I’m on a number of civic mailing lists for Observatory, the suburb we live in. One particularly active list is the neighbourhood watch list which is peppered with crime reports and the occasional report of residents aiding the police (who’re doing an incredible job) catching criminals.

It can be a daunting list to be on. Especially before you even move in. But soon you realise that crime is everywhere and that being on this list is like spending your days in the police station… You’re going to hear about a lot of crime.

Pessimists piss me off. People who think they’re being smart by saying thing like “Oh, It’s obviously going to go the way of Zimbabwe” etc etc. What these fuckers don’t seem to realise is that assholes like them have been saying shit like that since the dark ages. I have a friend whose grandfather sold everything in 1990 because he was convinced that Mandela was going to take his home. He died, bitter and twisted, in a caravan, while all around him the Rainbow Nation smiled.

Anyway, back to the mailing list. Some asshole, who has already fled the country, in reply to a report about a cash in transit robbery that happened in front of a child, felt the need to basically tell everyone that we’re fucked and “Get out of that hellhole which South Africa has become!” and “There’s no future in SA for you and your children”. He also went on about white suburbs and how the criminals hate our skin colour.

My reply was cordial. I suggest politely that he never post on the list again because we don’t really need his pessimism.

But here’s what I wanted to say.

You ignorant fuckwad. You racist, bigoted, coward. How dare you come onto a public forum and spout your simple-minded drivel, aimed at nothing else but undermining the good that these people are doing. The blood of generations of slain innocents stains our soil and punctuates our history…The struggle is not new or unique. Our legend is one of truth and reconciliation, of forgiveness and grace… and I would be honoured to have my own blood take its place in this soil while I worked to make this country better. You on the other hand ran away. You asked whether we love our children more than our country… My answer to that, you shallow dipshit, is that no parent wants to see their child hurt, but I would rather build a better future for all the children of this country than teach my own that running away is an option. In short, fuck you and the horse you left town on.

I didn’t post that because it’s a public list and we’re trying to be civil.

I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with a Zimbabwean the other day. He, like millions of other Zimbabweans, left their country because the realistic alternative was starvation or torture. He will never be anything but Zimbabwean. He has a passion and a deep love for his country. He knows that HOPE is greater than FEAR. He believes that normal people make a difference, even in light of insurmountable obstacles. He knows that the human spirit can stop tanks and dictators even when their bodies can’t.

A lot of what Tawanda, the Zimbabwean, knows about the human spirit was taught to him by us. South Africa.  A country where the story is so incredible that people would have not believed it if it were not for CNN.

This blood in our soil belongs to men and woman far greater than any of us can comprehend. Millions of unsung heros, children, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters… I could not dishonour their sacrifice by running away now.

And hey, I’m actually loving my life. You’re the miserable dude in the first world telling other people how fucked their lives are over the internet.

ps. I have no issues with people leaving the country because they just want to live somewhere else. My sister lives permanently in the UK. She left for a whole bunch of reasons, crime was obviously a factor but it wasn’t the biggest factor. She can’t wait to come home for holidays.

pps. I don’t have any children.

Needless to say I grossly under-estimated the amount of critical work (cleaning, fixing etc) we had to do before we got to the luxuries like curtain rails and knife racks.

Anyway, last night I fitted the knife rack. It definitely feels like we’re making progress.

Please excuse the shoddy mobile pic!

What matters is what you do, not what you have… and yes, installing an extractor fan is important, but it’s not the kind of “doing” that matters.

Compare “installing a mould reducing extractor fan” to “pouring bright coloured paint onto a large canvas”:

One is pure function while the other is pure creativity. I don’t want to get stuck in a trap of functional “doing”. I need to find some other thing to “do” with my life or little johnny will become a duller boy.

ps. The place is coming along beautifully… And I’m really enjoying the process.

More accurately I think we’ve spent about 48 man-hours cleaning this weekend punctuated with bouts of repairs and miscellaneous DIY… The high point probably being when I was lying on my back with my face wedged up against the side of the toilet while we hack-sawed, hammered and generally bashed-off the toilet seat off in order to fit the new one.

But the house is starting to look like a home. I’m taking tomorrow off to tend to other issues like alarms and showerfittings.

The cat finally left the bedroom and is now investigating the entire house and returning to her normal non-leopard crawling self.

