Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Brenda should have dumped her rubbish

I’ve had lots of rubbish on my mind this week.

I’ve returned to a former stomping ground, East London, which has become home in this season of our life.

Twenty-five years ago I started working as a junior reporter on Herald sister publication, the Daily Dispatch. On my first day, I was pushed out of the door with a photographer to get the obligatory stories about holidaymakers enjoying themselves on the city’s beaches in a sweltering heat wave.

On my second day or so, I was sent out with a photographer to cover a police search of the bushes around the golf course for a missing Johannesburg holidaymaker.

Brenda Thornley had left the family’s holiday bungalow in Sterling one afternoon and walked into the veld, apparently carrying her husband’s firearm. She was never seen alive again. A few years later, her skeletal remains were found very close to where the search had kicked off.

Although the Thornley story held the front page of the Dispatch for a couple of days that holiday season, it was not a particularly gripping one.

But, unlike the victims of other human tragedies that I wrote about over the years, her name and memory were seared into my consciousness as a young reporter. As I’ve gone about settling in this week, I’ve been wondering much about the kind of rubbish that prompted her to end her life in my new home city.

With hindsight, I lament that not nearly enough journalistic effort went into understanding or unravelling the final moments of this young mother’s life.

Despite having flitted here regularly on business over 20 years, I confess I’d never liked this place, until we came here two months ago to check the lay of the land again, and I fell in love.

I’m trying my darndest to avoid referring to the city as Slumtown or Slummies – as cute and endearing as users, usually mid-life and mid-level professionals, think this self-deprecation is, it connotes and feeds into the negative impressions which are created around East London.

And there are many negatives to overcome when you tell friends and colleagues across the country that you’re relocating here. I think places that you fall in love with warrant much more than a Slummies epithet. So, I’m opting for El, eMonti, even BF or Buff.

I’m enjoying getting to know the city again. There are no old haunts, though; too much has changed, in the physical landscape as well as the psycho-social milieu.

East London has cleaned up it’s act since last I spent any meaningful time here, which probably explains my fixation with dumping my rubbish, or at least having it collected by the municipality.

Do you know there is no reference to refuse removals on the Buffalo City Municipal web site?

I’m told I can enjoy the beach although the promise of amusement facilities doesn’t materialise. Is this an oblique reference to the antics of the city mothers and fathers?

There’s enough information if I want to put a billboard up, or build a shack, or call someone to fix the burst pipe running into my yard, get interred (presumably this is for new departures and not new arrivals), book a hall, visit a clinic, ask about rates or roads, or if I dispute that EL still has a zoo (as I did with my wife as we drove into town last week behind a removal truck.)

It’s a good web site so I don’t want to trash it unnecessarily. But it has nothing about refuse collections, removals or dump sites. And I think people need to know how to deal with their rubbish.

My own telephone efforts lead me to an official in “waste” who tells me they collect refuse in my area on Fridays. (It’s a blessing that I oversleep on Friday morning and don’t put the rubbish out, as I discover they actually collect refuse in my area on Thursdays.)

Same official tells me the nearest site for dumping rubbish is Berlin, on the road to King, adding in response to my incredulity: There’s an old tip in Parkside, it’s only for garden refuse and builders’ rubble.

I’ve never before been caught in the no worker’s land between garden refuse and builder’s rubble. So I ask: Can I take my household refuse to Parkside? No, she says emphatically, it’s only Berlin.
So Berlin it is for me then.

There’s a melancholic metaphor in there somewhere: I like that I can drive to Berlin to dump my rubbish, removal packaging and perhaps other bits and pieces of junk before settling into this new life season.

Someone should have told Brenda.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Ghosts of past lives make for miserable Christmas

Tommy and Freddie were class acts. You looked forward to the annual visits to the family home.

Uncle Freddie entertained generations of kids in the family with his mimicking of a ferocious – and occasionally sweet – alley cat. A great – and frustrating ¬- part of your visit was spent on fruitlessly searching high and low to find Tiger – or whatever name Fred had decided to bestow on his little kitty that year.

It was only when you were well into your teens that you realized you’d been had all those years. There was no cat, and the meowing was the result of a subtle ventriloquist’s craft and the vivid imaginations of young and old members of the audience gathered in the lounge.

Still, as an adult, you totally bought into the ritual the kids went through every December of searching for Fred’s kitty, while he sat there with the most serious expression on his face and you knew he was simply bursting with laughter on the inside.

Together with his brother Tommy, Fred also had a tap dancing routine which was open to all although it was generally lost on the kids, who preferred to continue to hunt down that cat.

The visits were made the more pleasant by the mounds of sweets – éclairs, nougat and chocolate nuts - you were allowed to stuff into your mouth – in fact, you were generally encouraged to “take more” by well-meaning relatives who thought your skinny frame was the result of serious food deprivation on the part of your parents.

Not all visits home have the same joie de vie of uncles entertaining kids and aunts filling them to the brim with good things.

They may not quite be holidays from hell, but the encounters with the ghosts of your past lives may make for a very miserable Christmas.

There’s the great-aunt who has yet to come to terms with the fact she ended up on the wrong side of the colour bar when apartheid was introduced. She never says so, but you know your brown skin is a huge letdown, a too painful reminder that the world changed for her in 1956.

