Travels in Hyperreality

Return to the Scene of the Crime

2009-08-13T06:48:00.000+02:00

Saturday 18 July 2009
The Quenera River to the right of me, Bonza bay

Very soon after I came out of surgery and was diagnosed I was told that at the end of my radiation and chemotherapy I would have three weeks of ‘holiday’. It was then that I had the idea to book myself into the St Frances Health Hydro (hyperlink) to recover from whatever the effects of the radiation and chemo might be. At the time it was just a notion. I had heard from different people that it was a powerful place of healing and in particular I knew two people who had made radical shifts in their lives as a result of having spent time there and being treated in particular by the founder, Ms Cowley. As I neared the end of my treatment I noticed that my holiday coincided exactly with the kids school holiday. Perfect.

So a week after my radiation ended on the 26th of June I booked myself into the St Frances Health Hydro under the healing hands and eyes of Ms Cowley.

Mention St Frances to anybody who’s been there or heard about it and they roll their eyes and say something about the food. I had heard about the ‘food’ so many times that I called Ms Cowley a week before I checked in to confirm that I would be able to eat hot meals in accordance with the principles of Chinese Medicine that I’m currently being treated with. She assured me that there would be hot options for me and that decided it.

The drive up to the Eastern Cape was incredible. There was the fiercest wind blowing the whole way from the Cape all the way up the garden route. We passed fallen trees often. The whole way it blew from behind. When we entered the Eastern Cape I felt myself expanding, like water being poured out on the ground.

I stayed in Grahamstown for two nights to ‘acclimatise’ and booked in on the Saturday afternoon. On the one hand I could run through a list of treatments, consultations and detail the meals we received and all the food we didn’t eat and the food we spoke about at dinner that we drove ourselves a little mad with. But words can’t capture the finesse of the experience. I’ve never had such a tangible experience of how powerfully the food I eat affects me. By the time I left a week later I felt so finely balanced and tuned dare I say. The full impact of this incredible ‘attunement’ only hit me with full force a few days after I checked out when I ate some meat and could literally feel myself stumble and, dare I say, fall about a bit.

Detox diets and reduced calorie intake aside what draws a lot of people to St Frances is the opportunity to work with Ms Cowley, the founder and heart of the centre. She is renowned for her healing arts and powerful intuitive process. Part of me expected the work I did with her to be about the tumour and how or why I had manifested it. No such luck. It seems that there was something far more pressing to release and balance.

Looking back now the reason I felt compelled to return to the ‘scene of the crime’, the Eastern Cape, 10km from where I had the first headache was to unearth and reconnect with something I lost a long, long time ago.

Ever since I discovered the simplicity of living 'in the now' in my mid twenties, I’ve been very happy to let past be just that, done and dusted. I’ve also been more than happy to let the future remain a mystery. So much so that I drive Sarah mad sometimes with my resistance to get involved in any kind of long distance future gazing or planning as she likes to call it. I know the communists liked their 5 year plans (as did Hoover in the States) but I have found just the sound of a 5 year plan far too grown up and potentially mind numbing. This is only the tip of the ice-berg. When it comes down to it I’ve resisted having a picture for my life for a long time.
If you want to get my pulse racing and beads of sweat on my upper lip put me in a room with a facilitator and have them write in big letters on a white board “How to Define a Vision for Your Life” or something suchlike. I’ve been there and I’m always left with this overwhelming sense of, “how can I know what I want tomorrow or who I’m going to be or what I’m going to want!”. Invariably, the times I’ve found myself in those situations I become uncharacteristically quiet and un-participatory. The only progress I’ve managed was in a session last year where I realised that having a vision for your life could be as simple as being able to just see what’s going on right here, right now.
Back to the now.
Funny that.

So imagine my surprise when I discover at St Frances, on hot calorie restricted diet, that within me lies a powerful electrifying and exhilarating vision to transform the world around me through film. A vision that I can feel in my body, in my bones and especially on my skin. Hold onto your hats.

School's Out!

2009-06-26T00:07:00.000+02:00

25 June 2009

My desk, dark sea to the left of me, sleeping Sarah to the right

Tomorrow is my last day of Radiation and Chemotherapy. I’ve been feeling a rising sense of excitement since Monday. On the one hand I’m expecting all the side effects to get worse and worse and on the other hand I’m too excited to either feel it or notice them.

It also happens to be the end of the school term, school holidays start tomorrow. How perfect. I'm on holiday and so are my kids!

Yesterday as I lay on the treatment bed waiting for the Radiation to start I thought to myself, “I wonder if I’ll ever do this again?” I then decided “no” and savoured every moment of it as if it was my last time ever to get ‘radiated’ . I did the same today and tomorrow I’m going to eat up every second of it.

When I look back at the weeks before I began this treatment I remember how conflicted I was. I had come across the criticisms of Radiation and Chemo and was considering not going through with it. It was a very difficult crossroads for me. I could appreciate and understand why people saw Radiation and Chemotherapy as poison and harmful and not geared in any way towards healing. In fact the one description that resonated with me was the idea that surgery, radiation and chemo did not heal the body from the cancer, it merely treated the tumour. Again the idea that allopathic medicine is myopic in it’s focus on the symptom and not the cause. So what led me to go through with it?

I remember going to the hospital to have my mask fitted a week before the treatment was to commence and meeting the Radiology Team who were going to treat me. They were and are an incredible group of people. All women as it turns out. When we drove away after the mask fitting it was suddenly a non-issue for me. I would do the radiation and chemo. It just felt like the right place to be and it has been.

My dear friend Daron came along one day and shot a whole sequence of photos of the radiation process. You can view them on my flickr photo-stream.

Hooray!

Betwixt and Between

2009-06-25T23:20:00.000+02:00

22 June 09

my desk, still dark outside but I can hear the waves

Last night was the longest night of the year. From today the sun claws it’s way back into the sky. Here begins the last week of my radiation and chemotherapy. Week six of six. I’m feeling a mixed bag today and have for the last week or so. What next?

I’ve noticed in myself that knowing what is going to happen next is more comforting that what that ‘next’ actually is.

My treatment from an oncological point of view has only just begun. After this week’s treatment I have a three week ‘holiday’ to give my body time to recover from the side-effects of the radiation and chemotherapy. After the holiday I am scheduled to start a six month chemotherapy regimen which will be five days of high dose (oral) chemo for one week every week. Sounds do-able.

While everybody has a picture of ‘chemo’ my journey has not been that. I had some nausea in the beginning and days here and there that were tough. But all in all it’s been very do-able. The side effects of the radiation have slowly been accumulating and are now very noticeable both to others and in the way I feel. My hair has begun to fall out and I have a radiation burn on the side of my face, plus my right ear is taking strain. It feels blocked most of the time due to excessive oils which are being generated in reaction to the heat and irritation from the radiation.

I was warned that there could be some ‘short term’ memory loss.

What was I going to say again?

I noticed it at first last weekend at Kath’s wedding. I gave somebody a camera to hang onto for a few minutes while I did something else. When I returned half an hour later I had no idea who I’d given it to. I knew I’d given the camera to somebody but that’s as far as I could go. As much as I searched my records I couldn’t switch on the light, it was like the library was dark and I had no idea where the shelf was. The next morning while I was meditating the lost memory fell out of my head. So it was there all along! Strange, but stranger things have happened.

