COVID-19 CHRONICLE

Another restless night. In lockdown, sleeping is to night as cycling is to day — it doesn’t happen. In the Company’s Garden, the hadeda ibis’ are loud and irreverent. Routine. Take a cup from the Colombia Café and sit on the balcony. Watch the sunlight spread down Signal Hill in a blink. Twilight is like that on the continent: one second the world is dark, you blink and it’s clear. Further north, light emerges, like layers of tissue paper being removed from the landscape and you ease out of darkness, things take shape, then light gets in. Down on the street, the city cleaners in their yellow overalls and white bibs, walk carrying brooms over their shoulders and plastic scoops. Some wear their face masks jauntily on their foreheads or casually strung under their chins; very few wear them across their nose and mouth. They’re out there every day, sweeping the empty streets, chatting to the security guards and enforcement personnel. It’s mind-numbingly reassuring, this long-term preparation for our return to normal.
Once, in Omdurman, buying a broom in a hardware store owned by a friend, a laconic, amiable man married to a woman from northern Europe, where he had spent some time in exile (though he never described it as such), he asked, “For the courtyard or inside?” “Courtyard.” He spoke to a boy sweeping the aisle, and said, “Let’s have a coffee.” We crossed over the street.
“He says he has 99 flavours of coffee. Praise be to Allah,” said my friend, as he ordered. We sat on a carpet on the floor. A man sitting to the side, greeted us, and said to me, “Welcome, welcome! You are my son’s professor.” “Thank you. No. No.” I said. “I am his English teacher — but not a professor.”
He turned to my friend speaking in Arabic, for a while and I could not follow the conversation. My friend eventually turned to me and said, “He wants to tell you a story, and I will translate.” I shrugged, thinking maybe I had given his son a poor mark, or had called him out in class for miscreant behaviour, and he, the father, was now going to give me a good lecturing. It went something like this.
There are always two ways of doing things, said the father. Two ways to be a shopkeeper; two ways to be a coffee maker (I didn’t know the word barista existed then); two ways to be a teacher.
He paused to sip his coffee, while my friend translated. Here it comes I thought.
But let us speak about a man who decides to make a drum. Immediately, this man sets off into the forest, finds a tree, fells it, and hews the wood for a drum base. Then he marches into his field, catches the nearest goat, slaughters it, and stretches the skin out to dry. Later, he will cut the skin, stretch it over the base, and work it until it made the correct sound, and then he would play it. Another man also desires to make a drum. He goes about his business each day, takes walks in the forest, talks with his friends, And then one day he will come across the right tree. It will have the right feel. So, he will cut the tree, and he will set aside the wood for some days because you cannot simply take from the land, savage a tree, without a ceremony of thanks and without it having a role within the larger picture of the world. He would do the same with the goat. He would go about his daily business again, until he came across the right goat, one that felt suitably sacred, and would give the right energy to the drum. Then he would wait for the right time to sacrifice the goat. The first man will laugh and say this takes too much time. But for the second man, time is meaningless. For him, the drum was a sacred vessel to be fashioned with ritual, with respect for the wood and skin that formed it because it would be imbued with their soul and would hold within it deeply significant knowledge. It would be an instrument to be revered and treasured. If made any other way, it would not be a drum; it would just be a wood block with skin over it.
We all three sat in silence, sipping a fresh cup of coffee. He stood up and said, some students when the teachers have finished with them are but wood blocks with skin over it; others leave as vessels with deep knowledge. Then he left.
The boy from the hardware store called. A customer was waiting. He held out my broom. I thanked him, turned to pay, and my friend shrugged. “You had to listen to his story. That’s payment enough.”
Yesterday, a good friend who was called upon to review the ten musical albums that most influenced him or were the best of his lifetime, or most extraordinary, or whatever — I know it’s another FB effort to squeeze more personal information from users — and instead he chose to review the ten most overrated. His review of Steely Dan’s Aja contains two of this year’s best comments. His writing is wittily acerbic, his opinions surgically precise, and his judgement as solid as a wooden mallet smacking bone china. This album he says, is “the musical equivalent of ironing your jeans”. And it doesn’t stop there. Yes, he grants, there “are some lovely melodies and lyrics here, yet it’s like the food the astronauts are given — perfectly balanced and absurdly nutritious, but nonetheless space powder. There’s just no goodness in it. It’s utterly fake”. After drying my eyes, I wrote him, and he immediately responded with a description of Trump he had noticed on Twitter, in which the US Bozo of Note is described, among other choice lines, as a man “wearing a dead ferret on his head”. The passage leapt to the top of the year’s best comments. He conceded gracefully, saying the man’s description of Trump deserved it because it was true. Can’t argue with that. It’s late. Outside, there are arguments in the dark. I close the door.