. I remember how I felt learning Latin at school. I grew up in an outdated English colony and both Latin and Greek stayed on the curriculum twenty years after these ‘dead languages’ had been put aside in Britain and the USA. I’m not sorry I learned to read Sappho’s poetry in the original or  the pastoral daydreams of Ovid, but  I hated irregular verbs with a vengeance. 

My housemate is revising the Easter menu for the third time. In the background I hear her on the phone inviting more and more friends around for roast lamb. She is recovering well from the knee replacement and feeling more sociable by the day.

And as the cold wind blows across the sunlit fields and dead leaves heap up in the gutters, I am drafting out a new chapter and waiting to hear if a wanna-be-sober friend went to a meeting last night and if she has stayed sober today. There isn’t anything I can do except wait. People don’t get sober because they need to get sober, because they  glimpse the writing on the wall, because they  feel they have had enough, because they have a family falling apart or a marriage gone dead. If we all sobered up when it made sense to sober up, alcoholism wouldn’t be a problem. Many of us only get sober when we desperately want to get sober, when we have finally had enough of the drinking life, when the tunnel vision goes black as night. When getting sober is the only thing that makes sense.

Nothing works like service

Cold blustery day here in the mountains and I am sitting with a glut of leeks, wondering if I can serve more leek dishes up to the convalescent housemate. The idea of a Welsh cawl or leek and lamb stew appeals to me.

I sat up with neighbours last night watching Revolutionary Road, a film based on the brilliant edgy novel by Richard Yates. Suburban life in 1950s America — it wasn’t the non-stop quaffing of martinis that bothered me so much as the chain-smoking, even in the work place and at meals. I remember people smoking like that when I was a child, with no idea how harmful it might be. It was grim watching and knowing that author Yates died of alcoholism complicated by severe emphysema.

Some of us on forums are  talking about pride and humility and  all those loaded terms that  can mean so many different things to different people. I prefer to focus on the lived specificities rather than  abstarct ideals.

 When I was sobering up I had nothing more than a muddled and hazy notion of what was happening to me and who I had become. Alcoholism had thrown me off-balance and I tended to seesaw between feelings of self-hatred and low self-esteem, and feelings of grandiosity, of exaggerated importance and what is called ‘terminal uniqueness’, deserving special treatment or attention. Now that I have been sober a while I see this same rollercoaster in others and how it is fuelled by self-preoccupation or unrealistic expectations of oneself or others, the need to protect a fantasy of perfection.

One word that has helped me gain steadiness and perspective has been self-respect. We acquire self-respect by doing the things that build a sense of self-worth and the opportunities for service in AA are crucial to this. As we serve our new-found community in AA, we earn respect from others who are sober and who offer us encouragement and support, begin to trust us to turn up on time or help out or volunteer for service positions. Self-respect is not something that can be acquired overnight or in isolation, it is something that gradually happens amidst family, friends and co-workers as we mature in responsibility and trustworthiness. The best definition of humility for me is not that we think less OF ourselves but that we think less ABOUT ourselves.

I believe that at the heart of grandiosity there is often the fear of having our own illusions about ourselves challenged or corrected. As an alcoholic I knew myself to be a secret failure no matter how successful I was at work, and that despondency stopped me from finding common ground with others. While listening to or reading the stories of others in AA, the need to protect secrets fell away. Why hide human failings that others admit quite freely? And from that comes a realistic acceptance and hope of doing better the next time around. We are all as ordinary and extraordinary together in recovery as the earthy simple humus that nourishes growing plants each spring, humus composed of rotting leaves and decayed plant matter and  soil and thriving earthworms. The word humility has its etymological roots in the word humus.

New week, seizing the day

I have been sitting at my desk since 5am trying to write a chapter full of new ideas and inspirations and nothing is working. It is good to know that frustration no longer makes me feel like drinking. Now it just makes me feel like becoming  a car mechanic or a newspaper vendor, anything except a writer.

Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday yesterday. A passage from my favourite Christian thinker and novelist, the eloquent and thoughtful Marilynne Robinson:

And when He did die it was sad — such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was.

There is so little to remember of anyone — an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long, 

Loss and restoration. A friend who lives in Europe these days  wrote to me to say that she is sober now and  a much calmer and happier woman. Her children are grown and  also very happy to see their mother sober. Rita, as I shall call her, says that her deepest regret is  that she did not sober up in time to raise her children who were in effect brought up by her mother and older sister.