The biggest side effect of the radiation is that it’s shifted my energy radically. Unless I’m with people I feel very cut-off and dislocated. On the one hand I feel like I should be out there engaging and on the other hand I don’t feel like doing anything. Betwixt and between.

As hard as it was in the beginning to reconcile myself with the radiation and chemotherapy I now find myself at a cross-roads again. Where to from here? The variety of treatments and different paths to healing are still arrayed before me, like a fan of possibilities, radiating outwards.

I’ve booked myself into the St Francis Health Hydro for a week in July to give myself a chance to recover what needs recovering from the radition/chemo and also to get clear on what’s next.

Ching, Chong, Cha!

2009-05-30T14:30:00.000+02:00

Cold beats cancer, cancer beats fear of unknown, fear of unknown beats cold

30 May 2009
The Atlantic to left of me, the 12 Apostles to my right, here I am…

I’ve completed the first two weeks of my six weeks of combined radiation and chemo therapy. If it wasn’t for this hectic sinus cold I’m battling I would say that I feel just fine. Hang on. What I meant to say is that it’s taken a particularly nasty sinus cold for me to get the message.

Everybody around me has been encouraging me and giving me permission to just rest as much as I need to. Have I been listening? No.

I have been going here, there and everywhere. Popping into the office, seeing one or more different kinds of therapists or healers a week, if not a day! Busy, busy, busy like a bee. But I’m not a bee. (Confusing metaphor in South Africa, I know.) Perhaps it’s the fact that I recovered so incredibly well from the surgery and added to that the fact that the Radiation and Chemo treatments I’m on are so very mild. More about that later.

What I have realised in these three days in bed is that the dis-ease I have to heal myself from is not an out-of-control growth in my brain but an out-of-control compulsion to be busy all the time.

Phew.

Writing that down feels like too much, too soon, too fast.

I could write pages about this. It falls under the heading, why do you think you got this cancer? I have been thinking about that since day one and since day one I’ve known that there was a part of my brain that could get onto an action or thought or plan and ride it so hard and so far and so fast that eventually it sounded like an air-raid siren in my head. So intense and without pause I would become.

To people on the outside this must have looked like many things. Sometimes it would seem like a kind of stubbornness, other times like a great ability to focus. I often experienced it as a way to disconnect from the world and what was going on around me. Excessive focus as a way to avoid life.

Just this week I was writing in my diary and I found myself worrying about arriving at the end of my six weeks of Radiation Therapy and having wasted my time. It was as startling for me to write it down as it was to wonder what it was that I would have wasted. This was before the Sinus Cold hit me so I hadn’t had the time for this to sink in but already I had a sense. This is what I wrote:

Time would be wasted if I emerge on the other end with nothing to show for it.

As I think about this now I’m less interested in the neurotic fear of missing the boat, of not delivering and I’m much more interested in what this incessant drive to be busy, to be doing something about everything all the time, is really about. What am I avoiding in my life by always being busy?

If I let this journey keep me at bay, if I allow my body to rest for the next four weeks perhaps I’ll find out.

When I found out about the tumour some six weeks ago one of my first reactions was excitement. I know this will seem foreign and perhaps even abhorrent to some, but for me the prospect of going on such a huge journey immediately spoke of opportunity to discover new territory, new places, new sensations and ultimately treasure.

So now’s the time to approach the cave one more time. Dragon’s are magical creatures. One moment they are spewing fire and fighting tooth and claw but they can be sly and crafty when they want to be. Suddenly I have to face a Dragon that seems to protect not a shiny golden hoard but a cavernous emptiness. All I can see behind the Dragon is a big dark space in which I have to lose myself if I ‘m going to defeat him.

Navigating the 3 C's: Cancer, Causality & Conspiracy

2009-05-30T14:24:00.000+02:00

Monday 18 May
My Desk, the Atlantic on the left of me

Before I’d left the hospital I had first a visit from my neurosurgeon, Dr White, and then a day or two later from my Oncologist, Dr Eedes, to discuss first the histology and then the proposed treatment. The histology showed what Dr White had expected, a malignant tumour which, due to it’s position, he was able to remove in it’s entirety. However the tumour was like a beehive, he explained. You can see the beehive and remove it, but you don’t know how many bees are outside of the hive at any given time. These ‘bees’ of course being other cancerous cells in the surrounding tissues which are doing the cancer thing, namely reproducing, making more cancer cells. So the focus Dr White explained was to kill any remaining cancer cells. Enter Dr Eedes.

Dr Eedes, one of the most highly regarded Oncologists in the Western Cape, explained that for this particular type of brain cancer there was a ‘best practice’ used worldwide which involved six weeks of radiation combined with an oral chemo drug. He explained and I’ve also found out since that this particular form of chemo is on the milder side of possible chemo treatments, being oral and in slightly lighter doses than what other types of cancer often warrant.

So that was that sorted then?

It took me almost a week at home before I dared to go online in search of ‘more info’. There was a part of me that didn’t want to get too familiar with how the doctors saw me or my condition. I can appreciate how useful the labels are for them in helping them navigate what must be a very difficult landscape. I say ‘difficult’ because I did start to research and find out more about cancer in general and brain cancer in particular. The more I read I started to wonder how a person who becomes an Oncologist to ‘heal’ people with cancer must function with such a limited tool set (Radiation & Chemo) which has a very chequered history and jury’s still out on whether they actual heal.

Why was I so reluctant to engage with the clinical in’s and out’s of my condition? On the one hand I was weary and cautious not to be drawn into a set of labels that were just that, useful to describe something, but not the thing itself. On the other hand I really did not want to hear what the statistics were on my kind of cancer and the survival rates. Would you? But like all things you resist, viola! A friend with the best intentions sends me a link to a site that he thinks has useful info and within seconds of landing there I see a graph with survival rates for people with my kind of brain cancer. Reminds me of a Jedi mind trick: “What I don’t want you to think about is a jedi knight wearing a tutu”. Too late, right. So what did that change, if anything?

I now had a sense of why some people were so alarmed at my news. When I checked in with myself I also realised that these graphs were only one side of a much bigger story and so I started to read and research. Little did I know that I was about to uncover one of the biggest unanswered questions of our modern age.

The easy questions seem to be, in no particular order:

When will the aliens give us 3D TV technology?
Is there a God?
Who shot JFK?

Much harder I discovered was:

What causes cancer?

One of the first distinctions I discovered was that the combination of Surgery, radiation and chemo therapy does not technically heal the body of cancer as much as it removes the manifestation of cancer, namely the tumour. To heal the body of cancer something else often needs to happen, something that addresses the underlying cause, what gave rise to the cancer in the first place. But nobody can agree on what causes cancer! So where does that leave us, where does that leave me?

