Tourist

You’re not a tourist. It’s one of the things that makes you different. You travel with work. It gives you insights into places.

You’ve been to Africa many times before.

So you have a day working hard, sweating, and then you decide it’s time for some fun. You know someone who used to live here. She has told you what the local drink is, and how to order it. Then you met, today, a guy who knows the town well. Earlier, you walked past a door that leads into a shop, and he pointed to it, saying, go through the shop, and that’s the best locals’ bar.

You won’t find any tourists in there.

So you’re tired, cut adrift as you often feel on these foreign trips, and a little confused by things happening at home. You should return to your hotel. But you don’t like your hotel. It’s basic, and grubby, and power and water are intermittent. You have be sanguine about this, because you know Africa, but you don’t like the feeling of lying there early, in the dark, or if the light works, pretending to read.

Your hotel does not have a bar.

You feel, when it comes down to it, that there should be more drinks in this evening. So you head to this place that was pointed out to you earlier. It is dark, and you do not feel confident. But you’ve had just enough to drink already to decide this might be a good idea. The edges have been rubbed off. The first time you miss the entrance. You walk past, but realise before too long your mistake. You backtrack, feign confidence, head in.

You greet the men you were talking to this morning, even though you are not sure they are the same men.

You stride through and... it’s great. An open courtyard, a home-made looking bar, to your left, the sea. You sit in a plastic chair at an empty plastic table. It is very dark, and you can only see silhouettes, cigarette flares. This reminds you that you can smoke in bars here, so you light up, dragging on the rough, local cigarettes you bought from some boys on the street earlier that day, feeling a participant in this city rather than a tourist when you did so. You struggle to make yourself understood to the woman who is serving, but on the third pronunciation you succeed. She brings you a glass, and a transparent plastic sachet full of clear liquid, which she cuts open and pours from.

You drink it neat and you like the sting.

This is it, you think. This is... authentic. Drinking local drinks from plastic sachets, and knowing the right thing to ask for. No white tourist would come in here. They would feel intimidated. They would not feel safe. They would stick to the main bars, the well-lit ones, with lights, and menus, and working toilets, and lots of other white people. They would deny themselves this experience. You light a second cigarette. When the serving woman comes and asks if you want one more, you say yes.

It’s just... you’re drinking the neat drink and you’re on the phone to your wife, as it happens, who you have not spoken to on this trip, when the girl comes up to you, puts her hand on your shoulder and asks if you want company. You gesture her away, not rudely, but look, I’m on the phone. You think about making light of it with your wife, but decide not to. She is liable to get the wrong end of the stick.

When you finish the call, the girl comes back, and you tell her you’re fine, and she goes away.

Then you’re smoking and texting someone who isn’t your wife, when a man comes up and says hi. You respond neutrally, whereupon he whispers in your ear about some really great shit from Malawi he has. Again, you politely decline, trying not to cause offence. But really, you’re getting irked. You just want to sit here, in the dark, being quiet, getting mildly drunk, smoking cigarettes and making contact with people in the UK in case they forget where you are.

Really, can’t these people just leave me alone?

And then you’re doing nothing, not drinking, not smoking, not communicating, not even thinking really, having said yes again when asked again if you want one more, just sitting there in the dark looking at the sea, when a man comes up to you and insists he is the driver of the taxi you ordered. When you tell him that you ordered no taxi, because you need none, because your hotel, however basic, is five minutes away, there, in that direction, and you point, he changes tack. Will you need one? Perhaps tomorrow? In the future? Do you plan any excursions? When do you leave? How will you get to the airport? And again, you’re ever so polite in saying no, because you’re never going to be one of these tourist types, the ones who snap at the locals.

So then you decide you’ve had enough and your hotel, even in the dark, might after all be the sensible place to be.

You finish your drink, light one more cigarette and when asked again if you want one more, this time you say no. Instead you call for the bill. When it comes you happily overpay it, refusing to quibble, knowing you’re being ripped off, but feeling that it forms part of the duty of someone in your position to be ripped off.

As you pay, the girl from earlier reappears, and asks if you can buy her a coke.

You say no, and get up to leave as quickly as you can without trying to make it too obvious. You head back to your hotel, walking slowly, more unsteadily than you’d like, trying to mask your drunkenness, although you fail to find the exit correctly the first time.

You know you’re fair game. You know, despite the failure you view yourself as, that you enjoy incredible privilege and success in the eyes of those other people in the bar. You know that while you want to feel part of some great humanity, they just want to swap places. And you know there is nothing you are ever going to do that could change that.

It’s just, can’t we pretend for one night? What’s wrong with just wanting to have a good night out somewhere else?

Green Park

On Sunday night and Monday morning, snow fell. Perhaps only once a decade is the city blanketed. Movement stopped, but I travel on the only tube line still running. A handful of us reluctantly straggled into work. We compensated ourselves by lunching in a deserted pub, then throwing snowballs and making a snowman into the otherwise virginal gardens of our building. Snow had revealed the magic of trees, and reminded us that we are something more than our jobs and journeys.

By Wednesday rain came and the temperature had raised. Our proud snowman was washed down to a meaningless stump. And on Thursday, when I made my daily walk through Green Park, I saw this image repeated dozens and dozens of times. The park was an eerie battlefield of stumps. Everywhere I looked there were these snowbases, rapidly fading memories of a brief moment of frivolity and fun when we all downed tools to play at being kids again.

I stopped, and looked, and sort of mourned. Around me, heads down, umbrella wielders hurried, late for work.