I haven’t posted anything for a long time. Things change. I have less hair and greyer stubble. From where I write, I look due east over rooftops and then the sprawl of twinkling city lights to the distant line of mountains, etched hard and clear by the dawn. They are the mountains in which we used to live. For twenty-five years. Until the unrelenting tide of change swept that all away, with the force and violence of which it is perfectly capable.
But this is not about that. It is not about big stories. For it is often not the big stories that are important, but the little ones.
I awake, on my fifty-third birthday, in the most beautiful place on earth. The first of the pure white sandbanks are already exposed, with the tide still running out. The wind is from the north-west, the winter wind that brings rain and cold. But today it is soft and gentle, yet chilly. The dawn is silver-grey and unremarkable. None of the showy, warm tones of a typically African sunrise. Simpler. Cleaner. So that you have to look more intently to see the perfection.
