Almost Famous

Following in my pledge to write about life even when it’s crappy, here I am in Toulouse, in a tiny hotel room with a giant extractor fan outside my window spewing fatty smells into the groggy air, miles from the city centre, having had no sleep for 2 nights running. Yes, folks, music journalism is expensive, tiring, and incredibly stressful. It is not the professional holiday-making you might imagine.

I did chose to come to Toulouse and it wasn’t to make money, but I hoped not to lose any. There’s a five-day festival of Senegalese music going on in the beautiful park on the river-side and friends from all-over are here; musician friends from Senegal, Sweden, London, France. It’s a good chance for us all to get together and dance and have fun. But feeling that I can’t take holidays, especially not ones that start with a £350 plane ticket, I scrounged, begged and blagged my way into a few articles and radio pieces which, if I take buses not taxis and eat half-plates of food with Senegalese friends (who will never sit by and watch a girl go hungry) will keep me here until Monday.

So as my Senegalese friends- musicians who have everything paid for for two days so they can strum a few guitar strings for an hour or so- stay in £200 a night hotels in town, get driven around in taxis by drivers whose sole job it is to make sure they get from room to free meal and back to room again safely, and can eat and drink as much as they like for the entirety of their luxurious stay, I, the rich toubab, am going hungry. Where did this all go wrong? They all think it’s funny and share everything around so actually I get driven around too and eat and drink as I please, but I have to do it so the Frogs at the festival don’t see and tell on me…(there’s already been one unsightly altercation over some pasta salad).

Anyway, I got off the plane in Toulouse after an all-night-no-sleep flight via Casablanca and got to my hotel where I got in an hour’s sleep before making a mad dash to and from the phone box and room trying to telephone the PR lady who’s meant to be organising my interview with Senegal’s 75- year old drum revolutionary Doudou N’Diaye Rose. After she had told me twice that she was too busy to deal with me, and that because I was a freelance I couldn’t have a press pass, I gave up and decided I was much more likely to get my interview if I just found the guy’s hotel and asked him myself.

(On the press-pass issue, what makes someone think that because I bring myself here with my own money so that I can do my poorly-paid work to try and cover my costs, means I’m a free-loader? Any old fool can get sent by the BBC on an all-expenses paid trip (and readers, you should know that they do stay in the best hotels, and they do take taxis everywhere unnecessarily, and they do eat and drink in the best restaurants, and that is your TV licensing money that pays for it) and say uninsightful things about Africans and rhythm. All I’m asking for is a 20 Euro pass so that I can do my job properly.)

Anyway, Doudou and I did find each other (in the end, I have to say, the PR lady did come up with the goods) and we did the interview in his porta-cabin and all was going well and then my mini-disc started emitting strange noises…

…sort of crunching noises and whirring and then the monitor showed no peep-peep-peep life signals and I realised that the little innocuous hole where I plug in my microphone has somehow got damaged and no sound is going in. So there goes my £230 job…

After leaping about for an hour or so, (meanwhile the concert is going on and I’m missing all the drumming), trying to get the mini-disc to work and having to run from the stage, where I was recording, to miles away behind the loos where it was quiet enough to listen to the recording to see if it was OK, I did get it to work. Pheww. Got my £230 back.

Then I remembered I had forgotten to take what’s known as a wildtrack, two minutes of sound from the recording room which we use to lay underneath interviews to hid any cuts that get made. So back to the Portacabin where I find a handful of Senegalese drummers all sitting about chatting. The drumming from the stage is too noisy to take my wild track so I have to wait, during which time the Senegalese decide they must make it their mission to find out if I am married, and on discovering I am not, what flight I am taking back so the one who is most ‘in love’ with me (45-ish, quite fat, not too many teeth remaining) can come to the airport to wait for me and give me some children. Nice, thanks. OK, drumming over, Wildtrack can begin, but, oh, wait, my mini-disc isn’t working again, jiggle it around, think I get it, but then someone’s turned on an air-conditioning machine that wasn’t there before, where’s the button, oh fuck, the musicians, twenty of them, are back from stage, and shouting. Fuck!

