Okay, I haven't been around much lately, and that is unlikely to change. I no longer have free internet access at my friend's place, so I am sitting in an internet cafe writing this - a new experience for me!

I was on another farm over the last weekend, but had - for the firts time - a miserable time. Too much like hard work, and not enough like fun. It wasn't entirely the fault of the couple whose smallholding it was - they were weird, but basically nice people - but just tiring, physically and mentally as I just didn't "click" with them.

So it was lovely to get back to London, for once! And at the end of this week I am going away again, this time to a little village on the coast, to a cottage where I will be staying for a while before heading back to South Africa for a couple of months. By the time I get back to the UK in August, the year I gave myself after my redundancy will be up, and I'll need to start making some serious decisions about what I do next. Hmmm...

Wow... this is cool, and strangely addictive: a picture of a face, that responds to mouse movements.

I finally got around to visiting the Tate Modern this weekend... I don't know much about art, but it was fun to wander around and just look. One exhibition really got to me though, and I could have quite happily made myself comfortable on the floor and stayed for hours watching and listening. Bill Viola's Five Angels for the Millennium consists of five large (at a guess, 10 foot tall by 12 foot wide) screens, each showing a short film, with accompanying music, on a loop. Each film is a strangely lit, slow-motion shot of a figure falling into water, but shown backwards so that the figure seems to be emerging, or being formed, from the droplets of water. Really beautiful...



...though a small image like that can't do the full-size version justice.

Can we just assume that I am suitably sorry for my prolonged absence and dispence with the formality of an actual apology? I never know what to write when I've been away for a while - it seems tedious to write a whole list of my activities. I'm in London again, and though I am going through a week's worth of email, I still feel somewhat disconnected - I arrived at Jim's flat, my little "base" here, to find it immaculately clean, furniture rearranged, looking great... but no-one has been here since I arrived. I've started to wonder if perhaps I accidentally side-stepped into a parallel universe of some kind, real enough but just not quite the same as the reality I am used to...

Even my journey into London was surreal in it's smoothness: without having checked timetables or planned anything properly, I arrived at the train station minutes before the train left, and never had to wait more than a minute or two at any of the tube stations where I had to change lines. Weird.

I guess I have to say something about the last week, don't I? It is hard to know here to draw the line between being completely honest and open (as has always been my intention here) and being... appropriate. But waffling on about my thought-process, as tempting a displacement activity as that is, isn't really suitable either.

I spent the last week in Buckinghamshire, with the community I visited before. Thirteen years ago, when I first left home, my mother gave me a little book called The Prophet, and I carry it pretty much everywhere with me... when I think of what my life has been like lately, phrases from this book float through my mind: "Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow. Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments." .

Is quoting poetry to express how I feel about my daily life pompous ? Apologies if so... it is just that I have read and re-read those words so many times before, and am only now starting to experience their meaning. For me those words are tied up with memories of walking through the woods just after sunset, when the sky is that intense blue, waiting for the bats to emerge. Of helping to cook dinner for more than twenty people, singing along to Rodriguez's 'Cold Fact' - music of which for some reason only South Africans seem to know. Of weeding and digging and planting beans... watching the kids playing, two girls having a water-fight so complexly ruled that neither of them got more than slightly splashed... realising that the good weather I'd packed for wasn't lasting, and rummaging through the community's charity box to find something warmer to wear.

P.S. That ends rather abruptly, doesn't it? I actually wrote a whole lot more - on my thoughts on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and the Islamic concept of Ummah, and the general interconnectedness of things, but Blogger crashed and seems to have lost all that... I couldn't even get onto the site for a couple of hours. grrrrrr...

Busy busy busy time in London again... I won't bore you with the actual details, suffice to say I've been meeting up with lots of people and completing lists and lists of things marked "to do": not all of them though, somehow there are always a couple that can be put off!

I don't think I would want to try settle in London again, but I still love being here occasionally... I have a little stock-pile of visual fragments from this weekend: a beautiful young Asian man in high heeled platform boots and rose-tinted glasses standing on a platform being engulfed by a crowd of football fans singing drunkenly; a couple loaded up with shopping bags snogging on an escalator, Soho Square at lunch time on a sunny day - all the girls emerging from nearby offices to sit on the grass with their heels kicked off and skirts hiked up. London would be grey were it not for the advertisements everywhere - posters in stations, shop front signs, flyers littering the pavement: everywhere the message to buy, buy, buy... I always forget just how intense it is. There are sounds too - foreign voices, music from passing cars, fumbled piano playing drifting up from the flat below while I lie in the bath, traffic and sirens.

I've managed to sort out most of my schedule for the next few months until I get back from Cape Town, I've caught up with several friends, and had a few intense (and a little uncomfortable) conversations. Some people I haven't seen since last year, when the thought of leaving my room just to go to the shop was intimidating enough to make me cry; it is hard for me to remember just how unhappy I was back then and great to have them as a reminder of just how far I've come.

I can't find it now, but recently I read an old post where I explained why I called my blog "Journeyman" and it was a good reminder of why I am living this vagabond lifestyle - the idea of leaving the safe world behind and setting out to learn about myself, and how I can be fulfilled, and seeing which of my dreams I had to let go of and which I should pursue, and of being willing to take risks and change my mind and all that kind of thing. And it seems to be working out - maybe I'm not ticking off every item on the to do list but the bits of the bigger picture are starting to fall into place.

The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld:

Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.

It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing