Life continues

I took wife, son and three friends to supper. We went to our favourite spot called Wilson's Wharf, which is, as the name suggests on the harbour front. There are a number of restaurants lined along the wharf where some luxury yachts and leisure cruise vessels anchor. You can watch the ships come in to the harbour as well. The modest supper of toasted cheeses and coke all round for 6 people cost R180. On the way back home we passed the spot where a gang of 8 robbers were shot down by the police yesterday. Two passersby were shot as well - one of them critically. Last week two people came into my wife's school and while all the staff were in a meeting, robbed at gunpoint the people who had brought in all the stationery for the pupils. (Waltons, for those of you who know.)

I was glad the whole gang were shot dead yesterday. The police do not take prisoners anymore. The gang had robbed a pension paypoint and made the mistake of firing on the cops - bad mistake nowadays - they are better armed and better equipped with vehicles that they used to be

Broken leg and Lord Malvern

Perhaps it is the wet, cold weather which jogged this memory. When I was 15 I went to school at Lord Malvern in Salisbury. It was quite a modern school and was co-ed which was very pleasing. It was also, for some reason, very cosmopolitan. In my class there was Titiana (Italian), Manuel (Portuguese), Hettie (Dutch), a Hungarian girl and several other nationalities. Needless to say we were all European (White). We had a wonderful blue stripe blazer and some eccentric teachers. When Ian Smith declared independence from Britain we were told to sit out on the lawn where we solemnly listened on the school PA system. We all felt excited and were blissfully ignorant of what it was all about. Some of us in the school possibly died in the succeeding war - I don't really know as I left the school by the time I was 16.

In winter I was taking part in a rugby practise - my side the U15C or something like that were practising against another team. I ran past my opposing centre and our legs must have tangled in one of those freak accidents. I didn't even have the ball, for Pete's sake! I heard an almighty crack which wasn't just subjective because everyone on the field heard it and stopped in their tracks. I found myself on the ground and when I tried to move my right leg I felt the bones grating. No pain - but just because I had a sense of big damage I let out a yell. I was carried off the field and put in the teacher's car. No Emergency services in those days. He drove me to hospital while I held my leg together - if I let go it would bend in an alarming way.

I was left to wait on a wheelchair in a cold corridor for a long time until my parents arrived. I was still quite stoical and watched while a plaster cast all the way up to my pelvis was wrapped on. The doctor let it dry and then cut a slit saying quite laconically that it would swell quite a lot.

Swell it did and with it came lots of beating pain. Nobody even mentioned pain-killers, nor after 3 weeks of being bed-ridden did anybody mention physiotherapy. I actually had quite a good time reading - I read War and Peace I had a moment of glory when I arrived at school with my plaster cast and I became a practised hand with the wooden crutches.

I played Rugby the next season without a qualm so I must have recovered well enough.

That was 43 years ago. I suppose the medical basics were the same but I could have done with a few sessions of physio, I guess.

Nostalgia and living in the now

It's a cool and rainy day - very overcast, moist and conducive to reflective thinking. In the background an endless loop of Hard Rock classics is playing on satellite TV. I dug out my flute and fluted up a storm in accompaniment while dancing around the lounge - Hendrix, Cream, Springsteen, Foreigner and now the Doors (excuse me while I go back to the lounge)....
Ahhh that was good ... Love me two times ....

Of course I should be working but I have been putting in some solid late nights recently so I feel a bit reckless. I have written a fairly complex application in Access and I have been pursuading it to run as a scheduled task on my server and convincing the server that it can be trusted. I have worked out that at least two-thirds (ahhhh Cream .... Crossroads.....excuse me a sec) ...phew ...breathless now. Yes two-thirds of programming time is scratching one's head and figuring out why the cursed thing didn't behave the way it should. So one forms habits of adaptive behaviour - try a bit of this and a bit of that. In the end one learns to defeat the system with sheer persistence not much real understanding.

To get back to the topic I never started properly. The good part about getting older (I am 57 now) is that life becomes sweeter. I am learning new skills all the time. I am a bit sceptical about learning new software skills although I am plunging straight into Visual Studio 2008. In the last 30 years I have been learning cutting edge programming stuff only to see it superceded in a year or two. Fortunately there is some sort of transference - programming logic sinks into an instinct.

Other skills like music and art are a never ending delight. The real beauty is that I don't feel beholden to please any critic - I play music at my level and enjoy it. I paint at my level and enjoy it. If I do have a regret it is that I didn't start sooner.

I find that I am really enjoying memories of my past - trivial and momentous they are all equally important to me. Some of them were painful, some joyful - I have been remembering, savouring, perhaps shedding a few tears, giving my past self a nod. "Well done - good job .... I might have done that differently - but I wasn't there ..."

PS I decided to add a recent painting. It does depict a naked woman with a naked skull so I hope it doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities on either count. It represents the Goddess of Life contemplating the DNA strands she is creating. Her skull is to remind us that life on this plane automatically brings death.