A minibus taxi user guide and more

To hail a minibus taxi just point in the direction you want to go. There are a number of finger signals that you may use that have the same effect, but avoid the middle finger since this signal is reserved for other motorists who have to deal with the taxi's erratic behaviour.

Five outstretched fingers will get you to the main railway station, Park Station and three fingers will get you to Bree Street in Joburg's CBD.


Once aboard the taxi start praying ... even atheists may do this apparently there is a special permit for them to pray in taxis. The standard fee seems to be R7 for a trip on one route. This may go up during the World Cup ... or a dual payment system will be designed to rip off foreigners.


You can pay on getting on or just before getting off. If you are in the back of the taxi, you tap the person sitting in front of you on the shoulder and hand him/her your money.


That person will pass it on to the next and so on until it reaches the driver ... who will briefly interrupt his cellphone conversation to fish out change from the vehicle's ashtray, before sending it back the way it came.


Some drivers expect the front-seat passengers to deal with the money matters while others clearly don't. Surprisingly enough I have seen no disputes over money going missing in this to-ing and fro-ing of money.

Once you have paid start praying again, because by this time the vehicle's obvious defects would be obvious to you too.

Too get off the taxi just shout out the point where you want to do so. Like: "Next robot..." (Traffic lights are often called that here and if you are a World Cup visitor asking for directions you should know that.) Or shout "shopping centre" ... or "Garage" as filling stations are called. You can shout anything really as long as the driver hears you and knows what you are talking about.

When you get off, sigh a deep sigh of relief and think of buying a car. However, millions of people use minibus taxis and survive. Meanwhile a pseudo Frenchman in Fouriesburg told me that communal taxis are the only form of public transport that is profitable in the world. I somehow believe him. I call him a pseudo Frenchman because we spoke French ... it turned out that he is a 'Norman' from the channel island Jersey.


My next blog will be about the different kinds of porn favoured by different nationalities. It is PG18 and sensitive readers must please abstain.

Fouriesburg and a taxi nightmare

Fouriesburg is a dusty three-bar town in the Eastern Free State. You will notice that I base my tourism on the number of bars in a town. If you can count them it is my kind of a place. Fouriesburg has few attractions as town in itself, but it is situated in one of the most beautiful corners of South Africa. It lies between magnificent sandstone formations at the foot of the Drakensberg (Maluti in seSotho) mountain range, about 8km from Lesotho and about 30km from the much more (too) touristic Clarens.

My friends John and Amanda have a weekend house here, so the Oyster Bay crowd, with some new additions in the form of Charli, Hannah and Carol decamped from Joburg for the weekend. For future reference I decided to name everyone here. They are : Jan (previously called the Laughing One), Madelein (previously the Laughing One's Chick), Vince (Writer), George (Fridge Guy), John (Lawyer), Amanda (no previous mention) and me. Charli debuted on my fist blog as the Wannabe Lawyer.

For the outdoors enthusiast Fouriesburg has much to offer. From rock-climbing to horse-riding, day walks, scenic drives ... you name it. Since I'm not much of an outdoors enthusiast myself I quickly ran out of possible things that the typical outdoors enthusiast might be interested in. But there is more outdoors here than you could reasonably shake the proverbial stick at, or in my case wave a wine glass at and I'm sure that there will be something for everyone.

Incidentally, the road between Fouriesburg and Clarens is one of the most beautiful in the country and the world perhaps. For more things to do in Fouriesburg see my guide about things to do in Oyster Bay.

As we speak, my friends are busy engaging with the outdoors. They invited, nay pleaded with me to come along but I said no. I pointed out to Jan that my time is no longer my own and that I have to satisfy the thirst of my 13 blog followers first and not be tempted by the lure of excursions into the mountains on foot. I must admit that I am running out of excuses for not going on these walks. I think last time I feigned a pain in the knee ... I was shot through it remember!

Anyway I walk enough in Joburg, not having a car and being reliant on public transport and taxis to get around.

The last minibus taxi I took was straight out of Stephen King. It had no tread on the tyres, and only the right front brake pad seemed to be working, but the driver made no allowance for this fact at all when it came to the speed he was driving at.

It was also raining and every time the driver braked, it would slide across two lanes to the right before coming to a standstill. When we almost smashed into the back of an oblivious police van, most passengers interrupted their fervent prayers to loudly voice their concerns ... this included me .... the atheist.

I still maintain that minibus taxis converted more people to prayer than any number of missionaries ever could. They are probably the most religious places in South Africa.

After the police van incident most passengers got off when the taxi stopped next. I followed suit and took a municipal bus ... which happened to come along at the right moment. Nobody knows exactly when or where these things run, but they are there. After the taxi it was a pleasant experience. The driver took my R6 without issuing a ticket and I did not mind.

This morning just before waking up I dreamt that I was on that taxi again ... but when I wanted to get off, the driver told me with a grin: "This is like the Hotel California. Once you get on ... you can never get off."

I woke up in terror.

Next time I will blog about a taxi user's etiquette.

Some other stuff 2

Say "Soweto" and most people think of an endless sprawl of apartheid-built box houses. People who have actually been there would perhaps think of the palatial houses rising incongruously here and there between the box houses. Others may think of the vibrant street life and the famous, perhaps infamous, Soweto street parties and the pulsating beer halls called shebeens - but very few people would think of wine and winemakers.

 

But one of the historically most entrenched white-dominated industries is slowly but surely giving in to the pressures of transformation and wine is becoming big in Soweto. Proof of this is the phenomenal growth of the Soweto Wine Festival which is due to host its 6th annual edition in September this year. (Yes, there will be life in South Africa after the Soccer World Cup!) If past growth is anything to go by, the festival is set to become one of South Africa's top wine festivals ... and by virtue of that one of Africa's biggest wine festivals.

 

So who are the people driving this move towards wine in a predominantly beer drinking market. The short answer would be the so-called Black Diamonds ... mostly as wine consumers. They are the emerging class of black entrepreneurs and business people who are making the most of their post-apartheid opportunities. They are mostly, but not exclusively, young, confident and on the go ... and they are going in just one direction and that is up!

 

Joe Chakela (55) and five other owners of bottle stores (as licenced liquor outlets are called locally) became involved in the wine industry shortly after the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994. Strictly speaking, Joe and his friends are too old to be called Black Diamonds, they deserve a mention because they consider themselves as a  main driving force in bringing wine culture to South Africa's townships, especially Soweto.

 

"Up until then (1996-97), I was involved in the liquor industry owning about 5 bottle stores with my partner, Menzi Kunene. One Mk Malefane convinced me and my colleagues that the time has come now to get involved in the mainstream of liquor making as opposed to being involved in the distribution channel only. We decided to engage Distell (then Stellenbosch Farmers Wineries) to partner with us in purchasing a farm and making wine," says Joe.

