Please be Seated.

The Future Direction of Reflections.

PLEASE BE SEATED.

Last night I dreamt about Audrey Hepburn. I used to see her a lot when I was young and impressionable, hoping to achieve that compelling ease. She even managed to wear her name like a Courreges dress. ‘Audrey’ hitherto fitted a Mrs Mop who came on a Monday, and was not noticed unless she failed to appear.

After Breakfast at Tiffany’s, emulation got a lot easier: a pair of outsize sunglasses, an enormous black brimmed hat, and a cut away sleeve that revealed a sculptured collarbone. I had collarbones then. But I lacked that swan-superb neck. My life could not sustain a long cigarette holder, but when for the sake of pregnancy, I gave up cigarettes, and took to puffing on husband’s pipe, he presented me with my own, and I never looked back. For grand occasions I sported an elegant churchwarden. That was as close to Audrey Hepburn as I got.

Mine was much longer!

But what I really remembered from Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the haunted agonized face of her rheumy eyed husband Doc Golightly, the pain of her loss, the appeal for her return ‘You belong with us.’ That stabbed as the truth always does, and even at twenty I recognised it. She belonged where she was loved, but she was so busy being free. Weren’t we all?

It strikes me now that each one of us is facing the gulf between what we thought we were, what we tried to become, and what we really are, and no Gucci or Balenciaga can obscure that. We now stand on the precipice of a new world, one that seems to have little time for innocence, ambition, nostalgia, or hope. The past is almost another country, whose wafting memories drift like smoke from an extinguished bonfire.

This past weekend I watched The Duke with my daughter. It was set in the London I first encountered, bobbies still wandered in pairs, wore helmets and gave directions, people stopped to talk, you could smoke in the cinema or on a bus, jump on in slow traffic, and judging speed, alight backwards between stops. Life could manoeuvre within routines, without routines limiting life. She remembered the tail end of those liberties, and said ‘I am so glad I knew a little of that world. If I was twenty years younger, I would have missed all of it.’

At Peace. Not keeping it.

So, with whom do we, each of us, belong?

I have spent a longish life trying to find my natural kin. As a writer I began believing I would make a difference, and nearing the tail end of that life ventured here, on Substack, to reveal in ALL RISE the trials of that attempt, and the barred gates of ‘received opinion’. Science was the most fiercely defended, but even poets or so called ‘spiritual thinkers’ had clear admission requirements. Ideas were judged for their conformity, long before their merits were considered. But, and this is important, the few unbound by conformity (or jealousy!) shine bright and luminous. They are braver, freer, humorous, and spontaneous. Natural kin. London was full of them.

Finding them again has been made easier by the past three years. I would say that alone has been its value. On the Island of Gullyball (thank you to Richard Vobes) the sheep and the goats graze on different fields for the present. They may again mingle, I hope they do, but I shall be gone by then.

Like Holly Golightly I abandoned where I once belonged. Only now do I perceive that my reviled homeland, South Africa, gave many of us the resolve to defy, to ignore the arrows, and continue. It was a great gift, to be early rejected, and get ahead of the current game.  I see in its rough rugby the lessons for a future life. I no longer mutter the name of my birthplace apologetically.

In my case my family was also rejected where we began, neither Boer nor British (but straddled between both) some fluent in Zulu or Swahili, all choosing careers of impoverished service in medicine or education. Perhaps also able to see the arrogance of colonial assumptions, and its racism camouflaged as paternalistic benevolence. Also able to understand the ensuing anger it generated, and the futility of belated revenge.

Clear vision is greatly assisted by standing outside. It is bracing but it is lonely.

I hope to find friends by publishing here. Short stories that reveal the subtle influence of conformity in its self-censorship in the Old World, against the abrasive rawness of the New. Mostly the portraits of extraordinary individuals I was lucky to know. Many were gargantuan in stature; only in individuality is liberty preserved. Recording individuals is my catalogue of the world being destroyed, in the hope that it might generate a small germ for recovery. And in the hope of an occasional conversation.

I shall start with stories and if I grow brave and find a readership I may offer extracts from a memoir, entitled FAR FETCHED. It was a Safari Summoned, as I believe all lives are; summoned to return from an exile of what we thought we wanted, into the return to where we belong, family or country, where we loved or were loved, and where our roots revive.

Everybody is invited to ‘uitspan’ with ‘Reflections’. I would welcome subscriptions (free) from those who enjoy a fire and a tale, some incredible, some philosophical. I have no advice to offer, nor any programme of purpose, mere companionship from an old woman who still writes to find out what she thinks and to record those she loved.