After all the reading it left me feeling between a rock and a very hard place. On the one hand I had great doctors prescribing six weeks of radiation and chemo therapy and on the other I had an avalanche of “alternative therapies” all vying for pole position. Not only did the alternative therapies demand their moment in the sun, their advocates also spent a huge amount of energy painting the “Big 3” (Surgery, Radiation & Chemo) as an evil triumvirate cooked up by a cabal comprised of the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and “Big Pharma”, intent on keeping their monopoly on ‘approved’ cancer treatments that they can profit on and squashing any treatment that they couldn’t own even if it did show promise or even heal people.

So how did I navigate this?

Intellectually I couldn’t resolve this. It was a minefield with both sides taking great pains to paint the other side negatively. What really set my alarm bells ringing was noticing how much energy going into making it a black and white issue. So I took the 3rd way. I felt my way through it is what I did.

I remember going to the Vincent Pallotti Oncology ward to have my mask made a week before my therapy started. I met the team that would treat me for the six weeks in the Radiography department as well as the team that would handle the chemotherapy. These are some of the best people I’ve met in a long time. I came away from that day feeling that I could go far with these people. I could feel that they cared and that they were committed to me healing. That decided it for me. I exhaled and knew that no ill could befall me in that place.

Ironically the harder part of the journey now is to navigate the myriad of alternative therapies. It seems there are enough alternative therapies to suit every kind of personality, eye colour and taste.

The Missing Piece

2009-05-18T00:00:00.000+02:00

Sunday 17 May 2009
My Desk, listening to the sounds of the Atlantic

I arrived home exactly one week after having the tumour removed by miraculous brain surgery. It was a strange new reality that met me around every corner. I was and still am overwhelmed by an overwhelming feeling of feeling.

I can’t make sense of it, don’t want to make sense of it. It’s enough to just wake up in the morning and instead of thinking, ‘what will I do with this day, how will I take it and shape it and make it interesting to me and do something with it?’ I don’t. Most mornings I wake up and I notice a feeling or sensation in my body. Usually it’s in the middle of my chest and it sets the tone for what unfolds. But more than framing the day, this feeling has become the new language of my waking time in ways that I can’t really express in words.

I have wondered if, by divine intervention, the neurosurgeon removed that part of my brain which has been holding the reigns of my waking hours for the last 38 years with such cunning control allowing me only rare glimpses of what it might be like to feel.

So on the one hand I have been swimming in an ocean of feeling and discovering a patience and receptivity that has me speechless, (hence the lack of blogging!). But on the other hand I have been watching the approaching deadline of my Radiation and Chemo therapy approaching which has been pulling me out of the ocean like a coast-guard helicopter intent on rescuing me when all I want is to carry on swimming in the warm water.

Which brings me to tonight. Tomorrow morning I begin Radiation and Chemo Therapy. It will work something like this: I will receive about 10min of very focused X-rays to an area of my brain designed to target any remaining cancerous cells that lay outside of the tumour that was removed. I’ll be going to Vincent Pallotti hospital every weekday for the duration of the 6 weeks. The Chemo Therapy will be a pill or pills that I’ll swallow every day for the next 6 weeks. That will be followed by a 3 week holiday and then an MRI scan to see how I've responded. I'll then start a 6 month Chemo treatment which will involve 5 days of a higher dose Chemo per month for the 6 months and then another scan and so on.

How do I feel? On Friday I noticed that I'd been picked up by the coast guard. I felt a real discomfort and sense that I did not want to be where I was for the first time since the wave broke. On Saturday the feeling intensified and I acknowledged that perhaps it was time to admit that the prospect of Radiation and Chemo was enough to make anybody feel a bit bang. And now as I sit here, on the eve of the next big phase of this journey, I feel ready. If I wanted a walk in the park I'd be in the park.

What about the Alternative Therapies? It’s been a bit of climb to get to this point. More about that tomorrow.

How do I know which part of my brain is missing?

2009-05-17T22:27:00.000+02:00

I got a little behind, so here's some 'back-story'

Thursday 30 April 2009
Room F5 Cape Medi Clinic

From here I can see all the way down to the see and beyond.

A thought just occurred to me… How would I ever know that the Neurosurgeon did not remove an essential part of my brain? How would I know? What if the piece that I would miss, by virtue of being missing, will never make it’s absence felt by just not being around?

I had some visitors today and I wondered if they were being briefed down the corridor on the part of my brain that was missing so that they didn’t accidentally mentioned or alert me to it.

Funny. Funny in a brain surgery joking kind of way.

The bottom line according to my Neurosurgeon is that the part of my brain that I grew the tumour in, the front right temporal lobe, is one of the least critical parts of the brain and conversely the most ‘up for it’ when it comes to taking bits out.
Or put another way, he has removed up to 9cm of this part of the brain with no notable side effects. This is one of the many miracles of what is happening to me. I grow a tumour in the part of my brain where there is little if anything preventing a surgeon from removing it in it’s entirety.

But I’m writing this myself and I’m also the one with 5cm less front right temporal brain so who are you going to believe?

I mean I know there’s a hole there now!

Tomorrow is a week since the operation and I’m probably going to be discharged, I’m going home. Today is the first day since the operation that I feel like I can survive myself. If I woke up tomorrow and the Swine Flu had killed all the ugly people in the world and Cape Town was overrun by six foot blonde’s ripping all the copper out of the city to redo their bathrooms I think I’d actually be able to fight my way to the harbour and find a way out of here.

What the Doctor thinks he saw

2009-04-22T16:10:00.003+02:00

Sunday 19 April 2009
My side of the bed, home

When I woke up on Saturday morning I felt better than I’d felt in a long time. Was it the reduced swelling from the mega-dose of steroids I was on? Was it the night’s sleep bereft of rolling a large boulder up a hill and then watching it tumble down the other side? The only thing I remember out of an otherwise flatline of a sleep was hearing my son, Jude, crying in the middle of the night, hearing him get up and then knowing that he was ok.

Dr White arrived mid morning and began to doctor me. There was something re-assuring about the way he tested my reflexes, checked my eyes tracking his finger, my pupils dilate and various other oddities of the neurosciences. Then he began with the neuroscience lesson.

From the MRI and the previous CAT scan and his experience he felt that it was more than likely an “Astrocytoma”, one of the more aggressive variants of brain tumour.

What's obvious is that there is some bleeding (the white area) around a darker area of growth.
The most active cells in our brains are called glial cells and they do most of the repair work and maintenance. It follows that if there was going to be any 'bad' mutation that it would more than likely happen in and amongst these glial cells which are constantly reproducing themselves in the process of building the various bits of neuron sheathing, brain scaffolding and whatnot that they do.

Dr White offered that given the size of the growth he could see on the scans and the way the symptoms were manifesting (headache’s and ‘seizures’) he thought that it was an “aggressive” Astrocytoma. Cancerous growth are apparently ranked from grade 1 to grade 4 depending on how active and virulent they appear and behave. He went on to say that until they can do a biopsy on the tumour this is all speculation but that he was proceeding on this basis.
He went on to explain what was going to happen to me in these rough stages:

On Friday 24 April he plans to operate on my brain, removing this growth and putting my head back together. I will go into an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for a day or two, or until the risk of any bleeding, swelling or infection was ruled out. From there to a general ward at the Cape Medi-Clinic and then home by the following Friday.

