Tania.co.za

My party

(Grace and Jaco depart with their toddler, Julia. Ross leaves to buy his younger brother a take-away. Paul says goodbye to go home to his wife, Marlene, who is sick in bed. Tania hands out sweets to act as chips, and Anton explains the rules of Blackjack for the benefit of Roelof and others who aren't seasoned players.)

Liezel: Aw, the music has stopped.
Roelof: I can fetch my Ray Charles CD.
Tania: Yes, please.
Roelof: OK, just don't spike my drink while I am gone.
(Exit Roelof.)
Tania: (Slightly hurt) I wonder why he said that.
Liezel: Maybe he thinks we're members of some swingers cult.
Anton: I wonder what would happen if he got back and we were all naked, and we just sat here acting as though nothing has happened.
(A moment of silent glances follows.)
Liezel: I know what! Let's all swap clothes!
(Tania and her brother Anton swap T-shirts. Tania's three-quarter sleeved Morgan T-shirt is of a soft red fabric and has a glittery print on the front and a cut away neckline. On Anton it is so tight that it looks as though it has been painted onto his body.)
Tania: Hahaha! You look gay.
(Tania looks at Marisa and Mikhailo)
You two swap shirts!
(Marisa and Mikhailo swap shirts. Marisa's shirt is a feminine blouse with delicate flowers and rounded lapels.)
Liezel: What about me?
Tania: I can wear your dress and you can wear Anton's T-shirt and my pants. Let's go into the bathroom!
Liezel: Hurry, he could be back any moment!
(Exit Liezel and Tania. Enter Roelof. Enter Liezel, giggling, squeezed into Tania's cargo pants. Enter Tania wearing Liezel's knee-length dress, and a shiny satin night-gown to mask her lymphoedema. All sit down.)
Roelof: OK, so are we going to play?
(Tania, Liezel and Anton giggle.)
What?
Tania: Is your drink OK?
(Liezel, Anton and Marisa giggle.)
Roelof: Why, what have you done to it?
(Liezel, Anton and Marisa laugh out loud. Mikhailo chuckles.)
Tania: Nothing, it's just that you were worried that we might spike it, so I just wanted to find out if everything seemed normal to you.
Roelof: (Confused, suspicious) Ye-es...
(Liezel looks at Mikhailo wearing Marisa's girlie shirt and packs out laughing. Anton laughs at Liezel and Tania laughs at Liezel and Anton. Liezel falls over from laughter. Marisa and Mikhailo smile and pretend that life is still normal.)
Roelof: What? Why don't we play now?
(Liezel rolls on the floor, shrieking with laughter.)
Tania: (To Roelof) So, everything is just fine? Do you mean to say that none of us look different to you?
Roelof: Well... (pointing to Anton) He's wearing a different shirt.
(Mikhailo and Marisa join Anton, Tania and Liezel in laughing out loud.)
Marisa: Doesn't it strike you as strange that everyone is wearing different clothes?!
Roelof: (Sheepishly) Well... my usual approach to things that I find strange is just to to act as if they are normal, in case they really are normal.
(All except for Roelof degenerate into hysteria.)

Marisa and Roelof pretend to get motherless. (Everyone actually went to bed sober but in excellent spirits!)

A scene from Kafka's Metamorphosis

Seen from my window: Standing upright against his window in the opposite building, a wistful-looking Gregor Samsa...

Christmas

I never really thought it was possible, but I had a very nice Christmas. I have been a Christmas cynic since I was eleven years old. I can still give you many good reasons why Christmas should be cancelled or banned. But I had a good one, and I will leave my Christmas tirade for another year.

When I was little, we spent most Christmases with my second cousins. Then uncle Chris and tannie Mercia got divorced, and two of the kids chose to live with her, while the two chose to live with their father, and so we lost touch with half of the family. This Christmas the eldest of those children, my second cousin Ilse (now in her 40s), invited us to their house in Somerset West. (Before that, early in the morning, Mikhailo and I took out two of our friends — Linda and Carol — to breakfast. For various sad reasons it would not have made sense for them to have spent the day with relatives.)

Ilse's husband Simon got so excited talking to Mikhailo about martial arts, that Ilse thought he was drunk, a never-before occurrence in their home. (He wasn't drunk, I watched them getting progressively more excited. It was a natural high.)