 

"The biggest challenge we faced in the wine industry was getting recognition for our brand.  My favourite cultivar is Pinotage not only because it is a pleasure to drink but also , for sentimental reasons, it was our first wine. However, my favourite drink is Tukulu Chenin Blanc as I love sea-food. It goes very well with fish. My personal philosophy and perspective on wine is that to enjoy it fully, do not drink more than three glasses a day," he says.

 

"The accolades, in the form of various awards totalling no less than twelve, received by our wines, especially, Pinotage, Chenin Blanc & Organic Sangiovese have been a source of great pride and achievement for our Consortium and Distell and we look forward to reaping more rewards in future," Joe says..

 

Their initial plan was to launch a new brandy in the townships,  but then Joe and friends developed a taste for wine. Joe stopped drinking beer and switched to wine ... and today he and his colleagues are the proud owners of 55% of Tukulu wine farm in the famous Stellenbosch wine region. The minority stakeholder in Tukulu is South African liquor giant Distell and the venture is considered as an example for successful transformation in the wine industry.           

 

But back to the Black Diamonds.

 

As Black Diamonds go, Ntsiki Bayela of Stellekaya near Stellenbosch is a perfect example ... and she does not even mind being called that. Some of her more urban counterparts, perhaps the slightly older ones, are less than fond of that appellation. The 32-year-old Ntsiki is not only a consumer of wine  she makes the stuff! And judging by the number of awards the wines produced by her estate, Stellekaya in Stellenbosch,  have won since she joined them six years ago, she is a winemaker of note!               

    

Ntsiki's road to becoming a top winemaker was not an easy one.

 

She grew up as an orphan in rural KwaZulu-Natal and was raised by her aging grandmother. Ntsiki says the proudest moment of her life was not winning the scholarship that enabled her to become a vintner, nor the moment when she successfully completed her studies, but when she gave her gran a taste of the first bottle of wine she made. The fact that the old lady,  not a wine drinker, did not really like the wine, did not diminish Ntsiki's joy. She was just happy and proud that the real mother in her life could taste the fruits of her labours she sadly died some years later.

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But how does a black lady from a rural area of a province where wine making and vineyards are unheard of become a winemaker, a white male dominated industry? The simple answer is hard work at school that won her a scholarship from South African Airways. The scholarship was specifically to encourage young black people to become involved in wine making as part of the airline's wine selection process.

 

Ntsiki says they told her she could do something else if she did not like wine making ... but once she started out at the Stellenbosch University she knew that she had found her calling in life. That was despite being the only black person in her class and one of only a few women.

 

"I did experienced a fair degree bit of resistance and mistrust from my fellow students, but I didn't let that get in my way. I focused on my studies instead, and once I qualified and moved into the real world of wine making, meeting older winemakers, it all became Fun with a capital 'F'," Ntsiki says.

 

 "There is not a single aspect of the job, from the vineyard to the finished product, that I can point out as being more or less important or enjoyable than the rest. For me the joy of making wine is the whole process and all the beautiful mystery of it," she says.  

 

Ntsiki's favourite wine of the moment is Stellekaya's Orion, a Bordeaux style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc. It got no less than four-and-a-half stars out of a maximum of five, from South Africa's foremost wine critic John Platter                 

And with an attitude like that, expect the awards to keep piling up in her display case. The unassuming Ntsiki is a rare Black Diamond indeed!  

Some other stuff that I wrote ... a bit more serious ... ahem

Opposition politics in Africa often meant the bullet instead of the ballot, and a change of government seldom brought positive changes in governance. It was more often than not just a case of a change of faces at the feeding trough. Fortunately this is changing and in South Africa is leading the way.

   

With the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994, euphoria ruled. Then Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu's "Rainbow Nation" seemed firmly on track, but soon enough the 'rainbow' became monochrome and this bedevilled opposition politics in the country ever since. 

   

The obstacles faced by opposition parties in South Africa are many-fold and complex to address. I will just have a brief look at some of the main ones and at the ways opposition parties deal with them.

  
First of all the concept of "loyal opposition" is new to South Africa and as such often poorly understood. This is reflected in the huge majority the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have won in the three fully democratic elections since 1994. That is despite their decidedly poor track record in delivering on their election promises.  

 

That is just one of the obstacles opposition parties in South Africa, as elsewhere in Africa, face. This holds true especially in rural areas where traditional leaders have held sway for hundreds of years and opposition to them meant either death or banishment. The idea of a loyal opposition simply did not exist.

 

Other problems include what I would call the Lure of the Liberation movement and a strong belief in ancestors. These two go hand in hand. It boils down to the following pattern of thought: "I must vote for the liberation movement, because my ancestors fought and died for it, and they would be angry if I voted for someone else." 

 

Then there is a perceptional problem that is unique to South Africa. The official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is perceived as being a party promoting "white" interests. Whether this perception is based on any kind of reality is debatable and quite contentious, but the fact remains that it exists. The ANC realises this all too well and does not hesitate to exploit it to their full advantage.

 

That was particularly true under the rule of former president Thabo Mbeki who tarnished the legacy of Nelson Mandela by making race central to all his policies. Thus it became easy for him to label all criticism of his government as "racist" and, as such, not worthy of debate. And when the criticism emanated from black quarters the critics were derogatorily called "coconuts" meaning people who are black on the outside and white on the inside. Their criticism could also be dismissed out of hand.

 

DA MP James Lorimer says that the return to race-based politics under Mbeki was a direct result of the palpable failure of many of his policies to provide the "Better life for all" promised on ANC election posters. In fact Lorimer also blames the race-based approach for many subsequent failures of the ANC government. The appointment on racial grounds of loyal ANC cadres to especially the middle management structures of the public service often meant that the most competent person did not get the job. This led to a blockage of service delivery projects at the very place where they were supposed to take final and effective shape.       

 

Now the question remains: Are these very real obstacles insurmountable? South African opposition parties do not seem to think so and they may just be right. 

 

The DA is especially optimistic that South African politics are escaping from "the straight-jacket of race and ethnicity" in the words of Lorimer. Surprisingly, Lorimer credits the emergence of the Congress of the People (COPE), a break-away party from the ANC, for what he sees as the beginning of of a sea-change in opposition politics in South Africa. He says that COPE, despite its organisational shortcomings, opened the first non-racial debate about opposition in the country and this benefited his party enormously.

 

Suddenly it was "Okay" to  vote for someone other than the ANC. In the 2009 elections, the DA had a nett gain of 20 seats against a nett loss of 33 seats for the ANC. But the majority remains firmly in favour of the ANC. They have 264 seats in parliament against the DA's 67, the 30 seats of COPE and the 18 of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP).

