Author: 6000

Weather woes

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While the weather here in Cape Town has been pretty miserable of late – a succession of cold fronts bringing wind, rain, more wind and more rain to the peninsular, life is no better in the UK.

Of course, it’s summer there, so they’d be expecting rain. Add that to the fact that Wimbledon starts today and it was the Glastonbury festival this weekend and you could have predicted precipitation.

That said, I don’t think many people expected it quite as bad as it was.
For example, check out this picture snipped from the BBC News website earlier today:


Bassey: grounded
That’s right. The weather in the UK is so bloody awful right now that they had to ground Dame Shirley Bassey.
Apparently, there were worries that she would drift away like a giant zepplin. Extra cable had to be brought in from Poland to tether her securely to terra firma.

“This unprecedented action was taken due to the inclement conditions,” said a spokesperson for the singer, “Usually, we allow her to fly throughout the summer, before locking her away in a hanger near Cardiff for the winter months. But we had no choice but to ground her due to the heavy rain and strong winds. We hope to have her flying again before the end of the month.”

Da Lowdown

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As my virally-ravaged body continues to exude mucus at an alarming rate, I felt it was time to update the site once again. This is mainly because, although my symptoms have shown a mild improvement since yesterday, I’m still far from convinced that I’ll make it through to the end of the week.


I have already been forced to miss two football matches, one international rugby game and one father’s day, while the pharmacists of Cape Town now greet me happily by my first name and offer less then reasonable credit terms for the myriad of their products I have been utilising. At one point, I was taking 22 times my RDA of vitamin C. My kidneys were extremely unhappy about this and it seemingly made precisely bugger-all difference to my immune system. I cut down when my hastily calculated risk/benefit analysis on the back of a tissue box revealed that the vitamin C would allow me to live for approximately 3 more days than if I wasn’t taking it.3 more days of snot, coughing and generally feeling like crap?
No, thank you.

So, aside from generating bucketloads of phlegm, what have I been up to?
On the technology front, I have discovered Audacity and have been playing around with that. Now all I need is a nice OpenSource video editor and I’m sorted. Anyone?
My music listening on the now infamous rattly iPod has been almost exclusively Send Away The Tigers by the Manic Street Preachers, which is dangerously happy by their somewhat melancholy standards, but with guitar work echoing back to Generation Terrorists and The Holy Bible (the Manics’ album not the book, which, although not an avid reader, I believe contains virtually no guitar work).


The public sector workers strike continues – just. A whole one bloke in the picket line outside the hospital this morning, which was rather amusing. He was toyi-toying, but mainly just to keep warm, I think. Note: solo toyi-toying is really funny to watch.
Anyway, according to the Allister Charles of the NEHAWU Union in this morning’s Cape Times:

Our demand is still at 10%, there’s no doubt about that. But the question nationally is: are we going to accept or should we fight until we reach 8%? That’s for you to decide.

Is it just me or does he have it all wrong? Isn’t he supposed to be fighting for a bigger percentage increase? Keep fighting, Allister and you’ll owe them money.
Once you’ve settled that little issue, we can chat about the R50 you owe me. What’s that, you say? You actually owe me R75? I thought it was R100. R125? Really? [continues until I’m a millionaire]…

One last bit of good news. While I may be slightly behind in updating my 2010 flickr pictures, South Africa is exceeding its obligations, as Sepp Blatter found out on his visit this week. Awesome stuff, even if he can’t pronounce Phumzile’s name. Lots of people struggle with that though.That’ll be all for now then – consider yourself informed.

Postcard from Cape Town

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Hello there. How’s the conference going?

I must say that at first sight, five days in a 5-star hotel overlooking the Victoria Falls in Zambia didn’t seem to be the worse scenario in the world, but I’m sure you’re all working damn hard out there between the drinking sessions, although the thunderous noise of the spectacular 108m high, 1.7km long wall of falling water must be a little off-putting. As you know, I’ve never been, but I’m guessing it’s something like our back garden a couple of weeks ago. I still haven’t found our goat, by the way.
I can’t believe your phone isn’t working – curse those yellow freaks at MTN. Curse them.

