Old conversations, enduring aphorisms...

I spent Sunday thru' Tuesday night with Pat and Pam - Simon's mum and aunt respectively. I gabbed and gabbed, making stuff up when all else failed. Tales of heroism and insight - tall and patently fraudulent, every last word of it all.
On the rare occasions I'd stop to draw breath, they'd interject with brilliant tales of their own lives. And in sporadic fits of lucidity I could only sit rapt. They were army brats throughout the 40s and 50s. Moved about all over the world with their career Royal Engineer father. Nairobi, Germany, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. And although their father was tasked with building bridges - literal and cultural - in a final heroic effort to prop up the tattered vestiges of the war-ravaged, crumbling Empire, they always ended up being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. The time of the Mau Maus. The time of the Communist insurgents. The time of the disorganised and resentful vigilantes of every nation. And, conversely, the time of the Economic Miracle.
In my teens, Pat once shared an anecdote that I've never quite let go of. Held sacred throughout my life, in fact. By the early 1950s she'd been in Kenya long enough to be considered just another street urchin playing with little more than rusted and broken barrel hoops and sticks with everyone else and whereas the right age (ie. NOT adult) mattered more than life and honour, skin colour and country of birth mattered not one damn.
And the tourists would come. The ageing couples. The lesser dignitaries of every shade. The corporals of industry that would, in years and decades to come, achieve something approaching respect and captaincy in their short-lived and sometimes prosperous fiefdoms. The demobbed and disillusioned survivors of the long, terrible conflict. The new castes of proselytisers and missionaries of every creed. And from all of their mouths, nothing but complaint. The dirty rooms, the filthy streets, the appalling food, the grubbing locals, the stench, the chaos, the terrifying and possibly affected insouciance of the natives who would - according to every Briton of worth - enterprisingly steal every last penny given half a chance.
And the children would secretly laugh at the florid, indignant faces and the pale, translucent skin that burned within an hour of exposure to the sun, and the blustering, arrogant voices of the men and the braying, imperious accents of the women.
And all the while, this young grime-covered tomboy wanted to scream, "BUT YOU'RE IN AFRICA!!!".
These few words and every conceivable permutation thereof, have followed me all my days. And when my workaday mornings or bouts of moribund self-importance run the risk of blending into beige and wasted nothings, there lives in me an urchin that never fails to scream, "But you're here!"
Because I have been and I have known people who were so badly at war with themselves, their lives, the bodies and the days they inhabit, the streets they walk and the poor facsimiles of lives they have forged for themselves or settled for, who will never know. They have no here. They have no Africa. Or, in their hubris and foolishness, they have spared no effort to dissociate and erase themselves from these hallowed places.

Every reckless daughter, every fated son...