 

The remaining 27 seats are shared by smaller parties like the Independent Democrats (ID) with four seats and the Freedom Front + (FF+) also with four seats. The problem these parties face is once again the perception, in their case mostly accurate, that they serve the interests of small or ethnic groupings. Thus the ID is seen as a mainly 'coloured' (mixed race) party of the Western Cape, the IFP as an ethnic Zulu party and the FF+ as a party serving thee needs of conservative Afrikaners. The general feeling is that these parties are likely to disappear gradually as the South African democracy matures.

 

As for COPE, like many opposition parties in Africa, they face mostly problems of their own making. They started out with much fanfare but even before their first election, they descended into leadership squabbles that cost them dearly. They finally went into the elections with a compromise leader with no political track record. Ever since the election they have been plagued by infighting and organisational disarray. Their future does not look very bright.

 

In contrast the DA is "keenly looking forward to the next elections," says Lorimer. He says that the Lure of the Liberation movement is fading fast as is witnessed by the number of violent service delivery protests besetting mostly the ANC dominated provinces of the country. Although the Western Cape where the DA rules has also had some service delivery protests, it was nowhere nearly as bad as elsewhere in the country. A fact that the DA hopes would not be lost on the electorate. 

 

To sum up then, opposition politics in South Africa are changing slowly but surely and is likely to mature into a two or three party system in the not so distant future.         

 

Another view on Afrikaners ... this time by Clem Sunter

It is an ironic twist of fate that so far the real beneficiaries of the ending of apartheid are the people who were supposed to have benefited from it whilst it was in existence - the Afrikaners.

During the years of apartheid, there was a culture of entitlement among the volk. With a good education you could end up as a Cabinet minister, a top civil servant, head of a parastasal or a senior executive in an Afrikaans-owned business like the Trust Bank or Sanlam. If you weren't so privileged, you could get a job on the railways as an artisan, join the ranks of the army or police or work for a municipality.

After 1994, all these expectations came to an end. Suddenly Afrikaners were out of power. They had to take a leaf out of Steve Biko's book: you are on your own and you will have to fend for yourself. And they have done so - fantastically well. I was told the other day that the fastest growing element of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange are companies owned and run by Afrikaners. The whole coast north of Maputo in Mozambique is now a string of safari lodges and dive shops established by entrepreneurs from Pretoria. The list goes on and on all around South Africa, and increasingly north of the border and elsewhere in the world.

One could call this phenomenon the great trek into business. Adapt or die, John Vorster said. The Afrikaners voted for the first option individually and collectively. Rather like the Jews in America, the Pakistanis in London and the Chinese in Australia, Afrikaners have a collective consciousness which is the spiritual foundation of an effective commercial network. Language, religion, culture and a common outlook on life bind them into teams that are almost unbeatable when challenged by less cohesive competitors. This trait obviously extends into sport as well. It is a form of ubuntu: you help me and I will help you because together we can achieve more. It's just that you have to speak the taal!

This article was prompted by my wife and I staying one night last week at a brilliant place called Bergwaters Eco Lodge just outside Waterval Boven. It was a real pocket of excellence in the Elands Valley. Run by a young Afrikaans couple, it offered everything from a long, beautiful walk to great food to a comfortable bed. But it was the entrepreneurial spirit that impressed me. She wants to give every room the theme of a herb and he has just bought a local hardware store as a second business. Music to my ears. You should always want to improve, no matter what the current state of your business is.

This all goes to show that we need an entrepreneurial state in contrast to a developmental state. California is the sixth largest economy in the world with only 36 million people. There is no sense of entitlement there. Everybody follows the Steve Biko code: you make it yourself. It would be a real shame if, by replacing one entitlement culture with another, we undermine the truly entrepreneurial spirit that South Africa undoubtedly possesses in its population as a whole. The Afrikaners were liberated by creating a level playing field. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Entitlement shackles it.

I conclude with a question: why do you think Jews, Pakistanis and Chinese people perform so much better on other people's playing field than on their home grounds? They know the result depends entirely on their own efforts. Afrikaners have managed to make this psychological adjustment without having to emigrate. Good for them. The next job is to liberate our black brothers and sisters in the same way.

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My dodgy connections ... and stuff that I wanted to write

I never get a headache, not even when I have a hangover or babbelas (as the same is called here) but sometimes when I'm hungry, I get a headache to indicate that. Similarly my stomach gets upset when I'm hungover ... a dodgy connection between cause and effect.

This is apparently caused by "Extended Tourette's Syndrome". I put that in parenthesis because I only half believe it. I was once diagnosed with it and put on a diet of Ritalin and Prozac. It did not work. I soon gave up the Prozac and fed my friends the Ritalin. They seemed to enjoy it (like coke they said) and all that it did for me was to give me sweaty palms and suicidal tendencies.

My Internet connection at home is the same. Sometimes it works fine on virtually no signal and sometimes it does not work at all on a full signal. Go figure.

In the meantime here are the blogs that you missed due to my dodgy connections:

• David Butler's must-see show about Herman Charles Bosman at a dodgy place called "Die Blou Hond" (the blue dog)
• A minibus taxi user's etiquette
• Porn and different national preferences for it (PG 18)
• The mating habits of the common milkweed locust

and other stuff ... my connection just died crxetrcvybuni0moiominbvfcxsazzsxdcfvgbnumio,

Hopefully, I will get to them sometime. I must go and sleep. Tomorrow I have a long insert about rhino poaching in South Africa to deal with. Apparently the new myth is that rhino horn does not only give you a hard-on, it also cures you of cancer ... and the F#$$%N market is responding to that. There are two to three rhino killed in South Africa per week ... Another dodgy connection. Go figure.

Then thanks to Amanda Hobson and lmprt for joining ... especially Amanda since I was deeply and speechlessly in love with her for most of my high school days (she knows this now, so don't fret).

My maid Zita and race relations in South Africa

Yes I have a maid. It is a South African thing. Not that I need a maid or even wanted one. I employed Zita out of charitable considerations while I was still employed at the newspaper.


She was a waitress at my networking hub Nuno's, the Portuguese restaurant run by the two lovely lesbians. She needed extra income to pay for her kid's creche. So I employ her because I do not believe that charity does much good to the recipients thereof.


I know because I was also a bit of a charity case lately. My friends refused that I pay for a number of restaurant outings here and in Oyster Bay and although I was suitably grateful, it grated me. We have another friend who lives in Cape Town ... in his car. I pointed out to Jan that once you begin to see yourself as a charity case you are buggered ... and I don't even have a car to live in.