Not much news from here. Of course, we miss you. Alex regularly breaks off from tearing the pages of his nursery rhyme book to go and investigate the Case of the Missing Mum by peering round the nearest corner to see where you’re hiding.
I do try to explain, but by that time he’s moved onto hugging his teddy or playing with the contents of your underwear drawer. How come he’s allowed to do that, but I’m not?

Anyway, we’re getting on just fine, despite his “dirty protest” in the bath on Wednesday evening. It wasn’t as bad as the last time he did it – I wasn’t actually in the bath with him this time. *shudder*
I’ve been using that old South African Klippies-in-the-bedtime-bottle trick your mum said she used to use on you. I can’t say for sure if he’s been sleeping through but generally I have been as I’ve been finishing the Klipdrift off once he’s passed out. I can’t allow him to drink alone, now can I?
Interestingly, he seems to handle the blinding headaches of the following morning better than I do.
I’m quite envious. </font

I hardly like to mention it, but tonight is the big England v Brazil friendly at Wembley. You must be gutted. I know you would have loved to have watched it with me, so I’ll look up when it’s repeated when you come back and we can enjoy it together then. Maybe it’ll be repeated twice if you’re lucky.
But that’s assuming I can get out of the hospital past the picket lines this evening. I tried to appear all cool by joining in their songs and toyi-toying on the way through the gate this morning, but I just ended up singing “Shongololo” instead of “Shosholoza” and proving that white men really can’t jump. I like to think they appreciated my efforts though and that they were laughing with me. Possibly anyway.

Tomorrow looks like being Saturday and so I’ll plonk the boy into his car seat and we’ll hit the beach and eat some sand together (washed down with some more Klippies). He’s expressed a wish to take up ornithology ever since he saw that “Puffin with Muffins” page in his rhyming book, so I thought that Sandy Bay would be the obvious choice, where you can see plenty of Capetonian birds in their… erm… natural plumage. We’ll probably just sit back and admire them preening or something and knock back a couple more Klippies. We’re not addicted though. Oh no.

OK – I must get to the bottle store before it closes.
We’ll see you at the airport on Sunday.
If I’m too drunk, Alex has said that he’ll drive. If he’s too drunk as well, I guess you’ll have to get a taxi.
Til then dearest,

Me.x

Sport and Racism in South Africa…

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I read with interest the Ruck & Maul column by Ashfak Mohamed in today’s Cape Times. Ashfak is a rugby fan who was at the SA v England game in Bloemfontein last Saturday.


Ashfak isn’t white. (There was a photo).


He described what we’ve all seen at rugby matches across South Africa, namely an almost complete absence of black and coloured fans in the crowd; an embarrassing and hostile silence through the first verse of the national anthem (which is sung in isiXhosa), followed by a bellowing of Die Stem (the Afrikaans verse which also used to be the national anthem of the “old” South Africa) and players of colour being racially abused for their mistakes on the pitch. His citing of previous racism at matches in Bloemfontein for this overwhelming majority of white fans got me thinking. Also on Saturday was the ABSA Cup final between Ajax Cape Town and Sundowns (that’s a soccer* game, folks). One wonders how many white fans were at that game? I would wager that it was fewer than blacks and coloureds in Bloem. But is that a problem? Well, obviously, it is a problem when racial abuse stops people from watching sport** – whatever their colour. But is that really the reason that these two games were attended by such completely different crowds?
I think it is only one part of the story.

According to southafrica.info, “Sport is the national religion. Transcending race, politics or language group, sport unites the country”

I laughed when I read that. Yes, this country could have gone down the road of civil war in 1994 and it didn’t, and for that everyone should be thankful. But saying that life is settled and the country is united in any form just because there’s no civil war is like saying that England did well at the rugby because they didn’t lose by, say, 100 points. Those claiming “racial harmony” are, to coin a cockney phrase, “having a larf”. This country is amongst the most divided in the world.

