Leaving Barcelona: Attempt 2

Well, so much for starting the camino this afternoon. There was no room on the train this morning and I´d been asked to leave the hotel as my room was booked for tonight. I was so flustered that i left through the wrong train station exit and got totally disoriented. Which meant that seven thirty this morning found me wandering around Barcelona, lost, with nowhere to stay, carrying all my luggage in the rain. and because it was a public holiday there was not a single blooming taxi anywhere in sight. it was dismal, i tell you.

oh, and did i mention the station officer had never even heard of st. jean pied de port? we eventually established that it´s a four-train journey and one can only book two of these four trains ahead of time, which means that you have 15 min in between trains to book the other two and get onto the right carriage or else your pre-booked ticket goes to waste. grrr. so please think of me tomorrow, racing between trains.

anyway, after about half an hour of frustrated wandering i eventually got picked up by a taxi driver who was NOT awesome. he started jabbering away at high speed in spanish and when i explained that my spanish was not very good, he just ploughed right on. i told him the name of my hotel, which i happen to know is just 500m from the station and which was very near to where i was lost because i recognised some of the shops (i was just too frustrated and wet to keep trying), but this man drove me around the block about 15 times and charged me nearly six euros for the privilege. and naturally i did not have the spanish to say, listen you cheating baboon, i may be foreign but i am not completely stupid. not that he would agree, since he kept arguing with me about the location of my hotel and pointing enthusiastically to a totally different building, while i pointed enthusiastically to my actual hotel and tried to explain that i had stayed there before and was intending to return. well, my spanish is not very good but he was obviously VERY keen for me to go to his preferred hotel and shook his head as though he could not believe he was saddled with such an idiot, and i could swear i heard the words ´puta´ and ´estupida´ coming out of his mouth. what an ideal opportunity this would have been to use the phrase lovingly handed down by Naomi´s grandmother: ´No, senor. Yo soy bonita e inteligente. Pero USTED eres un prostituto.´ (No, sir. I am pretty and intelligent. YOU are a prostitute.´)

Anyway, my day got better when i got back to my hotel and i explained in desperation that it was a rainy public holiday and i had nowhere to go. they kindly found me another room, more expensive than the one i had been in, but honestly i did not care. they allowed me to check in early (it was only 8am and check-in is at 2pm) so i dumped my bags and went to the tourist centre to book a bus trip for the day.

the trip to the plaza catalunya, which is the centre of barcelona, was much more pleasant and the taxi driver actually told me my spanish was very good (you see, i AM pretty and intelligent. take that, stupid taxi driver number one). well, i may only speak three sentences, but i obviously spoke them with gusto, because when i apologised for the poor quality of my spanish he said nonsense, you speak very well. so i felt an absurd level of pride and puffed my chest a great deal, and went onto the bus tour in a considerably better mood. anyway, i was very proud because he asked me where i wanted to be dropped off and i actually understood and managed to tell him! it is amazing how fast one picks up a language if it is all you hear. Actually, I am so ridiculously over-confident now that I ordered my lunch in spanish even after i heard the waitress speaking english, and i did not end up with souffle de kitten or a live pig on my plate. go me.

the bus tour was fantastic; an architecture guide focusing on (mostly) the work of gaudi. we spent a considerable amount of time in la sagrada familia, which was just amazing. we were lucky to get in because, as i said in my first letter, there was a fire recently. my spanish wasn´t good enough to catch the story properly when i saw it on the news, but i asked the tour guide today and she said the fire had been started by a mad tourist (she pointed rather accusingly at me as she said this). the church still smelled of burn today. the church itself (nope, it´s not a cathedral) is based on the concept of a cypress forest - trunks for columns, branches for arches and leaves for the ceiling. it is *beautiful*. the light comes in in a completely magical way, almost as though one were in a forest, and it apparently looks different at all times of day.

the church is quite an amazing conglomeration of artists´ design signatures, because gaudi believed in letting his co-creators have creative freedom as well as credit. so for example the facade has sculptures arranged in an S shape, for the sculptor´s initial, and the sculptures themselves are in a cubist-influenced style because the sculptor thought that would be more interesting than gaudi´s original design. (he was faithful to the design in general, just changed the style in the individual statues.) and on the front of the church some of the sculptures are lighter in colour. this is because they are newer - during the war they were destroyed, and a japanese architecture student took it upon himself to replace them at no charge. he painstakingly re-created them exactly as gaudi had, with one exception - they have a slant to the eyes.

Gaudi´s designs are wonderful - he uses broken ceramics and pieces of beer bottles and all sorts of things, back when people had no clue what recycling was and thought he was just a mad man who built with trash. Nonetheless he became weirdly fashionable among the rich and it´s a misconception that he died poor - what people mean is that he died LOOKING poor, because he wandered around in ancient clothes and didn´t really care what he looked like. (when he died, the tram driver who hit him assumed he was a beggar and took him to the cheapest hospital he could find. it was only when they found plans of la sagrada familia in his pockets that they realised who he was.) actually, the architecture throughout barcelona is something to be seen - gaudi was not the only famous architect active in barcelona, and many of the buildings are unusual or eye-catching.

i am now off to try and find a t-shirt that costs less than my hotel room, since i am a total banana and only packed one. and nobody, not even me, can last for seven weeks on one t-shirt. can they? i have already done washing twice, and my current shirt has a hole in it and is looking linty. oh dear. on the other hand, maybe i am just channeling gaudi.

Leaving Barcelona: The first attempt

i am leaving barcelona tomorrow at the crack of dawn. i hadn´t intended to yet, but my hotel can´t take me on for another night because someone has booked my room, so i need to clear out. plus i watched the news last night (the tv in my room has only one working channel) and it said that there was what i THINK was a fire at La Sagrada Familia, which was a tour i´d intended to do in the morning - well, this morning actually, only i overslept. by about four hours. whoops.

anyhow, since the cathedral is presumably still burnt out, i would rather come and see it on my way back, so i don´t really mind leaving barcelona a bit early. i spent this afternoon up at Montserrat monastery - which is just spectacular. it´s right up in the mountain and there are still about 80 monks living there, though how the poor fellows get any solitude or reflection in at all is beyond me, given the number of tour buses going past there every three seconds. anyhow. it is a beautiful place and the mountain views are spectacular. we had about 30 min free time after the official tour ended and i badly wanted to get to the wooden cross and chapel at the very top of the mountain, but didn´t realise how very high up it was. with the result that i climbed up and got to the top with 7 minutes to get back down again. call it good training for the camino, but i have never sprinted like that in my life, not even when i was trying to get through madrid airport. i ran down that mountain like a deer with its bottom on fire, and arrived at the bus a mere 4 minutes late. (it could have been worse.) i like to think the other passengers were less cross when they saw me purple from exertion. not the face of a person who was wilfully late. was it?

i finally found a sim card this morning after several hours of asking directions in entirely over-confident spanish, by which i mean i nodded enthusiastically at everything anyone said (this is something i do at home as well, i realise). i am getting very good at faking being able to speak the language and have found to my amazement that what works in english also works in spanish - that is, just smile a lot and pretend you know what is going on, and people seem to like you. fortunately i have had years of practice in this. i am telling you, being in a foreign country has been a humbling experience, not because i am more lost here, but because i am NOT more lost. it has really driven home how clueless i am as a matter of course, because honestly, it is no more overwhelming for me to try and understand directions in spanish than english.