Once the scientist dudes had sliced and diced my dragon they will know what to call it on their carefully devised maps of the human brain and then we’ll all get together and talk about what their map suggests is the next step to take. Dr White has told me that if it turns out to be an Astrocytoma then it will more than likely involve 6 weeks of Radiotherapy and a milder form of Chemotherapy.

We’ll cross those bridges when we get there.

What The Doctor Saw

2009-04-21T21:26:00.004+02:00

Sunday 19 April 2009
My side of the bed, home

“The castles the mind builds by day
the heart can tear asunder
in a slumber”
Stupor Mundi

So much has happened since Thursday that I find it difficult to pick up the narrative thread of what happened next and what feeling or thought that evoked.

When Sarah and I were alone that Thursday evening I felt, dare I say, excited. There was no part of me that thought that this would end in tears. I remember saying something to her like, “this feels like the first time I went overseas.” And it really has. I remember sitting on the plane, flying to America, exhilarated to be sailing into the unknown, hungry for what was going to happen next.

There has always been that part of me that, like a Meerkat, sticks its head out of the borough at the first sign of anything vaguely interesting and out of the ordinary, even if it is burrowing inside my head.

Thursday night I slept, if that’s what you can call it. It woke up exhausted. It felt like I had spent the whole night pouring the left part of my brain into the right and back again. Sissyphus eat your heart out!

Friday was a busy day, full of distractions, things to do, people to meet, places to go. Thank goodness. Dr White had me check myself into the Cape Medi Clinic where I met him later that morning. He was in theatre all day and popped up to see me on one of his tea breaks, between brain operations. The moment he walked in the door I felt good about what was happening. I told him the story, pretty much like I have here and he had already seen my CAT scan. He asked me if I had been experiencing any ‘other symptoms’. Always one for over-sharing I let him in on what to date has been a very personal journey and for me in no way connected with what was going on… or so I thought.

About 5 weeks ago I was sitting in my office listening to a colleague when I suddenly become hyper aware of everything happening around me. I could hear Theo talking to me. I was thinking about what he was saying and it seemed at the same time I was also aware of everything else that was going on in the street outside, the room next door, and dare I say somewhere else that I knew wasn’t as easily placed and explained as the room next door.

The feeling passed. Then it happened again and again. Except each time it happened it become more layered and nuanced. It felt like something or some other time and place was bleeding through into my waking awareness. At times it felt like a memory. At other times it felt like it was happening to me right then and there. Each time it was an aspect of the same thing. There were actually people in this other time/place I kept bumping up against but I could never see a face or recognise anybody.

The first time I described it to Sarah I remember saying to her that I feel like a new sense has switched on inside of me. I felt like I was experiencing all this extra stuff on another level in addition to the five senses we make do with every day. If I had to locate the sensory organ for this new sense I would say it was inside my solar plexus.

It was at this point that Dr White, my neurosurgeon, piped up and said, “oh that must have been the beginning of your seizures.” What could I say. At that point it dawned on me how limiting the maps are that we have drawn up to describe the territory we find ourselves in. The doctor’s map tells him I’m having a seizure. My map tells me I’m experiencing a world beyond my borders.

Of course there was nothing else to say to Dr White at that time. Probably because he sent me to the City Park Hospital (Christian Barnard Medical Centre) where I had an MRI scan. If you’ve ever had one you will know that it is a very foreign place to be, lying inside a narrow sarcophagus that huffs and puffs with a myriad of magnetic pulses and impulses. A friend wrote to me today about her experience of hearing ‘God’ talking to her during her MRI scan and I knew exactly what she meant.

En-route back to the Cape Medi-Clinic I had another one of my experiences/seizures and was very relieved to be back in the hospital. I was attached to a drip and put onto an anti-seizure medication Epilim and a saline solution to hydrate me. I’m going to get off this Epilim as soon as I can. It’s scary stuff. I totally realise why I’m on it and while Dr White is running the show I’m going to allow him to make this call. But as soon as I’m out of surgery I want off this stuff. Nuff said.

The MRI Scans were sent to Dr White who was still in theatre and he appeared later in the afternoon to tell me what his prognosis was. At this point he hadn’t had the time to inspect me and he made an appointment to meet me the next morning and do a full consultation with the MRI scans and give me the full run-down on what he saw and what that meant. At this point he assured me that if it had been urgent I’d already have been in surgery. This is what his first prognosis sounded like:

I had an ‘aggressive’ tumor behind my right eye which had to be surgically removed as soon as possible. He told me he wanted to operate on Friday after the election craziness had subsided and when he had his trusted theatre team with him. He prescribed a substantial course of steroids containing cortisone to combat the swelling to reduce the pressure of the growth on my brain. He made an appointment to see me for a full consultation on Saturday morning to take inspect me and discuss all his findings and answer all my questions.

I went to sleep on Friday night drugged up to the eyeballs, enough steroids to give the ‘governator’ a run for his money and talk of brain surgery that still left me feeling excited and a more than a little intrigued by what this all held in store.

The Story So Far (OR Why does everything big always involve sex)

2009-04-19T21:02:00.003+02:00

Saturday 18 April 2009
Cape Town Medi Clinic
Bed F21 with a courtyard view

I’ve never suffered from headache’s. The rare moments where I have had headaches I’ve rarely taken any kind of medication. The only painful head pain I’ve ever experienced was during and following several dental operations to remove excess teeth during puberty, wisdom’s et al. This was technically not head pain, but in my jaw. But like anybody who’s been ‘hurt’ by a dentist, it feels all the more intense because it’s so close to your brain.

I can remember wondering if an amputated toe could possibly hurt as much. If somehow the nerve impulses could somehow loose some of their urgency if they travelled over a greater distance. Anyway, the question was there and obviously not important enough to ever answer because I didn’t go on to study medicine and neurology, instead I chose to become a student and practitioner of a different kind of signalling science, choosing to explore and learn how to send signals through the ether, through the air, using the power of light to flicker and touch a different set of nerves, to trigger a different set of impulses, some painful, some not, some exhilarating, some edifying.

And so to last week. I was making love to Sarah when I started to feel a tension, a fiery burn up the right side of my neck. Perhaps if I was watching TV at the time I would have paused sooner. As it was I was consumed and otherwise occupied. I only realised what was happening when the pain exploded like petrol thrown onto a flickering fire. Suddenly this white-hot hand seemed to reach up out of my neck, gripping the right side of my head, squeezing my ear, my eye. It was like the worst kind of sinus pain I’d ever experienced and more. I fell down on the bed and all I could do was dive down into something like sleep where I felt I could escape the worst of it.
Sarah fearing the worst kept waking me up every hour to check on me and in this way we made it through the night (thanks Louis Ferdinand Celine). The next day I spoke to my two doctor friends, one who happenes to be ‘my’ doctor and between them we established that a sudden painful headache without any other symptoms may not be a ‘worst case’ scenario and I promised to report any other changes in my condition.

For the remainder of last week and this week I had a mild headache that half wasn’t there. If pressed I would admit that it was hanging around the right hand side of my head. After a lifetime of no real headache’s I was beginning to wonder what this was about. Then on Wednesday everything shifted.