Mikhailo and Anton listening attentively to Simon's karate stories.

Simon also told us that he got mistaken for David Kramer by a carload of drunk people at the Lynedoch petrol station. "They were so om," he explained, "that I wasn't going to argue with them." After that whenever I looked at him I saw David Kramer's double.

Afterwards we went to my parents' house to open presents, and Nadya and Charl came over for some sparkling wine. (Well, Charl was coerced.)

Carol phoned me that night to ask me if I could bring her two continental pillows. She said that her sister confiscated the ones she's been using, and she needs them to sleep upright otherwise her breathing will stop.

All in all it was a nice day.

Back

I am back from a brief and enjoyable holiday.

Here's Alison and her baby Rebecca. (The baby was first named Samantha, but she and Neal decided after a month that Rebecca suited her better. I agree. She doesn't look like a Samantha at all.)

Anton and Liezel are visiting from Australia. They joined me in Calitzdorp after a few days, and then we drove to our secret spot on the Breede River. Mikhailo also came for two nights. The relaxation was very welcome, as we all lead very busy lives. Here's Mikhailo playing around with my acrylic paints. (I had taken them out in order to paint on my jeans while sitting under the tree, because while I was in Calitzdorp, I spent a day and a bit painting a landscape at the home of artist Dennis Kalil, and I got white stripes on my jeans. Since you can't easily wash out acrylic paint, I decided to paint paisley patterns over them.)

Here's my shadow, who accompanied me on holiday. (Note her radiating halo, hehehe!)

On the final night I was alone. The others had gone their separate ways, and we'll rejoin each other on Christmas day. I took the canoe downstream at about half past six the next morning.

At mid-morning yesterday, I left the campsite and began the trip home.

Now that I have returned to my usual abode, I am becoming more and more convinced that I am mad. I believe I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It's not as bad as I have seen in the documentaries — I can hold down a job — but I have had seratonin problems before, so it would fit the pattern. I have been meaning to see a psychologist about this, but I have just been too busy for the past few months.

Mostly, my "obsessive compulsions" are distressing to me, as the ways I have been using to deal with them have become obsessions of their own, and this is beginning to disrupt relationships. But sometimes the behaviours can be useful. For example, it is Christmas Eve and the office cleaner is on holiday in London and I noticed when I came here yesterday that several cups, saucers and teapots were unwashed. I couldn't imagine that anyone except for Marius would be coming to the office during this time, so this morning I felt a bout of madness coming on, and after I had cleaned all the surfaces in my parents' kitchen, I decided to come in to the office to do the dishes.

Unfortunately I am not always obsessive about cleaning, otherwise my floors would have been washed three weeks ago!

Bye

Anton & Liezel arrived last night from Australia. We're off to the Klein Karoo for a few days. I got invited to my uncle's penthouse in Plettenberg Bay along with them too, but the thought of om nog daai draai ook te ry is rather stressful, so I'll just go to Calitzdorp and the Breede, because I have to be back at work shortly after Christmas to work on marketing stuff.

Looking for Derrick?

Somebody has been Googling this site for Derrick (Derrick John Houy), my colleague who died in July 2005. If you knew him (even just as an Internet person) and you'd like to talk about him, please contact me. I miss him and I would like to talk about him too.

Naweek

Donderdag

Mary het gekom vir aandete. Sy is klaar met haar twee meestersgrade, en gaan nou Johannesburg toe om 'n jaar lank by die Constitutional Court te werk. (Ek weet nie of 'n mens dit in Afrikaans 'n Konstitusionele Hof noem nie; Grondwethof klink meer oorspronklik.)

Vrydag

Ek het alleen gegaan na Mystic Boer om te ontspan. Hierdie twee ouens het my toe genooi om met hulle glaskasvoetbal te speel toe hulle sien ek neem hulle af. My drankie was baie duur. Daarna het ek vir Carol geld gevat sodat sy kan hospitaal toe gaan. Haar hart is nou vergroot en sit skeef. Haar niere is ook besig om in te gee en dit gaan lankal nie goed met haar lewer nie. Sy het omtrent 'n derde van haar longfunksie oor en raak soms blou. Sy is gedurig in pyn. Sy sal tot Januarie toe moet wag vir 'n ongeskiktheidspensioen.

