Winter solstice, blue Monday, Oros and beyond... PART 1

So it is winter solstice.

It is also Monday in Johannesburg so it is going to be blue ... the sky I mean and my lips and my fingers due to the unfortunate heating arrangements in my humble abode. So far so bad ... then it gets ... well worse ...

I stumble out of bed and rush to my R149 heater. The one that have reversed climate change when it was called upon to do so, but having done so, found that it was no match for the real deal: An old-school Joburg winter.

You must remember that my humble abode is at the bottom of some kind of valley and the well-known (at least to me) inversion effect is in full force here. The cold settles at the bottom of the valley and that point seems to be right below and around my bed with the lesser effects felt in the rest of said abode.

That is why I bravely rush to my heater in the morning, often having to fight off an amorous polar bear or two in the process. They always tell me the poles have heated up too much for their liking and find my said abode more suited to their suits.

But that is besides the point. When I get to my heater it refuses to give heat. This one may expect from a reluctant woman but not from a R149 heater. I am upset especially since it so admirably did my bidding when climate change needed to be reversed.

I curse it and the R149 I spent on it and turn to make myself a cup of tea but my much more effective and expensive kettle would not budge either. I am beginning to see the dawning of a bad blue day ... and once again I'm not mistaken.

There is indeed no electricity.

Now, I may or may not, have mentioned in my previous dispatches that I cannot really be considered fully operational before I had my first cup of tea. This is the proof.

I am freezing my arse off while morosely sipping on a glass of Oros ... a sort of synthetic drink that poor people use to keep kids happy at under-8 parties ... but it is not working for me. It only serves to remind me that my situation is poor.

No electricity means no escape from the Alcatraz in which we live ...I can't get out of my electric-gated yard.

It is only on my second glass of Oros that my brain, out of desperation no doubt, sends me an urgent message which I decode as follows: "Your damn sister has a gas stove!"

For me it is the work of a moment to realise: "TEA!"

Now things are coming together ... it would seem.

Armed with a cup of warm tea, I immediately search out a sunny spot from where I can eye the forbidding fort gate while smoking a cigarette and think. Yes the sun is shining outside.

Then I realise that this being South Africa where 'load-shedding', the euphemism for
'black-outs' (I suppose the latter could have a racist connotation) are not uncommon, it would be stupid to have an electric gate that you can't open manually.

Working from that premise I further surmise that if the manual option at my humble rented abode is padlocked there must probably be some battery-assisted emergency escape. And so there is.

Soon I'm walking gaily in the sunshine to catch a taxi.

On nearing the spot where I always catch them I am briefly heartened by the number of them passing and when one stops within hailing distance I forego it as a skoroskoro. A little mistake...

Although it is already 11am every single taxi that comes by after that is packed. So I stand at the roadside forlornly pointing my finger in the direction of Randburg ... for 20 minutes ... before I get a real skoroskoro ... what else I think and I take it.

TO BE CONTINUED...