African Diaries: Prelude

I: Written on 02.10.2018, Tuesday, on board Rome — London Flight

It is scorching hot in the telephone cabin. I look back at the Gothic Cathedral. Tears are slowly starting to come down; voice starting to crack.

“Hang in there”, says Dad. “Remember why you’ve started this journey. See how you feel for the next few days. Of course you can come back anytime”.

I didn’t know at the time that my mother was secretly worried about the whole thing. I owe my exploratory trait to her.

It has not been easy sleeping, lately.

“Hang in there” used to say G. “Solve one problem at a time”. G. has recently repeated this mantra, and so have A., R., M., and others.

Napoli Centrale was the first real moment of loneliness. On the ferry to Bari, I had company. We sang and slept on the deck. We’ve read about Pompeii and blessed the ashed souls. Napoli Centrale’s imminent chaos and the lonely, grimy streets on a Sunday were too much for me to take. I ran away to familiar Rome and then to the sun-blushed and tourist-ridden streets of Siena.

Cote d’Azure followed suit, but in Barcelona, the crowded solitude hit me. It’s Year 2004; I’m 19, my father on the line tells me: “hang in there”.

H. left me five perfectly rolled cigarettes. I had grappa, H. had brandy in Montescaglioso. We went into the shop to buy tobacco and shared our drinking appetite with an old man in a cap enjoying the same earth-coloured brandy as H.’s and with a lonesome cowboy in leather boots and a dark brown leather jacket, barely kept astood, leaning onto the washed-out jukebox.

He whispered: “I’ve played the same tune on this for over 20 years.”

H. told me about a family who lived in a dust-shaded house with green shutters by the canal close to the train station in Venice. She was a pharmacist and he was a baker. They never left Venice, together, alive. When he passed, she took him to his ancestral land, somewhere in Basilicata, not far from this Tabacchi, in which we had a grappa and a brandy.

What read in Lonely Planet was why I picked Bruges over Brussels. Had it not been to Bruges, I would not have appreciated Ghent as its livelier Medieval sibling. The season had turned on the overnight train from San Sebastian to Paris, from the dying days of Summer to overcast Autumn.

I had “hung in there” and made it out of Barcelona and over to Madrid. In Paris and Brettany, rains have washed me over before I arrived at my hostel in Bruges.

One of the reasons I went to Istanbul before Berlin was the weather — Istanbul was still warm at this time of the year, just about.

When in Berlin, R. looked up at the sky and checked his complicated app on his phone to track the cloud movements. Between the time we had würste and finished our long, chilled dip in Schlachtensee, Y. had arrived with her mother-in-law and soon. As soon as we finished swimming, the hyper-evaporated body of water met the cold weather stream that followed me from the British Isles, and we observed the most extraordinary change of seasons from Summer to Autumn.

“You have met a bunch of inspiring people and you might just be on your way through the Alps with them in a van” A. remarked in excitement.

I chose not to.

H. asked if I was a good driver. I nodded. We walked the narrow streets of Venice, I had few more Aperol Spritzer, she kept going for Campari Spritzer. We had tiramisu and took a crowded night train to Napoli.

I await A. next to his house. He lives by a pub. I’ve been to this pub a lot — I’ve also been to and kind of lived, on and off, in A.’s house a lot and now I’m taking refuge here for the next couple of months.

“Piña Colada” plays on the stereo, the quintessential summer-inducing song from my favourite film review podcast’s playlist. It’s a cold October’s night. Across from me is the Stoke Newington joint of the famous Neapolitan pizza shop. Earlier today, I had pizza there, in Napoli.

The number on my receipt reads 96. I keep rotating the paper upside down; it’s a perpetual 96 somersault.

Napoli Centrale. First time on my own on this trip, since leaving London. The taxi driver who talked me into football and ripped me off by taking exactly the only €30 left in my wallet that H. had given me when we said goodbye at the airport after we saw a double rainbow.

I light up first of the five perfectly rolled cigarettes she had given me. Centro Storico to Quartieri Spagnoli, up one hill and down another one. University students protesting the Interior Minister for his racist, anti-immigrant policies, and aunties with white head scarves. There’s smell of baking oven, piss and Catholic frescoes…

II: Written on 09.11.2018, Friday, on board the Antwerp — Den Haag Train

Khruangbin… “Geri Dön”. Thinking of C., missing H.

Early sunset days. Same sun that’s been disrupting my work back at H.’s studio earlier in the day. Girl sat next to me is browsing through lines of what appear to be caption text that reads: “… written as …” the form each text follows.

Autumn written as Autumn.

“I think I need to finally finish the story I started writing back in October when I returned from Italy” I think to myself.

There’s always some trepidation in even thinking about finishing a story. Next song on Spotify’s radio based on my “Starred” playlist is “Last Minute Change of Heart” — how appropriate!

As we approach the Belgian-Dutch border, wind turbines appear again: there were quite a few of them on the Slovakian-Austrian border and plenty, if not as many, through Basilicata. H. and I had discussed emotions towards turbines when we saw slightly scary flashing red lights piercing through the barren skies across Montescaglioso.

I think she and I have difference in opinion about wind turbines, as do we about pigs, and other things.

There’s a text about Ethiopian economy C. had given me earlier in the week when I went to visit her and my former boss R. at the LSE. The Guardian’s weekly music newsletter has Damon Albarn interviewed about Brexit. I recall his Mali Music project and mark Mali as a possible destination.

We cross the border into Netherlands through indiscriminate fields.

I’m gearing up (at least mentally, for now), for Africa.

III: Written on 26.11.2018, Monday, on board Frankfurt — Addis Ababa flight

Finally en route. Exciting, scary, ambitious, ambiguous.

With a “Culture Smart” Ethiopia guide at hand, Mulatu and other jazz musicians on Spotify, a big void in front of my seat, courtesy of exit row. With a fellow plane flying about a few hundred metres above and to the east, and with a starving stomach and a mind full of anticipation…