Joy Kahumbu

All-Round Creative

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I am an older (than what??) female-bodied queer person of colour, a QTIPOC – sounds like a friendly Pokemon doesn’t it?

Peeling potatoes at the kitchen table with my brother and our mum, when she was in her late 70s, she inadvertently revealed that I was conceived alfresco. She was immediately mortified, I was ecstatic.
I turned to her shocked, red face and bullet-pointed it for her:
1959
A blonde, blue-eyed English Rose
Unmarried
Shagging…
An African
Under a bush
In Kensington Gardens
🙌🏽You are my hero🙌🏽

And it wasn’t a one-off; in total, Roz and John went on to make nine of us.

If I could make a film it would be about a menopausal super-hero who would fly through the skies rescuing women from bad sex. Her weapon would be lube, and her message would be: “Get on the HRT train. Seriously. Don’t diss it ‘til you’ve tried it”.
I would have called it ‘Super Dry’ but someone super dry got there first.

I was born in Leicester, but grew up in Kenya. Phew!

I now live in Hackney, East London
But if I could live anywhere, it would be Byron Bay because my only child moved there in Jan 2020, and since then the UK has gone to pot. As soon as he produces my first grandchild I’m off…

Right now I’m binge-watching true crime, murder and mayhem, in particular Gisela K, a South African former pilot for SAA who lives in Amsterdam with her Swiss husband, one of her former cabin crew…

The last track I listened to was the sound track from Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love

I dream about being at sea, the water is dark blue and choppy, the sky is bright blue and sunny. We’re skimming along at a ridiculous speed and I’m hanging off the edge with my fingers locked into a loop at the end of a rope. I have no idea who’s helming, or what all this means, but for some reason I’m not frightened.

The app I couldn’t survive without is Spotify, again

Social media is… a misnomer