Setting fire to old ideas

Sitting in my parents’ home in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa I can hear the lawnmower chugging outside while the dogs pant at my feet. The doors and windows are closed, to both keep the flies out and the insect repellent spray in. It’s boiling and this is the first time I’ve had electricity and wi-fi in three days. I could not be further away from Utrecht.

It’s my first Christmas period back home in three years. I type ‘home’ and wonder what that means now. Somehow, nostalgia makes time pass quickly and the years blur. Soaked in memories, my body feels like a wrinkled prune.

I started writing this column at the end of 2023 when I was predominantly looking backwards. Life, love and laziness got in the way and with the grace of my editor I am only finishing this, my very last DUB column, in mid-January. In contrast to how I felt only a few weeks ago, I’m now eagerly looking forward. 

Despite my change of pace, I still want to dedicate this column to my funeral pyre of ideas: all the bits and bobs that got feverishly written down in notebooks or tossed about in conversation, but failed to make it out of my Google Drive folder. So, here goes!

It took me a few stops and starts to let go of a column about our society’s fetishisation of busyness. Each word felt hypocritical as I marched it onto the page.

I was too angry to write coherently about the importance of learning how to pronounce people’s names, especially as a white foreigner telling stories about Black Africans. I will write about it one day when my storm has simmered down. 

I almost told you about when my faith in middle-aged white men was restored on a mountain in Italy. Hiking with my housemates, we ended up on the same route as a group of three fathers who consistently challenged my stereotypical beliefs.

In my head, I wrote a piece about the popularity of polyamory and what it was like to be one of the few survivors of post-monogamy. But then I thought that the DUB column wasn’t a place to throw a pity party.

Sitting at a queer open mic night in Amsterdam, one of the poets talked about bisexuality being a gateway drug. Ever since, I’ve had a note on my phone reminding me to write about that idea. I hope I still do.

Probing an old wound from reporting sexual harassment I wondered if this was another chance to tell my story but the gash stayed stubbornly closed. The timing just wasn’t right.

Self-care. 

Stopping smoking. 

Dutch royalty as academic missionaries. 

The impossibility of tattooing moving objects. 

Shared living and the group dynamics of three.

In this watery graveyard also lay the ideas that I’m not brave enough to say aloud, right alongside the ones lost to illegible handwriting. In between them are what I like to believe are the scattered ashes of every thought that I refused to write down, believing my passion would imprint it on my brain, only for the slate to be wiped come morning.

To each person who read my columns over the last year, thank you. I hope we meet again.