Metrobus 101: Waiting for Godot

I don’t know why they changed the name of the Civic Theatre. A big sign board claimed that “Johannesburg Civic Theatre” was too much of a mouthful, and that “Johburg Theatre Complex” was infinitely snappier, which in the long version it clearly is not. Shortened, as always happens, “Joburg Theatre” is beaten by “the Civic” hands-down-no-contest. The latter, I think, is at least as sexy as NYC’s “the Met” with comparable suggestions of the gravity of excellence in performance art. “Johburg Theatre”, on the other hand, positively rings with the pedestrian dum-de-dum of amateur dramatic societies and ballet classes brimming with gauche and resentful preteens.

It is a damning comparison that one could easily apply to other areas of local municipal service, not least of all the Metrobus, and I should know as I was standing in the shade of the Joburg Theatre Complex waiting for it. Across the road the recently-renamed Metropolitan Centre (oh! the parody!) reached formidably into the sky, a mysterious and ugly monument to incompetence, fiscal imprudence, corruption and general idiocy. From last year’s Miss World fiasco to the ongoing, Kafkaesque reports about the water and electricity billing problems that Dumisani Soap and others suffer on a regular basis, our Met does not much inspire confidence in its ratepayers.

So standing at the bus stop was a slightly surreal experience. I was with Mark and Kay, my friends and neighbours who habitually relied on the #3 to get home in the afternoon, but I completely expected the bus not to come. Every now and then we would glance, in unison, down Loveday Street to where it curved in the direction of the city, but in the steadily thickening throng of home-time traffic, no bus would arrive.

Supersize me

Reuben had simple values and basic needs.

(I have decided that I have to start writing fiction, and liked this very much as opening sentence for a short story. The rest of the story will come, I hope. But never mind that.)

Yesterday, for about ten minutes, I actually wondered what it would be like living in Boksburg.

I was driving with my folks down a road called something like Noordrandweg from Game to Builders’ Warehouse. From the right, aeroplanes of various sizes were flying in at 90-second intervals to land at OR Tambo. It is always a thrill to see a huge aircraft descending from fairly close quarters. And there, over Noordrandweg-something, they were coming in as if a really big person was shaking out his aircraft piggy bank in slow motion.

Earlier we had lunch at the House of Ribs Family Restaurant, where you can have eat-as-much-as-you-can carvery for R80 per person. Even the more modest version for R55-a-plate meant you could have soup and bread to start, as much salad as you like, and then as much food as you can pile on your plate – and it was quite astonishing to see what was possible – and then, just in case you were still peckish, a couple of slices of pizza. The pyramids of food that were carried to the tables by people of all sizes were really impressive. It was impossible to imagine that people could actually go back for seconds without keeling over of a heart attack en route. Impossible.

The carvery is the earliest version, I think, of “supersize me”. I don’t know if anybody else who grew up in a small town remembers going to the local hotel for the Sunday lunch buffet, and seeing evidence for the first time that if you keep on giving people food, they will keep on eating it way beyond any bounds of decency or reason.

Not surprisingly the place was abuzz from quite early on. I would guess that it seats about 250 people, and I thought that they turned their tables about twice while we were there. Seven hundred and fifty plates… I think they make a lot of money.

But that was not the amazing thing. What I really liked was the loud swooshing of jet engines that powered towards the landing strip while we ate. That and the electric train that did continuous rounds near the rafters right around the restaurant.

Anyway. The House of Ribs and its toy train is not a reason to live in Boksburg. The aeries passing very close overhead and the shopping you can do at supersize-me versions of every supermarket experience you can dream of, these might be reasons. I think living in Boksburg must be a little like living in middle America.

It was a thought. But it did not last very long.

Holiday snaps #3: In the middle of nowhere

The last time I ate in a Spur was in 2003. It was in Fordsburg, it was a group-thing with the folk from the dojo (The Islander was visiting from NYC and I was invited because he was staying with me, otherwise it would have been a black-belt-thing only) and I did now know that the Spur in Fordsburg did not serve beer. It was a bit embarrassing.

Right now I am settled in with a Spur cheeseburger, some wine and the cricket on a huge screen on my left. At the table in front of me two young okes have just downed what I assume are their first shooters and ordered their second round of beers. I suspect they are drowning their sense of impending doom, as the English are fast catching up to our first innings score with six wickets still in hand. Cook is just out for 118 and Collingwood is standing firm with 72.