Saterdag

Die mense by daai Classix CD-winkel het die beste weergawe van Misa Criolla wat ek nog gehoor het, aan my verkoop. Die solis is Mercedes Sosa. Al die ander soliste wat ek gehoor het, was mans. Daarna het ek kom voorberei vir 'n kursus wat ek Maandag en Dinsdag moet aanbied, en laat in die aand gaan tee drink by Java Café saam met Johann Heyns.

Sondag

Ek was by my ma-hulle vir lunch. Ma en tannie Rita het baie gelag vir ou kiekies.

Ek moes my pa se skootrekenaar leen vir Maandag, want myne is terug vir herstel (nog onder waarborg). Nou is ek op kantoor om die voorbereidings vir more te voltooi. Ek voel trots oor die customised courseware wat ek vir die mense voorberei het.

Aggeneys continued

The mine

The mountain behind the mine is much darker than the surrounding plain, and in Afrikaans it is called Swartberg — hence the mine's name, Black Mountain.

The road approaching the mine.

There are also plans afoot to create a new mine some kilometres away at Gamsberg. The current mine is not all mined out yet, but the end is in sight, the first levels already having been depleted. I hinted from the day that I arrived in Aggeneys until the final day when a senior staff member arranged for me to be taken down the mine — and what an excellent personalised tour I got! I was taken down the mine by oom Sypie, who has been working there for some 19 years. (Before I went down, I was briefed in the use of my safety pack, which can provide oxygen for up to 30 minutes in the event of an emergency. I was provided with a calico overall, a helmet, ear-plugs, big fluffy socks and boots, as well as a torch.) He took me down to the 40th level first, where there is some active mining going on. The distance between one level and the next is some 37 metres, and the deeper you go, the warmer it gets. It's possible to drive down with a spiral road (about 12 km), but if you go down the main shaft in the cage (which can hold 63 people) it takes only a few minutes.

This is what it looks like above the deepest shaft.

Strangely enough, it wasn't scary, just hot. The tunnels are large — there are big purpose-built vehicles which drive through them doing scooping and other tasks. It appeared as though the work requires endurance rather than strength; indeed, I did not see any work being done which seemed to require male strength specifically, yet there were no women amongst the labourers. A shift is 12 hours; the men work for seven days, and then they are off for seven days, and after that the day shift men work night shift for seven days, and vice versa. After visiting the 40th level, we went down to level 51, which is about 1700 metres underground. All the stuff which is mined ends up there at the crusher — except for the waste, which is sometimes loaded directly and taken up in the cage. Operating the crusher is a one-man job, and the man who does it is very handsome. He was wearing a piece of blue toweling cloth under his helmet, looking a bit like a Saracen. If I were looking for someone to pose for a portrait of Othello, I'd have picked him. He was quiet and mechanical, and when he made eye-contact, which was not frequent, his eyes had the expression of a tamed gorilla. From level 51, everything goes back up to the surface and ends up in the conveyor (several kilometres long) which carries it to processing.

The maintenance philosophy for the mine as a whole appears to need a new approach. The policy for the conveyor, for example, is to fix it when it breaks. This is not a good idea, because any conveyor down-time has an extremely detrimental effect on production targets. People get bonuses based on production, but I suspect that some of them don't care to think too far into the future or to rock the boat with suggestions of preventative maintenance, which could be a schlepp to get approved, because they expect to have left the mine by the time that things break down completely.

Conveyor to processing area.

The one thing they do attach great importance to, though, is the preventative maintenance of anything which might impact on safety. There are refuge spaces on every level (except the 51st, where it is still under construction). The first aid tanks are checked daily. Safety gear is mandatory. There was going to be an enormous party on the 50th accident-free day (a new record) and then some klutz went and hurt his finger by doing something stupid, and they had to cancel the caterers, musicians and everything. His colleagues were livid: "Couldn't you have waited until the 51st day to have trashed your #$*&% finger?" was the general mood around the mine.