Insecurity, paranoia, resentment, retribution, disillusionment and distrust are plainly evident the way many South Africans live their daily lives. Those reading this will probably snort and dismiss this. “That’s not me.” they’ll say. I beg to differ.


The population here is divided into those who won’t openly admit to there being a problem, those who see the issues but don’t have a problem with them and the other 1% who want to sort things out but can’t overcome the apathy or engrained racist attitudes of the other 99%. Of course, 99% of the South Africans reading this think that they’re in that 1% – and that’s exactly the problem.

But back to sport.

Because of the unique history of this country, the lines of division run through every aspect of life. But perhaps the most public of these is sport. Well, that and politics, but no-one reads posts about politics. Sport is neatly divided in three in this country: Rugby, Cricket and Soccer. Of course, there are other sports played here, but those are the biggies. Rugby and cricket get the most press. They are the “white” sports. What distresses many of the rugby and cricket fans is that the official national sport of South Africa is… er… the other one. And that’s because the majority of the sporting population play football. Rugby and cricket come in very much second and third. How embarrassing.


And while there is a huge push to get more coloured and black players into the national teams for rugby and cricket to make the team more representative of the racial make-up of the country (often despite the fact that the players in question aren’t actually very good), there is no reciprocal push to get white players into the soccer team.

Ashfak suggests that beacuse the ANC is in power in the Free State, there must be a lot of black people living there and they should have been at the game. Nice big tarring brush you have there, sir.
But it seems to me that the major reason for the obvious racial divisions in South African sport is that for the vast majority of whites, soccer holds no interest and for the vast majority of blacks, rugby holds no interest. And as long as those few who want to watch and play a sport from “the other side” can, I don’t see a problem.


So Ashfak, while I agree with your comments regarding the Afrikaaners and their small-minded and right-wing attitudes, I think the major reason for the nearly all-white crowd last Saturday was really because they were the only ones actually interested.

*I hate this word. Obviously, I mean football, but that would just confuse everyone.
**or indeed doing anything.

Memories of 2003

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While I’m reading papers detailing the genotypic make-up of quinolone resistant and hypersusceptible clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (it’s all in the DNA gyrase* genes, you know), I tend to listen to my rattly iPod. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

Today, I have been mostly listening to Radiohead, which has been bringing back amazing memories of their performance at Glastonbury in 2003. In fact, I’m pretty sure that you can actually see me on this YouTube offering of Karma Police (bottom of the screen at 1:34, next to the waving bloke with some red thing over his shoulder).

You can also hear me singing along later in the song, but I’m a little drowned out by several thousand others; which is sad after I’d made the effort.
Wow. As the song says: “For a minute there, I lost myself”. Lump in the throat, tears in the eyes, shivers down the spine, goosebumps all over. Well, nearly all over anyway.
That said, I thought the Manic Street Preachers were better, to the disbelief of my companions.
Dusk, the big raindrops falling from the moody, grey sky illuminated by the brilliant white lights and James Dean Bradfield giving it some welly on that big guitar just a few metres away.

Ah yes – that’s completed the goosebump coverage nicely.And then it’s back to the here and now. And a particularly worrying story from the front page of today’s Cape Times:

The severe cold, wet and windy conditions expected to spread eastwards across the Western and Northern Cape provinces this weekend could be fatal for livestock and dangerous for humans, the Cape Town Weather Office warned yesterday.
Forecaster Carlton Fillis said rainfall of up to 50mm, combined with gale-force winds and temperatures of below 15C**, was especially dangerous for livestock such as goats. People should also be careful.

So there you have it. Conclusive proof that when it comes to South African livestock, your average goat is the least hardy species around.
Sheep? – sorted. Cows? – no problemo. But goats? – dead.
Carlton says so and who are we to question his judgement?

So tomorrow, it looks like I have have every excuse to cook a big pot of soup and hide under a duvet watching the football and the rugby while knocking back coffee and hot chocolate. And beer, obviously.

Enjoy your weekend. And take good care of your goats.

 

* It should be noted that DNA gyrase is an enzyme, not a dance.
** Er…yeah. That’s what they call cold here. Hmm.