Mokkori Sweat!

Aaron is now gone.
It was pretty cool to see him again. Leon and I met him in Portugal in the tail of 2002, and the three of us went down to Lagos together for random fun in the sun. Those of you who have seen the hidden surprise pictures on the Leon Is A God site will have seen some of the beach we hung out on.
Edinburgh was full of great weather for his visit. We went up Arthur’s Seat and almost got blown to Fife, and generally stomped around and talked a lot of shit. As you do.
Aaron is a chef by trade and, uniquely, appears as himself as a chef in ‘Ron the Body’. Well, so far only his footsteps have been heard, but he gets a whole chapter named after him fairly soon.
Some people at work have vaguely coalesced into a writing circle; we’ve set up a “secret room” on the work intranet where we post stuff we’ve written and discuss. There’s only three active people so far, plus two invited yet-to-participate lurkers. It’s always a pleasure to be reminded of the energy of sheer creativity going on just out of view everywhere around us. On top of that, it’s genuinely excellent stuff – and I’ve read a lot of people’s writing over the years, so I’m not exactly speaking from ignorance.
Waaaaaay better than everything at that Masters in Creative Writing performance night I snarked about a month or two back.
I finally got around to making that donation I promised. I decided to donate to the Al-Rowwad Centre in Aida Refugee Camp, Palestine. (Do click through if you have a moment, it’s fascinating and there are lots of great photos of the kids performing.)
The work they do there is incredibly valuable and it really made an impression on me when we visited in April. Hmm, I don’t say much in the writeup though, do I? Oh well. It’s nice to send them some support, however small. The irony, of course, is that the director of Al-Rowwad was the one who said to us “We in Palestine don’t want you to send us money! We don’t need cash donations – we need an economy!” I trust he’ll forgive me 🙂
(NB: T and newly-daddy-for-a-third-time Matt both commented on that original post that sponsoring a child might be a good option; I’ve decided not to do that with this windfall because of its one-off nature, but the seed of an idea has well and truly been planted.)
I have a whole bunch of comments to reply to in the last month’s worth of posts. A few go back even further than that. And the world has kept going in the mean time, giving me more to write about to boot. I’ll see what I can do over the next week.
Cal flies home to NZ on the 25th of this month. It’s gonna be strange with her gone.