On the way to Montserrat (which means ´serrated mountain´), we passed some fascinating architecture including a number of buildings done by Gaudi. Alistair, i tried to get a picture of his signature cross for you, but the bus was moving so I hope I got the cross and not, say, a blurry tree! Montserrat is named for the patron saint of catalunya, and the monks there have had their own printing press for centuries, with all texts in catalan. the tour guide seemed very proud of this, and added just as proudly that all the street signs in barcelona are in catalan. but i think she may have overestimated the bargaining power of the catalan people then, because in the two days i have been here i have seen a grand total of two street signs. it is utterly bizarre. there is this total absence of signage which makes my map-reading an even less scientific process than usual and involves counting blocks and hoping for the best. of course if you can´t see the street names you can´t at any time confirm you are actually going in the right direction, but so far i seem to have done okay. actually, more than okay. i am REALLY enjoying myself.

interestingly, for a city that can´t seem to manufacture a single effing sim card, they sure take good care of their eyesight. i have seen an optometrist on basically every corner and even the people handing out pamphlets are, half the time, advertising optometrists. there is also a totally unnatural number of pharmacies.

back to montserrat: it was a wonderful experience. the monastery sprang up after a statue of the virgin mary was located in a cave there in the 12th century. the legend goes that the statue was glowing and the monks went after the light to investigate and decided, upon finding her, to build a monastery on the spot. more prosaic accounts focus on the fact that this statue is one of a handful in europe that depicts mary as a black woman. the mystery is also how in the heck she got up into a cave at the top of an uninhabited mountain. there are various theories on why this virgin mary is black; some say it is a veiled pagan statue (as pagan statues were not allowed) and others say it was sculpted in Africa and got to the mountain in spain by some process that will probably remain a mystery forever. the statue itself is absolutely beautiful, i came over all catholic and took about a million photographs and even rubbed her hand, which is made of wood. she stands in glass in a beautiful room decorated in gold leaf and mosaic. i didn´t want to leave  but the queue was moving fast and people were getting antsy so i took one last picture and went to find the cross at the top of the mountain.

interestingly, st. ignatius originally gave up his sword at montserrat (he was a soldier who had a change of heart during a long illness, when he read a number of religious texts in a relative´s house). but he didn´t like the monks at montserrat much, so gave them a wave - and founded the Jesuit order instead. so moet ´n bek mos praat.

i didn´t have time to explore the montserrat art museum, which started as a display of the monks´engravings and later grew, through donations, to a spectacular collection including caravaggio, monet and even picasso, as well as some other very well-known artists through the ages (i can´t list them all). i also wanted to buy some of the Montserrat schnapps; it is made out of a tree bark found on the mountain and although it is no longer made in the montserrat cellars by the monks, apparently is quite tasty even in its commercialised form. but then i remembered that i´d have to carry the drink for 800km, and thought better of it.

tonight the city is very lively; there is a match between barcelona and real madrid and from this afternoon already, ribbons were flying, cars were hooting and police were patrolling. but i´m going to get an early night because my train leaves at 7:35. Hold thumbs that i get a ticket!

Self-discovery lesson 1: I am afraid of cows

Two years ago, I undertook the adventure of a lifetime. I decided to walk 900km, by myself, from the Western edge of France to the coast of Spain on the other side. At the time, I didn't blog about it. Now, many moons later, I feel ready to resurrect my notes and post them. I will - at some stage - finish sorting through the several thousand photos I took. I promise. It's just that when you're hiking nine hours a day, often going several days without seeing another person, there's not a whole lot to do but photograph EVERYTHING.

We begin at the beginning, with a week in Barcelona. I have left my style of writing as it was then - less concerned with spelling and grammar, and more concerned with not spending all my Euros on the internet. You know.

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i am safe in barcelona although this keyboard seems to hate me and not want me to use any capital letters, ever. sometimes not vowels or consonants either. so please forgive that.

firstly - i have not been able to find a spanish sim card, so close family and friends, if you don´t hear from me, that´s why. I´ll email when in cities to let you know i am alive. oddly, nobody in spain seems to want to sell anything cellphone-related. it is weird coming from SA where every second shop will sell you a sim card. i have walked this city flat for three hours and not seen anything close to a sim card. there is, however, beer on every corner. literally. from early in the morning. (or maybe i am just staying in a dodgy part of town, which is also possible. in fact, probable.)

if you are not close family or friends you can stop reading now if you like, because the rest of this letter is likely to be full of completely useless information that will bore you to tears. of course, you are welcome to carry on if you have nothing better to do.

the flight here was mostly uneventful. i found my way onto the right flight without any trouble and fell asleep almost immediately on the plane. i sat next to a very nice lady who is apparently quite a well known former pro tennis player who now coaches all sorts of famous rising stars but i didn´t have a clue who she was and didn´t like to ask. anyway, she was very sweet when i was conscious, which wasn´t for long. i must say, my dad has given me many good things but the one i am most grateful for is the one he gave unintentionally, which is the ability to sleep absolutely anywhere and in any position. i literally passed out cold and woke up when we landed in madrid.

let me tell you though. if i am a very bad girl, i am definitely going to madrid airport when i die. there are no words for that place. it is completely illogical and as such is the perfect home for iberia staff, who are also not my idea of the friendly over-solicitous flight attendant. they just do not smile. the only person who was nice to me was a passport control policeman who, when i asked how he was, said ´not as good as you, because you are on holiday´and then asked me very earnestly if the correct word was ´well´or ´good´. well, you can take the girl out of the editing job but you can´t take the editing job out of the girl, so we had a lovely chat about grammar and then i wished him a nice day. however, it was downhill from there. when i was at joburg airport the iberia ground staff told me that madrid was just a quick stop and i would probably not even have to leave the plane. har har. when i got to madrid, we were unceremoniously booted off  but the staff did not know where the barcelona passengers had to go! i asked the flight attendant and she had no clue, and the most i could get out of any of the ground staff was ´we don´t know, but follow letter J, flights to barcelona have letter J´. now i should point out that the ticket did not even indicate that we had to change planes in madrid, only joburg, let alone actually saying things like what time the next flight was or where we should board it. and there are NO signs anywhere in madrid airport, while what is actually signposted is done completely illogically. and you know that if i find something illogical, it must be pretty bad.

when i got to customs i managed to set off the alarms and at that crucial moment where i was really pushed for time and still had no idea where to go, ended up having to remove my jacket, my boots, my belt, my etc etc etc to try and find the thing that was setting off the alarm. i felt like mr bean in that horrible gift-wrapping scene in Love Actually, only it wasn´t funny. i was body searched like nobody´s business and FINALLY, as i watched the precious seconds ticking away, we figured out that it was a frigging packet of chewing gum (the tinfoilwrapping had set off the metal detector). breath so fresh it´s considered a weapon. now there´s an advertising slogan for you.

anyhow, i eventually found the information desk which had a queue snaking around the corner, and i knew i didn´t have long to get onto my flight because the board already said ´last call´, so i was busy having hysterics when the customs official who had body-searched me walked past. well, call me crazy but maybe being felt up and groped in bits i didn´t know i had maybe gave me a false sense of familiarity, so i went up to him intending only to ask if he knew where gate J was. he barked ´INFORMAÇION!´ and bodily rotated me towards the long queue. i mean really, would it have killed him just to say ´through that gate'? i´m afraid i called him some names that would have got me arrested if he spoke english, which fortunately he did not, although i may have muttered something about y tu p**s de mama under my breath (janine suggested ´madrid es pero un lugar kak´ (madrid is maar a kak place)). so i stood in the queue from hell waiting for a confused-looking ouma and about 50 others to ask their questions, and eventually was told which way to go for gate J.