But back to Zita. I employ her and convince Vince that he should do the same. To save her transport money we let her work for both of us on the same day. I am sure she does not work longer than two or three hours per week between the two of us. I live in a bachelor's garden cottage and Vince in a room. Since neither of us cook at home it is merely a question of picking up the clothes from the floor and general tidying up.


As soon as I lose my job, Zita loses hers, allegedly for overcharging a customer. Now Zita is a Xhosa and there is a long tradition of mutual mistrust between us Afrikaners and the Xhosas that started more than 300 years ago with mutual thieving of cattle and intermittent warfare about the same in the Eastern Cape. Vince and I give Zita the benefit of the doubt.


On her last working day before my unfair dismissal case I speak earnestly to Zita about my predicament and tell her that I would have to let her go if the case went badly. She says she will work for me for free as long as I can help her out with transport money. I am touched by her generous spirit and my case goes fairly well so Zita stays.


Yesterday I even convince my sister Emily, who lives on the same property, to also employ Zita. I initially arranged with Zita to come in at 10am because I do not work on Mondays, but now I phone her with the good news that she has another job and tell her to come in earlier so that Emily could show her around.


I spend a fair bit of the night busy with "Internet research" and drinking wine. Zita pitches at 7am. A shouting match ensues, only half in jest, about who said what about time.


Emily clearly forgot that Zita was coming but I pack Zita off into her house and go back to bed thinking that a house occupied by three children and a woman would keep her busy long enough for me to catch up on some much-needed sleep.


I am disappointed at Zita's efficiency when she chases me out of bed at 9:30am. Another shouting match ensues as I refuse to get up and she refuses to amuse herself a bit with more cleaning in Emily's house. She insists that I inspect her work. I tell her that I am a man and that I know from experience with women that I do not know what clean really means.


By 10:30am Zita announces that she is done. I walk up the road with her to draw money for her, but the ATM is not working as it should, so I just give Zita a generous transport allowance and buy her breakfast.


She only eats one egg on toast and when I enquire about the meagre portion, she explains that she needed to be "in shape" for the World Cup ... She plans to make lots of dollars, euros and pounds as a hooker. I just shrug and roll my eyes.


That was my maid Zita and race relations in South Africa in a nutshell ... and the spellcheck tells me that I made only one typing mistake in this whole piece ... By the way thanks to all 11 people who actually took the trouble of becoming followers of my blog. Welcome Simon.

How to deal with floaters and my other superstitions

I am of the firm conviction that the more you know and the less you believe the better you are off. However, I am not free of my own personal superstitions.

Let us take floaters as first example. These days I seem to produce a lot of them. I don't know whether it is because I am eating better or just whether it is because I have less stress. Whatever the reason, there they are. Now according to my 'belief' system the best way to get rid of a floater is thus: Don't look at the fucker while flushing. I swear that's the best way.

This works nine times out of ten when you are in your own home and apparently one time out ten when you are in a friend's house as I found out at my friend Jan's house last night.

I dread to think what would happen should I ever have a shit in my boss' house ... I don't think I will ever do it but one must be prepared for any eventuality in life. So I'll just take enough cash for a taxi and go and stink up the nearest restaurant.

Stemming from my floater belief comes my belief about watching my laptop connect to the Internet. I hit the button and walk away. It works nine times out of ten. I do the same for 'difficult' websites such as Scrabble. Connectivity in South Africa is not what it should be. I walk into the street or garden and scratch my head or balls and light a smoke and refuse to watch.

My signal on my cellphone modem at home is dodgy when the the sky is blue, which is often the case here, and even dodgier when there is a thunderstorm, which is often the case here. In the good old days when I was young and life was predictable one could have set one's watch by the outbreak of a high veld (a geographical area in South Africa. Joburg is about 1250m above sea level) thunderstorm. It happened for a half hour at 4:30 on summer afternoons and that was it.

Not anymore. Now there is rain about all of the time (well at least this summer) and everybody sagely agrees that climate change is a reality while very few people want to sagely consider the cause thereof. According to most scientific evidence it is not Al Gore's carbon emissions, but who cares about science if we can believe something else and get hysterical about it. It is so much more fun to 'care' about something and express that care loudly in public than to be seen as 'indifferent'. Climate change is a reality ... so do not fart.

I also do not check my bank balance when I am unemployed, believing somehow that it would decrease the rate of the decrease in available funds. This works zero times out of ten, but hey ... a belief is a belief.

I also somehow believe that retracing your steps when you have forgotten something at home or in a restaurant would land you in more trouble than whatever the forgotten item is worth.

This is totally irrational and if it is your credit card or wallet or cellphone that is in the restaurant make haste to get back there and retrieve it.

What else do I believe ... not much ... except that is better to have a low-paying job that you hate than no job at all. This works ten times out of ten because you will find something better soon enough. Yes, I do believe one should stay positive when times are shit.

Computer blues and why I need a Mac

I work on Windows Vista (Home), probably the worst operating system ever. My new workplace is driven by Mac and never the 'twain shall meet ... I want to work from home as much as possible, so they buy me a licence for the necessary software ($99) and I am ready to roll ... not.

I do one job and deliver on time. Like Dave Barry, I like deadlines, but unlike him I hate the whooshing sound they make when they fly by. From Wednesday to Friday this is all I hear. The size of the visual files I have to deal with prove too much for my laptop, so it goes on a go-slow.

It is a new job and I'm eager to impress, but instead I spend most of my time sitting in the courtyard smoking and drinking coffee while a variety of very patient IT types pore over my laptop. On Friday it becomes clear too all involved that my laptop now went on a full-on wildcat strike and a Mac is hastily assembled for me while that whooshing sound increases in pitch and frequency.

The Mac is assembled from various odd bits and I soon realise that the yellowed keyboard was programmed with many shortcuts by a heavy smoker during the time that one could still smoke in the workplace .... about a century ago I think.

The shortcuts are designed to make life easier when one works with visuals, but I work with text so WHOOSH! another deadline flies by while I smoke in the courtyard and and the IT types pore. The solution is to disable all shortcuts while I do one aspect of the job and enable them for another .... WHOOSH, WHOOSH, WHOOSH!!!

So now I'm rolling and the people who are missing their deadlines because I am missing mine seem very understanding. They only come to enquire about my progress on this or that job every quarter of an hour or so. But at last my job is done ... I return to Melville to join my friends for drinks at about 6:30pm while many others work through the night. Life has a way to even things out (see my previous posting about me working through the night on my first 'day' on the job).

