If Cape Town is a place then Johannesburg is a people and in December the people are on holiday. The streets are hollowed out and the sprawling metropolis is much too polite without it's frenzy of commuters. The plainness of the city is difficult to explain, for tourists there is not much to look at, it's definitely eye-catching and at times beautiful but it doesn't flood the visual system with the novelty required to fill a 35mm roll. This is a feature, without the distraction of stunning vistas people in Joburg are content to look into the eyes of another and attempt to know them, if only for a moment.

It's my first time being back and looking at the city i'm surprised by how little has changed — solar panels dotting the rooftops being the biggest aesthetic shift. All news is bad news though and my feed has conjured the image of a ruin sinking into the earth, some truth to this. Even when driving down memory lane the pothole which dented my wheel last autumn remains, it's the same size but more menacing now in it's old age. When talking to the inhabitants of the city, I re-introduce myself, I compare, I contrast, I complain — ego-wise the diminishing return curve of this conversation is surprisingly steep.

One conversation however has the most gravitas — that is the governmental genius for kleptocracy. 2024 will mark 30 years since the first democratic elections in South Africa, while a relatively peaceful transition to democracy was encouriging — the politics of complexion gave way to the politics of complexity, as in the construction of politicians private complexes and inscrutably complex public procurement practices. How can you know anything in all that supershelter ? As a former gifted child with rhomboid pain, I can only emapthise at the vacuum of all that early promise.

"How will I know anything in the middle of all this warmth and space, all this supershelter ? I want to feel like the trampolinist when he falls back to earth and to gravity. To touch the earth with heaviness just to touch it. God expose us, take away our padding and our room. - Martin Amis, London Fields"