THE ADVENTURE – Dianne Hofmeyr

It’s 1962. You’re 15. You’re sitting on the fence wearing your first ever bikini… snapped by a friend (never again do you have friends like the ones you have when you're 15) with a Brownie Box camera, staring out with all the vulnerability and all the invincibility that comes with being 15.

You worry about puppy fat. That your lipstick Cutex Kiss Me Quick smeared over with white lipstick, looks frosty enough. Bardot-like. But it’s not Bardot you want to be. It’s Sophia Loren. You practice her lips and even speak Latin into the mirror hoping to sound a bit Italian. Kiss me Quick has hasn’t happened yet but its around the corner. You’re 15 and the whole world lies ahead.

At the start of a year in these heady, first days of January, there's the same feeling of adventure ahead. I wonder who named this The Awfully Big Blog Adventure? I've discovered Penny Dolan has written the most blogs at a score of 126 (counting yesterday's). I come in at 124. That means we’ve been part of this 'adventure' for over 10 years!

'When dreams and reality are one, the miracle has happened,' D H Lawrence inscribed to the artist Georgia O'Keefe in his book, 'Death of a Porcupine and other essays.' 

 

It's 2014.  No... I  didn't fly this plane, I stood there under its wing in the middle of the Namib Desert in a place called Wolwedans, which literally means where the Wolves Dance but more accurately where the Spotted Hyena hunts. We flew into the red dunes with skylines punctured by the silhouettes of oryxes...  'my dreams and reality are one'. 

It's 2018. 'My dreams and reality are one' again when I spend a few nights miles from anywhere, under ancient baobabs in the Okavango with a group of old friends, where dried elephant footprints embedded in the salt pans from who knows when... tell their own story and in the darkness I listen to the whoop of a hyena and the continuous prrr of an African Scops owl.

After this, my 125th blog, I’m signing off from The Awfully Big Blog Adventure. Thank you for the times we’ve had together, the comments and the cameradie and especially to Penny and Sue for keeping us all on track. Never when I started this, did I think I'd write a blog once a month for more than 10 years. What an adventure!

Landscapes are intrinsic to who we are... something we go back to time and again and draw strength from. So it seems right to close off with these two photographs.

It's 1952, me aged 5, with my father in front of the Zimbabwe ruins dated Sat.16th Aug.'52 in his handwriting. Little did I know that 50 years later I would set a historical novel, The Waterbearer, in this exact place, that would go on to win an IBBY Honour Book Award. 

It's 2018. The dusk of a quiet day in London between Christmas and New Year, when a pollarded London Plane tree turns a church steeple into a Baobab and I smell the woodsmoke of Africa.

A wonderfully adventurous 2019 to all of you. Did you see Venus chasing the rising moon this morning? For the next few days Venus, Jupiter and Mercury will all line up with the moon at dawn. May your planets line up this year. May you write like your pen will never run out of ink. May your dreams and reality be one. May you be invincible!

www.diannehofmeyr.com
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Twitter: @dihofmeyr
Latest book: Tiger Walk illustrated by Jesse Hodgson and published by Otter-Barry Books