now, you would think, would you not, that J would be somewhere between gates H and K. It is not. It is nowhere near there. I found gate A, B, C, D E,F, G,H...and K. Followed by L, M, N. But no J. what is that even?? J, for some reason known only to the spanish, turned out to be WAAAAY down the other side, nearer to Z. anyway, i sprinted like nobody´s business and made it *right* as they were closing the boarding gates. relief. i got onto the plane and although my seat was in between a fat lady and a broad greasy young man, i fell asleep again immediately and only woke up in barcelona.this is perhaps how everyone should exprience transit in madrid, i feel. just shut your eyes until it´s all gone away.

the rest of my day has been pretty uneventful except that i smell like a person who has been on a plane for a day and a half. my hotel only opens at 2 but it seems to be quite a find - it is cheaper than your average b & b in cape town and from what i can see, not at all skanky. the staff were very helpful too, and i can decide day by day whether i want to stay on. so that´s good. it´s also very close to the station where i will catch the train to st jean. and barcelona airport, just by the way, is HEAVEN. the signs are so clear and the people are friendly and helpful. the only hiccup was my taxi man thinking i asked to go to the Catalan Rumble and not being able to convey to me in spanish that he did not know what i was talking about. (for the record, i´d asked for the Catalonia Roma Hotel). but we muddled through and now i am here, having dropped my luggage off at the hotel this morning and spent the last few hours wandering about and exploring the area. i´m a little hungry but my hopes are not high for finding a healthy nutritious lunch - everything here seems to be rolled in pork or dipped in chocolate (mercifully not both). i went to a supermarket to try and get a light something which was an education - even the Special K, despite having the same branding as in SA, is actually little clusters dipped in chocolate!! i eventually bought ´all bran with fruit´ which turned out to be a box of giant sweet apple cookies with the barest hint of bran underneath. maar nou ja. i can chew and swallow. this is a good feeling.

Whale a minute

I haven't blogged in a long time. This is because I am a lazy blogger who, as I explained in my very first post, is simply not interested enough in my own thoughts to put them down regularly. Besides, as I found when I walked the Camino, I just don't have that many of them. There is something really special about forking out 50k to hike across a country for two months, alone with your thoughts, only to find that your thoughts are, in order of importance:

1. I am scared of cows.
2. Food.
3. Food.

However, I feel duty-bound to say that the next post, as in the one below this one, is not an accurate reflection of what you will usually find on this blog. It is sad, serious, and pained. And, as my friend Rebecca put it so beautifully, if you wanted the heavy stuff, you'd be on Perez Hilton, so if I were you I'd skip it unless I were in a really maudlin mood and instead go right down to the bits that are about whisky and moving boxes. It's a post I put up for myself, because I needed to, and not because I particularly think it will be any fun at all for anyone else to read. You have been warned.

So that's it from me until I find something witty to say again. I did read in the news today that a) three men were injured when a whale leaped out of the water and landed on their rubber ducky, and b) Lindsay Lohan and Jenna Jamieson are endorsing Romney in the US presidential race*; but both those stories kind of tell themselves, so I don't feel the need to add anything.

* Lol.

Pie in the Sky

Pic: The Walt Disney Company

My girlfriend and I almost never leave the house. Most of the time this suits us just fine, but we realised things might have got a little out of hand when we received the following invitation:

We were wondering if you and the lovely Janine might be available to come over for dinner this Thursday evening? I know you prefer to do your eating and drinking within the hermitage of your home but we would be happy for you to wear PJs.

Any claim to inaccurate characterisation disappeared in a hail of derisive snorts when we told my girlfriend’s son what had happened. The little bugger actually laughed out loud when we said we were going out. 

Clearly something had to be done - long-term. “Listen,” I said. “We don’t actually have to be normal. We just have to look normal. Sometimes. Like, leave the house. Do normal people stuff.”

The trouble is, it’s not as easy as it sounds when you essentially live in a cave and were raised by wolves. Even in my distant youth my cousins gave me a Gary Larson birthday card featuring a gorilla flapping its arms with the caption, “For Pete’s sake, Phil, can’t you just beat your chest like everyone else?” The truth is, neither my girlfriend nor I have any idea how to behave. When we’re alone, we don’t even bother with nouns or verbs most of the time. We communicate either in grunts or by creating rhyming nonsensical lyrics to the tune of my cellphone ring. We’re apparently terribly rude to each other from time to time (other people need to point it out: we think we get along great)*.

I don’t even blame us. It's not like we had role models. My parents are really happy, but their idea of a balanced marriage is one where the partners are equally insane. They are like Nell in her forest, wandering  around blissfully in a world of their own joys without really understanding that normal people don’t spend their lives balancing pillows on their heads for fun (true story) or playing adventure games during power cuts.

When Eskom was cursed far and wide during load shedding periods, the only people in the country who didn’t hold it against them were my parents. My parents eagerly awaited 8pm on Monday nights, which gave them an excuse to create a new adventure to pass the time. Some weeks it was pretending to live in another century. Some weeks they would haul out candles and flasks and pretend to be camping before gleefully scampering off to bed. And one particularly memorable night, my dad found himself stranded in the pitch dark on the other side of the house, with no glasses and no candle. Clearly there was only one solution for a sensible man.

“MAAAAARCOOOOOOO!” he yelled.

“POLO!” my stepmother hollered back, without skipping a beat.

So what exactly do normal people do? As far as examples go, you understand we are – literally – in the dark.

“I know!” my girlfriend cried, pointing a triumphant PW-finger in the air. “They go to markets!”

So began the long process of finding a market we could attend. We spent some weeks rolling out of our stupor at noon on a Saturday and realising the organic lettuces we’d fantasised about would be more verlep than Patricia Lewis’ hair in a snowstorm by the time we got on the road. Faced with repeated failure, we needed more drastic measures.

“A night market,” Girlfriend said darkly. “It’s the only way. ”

So we piled our struggling teenaged captive into the car and began our attempts to impersonate a normal family. That’s for laughing at us in our hour of uncoolness, we muttered. Voodoo the child with some market mojo.

The trouble is, either we misjudged our target, or normal people don’t effing go to markets. The first people we saw were a quartet of lesbians: two middle-aged and quiet as Quakers, two young, spiky-haired and very, very large. 

To be fair, plus-size lesbians are a sensitive subject for me, since I only recently spotted my own post-Spain cameltoe (a function of sloth and contentment, I suspect). But I nonetheless clawed my desperate way into non-identification and gawked. Because for as long as we watched the four of them, all they did, all night, was feed each other pies.

I don’t just mean they bought pies and offered each other a bite. I mean it was full-scale arm-wrestling shove-the-pie-in-the-face match. If these women were Springboks, they wouldn’t know their scrum from their lineout. Attack and defence mingled cruelly in an epic battle for survival between hand, face and pie.  The pies lost, but only just.

 

We looked around. The entire market was crawling with chewing hippies, shoveling edibles at each other.

“Oh my God,” Janine said. “Is this it? Is this what normal lesbians do? Go to markets and feed each other pies?”

“Yuh-huh,” I said. “Seems so.” 

So that was it for normality. At least our pointless activities are fun, we argued. And we went home and made up harmonies for our polyphonic ringtones. 

But we're working on our social life. Anyone fancy a flipped main switch and some Marco Polo?

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* Example: apparently normal people tell their partners how beautiful they are. We, on the other hand, take attraction as a given, although the assumption does sometimes backfire. Last night I made the fatal mistake of saying I cared more about Janine’s personality. This morning I was putting on my exercise clothes when she snorted and said, “Should you not be doing exercises for your inner beauty, baby? A gym for the soul?”

