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.