At lunch I had an experience that I later described as a ‘blood sugar’ moment. I suddenly felt like I might feint and asked Sam to get me something with sugar while I slid off the chair (in the middle of Melissa’s in Constania nogal) and lay on the slate floor wondering what was going to happen next. The juice arrived and five minutes later I felt that I wasn’t going to feint after all, climbed back on my chair, seemingly normal.

If you keep reading you will soon begin to regard this word “normal” with some suspicion. I suspect you may come to realise, if you haven’t already, that normal has got very little to do with anything interesting and life-affirming.

Back at my office later that day I was seeing a client out and when I got back to my office I had another one of these ‘blood sugar’ moments only this time it was much scarier. I had visions of passing out and nobody being able to get to me so I leopard crawled to my office door which latches from the inside and made sure the latch was off. Then a scrambled for my cell phone and called Murray, my doctor, and with some urgency asked him to get to me as quick as he could. Like the angel he is he sprung into action.

When I began to feel like everything was going to be ‘normal’ I felt a bit foolish that I’d summoned Murray who was by this time weaving his way through rush-hour traffic to rescue me from who knows what. When the second biggest headache of my life hit me a few minutes later I got back on the phone to Murray pronto. He had only one thing to say, “I’ll be there now and I’ll bring some shots”. It was then that I knew he was an angel.

Everything happened simultaneously after that. Murray arrived, Sarah arrived, Sarah’s sister Liz arrived and Murray gave me the biggest Voltarin injection straight into my ass cheek. At first I thought the pain in my ass cheek was an attempt by Murray to distract me from the red hot pokers drilling through my eye and ear sockets. But when the I got home a few minutes later and the ‘migraine’ had receded into a more manageable painful headache I was so grateful.

I have to acknowledge that up to and until this painful Wednesday I had been more than a little laze’s faire about the whole sudden headache episode of the previous week. If Sarah had had her way we would have zipped off to Port Elizabeth for a CAT scan the day after the “First Headache”. I balked at what I thought was a complete over-reaction. I thought that if it was serious that I would have other symptoms. And in the absence of ‘other symptoms’ I felt it more than appropriate to just take it easy. As will be revealed later, I had in fact been having ‘other symptoms’ for about four weeks before the “First Headache”, but more about that later.

When I woke on Thursday morning with a nagging headache on the right side of my head I acknowledged that Wednesday qualified as ‘further developments’ and that I was now ready to be tested. I saw Murray for quick physical and then we headed over to the Christian Barnard Medi-Clinic in Cape Town city centre for a CAT Scan.

The radiologist who inspected my scan was surprised at me sitting down next to him as he viewed the plates and a bit put-out I’ll add. I realised very quickly why when I saw a very visible bit of something pushing my brain this way and that in the middle of my head. Not be drawn out at all he mentioned something about a ‘lesion’ and bleeding and that he would give Murray the run-down.

If you like me haven’t been hanging out in hospitals then you will also be wondering what on earth a ‘lesion’ might be. As it turns out it's not 100 well drilled Roman soldiers. It turns out that it’s doctor speak for a tumor or growth. But not necessarily in that order.

This was the first moment that the word ‘Tumor’ had popped into my head and no sooner had it landed I promptly put it down again. It has a real hot-potato like quality. It actually radiates a tangible energy. I imagine in the cold war days if you lived in the west and thought McCarthy was the best thing since automatic dishwashers then the word ‘Communist’ may have had a similar radioactive quality to it.

Murray booked me to see a highly regarded Neurosurgeon, Dr Grant White, and the plan was to see him with the CAT scan on Thursday and let him guide us from there. From ship to shore, from pilot to guide.

The Way the Week Starts

2007-07-09T00:57:00.000+02:00

We've survived the weekend but only just.

I think since the first time I came to Kinshasa and was dragged to all the nightspots I have not bothered to go out and party. Usually I'm too knackered to think of partying. Not so this time. The client (Heineken) sponsored a huge party on Saturday with muso's from Paris and when I arrived there (after drinking two beers at the guest house) I proceeded to drink more beers than I can remember over the course of an evening which ended in a night club called 36. It also helped that the music was fantastic and the dance floor small and packed. At some point I recall everything coming together in a way I haven't experienced at party since the ecstacy fueled 90's. In fact there was a three or four song period of time where I think everybody on the dance floor was dancing with everybody else, or so it felt.

I paid the price on Sunday and luckily got a full nights sleep last night so today I feel like a normal person again.

By lunchtime the full crew will have arrived in Kinshasa and we will be going full-ball. At this stage I'm focusing on the first two commercials that we'll be shooting and hoping that the second two will come-together at some stage...

I have vision's of Werner Hertzog's "African Queen" flashing past my eyes every so often.

King of Congo

2007-07-04T09:26:00.000+02:00

I'm getting ready for another trip up the big river. If only Marlowe could see me now.

Tomorrow I fly to JHB and Friday to Kinshasa to shoot 4 beer commercials for Primus. This time we have to shoot 4 commercials in the time it usually takes us to shoot one feature length music video (13 minutes at LEAST!).

It's a hot balmy night in Cape Town, 19 degrees and the moon's just popped over Devil's peak.

The Prez comes to visit

2007-06-15T17:11:00.000+02:00

Sarah and I set up the stand for the Cape Town book fair today. While I was waiting for the paint to dry (literally) I saw a commotion at one of the stands and wandered over while munching my greek salad (in name only). Of course I was surprised when I peered over the mass of raised cellphones not to discover a famous author (even though it can be argued he is one) but none other than our diminutive president. It's amazing how short he is. Luckily for me I could hold the cell phone up above my head to catch this neat little clip of him.

Tomorrow the Festival opens and we launch Sarah's new business, "The Write Co" Cape Town.

2007-06-14T22:38:00.000+02:00

This is what it has come down to, looking at satellite images of the weather so that I can find a gap in the rain so that I can fix my roof. Our roof leaks buckets... (one, two, three...) 5 buckets and two towels as I speak. Yesterday was the first sunny day in weeks and there was a team on the roof painting it black with various forms of waterproofing etc. Obviously that wasn't the problem. This makes it much more interesting cause the next option is to rebuild one third of the roof. Makes you want to go out for a long drive along the sea...

It's day three and today the house is starting to look like a house. Less boxes than people and furniture. The people and the furniture are winning!

Think sunshine, sunshine, sunshine.

Worms!

2007-06-13T21:21:00.001+02:00

Worms!, originally uploaded by Llewelyn.

Ruby and Jude found all these worms freeloading on our cauliflower plants int he garden. "They made green poo on our fingers" said Jude. Either Ruby hasn't discovered that she should be illogically afraid of worms OR she's really special when it comes to critter lovin!

Today was a harder day than yesterday. Lot of boxes to unpack. Can't figure out where to put the tv so on.

Tired. Tomorrow pics of the new house with our stuff inside.

Home at last

2007-06-12T21:59:00.000+02:00

We moved in to our new house today. The bit of sunshine I found in the Karoo followed me to Cape Town and the sun shone today for the first time in weeks!

