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.

Titch the dog and Blunder

When we were still at the Location House we had a strange little dog called Titch. He can be seen in another blog of mine below. He lived a regrettably long time. No-one really liked him. He had teeth jutting out his lower jaw and large protruding eyes and an irascible temper. He was also insanely jealous. When I was about 7 he killed our new kitten while we were at church. We came back to find the lounge full of blood and a savaged kitten corpse. My father was a man of few words and normally quite placid. He tenderly placed the kitten on a shed roof outside and then beat Titch until he howled. My mother hurried us sobbing kids inside but I do remember feeling that justice was being done.

Blunder was an enormous army vehicle from the Second World War. My dad had even used it as a plough on the farm. It was in permanent four-wheel drive and had bullet proof tyres. I will try to find a picture on the Net - I think it was a Bedford. I used to spend endless hours playing in and around it. It ceased to move from a lack of spare parts so my dad just kept it in the garage. I was once even inspired to stand on the high bonnet and wee far into the air.
I found a picture on the Net and it is posted above.
The following description is interesting: "CMP - Canadian Military Pattern, Heavy Utility, Personnel: Between 1939 and 1945, Ford and GM worked together to produce these trucks for the Commonwealth’s WWII efforts. "
Found another picture which is a Ford (the top one) looks more like the Blunder I knew

Stranger in the house

When my parents left the farm in Umvuma my dad found a job in a tobacco-curing company. He worked such long hours that he left before dawn and arrived after I was asleep. Once he arrived home early and had supper with the family. I was apparently very worried and drew my mom aside and whispered in her ear, "Who dat man, Mommy?"
My mother had little family stories we used to hear often. Another one about me was that I took a long time to talk as a toddler. My first utterance was during a bath, piping load and clear, "Don't wash that laig Nanny, I washed that laig 's morning."

Living in Gwelo - Safety and other trivia

As soon as I was given my first proper bicycle (a Raleigh) for Christmas at the age of 10 I was on the road. My mother was the most neurotic mother imaginable. "Don't climb that tree - you'll fall down." "Be careful, honey" was her creed. And yet such was the blandness of life in Gwelo she was quite happy to let me go cycling on my own all afternoon. And I didn't just stick to roads - one could dive off into pathways through the bush, twisting and turning. I was humming along a bush path at full speed once when I saw a big hole. It was a mine shaft - completely unprotected. I called some friends and we took turns throwing rocks down and listening for the distant splash. There was absolutely no danger from other humans - kids could roam where they wished. Cars on the road were no real danger because the roads were wide and on most roads there were cycle paths running parallel. Gwelo is also exceptionally flat - the whole of the Midlands was once a seabed. There was only one biggish hill called the Kopje (Koppie). My dad who studied Archeaology though Unisa used to take us there to find stone age axes - we found hundreds. When I was 11 my dad used to let me drive his Landrover on the bush roads behind the Kopje.
After moving away from Riverside we moved closer to town, into a house called a pise - it was basically poles and mud construction but well-built - very thick walls (picture above). After WWII there was a shortage of bricks so many houses were built like that. I remember it as being very cool with a long passage where I could play cricket with my friends.

We had a large family living over the road who initiated me in some of life's secrets. They had their own gang and we made a fortress in the bush. The password was "Bernadine" They taught me how to sling a brick about 50 metres. One of them had a girlfriend and there was talk of showing me some interesting things but the oldest brother looked at my wide-eyed face and said I was still too young. They had chickens in the yard and fixed motor-cars. Our next-door neighbours had a baboon which lived at the top of a pole. (You can just see the pole with a little hut on it just above my sister's head in the picture above.) Every now and then it escaped and there would be frantic hustling and bustling and closing of windows. My mother lived in fear of the wretched baboon.

I had my own pellet gun and used to blast my dinkey toys pretending I was a sniper.
I was back at my original school Cecil John Rhodes Primary and had two big crushes, one of them on a girl called Melanie. I was so painfully shy all I could do was fantasise that her bike had broken down and I could give her a lift. She must have sensed some of this ardour because at an end of term party we played "Spin-the-bottle" and she spun it straight at me. I was supposed to kiss her but I didn't, alas.

We moved into a nice house directly opposite my school and were there for my last two years of primary school. I would vie for first place with Jimmy, an American boy, who is now a Maths teacher in the States, and Audrey who sadly died of cancer in her 40's. In the final exam I just pipped them and was awarded Dux with a big book prize. Predictably I chose a lot of books about pilots and a novel by Stuart Cloete who was considered very racy.

I read prodigiously and was hard-working but when I compare my zero social skills and inability to talk to adults with the all-round skills of my youngest son who is about that age now I have to say that the modern child is much better prepared for life.

Fighter Pilot and shattered dreams

For a long time - from about the age of 10 to 15 I deeply wanted to be a pilot. I knew all the hero pilots of the Second World War, collected books and stories and knew the names of every airplane that ever flew. I had a model plane collection (Airfix) of about 60 - all carefully painted with Humbrol paints. It just took one chance remark by someone that pilots had to have perfect vision to shatter the dream. I just quietly put it away.
I discovered the last broken model plane the other day - can't even remember its name