Meanwhile my laptop returns from full strike mode to the go-slow mode. I cannot blog or play Scrabble (my other little addiction) and find all of that slightly boring ... so I go and see the Morrocans again. I leave the laptop with them overnight and fetch it this morning but nothing was done to it. It remains glacial in its responses to my commands.

I braai (barbeque) for my sister Emily and her kids to treat her a bit, seeing that her French lover who came to visit for three weeks returned home on Thursday. I also buy her a small South African flag for her car window, thinking that patriotism is not the duty of the darkies alone. After that it is back to the Morrocans.

This time I peer over their shoulders while they pore over the computer and once again they fix the problem while I drink coffee. The computer, however, remains slightly hesitant in responding to my commands, but at least I can blog and play Scrabble.

By the way, I met my boss, Charles for lunch yesterday and we agreed that I really needed a Mac. I just looked at my heading and saw that that was where I was heading. Since I could not blog much last week I'm going to do it twice tonight. Don't miss the next one: "How to deal with a floater and my other superstitions"

Getting a new job and using public transport in a time of supposed racial tension

Ask most whiteys in Joburg about public transport in the city and they will tell you their is none. Until yesterday I would have told you the same (see my previous blog about the issue and also read the informative comment below it).

So yesterday Charles Moore, an independent TV producer phones me and says they need help with their sub-titles on a well-known multilingual environmental programme 50/50 (Human/Nature). Their offices are in Randburg and I take a taxi to go for an interview with Charles and Clive Morris of Clive Morris Productions. That costs me a whopping R100!

The interview goes well and afterwards I decided it was time to take a plunge into the only real public transport available, the minibus taxis used mainly by darkies to get around town. I quickly hail one by sticking my forefinger in the air pointing in the direction I wish to go. It is important to use the right finger because these terrors of South African roads often get the middle finger from other motorists and they don't seem to like it.

I get in with a friendly isiZulu greeting that is greeted back with ... silence. Oh shit, I think, this is a time of racial tension. But after the taxi stopped for a number of other passengers who got in silently and sat silently I realise that silence is the way to go. I suppose mainly because the passengers are deeply engaged in silent prayer for their lives. I soon join them.

The driver seems intent on breaking every rule in the book and all of that at break-neck speed. I can't say how fast he is going because his speedometer is working about as well as his shock-absorbers. It permanently shows that we are going at 20km/h. The shot shock-absorbers and the general rattling of the old Toyota Hi-Ace add to the feeling that we are hurtling towards a certain death.

One of these 'Coffins on Wheels' once got pulled over and the steering wheel was found to be missing ... it was replaced by a vice-grip spanner!

However I arrive safely at my destination for R7! I realise that thousands upon thousands of people do so every day.

I am hardly home when Charles phones again to tell me that I got the job and that I am starting immediately. So I am back into another minibus ... silently this time. Once again I arrive safely despite the fact that this one's sliding door refuses to close and I am required to hold it closed.

Charles gives me a printed script to be translated into Afrikaans. I give it one look and decide that I can knock it off in an hour. Charles promises to send me an electronic copy and I go home but first stop for celebratory drinks with my friends Jan (previously known as The Laughing One) John, the lawyer, George, the fridge guy and Vince, the writer. So I finally get home at about 10pm and the electronic copy is not there.

I phone Charles again and he sends it again ... this time I get it. I knock it off in about 7 hours and get to bed at 5am. I sleep till 9am when Charles phones again to ask if I got my next assignment for which the deadline is 11am. I check my mail and it is not there. He sends it again and again and I finally get it at just after 10am ... This time I do knock it off under an hour and send it off at 11 sharp.

Strangely enough I'm kinda tired now ... and there is more work to come, so this is me for today.

Today

Today is Monday. I was up early to go for my unfair dismissal case. I 'won' a couple of months. I probably could have done better, but that would have meant a protracted battle that I did not have the money or the stomach for. I even dislike the legislation that enabled me to bring the case to that point.

So I got some settlement that will pay my bills for two months and I bought a giraffe.

It was a case of living to fight another day ... rather than dying on my way to more pay.

Sunday lunch and an important conversation with a solitary kid

So my friend, previously known as The Photographer, Mark Morisson, invites me to lunch with his friends David Butler and Kate Shand. Or Kate invited me to lunch, but there I was at lunch in Greenside.

David is a well known South African actor and if he lived in the US he would have been a well known Hollywood actor. There are only so many real good actors in the world and he is one of them.

Kate is a very successful woman in something and she is married to David and they have kids ... four of them and they live in Greenside, a ''leafy suburb of Joburg" as the name suggests .

OK, so Greenside is not too far from Melville, I accept and I go.

David braais ( barbecues for my foreign readers) a Springbok and a sheep and does so excellently. The problem with braaiing (correct spelling) something wild is that it can become quite tough and dry. David does the Springbok justice and deserves applause just for that.

Invariably the conversation turns to Terre'blanche and Malema and the whole seeming mess. David sums it up perfectly: "It was a double whammy. If he was gay with a white person, he would have lost 50% of his followers, but sucking the cock of a black person is a 100% fuck-up for a white supremacist."

So the afternoon goes on with much laughter and typically Joburg indifference to 'serious' topics (we know about them).

When the lunch party starts to break up (at 7pm) I get occasion to speak to John-Peter, a solitary child who kept to himself all day. We smoke a non-drug, non-whatever hubbly-bubbly pipe together and he tells me his problem in school is maths.

So I tell him to trust his brain ... it can do maths.

That was the important conversation.

Defused (if you would excuse the pun)

I almost believed in God this morning.

Racial tensions were running high in South Africa after the murder of Eugene Terre'blanche.

A very emotional funeral was held for him yesterday ... in pouring rain with one of Afrikanerdom's most popular pop artists and publicity sluts, Steve Hofmeyer, delivering a rousing speech in the manner of Terre'blanche to lay him to rest in front of apparently thousands of people who flew in from all over the world to see their 'leader' go underground (bad pun ... I apologise)

Then the story broke today.

Terre'blanche was found dead with his pants down and the prosecution added another charge, crimen injuria to their charge sheet.

And then there apparently was a spent condom or two found on the floor of the deceased's house. The implications are clear. The leader of the white revolution will become the leader of the white revulsion if they learn that he had sex with a black man and/or a black boy of 15 or 16.

I am tired of all of this, but glad that something explosive like a right-wing uprising and wanton violence seem to be defused.

As I said South Africa always seems to be heading to the abyss, but always pulls itself towards itself when it matters most.

PS: The ANC finally scraped together the guts to reign in and severely repudiate their errant youth league leader Malema today and the revenue service is 'probing him' (no pun intended). If you can't get at somebody on anything else, let the taxman get him. Ask Al Capone.

