All Quiet on the Western Front

On a beautiful pre winter’s day, load-shedding well under way here, there, and well just about everywhere in South Africa,

I sit in my very quiet office. Listen I can just hear the wind in the trees over the distant hum of the diesel generator. And that “report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.”

I had fallen forward, head lay on my desk as if I am sleeping. Listen? Listen no birds, only the wind carrying that dull hum of motor making electricity.

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial, I believe we are lost.” I close my eyes.