summer rain- postcolonial creatures

The cool weather and the dark skies brings back memories which have been pushed into a corner in the crowd, which I have not had time to contemplate...

I sit at a crowded table in a Thai restaurant and the smiling (but nice) waiter brings me my diluted ginger tea-- it is in fact just ginger and hot water. The Southafrican by my side is inspired and orders one herself, I tell her to ask them to dilute it from the start. I put some lemon into it, and try to chat up the Anglo-Irish guy on my left, but he's not forthcoming. I see that his attention is fixed on the slanted eye Austrian beauty (surely she has some Oriental ancestry), but she's too far away to speak, it's a very noisy joint. Then the Southafrican and the English guy diagonal from me start talking about a conference in Joberg, and I listen as if all the names should be known to me. I know Joseph Conrad alright, but that's about it. Then the Southafrican lady turns to me once again and asks me if I find it difficult to find halal food in Germany. I whine. The slanted eye Austrian beauty eyes me, I don't know whether to play the good neighbour or the nasty exile. I turn the topic unto the Nünnings, it never fails in a German speaking context. Then the Austrian beauty and I exchange compliments concerning our accents, and with her lovely accent the Southafrican lady joins in. The Austrian beauty blushes a little, it will be sometime yet before she gets used to it, it seems. The Southafrican lady is a professor and wears what looks like a hautecouture skirt. I love. She tries to lift my bag and is appalled at the weight. It's my old laptop inside.

It is infernally cold outside and the hot ginger has opened my sinuses. I imagine what it will be like if I breath that in, and decide to take a taxi rather than find a busstop.

I am a stranger in Cambridge. And I have come so ill-prepared, I don't even have a map of the town. Unheard of in my travelling history. And in the dark it will be triply difficult- finding the salmon-coloured English faculty in the morning was quite an adventure in broad day-light. I missed the talk of the professor from Leeds, is that why he spurns every attempt at conversation I make and turns his head towards the Southafrican professor? I do my Southafrican trick. I tell her I have never met a black Southafrican. I tell her that I have even met someone from Swaziland and he was the blondest guy ever.

Anyway, I am pleased with the company of the Austrian beauty and the Southafrican prof who listens to my old tricks with Ottoman composure. I like her.

All those present, it turns out, will be staying in Cambridge that night. So I pack bags and make a move. First the train into London, and then to what seems to be a longer journey into Bromley.

The Bromley library, or rather the librarian, that's still another story...