‘I didn’t think they would miss me,’ she wrote. ‘I felt that my mother would do a much better job than I ever could, drunk or sober. I felt anyone would make a better parent than myself. But now I can see how exhausting that  child-rearing was for my mother and how it contributed to her frailty and depression. My sister  had children of her own and  put them first, so my children felt like orphans or step-children in her home. And  each of my children has told me he or she felt abandoned and as if they waited years and years to get to know me. There is no way I can explain that I preferred  alcohol to flesh-and-blood relationships, but I wish now that I could have known I was needed. I felt so unnecessary and irrelevant, useless. And now it is too late for hands-on mothering and although I am grateful for  the amicable friendship they offer me, regret is like a knife twisting in my heart.’

In sobriety there are the promises of renewal and growth, and the  possibilities of healing in all kinds of ways. But often there is a reckoning. Some realities cannot be side-stepped.

On a lighter note, I have been making a leek-and-potato soup that is creamy and silken enough to be called vichysoisse, the French name for a humble leek-and-potato soup with cream that is served up as an ice-cold  luxury in Parisian restaurants. There is no season as satisfactory for comfort eating as autumn. And there is never any better time to get sober than right this very minute, before any more of your one and only precious life slides away out of sight. I hope that doesn’t sound preachy. Those of us who sober up late in life  sometimes have an acute sense of what we have missed out on seeing, doing, hearing, experiencing, sharing.

As I walk through the village each morning I see the autumn leaves falling, the season of mellow fruitfulness and loss. A cascade of falling leaves the colour of blood and honey and copper.

Autumn moon

Last night we went  to have supper with Niall and his friend whom I shall call Justin. Niall has transformed a small Cape cottage into a an urban town house with great skill. Not something I would do myself, but the open-plan split-level interiors are luminous with discreet light and the kitchen area has wonderful black-and-white photographs of New York on the walls.

Niall was living in New York, buying textiles from Bloomingdale’s on the day the Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11 – he couldn’t understand what he was seeing on that crisp cloudless autumn morning and was curiously wandering down  towards what is now called Ground Zero when a woman in very high red heels came sprinting past him, running for her life. As if on cue, everyone turned tail and ran as the towers  of the World Trade Centre  collapsed. I asked Niall  what he thought of the New Yorkers’ collective response, those gritty fast-talking urbanites who are somehow a tribe  unlike any other. (Going to an AA meeting in Manhattan was like  attending an  unearthly ritual on Mars. I’ve never quite got over it.)

‘There was no collective response amongst the New Yorkers I saw,’ replied Niall, pouring me some more lime juice and soda. ‘Some people stopped to help the elderly and those in wheel chairs. Some snatched up dropped purses and coats, a kind of instant looting instinct. Some just left children and partners and ran for their lives. Some were paralysed and stood as if frozen in doorways, hands covering their eyes. Some were angry and cursing and  wanting to get their hands on a gun, immediate revenge and retribution uppermost in their minds. Others were moving away from the  rolling clouds of smoke and dust in an orderly manner, calling out  to one another, trying to understand the enormity of it all. Heroes, cowards, crooks and  the unflappable. Do any of us know how we would react to sudden life-threatening violence?‘

It was a lively and successful supper — we brought along an abalone starter and a sourdough bread — there was a fillet done on the coals, autumn chanterelles and ceps tossed in truffle oil, a salad of endives, walnut and pear, braised zucchini with mint and lemon, caramelised butternut with Parmesan – followed by a sublime Olde English Toffee Pudding with cream.

Justin,  who is a shy and tentative man in his late 30s, relaxed and  talked  about his life in Johannesburg and decision to relocate to the countryside and ‘spend time in nature’. He wants to  take a bell tent and camp out under the stars. If he isn’t eaten alive by mosquitos and survives the odd encounter with  bad-tempered ant eaters or  rural homophobes, he may  find he enjoys country life. But he seemed wistful when he spoke of city delis and film previews and art galleries and unexpected  encounters with fabulous ex-lovers in  trendy restaurants, so  he may opt for city lights after all.