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** Update: Why does everyone think 'I care more about your personality' means 'You're ugly'? *shaking head* Obviously my girlfriend can never leave me, since anyone else would dump me in about 2.5 seconds for tactlessness. Actually I think she's 'n lekker warm stuk stert, but I wouldn't care if she wasn't. Or maybe I would. I don't know. We should test the theory. Try some of that pie, baby.

Baby, don’t hurt me no more

Being of a philosophical turn of mind, I often ask myself probing questions like: If whisky falls into my glass and nobody sees it, am I still drinking? Is hell really other people? Why do we eat tofu? And how much glitter is too much?

Lately, the seemingly mundane task of packing boxes has led my multi-faceted brain to ponder: what is love?

Is it the moment where you decide to spend your morning offering a removal company everything bar sexual favours to help you out on less than 24 hours’ notice because your drunk fool girlfriend didn’t call them two months ago when you first gave her the number?

Is it the moment where, surrounded by newspapers and other moving carnage, you applaud her warbling Lionel Richie impression across the hall floor because you know that if she does not do karaoke at least once a day something inside her will die, and it’s already 1am and she has not performed this life-giving ritual yet?

My girlfriend is very, very good at wasting time. She dances. She sings. She dismantles DVD players and makes cardboard mousetraps. She arranges layers of synthetic fuzz on my head and photographs it. (Really.) I have personally witnessed her sending over 700 pointless emails in less than a week. And when times are really tight, she pretends she’s a porn star or practises the moonwalk. She so good at making nothing happen that I have recently found myself in the hitherto unexplored role of being the organised half of the outfit, which is a little frightening because I pretty much have procrastination down to an art and have spent many Beckett-esque hours calculating exactly how much time I am wasting by calculating how much time I am wasting. Really, it is quite poetic: in a metaphysical, Russian doll, room-within-a-room kind of way you might almost say I had distilled time down to a living, kaleidoscopic mechanism, mapping its fractal dimensions on infinite loop. I mean if you think about it, Einstein got a kick in the absolutes for trying the same thing.

All of which is leading up to this: it’s been an unusually eventful week. Owing to our combined talents for spending endless, circular hours waking up, having a snack, sleeping off the snack, waking up, having another snack, sleeping off the snack, waking up, having a snack, sleeping off the snack (it’s like Groundhog Day for the greedy and slothful) – well, let’s just say time made fools of us. We woke up one week before Moving Day and realised nothing – nothing – had been done yet.

It’s not that we didn’t have good intentions. Every weekend since early autumn the conversation has gone something like this:

GF: Baby.
Me: Yes?
GF: It’s Sunday.
Me: So it is. I do like how we agree on everything.
GF: We do though.
Me: It is because we are always right.
GF: We are though.
Me (pause): Why did you tell me it was Sunday?
GF: Because it’s not Saturday.
Me: Good God, you’re amazing.
GF: I know though.
Me: What does this mean?
GF: It means we can’t go tile shopping. I will have no bathroom and we will not be able to bath.
Me: But we will be able to have snacks.
GF: You make everything light again, my dove.
Me: I do though. Let’s have a snack. * violin *
GF: Okay.
(Food materialises. Rainbow forms. Fade out.)

This is how our capacity to be productive, successful adults has been sucked away by an endless capacity for naps and mutual validation. I am reminded of the Collyer brothers, whose similar habits ended up in their being buried to death behind – among other things – a wall of old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes, parts of a wine press, the frame of a baby carriage, a rake and some umbrellas. One was squashed under a makeshift booby trap he had designed himself to keep out nosy teenagers; the other died from the combined effects of malnutrition, dehydration, and cardiac arrest.

So this week, I decided something’s got to give. “Okay,” I said, all reassuring experience. “Let’s do it. It won’t take long. We just have to get started.” I have, after all, moved several times and usually managed it in record time, owing to Zen-influenced short cuts such as simply taking drawers out of their chests and walking with them just like that to the new place. It would be okay. We just had to motor.  I would bring dinner. She would buy masking tape. It would happen.

I had not counted on GF’s hitherto unsuspected – and apparently entirely random – leaning toward perfectionism.

“No!” she cried as I attempted to throw out an empty envelope dating back to 1998. “What do you mean I don't need that? Put it in. No, not that box, this one. No, not like that. Like this! Honestly woman, have you never packed an envelope before?”

The trouble with these bursts of control freakism is that they are both random and entirely unhelpful and, almost as though she has a tic of some kind, come bursting out at unpredictable intervals between equally unhelpful behaviour.

“No!” she screeched, as she Commodore-slid* her way down the hallway. “You can’t pack that underwear! It’s too wide!”

“Wait!” she yelled, as she rugby-tackled me and we went hurtling across the kitchen in a sudden – and apparently life-or-death necessary – attempt at reviving the traditional Sokkie. “You can’t put that jacket in there like that! It’s shiny!” And then, as I moved to take it out: “No, you can’t do that now. We’re busy. We’re dancing now. Move your pelvis more. Keep the shoulders still.”

True story.

The funny thing about all of this is that I swear she spent half the morning last week complaining  - in outrage - that her son, late on his way to an exam, had interrupted her lecture on the importance of education to say: “Look at me dancing, Mommy! Every day I’m shuff-ell-ing! Look!”

“Why?!” she wailed in despair. “Where does the child come from? Where did I go wrong?”

Which begs another probing question. Should I tell her?

* She actually did do this; and spent a further ten minutes berating me for not fully appreciating the how smoothly she executed said Commodore-slide. Because, she pouted, I was too focused on the stupid boxes.

The Tooth is Out There.

It’s an unfortunate reality that during the most awkward moments of your life, you are often in the hands of a stranger. Giving birth, having your legs waxed, or placing a discreet enquiry at the pharmacy.

The indignity is bad enough when the person is sane, if a little desensitised. For example, when your first-ever gynaecologist grabs latex gloves and an instrument shaped like a giant duck and asks you, in a bored sort of voice, where you go to school. Or when a beautician casually tells you her kids’ names whilst pouring hot wax into bits you didn’t know you had.

I don’t think human beings are made for this kind of encounter. We’re not socialised to expect it. The horror is compounded when you throw into the mix a practitioner who is just – for want of a politically correct term – flat-out cracking nuts. I’m not talking about a person who is so used to their job that it makes them a little insensitive*. I’m talking about completely oh-my-God-get-me-out-of-here bananas. (Like a proctologist who can't stop talking about his ex, or a psychologist obsessed with antique china poodles.) And yet because the situation is already so completely fucking weird, your brain doesn’t have anything on file for what to do with an added element of crazy - it is already in full-out suspension of disbelief. It digs into its database for notes on Stranger With Latex Gloves (Customs officer – stop breathing, do not attempt humour), cross-references it with They Are Very Angry About Their Divorce (nod and smile) again with Near Your Naked Buttocks (run), and lastly with You Are Paying Them For It (no results found). In the end your brain merges all possible answers and winds up with this:

Often, you end up just combining a random selection of known social behaviours, hoping one of them will turn the scene normal again.

My biggest 404 came about two years ago, when I had to have a root canal. Because it had been botched previously by my regular dentist, a colleague recommended the province’s root canal specialist. “Go to him,” she urged. “He’s dishy. You’ll love him.”

Now, there are a few phrases in the world that should instantly set off alarm bells for any halfway intelligent human being. One of them is, “You can’t miss it.” Never has anyone using this phrase given me directions that didn’t land me in the middle of Malmesbury with a bright red light flashing on my what-the-fuck-o-meter. But it’s even worse when someone says, “You’ll love xyz.” Because whatever it is, not only should you know that you will not love it, you will also feel duty-bound for the rest of your life – whether it’s the person’s hairdresser or a particular kind of pudding – to validate their assessment and pretend you did love it.