My stay

They put me up in a flatlet behind the HR Manager's house. But there is no HR Manager at the moment, so the house itself is empty. (The last HR Manager was a Coloured from Cape Town who allegedly refused to speak Afrikaans — en dit nogal in Aggeneys, kan jy nou meer!) I was allowed to use the pool, which meant that I had an excuse to invite my new friends over.

Me in Aggeneys.

I would have loved to have cooked for myself, but there was only a microwave oven.

I don't know why, but the Nescafé was labeled in Brazil. (The picture on the mug is probably supposed to work subliminally, so that you think that your instant coffee is a genuine cappucino.) These cups were so small that one evening I made myself three cups of tea at once, because I am used to drinking my Earl Grey from a large mug.

The magazines available in the flatlet indicated that the mine doesn't often have women who come from the outside as service providers. I flipped through pictures of Paris Hilton, Halle Berry and Kate Moss and several others who didn't have torsos quite as nice as those, and found out a whole lot of stuff I never knew about what turns women on. I also read an article in Men's Health on anti-oxidants, was fascinated by a ten-page review of foreign beers, and learned that I am living in the party capital of South Africa.

I learned a lot I never knew about women by reading these magazines. My favourite one was a magazine called Not Only Black + White, which I had never heard of before.

On Saturday after our walk up the mountain, Marinus beat me at chess; the following day, I played against Chrizette and lost again.

The lotions on the board attest to a novel travel experience. I wonder how many people can say that they went to a small mining town to present a course and ended up getting a pedicure from the Biodiversity Manager whilst losing against her at chess.

Apparently, there is quite a bouquet of religious options available in town. There is only one church building, but the Catholics, charismatics, Dutch Reformed and all the others all take turns on a Sunday, so you can go to church any time you like, but you'll get a different programme depending on when you go. I didn't want to go to church, but Chrizette gave me a recording of the book of John on CD, which I listened to on my return journey and arrived back in Stellenbosch much calmer than I had been ten days before.

Back home

I dropped off the rental car and was so tired of sitting down that I decided to walk home from Dorp Street. I went looking for Robbie in the basement, but he wasn't on duty. I ran into the maintenance manager, who has recently resigned, and invited him to supper so that he could mope about his job. Everything was tidy and my laundry was done by midnight, but the next day I had my walls repainted, and I didn't have time to put the curtains back up or to lay out the carpet again for several days, so a rumour grew amongst those who know me in the building that I am moving out. I had to go straight into teaching another course this week, and it wasn't until last night that I finally got things sort of cleared up at my flat. My former neighbour Mary came for supper and I took her home to Kayamandi. (The year has gone so fast that we hadn's actually seen each other at all since 2005; we just had a bit of cell-phone contact; and having finished off both her Masters degrees, she is moving to Johannesburg to work on contract for a year at the Constitutional Court.)

I got good feedback from Black Mountain about the course which I taught, and hope to go back to Aggeneys to teach some more people next year. They were talking about March, but I am already booked to teach three groups of parliamentarians in March. I suspect that it won't be as easy as teaching metallurgists and engineers...

Aggeneys

The car

Aggeneys is about 7 hours from Stellenbosch by car. The university rented me a big fancy blue one, with lots of buttons. Being accustomed to a 20-year-old Toyota Corolla, it took me a while to figure out how some of these buttons worked. I was several hours into my journey before I worked out how to pick a specific track on the CD player, and it was only the following day that I learned how to turn the thing off without actually switching off the whole car. I also made the mistake of winding down the windows some 200 km before I reached my destination. The aerodynamic result of this mistake had a significant impact on my fuel consumption. When I finally arrived at the security office of the Black Mountain mine, I got the admin girlie, Urina (or Jurina?) to show me how to wind them up again. (She tried not to look stunned at my ignorance, because I was there as a "consultant", and you don't insult consultants.) In addition to an ABS, the car (a Chevrolet Optra) also appeared to have built-in ESP, because it made an appropriate adjustment to my over-steering on one occasion. (I learned about all this stuff when I went on an Advanced Driving Course with the Four Rings people at the Killarney race track earlier this year.) Now that I am back, it is difficult for me to adjust to driving the Corolla again.