He went off to an art exhibition in a neighbouring village and found only large  bad paintings of red or black cows and squinty sheep, along with  daubs of thatched homesteads with more cows standing about under tall poplars. For no aesthetic reason, I enjoy local art done by self-styled artists who have grown up in this part of the world because the cows and sheep are painted from life and the artist can tell you their names and bloodlines and  how old they were when he or she painted them. If there is a sheepdog or border collie in the  painting it  usually has a rubber ball in its mouth and  the artwork will be titled ‘Skip, aged three years and four months, in front of Mooiplaas Farmhouse, January 1998.’ It  will often have been painted from a colour photograph and  will have  huge sentimental value for all who knew Skip the collie or who admire Dorper sheep breeds. The skies are always an improbably bright blue with a lurid sunset attempted in the left corner.

Sometimes I pine for  city life too, but I have always known that  at heart I am someone who likes quiet country life and who can look at mountains and trees every day with undiminshed pleasure. When I was drinking, I carried my  obliviousness and misery everywhere I went. Now I believe that many of us can choose to be happy,  can learn to focus on  life-enhancing activities and  enriching relationships. Service is core — primarily  with other  alcoholics wanting to get sober, but  also with  anyone who may need our support or neighbourliness. Nothing  banishes  self-pity faster than  the reality of being able to do something for  another person in need.

Back home last night, we found the  streets and garden and fields  an unshadowed white from the moon waxing full, the first of our great golden autumn moons that seem to hang low over the valley like a radiant lantern. The owls hunt by these moons, and we saw two barn owls gliding over our rooftop as we  let the dogs out into the garden before heading off to bed.

Wind from the north

In the winter months there is a cold rain-bearing wind that blows hard from the north at night, tearing through the mountains and shaking the trees in the village. It keeps me awake and the howling of the wind is a mournful sound on nights when I feel restless and sad. I get up and read blogs and book reviews while sipping from a large mug of warm milk and  grated nutmeg. Last night I sat up from 2am until 5am and then went back to bed feeling over-informed about many things and  woefully sleep-deprived.

Had brunch with my friend Artemis and her ravishingly beautiful 13-year-old daughter. Never again.

We met in the walled garden of a chic boutique hotel (don’t ask, I don’t know  what the word ’boutique’ means in that context either, except that the owners would probably sell the  bedcovers or cafe tables and chairs to you if you were willing to pay a small fortune for them) and sat out in the mild sunny shelter of walls smothered with reddening ivy, old roses flaking cream petals onto the gravel. Breakfast was a scant mouthful of brioche with  grilled and caramelized fruit, freshly ground but lukewarm Ethiopian coffee in a tall gilt-enhanced Limoges coffee  pot. Inattentive wait-persons and tourists flinging American dollars to the wind. My friend Artemis looking frazzled and muttering about needing to diet.   

Her daughter, whom I shall call Zandra, was wearing a backless scrap of gold tissue floating on her perfect breasts, clubby stiletto boots in green sharkskin and a kind of acid violet frou-frou skirt. Zandra has mastered the Versace catwalk strut, which is a va-va-vroom swishy little pelvic saunter I dimly recalling doing myself as a mean-eyed teenager. Everyone in the courtyard just sat and watched her walk in.

Zandra sat down and tucked away those impossibly long legs, pouted at me and  annnounced that she needs breast augmentation surgery if she is to be able to summon up the strength to go on living. Her mother groaned and shook her head. Beautiful daughter  ordered smoked salmon and an omelette with  pancetta and Gruyere, as well as a large bowl of Bircher muesli, then left  the food untouched. Her mother, who was also a beauty in another less fraught life, began to argue with her while Zandra yawned and ignored Artemis. When Zandra went off to layer on some more creamy scarlet lipstick, Artemis told me that last week she caught her daughter  flirting with a local tennis coach aged 29, a divorced man with no propects and no brains. Zandra  told the  flattered coach that she was 19 years old and asked him to tie a sneaker lace for her, like an unsubtle Lolita toying with her prey .

‘Pervert! Rapist! Child-murderer!‘ hissed Artemis.

I tried to point out that Zandra looks at least 25, sophisticated, world-weary and  bored to tears. All of 13 going on jaded 45. Artemis  had been thinking of sending her to a strict convent in the Austrian Alps where she would be locked away from men and made to take cold baths until she turned 18, but Zandra is deeply, torridly in love with her best friend Marguerite and wants to explore her bisexual options. Her mother is torn between interfering with her daughter’s psycho-sexual development and the maternal desire to have her locked up out of harm’s way. Zandra thinks her mother is a pathetic klutzy wrinkled hypocrite who exists only to spoil her fun, ruin her life, treat her  cruelly etc. They are evenly matched and one another’s favourite enemy in the same intense way they were once best friends.