In fairness to my colleague, I admit that when I first cast an eye over this root canal meister there was a fleeting – very fleeting – resemblance to George Clooney. Something about the greying hair and the Strong Masculine Jaw. But I should also have remembered that my colleague was rather more open-minded than I was and that no sane human being would ever specialise in root canals. It’s just not normal. Alarm bell 2: he did not once, during our entire encounter, smile. It was as though he had a permanent dose of Novocaine in the base of each cheek, keeping his expression and tone of voice eerily soft and static. Alarm bell 3: no assistant. Alarm bell 4: he started working at 5am. Call me prejudiced, but I just don’t trust people who are functional that early in the morning.

Maybe it was so that nobody would hear us scream.

On the morning of my appointment, I walked into the deserted building at 6am, took the deserted elevator to the top floor, and found him waiting alone in his rooms. “Hello,” he greeted me, starting off well enough. “Won’t you have a seat? We’re going to be about an hour.”

“Thank you,” I said, still all small talk and good humour. “Do you have a toilet I can use before we begin?”

“Certainly,” he answered evenly, and handed me a key.

Incongruity #1: Dangling off the keyring were several human teeth. A little brown in places. Attached to a pink, plastic gum-guard.

My brain, finding nothing in its filing system to cope with this, went straight to Default Setting – Give a Compliment. “Nice keyring,” I said warmly.

“Thank you,” was his deadpan reply. “They were a patient’s.”

On the toilet, I took a few moments to think about whether to run and pretend the whole thing had never happened. But denial (“maybe he’s just a little eccentric”), and the fact that my handbag was still in the reception area, led me back to the waiting room. It was the last moment of that appointment where I didn’t feel sure I was in the hands of a serial killer. His actual surgery room – and I don’t want to exaggerate, now – looked like a morgue straight out of Law and Order. Everything was pale minty green, oddly dilapidated and peeling in places, and reeked of formaldehyde. Icy fluorescent lights. Unnatural silence. The tinkling instruments being sharpened.

I sat in the chair. I was cool. I had done this sort of thing before.

Now the thing with a nerve-wracking situation is that your brain seeks any – any­ – aspect of familiarity for comfort. So the way to send you completely over the edge is to tamper with the little things. The things you expect. The way the light looks, or the angle of the chair.

He turned the chair upside down.

I was strapped in, dangling at an 80-degree angle to the floor, head at the bottom and feet pointing absurdly into the air.

“I find I work better at this angle,” he said darkly. “Don’t you?”

I didn’t have time to answer him, because the next thing I knew a dental dam had been clapped over my nose and mouth. Now, if you’ve never had a dental dam, I’ve got one word for you: don’t. You can’t breathe because it’s covering your nose and mouth, and if you’re this particular root canal specialist, you’ve rigged it so that the patient’s jaw is locked in position and it is very uncomfortable indeed, and you’ve strapped their limbs in so that they can’t poke you in the eye and run for their lives. I tried to mention that I was claustrophobic.

“Mbbrldble,” I said.

“I know!” he said. “Much more hygienic!”

Now the thing with dentistry is that it’s ideally suited to monologuing. The patient can’t say anything – especially if their jaw is locked around a dental dam – so you can basically treat them to any subject you like.

“Where do you work?” he asked, just a little hungrily.

“Grgle,” I said.

“Oh I know already, I read it on your form,” he nodded gleefully. “But I noted it because I have a story for you! Headline news!”

And he started talking. And talking. And talking. Turns out he was not just a root canal specialist, but also an amateur sleuth. And his deductions had led him - in travels spanning approximately 65% of the globe – to believe Brett Kebble was still alive.

“I know where he is, too,” he said smugly. “I know where he’s hiding. And I can get his bank records.”

“Grgh?” I asked.

“You bet,” he said. “And I’m not telling yet, either. Because my time will come. And I’m going to out him. I’ll make millions. I’m the only one that knows. But because I like you, I’ll give you a clue. I found the answer on a mountain in Switzerland.”

He flashed his drill thoughtfully.

“Of course, I guess I could show you. You wouldn’t tell anyone else, would you? I don’t really like people. But we could make a trip of it. Get the newspaper to pay. Take some pictures. Sell the story. Share the money.”

He paused. “But I’d need to finish your teeth first.

“Can you see my probe anywhere?”

----------------------

* Witness the teenager ahead of me in the pharmacy queue this morning, who exhibited telltale symptoms of Embarrassing Itchism – fuschia -coloured ears and an inability to form audible consonants. Not that I needed the clues, because the doddering pharmacist nodded, smiled, and bellowed: “SORRY DEAR, I CAN’T HEAR YOU. IS THAT ORAL OR VAGINAL?”

A Sign of the Times.

Do you ever have those weeks where you just can’t shake the feeling you’re the butt of a giant bureaucratic joke? Where, with the bewilderment of poor Truman before you, you are trapped in an administrative farce of Shakespearean proportions?

You know – the kind of week where you get called aside because Jill from call centre has, in earnest, filed a complaint with your manager that you spilled a small blob of yoghurt in the office sink (true story). Or you take your computer in for repairs and the technician tells you, with a straight face, that he’s lost all your data but you owe him R3000 for the installation of hardware you didn’t ask for (also a true story).

It’s been that kind of week for me. The kind of week where you know, in some temporarily inaccessible part of yourself, that actually it is the rest of the world that has gone bananas. But it still smarts.

Never do I feel the sting of this brazen, batshit-craziness quite as strongly as when I’m reading street signs. My capacity for reasoning peeks out to investigate, registers an unrecognisable entity, and shuts right back down with a resounding COMPUTER SAYS NO. I know, in the deepest part of myself, that the municipality cannot be serious. That when they paint this:

…they do not actually expect me to understand what to do in a life-or-death situation when I’m operating a three-ton killing machine at 120 km/h.

(For the record, this sign does not mean “portly alien with chastity belt ahead”. It means “vehicles with dangerous loads only”.)

The devilish power of the bureaucratic bullshit generator is that it actually can make you feel like a simpleton, even though you know they must be having you on. I’m telling you: go into any signwriting office and you’ll find cubicles full of snarky designers laughing their heads off and cashing in on everyone else’s terror of inadequacy. I can hear it: “Hey Bob! Bob! This one looks just like YOUR MOMMA, Bob! Ha ha ha ha ha! I’m gonna use it as a tunnel warning!”

I get the same feeling when I’m doing IQ tests. That there must be some chuckle factor I’m missing; it simply is not possible that everybody in the world gets it except me. Last year, I took over 12 online tests in one day when every single test bar one told me I was clinically retarded. (I’m serious.) One even said kindly: “Subject should not be given tasks outside of his/her skill range, as this can be demoralising. With guidance and encouragement, confidence may be developed and subject may eventually be groomed for a position of moderate responsibility, such as a janitor or Wal-Mart cashier.”

Well.

Maybe there is something wrong with me. I have the same problem with the instructions on childproof caps and basic kitchen appliances. I can never get the damn lid off the Panado and it took me a year to set up my oven when – seriously – all I had to do was stick in the tray and burn the gas off by turning the oven on for 20 minutes. But to be fair, wouldn’t you be confused if you were confronted with the following instructions?

1. Do not use appliance for other than intended use.
2. Turn the heater switch dial on the position.
3. Turn the Time Control to desired darkness. Bell will ring.

Is it just me, or does that last line in particular sound a little… apocalyptic?

