Via email, Hester asks how I am doing here in Joburg.
Great. Terrific. But sorry I left Amsterdam just two days after bars and cafes were allowed to open again.
“Yes,” she writes back, “it feels really good to bike around a city where people actually live outdoors again.”
A day before my flight, walking next to a young women making unintelligible squeals of delight I ask: “How come you are so happy?”
“Everything’s open, again,” she says.
“Yeah, isn’t it glorious?”
Two months of walks to the supermarket and . . . that’s it, suddenly replaced by smiling imbibers behind every plate glass window. Candles and white wine and people re-imagined into the frame of life. Like walking through a museum in which all the pictures have been turned around and then suddenly entering the room of Manet’s and Renoir’s where all is right side round.
More rooms like this one, please, . . .