Twenty years today

It's as if twenty years passed since I last posted something - so sorry - a covid slump of sameness.  I feel terrible even saying it, but the reality is that I am so used to riding the same roads on my bike at the moment that I now have patterns: round the corner, stand in the big ring to the fourth street light pole, swap to small ring... etc.

We came to Hong Kong twenty years ago.  As it is today, it was raining then. How has it been?  Wonderful. Disruptive. Life changing. Alienating.  Gained so much.  Lost so much.  I think best put as you can only live one life, or everything that moving away from a sense of home to somewhere excitingly foreign might mean.  

Memory is so imperfect.  So here is what was happening at a headline level in South Africa in June and beyond, in 2001.  Wikipedia has the following listed as the big events:  Conservation.  A reasonable government visiting abroad.  A world conference against racism.  More conservation.  A census, an interest in who we are as a people.  More conservation.  Some murder - no-one is exempt, and thankfully Kortbroek signs himself off into irrelevance.

The deaths list was stunning.  Guy Butler.  A reference to Pandemic, and an ongoing one, HIV/AIDS.  Nkosi Johnson was the longest surviving child born with HIV at that point, tragically dying at 12, silently highlighting how many had died so much sooner.  Donald Woods, serious newspaper man and friend of Steve Biko - murdered by the security police in 1977; Govan Mbeki, ANC royalty, back when it meant something: Rivonia triallist, friend of Madiba, father of Thabo; 24 years on Robben Island.  Chris Barnard - first ever heart transplant at Groote Schuur - medical marvel.  Joe Modise, Minister of Defense during the Arms Scandal, that really was the start of the rot, and which Jacob Zuma is only now on trial for.  And then the murdered Marika again, grim.

I thought to try contrast this to the front pages - in so far as a digital newspaper has them - today:

So what do we have here?  Clearly another pandemic, but fascinatingly, also reference to the previous or is is ongoing one, if you clicked on the cartoon with the running guy, you would find the HIV pandemic compared to Covid - and as Nkosi Johnson 20 years earlier so tellingly pointed out - they are orders of magnitude different in terms of lives and impact.  And that is not to take the current pandemic lightly.  Infrastructure is a problem - water, power, the environmental crisis takes the place of conservation triumph, Denel is about to fall apart (a silent homage to Joe Modise?) and the police are the biggest gangsters in the country (not in itself a new thing).  On the very positive side, LGBTQ rights have taken huge strides (with many more needed and hopefully to come).  How short is a life?  How much changes yet stays the same.  Spending so much time apart from you has been an incalculable loss and horror - that is a heavy marker over 20 years of absence.