Seriously ... Yesterday everyone who owned a vuvuzela in Joburg blew it from 12pm to 1pm ... and sporadically throughout the afternoon and evening.
My friend Jan says in his office it sounded like a beehive on the move and outside like the coming of the second revolution...
Jan must have very good soundproofing in his office because inside my office it sounded like a thousand beehives on the move .... or at least the Israelites leaving Egypt and blowing down the walls of Jericho.
I am more in agreement with his second statement and given that Jan is not prone to hyperbole, you better believe me when I say that it was an unparalleled racket...
Forget the flags ... this is going to be the World Cup of the VUVUZELA!!!!!!!!
(Just a brief note on the flags ... there were 316 of them on the last official count. The schools closed and Charles and I are no longer driving Kieran to school in Parkview so any flag count from here on would be unscientific because the parameters of our study changed.
We did briefly consider beginning a new study on our new route but when he nearly drove into some-one while counting flags yesterday ... I forbade him to count any more flags today and desisted from doing so myself. In any case we were dog tired from work because everybody else wanted to be 'off' next week ... and we wanted to be off tomorrow ... so we packed two episodes in one week .... and could not even be bothered with our own private obsessions.
Meanwhile my spy, Lizette Pretorius from Pretoria reports that she counted 173 on her designated scientific route yesterday and remarked in her confidential report: "Even Pretoria is getting it!"
The 'it' being GEES ... as encapsulated by the VUVUZELA!!!! I can even hear a solitary one now... sounding forlorn like the mating call of a moose... Never heard that sound myself but I have an imagination. Lastly flagged my hat ... SA/France...)
Okay, I admit, that was not a brief note ...
My new best friend Maphala Makgoba did indeed join my blog and now the darkies outnumber the Germans on my follower list ... so there Gabrielli.
Talking about Germans ... they seem to be the predominant group of World Cup tourists in Melville at the moment ... followed by Americans ... British ... Spanish or Portuguese (from wherever they hail, ) ... French and Italians.
This was not a scientific study but Charles Moore and I decided it should be the next survey so I began listening to the tongues around me.
But I did meet Rufus and Dan from London and Arne from Germany.
As for talking to Germans ...
I went and sat down ... tiredly ... at a German table in a restaurant in Melville to smoke a cigarette, as we do here when you are a smoker in a non-smoking section of a restaurant, and talked to them ... as I do.
Arne had two darkie chicks with him. There is something deeply unsurprising about that.
The one was Naledi (it means 'star' in seSotho) ... she did mention her last name but it was too noisy for me to hear it and the other was Patience. I did my survey on the usage of the word 'darkie' with them and they shrugged it off. No offence ... but Naledi reckoned it was "a level of education thing" or something like that.
I disagreed because I conducted a more broad-ranging survey among darkies since my last altercation with Gabrielli.
The rules of engagement are simple: I call them darkies and they call me King Charles ... sorry I could not resist that. They call me whatever ... mlungu, Boertjie, whitey... for the duration of the World Cup it would seem that we South Africans are going to be a nation united.
I am off today so I am free to mingle with the crowds ... I'll keep you posted.
WELCOME MAPHALA ... sorry ... a VUVUZELA!!!!! again.
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