Of course, just in case you really are the moron you think you are by this time, the writer kindly includes a few basic life-saving instructions that are unambiguous enough for even those of dubious intelligence to understand:

1. Do not immerse appliance in water or wash it under waterspout.
(Seriously – it’s an oven. Who do they think I am, He-Man?)
2. Never leave the appliance unattended under any circumstances.
(Whoops, better get a sitter for those times when I’m not home, baking.)
3. Do not store any materials in the oven. (Well, there goes the cat’s bed.)

I hate feeling that my survival depends on joining this discourse of insanity. That whether I’m trying to get my breakfast from the office kitchen, navigating through the city or trying to open a fire extinguisher when my car goes up in flames, I’ll have to learn the language of bureacracy first. It’s like being trapped in a never-ending episode of Survivor: Urban Edition. And knowing that, although there's no escape for me, the tribe has spoken.

Neither Queer nor There.

Gays these days! What’s up with all the hatin' on Steven and Tiwonge? Sure, young love is fickle. One minute you’re all Romeo and Romeo, embracing lifelong incarceration for the man of your dreams. Next thing you’re hot-footing it back to your home village, trotting into the sunset with some hussy named Dorothy.

Jawellnofine, love hurts. But why is the rest of the world acting like they’ve been slapped in the face?

Let me tell you something: if I had the whole of Malawi threatening to give me a spanking – and not the fun kind - I’d also let Dorothy munch on my Mbatata cookie.

And I don’t think that would delegitimise the relationship that came before.

There’s a funny trend going on here; the assumption that a) being gay is absolute and b) there’s no choice involved. That it’s some kind of biological finality made null and void the second someone displays any ambivalence or looks at their orientation from another vantage point. And the second they do, blam! There goes any claim to support. Because obviously they can help it, the little ingrates.

So personally, I’ve found a breed out there I hate far more than homophobes. And that’s the type who trumpets, righteously, that gays shouldn’t be judged because they can’t help it.

Seriously? That’s the best defence you can come up with?

Every debate around homophobia has some do-gooder tacked on the end, bleating lamely that homosexuality appears in animals or that some chemical explanation has been found for it in humans. But intentions aside, are they any better than their homo-hatin’ brothers and sisters? Their logical process is both patronising and fundamentally flawed. I’ll rather take an honest-to-goodness conservative any day. At least they have the balls to nail their colours to a mast. But limply cooing that the poor gays can’t help their abnormality, and then patting yourself on the head for being such a stand-up, open-minded guy? Stick it, bru. We don’t need your pity.

People claiming gayness is a biological absolute belong in the same category as the so-called Caster Semenya supporters who kept snivelling that she was a “real girl”. Just take a moment and think about what you’re saying. That Caster would only be okay if she weren’t intersex? That being gay wouldn’t be okay if there were an element of choice?

Here’s another news flash for you, my friend. There’s always a choice. Sexual bonding is fluid and many people the world over – regardless of orientation – are married to, or sleep with people they aren’t 100% in love with. It can be done. Whether they are in an arranged marriage or married for money or the romance died or perhaps they just made a poor choice of partner, staying there always boils down to free will. People prioritise what they need most. For some, this is status, morality, convenience, acceptance or even basic safety. For others, it’s love.

But that’s not the point. The point is we should be allowed to explore our options. We shouldn’t be open to dissection by either homophobes or homophiles. It’s nobody’s bloody business but our own.

Moreover, the idea of absolute sexual orientation – betrayed by any exception to a person’s general preference – is tripe. Many of us have the capacity to fall in love not with a gender, but an individual. I know many people – myself included – who have been attracted to both men and women in varying degrees, depending on who they were. I know many people with powerful attractions to the same sex who manage, happily, to love partners of the opposite sex, and vice versa. Being gay isn’t a physical abnormality that leaves you totally unable to connect with someone of the opposite sex. Ultimately it’s a sexual preference, i.e. what you prefer. An orientation, i.e. where you place yourself. Yes, there are gay people who are only attracted to the same sex and straight people who are only attracted to the opposite sex. But they’re on two ends of a spectrum. The rest of us fall somewhere in between, and we shouldn’t have to hide behind “I can’t help it” to justify our choices. Or commit to one gender for life to validate public support.

Those who say gays should be accepted because they can’t help it – because the poor lambs just can’t bear someone of the opposite sex – are still reading from the same moral rulebook as any homophobe; they’re just on a different page. They still aren’t seeing that choice or no choice, no one has the right to tell others what to do.

Our legal system is here to prevent people and animals getting hurt. No more, no less. It prevents injustice, violence, and abuse of beings who can be overpowered into sex against their will. It is not here to make moral statements about private relationships between consenting adults.

So please, defenders, next time you’re feeling magnanimous and handing out badges for Pat a Gay Day, please remember that we are not ill and we are not children.

And then, for the love of Pete (and his partner Gerald), just shut the fuck up.

-----

*In case you've been living under a rock, Steven Monjeza (26) and Tiwonge Chimbalanga (20) were a Malawian couple recently imprisoned for being gay. After massive international protests, they were pardoned - only for Monjeza to leave Chimbalanga and begin a controversial relationship with 24-year-old Dorothy Gulo, rumoured to be a prostitute. According to news reports, they plan to marry.

** This piece has also been published by TheDailyMaverick.co.za. Be a pal and give them some love, because they rock.

The Importance of Being Comatose.

So I spent today making sums. This is because an angry client came knocking with a project which (for reasons that I promise will not interest you, and did not really interest me either) had been dragging on for 18 months in the hands of five writers who I can only guess were rescued from a Russian mail order bride catalogue or a rehab for injured circus bears. Client finally realised, today, that it had to be redone from scratch. By me. And wanted it completed today. By me.

Unfortunately I suffer from a rare form of involuntary muscular contraction which occasionally forces my jaw to form words I do not mean. In this case, I meant to say “Are you completely fucking insane? These documents were finger-painted by sea-cows!” but instead my lips went: “Ok, sure. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

It only took me about three seconds to realise the consequences of my mistake, but by that time it was too late. So, because I am a sensible person, I did the only sensible thing, which was to freeze in terror and immediately go onto Facebook and tell everyone I knew OMG I HAVE SO MUCH WORK I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO DO PLS HELP GUYS SRSLY. Which in turn led to a friend thoughtfully distracting me by asking what she should do with her hair.

Of course, this was a situation in which I did know what to do, so I did what all good friends do – listened without judgement, although I clearly had the answer neatly stored in my multi-faceted brain – and offered helpful insights without forcing her hand. Because I am a woman of both precision and generosity of spirit, I illustrated my objective report using a number of advanced statistical models.

And because I realised you might be wondering about how to style your new haircut, I decided to share it with you.*

Hypothesis
a) You are a person who washes your hair regularly and styles/ blow-dries it.
b) Towel-drying, brushing and styling your hair takes approximately 15 minutes, if you are reasonably quick.
c) There are 24 hours in a day and 364 ¼ days in a year.
d) Our generation’s life expectancy has increased from +- 80 to well over 90, meaning the average person has approximately 80 solid blow-drying years.

Calculation
If you spend 15 min per day blow-drying your hair, that’s 1,75 hours of your life each week, which is 638,75 hours a year, and if you live to be 90 that means you've wasted 51 100 hours or 5,8 years blowing hot air at yourself.

Conclusion
Let the little fuckers curl.

Of course, once you start this line of thinking, it’s only a matter of time before your brain starts taking some logical leaps and your heart starts sinking at the thought of your life ending, one miserable, procrastinatory moment at a time. If, as I do, you spend inordinate amounts of time Googling random factoids, you will already know that the average person spends six months of their life licking stamps, or that you will probably spend 27 years of your life asleep (50 if you’re me). Or, at a conservative estimate, 86 days shaving your legs.

