Alhamdulillah!

Not broken. Only badly sprained. Will be on crutches for a week or so, but leaving for Djenne as planned on Saturday!

So Cross....

This time honoured room at the Swedish Residence, which has been the scene of numerous health crises, both Keita's and mine, is once more the stage of another calamity.
I tend to have my head in the clouds, so I am not going to accuse the two young boys who ran into me this lunchtime with their Djakarta, the omnipresent scooter of Mali. I may well be at fault, having perhaps  stepped into the road without due attention...Anyway. there was an almighty smash that sent me flying and I landed on my back, spead-eagled on the road in front of Amandine's in Badalabougou.
Kind passers by pulled my dress down, supported me as I tried to stand up, and in due course I found enough presence of mind to wriggle my toes and try and find out if I had anything broken. It seemed that I did not, at least at first.
So a kind stranger gave me lift back  to Eva's, where I have spent the afternoon resting and indulging in self pity, while  the pain my foot has steadily increased. I can't stand on it. Dear Eva came to commiserate, to plunge my foot into a bucket of ice water and to comfort me with good white wine. Her new chef brought us great dinner in my room.
I am extremely cross. Now, what is THIS supposed to Mean? I do not have the time for this disaster.

Tomorrow my dear friend Karen will pick me up to take me to have the foot ex- rayed to see if it is broken.
I am totally intending to go on to Djenne and Timbuktu, even if it will have to be on crutches, goddammit... Just try and stop me!

The Meaning of Things.

Happy to be back in Mali again. To stay with Eva at the lovely Swedish  residence feels like coming home: so many important events have unfolded here over the last few years. Bamako is pleasant now, neither sweltering hot, nor has the cool period started. I swim in the pool every day and spend most of my time wrestling with administrative details, trying to organize the upcoming  trip to Djenne and Timbuktu.

Today I met Berit, the charming wife of the new Norwegian ambassador to Mali. She has been 
reading this journal, and also the old one Djenne Djenno, and she wanted to meet me so she kindly invited me for lunch in Bamako today. Between starter and main course the conversation took a   philosophical turn...

I have always been an inveterate searcher for the Meaning of Things, with a feeling that  the events that pass by us, or involve us are somehow invested with Meanings that we are supposed to discover, decipher and use as material to form our life.

Berit was not of the opinion that there are Meanings to what happens. ‘Shit Happens’, she accurately pronounced. Yes, I know.  All that happens is  not positive and rosy and all cannot  be construed to be working for our good. I know that I could not even begin this conversation with someone whose son had just died in a car accident. She said that she was not a believer. But I don’t think one needs to be religious to believe that there is a sort of mysterious pattern and purpose to what happens to us.  

“ I don’t mean that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds in some sort of optimistic and delusionary vision of reality”, I said.  Berit probably  meant that to think there is a pattern and a Meaning to things entails a fatalistic passivity: that one is off the hook and one can sit down and wait for it all to happen, like some spectator at a show. One is not  responsible. The events are simply unfolding. But that is not what I mean.

I think of the river again. The river flows by us, fast sometimes and slower sometimes. It is filled with flotsam. All of it Means something, in eternal and infinite combinations. Some of it is meant for us, some of it has nothing to do with us, but is meant for others. We have to try and decipher what belongs to us, and make something out of it. To let it all float by without grasping hold of any of it is to waste it. We will  make mistakes and misunderstand...it is a risky business. But to believe in Meanings and Reasons is not a passive thing, sitting down waiting for things to happen, it is to use the flotsam from the river as it is floating by, and having a hand in shaping one’s destiny.
The action of writing a journal for the last eleven years has has not only recorded events, it has helped to shape my life, because in the choosing of what is recorded and what is discarded one builds structures from all this fast flowing flotsam and continually attempt to grasp and even shape  the Meaning of Things...

Berit works for a human rights organization in Norway. She has taken some time off now to enjoy Mali.  I think in the end we agreed that it is our response and our reactions to what happens to us that is the important ingredient in  the Meaning of Things. In that we form our destiny. And there must be plenty of movement , hope and creative possibilities  in that.

This reminds me of something lovely I read the other day:

Without hope there can be no endeavour…it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded ; for hope itself is happiness and its frustrations, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction. Samuel Johnson on DonQuixote, The Rambler, (1750)

An auspicious lunchtime conversation with a new friend. I am sure it means something...

The Approach of the Journey

This picture greeted me when I dipped into Facebook, somewhat guiltily, just now. I am riding my Yamaha DT from my hotel into Djenne.The picture  was put up by  my cousin Elisabet, a film maker, who is making a documentary about my little mud hotel Djenne Djenno amongst other things. She and her French camera man Henri was with me on the very last evening before closing the hotel, here with Baba, my manager/waiter who worked at the hotel for the whole 11 years. Elisabet is giving a screening of the film as 'work in progress' next week in a Swedish cinema.

 I am supposed to be concentrating on Auckland Castle floor coverings but find my mind wandering.

It hovers over Mali...  Always before leaving I find that a part of me travels before the rest somehow. Now half of me is already there, at the festival of Maoulod in Djenne, when the air reverberates  with the sound of the rythmic, melodious and joyous chanting from fifty  Koran schools, announcing the birth of the Prophet Mohammad. This festival is the best time of the year in Djenne.
I will never forget when I first arrived in 2006- I slept on a roof top and was lulled to sleep by the chanting which continues until sun rise...

I will also go to Timbuktu. This time I will travel down the Niger river from Mopti,  recreating the  river journey I did when I was a teenager.  More of this soon...

Joy.

Something has happened which has made me feel like skipping over little houses, but since I have never talked about this before, not wanting to drag tedious health matters in to contaminate this journal, it will seem of little consequence to anyone who  may look in. But not to me…

For the last few years I have had a problem with my lower spine which has given me a limp and which has become increasingly painful. The last few years have been so overshadowed by Keita’s much worse health problems that whatever was wrong with me seemed unworthy of attention and was more or less ignored.

 I had more or less resigned myself to being confined to a wheel chair within a not too distant future, because at the fleeting consultation I had about it a long time ago  I had been told that nothing could be done and that it would get worse.  Dear Jeremiah, always practical, had tried to comfort me, unsuccessfully, by telling me that it would be perfectly fine: all I would have to do would be to sell my third floor flat and buy one with handicapped access  on  the ground floor, then the NHS would give me not only a wheelchair, but I would be nipping around Ladbroke Grove in one of those electric three wheelers, so what was I complaining about ? It would be quite OK. I can’t say I was convinced, ( I used to ride a Moto Guzzi LeMans Mark2, after all...) but nevertheless, what was there to do, except try and grin and bear it with as much grace as I could muster? I have had a great life…and there would always remain the possibility of the Hurtigrutten, or cruising down the fjords of Norway…so indeed, who was I to complain ?

That was until this week when I met a specialist who told me that whatever prognosis I had been given in the past was completely mistaken! There was nothing terribly wrong with me that a fairly minor operation won’t take care of, and there is even no reason why I shouldn’t ride again ! and I thought that was all over…

The picture seems appropriate as a token of thankfulness: it is from a prayerbook in Djenne, and the picture will appear in an article about the Djenne Manuscript Library written by Anthony Sattin in the upcoming February- March issue of the Christie’s Magazine. The pink colour is painted with ‘Dableni’ the juice of the hibiscus flower.