Angry Bird

The sun has been shining in Cape Town for the last few days. This is a good thing and, given the run of four months with above long term average rainfall, a rare sight since the heady days of May.

While I’m busy mentioning good things, another good thing is the fact that a blog post gives no sense of time and does not require me to list everything that happens from one paragraph to the next. If this was a real time account you’d have just had to witness me jousting with the ghost of Elmore Leonard for breaking his first rule of writing – Never open a book with the weather. I managed to fend him off by showing him a selection of my work where he agreed that I had stuck to his overriding principle by not having anything that sounds like writing anywhere in sight.

But I digress (oops, there goes another five unscripted minutes with me being beaten to death by the never start a sentence with a conjunction police, a little known offshoot of the grammar brigade).

The sun shining in Cape Town is a good thing because it has reminded me that I live in one of the most beautiful places anyone could hope to live in. This is in stark contrast to how I felt last week when, after a long day that saw me missing out on a team function due to an outbreak of idiocy at a client site I found myself hunched over the wheel of my car like an angry lesbian listening to Alanis Morissette. As I crawled through traffic (well, my car did at least – I was far too busy being an angry lesbian) under grey drizzly skies staring out at a giant cloud covering the flat lump of rock that has been voted as one of the new wonders of the world I will confess to being somewhat down in the mouth.

“Bother,” I said, “How unfortunate. It appears that the traffic is going rather slowly.”

Cloud on the mountain generally has the same effect on the locals as a magnet on a pacemaker. I saw several vehicles abandoned by the side of the road, their previous inhabitants stumbling along the side of the highway desperately looking for Devil’s Peak to get their bearings. So confused was one individual that I actually witnessed him leaving a gap open for a woman in a car bearing Gauteng plates to swap lanes in to.

Luckily I am an import and spent most of the journey home randomly swearing.

It took a while for my mood to improve over the weekend so I concentrated more on my return to running rather than on editing a couple of stories I’ve recently completed. In the space of eight short days I managed to run a combined total of just under a marathon in roughly the same time it took Ellen MacArthur to circumnavigate the globe. Good to see that base fitness is alive and well and that the shiny happy mood displayed in my recent post about the irrelevance of time has been buried under a long line of cars.

All this is just my way of explaining why The Curse has still not seen the light of day (I know you are all on pins regarding the mute whistler cliffhanger). If it makes you feel any better there’s a man trapped on a page with an imaginary talking cat keeping the other story company. As of this moment he doesn’t even have a title to cling on to after a Google search revealed that the amazingly witty option of Imagicat has already been taken.

OK, OK, I get it…no more rambling, time to get out the red pen and start hacking…