Nkosi, sikeleli Afrika., or in Shona, Ishe Komborera Afrika.

Concerts

On Wednesday I'm going to see R.E.M. I had Radiohead tickets because R.E.M was sold out, but thanks to marktplaats and some good luck I swapped! Funny thing, the guy that phoned me to swap had such a young voice that I thought he was a teenager. I was really expecting the door to be opened by someone's mum, but no, it was a middle-aged man. It goes with the article I read recently about how the only people who can afford to go to concerts are the middle-aged. Ehm. That says a lot about me I know.

On Saturday I checked my email early enough and got tickets for Amy McDonald (I missed her last time she was in Amsterdam) and also for Jason Mraz. A few weeks ago I got tickets for Paul Weller. So that's four! I love living in the Netherlands, it's a musical playground.

Personal Manifestos

I read on a motivational website the other day about making your own personal manifesto. Despite sounding all Chairman Mao, a personal manifesto seems like a really good idea. What are you really after? What do you want? What are your primary goals in life?

The idea is to define your goals in one sentence which you can repeat to yourself as a kind of mantra or a reminder of why you're doing thing you're doing when it's bogging you down. Or maybe just to define to yourself what you really want. If you ask most people what their goals are, they'll have some longwinded explanation (after looking away embarrassedly) about what they think they want. The key is taking that longwinded explanation, trimming all the bullshit away and leaving just the core. I'm still working on my manifesto, but I'd love to know if any of you have one.

Being good-enough

I'm struggling with the concept of not being a 'perfect' mom anymore. My kids are in daycare for 102 hours a month now. It's 102 hours that they used to be with me, albeit while we were at football, the gym, tennis lessons, at home. I doubt if much of the 102 hours was actual one on one time with me, but still, I was there. Now I'm not there at all during those 102 hours and I'm not there during the time they're asleep at night. 

Perhaps it's time to revisit the concepts of Donald Winnicott's Good-Enough Mother. When I was in psychotherapy back in the mid-90s and agonising about being a 'bad parent' my psychiatrist presented me with Winnicott's work (The Child, The Family and the Outside World) as well as Alice Miller's Drama of Being a Child. I read through them and although I was able to analyse and rationalise the contents to myself I was never able to apply the concepts to my own life. Perhaps now that I'm older I'll be able to apply those concepts more effectively.

This ties in a bit to some of the things that my post on The Reader made me think about. The futility of making choices for other people and the inability I have to let go and allow those choices to happen. There's nothing harder sometimes than standing back and letting things take their course.

White and African

Still reading Blood River and I'm about half way through now. The immense grief I felt for Africa at the beginning of the book has abated a little, but I find that some passages really shriek at me. Like the one I read about how the Congo massacres in the 1960s run a black vein of fear through every white African, because we've heard about it from when we were little and it pulls on the 'them and us' divide that is instilled in us from birth.

When I was about 9 or 10 our white neighbours were held at gun point by black rebels in their house. The man was raped and tortured to death while the wife and their three kids cowered in a bathroom which was inaccesible from outside. They heard him screaming all night until he finally died at about 5 am. In the morning the party-line telephone rang and the news filtered slowly from farm to farm until finally it got to us. The first thing my mom said, standing in the passage in her candlewick dressing gown, tears streaming down her face, was 'my god, it's getting to be like the Congo here'.

Tim Butcher is quite astute in his observations about white Africans sometimes.

It depressed me. Especially when I read this article this morning.

I talked to B yesterday about taking the boys home to South Africa for Christmas this year and the conversation turned, as it does, to the stability of Africa. He says South Africa is like Zimbabwe was 12 years ago when we left. I don't know, I can't really tell. He mentioned rolling blackouts of electricity, which only started in Zimbabwe in 1997 or so I think, but which are common in South Africa now. Hearteningly, wikipedia has no entries for human rights abuses under the South Africa entry.

I try not to follow African news at all. Sokwanele is the only media I read about Zimbabwe and M reads the BBC and tells me what has been happening in Zimbabwe. He is always surprised that my attitude to the news of atrocities, shootings, mutilation and murder is indifferent at best and blase at worst. It's not that I don't care, it's that I have African apathy. No optimism = no disappointment.

My mom, on the phone last week, told me that she thinks that if South Africa cuts power to Zimbabwe something 'might happen'. I heard this irrational hopeful tone in her voice and my heart sank. How, after 28 years of watching Zimbabwe stumble, falter and fail can she have any kind of optimism at all?

People ask me all the time, 'why don't your parents come and live here?' as though removing one's parents from their home country, the country of which you are a third generation citizen, is that easy. 

On that note, my citizenship exam for the Netherlands will be on 11 July. Shortly after that I'll bury my past and say goodbye to my heritage, while I embrace orange culture and a world removed from steamy Africa. 

• Get my driver's licence. Yes!
• Lose 40 pounds. Done and more.
  
• Go to the gym at least three times a week. Not at the moment but I did for two years.
• Drink 8 glasses of water a day.
• Go vegetarian. Did that and then stopped, because I really do quite like being an omnivore.

'I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the wilfully blind, accomodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self-righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?'

'Don't you remember how furious you would get as a little boy when Mama knew best what was good for you? Even how far one can act like this with children is a real problem. It is a philosophical problem, but philosophy does not concern itself  with children. ...But with adults I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves. ... We're not talking about happiness, we're talking about dignity and freedom. Even as a little boy you knew the difference. It was no comfort to you that your mother was always right.'

'I've looked for love in stranger places.' - Melee, Built to Last

1. Preheat oven to 230C.
   
2. Butter the bread and cut into fingers. Layer in an ovenproof buttered dish with the raisins.
   
3. Sprinkle each layer with cinnamon, sugar and orange zest. Don't be stingy with the sprinkling, you can't have too much of these things.
4. Beat the eggs and milk together, then pour over the bread. Leave to soak for about 15 minutes but longer if you have the patience.
   
5. Bake on combination 6 (this is in a panasonic combi oven, if you have a different kind just wing it) for about 20 - 25 minutes until golden.
6. Serve hot with cream.

1. Preheat oven to 200C.
2. Grease or spray a shallow 1 3/4 litre baking dish.
3. Spread slices with butter and marmalade and cut into triangles.
4. Combine juice and rinds in a bowl, add castor sugar and combine until dissolved.
5. Line bottom and sides of dish completely with triangles of bread dipping them into the orange syrup as you use them and arranging them buttered side up. Filled the lined dish with the remainder of the bread triangles, reserving a few for the top of the pudding.
6. Make the custard by heating the milk to just below boiling point then beat the eggs lightly and pour the hot milk onto them gradually, beating constantly. Return the mixture to the pan, add sugar and stir over a low heat until the custard thickens to the point where it will coat the back of the spoon.
7. Remove from the heat, cool slightly and stir in the cream.
8. Pour the custard over the bread in the baking dish, cut the remaining triangles in half and soak in the rest of the syrup and arrange on the top of the pudding. Pour the leftover syrup over the top.
9. Bake for 30 minutes or until crisp and golden on the outside with a soft creamy centre.