The journey there

Background

Mikhailo's mother is dying. And we had a conversation on Saturday night that opened up the unresolved conflict and misunderstandings pertaining to our divorce. There was little time to indulge in my feelings though, as the days preceding my journey were busy, as I rushed through everything on my checklist, determined not to have to return to a messy flat. Feeling guilty about having left the Tygerberg City Choir, I had offered to sell programmes at the Gala Concert. That was on Sunday afternoon. The concert was still in progress (and making a much improved sound under the leadership of the new conductor, Rudolf de Beer) when I left to continue my preparations for the journey. I had somehow forgotten to SMS Marisa about the birth of Alison's baby, not realising that Marisa had bought baby clothes which are now awaiting delivery to Calitzdorp before the baby grows out of them!

Muse

I finally got underway with the fancy-buttoned car at 9:00 on Tuesday morning. It was raining. I felt emotionally unstable. As I drove through the Swartland, I listened to Muse for hours, so loudly that I missed several phone calls. It helped, though; I had tried a Bruch violin concerto and it just made me feel worse; but Muse was able to anaesthetize the emotions which are hard to process and difficult to cure. Unlike the Bruch, Muse was out of synch with my feelings and with the pastoral environment, producing a welcome surreality. A bird flew into the windscreen. It felt like a minor hit in a fast-paced video game. I was shocked at my callousness and contemplated switching off the music to try to regain some empathy. Then I thought of the last time I ran over a cat and realised that my usual reaction is one of pragmatic humaneness. So, with this bird probably being dead, I reckoned that I would not normally have felt much more anyway. I contemplated the brevity of life for a few seconds without slowing down.

Passengers

Having passed through Bitterfontein, I picked up two women who had been walking for hours to a farm on the road to Garies. (According to my olfactory system, at least one of them had not bathed for several days.) It was a good thing I stopped for them, because Johanna had neglected to tell Eva exactly how far this journey was going to be. They argued for a while about whether to call me nôi or kleinnôi. ("Kleinnôi," insisted Eva; "Sy dra nie 'n ring nie.") I tried to resolve it for them by explaining that since I was neither married to their baas, nor was I his offspring, I should be called neither nôi or kleinnôi; but the notion of calling me by my first name was too much for Hanna. That's not the way her mother brought her up, she said. So I let her resolve it for herself, according to what made her feel best. She then went on to chide me about the dangers of a woman such as myself traveling so far alone, especially since the "kaffers" (sic) had taken over. "There are good and bad people of all colours," I argued, but Hanna liked her own ideas better. I wanted to know something else, though: If it was so dangerous for me to drive alone from Cape Town to Aggeneys, why was it all right for her and Eva to walk from Nuwerus to a farm near Garies? This had Hanna stumped, although I don't think she managed to make the intended conclusion: that neither ethnicity nor economic circumstances should deprive them of any right to safety which I might have. But we all know that rights and realities don't always line up...

Being in a hurry to reach the mine in time for a security induction, I said that I would not take them the additional five kilometres down the dust road to the farm (although Hanna had been keen to show me the goats). I had, however, saved them about thirty kilometres of a much longer journey, and thought to ask whether they had water. They had none. I gave them a bottle.

Hill near Garies.

Aggeneys

The roads

Aggeneys is an oasis along a straight stretch of road from Springbok to Pofadder. International car companies fly their vehicles to Upington from Europe, along with drivers and support teams. Attended by physicians who monitor their fluid intake and other aspects of their well-being, calibrating them like machines, the drivers then drive them at breakneck speed wearing nothing but shorts. Signs along the road indicate to the locals that they had better watch out because there are Germans traveling at more than 200 km per hour. As it is, it is difficult to keep to the regular 120 km per hour speed limit, because the roads are just so clear, straight and comfortable all the way.

The roads and pavements in the town are paved with interlockers, and the transitions are created by sloping kerbstones. It gets so hot here that truck tyres particularly tend to pick up the tar, so cast concrete paving makes a lot of sense. It also contributes to the atmosphere of the town.