Next, photos. I can earn myself £22 a photo if I get good ones, and the magazine says they need 3, although some might be printed in black and white in which case I only get £15 a photo, but worth doing anyway. Trouble is, the light’s not good, but, oh, there’s Doudou N’Diaye, “Doudou, can you sit down so I can take a photo, maybe bring your son over to stand next to you, great, thanks”. Snap. Turn around, oh, there’s Doudou N’Diaye behind me. Hang on…shit, that guy's your son? These men all look about the same age but span about 4 generations of the same family. I’m embarrassed and I’ve ended up with photos of the guy’s son by mistake. Anyway, no time to dwell on it, I’ve got to do a stand-up now for Canadian radio, which is where I go to a place and record from there and then narrate off the cuff something witty and insightful and well-spoken. Trouble is, the drumming is too loud (so it’s back behind the loos again) and it’s 8pm and I haven’t yet eaten today, or slept actually, so my hands are shaking and my voice isn’t too good either.

My friend Samba brings me red wine. Then he gets me food (this is where the altercation over the pasta salad comes in but he manages to charm them all with his winning smile and they conceded to let me be nourished that day), and I feel better. Actually, now I’m quite drunk and there’s no light left at all and all I feel I have in my pocket is 2 tapes of fuzzy drumming noise, air-conditioning-unit sound and a bunch of old men asking if they can give me babies.

Still, no time to dwell, I’ve got to get home and get this stuff onto my computer so that tomorrow morning early I can come back and send it all off to Canada and England. Except, the internet place at the festival set up for journalists isn’t going to be open until tomorrow night which means I will miss my deadline, and I can’t do it now because my computer cable’s at the hotel, and…oh fuck it, I send them an email saying I can’t deliver tomorrow morning because I’m exhausted, frazzled, and quite honestly can’t be bothered to work my way out of this one. That’s another £50 down the drain. Never mind, just get home and get some sleep. “Can I have a taxi please?”

“Fully booked madam. It’s the concert, you see…”

A place to remember them

How to write about someone you have loved all your life and who suddenly isn’t there anymore? And how to write about two people who had such a great impact on your life, and neither of them are here anymore? How to reconcile my suspicions about what happens after life with my desperate need to believe that something wonderful happens to us?

Twice now I have had the good fortune to have been called from Africa, by some unspoken feeling, to London where I found that a grandparent was dying. The first time I was crossing Mauritania and Morocco by land when I had the irresistible urge to keep going until London. When I got there, my grandpa Ken went into hospital, and died a few weeks later.

Just recently I went for my parents’ birthdays and while I was there, my granny Wendy, four months after losing her husband, followed him. It doesn’t sound enough to say that I loved them; those words are nothing compared to the excitement I would feel when I went to stay with them, or went to the cinema with them followed by smoked salmon and scrambled eggs in their flat. Or the great happiness I got from writing to them and knowing a letter would come from each of them, about the same things seen differently, two weeks later. I’m not sure I’ve even begun to process the fact that they’re not here anymore because it doesn’t seem possible, or right, that they’ll no longer be in my life.

Getting back to Dakar and finding a phone bill and nothing else in my post-box was a sad day. No familiar envelope with my name neatly-written, no saving it up until I was at home with a cup of coffee to really enjoy the two sides of concise prose on what films they had seen, who was doing what in the cricket, the state of the garden at their house in France, plus a reflection on the news I had given them, sometimes funny, sometimes politically-incorrect, but always supportive.

They seemed to find my news interesting, yet their lives were always packed with just as many adventures and stories. They were people I would be happy to hang out with, like I would friends my own age. Granny was always far better dressed than I, and always looked beautiful. Her hair was wonderfully thick and curly and she always wore beautiful jewellery. I used to look at her and think how lucky I was to have her as mine, my own Granny. Other people don’t have grannies like that, grannies are old and crotchety. Not mine, she was just incredibly sharp-witted and fun.

The last thing my grandpa said to me before I went off to Senegal, and it was the last thing he said to me before he got ill, was that whatever anybody said to me about my choice of life and job, he was incredibly proud of me and supported everything I was doing. I was leaving their flat at the time, it was October. He rolled up the sleeves of my jumper, and straightened my collar lovingly. “Yes, we love you” called granny from the kitchen. It is my lasting memory of those two happy people.

I wanted to write something about why these people were so special to me, but I’m not sure I’ve got very far. I feel so incredibly sad when I think about them because I miss them so much. I feel like there is all this stuff inside of me, represented by tears maybe, that needs to come out and not being there for my grandmother’s funeral has made it much harder to face the fact that she has gone. Everybody needs a place to remember the people they love and that place needs to be near. I live in Africa and I don’t have that place, and it has left a horrible hole in my heart.