“Forever Young” (Alphaville. 1987, I think) is on the speakers. In this moment I feel as close to happy as is possible. Pretty damn groovy.

There is a perfectly reasonable near-truth I can tell about why I am where I am right now. I am in the Soaring Eagle Spur at OR Tambo airport, and I could say that I am here because I have a four-hour stopover and I am waiting for a Cape Town flight. This is true, and would even be reasonable if 1) I was going to Cape Town or 2) I did not just fly in from Port Elizabeth. Truth is that I could actually just catch a cab home, and then, be home. But what fun would that be?

I am waiting for Ruth to get in from CT, and then John Barnes is collecting us at half six-ish. So, technically, what I said is effectively true even though the real story is that I made a completely odd lift-arrangement to get home in order to hang out at the airport for four hours. I could have asked a friend to come and get me, or just forked out the R200 for Maxi Taxi – it’s hardly a price above rubies – but here I am, and feeling, as I said, pretty damn groovy.

I hear a thick Afrikaans accent behind me order a cup of rooibos tea with cold milk. I look. A tall, well-proportioned man is ordering for his mother, a wiry and elegant but clearly conservative mevrou in a blue pants suit. Her air is stern and pleased, as if she has noticed that I noticed how well she has raised him. The boys ahead ask if I am (sic) finished with the tomato sauce, and ask if I am charging for it. I say maybe. A couple with an animated infant leaves. The baby waves and drools goodbye in baby talk. His father encourages him and waves goodbye to the whole section on his behalf.

There is a strangely uncontested freedom in the anonymity of being alone in the throng of a public place. Airports are places of transit. They are not as such the beginning and endings of journeys I think. The Golden Eagle Spur at OR Tambo is a halfway house.

Somehow the time in PE passed too quickly. We did not finish the quilt, in the end (although I will put up a picture of the work-in-progress as soon as Ben emails it to me), for a variety of reasons that will only make sense to people who make quilts. (We had to unpick the border because it turned out we were working with two different colours white and we had a helluva time deciding how to actually quilt it, so we ended up unpicking again. But it will still be beautiful when done.)

I did not even finish my book, although I think I am going to take quite a chunk out of it as soon as I have posted this blog. I still have an hour and a half to kill.

Christmas and the 26^th were spent with my mother’s siblings and their broods and grandbroods. It was great to see everybody together, briefly.

And now, too soon, I am back in Johannesburg. My holiday is over. On the one hand it felt too short, on the other, long enough. I have a lot of work to do to prepare for the work I am going to do next year, but I will also have time to settle in, file 2009’s reading away, and think about what the hell I was thinking when I thought I was going to write for a living.

But first I am going to put my feet up on the plastic cow hide and read my book and keep an eye on the cricket and wait. And all of that other stuff will wait for me.

Something really light for a change

Today I made my first ever pot of soup that had pearl barley in it. I love barley, I don’t know why I had not done it before. Just like that time Ingeborg and I drove to Maputo… we just got in the car one day and drove there. It did not take very long, in spite of the border being chaotic and us losing about an hour and a half while doing some bureaucracy. It meant that we only got to Maputo after dark. Even so, we kept on thinking, why haven’t we done this before? It was a bit depressing to have to wander around the crumbling city on the first night looking for a place to sleep, but that was an adventure too. In the end, I loved it.

I remember sitting on the balcony of the hotel on the Avenue (some day in) September when the May 1 Workers’ March came crawling past, droning with mass exuberance and vibrating with, of all things, outfits in a variety florals and Scottish tartan. It was like having a front row seat to an Ionesco play. Across the road was some shop with a deep doorway and men kept on dashing in there to squirt out the excess water from the 2Ms or Laurentinas, which were flowing freely. I felt somehow that this was not quite in keeping with the  revolutionary spirit reverberating down the street. But then again, I was the tourist on the balcony eating hotel breakfast, so what did I know?

One of the best things in Maputo was the bread and butter. Soft rolls with crisp crusts and lightly salted real butter.  Perhaps it was the only thing the Portuguese left behind intact, other than a national language. That and Pasteis de Nata.