Animal, vegetable, mineral

Aggeneys exists because of the Black Mountain mine, which belongs to Anglo. The mine produces lead, zinc, copper and other minerals. The whole area is a geologist's dream. During my stay in Aggeneys I had the privilege of being befriended by the mine's biodiversity manager, Chrizette, who invited me and Marinus (one of the junior engineers) for a morning's walk up the mountain. We saw many types of crystals, such as rose quartz, and a great number of sparkly and shiny stones. Some looked like glitter, some looked like mother-of-pearl. Going for a walk with Chrizette was like getting a tour with a proper tour guide. She could identify plants and tell you which ones were edible; she identified the skulls we found as belonging to dassies, and explained why the mining activity had caused the mountain stream to dry up.

Marinus & Chrizette on the mountain.

Many of the people who live here now are not originally from the area, and some of the engineers and managers see their work in Aggeneys as CV material rather than as a reason to settle here for good. As I arrived in town, the current mine manager, André, was departing for a job in Gauteng that allegedly pays R50,000 per month more than he earns now, bringing his salary to something in the region of R1,200,000 per year. The town, I am told, is not as touched by racism as the rest of the Northern Cape, because everything here centres around the mine; it's classism which prevails. Indeed, I could not identify any predominantly White neighbourhood; I mostly saw coloured people in the residential areas, with Whites and Blacks from various tribes sprinkled in between.

The many indigenous trees in the town are there thanks to the very first mining manager's wife, said Chrizette. Without her passion, the trees might all have been exotic.

 
There are several kilometres of cycads between the town to the mine.

From the top of the mountain (the destination of our Saturday morning walk), the town clearly appeared as a small green oasis in an arid plain. The mountain houses several plants which grow nowhere else in the world. These hibernate in the summer, and go insane if you water them during that time.

From the mountain, Aggeneys appears as a small green patch.

In the middle of these rocks is an amorphous grey-green plant, endemic to the mountain.

Food

You can... sort of... eat in Aggeneys, but you don't get many options. You can, for example, have a mixed grill, or egg and reconstituted bacon. If you ask for it, they will make you a salad, and you'll have to ask for something to put on top, like mayonnaise. The tannie from the café is sweet, though, and she will accommodate non-menu requests within the capability of her staff. I gave her my recipe for tzatziki, which she had never heard of before, in spite of the fact that they had bought the cafe from a Greek many years ago. (I could not bring myself to call her tannie, though, because she wasn't really old enough to be my tannie. But that is how she was introduced to me.) There is an air conditioner in the room where you eat, and this pulls grease-filled air from the cluttered kitchen through the whole area. I had to wash the smell out of my jacket after a day or two. The menus are also coated with a layer of oil, and so are the plastic table cloths. I am not convinced that if you stayed in the local guest house you'd be able to get anything different, because even the mine manager had his meals cooked by the café for years, and I would have thought that if there had been an option, he would have used it; although, I must say, the cafe couple's sociability works very well in endearing them to the locals.

Breakfast at the Aggeneys Café. They bring the teabags separately and are surprised when you add them to the jug instead of putting them into the mug.

The conclusion you should be making from all this is that there is only one place to eat in Aggeneys if you do not have cooking facilities of your own. There is also the "rec" (the mine's recreation centre), but while I was in town, the mine was in the process of firing the guys who run the catering there, so that was not availed to me as an option. I did, however, go there with Chrizette and Marinus on the last night of my stay, and the food was OK. The waitress, Blanche, told us that the local second-tier employees of the fired catering company had tendered to manage the restaurant themselves, and that they had just heard they'd won the tender. Blanche was excited. She had grown up in Aggeneys and had always dreamed of running her own restaurant. "I have a lot of vision and ideas for turning around this place," she said. I hope (and to some extent believe) that the will to succeed, and the goodwill of those who awarded the tender, will help to compensate for the lack of formal business management training which I suspect would otherwise be needed to make a success of this venture.

On the way back from Aggeneys I stopped at Vanrhynsdorp and entered a local eating establishment. "Soup of the day" for R9 seemed like a fine idea. I reckoned they'd use leftover vegetables and call it minestone. No such luck. "Soup of the day" was Cup-o-Soup.

The moral of the story is this (with a few noteworthy exceptions, such as the Rose of the Karoo in Calitzdorp): If you want good ol'-fashioned country cooking, you must go to the city.

Now that I am back in the Cape and teaching at the university again, and have a renewed sense of appreciation for the colourful and tasty balanced meals which Fedics provides from the Van der Horst Building's kitchen.