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.