So, will it be third time lucky?

The early-morning sun, a great big yellow African ball of fire, is bouncing off the Indian Ocean and into my eyes. I am blinded. A broken heart is blind. I am not broken. But I am blinded and can barely see the screen on which some words, seemingly random, are appearing.

And, as I sit here at Cafe Java in Umdloti and watch the surfer boys get as one with the waves that peel off in perpetuity, I don't really have the words to truly express my feelings. I got the call at 6.30am this morning from Caro to say that the pregnancy test had come up negative. For the second time. Her tears felt close to me. They dripped on to my heart and burned a wound in my hope.

But we pick ourselves up and look forward to a fortnight's time, when I will produce the sperm that will give us what we so desperately desire. Our child. I shall do everything in my power this time to make my swimmers Thorpedo-like, sleek and muscled, cutting vigorously and effortlessly through the fluids and tissue to find Caroline's eggs. This will happen.

And I will visualise and meditate and gaze up at the moon in all of its phases to ask my mother a million times to send our spirit baby down to fulfill his destiny. He shall come to pass.

And that, as I sit here, the sounds of young children chattering exuberantly as they head to the beach with their parents, their bubbling beach-burble rising tantalisingly around me, is all I have got.

I shall join them soon, the grains of golden sands sliding between my toes, the waves crashing with eternal promise in my ears... as I go in search of that great fertility symbol of yesteryear, the elusive cowrie shell.