“The wind that comes off the Sahara towards the Atlantic is called Harmattan. The breezes over Senegal and Mauritania mingle with the warm waters near Cape Verde and occasionally become one of those end-of-summer storms that plod their way up the Mid-Atlantic states, dropping enormous amounts of rain and causing damage.”
In this our land we have a term for suffering, shege. The proverbial phrase seeing shege is a present participle tense that describes the action of going through it — suffering. And there’s levels to it you see, because in this our land we’re all in the same hell, just different levels.
I am now forever connected to that city but not because of the house, because of the people and relationships that were forged over that time.
During the pandemic, Matt Cotten reflected on his time in Kilifi. He was finally able to return in September 2022. Here is the before and after.
The Monkees couldn’t put a foot wrong for this ten-year old boy, yet to worry about small parts and auditions … yet to discover that they weren’t in fact cool, because they were manufactured and didn’t write their own songs, yet to discover that despite all that they were still brilliant.
They are works that make you feel happy. There is a level of complexity in the music that your brain can grasp immediately.
“I think I then immediately boxed my heart away and tightened the great padlock over my chest so that I couldn’t feel anything that would undermine or dissolve me…”
“It was a terrifying record, an exhilarating record, it was everything I ever hoped to be, everything I feared, a prophet crying in the wilderness”
“Most of my traumatic moments, my lonely moments, my brave moments have been hidden inside my personal soundtrack. The music made it all bearable.”
They were at the height of their power, where they would stay for another 4 years. I was at the depths of my weakness, and forever afterward lived in fear of repeating it. I built my heart’s castle wall from the mud of Selmeston village. I wouldn’t start to unravel it until I was in my mid-fifties.
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