Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: entitled

  • waking up in Africa

    It is my birthday tomorrow and I’ve woken up in Africa! Beautiful Ghana of the glorious peoples. At the spanking new immaculate airport a man was bobbing at his keyboard and singing, in the arrivals hall, “And you’ve all arrived safely on this Wednesday night, hope you’ve had a great flight, welcome, welcome.” My flight was grumpy cos we got stuck on the runway for an hour (in, you know, air-conditioned comfort with personalised movies to watch) and I reminded the guy rolling his eyes next to me and complaining, you are in Africa. You arrived here on a million-dollar machine. A fast-disappearing luxury neither our planet nor most people working late at this airport can afford. We were fed and offered tiny bottles of wine and scented towels to wipe our hands and no one fell out of the sky on long wings of flame *just enjoy it!* Singing and bobbing in the passport queue, overjoyed to see my sweetest honey the kindest most gorgeous man in the world, whom I adore, who waited patiently outside in the crowd an hour for me and carried all my cases. I travel heavy, mostly books.

    He had brought me a malaria tablet and fed it to me in a swallow of boiled drinking water in the car park. Then we got as close to each other as we can on the back seat and drove away into Ghana. What a blessing and privilege to be here, to be with him, even to know him when we have spent our lives on separate continents, to be running a tiny business with big eyes that wants to construct a way for Europeans to offer ‘personal, partial’ reparations to Africa.

  • buy for me

    Young, scruffy, insouciant Indian boy is walking by the greasy canal with his parents. Evidently he’s been showing them Berlin. Lifting his shapeless hand in a vague gesture towards the old, carved terraces he says:

    If I were ever rich –

    the slight rush of his r’s making it clear he quite expects this to happen, doesn’t expect it to be all that difficult –

    and they pass on, his parents well-heeled and looking rather bored as though Berlin in its filthy grey boilersuit does not impress them, barely glancing at the costly apartment houses he has chosen out for them to buy for him.

  • opportunista

    In the supermarket I was queuing in front of a woman with a lot of groceries. Her arms were laden and I stepped aside to offer her the space to put her stuff down on the conveyor. Germans are possessive about their conveyor space and it remains the only country where I have ever had someone not only install one of the little dividers between my groceries and his, but then lean across me to reinstate the missing divider between mine and the person’s in front of me; then rock back on his heels and give a satisfied nod, saying to himself almost sweetly, “Hmmphf.”

    The woman spilled her goods onto the belt and said, “Ich hab’ gerade ‘was vergessen. Kannst du…” She had forgotten something, she darted away into the aisles and disappeared. I said hello to the guy with all the piercings who works the register. He scanned my bunches of vegetables one at a time. The woman slipped back into her place in the queue and put one of those toilet ducks on the belt beside her things. She smiled at me. Her smile, and the fact that she’d used du rather than Sie earlier, gave me a slender opportunity and I made the most of it.

    “Kannst du bitte – das nächste Mal – vielleicht daran denken, etwas ein kleines bisschen umweltgesunder zu probieren?” Couldn’t you please, next time, perhaps think of trying something a bit environmentally healthy? I tipped the plastic duck-beaked bottle to show her. “This stuff is complete poison. It goes down the drain and comes back out the tap, goes into our rivers. There is a brand called – Frog, I think they sell it here, you might try it.” I strove to sound as casual and off-handed as I could. This is perhaps the five hundredth such conversation I have had in a grocery store with a stranger and I’ve got skills. “Have you ever thought about trying the recycled paper toilet tissue?” I’ll ask, sidling up like a flasher in the aisle. “Ah, no,” they might say, looking startled. Often they confide they have sensitive skin and it’s supposed to be much scratchier. Oh, good god. Around us in the shadows rainforests fall to bulldozers and orangutans limp away from palm oil plantations so that we can eat our corn chips and make our soap. “Actually, it’s softer,” I always say. I’m smiling. “I mean – it’s been pulped twice.”