Puberty is hormonal madness. Sometimes I wonder if Artemis remembers that she ran off with a guitar player from Marrakech with she was 15 and was retrieved by her enraged mother and sent to boarding school herself. But I just offered sympathy and  drank some cold coffee from the Limoges. Zandra came back all lipsticked up and  trailing strong cigarillo smoke: I noticed that she has a couple of frisky blue bats tattooed on her slim inner thigh. Mother and daughter carried on screaming sotto voce at one another while I drank my coffee and tactfully looked the other way. A gawky waiter with a cultivated wisp of  moustache  hovered around Zandra hopefully, ignoring my pleas for  a hot refill of coffee.

‘At least, she doesn’t smoke,’ whispered Artemis to me. ‘I made her promise on her grandmother’s family Bible that she would never touch nicotine. And we agreed there would be NO piercings or tattoos or damage done to that lovely skin. She inherited my delicate complexion.’

‘Really?’ I said, startled at the blindness of mother-love. The girl smokes like a chimney.  Those blue bats didn’t look inked on to me.

When Zandra went off for another smoke break, Artemis sighed deeply and said that her daughter was driving her to drink. She meant it metaphorically.  

‘Nonsense,’ I replied. ‘You haven’t been drunk since your 30th birthday. I suspect that just one day of trying to chaperone your  lovely Zandra would send me  in search of a case of gin.’

Artemis doesn’t drink and is unlikely to ever become a Friend of Bill’s. She began laughing.  ’You have no idea how  my daughter would react if I got drunk and embarrassed her. Everything has to be about her. You know, I have such  compassion for my own poor  mother these days. She went completely grey by the time I was 16, just aged a decade or more overnight from lying awake trying to save me from myself.’

‘Don’t look now,’ I said, ‘but your daughter seems to have picked up a used-car salesman from Ohio with a drinker’s red nose. That large man with the toupee. She seems to be a magnet for unsuitable men.’

‘If he touches her, I’ll kill him with my bare hands,’ said Artemis coolly. The tiger-hearted mother  with her wicked cub.

In perhaps twelve years time they will be friends again, mother and daughter united in adulthood. But  the truces are a long way off. I can’t begin to tell you how much I admire sober, intelligent, helpless mothers in the 21st century.

Sober Friday afternoon

Last night I had three sequential  dreams in which I was trying to force friends to eat linseed soaked in water, mucilagenous gobbets of saturated linseed which they refused to  take from my outstretched hand. It is not that mysterious a dream sequence because I bought a large packet of linseed last week and had two thoughts as I put it away in the grocery cupboard.

1) Too much linseed for one person. Why does nobody  else except me eat linseed?

2) Linseed is good for human digestion. Everyone should eat linseed.

So there I go along the sidewalks of the dreaming unconscious, offering soggy  linseed to all and sundry. I have the same kinds of dreams about  telling  people to get sober and feeling that sobriety is  good for everyone, but my conscious mind knows better. There is a kindly but tedious  balding bachelor who lives  on the far side of the village and  goes from door to door  giving away copies of ‘the only trustworthy translation of God’s Word, the King James’ Bible’ and I might offer him a small packet of linseed in return. Us missionary types  should support one other.

On one of my favourite forums, people have been listing their favourite movies. I recall going to see many of the films but cannot remember what  they were about because I was drunk at the time. What a depressing thought.  All those spaghetti Westerns with stony-eyed unshaven tongue-tied Clint Eastwood and I can’t tell Josie Wales, Outlaw from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

My housemate went off shopping this morning and is planning to grill lamb chops this evening. We are going to supper with our friend Niall the chef tomorrow night and hosting a crazy kind of Mexican buffet al fresco lunch on Sunday with spicy buffalo wings, fajitas, tacos, sour cream dips, chile con carne, a strong grated cheese, al0ng with an original chile and origanum mole I shall be concocting from a recipe found in a 1967 Texas whodunit. Hola! What fun.

In the past, Friday afternoons were prolonged and exhausting mental battles about  whether or not I should drink, how much I should drink, how to drink as much as I wanted unnoticed, what to do if I couldn’t afford enough alcohol, how  much to openly buy at the bottle store,  why I should split my alcohol purchases between two bottle stores to fool the till cashiers who might otherwise suspect I had a ‘problem’, what to say to anyone who bumped into me coming out of the bottle store, why I would need to not answer the phone at all if I started with vodka rather than more innocuous wine, why I should try to save some alcohol for the next morning, what I should  buy from the chemist in case I should wake up very ill the next morning, how soon I could start in on the alcohol and end the  misery.