Afrikaners

Many books and theses have been written about Afrikaners, a tenaciously nasty bunch of white people in the south of Africa who had the audacity to call themselves 'from Africa' Afrikaner.

The "White Tribe of Africa" as some British jounalist once described us. I forget his name but it made some news here when the book came out in the 80s. I read some parts of it without much interest.

There are about four million white Afrikaners left in South Africa (the other 2 million have emigrated to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and wherever) and another 3 million or so 'coloured' Afrikaners. My definition of an Afrikaner is someone who speaks Afrikaans as mother tongue.

The distinction between white and coloured Afrikaners is an apartheid-based one that should not ever have existed, but it does. Many coloured Afrikaners do not consider themselves as Afrikaners and many white Afrikaners feel the same about the coloureds, that they are not Afrikaners.

The difference between white and coloured Afrikaners is that the former have less 'coloured' blood, but all of us have a percentage of it.

The 'whites' are supposedly a pure mixture (as if something like that is possible) of Dutch, French and German stock, while the 'coloureds' are the result of a bit more adventurous love-making by the supposedly stolid Afrikaans forebears. That means taking liberties with the slaves and the native population alike ... often forcibly.

I am apparently a quarter Dutch, a quarter French and half German with 7% Indian in my genetic make-up. This is according to my father, who made a study of our geneaology. I am French in my heart.


Being an Afrikaner in current day South Africa is to live in interesting times for whatever type of Afrikaner you are (remember the old Chinese curse). The poor coloureds were not 'white enough' for apartheid and now they are 'not black enough' for the post-apartheid South Africa.

One of the pre-eminent coloured poets, Adam Smal, who wrote in Afrikaans, summed their situation up in one line: "God shook the dice and it fell wrongly/badly for us." I am not a translator of poetry, but you get the idea.

Meanwhile white Afrikaners are the 'richest' single ethnic group in the country and the end of apartheid strangely benefited them most. I put richest in parenthesis because it only means they have the most expendable income according to statistics.

But apparently the fastest growing sector of the Joburg Stock Exchange consists of companies owned and run by Afrikaners. I can well believe that.

The end of apartheid meant that we had to get out of our bureaucratic mindset and start living up to our genes. The genes come from European malcontents that came here from 1652 onwards. (My own first Dutch 'South African' forebear whose surname I still have, arrived in 1695 and gained notoriety as a horse thief. It was apparently him who screwed the Indian girl.)

By living up to the genes I mean leaving Europe behind and adventurously, if somewhat brazenly, forging a new life in a 'new' and unknown place.

So I have to conclude that the guys in the bar in Oyster Bay were doing just that ... living up to their genes.

Close to despair and being rescued by the Morrocans on the corner

Not, I will not carrion comfort
Despair not feast on thee
Not untwist, slack they may be
These last strands of man in me
and cry I can no more

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844 - 1889)

Yesterday I had occasion to recall those words by one of my favourite English poets.

At about 2pm my connection went AWOL. I rebooted and rebooted to to the point of despair. I was fearing that something serious was wrong. Something serious going wrong almost invariably lead to spending serious money and that is something I am seriously trying to avoid at the moment.


Then I recall that some Arabs recently opened an internet cafe not far from where I was sitting and I run to them for help. These Arabs turn out not to be fully Arab, but Magrehbians from Morocco. They are very friendly and we speak French, something that I like because I do not often get to do it here.


I remember that I have met the owner of the establishment, Moustapha, at another bar/restaurant earlier this year. Moustapha says he is actually French and he assigns one of his underlings, Hisham, to attend to my problem.


Hisham spends quite a bit of time on the problem and does not seem to be making much headway which leads me beyond mere despair to raw panic, because he indicates that the problem might lie with the phone that I use as modem, because his phone works as a modem.


After some more time that I spend on the pavement smoking and reciting Hopkins to myself, Hisham comes with good news. The problem lay with my USB cable. He offers to replace the errant cable with a secondhand one that he happened to have at hand and that seemed to be working. What do I owe him for his time? Nothing. For the cable? Nada. For the excellent Marrakesh coffee I had while waiting? Niente, rien. Hisham and Moustapha know how to gain a loyal customer. I am now sitting in their establishment writing this.


ASIDE: There is a crazy guy who walks the streets of Melville aimlessly. He does not beg or do anything but walk the streets. Today he just took some time out of his busy schedule to come and laugh at me for a longish while.


There is a lot of investment going on in Melville at the moment as people try to position themselves to make a buck out of the Soccer World Cup. Apparently Melville has been named as one of Joburg's entertainment areas for the event. Moustapha hit the sweet spot with his IT Corner idea and I thought it would fail when I heard what they planned.

The place is bristling with more laptops and lattes than one would be wanting to shake an espresso at. The coffees and the laptops are operated by all ages, creeds and colours ... I mention colour only because there is a pierced, tattooed Goth girl in a rather disturbing black, purple and pink dress who is just ... disturbing.

Fortunately I put on my glasses to take a closer look and see stuff protruding from her nose. It looks like snot but in fact it is another piercing thing, but I am very sensitive about stuff like that and I return my gaze to my laptop to focus on the task at hand.


That happens to be to tell you more about Melville.

Further up the road (the entertainment area of Melville actually consists of one street, 7th Street) a French woman from Lyon opened a French restaurant that I thought would work. It did not. It is still going but just barely and she is aging by the day. Her idea was to introduce specialities from Lyon to the South African market. This did not go down well with the gourmands of Joburg. Their idea of French food is firmly rooted in Paris and they would not be tempted by anything from Lyon where they have never been.


The woman fortunately realised her mistake and adapted the menu to become more of a neighbourhood eatery rather than an upmarket restaurant. I just had the hake and chips there and it was excellent value for money at R39. I wish her well.

BREAK IN TRANSMISSION: I had to go and do some urgent networking with (former) TV journalist Mike Cadman. I thought he would have the international media contacts that I so badly want to pitch for as a World Cup surround sound stringer. But Mike is now writing a book on the looming water crisis in South Africa and in his own words " sort of getting out of being a street hack" and he can't really help me. So we just have a beer or two together and he does give me networking leads.

Melville is to a large extent a microcosm of South Africa. A melting pot of everybody. I just came from dinner with friends at a Japanese sushi bar and with an excellent teppenyaki (their spelling ) chef. He and everybody else there are all Chinese.
My favourite networking spot is a Portuguese restaurant run by Afrikaans lesbians.
But more importantly, like South Africa itself, Melville is always hurtling headlong into disaster but somehow always manages to pull itself together and make a dramatic U-turn right on the brink of the abyss.

That was that for today.

