Done (a sad rant)

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Forgive me. Bit of a moan incoming.

When April comes around this year, it’ll mean that for 20 of the last 24 months, we’ll have had building work happening on our doorstep. Not literally our doorstep, obviously. Our actual doorstep is perfectly functional, but rather small and ordinary. 20 months of building work on that would be both excessive and completely unnecessary.

But much of life over the last two years Chez 6000 has been accompanied by the sound of drilling, banging and angle grinding from the house next door and the house just across the road.

And I’m actually done with it now.

Just tired of it. Weary. Fed up. All the appropriate synonyms.

I know that building work has to be done sometimes, and I know that it is often, by nature, rather noisy. I’ve just had enough of it constantly being noisy around me.

And let’s not just leave it at the noise, because while that is very, very irritating, it’s far from the only issue which local building work brings with it. Driving is near impossible, the road is a veritable vehicular assault course of poorly parked bakkies. The tea breaks and lunchtimes spent on the grass verges generate a highly annoying amount of litter. Annoying because it’s sheer laziness, given that the builders have to walk right past a bin on the driveway on their way back into work.

And then there’s the petty crime. What used to be a very safe neighbourhood just isn’t at the moment. You need to double check all your gates, doors and windows. Repeatedly.
Anything metal will disappear from the outside of your property. Your recycling bags will be opened and ransacked and then left for the South Easter to do its job spreading stuff all over the driveway and road.

One neighbour remarked:

With so many builders around, petty crime is bound to happen.

Which might be true, but is also an pretty crap way of shrugging your shoulders and just accepting it.

Well, not on my watch, you bastards. Try me*.

But is the end in sight?

Possibly. I mean, they’ll run out of stuff to build in the end, won’t they? But I can’t see anything slowing down or finishing up in the next few months. And as I might have alluded to above, I’m really rather pissed off with the whole situation already.

.

* …again, because you’ve already nicked the letterbox off our front wall.

I could live here

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It’s Denmark, which is the most boring of the Scandinavian countries I have been to (n=3), but still – look at this:

This bar will give you a free beer between 12 and 1pm.

There’s no catch, no obligation to buy another beer or any food or any other product. You just turn up and ask for your free beer, please. And then you can leave, although I’d advise you to drink the thing once you’ve ordered it, obviously.

The only T&C here is that you are only allowed one per customer per day, and that seems a bit tight perfectly reasonable.

As a loss leader for the bar, one presumes that it must work, otherwise they wouldn’t be running it. And – according to the guy who shared this – it’s not a limited promotion either. This has been going on since New Year already, and shows no sign of stopping.

I’ve seen beer offers before, but they’ve always come with the inevitable hidden catch. There isn’t one here. And for reference, a bar-bought 500ml Tuborg costs about 60DKK in Denmark, which is a terrifying R127, so this is a pretty sweet deal.

Sadly, the price of flights alone make this one a bit of a non-starter for us here in Cape Town, but if any of the local pubs are reading this and thinking that something along these lines might be worth a bit of a trial run… well… let me know and I’ll see you at noon tomorrow.

Yellow warning

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There’s a yellow warning out for potential severe thunderstorms and heavy rain over Cape Town and parts of the Western Cape tonight, and I couldn’t be happier. Everything is dry and brown and so very DUSTY.

Not only do we need some rain to alleviate the drought that we’ve been suffering, we need some rain just to give the place a nice clean.

It’s not a huge warning for Cape Town, but they have gone with “High Likelihood”, which is great news. No-one wants floods and stuff; just enough to wash away all the grime. But it must happen, please.

However, we’re looking at a different picture down in Cape Agulhas, where they’re playing with “High Likelihood” and “Significant Impact”. And no-one has forgotten the horrific floods of September 2023 (that one when Juan was a bit of a twat). They could do with the rain, but no repeat of those scenes.

I’ve checked our gutters are clear (and so should you), and I’ll be lobbing some fertiliser on the garden before bed tonight: might as well make the most of the opportunity.

But right now, with the sun still beaming in the cloudless sky, I’m going to watch some footy before the weekend is – once again, all too quickly – over.

Upload

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Great news: TLC have decided to upload the new series of Mock The Week onto YouTube.

You can find it here.

Not so great news: You need to be in the UK to watch it.

Of course, there are many ways of being in the UK when you’re not actually in the UK, and so that’s not too much of a problem.

And I’ll also be using some of those techniques to enjoy the Winter Olympics over the next couple of weeks, given that our national broadcaster can’t afford it and the local Sports TV service has decided not to buy any rights either.

But that’s reasonable, because it’s only the cold places and the big countries that pay for that sort of thing, right?
Well, if I lived in Curacao or Afghanistan, I could watch.
Micronesia, Ghana and Guinea-Bissau are all broadcasting them, as are Yemen and South Sudan.

Cold. Big. Nope.

In fact, it seems like SA is just about the only place on the planet that is not showing any Olympics.

And so local residents will have to rely on the Olympics YouTube channel (not great) or digitally fly to some other place (like Yemen) to watch.

Which is absolutely ridiculous in 2026.

Quickie

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Bit rubbish today: Mrs 6000’s chest infection has caught me out. But a day of rest, and hopefully, I’ll be up and at everything again tomorrow.

Pub quiz last night was good. We didn’t win, but I think we had about an equal number of brilliant answers and really silly mistakes. Broco’s area and Kendrick Lamar, Banksy and female lobsters. It quite literally takes all sorts.

Can I stay awake for tonight’s footy? Probably not.
Would I want to anyway? Probably not.