And the only thing I ever wrote and lost, and have no idea how, and am sad about, was an account  in Afrikaans of our weekend there. I was very pleased with it, I remember. It took a long time to write, just like anything to do with serious literature. Not that it was serious. It was just in my mother tongue, which I find increasingly difficult to be coherent in. But I think it was good, and I am sorry that it’s gone. I think I sent it to a magazine who ignored it. No wonder magazines are dropping like flies in the face of the economic crunch.

Anyway. The barley soup.

The curious habits of the daggaboy and other male animals in captivity

Denis said later, on the way to Sharpeville, he thought that game rangers always go on a bit too much about the sexual habits of animals. Personally, when it comes to animals, I am really not sure if “habit” is the right word. I always thought of a habit as something you can change about yourself, with enough determination, on January 1. Unless of course it is a good habit, then you can write a book about it and others can acquire it, and hopefully you can make a bit of money.

And perhaps that is an interesting thought right there. “The sexual habits of highly effective animals” may be a best-seller yet.

I have been on a couple of game drives in my life. I don’t need my fingers AND my toes to count them, but still. A few. On this specific drive I retained most of the information dished out by the ranger, which was atypical. I usually forget that stuff as soon as we sit down to breakfast, or pour the first whiskey, depending on the time of the drive.

Perhaps THAT made the difference. There was no breakfast and no alcohol involved afterwards. Or maybe that was not it. After what could only be described as an abridged version of a game drive, we stepped into a zoo to see two lion brothers mating in captivity. So, everything about the morning and the animals we saw was slightly surreal. The whole experience was also tinged with guilt: I kept on thinking that if Bob, my friend the conservation nazi, were there, he would have had to drink a lot to make the memories go away.

The end of the world all over again

It was like Armageddon. No, really. It was just like the movie. A meteorite the size of Table Mountain (as opposed to the size of Texas*) hit a huge inland lake around the area where Vredefort is now about three thousand million years ago.

The effect was that of multiple atom bombs going off. It was Hiroshima, but vastly more destructive. Some rock shattered, some melted, of some only powder remained. The meteorite made a hole 90 kilometres wide, and radically shifted the crust of the earth in concentric circles another 200 kilometres in diameter beyond that.

In spite of the fact that the rock landed in the water, the dust fallout from the impact covered the atmosphere of the entire planet, and remained there for four years.

In the cold darkness most plants died, then the herbivores died, and then the carnivores died. The only cold blooded animal that survived was the crocodile, which, apparently, is amazing. Some small rodents and other warm blooded minutiae made it as well.

There was a sort-of-an ice age, long before life as we know it existed.

A thousand million years later, almost the same thing happened in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Bam wham thank you m’am, and life as it was, was over, again. There have been other such events. And I think one can reasonably assume that there will more.

A recent BBC documentary made the point that, as human beings, we are not actually busy destroying the earth. We are simply making it uninhabitable for our own race. Regardless of the consequences of our actions the earth will be here, and it would seem, absolutely fine, long after we have gone. The natural disasters that the earth, and life on it, have survived WAY surpass anything we can concoct by not recycling glass and plastic in a world economy driven by fossil fuels.

(Just out of interest, at this juncture, is anybody other than me impressed by the fact that you can score more carbon brownie points by simply eating local brie than by eschewing the driving of a gas guzzler?

We will always have Parys

That German fellow Schilbach, a veteran of the siege of Paris in 1870, thought that something on the banks of the Vaal reminded him of the French capital on the banks of the Seine, and hence Parys,  founded in 1887, was christened. Apparently a few renegades claim that “Parys” was a shortened version of “Paradys”, the intended name originally, but I found only one source to support this.

The latter version may have been better publicity as, tragically, a walk through the northern Freestate town reminds one not even vaguely of the history and excessive romance of its European namesake.

On my only visit, Parys’ business centre felt like small-town business centres all over South Africa. Low and low-cost uniform brick-and-glass shop fronts sported Chinese porcelain or clothing specials marked in bright neon paper stars. A home ware shop window was crammed with huge towers of aluminium cooking pots teetering towards arrangements of beige stoneware crockery and enamelled containers in yellow, blue and green. The packaging of the electrical appliances was faded  by the sun which beat down on the stoic little display. From a certain point of view and at the time, it was beautiful.

Now, however,