A note on editing problems

Since I'm doing all of this on the fly there is a risk of editing problems. I cannot on DAMN WINDOWS VISTA do something in another application and copy and paste to the blog. So I run a spellcheck but that is what I can do. If the spellcheck does not pick the problem up it goes unnoticed like: "I see the sagging of the face". It should have been the sagging of their faces.

Bare wit me.

I am devoid of ideas so I look at the newspapers and tell an old joke about a rich black guy in Ventersdorp.

Predictably the inflamed racial tensions in Ventersdorp where Eugene Terre'blanche was murdered make front page news across the board.

The Star's headline is: "'Killer' given hero's send-off". Daily Sun leads with: "COOL IT!" and a subhead that reads: "Cops step in as rival groups scuffle outside murder court!" Well there you have it ... the news.

The Daily Sun is Africa's biggest newspaper with a circulation of 560 000 buyers daily. Multiply that by about 7 and you get the readership. I always maintain that if you want to really know what is going on in South Africa outside the predominantly white urban suburbs, where people drink cafe latte and complain about crime, you have to read Daily Sun.

It tells the stories of the majority of the people of this country and what stories they have! Here are some samples from today's edition.

"Free beef meals" on page 2 is about a cow being struck by a car in a hit-and-run incident in Mabopane, north of Pretoria. No sooner did it hit the ground than it was slaughtered by residents.

"Residents armed with knives, pangas and axes began to cut chunks from the dead animal and took the meat home for an Easter Monday feast!"

The cops and the animal welfare organisation the SPCA tried to stop the carnage but "the people chased them away". Nobody was going to get between them and a piece of fresh meat.

Then the page 3 lead: "ONE-NIGHT STAND DAD!"

"He believes he has more than 25 children ... but he has never seen any of them! because this huge family were all fathered with different women - on one-night stands!

"I will recognise my kids," said the lonely father with the big family. "If they bite the nails of their left hand, they are mine!"

Now Tshepo Senyane (49) wants his kids back. He says old age has caught up with him and he is no longer handsome ... and his picture confirms this.

Then there is a story about a fire "eating" a church and so on.

The letters page gives Terre'blanche short shrift, with most writers being of the opinion that he got what he deserved and the question of racism is hotly debated, but solely from the perspective that it is the exclusive preserve of whites against blacks.

In fact the newspapers depressed me even further so here is my old joke about a black guy in a bar in Ventersdorp:

So this black guy walks into an all-white bar in Ventersdorp and despite the grumbling of the farmers collected there he proceeds to order himself a double Johnny Walker Black. He takes it in one gulp and declares loudly:

"I have R30 million in the bank, I drive a Porsche, Ferrari and a Merc SLK 500 and I only fuck white women!"

The grumbling among the farmers gets distinctly louder but nobody does anything.

The black guy orders another double and repeats his statement with special emphasis on the only fucking white women part.

Once again the grumbling increases in pitch but nobody does anything.

The black guy repeats the performance again and when he realises that he will not get more than grumbling out of the farmers, he pays up and leaves.

As soon as he is out of the door one farmer pipes up with: "Well if I was that rich I would also only fuck white women."

Cheers for today.

Oyster Bay wrap-up, meeting Jack Parow and public transprt at OR Tambo International

WARNING: THIS WILL BE ABOUT AS RAMBLING AS MY TRIP BACK FROM OYSTER BAY.

The Fridge Guy, George, the Writer Vince's Chick, Adri and I left Oyster Bay at 5:15 in the morning to get to the Port Elizabeth airport in time for their 8am flight. Mine was scheduled for 10am so I was in good time.

At 6am we could be observed fixing a flat tyre in the rain. Nevertheless we still got to the airport in time for their flight and I had time on my hands to reflect on the time in Oyster Bay so I compiled a mental list of 10 things to do when in Oyster Bay.

1) Take good friends along. That is unless you yearn to be very much alone.
2) Braai a lot, be it fish or meat. Add good friends and wine and you won't believe how much you will enjoy Oyster Bay.
3) Relax ... there is not much else to do. If your idea of relaxing is to take long walks on semi-deserted beaches with soft white sand, Oyster Bay is the place to be.
4) Go and enjoy the splendid view from Bar-Nic-Les over a long tall cool one. Take friends along or make new ones there, but not when they are watching rugby.
5) Go to St Francis for shopping and lunch at Christie's Catch. Eat the hake and chips and buy the fresh catch of the day to braai later.
6) Take scenic drives and walks around St Francis and Oyster Bay.
7) Read a book or talk shit to your friends (highly recommended).
8) Relax (see 3)
9) Relax (see 3 and 8)
10) Relax (see all of the above)

That was the Oyster Bay wrap-up, no on to Jack Parow.

Until last week Wednesday I had no idea that their was a creature in existence who went by the name of Jack Parow. Then I chanced on an interview with him in the 1Time airline's in-flight magazine. Just by the way 1Time is my budget airline of choice in South Africa. They are always friendly and on time and as much as is possible with a budget airline, fun to fly with.

So then I learned that Jack Parow was an Afrikaans rap star of sorts. I don't like rap and dis not think Afrikaans even lent it to that genre. Jack tried, but failed to convince me otherwise in the magazine interview. I shrugged and forgot about him by the time I started reading the next article which I cannot remember what it was about.

Then on Friday around the lunch table Jack came up for discussion again and I was surprised that my friends (same age and older than me) knew about him and were even able to quote his lyrics. After my initial surprise, I forgot about Jack again until Saturday during half-time of the Sharks game when Nic the barman (Bar-Nic-Les geddit?) played Jack's current hit "Cooler than you or me" or something like that.

The song, if you can call anything by a rapper a song, mocks the self-satisfied middle-class people 'who have made it' in their own minds. The very types sitting in the bar and irritating me by filling the air with their impotent testosterone dregs. I immediately became a fan of Jack Parow as I saw their discomfort in the face while listening to the track.

Then while waiting for my flight, who should walk in but Jack Parow himself. I invite him to join my table and he accepts graciously. Unfortunately it is almost boarding time for me and I just have time to tell him how I became his oldest fan and he thinks that it is 'cool'. He also reminds me that we live in a small country then my flight is called.

On the flight my hopes to score a lift into town from one of my fellow passengers fade fast. The lady next to me is reading an Afrikaans Christian self-help book called 'n Doelgerigte Lewe (A goal orientated life) and she is going to Pretoria anyway.

On arrival in Joburg I momentarily believe that my incredible run of luck was continuing as someone taps me on the shoulder and calls me by my name. His name is Luke and he was one of my clients from the time I managed a gay bar in Melville. He says his sister is coming to fetch him and maybe she could pick me up as well.

