Walk It Off. Erns Grundling
neck can add to the obstruction of the airway. After my tests the specialist immediately wanted to prescribe a CPAP device. But I resisted, especially when I heard about the new Provent plasters, which are practically invisible and much less of a drama than a machine. But the specialist insisted: I needed a CPAP device to help me get a good night’s rest, to boost my metabolism and help me to lose weight, and also to prepare me for the Camino. In fact, in his view I did not stand much of a chance of completing the Camino without a CPAP device. He also recommended a special lightweight CPAP machine to make travelling easier. It all just felt too much like a one-sided push to sell me an expensive machine, so I went for a second opinion and decided to take my chances on the Camino with one packet of nice and expensive Provent plasters (R1 140 for thirty), which would hopefully bring some relief for my fellow hikers in the night if my snoring were to become unbearable.
* * *
The pilot announces that we are flying over Mecca and that those sitting on the right of the plane should be able to see it. I’m on the right. It’s already pitch dark outside. Mecca’s lights glimmer far in the distance, the holy place where millions of Muslims end their pilgrimage. From up here it looks like a massive power plant in the middle of nowhere.
* * *
Midnight at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar. About 24 hours ago I was still at a Boland wedding, twirling a bridesmaid around on the dance floor with clumsy enthusiasm to Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best”.
It’s a song that always brings back memories. At high school I was a sprinter, believe it or not. Our U-19 relay team at Uitenhage’s Hoërskool Brandwag was pretty sharp. Our X factor was the guy who ran the home leg: Wylie Human, who played for almost every Super Rugby team in the country in later years.
Tina Turner’s hit was our theme song. In the heats at the Volkswagen Prestige meeting on the tartan track at the University of Port Elizabeth, we were way ahead of all the other teams timewise. The final was going to be broadcast live on television.
I was to run the third leg of the race. But poor Gideonfell at the starting block and we literally bit the dust. Later that evening, watching the grown-up athletics, half-stunned, we heard “Simply the Best” blaring from the loudspeaker …
* * *
Doha’s new airport is overwhelming. I feel like Dorothy’s little dog Toto, in The Wizard of Oz, when she says, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more …”
I reckon Qatar looks ready to host the Soccer World Cup in 2020 – but they’re going to have to do something about the weather. It was uncomfortably hot and humid when we got off the plane – this, just before midnight.
I move with the mass of new arrivals in rows through passport control and reach the shiny and hyper-modern arrivals hall with a TV screen as big as a tennis court. Images advertising the Al Khaliji banking group flash across the screen.
But the TV screen is nothing compared to the huge bloody bear in the middle of the arrivals hall. At first I thought the seven-metre-high yellow bear was a Lindt chocolate advert, but apparently it’s a legendary work of art: Untitled (Lamp/Bear). It was created ten years ago by Swedish neo-Dadaist Urs Fischer, and has been on display at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous Seagram building in New York – the building, I might add, on which Go’s home, Cape Town’s Absa building, is modelled.
A member of Qatar’s royal family bought the bear, which weighs about 20 tons, for $6,8 million at a Christie’s auction. Impressive, but also a bit unsettling: a reading lamp sticks out behind the bear, as if someone has forced it into the teddy’s back.
The reading lamp reminds me that Slagtersnek needs finishing. My flight leaves for Paris in under eight hours, just enough time to finish and email the article before Monday kicks off in Cape Town for my editor and colleagues. A sterile hotel room nearby would have been perfect; alas, I bought my ticket on special, so I don’t qualify for accommodation.
* * *
I check in at the Oryx Lounge, a luxurious space that looks more like the domain of business class passengers, to bat out the night at the airport. My friend Le Roux often speaks of “the high premium on self-entertainment”. Forty euros for eight hours in the Oryx Lounge is certainly a high premium, especially since what lies ahead for me can hardly be called entertainment.
But I really don’t want to struggle with Slagtersnek in the arrivals hall, near the yellow bear, with the laptop on my lap.
The Oryx Lounge is clinical yet luxurious: a spacious room with laminate floors, hyper-modern standard lamps and rows of comfortable leather chairs. And no shortage of food: a buffet with dates, olives, dried fruit, rolls, cheeses, pastrami and a Nespresso machine. There is a family room, a games room with PlayStations and a computer area where the Macs’ little white apples gleam.
I drink the first of many coffees and settle into a leather chair. Okay: time to wring this Slagtersnek article’s neck. Starting the Camino without finishing this thing first would be career-limiting, to say the least. I might as well not bother going back to work when I get back to Cape Town in mid-June. The thought of walking for forty days with that sword hanging over my head makes me feel sick.
I’ve always found airports to be good spaces to work in. I’ve seen countless articles through their dying moments at airports, sometimes in transit between flights. I’ve even often wondered whether I should open an airport satellite office. I’m just more focused at airports, for some reason. Maybe it’s just that, when an article is dangerously late, my tail feathers catch fire, so to speak, to such a degree that my grey matter really starts shifting gears.
The Man Who Wasn’t There is a movie by the Coen brothers in which Billy Bob Thornton plays the lead. I also feel, sometimes, as if I’m not really present in the places I find myself. There’s certainly a case to be made for the old AA saying “Wherever you go, there you are”, but I don’t always experience it like this. At least not psychically.
Around me tourists are lounging – people in transit, between airports, between past and future experiences, adventures, loves, disappointments, business transactions … Some are sleeping, others are trying to, squirming and fiddling. Most are absorbed in the small screens in their hands, earphones plugged in. It is quiet in here – no background music, just the soft clink of cutlery every now and then as people help themselves to something from the buffet. A long night lies ahead for all of us. A long night under bright neon lights that remind you of a university library.
The article is slowly taking shape. I’m listening to Micah P. Hinson, a troubled singer from Texas who, at the age of 33, has the gravelly, husky voice of an 80-year-old taking the last puff of a Lexington.
A deeply strange way of working, this. The man who wasn’t there. How many times haven’t I been in this position? Every time, I promise myself: this is the last time. But like an addict who buggers up the finest intentions and promises with a relapse, it’s not long before I’m here again, in the discomfort zone I know so intimately.
The worst is when I embark on the next Go story before I’ve even completed the articles I’m still working on.
In a seedy two-star hotel in freezing Belfast (Mpumalanga’s, not Ireland’s) I once had to write an article about game ranger Christiaan Bakkes and his Jack Russell, Tiger, under extraordinary pressure – as all the town’s characters reported to the bar, one by one.
In a guesthouse in Winburg I struggled half to death to finish an article about the Gifberg resort outside Vanrhynsdorp. In a rondawel in the old Transkei, with the sea as a soundtrack, I wrestled with the closing paragraphs of a piece about a road trip between Carolina and Barberton.
In Tsumeb I literally locked myself in a room at the Minen Hotel for a weekend to wrap up a story on the Knysna forest’s characters (including two of the last true traditional foresters). A kind of boot camp for the psyche …
Here I am, freaking out at Hamad International Airport, building sloppy sentences in the vague hope of generating 2 500 readable words on Slagtersnek before the new day dawns at the start of