Even though the movers arrived 5 hours late we managed to get everything onto the property at least before sunset. I say property because we can't fit everything into the house. I was really kakking myself at the prospect of moving into a much smaller house but after just one day I have to admit that I'm loving it. For the first time in years I feel like the house and property can be managed.

In fact when the movers had emptied out Desborough ave and I stood in the empty house one last time before I headed down to the Cape I actually felt a palpable sense of relief. This took me completely by surprise. I really didn't expect to feel anything vaguely light about leaving. I guess my sadness at leaving Jo'burg led me to think that I'd feel a sense of loss when I left Desborough Ave, but I guess not. Just goes to show, you just don't know until you know.

When I drove to the storage locker this afternoon to put everything we can't fit into the house away (mostly office stuff) I sat in the famous Ctown traffic. It has to be said that it was the most beautiful traffic jam I'd ever sat in.

From JHB to CTown

2007-06-12T06:27:00.000+02:00

This is what our life looks like in boxes!

I drove down from Joburg on Sunday as soon as the movers had emptied our house. I slept over in Colesberg (the midpoint) and left again early on Monday morning.

There's nothing like driving in the Karoo at night and the sun rose as I approached Beaufort West.

And today is the big day. We move into our new house first thing this morning. More later, no doubt.

My trip so far in Pictures

2007-06-06T23:33:00.000+02:00

I found a way to link to my Sutherland road-trip photos embedded in Googlemaps! Click here to go to the map and click on the little markers to see photos taken at those exact co-ordinates with my Nokia N95 while I drove. I used Shozu's amazing software to automatically geotag and send the pics to flickr from where I use this nifty workaround to see them in googlemaps.

Under the Mountain

2007-06-06T23:22:00.001+02:00

A brief respite from the beautiful scenery

At this point I was still trying to figure out how to use the N95 with GPS and take photos and listen to music. Eventually I realised that it can only do two things properly at any given point in time. So while listening to music I cannot also have the GPS active AND take a photo. At best I can either have the GPS and the music or the GPS and take a photo and seeing as the idea is to have the GPS active while taking photos so that they are geotagged, it isn't exactly the mobile answer to blogging on the move. But, it is bloody marvelous. Now I have to figure out how to post my google map with all the pics of the trip tagged to their GPS co-ordinates onto my Blog.

Road Trip to the coldest place in South Africa

2007-06-06T07:28:00.000+02:00

This was full moon from the balcony of the flat I'm staying at right now, but taken a few weeks ago.

I'm off to Sutherland today, the coldest place in South Africa. Temperature right now (7h30am) in Cape Town is 12 degrees and in Sutherland supposedly 10 degrees but I see snow coming. So hopefully later today I'll be posting some snow pics!

I'm going to do a reccie for a 2 minute mini doccie that Discovery Channel is interested in commissioning. I want to tell a story of the Telescope as a "time machine". Let's see what I find.

It's 4 hours by car and I'm going to see if I can post some pics and clips via my new Nokia N95. To infinity and beyond...

I came, I saw and I had to get out fast

2007-02-28T09:14:00.000+02:00

(Wed 18 Nov)

I was going to spend almost two weeks there and I ended up leaving hastily on Wednesday the 18th via a quick river crossing and a flight out of Congo Brazzaville back to SA. That night my friends in the Congo called to say that it was for the best cause Bemba (one of the two presidential candidates) had unanimously announced himself the victor. This was before the official results were announced and of course the one thing everybody feared.
The rest is now historical record and Kabila was announced president and there was a huge collective sigh of relief.
The shoot was madness. I should post a retrospective but I've already been back since then.
I spent 10 days there from the 2nd till the 10th of February this year to shoot another music video for JB Mpiana. It was our biggest shoot to date and I would have blogged had I had the time. Oh well, suffice to say that life goes on even if my blog doesn't.

Kinshasa, here I come.

2006-11-13T10:54:00.000+02:00

10 Nov, 2006

The final election results are being released any day now. (Scheduled a week from now, 20th of Nov.) Congolese expect something to happen or for there to be some trouble. I’m not a political commentator so I’m not going to wage into the web of possibilities. But the bottom line is when most people with the means are leaving Kinshasa and the Congo for their ‘other’ lives in Belgium, France, South Africa and wherever else they find themselves in acceptable temporary ‘exile’ I am flying to Kinshasa to shoot a music video/commercial for one of the biggest musical stars of the DRC, Werason.
It can be said that when some people run out of a burning building and others run into it, they do it for the same reason or more specifically out of the same human mechanism. In this case my decision is that I am not ruled by fear, certainly not a nameless and unfounded fear. We shall see. My hosts and employers have made it clear that it is a less than desirable time to have to make this commercial and that we will have to be ready for anything and every eventuality.
Wow. I don’t know how often in life I am in a situation so focused and aware of what must be one of the fundamental laws of nature, namely that anything that can happen will happen.
Of course, our modern (western) lives seem to be predicated on the much more insubstantial premise that we have somehow managed to bring a large proportion (99%) of all probabilities into obeisance and can proceed with almost no chance of anything unexpected or unplanned happening! Ha ha!

I bought Richard Dwarkin’s book “The God Delusion” to read on my journey. We’ll see how that turns out.

I sat next to a South African security expert who was en route to prepare for Mbeki’s planned visit during the announcement of the results. Hey, if Mbeki’s coming then it must be ok I thought. I tried to fish for some ‘intel’ from this guy who did concede that they are not aware of any potential blow up, however he did say that he was there to prepare for any ‘eventuality’. We’ll see.

When I got to Kin I was met by the usual ‘protocol’ guys employed by the Agency to usher me through customs and baggage collection. However this time my passport was whipped out of my hand I was sent post haste into the baggage collection hall without even seeing a customs official. Used to a large amount of variation by now I went with the flow and sat on the very inactive luggage conveyar belt while I waited. After about 30 min I wondered what might be happening. Then Gill, the guy who usually meets me arrived and burst into long reams of French when he knows I understand very little. It seems that the more I say “I don’t understand much French” in French the more he assumes that I must understand something if I can say that much. Must be my accent or something. Anyway, I heard ‘visa’ and ‘pas bon’ and had to assume there was some trouble with my visa. At the end of the day it transpired that the lady who organized my ticket in JHB and visa had erroneously give my travel dates and that I my visa was only for an entry in two days time! If this was South Africa I surely would have been sent packing, back where I came from. This is the Congo so Gill and his assistants ensured that my passport was duly stamped with the appropriate entry stamp (reflecting my arrival as being two days later) and I was in!

We drove a different route to back to the City and I couldn’t really pick up any energy or vibe that would indicate that Kinshasa was on the brink of any kind of explosion of populist or military insurrection.

Back at the Agency it was business as usual. It’s great to see everybody again. I heard from one of the Agency guys that the three Maltina ads we shot last month have tested very well and everybody is thrilled by how they have turned out!

We work all afternoon and then I head off with Kris to his house in the hills, (Ma Campaigne) I wish I could take a photo of the view from up there but it’s almost impossible to find a vantage point. If you thought JHB was security mad, here every single house is surrounded by 3 meter walls, turning the roads into canyons from where you can’t see a thing! Walls, barbed wire, spikes and if you have airs you hire a private security company to hang around outside your house like one or two dudes in the street we live in.