These days I just pester dream friends with offers of linseed, which may be progress.

“And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone–even alcohol.
For by this time sanity will have returned.“
Alcoholics Anonymous p.84

Autumn musing

A pied crow  cheekily  scouring the back garden for any snacks  — that rough cawing and hopping about. I laugh as I watch.

Autumn is here with barrow loads of squash and butternut and my kitchen has baskets piled high with yellow and orange squash,  sweet carrots with dirt still clinging, papery brown onions and tiny flat white cipolino onions, banana shallots, plaited strings of garlic and dried jalopeno chillies.

My housemate has gone walkabout, taking her first walk up through the village all alone with a single crutch, stopping to greet neighbours and pay an electricity account. She has had cabin fever all week and was determined to get out and walk about like a free woman.

Sat in on and helped facilitate a women’s workshop with women speakers from north Congo talking (in French through translators) about recovery from life-threatening trauma, the attacks on women by criminal militia. Very moving shares — one of the women is coming to help out at the local clinic and may stay with us for a while, 65 years old and raped by militia in front of her children and grandchildren — she suffered terrible fistulas after the rapes, then had her throat cut, but survived and  laid charges, demanded refugee status  elsewhere. She has a great sense of humour and is physically strong as whipcord. It was humbling to listen to women like her, surviving the unspeakable, the unimaginable, and reclaiming their lives. And I once again I realize that Africa punches the sentimentality out of those of us who live here.

In a nearby garden, somebody is chopping firewood. I wonder idly what kind of wood: vine stumps or acacia thorn or  branches of rooikranz, appalewood, black wattle. In the evenings and early mornings there is the scent of woodsmoke from cooking fires and chimneys. Many villagers have old Dover and Rayburn wood-burning stoves and save on electricity, keeping tall pots of  black coffee simmering on the back plate. It is good to know the years of egographical escapes  has passed, that I have come home to myself. Sobriety is  the only landscape or horizon I want.

A handful of bloggers

I always feel bereft when somebody decides to stop blogging. I feel that  the conversation is impoverished by a voice fallen silent, that I have  one less friend to write for, one less friend to read. I  get that little hollow in the pit of my stomach that  echoes abandonment and the shrinking of my world, the loss of a unique and valued voice. It feels like a little death, to not know what is going to happen to that friend the next day or the next week, to be excluded from family news and  the flow of ideas and insights and shared dreams. It feels as if somebody has politely but firmly shut the door in my face.

Standing back a little, I can understand and respect the decision to stop blogging. People change, they move on, they lose interest, they want to write other things in other places, they feel constrained or unfree or simply bored. To stop blogging  may be a personally liberating decision. Real life may be calling the blogger to do something more pertinent or vital.

But sometimes I know that  bloggers stop because they feel unheard, unsafe or invalidated. That makes me wonder about the kinds of online community we are able to  build as AA members online. It makes me wonder about how much support we offer one another  in our comments and feedback. How well or badly we handle criticism or  conflict in  the cyber world of blogging. I wonder too about predatory stalkers on the Internet and how we can protect ourselves from  intrusive or unwanted readers without using password protection or closing down our blogs.

When I was 11 years old I began keeping a personal  diary in the back of a battered but unused notebook I had found in the school library..  I hid it behind dusty encyclopedias in a dim corner of the spare bedroom in my family home. I did not feel safe enough to write many secrets there, but I wrote cryptic entries in that cheap Crossley exercise book every day, usually in the afternoon when I was alone and had finished my homework. I was my own first reader and for a long, long time my only reader. This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me.

I still have a paper-and-ink moleskine diary I keep beside my bed. I write in it several times a week. Every now and again I read back through entries and notice things I was not aware  of at the time of writing. I write what I like and I write freely ans spontaneously. Keeping a diary is as natural and necessary to me as brushing my teeth. Blogging is not as natural or spontaneous, but it feels as necessary.

Some of us blog in different voices. Tucked away on the Internet I have a closed and password-protected  diary blog. Only one other person  has access to that. I write mostly for myself and a little for her. It is a place where I can scribble down half-formed thoughts,  feelings and jottings without having to reread or censor myself. The entries bristle with typos and unfinished sentences. There are scraps of fiction, drafts of letters,  fragments of dream.  I like the freedom to stop and start and not ever have to explain myself or worry about misunderstandings.

