Destination London

Travelling must be ingrained in my fabric. Ever since boyhood, the notion of travelling somewhere new has always enthralled me.

Of all destinations for travel, London must rate with the best in my experience. There's a special familiarity that carries with it certain nostalgia about London. Parts of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in South Africa reveal the recent colonial origins of these cities and thereby the strong British cultural heritage of South Africa.

As a boy, my country was firmly engulfed in the remake to rid itself of Britishness and become an Afrikaner dominated society. But large pockets of white society and essential pillars of national institutions still displayed a distinctly British heritage.

The school system was essentially a slightly outdated British system what with boarding schools, venomous teachers and all. Thousands of children went to boarding school, some many miles away from home. School discipline was strict and correctness was of paramount importance in all subjects taught. English and Afrikaans children were also mostly kept apart, respectively attending English and Afrikaans medium schools as it were.

Looking back, one of my biggest regrets about the system is the separation between English and Afrikaans culture that was instilled in schools by the government. My first encounter with English children was in high school. It was only at university that I started to make English friends.

Provinces such as Eastern Province and Natal showed their distinct ties with Britain with a predominance of English spoken in towns and on many farms. Natal was even mokingly called "The last outpost". Several families of Natal and elsewhere in SA to this day have relatives in Britain.

My family's heritage was divided between staunch Calvinist Dutch and Presbyterian Scottish. The predominance was towards Dutch and so I was raised Afrikaans. Even so, aspects of British culture still made it into my upbringing and were imprinted with strict, Calvinist fear of God. Good manners and table etiquette stand out for me as the most valuable parts of my upbringing. Unforgettable are the Christmas dinners, a formal afternoon affair serving a succulent leg of lamb to which followed a rather potent Christmas pudding with brandy sauce for desert. An alternative main course presented grilled chicken with vegetables. Dinner was concluded by tea or coffee with homemade milk tart and other confectionary.

Our family loved to travel, although most travels were locked into the seemingly inescapable rituals of Christmas and Easter visits to either one or the other set of grand parents. Of course, most travels were characterised by incessant family feuds and quarrels. But even so, some my most memorable travels were to the cities of Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. We had never lived inside the old neighbourhoods of either of these cities. But my mother, who voluntarily attended an English medium high school, grew up for part of her pre-teen life in a very English part of Cape Town. And my older sister, after getting married, lived in an old part of Port Elizabeth for some years.

On occasion, I visited Durban, in Natal, and excepting the most unpleasantly humid summer weather, the old city had beautiful examples of Victorian architecture. Inland, Pietermaritzburg had even grander examples of Victorian influences. Today, lavish city gardens exist in all of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Pietermaritzburg and even Pretoria and Johannesburg, created under British rule in years gone by.

Travelling to London puts much of the white history of South Africa into perspective. The origins are immediately clear. There is a sense of extended foundation, of knowing where some of the most important roots are based. It is a pilgrimage of sorts - my Jerusalem, if you will. Second to that stands Edinburgh, in honour of my Scottish great grandfather, George Wilson.

In October will happen another travel, destination London. It promises 9 days of sharing in modern Englishness, of recharging the cultural batteries with ingredients that are ever dwindling back home in the new SA. As my immediate roots are slowly getting extinguished by turning politcal and social circumstance at home, I am ever reaching further back towards my roots in Europe. As always, the experience will be both faintly familiar and surreal, a polite reminder that Britain is not my home.

The bachelor's advantage

I knew it: Bachelors have an advantage over those who have tied the knot, whether officially or otherwise. And now science has proven it, of course under certain circumstances. According to reports in some papers, sharing a bed with someone else makes one dull due to lack of good sleep - that is, especially if you are male [1,2]. This finding has nothing to do with having either raucous sex all night long or not.

Sleeping is rather a selfish thing - one does it best by oneself, in one's own bed under one's own duve. If cuddling or something more explicitly exciting is calling for the communal bed, let no man stand in one's way. But when it is time for sleeping, then for heaven's sake, the individual bed is the preferred instrument above all else.

I can attest to the poking and pulling that go on when two people try to get the better of a double bed and a single duve. There is nothing comforting about that. It is a pain in the neck, the ribs, the face, the you-know-where. Yes, I can. I do score the occasional luck you know.

So, bachelors rule and those couples too who have the sense to sleep in separate beds when not going like rabbits.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Some day I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemondrops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can't I?
Some day I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemondrops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?


[music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by EY Harburg]

Picking amongst the pieces

Does Sunday evenings carry a sinister spell? A Sunday evening seems to rattle the creaky doors of the closet; prise open the casket; slip a stone from the wall to make the whole rotten caboodle tumble out for the sorry soul to savour. And come Monday one has the whole shebang cemented and back behind the wall, to last another week or two. As we march on valiantly with our masks on tight, we seem to find the necessary bricks to complete the wall. But every Sunday evening cracks begin to form and the wall threatens to tumble. So the cycle goes on and on and on.

As I sit here pondering the futility of my existence, I cannot help finding myself staggering at the edge of a precipice beyond which lies the pit of self-pity. Yet, all things taken fairly, it would seem that whenever I put out my hand to touch the beauty of the rose, it is only the thorns I feel. The tragic tales of love unanswered and feelings denied appear all too frequently along the tortuous paths of this live half lived.

All too often, once half-life is reached, the time for stocktaking has arrived. The balance sheet is drawn up. The profit and loss account is summed up. The cash-flow diagram for the rest of the projected existence is estimated. A sense of reality is reached. Has plan Z been reached? Has filing for bankruptcy become the final plan, the final solution?

What drives us to get up, shake our heads and ask for more? When love and friendship merge into one and all is lost, what makes us get up and storm into the wall again? When the heart knows its own path and boundaries between sense and passion blur, where does the mind draw the line? Where are the answers to these questions? Who has the wisdom to know and the courage to speak?

When the game of life enters extra time and the score is nil, when does hope give way to despair and hopelessness kick the winning goal? Will it help to fire the coach?

Pink Floyd was right: All in all, you were just bricks in the wall.