At least she lets you into her home. The step-mother who passed on a decade ago always ensured that she was only available to receive Christmas presents after dark so that her neighbours in the white group area didn’t see her black relatives.

Your mother-in-law will find something in your behaviour to whinge about this year – it may even be the same thing she whinged about last year.

Then there’s the distant uncle who flirts with you on the sly in the kitchen. He’s been trying this stunt for 30 years, since you first came home from ’varsity for the holiday get-together, having ditched your denim dungarees for that cute polka dot mini-skirt.

Cousin Clive, who arrives with wife number three and yet another promotion up the corporate ladder, proceeds to do a detailed analysis of why your choice of wheels this year, a second-hand station wagon, is the worst car ever made. And are you still in that dead-end job?

Of course, it’s here that you’ll hear that quirky pet name that only your loving extended family calls you – all 300 of them – which you hate with a passion, and them for reminding you of it every year.

There’s the uncle who has told the same jokes badly for 40 years. They’re not really jokes, just silly memories of his own growing up, or the growing up of someone he read about in one of the tatty copies of the Reader’s Digest he keeps on the bookshelf, interspersed with arbitrary factoids and homilies.

You’ve heard them, everybody else in the room knows you’ve heard them, but will the family idiot ever realize that nobody is interested in hearing his stories, especially those who’ve traveled a day-and-a-half to get here.

It’s almost as bad as the compulsion the family feels about telling your latest new (girl)friend all your embarrassing habits. They do this every year when you bring a new (girl)friend home for Christmas, under the pretext that she’s never heard the stories before. But you have – a thousand times. Doesn’t anybody care? Makes you wish that this year you really did take up your mate’s offer to go white water rafting somewhere in in the Northern Cape.

Why do you do this to yourself every year? you ask as you pack the car for the trek home, to your real home, where people who call themselves relatives don’t abuse you.

Thank goodness for distance – of bloodlines and geography! And Tommys and Freddies who create great memories of family holidays.

Longer time-horizon ameliorates experiences of a bad year

While there is no golden rule, there is a kind of intuition that columnists should be seasonal in their reflections. So, this is supposed to be a column about looking back over old years and ahead to a new one.

As seasons go, this has been a pretty wretched year for many – economically, emotionally, spiritually, even politically (except for the mob purporting to run one or another faction of COPE), as the chair became the political weapon of choice in meeting halls across the nation.

Some were not directly affected by the storms but, having noticed how others were being tossed about, thought thrice of venturing out, instead hunkering down in a little corner until the weather turned.

Of course, this kind of seasonal analysis is fraught with inaccuracy and subjectivity and the natural human proclivity – exacerbated in South Africans - to wallow in misery instead of looking up, seeing the sun rise and anticipating a new day of opportunity. The glass remains half-empty.

There are few business leaders who will readily attest to having had a fantastic year. Most will find reason to be miserable about trading conditions and will only offer a positive outlook on the past or the next year under great duress – like when decisions have to be made about such critical matters as bonus payouts to executives.

One must wonder if, as suggested by the doomsayers, geo-political challenges are greater today than in the 1930s and every succeeding decade since then.

Is the world really in danger of turning back the clock on the rights of children, women, gays, journalists, migrant workers and minority groups as claimed by single issue activists?

Notwithstanding a litany of charges – corruption, bungling and insensitivity to the poorest of the poor among them – is the current government performing worse than the lot we had under apartheid, as indicated by the vile comments from ordinary citizens on any discussion forum? And are the policies they implement more archaic than the ones which gave rise to bantustans and group areas?

The middle classes in all societies may have been under threat from global recession but their primary identifier of status – what cars they drive – was not. An enduring pastime of the holiday season is observing how many new cars hit the roads at this time. This season has been no exception, as cars are being “pulled out of the box” all over the place.

And if the average Joe or Thandi is to be believed, this was a year of near-starvation, when in reality they were still more likely to have spent a considerable amount of time and money in as wide an array of retail outlets as it is possible to comprehend.

I’m not convinced that our life on the planet this year has been worse than any other 12-month period since the calendar was invented. Although I’m certainly not suggesting there were not major challenges or negative aspects associated with the milestones achieved.

For example, probably the only bright spot in 2010 we can all agree on was the amazing interlude we had for about 31 days mid-year, when we were the oyster of the world and the quid pro quo was seeing world-class football and enough celeb footballers in our back yards to last a lifetime.

Even that came at a price - an overly hefty bill for stadiums, and the emasculation we suffered as a country by a steam roller driven by the smug Mr Blatter who, despite pretentions to the contrary, is not the best fairy godfather a continent can have. At least we hung on to our vuvuzelas right up to the last. To think we even wasted one of our national orders, Companion of OR Tambo, on him.

But, the real trick to having an outlook that the glass is half-full, is to have a longer time-horizon, so that the life-challenging experiences of one “bad” year are ameliorated across a decade or a single dry season has a different value in the broader context of half-a-lifetime.

I’m realising the significance of a quarter-century horizon. Twenty-five years ago this week my feeble attempt at telling the story of a young mother who committed suicide in the bushes near the Nahoon River at East London gave me my first front page lead article and left me in no doubt that I was a writer. But it’s taken me that long to be comfortable with the mantle and not feel guilty that I split infinitives.

And today, a silver jubilee ago, despite the madness of apartheid, I was able to make a lifetime commitment to my sweetheart. No single season can wipe out that time line.