And I have another blog for exploring alternative spiritualities, politics,   poetry and  all kinds of quirkiness. That blog has a large readership but for the most part I have no idea who reads that blog or why. I have only the most tenuous sense of community there, so it feels quite solitary and  as if anything might happen, a blog free to go in any direction, a place where I can be outrageous or thoughtful or zany, at whim.

This recovery blog is my  strongest link to those who are like me and who stay sober one day at a time and share with me how they do it, one blog entry at a time. I write primarily for alcoholics like me who want to get and stay sober. I am not sure that this blog is a service to anyone but me – it may encourage one or two people once in a while to get to a meeting or  phone  the AA number in the directory – but it does help me  to stay present and accountable. I would love to think that my blog gave anyone  even a fraction of the support and inspiration I have received from  other recovery  bloggers.

And I feel bereft when somebody chooses to stop blogging. But all I can say is: I  will miss you. Take care. I hope you resume blogging some day. Thanks for letting me into your life for a few months or years. I hope someday we get to meet face to face as we trudge the road of happy destiny. Until then stay sober and keep passing on the message.

Brendan Behan behaving badly

Lively description found at A Journey Round My Skull:

When he wasn’t holding forth in a grog shop, he could be heard uttering unintelligibilities on radio or television. Edward R. Murrow cut out Behan from a broadcast citing “difficulties beyond our control”; on a television program where he appeared bombed with Jackie Gleason, the comedian said of him “Behan came across 100 proof—this wasn’t an act of God, it was an act of Guinness.” The Daily News quipped, “If the celebrated playwright wasn’t pickled, he gave the best imitation of rambling alcoholism you ever saw.” With tousled hair and rumpled clothes, Behan would attend performances of his own plays roaring drunk, taunting the actors, shouting epithets at them, and insulting the audience by screaming “Eejits!”

Stories calling out to us

Beautiful salmon-coloured dawn, the birds flying like black cut-outs through the colour. I had my coffee just watching the sun come up.

Here in South Africa, the question of healthcare has to do with the quality of care as much as the cost. My housemate’s surgeon insisted she go into the state provincial hospital rather than the plushy expensive mediclinic her employers wanted, because the quality of nursing is often better in state hospitals and the theatre staff more experienced. At the hospital there were armed security guards everywhere and the casualty entrances were crowded and grimy with babies crying and people lying in the corridors who had been waiting there all day in the hope of being seen.

But the wards were clean and the nurses and medical interns were very good. Some of the leading medical research in the world is being done in South Africa. Most of our medical resources, though, go to the battle against Aids and tuberculosis as well as diseases resulting from poor nutrition. To be ‘poor’ in South Africa is relative affluence because so many people are destitute. And destitution and homelessness out here is not due to drug addiction or the refusal to work, it is simply  that there are no jobs or housing. There is no subsidised  welfare system in the sense that this is understood elsewhere. Many communities live too far from hospitals or clinics to  get that kind of healthcare. But the home-based care in rural areas out here is far better than the equivalent in the First World because carers are so well-trained and used to coping with emergencies.

And the core emphasis here and across Africa is on preventative care — teaching people to take responsibility for their own health. To eat better, get more exercise, the basics of hygiene, the basics of contraception and safe sex, not abusing  drugs or alcohol, not smoking. I always feel sheepish when I write about this because there was not a single adult illness I had which was not affected by my alcoholism. I drank my way through courses of antibiotics, anti-malarial meds, fevers, sprained ankles, gastric upsets and eye surgeries. My health improved radically when I sobered up, and I can’t imagine how much my alcoholism cost the state healthcare system over nearly 30 years.

Later today I may be sitting in on and helping to facilitate a workshop for women refugees from north Congo, listening to  stories told in  French and translated  into local Nguni dialects, English and Afrikaans. Painful and traumatic experiences that also show  great courage and  the strength of the human spirit in adversity. After the tears and hugs, there will be cups of hot sweet tea and great steaming cauldrons of  mfifi, a stew made from wild spinach mixed with pumpkins, maize and yams. Sometimes chicken or peanuts are added. It always tastes wonderful. And it is no small thing to feel I am becoming a productive and caring member of society,  no longer a parasite or recluse.

“The world is filled with stories impressed on people’s hearts. We have only to speak out to set the stories free. Like smoke from burning candles, stories rise up. In the vast collective unconscious, stories amass; they bump against each other, calling out to us.”
 
– Sandra Benítez