I suspect we have a few weeks of repairs and touchups ahead of us before we can safely let the general populous into our abode, but I’m soooo glad I took a bunch of photographs of the place a few weeks ago while the previous tenant still lived there. The before/after photographs are going to be amazing… I hope!

Lots of love,
J.

It was from a post about property that I wrote a while back. The comment seemed legit enough, a little off topic, but still legit… Then I noticed the url that the poster had used… it pointed to a joburg based property company’s website. I viewed their site and noticed that their SEO was being done by a South African SEO company… Funny that… Lets look at the poster’s email address domain… oh look, owned by the SEO company.

So I called them and asked to speak to the girl who’s name was used… I told her what had happened and asked her, very nicely, whether she thought that sort of thing was ethical.

You’ll never guess what she said.

“No, it’s not ethical“… She sounded ashamed and admitted to not wanting to do that kind of thing, but not having a choice.

“I hope you find a better job soon” I sheepishly suggested…

I’m not going to pretend I could ever understand what kind of situation she’s in that she feels she has to continue working for a bunch of spammers, but I sincerely hope that she gets out of there fast. Allowing your integrity to be eroded is not a healthy place for any decent human being to be in… and she sounded like a decent human being.

Now she wants my friend to work late as well. My friend isn’t happy about that.

It all depends on what your priorities are. There are no wrongs and rights here.

On saturday I’m going to remove the kitchen door that has swelled slightly and plane it down so that it doesn’t scrape on the floor any more. For some reason that is a priority for me.

On saturday evening I think we’ll end up sitting on a couch and drinking champagne (it’s the day we move in after all)… That time, with just the two of us, is a priority for me.

The difference of course is that when I’m 70 years old I’ll have the memory of that evening we sipped champagne and that day I fixed the door on my very first house. I’ll also have all those evenings where we talked rubbish while cooking supper together, watched inane tv shows and played with the cat.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d rather have those memories than a fancy car and a list of people who know my name, but I respect any person’s decision to focus on those things.

Years ago I worked for a large travel company. There was an old lady who worked there… her job, for the previous 25 odd years, had been to travel the world and write about her adventures. One night at a company dinner she was telling us stories about all the incredible places she had been. Another woman of similar age said to her, “Oh, I wish I had lived your life, it sounds so amazing!“… To which the jaded traveler replied rather seriously “I would trade you my entire life for one week with a loving husband and children!“.

I think I was 19 at the time… Those words continue to haunt me… and guide me.

Then after a few minutes one of the other shop assistants walks into the technical area and, even after seeing Cokey and obviously not recognising him, says to one of the other shop people in earshop of Cokey,  “Dude, Colin Moss is in the shop!”…

(In case you’re wondering, Colin was actually in the shop…)

There’s something intrinsically human about that emotion… that necessity to just wait, knowing that nothing you could ever do could make time move along faster. You experienced it the week before Christmas when you were 5 years old and you’ll experience it when you’re 80 years old and waiting for the delivery guys to drop off your new off-road motorbike.

So we fill our time with packing boxes and trying to plan things that don’t really need to be planned, like where are we going to put all the boxes in the new house…

So now we’ve run out of things to pack or plan and we’re left like two little kids grinning at each other knowing that soon we’ll be home.

Happy times indeed.

I do however realise that proper English needs to be looked after by the people who care for its future much like a young parent cares for a child. You can’t let it be molested by laziness because it will rapidly become an unrecognisable fat slob of a language.

So it is with great pleasure that I read one of the senior editors at The Sunday Express getting all frothy at the mouth over English abuse in one of the paper’s own editions.

My two favourite lashes were:

P5 – Someone is described as an ‘ex-pat’. At the very least that’s amateurish. Look, let’s make it really simple; if you don’t know what a word means or how it’s spelt, don’t f***ing use it.

P9 – The conflict in Georgia provides us with some classic bollocks. What is a ‘battle tank’? Does this mean wars now have referees who decide whether or not a tank is allowed to go into battle?

Are all other tanks to be described as big metal cars for soldiers with a decorative gun on top?

The thing I love the most about this kind of bashing is that it truly is done out of love for the language. Also, any toff who can throw in a few “f**k”s is my hero… (Mr Fry that means you!)

Read the rest of the rants here.