19November1996

Tuesday 19 November
My dear folks,

Today I went shopping at Spar supermarket on behalf of the family. You turn right out of the gates, left at the stop street & left again about a mile down the road, into a brand new shopping centre. It’s easy enough to find, but the combined newness of locking & “alarming” the house, mollifying the dogs, driving Conal’s car (indicator bar on the wrong side of the steering) & negotiating foreign roads demands effort. So I took it slowly & carefully. The centre is as different from London as anything gets. A couple of armed guards loll around the entrance with another waving an automatic rifle in the parking area. This is RS of A - the badlands, as a perfunctory reading of the daily paper makes clear - what a lot of shooting & getting shot!

I had some trouble finding everything I wanted, prompting an alert Spar tannie to ask if she could help. She did, pointing out the shelf where the product was to be found! No Sainsbury’s lady would ever volunteer assistance. I was impressed. At the check-out, I asked the young (Afrikaans) woman if she could raise two cardboard boxes for me to pack the considerable haul of groceries I’d acquired - two trolley’s worth. “Ja, Oom,” she told me, despatching an assistant to fetch them. I haven’t been an “oom” in years - & enjoyed being again. All my groceries were packed into bags & the boxes for me & carried to the car where the carrier transferred the booty to the boot. He went away well pleased with his tip - as well he might. I left well pleased with the service. What a sensible system for ooms! Mind you, Bren’s maid, Evangelina, has decided that I’m “Ou Baas”. I’m not so sure about Ou Baas. I might just get that hair tint out & ginger up my beard.

Micaela’s writing exams. Tuesday was biology. She thought it had gone reasonably well although she was niggled because she had not been able to remember why people needed to wee more on cold days. She kicked herself when I reminded her. Well, she didn’t really kick herself; she used one of her several favourite exclamations, of the meatier kind. Her father & brother tend the same way. “Mind your nuts, Uncle Terry,” she warned me as I lay exercising & Lily came bounding into the room. The warning was timely, for Lily gets a trifle exuberant.

Brendan has turned his old workshop into a gym which is all but finished. Only the electrical sockets are lacking. Micaela & I spent an hour in there working out on the two bits of apparatus which have so far been installed, one for walking on the spot & one for a range of exercises. We had intended to go for a swim but the weather has been chilly & the water was not inviting. I thought I’d be brave as I really felt like the exercise, but a foot dipped into the pool was enough to put me off. As I write, close to midnight, it’s raining. Great black clouds have whipped themselves into menacing armies these past two days but without performing -- just a bit of distant lightning.

We had supper at a large “steakhouse” in the same shopping centre as Spar. Bren drove us down in Dad’s elderly Mercedes, still looking good & going well but sounding a bit hoarse, with a hole or two in the exhaust. The restaurant was perhaps a third full; it could easily have seated 200. The clientele was almost exclusively white. Earlier in the day, when Micaela & I went down to the coffee bar, we had espied one smart black group, consciously “with it”. Although the town centre has grown very black, Witbank remains predominantly Afrikaans & whites remain the employers.

Some things have changed though, even in Witbank. Black ladies wait in their BMWs outside the convent for their daughters the same as white ladies. Nobody finds it remarkable. It’s just the way things are.
Wednesday: Micaela & I are settling into a routine. I walk her around the corner to school in the morning & back at one when she’s finished her exam. We divide the afternoon into quarters, 2 for revision, the others for a trip to the coffee bar & a work-out in the gym. Today we revised history. Anything you want to know about the unification of Italy 1815-1870, you just let me know. Tomorrow it’s revision for Zulu. I’m afraid she’s going to have to do it alone. Before coffee, we went down to the post office to despatch some fig jam to Kevin, 4 parcels of 2 tins each. “You’d better register these,” a helpful & friendly post office assistant told me, “or they won’t even get to Pretoria.” No illusions even within the post office about the spate of thefts. Do confirm their arrival pse Canadians, although they may take some weeks.

I spent a couple of hours hiding the wire which links Conal’s computer to the phone. It had trailed messily from his bedroom door to the jack in the hall. The job was a good one, if I say so myself. The wire’s been vanished in no uncertain fashion. If I could figure out the problem with his printer - a fancy colour model - I’d be happier. It printed out my first letter but has absolutely refused to have anything further to do with me. With any luck, I’ll be able to plug my laptop directly into the telephone jack & get this off to you.

Conal’s girlfriend, Sandra, came around for supper. She’d finished writing her matric science paper that day & faces only the final exam, English, next week. She’d found the going mixed so far, some easy ones & some awful. I sympathised. Matric exams were the most traumatic I ever wrote. Her studies have served to limit contact with Conal but they have not impinged on the morning & evening phone conversations.

Thursday: I spent an hour listening to SABC Radio’s early morning current affairs show. Radio Today as we knew it is now “A.M.Live” & rather worse for it. In fairness, the presenter is good & so was Denis O’Donnell’s sports report. From there it was downhill all the way, an uneven mixture of material culled from the BBC, adverts, heavily accented (although perfectly fluent) reports from people whose first language was obviously Afrikaans & barely comprehensible reports from black journalists who were wordy & repetitive. Every now & then there’d be some very black music by way of a break. You’d have to be hard pressed to listen to the programme. One comes to understand why the SABC is widely regarded as either a joke or a disgrace.

I plan to drive to Johannesburg tomorrow to visit the bank & Merrowdown. I’ll overnight with friends there & return with Bren - who has to drive up himself - on Saturday. I’ve arranged to have brunch with Louise. On Sunday, we hope to drive down to Nelspruit to look at the new project. It’s fallen behind a bit because of a late start by a (much cursed) shop fitter but Bren’s still aiming to have it up & going by the end of the month.

Blessings all
T