Coming up for air

In between assignments.

I’ve just handed in a big school assignment¹ and am about to get stuck into the next one. Before I do so, in the spirit of productive procrastination, I thought I’d say “Hi!”

Slightly surreally, I’m now a little over halfway through the programme in sustainable development I began in February. A few thoughts:

• I’m starting (I think?!) to get the hang of the academic writing and referencing thing (which I hadn’t done in ~14 years) so assignments aren’t quite as terrifying a prospect as they were when I embarked on the first one

• It’s not always easy to juggle studying with work, housekeeping, living on another continent, caring for a spouse with a broken leg etc. but it’s been totally worth it. My undergraduate degree was at best underwhelming, so it’s been so nice that my postgraduate studies so far have been anything but. I’ve been blessed with fascinating, fun, insightful and enthusiastic classmates, lecturers and guest presenters from a wide range of different backgrounds; the combination has resulted in an extremely enriching and enjoyable learning experience

• A perk of being a university student again is having free access to almost any academic journal article ever published. The amount of joy this brings me confirms that I’m even nerdier than I thought I was

• After extensive (and extremely calorific) comparative research, I have concluded that Moro Gelato offers the best ice cream in central Stellenbosch

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While I was in South Africa to attend classes, I only made the pilgrimage to my favourite beach, Bakoven, once. For a couple hours, I sat on the rocks psyching myself up to take the plunge. Then a man from the council came to erect a sign.

He explained a fault at the nearest pump station had led to a sewage spill and so there was now a temporary advisory against swimming. It was a sobering reminder that Cape Town pumps millions of litres of untreated sewage every day into the ocean².

Since getting back home, I’ve been managing to swim fairly frequently (in a pool that’s not as beautiful as Bakoven, but warmer and less likely to contain e.coli). Yet again, swimming has reminded me that when I get into water on a regular basis, life on land is a whole lot more bearable. It’s amazing how quickly one is prone to forget something so obvious.

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On the opening night of the Frameline film festival a few months ago, I watched a movie at the magnificent Castro Theatre for the first time. The movie, Fairlyand, was as wonderful as the venue (in spite of being shot on a shoestring over 23 days). Speaking of shoestring indies, the Melbourne-set Of an Age was playing on one of my flights home and it was lovely: bittersweet, poignant, sexy.

I had almost given up on streaming — there’s nothing quite like And Just Like That... to make you want to scratch your eyes out. Luckily, Deadloch has offered a glorious antidote to my disenchantment with the small screen. In addition to its abundant hilarity (and a beguiling silliness), the mystery/dark comedy offers a super smart and spot-on skewering of rural gentrification, privilege, chauvinism and Australia’s colonial legacy.

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I’m tempted to blame the meagre number of books I’ve read lately on having to read so much for my studies, but that would be a half-truth — consuming far too many news stories is surely as much a culprit. That said, I did recently get to — and thoroughly enjoyed — Lily King’s Writers and Lovers³, Paul David Gould’s Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants and Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains.

1. This one was for my Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services module which explored the contributions nature makes to humans, why and how we ought to conserve it, and lots of other good stuff.

2. This was (I guess?) a good idea when it was first thought of many decades ago, but certainly isn’t now. If you’re curious as to why treating the ocean as a toilet isn’t such a good idea, Water Stories has you covered.

3. A friend recommended this to me when I told him about the travails of trying to find a literary agent for my novel. I’ve blown way past the number of rejections that Writers and Lovers’ protagonist got for her manuscript, so the solace the book offers about the struggling aspirant novelist’s life has been bittersweet.