It’s Friday night and everybody is planning to go out and party. Apart from going clubbing the first time I was here, I’ve avoided it ever since. (another story) But when we get home the heavens open and I experience a real Kinshasa thunderstorm that puts a monsoon to shame. Within minutes the drains can’t cope and the house, including my bedroom is flooded! Luckily the rain stopped 15 minutes later and we mopped and cleaned up. I ended up sleeping on the couch.

Take Two

2006-11-13T10:53:00.000+02:00

10 nov
take two day one

I’m off to Kinshasa again.
Yesterday was my last day of my Yoga challenge, 5 days of yoga for 8 weeks!
My last class last night was also my 2nd worst class since I returned to practicing Yoga this year. My worst class being my first class three months ago when I wanted to run screaming out of the yoga class but didn’t. I exaggerate somewhat. I mean, why stay in a place that you want to leave with every fiber in your body and nobody is making you stay? Except yourself that is. Well, that’s it, isn’t it. And it wasn’t every fiber in my body that was screaming for me to get out of the hot yoga room. It was just the more vociferous fibers, my digestive tract, some of my temperature sensors were a bit freaked out by the unfamiliar temperature. Mainly it was my brain and it’s notions of what constitutes a good experience and what doesn’t that was freaking out. As it turned out, my being (that part of me that isn’t my mind) was more than capable of staying in the room, suffering no damage. In fact now that I’ve finished 8 weeks of 5 day yoga my being has experienced some very powerful moments of just being.
I tried to figure out why it was my second worst class but I couldn’t. It might have been an extension of my day which was uncannily similar to the last ‘pre-departure for Kinshasa day’. Except this time I wasn’t taking any medication and can’t attribute my rising panic and extreme physical discomfort to an adverse reaction to my malaria medicine. And as much as I can suggest various reasons, none may be true other than the fact that I just felt horrible all day. This basic fact, that I felt terrible with no reason or discernable cause, is almost harder to bear than the actual discomfort of the day.

Anyway, here I go again.

The Chicken or the Egg?

2006-11-08T09:44:00.000+02:00

Day 10

After the brief night in the flop house (see "A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN KINSHASA") the Agency moved me into an apartment called Zeka. Very clean and simple, little kitchen, lounge and seperate room and bathroom. I woke up this morning to find an egg in the frigge. Yes, an egg. No, I don't have a clue as to how it got there. I looked for the chicken, but not a feather in sight. Just the egg. In the fridge.

Right, moving on.

A Perfect Shoot

2006-11-07T16:19:00.000+02:00

Day 8

Yesterday was our contingency day but because the second shoot day went so well we had a break which felt great! The Agency has asked me if I'd be willing to shoot another commercial on Sunday, the day before I go!!! The rest of the team is up for it and I figure why not, we are here after all. IT does mean that we only have 2 days to prepare. Tomorrow and Saturday! Hmmmm. It's for a local artist, Felix Wasekwa and we went to his house to watch him and his posse rehearse. We are going to have to do something with those girls!

the Last shoot day was inside a beauty salon that we revamped. It was the most controllabe of all the shoot days and in many ways the most enjoyable. We worked very hard and I definately feel that this one will be my favourite.

Sun, glorious sun

2006-11-07T16:17:00.000+02:00

Day 7

After the great day we had yesterday I expected today to start on a high. It was overcast when we drove to set only to find nobody else there. It felt like we would never get going. When Omar eventually got to set at 9am, two hours after call time I was pacing up and down like a caged tiger.
The catch 22 of being here is this: I might as well keep a calm head and breathe because shouting achieves less here than anywhere else in the world and what is, is more so than anywhere else. But as I sit there keeping calm and watching the hours slip by I wonder if anything will happen at all and at the end of the day I am responsible to deliver the commercials.
So I alternate, periods of calm punctuated by little explosions. At least the explosions are a deliberate, conscious strategy and not some automatic behavior.

Funny enough, the day turns out to be most perfect to date, with blue, blue skies and great sunlight and we manage to shoot today and tomorrow’s shots in one afternoon. When the sun eventually set, Merlin, my cameraman, and I turned to each other with a bewildered look in our eyes not quite sure if we had in fact managed to pull off the impossible. Of course, it could have ended up the way we’d planned it, with shitty weather and nothing in the can after two days.

I realized that evening how fantastic it is to have people you can trust working with you. Manuela, the art director, Merlin and I have really worked well and had fun so far. Fun seems to be the essential ingredient.

Our first shoot day was a day full of surprises!

2006-11-07T15:58:00.000+02:00

Day 6.

It was overcast and raining when I woke at 6am. We first went to the office as the organization was a little slower than we had planned. When we arrived at the botanical gardens where we were going to shoot it was still overcast but had stopped raining. Amazingly we shot our first shot at 10am, only an hour later than I had planned and we went on to have a fantastic day with great energy and shot all but 2 of our shots!

Elvis and his mobile soundsystem

The camera team

A light stand in Kinshasa

2006-11-07T15:53:00.000+02:00

A light stand in Kinshasa, originally uploaded by Llewelyn.

Merlin's home made kineflo's and lighstand on the Maltina shoot.

A beautiful day in Kinshasa

2006-10-20T17:00:00.001+02:00

We start shooting tomorrow so today is it (or was it). Today was an absolutely perfect day with beautiful blue skies and hot sun. It’s the first time I’ve witnessed this kind of weather in the Congo in 3 visits. Apparently this is the norm during the ‘rainy’ season. Blue sky, sunny days interrupted for brief thundershowers. If this is the case then we’ll have great light to shoot with. As I’ve learned, however, nothing turns out the way anybody says it will so I’m not holding my breath with the weather.

Great sunset from the office window.

Finished my 5th week of my yoga challenge today and walked out of the office at 7pm leaving Omar, the local producer, to hold the reigns. It’s a bit scary for me to do this but if I don’t let him do it on his own he’ll never learn. Let’s see what happens tomorrow. Call time on set is 7h30. Who knows what will happen!

I had to change accommodation from a house in the hills which is too far to drive to and from set everyday (more than an hour during rush hour), so I brought my clothes into town and when I arrived at the apartments they are renting for me and the other South African crew my room key was nowhere to be found. I very quietly threw my toys and insisted that I be taken to the only real hotel in town where the only rooms available were $400 per night which seemed to galvanize everybody into action and I ended up staying in what I would graciously call a ‘passion-palace’.

So I went from this...

To this.... The décor is conducive to sudden rather dissatisfying bouts of passion with strangers.

As I was ushered into the room I almost fainted from a lack of oxygen. They had just emptied a full container of air freshener just prior to me entering the room. Gagging, I insisted they get me another room and no spray this time. The new room was marginally less garish (marginally) and I immediately had a bath. When I got into bed I discovered that the Aircon (mounted next to the bed and blowing directly onto my pillow) had only one setting so it was either 33 degrees or ice cold air.
Oh yes, and I also discovered why they emptied a bottle of air freshener into the other room, the aroma of piss was everywhere!

