Jozi

YES! Three more … sleeps.

Your bed feels as if it’s the best bed in the world. You draw your duvet around your shoulders and snuggle into your pillow.

Yes, the best bed, ever.

Even so, sleep is served in intense bursts of shut-eye: six hours of a dreamless blank.

You become aware, slowly, of the sounds that indicate the time; it’s still dark and quiet – about 4.30am.

Perfect. The night stretches into a reluctant dawn. It curls its toes into the morning.

The guts of the city starts its restless rumbling. It seems very far away, at first.

Growling car engines and impatient hooters, they stretch and reach into the approaching light, stretch and reach out, again.

You can hear the stirrings of the city, your city, your Joburg, Jozi  —  a brazen hussy, with a heart of gold.

She swishes her skirts at the traffic lights.

They wink back at her. Wink wink.

The blood of her being moves on, pulses through the streets; relentless pursuit spills onto sidewalks.

The cloth of Africa unfurls into a palette of a brash continent.

But there’s much more to Joburg than its vibrant and rejuvenating inner city, 7km from where you live.

You love its open spaces and trees; millions of them, the biggest urban forest on the planet.

You enjoy your community, and low-key neighbourhood activities. You breathe. You live.

Jozi offers a spectrum of possibilities and glittering options.

They can dazzle and destroy, if you let them.

(ends)