You will also spend six months on the loo (10 years if, like mine, your toilet is the quietest place in your house), 2,5 years with a headache (more if you’re an asexual housewife, presumably), 13 years watching TV (50 if you’re American), and four years standing in queues (eight if you’re South African and it’s Home Affairs).

But what about those other things that sneak up on you? Like drooling, staring into space, or trying to figure out new ways to annoy taxi drivers?** Or lying comatose on a heap of dirty laundry, watching Walker Texas Ranger?

I am now 29, and a series of foolproof calculations has led me to the sobering realisation that I spend:

• half a month every year on Facebook,
• a month every year looking up random crap online, like the history of facial transplants or the longest dog ever recorded (nine feet from nose to tail – it was a Newfoundland/ Great Dane cross),
• 22,8 days a year in traffic,
• 15 days a year napping (naps being snoozes that fall outside of the normal eight-hour sleep night),
• at least nine days a year on a treadmill,
• 8,5 days a year swearing because I can’t find something,
• eight days a year re-reading Harry Potter books,
• eight days a year cleaning,
• five days a year making truly terrible puns,
• four days a year in the bath (I was hoping for more, actually),
• four days a year eating cereal (see above comment),
• 2,5 days a year SMSing,
• 2,5 days a year looking up Dolly Parton quotes,
• two days a year closing cupboard doors my girlfriend hasn’t noticed she’s about to bang her head on,
• 45 days a year lying on the laps of various people I love, and
• 438 hours a year whimpering to Anna that I want chocolate.
  

That already takes me to - hold me - 197,05 days out of a 354,25 day year. And I haven’t even started adding up the time I spend drinking gin, eating pears, lying in the sun, writing posts like this, avoiding the bank manager or watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns.

My only hope is clearly learning to multi-task (e.g. making puns on the toilet, or closing cupboard doors while chewing). But it's a long road ahead, and I fear the strand of optimism is a thin one.

* Well, if you are reading this, you are probably Anna. Hi, fan.
** Though this is a worthy enough cause to justify at least 12 years of dedicated effort.

Shag, Marry or Push Off a Cliff.

When I was a growing girl in the idyllic mountain village of Lower Woodstock, we used to play a wonderful game called Shag, Marry or Push off a Cliff. The object of the game is to drink a lot of whisky.

No, seriously. The object of the game is to completely flummox your opponent; that is, give them a combination of names that leaves them well and truly snookered, unable to make a worthy choice.

It works like this. You name three people, and your opponent has to choose who of the three they would kill, marry, or have a one-night stand with. If they cannot choose, or look unreasonably grossed out by all possible options, you win.

Relevance to this post: I find myself losing daily in a horrifying ongoing game of Shag Marry or Push X-treme - Reality Edition.

Scores:

South African political landscape: 1.

Me: 0.

Winning question:

Choose who to represent your point of view in the struggle songs debate: Steve Hofmeyr, Gwede Mantashe or the FF+.

*game over*

Liars, Damn Liars and Estate Agents.

As my friend Claire puts it: "Estate agents - it's like they are trying to win some amazing lying competition. They spend the day stewing, then go home and mail their lies to the estate agent evil brain. If the lie is lame, they are instantly frazzled into frog-soup. But if the lie is judged to be suitably evil, it is directly downloaded into the brains of other estate agents."

If you have never bought a home before, you will not fully appreciate the horror that is an estate agent on the prowl for gullible first-time homeowners. They are like witches out to lure babes in the wood, denizens of the underworld scattering little crumb-lies leading to the door of a house of horrors. You think you're following a trail of chocolates to a humble cottage coated in honeysuckle, but beyond the threshold is eye of newt and stench of fish; seventies tile and roach-brown rug. And such is their power that no matter where these demon-agents lead you, your tongue instantly freezes, leaving you unable to say: "Get thee behind me, devil-wench: this is no north-facing investment opportunity, but a dingy hell-hovel overrun with the ghosts of house-hunters previously sacrificed in your bizarre legal-parasatanic ritual. Fly!"

No, instead you say: "Um, I need some time to think about it. Here, have my phone number."

In a way, you've almost got to respect it. Whatever they're doing, it's a devilishly powerful bulldozing spell. So, as I surrender to the enemy and give the bank my soul in exchange for the one sparkling gem cowering in an otherwise terrifying property market, I give you this page in honour of the lies I was told by estate agents during my year-long house-hunt.

Standard-issue sales lies (evil score: novice):

1. You will never find another property of this calibre in your price range.

2. I’m embarrassed to take your offer to my client. Nobody sells flats for that.*

3. Somebody else is desperate for this flat, so you'd better take it before I give it to them.

More adventurous lies (evil score: shortlisted):

1. That’s not a cockroach.

2. Neither is that. Or that!

3. [Same agent’s last desperate attempt, after the third cockroach in 10 minutes ran over her foot] Well, I’ve been an estate agent for 20 years and never in my two decades have I ever seen a unit that didn’t have a large cockroach colony. Frankly, you’d be wasting your time looking for one that didn’t.

4. Pest control in external drains and communal areas is never done in flat buildings. I’ve never heard of a flat building that does it.

5. It’s really difficult to find flats where birds are allowed. If you want to find something in your price range, you should really consider selling your pet.

6. [Later, by the same agent] Some estate agents would advise you to sell your pet. I would never ask that of you.

7. That’s not a flea.

8. I’ve never seen a flea here before. Didn’t you bring those in with you?

9. [After a neighbour told me never to buy in the building because the security and maintenance were terrible] That’s just a tenant. You must never listen to tenants. They lie all the time. Everybody knows that.

10. If you buy now, we will build walls and install gates around the complex so that you have secure parking.**

11. This is the place to be if you want to avoid traffic. It's so quiet. (Lansdowne Road!)

Downright outrageous lies (evil score: direct download):

1. Oh dearie, dearie me. We do have champagne tastes on a Coke budget, don't we?

2. Well, if you don’t like the balcony, I can’t see that the body corporate wouldn’t agree to rebuild the whole building’s balconies in a different style. They talk about it all the time.***

3. Steer is a wonderful managing agent.****

4. White people don’t live in buildings like that. If I were the agent, I’d refuse to sell it to you. Now this one, on the other hand, is all right for a white person.

5. Fleas lie in wait in empty buildings for a blood host to enter. They do this in all empty buildings. Didn’t you know that?


* One week later, the self-same client dropped her asking price to R20 000 below what I’d offered, completely of her own accord.

**Thanks to Alistair James for this. Five years later, still nothing.

***Thanks to Claire O’Neill for this. Well done to estate agent for neatly bypassing the "permission for structural changes" law.

**** Steer is the managing agent that left my previous flat building infested with Godzilla-sized sewer rats for five years before calling in pest control.

Farewell, Oom Steve.

My uncle died this week.

Dying uncles are normally viewed with a certain distance; a way to explain a sudden, unexpected cash flow, or a morning off from work. But no real loss, and if there is sadness, certainly not for more than a day. It’s polite to feel that it death is a sad event, but one doesn’t actually expect real grief to follow the words “dead uncle”.

This uncle was different. I like cantankerous old men in general, and I loved this one in particular. I loved him very much. If I’d had some presence of mind, I’d have done something enterprising, like ShitMyUncleSays. The last two years of his life I saw less of him, because I felt awkward. I struggled to look at him getting older and I battled to know what to say to him. He seemed sad. I became self-absorbed.

I also pulled back because my mother, with whom my relationship is strained, is very close to him, and I felt she needed him. I might also have felt that he needed her.