If I had the conviction of a certain friend of mine (Wendy, you know who you are) I would have burnt the f**king place to the ground. By this time it was 10h30, I had to shoot the next day and I needed sleep more than I needed to have another fight.

Beware the Undertoad

2006-10-18T12:36:00.000+02:00

Day 4, Sat 14 Oct 2006

This is my temporary Yoga room while I'm in the Congo. I started a "yoga challenge" four weeks ago. Basically to do 5 90min sessions a week for 8 weeks and then this job was confirmed and I decided to just continue. This may seem straight forward but I do Bikram Yoga which is usually practiced in a room heated to 40 degrees celsius which does wonders for one's flexibility. The congo get's hot, 33 degrees on average, so I'll have some heat and I've got a CD of Bikram talking through a class and I'm playing it on my laptop (which you can see on the chair). Tomorrow I finish my 5th week.

After my yoga this morning I began to think about what it means to act here. What it means to have an intention and to follow through with it. There is such a powerful pull, undertow, that seduces (not the right word, there’s very little seductive here) that seduces one to just let go, to let things happen exactly as they will. I can feel it now, gently tugging at my consciousness, suggesting that I just let the day turn out the way it will. It even has a logic. I can hear it’s voice if I concentrate. “Don’t get into too much of a plan today because only so much can happen,” and “take it easy, every body else is,” and “why set yourself up for disappointment, just take it as it comes.” Of course, these voices are only the thin edge of the wedge.
I have to shoot three television commercials in four days and deliver quality as well. On the face of it, this seems to be an unrealistic expectation of anybody. Why? Well, for starters, a commercial requires a huge amount of planning and co-ordination of a variety of resources during a specific day plus the good fortune of a whole number of uncontrollable forces like the weather, the moods of all the crew and so on.
My experience so far is that if anybody can get away with not doing what they are supposed to do they won’t do it. Oh, eventually they’ll do it, eventually.
There are no consequences. Nothing happens when you don’t do what you said you would do, apart from a baby dying somewhere of course, or a woman get’s beaten to a pulp, or a whole country is left to scrabble around in the sand while the leaders get fat off the natural resources. And if you think this is judgmental then please write to me and tell me where is the judgment? This is what happens.
I wonder what I’ll do today. Maybe I’ll just take it easy, read a bit, have a swim. Or maybe I’ll be ready for my driver at 8 o’clock as agreed and go into the office and wait for everybody else to eventually arrive and start work. I wonder.

The lift in the Agency's office does not operate on weekends or after 7pm so it's up and down 9 flights of stairs a few times a day!

The first rain!

2006-10-13T18:27:00.000+02:00

Thursday, 12 October, was a bit of a blur. I spent the first part of the day looking for cast and the second part of the day for locations. The event of the day was the first rain of the rainy season. The day began dark and gloomy and while I sat in the advertising agency's offices with the window open I suddenly heard this rush of air and suddenly the rain hit. It was a 2 hour monsoon like downpour.

looking up at the office building, 'tres modern'

Omar, my producer, and I took the gap and went and had some lunch. Lunch as you can see consisted of batter fried fish. I don't know if the photograph does the fish any justice but it was a lurid Orange and I had to perform culinary surgery on the batter to extricate the fish.

This is the first city in the world that I've travelled to where you have to drive a 4x4 SUV to get from A to B. While the main drag, boulevard is fairly navigable, the moment you drive into one of the side roads in the city you are faced alternatively with bottomless pools or series off-road conditions.

I went home and fell asleep immediately, this time with the aircon on.

A bad Trip to Kinshasa

2006-10-11T17:44:00.000+02:00

There's nothing better than that feeling of excitement the day before an overseas trip. Which is why I couldn't figure out why my stomach was in knots and I felt the anxiety move through me like a bit fat aligator looking for something to kill.
Perhaps the fact that I was on my way to the Congo, the veritable heart of darkness, two weeks before the next election might have something to do with it. The Congo (DRC to be exact) where more than 2.5 million people are reported to have died from famine, disease and that most pernicious of plagues, civil war driven by greed and more greed.

Anyway, this was not my first trip to the Congo, and I wasn't prone to the kind of debilitating fear that seems to run the editors of the major news organisations, never mind most of the world. Colleagues of mine were in the capitol, Kinshasa in the weeks running up to the first set of elections. They, like me, were there to film a series of television commerials, and I got a series of sms's like "They are running through the streets firing automatic rifles right now," and "which direction is the airport?" The surreality of it all was that the incidents that there were, were so contained to a specific street or goal, like burning down one of the candidates TV station that life could and did continue fairly normally. At this point I have to point out that using the word 'normal' comes with a huge disclaimer, but you have to be here to know what I mean.

So, if I wanted to be afraid and paranoid about my impending trip I could be, but being me I shouldn't be so what's going on. Early the next morning on my way to the airport, feeling just fine, it dawned on me that I had taken my malaria medicine a little while before the paranoia set in. Silly me. I was just having a bad trip.

I arrived very late at the airport to a very full plane and had to take a middle seat which did my head in. So when I boarded the plane and sat down in my middle seat I instantly had the intention that somebody was not going to show and I was going to get my isle seat. I asked the flight attendandt if they could move me if an isle seat presented itself and all he could say was "the flight is very full" and roll his eyes. SAA truly knows how to pick them. I ignored his attitude and repeated myself. He rolled his eyes again and did a funny thing with his wrists which reinforced the stereotype that all male flight attendandts are gay.
As I sat down I marveled at how sure I was that I would get my isle seat, that somehow the fabric of reality, "the plane is full" would get off it's point of view and I'd get my seat. Not 10 minutes later another lovely attendant asked me if I was the gentleman who wanted the isle seat and promptly escorted me to my new seat. I ended up with french woman sitting in the window seat and the middle seat open next to us and I promptly decided that nobody was going to sit there either. Wonderful stuff, the power of intention. So, needless to say, the plane filled up and nobody sat in the middle seat and I had a very relaxing flight. The french woman and I made a silent agreement not to bother each other with our respective stories and we listened to our ipod's and read the whole way to Kinshasa.

The airport at Kin is a textbook case. I have to admit that since my last visit the whole checking in procedure has drastically improved. The first time I arrived (May 2005) I was lucky enough to be taken under the wing of an experience business man I met on the plane. He had a handler who took us immediately to a special waiting lounge for VIP's where we sat in airconditioned comfort sipping cold drinks while it took the handlers the better part of an hour to get our luggage. This cost my business man friend $100, which I soon came to realise was the costs of efficiency in this part of the world.

This time round I was through passport control and had my luggage within 30 minutes. I was dumbstruck. I then had to wait 30min for my lift to arrive.

Where have you seen a bus like this before. Seeing one in Kinshasa is the equivalent of going forward while moving back. Or put another way, even thinking that you are in America for one second could damage your brain here.

the market en route from the airport.

Day 1 ends with a swim at Kris's house and some supper and bed. I switched the aircon off, thinking I'll aclimatise while I slept. Woke up at some stage in the night swimming in my sheets but too out of it to turn it back on.