What to do when you have writer’s block

WHAT people mostly ask a columnist is how we think up something to say, twice a week every week. The answer is: we pick the right friends. Like Gus Silber.

Gus has plenty of stacked-up credit for naming projects of mine – my TV programme Beckett’s Trek; The Road Stops at Nowhere, a book on exploring the Karoo one breakdown at a time; and an emperor’s-clothes corporate job he christened Thinkstigator.

He has given value since the rinderpest, but never yet done my job for me.

Until this morning. When I arrived at the café he’d nominated, today’s column hung like a barbell from my neck.

Gus started reflecting on where we were. I perked up enough to calculate that if I kept my mouth shut and my ears open, Gus would pour a column into them.

And so it happened. Where we were was Maboneng, where Fox Street gets into the 280s. Gus talked of how it now feels like New York, alive pavements and the feel of cosmopolitanism.

He talked of Heather Mason, young American Jozi-lover whose blog, 2Summers.net, sings our city’s praises and has shown new places even to Gus, like Capital Cafe in Simmonds Street, eating-house with a worldbeater ceiling.

Gus talked of city districts developing personality, like Maboneng or New York’s Meatpackers, whose sweaty ancient name is the pride of vegans on slimming diets.

He talked of what’s in a name, of the favour that a bunch of Capetonians have done their city by naming the portion formerly amorphously described as “below Gardens Centre”.

It’s “La Guma” now, per nominations and votes, after Alex La Guma who stood up for the place and its people when the last racist phase was booting them.

Gus quoted equivalents, back to New York but this time Brooklyn, where the area South of Houston street has become Soho and where “Dumbo” has proudly arisen for the dell Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

Joburgers never say “let’s meet in Ferreirasdorp” or “I’m going to Jeppestown”, but we talk of Maboneng like that, and arguably Newtown too, now with its combination of art and history and craft coffee and the long disused railway lines that chugged through teams of sweating workmen.

Gus credits Heather with popularising the “regeneration” of Jozi in place of the previously fashionable “gentrification”, not only inaccurate but also exclusionary.

Finding ourselves inspired by what this regeneration might do, he and I make our way westward.

On the way, the other side of reality bashes its way into our unwelcoming heads. It’s hard to see regeneration in wreckage and blocked drains and “multi-storey” buildings that in fact are ground-floor retail with mountains of derelict concrete on their heads.

No one is saying the down-side has evaporated; just that there is another game in town now, too.

But the mess is in pockets, some big pockets, but not everywhere. Even before the Anglo-American west side, where many street blocks are as clean and safe as Zurich, we find ups.

One, Bridge Books in a stately former banking hall, with a days-old City Central food court, a challenger for Heather’s best-ceiling title.

Two, the stately Rand Club has not quite shut its doors. The kitchen has closed, yes, but they’ll do you a meal, member or not. Just order in advance; they bring it in.

Regeneration happens. So does generosity, like Gus letting me turn his breakfast talk into a column.