It turns out that the sister is also going to Pretoria first, so I decide to investigate the public transport from the airport into Joburg. The short result of my investigation reveals that there is none. The long result is exactly the same.

I spot the shuttle service of a hotel chain and decide to book a room in one of their branches near Melville, take the shuttle and disappear at the hotel entrance. Alas, the shuttle only operates between their airport branch and the airport.

Then I take an un-metered taxi for a negotiated R300. He wanted R350 but immediately agreed when I offered R300, making me regret that I did not 0ffer R250 as an opening bid. And that is how I got back to Melville where I am happy to be back in my natural habitat

A song by a buffoon kills a buffoon and revives a dying organisation

Often in history seemingly insignificant events have larger and equally often catastrophic consequences.

In his powerful novel The Master of Petersburg JM Coetzee describes the impenetrable stupidity and denseness of the young leader of the revolutionary movement in the city as being that of Baal. I could unfortunately not find the exact quote on the net. But Baal was the stone god of the Philistines and nothing describes Julius Malema better.

I have been trying to make light of the buffoon Julius, but events over the weekend are forcing me to look at this stone god of the Philistines a bit deeper. If my discourse becomes incoherent forgive me, but that is the power of the man. He addles the minds of his supporters and detractors alike. So let us look at him as far as is humanly possible.

• He does not have the interests of his ignorant followers at heart. Witness to this is his current visit to Zimbabwe where he is openly supporting one of the most deplorable regimes on the African continent, that of one of the last old time despots, Robbert Mugabe. That is despite the fact that South Africa is swamped on a daily basis with refugees from that godforsaken country. The disconnect is complete.
• He preaches nationalisation of everything, including my wallet it would seem (in true African despotic terms) while at the same time enriching himself to the tune of hundreds of millions of Rands with government tenders of which most are under legal and performance scrutiny. The last two bridges one of the companies of which he is a 'director' apparently collapsed shortly after they were built. The disconnect is complete.
• He has a well-publicised penchant for expensive clothing, whisky, cars, houses and such. The disconnect is complete, yet his followers follow.
• For the past month or so this president of the ANC Youth League has been going around singing an old 'struggle' song "Kill the farmer, kill the Boer". He adapted it by replacing "kill" with "shoot". (Note: I can't get rid of the bullet there so just read this as a new paragraph)

He was duly dragged to court about this blatant hate speech which is forbidden by South African law. A High Court interdict against the singing of the song was also duly obtained. So far so bad, but then things got worse.

On Saturday Eugene Terre'blanche, the leader of the white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging (Afrikaner resistance movement) a small and largely irrelevant grouping, was murdered on his farm. The motive for the murder was apparently a dispute with one of his farm labourers over an unpaid wage of R300 (about 30 Euro). The alleged killers were a 21-year-old and a 15-year-old.

Now I have no connection with the buffoon Terre'blanche or his silly organisation. As I said they were a largely irrelevant part of the South African political landscape. A remnant of the 'old South Africa' that would have disappeared by themselves in a couple of years.

However, now Baal and his song and the murder have put them back on the road to recovery. The reason for this is that most white South Africans, especially Afrikaners (Boers), have rural or farming roots. I myself have elderly parents living on a farm and I am often worried about their security.

At the same time there has been a continuing series of very violent attacks on farmers, especially the elderly, ever since the hold on power by whites began slipping. That was in the middle to late 80s and not with the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

So the 'historic struggle song' as the ANC wants to defend it in their appeal against the ban on the singing of it touched a very raw nerve indeed and the consequences are yet to be seen.

Meanwhile Malema has been singing it at Mugabe's Zanu-PF rallies, saying the court interdict did not apply there. Baal dressed in full Zany-PF regalia.

But to conclude. South Africa has been on the the brink of the abyss many times since the release of Mandela and somehow sanity always prevails just when most people think that everything is lost. Let us live in hope that it would do so again and that Baal would be sidelined by the organisation that keeps him relevant.

Watching rugby in Oyster Bay

So off to Bar-Nic-Les (barnacles geddit) to watch the Stormers (from Cape Town) against the Western Force (still from Perth).

The bar is filled with mostly overweight Afrikaners and they are pumped up with alcohol and testosterone. A different atmosphere from the one that I am used to in Melville. I remember why I am not overly fond of my own people when they are from a slightly rough background. They remind me ever so much of Julius Malema.

The Stormers lose the match narrowly and I am glad to be out of there. That was yesterday and I wanted to write about it then but my friend the Laughing One is a bit iffy about me using his laptop and I forgot my damn power supply in Joburg, so I am dependent on him. I am sure he thinks I will surf virus-infested porn sites on his computer. I will not, but sometimes one's friends have weird ideas about one.

Last night I convinced him that it depresses me being unable to blog. So today I am using the computer but have nothing to say and forgot what I wanted to say last night when I thought of something brilliant to say.

So now I am blogging off without having said anything.

Thoughts about Julius Malema in Oyster Bay

I was thinking about beginning this entry with the astonishing news that Julius Malema said something sensible like: "Former white public servants should return to the service to speed up service delivery." However I realised that such a weak April Fool's joke would be spotted immediately.

That is enough thinking about Julius. I can already feel a deadly dullness creeping into my brain.

So I made it to Oyster Bay at about 8pm last night after I left my home at 8am. I was picked up in Jeffreys Bay by the Laughing One, His Chick and his two lovely daughters, the Very Clever One and the One Who Will Be Famous.

But before I get to Oyster Bay some last thoughts about Jeffreys. I did eventually meet some Afrikaners there. When they heard I was a journalist all they wanted me to write was ha the death penalty should be restored to curb violent crime.

I am all for the death penalty. If nothing else it will reduce the prison population and our prisons are fairly overpopulated. Will it will deter crime? The jury is out on that score and passions are likely to become inflamed on both sides of the divide on the issue so I will leave it alone.

So back to Oyster Bay. It is a gem of a place with only about 250 houses, a small convenience store and one bar. Perfect for getting away from it all. So perfect that we had to drive to St Francis Bay to do grocery shopping.

St Francis is a another picturesque rich man's hangout. A pretty girl in Jeffreys once remarked that St Francis is where Afrikaners go to speak English to each other. And St Francis is indeed as English as Jeffreys is Afrikaans. Although I did meet a Darkie businessman in Jeffreys who wanted to buy a property there. He said the town was changing and that many Darkies invested there. I did not see any other evidence of this, so I had to take his word for it.

Here in Oyster Bay we are keenly awaiting the arrival of the Writer an his Chick and the Fridge Guy. Tonight we will braai a delicious fish, a Geelbek I think, and have our witty conversations that nobody will remember tomorrow.

I will do my best to remember some of it. The Fridge Guy just arrived so that is me for today.