I missed him, though. About eight weeks before he died, we had a confrontation about my mother. He did not know my side of the story, only hers, and felt I was neglecting her. I didn’t want to tell him any details; I don’t want people to judge my mother or take sides, I just want to be left alone about it. But I did tell him that there were things he didn’t know, and asked him to give me the benefit of the doubt. That confrontation turned into a very careful, meaningful conversation about how much he loved his own daughters, and what he meant – independently – to me and my mom.

I didn’t know he was unwell. I knew he had an auto-immune illness, but it seemed under control. I saw him about two weeks after those letters were exchanged and he looked happy. He’d just moved house and seemed older, but content. Actually, he’d just moved out of an old age home (where we’d been planning to raid happy hour at the pensioners’ whisky bar) to a flat in Rosebank. Things looked good.

About two weeks ago, my mother (whose version of a crisis generally needs to be divided by 17) told me he was very ill. I didn’t believe her. I thought it was a projection of her own fears that she would one day be old, and alone. It was only when I saw my cousin during the course of the week and she told me that her dad was at the end of his life that I got a fright. The next day he was hospitalised.

There is something unutterably horrible about seeing someone you love crying and jerking in spasms of pain. I don’t really know how to describe how it was to see him when the pethadine stopped working and he wasn’t able to eat. He was a tall man and had been normal weight around Christmas. By the time he died about two months later, he weighed about 45kg. He couldn’t get his words out, although he tried.

I asked if I could get him anything. “Five – let-ters. E, D, A, H, T,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you with that. Is there anything else you would like?”

“What,” he said, “You – could-n’t – smug-gle – a – sick-le – un-der – your – black – dress?”

It was that kind of party. Actually, a lot of parties with my uncle were that kind of party. I think we understood each other with a kind of giggling grimness somewhere between grin and grimace.

The Sunday before he died, my cousin told Anna that he was resistant to help; that he didn’t even want a DVD player in his house.

“What does he do all day?” asked Anna. “Stare at the wall and think about death?”

“Um,” said my cousin. “Basically.”

It sounds morbid, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t morbid. He just didn’t pretend. He had a habitual and deadpan delivery of the truth. He didn’t see the need to make other people feel less awkward about it.

I think we liked each other because neither of us really liked anybody. I am often mistaken for a sociable person. But believe me, it is a mistake. (If I had my way, I would live alone in a corner café in the Karoo in a straw hat, swatting flies and watching nobody come past.)

One New Year I smsed him to say I was sitting alone on my couch glugging JC le Rocks out of a plastic sippi-cup, classy-like, and watching the SABC1 special.

“Aberrant child,” he replied. “You should be out partying. What will you do when you are my age?”

On his second day in hospital, he tried to get longer words out for me to unscramble. He couldn’t manage it.

On my last visit to him, he fell asleep while I was there. My mother says he never really regained consciousness. He died in the early hours of day five.

I can’t really believe that he’s gone. The thing that makes it strange is that I never thought of him as old. He had big specs and a white beard but we were buddies. I didn’t think of him as in another generation. It’s a cliché, but I actually did believe he’d always be around.

I liked going to visit him. I hate chocolate éclairs, but I really liked his. When I was younger, he had a whiteboard on which I always left a cartoon after visiting. He would mutter crotchety things about my "grotty little pictures" but I choose to believe he liked them, deep down. (Perhaps very deep down.) One Christmas, I made him a book - an extended collection of cartoons - and called it Grotty Little Pictures. I wrote in water-resistant ink because he was known for his legendary Saturday-morning baths, when he would disappear into the bathroom with a book for several hours. I'm not sure whether my book ever made it to one of those reading marathons. I hope it did.

When he quit smoking (briefly) some years ago, we each caught the other at my cousin’s wedding, skulking behind opposite sides of the same tree with a fag. I was still in the closet; he’d allegedly “given up”, and hadn’t yet broken the bad news.

His flat was home to sundials he’d made himself, a telescope, countless drawings mapping stars or designs for rebuilding antique instruments, an analemma, and two cats named Frasier and Niles (he did outlive them). Frasier was fat and neurotic, Niles was skinny and hyper-expressive. They were well-named.

An analemma, for those of you who don’t know, is a design mapping the movement of the earth relative to the sun over the period of a year. You allow a sunbeam to reflect off a shiny surface at noon on a particular day of the week, and mark the spot it hits the ground with a nut or bolt. The next week at the same time, you do it again. At the end of the year, your fifty-two bolts form an elliptical design mapping the movement of the earth for that year. It looks like a long, lean figure eight.

My Oom Steve knew everything. He told me why popcorn popped and why mirages appeared on hot roads. He could explain anything you wanted to know about biofuels. He was a physicist, but had an incredible general knowledge: he bought me my first Sara Vaughn album, pirated the Bach violin partitas and sonatas for me (oh come on, it’s not like J.S. was going to get anything out of the sale!), and taught me how to do many great things with chocolate. He taught me that when one buys a car, the first thing you do is to make a dent above the wheel and remove the knobs from the radio face, so that you don't feel so bad when you first crash it or it's broken into. He dug up a limited edition Felice Swados Reform School Girl diary for me. From when I was little, if there was anything I wanted to know, I asked him.

I remember the first time I ever asked him something he didn’t know. I recall it as one of those painful moments when you realise adulthood has come for you and you don’t like it: you may no longer fall asleep on your father’s lap in company; you must cry with dignity; you find out your nanny’s husband beats her and realise your parents are not going to save her; you ask your uncle who knows everything a question and he can’t answer you.

The question I asked him was whether he knew an archaic term for a poisoner. Not an apothecary; it started with a V. I had known the word and forgotten it, and could never find it again.

At the same time – Google wasn’t what it is today, then – I had been on a decade-long quest for the name of Brakenjan’s horse. Brakenjan had been my favourite programme as a kid, and I had a special feeling for that ole yellow pony. Sometime after the programme ended, I forgot the horse’s name and it bugged the heck out of me.

Oom Steve knew about my quest, but kids’ programmes weren’t his field of expertise. I expected him to be more useful in the search for the term for a poisoner, so sent him an email giving him all the clues I could. He didn’t know. I tried the last port of call: Rodney Edgecombe in the English Department. A week later, I had the word: venefic.

I emailed Steve immediately.

“Venefic,” he deadpanned back. “What a great name for a horse. Hopefully this will spur you on to redouble your efforts in the search for the poisoner.”

Oom Steve wasn’t his name, by the way. He was a lone Zimbabwean marrying into a predominantly Afrikaans clan. (When he first arrived, he thought Roomies was the most popular brand of ice cream in South Africa.) On encountering the rest of us, he was somewhat bewildered by the vast droves of Ooms and Tannies. Oom Steve became a nickname; something he said to make himself laugh. I became Niece M.

He met my aunt when she was hitchhiking home and he picked her up. She was a drama student, he was a physics lecturer. He dropped her home and she told my mother: “I’m going to marry that man.” She basically followed him around campus until he did marry her. And it’s a good thing she was so single-minded, because I don’t think he would have approached her first. He didn’t like big displays of emotion. In later years, he softened a little, but he always remained a little awkward.

In the weeks before his death, he disengaged from the world more than ever, although for the first time, he seemed to really enjoy affection. He liked having his hand held, and he would squeeze if you tried to let go. He beamed at visitors, whereas previously he’d only just tolerated them, if he let them in at all.

But he was leaving. The interest he’d always had in anything and everything waned; he stared into space and retreated.

“I’m preparing to go,” he told me.

When my mother cried about it, he lost patience with her. “For goodness’ sake, I’m an old man,” he said. “I’m supposed to die.”

And maybe so. But I’m still going to miss him.