Weekus horribilis: weak us, and horrible humans. Someone's opened Pandora's Box

Jeez, am I lucky or what? Unlike certain other people who live in Johannesburg, I wasn't stabbed, shot, beaten or burned to death this week. I could have been, I suppose, after my family and friends were held at gunpoint, in my own house, in the self-same city, nine days ago. But, right now, I'm not even going to begin to entertain the thought of what could have happened to us during this ordeal. I'm tempted - oh yes, sorely and tearfully - but it just doesn't seem decent to dwell on the possible outcomes of a small domestic crisis in a week when bigger demons are afoot.

I'm not being facetious. I do feel lucky. I woke up this morning to see a shocking, grisly picture on the front pages of The Times of a human body on its knees and engulfed in flame. This man - his name still unknown - was beaten and burned to death by a baying mob, one of a dozen or more other packs of feral bastards who have stampeded through Johannesburg's informal settlements, burning, beating and killing 'foreigners' - that is, hapless refugees and illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and elsewhere in Africa. If you're remotely interested as to why this is happening, Google the words 'xenophobia South Africa'.

I don't have words to describe how sickened I am, not to mention frightened, shaken and rattled. I can't think of another week in my life that has made me feel so chilled and full of despair. Someone has opened Pandora's box. Bad news, misfortune and evil piles up, folds in on itself and replicates (and I'm not even the supersititious type; yes, even atheists get rattled).

Consider the events:

1. Cataclysmic storm in Burma; countless thousands killed and displaced
2. Tens of thousands perish in Chinese earthquake
3. Mayhem, murder and mob rule in the suburbs of my own city
4. Gunmen invade my home
5. My son's friend dies in a car accident
6. The nine-month-old baby niece of my domestic worker is badly burned (third-degree burns over half her body) when a candle falls over in a small shack in a Jo'burg shanty-town and sets light to the bed clothes. No news as yet.

I'm reasonably resilient, and I think I might have absorbed and coped with all this bad stuff if No. 4 on the list hadn't knocked the wind clean out of my sails. But - enough already. I think I'm going to do a Rip van Winkle and go to sleep for 20 years. Please wake me up when May has been abolished.

Milk of human kindness after our house attack - thank you

The feral bastards who invaded my home last week have terrified me and traumatised my husband, kids and friends, but they have not destroyed my faith in humanity. Forgive me if that sentence sounds like a platitudinous gobbet from a self-help book, but I'm just blown away, and so comforted, by the kindness and wonderful generosity of my immediate family, my mom, my sisters, my friends, my neighbours and my community.

I've been inundated with hugs, phone calls, emails, SMS messages and good vibes. I thank you all, and apologise if I haven't returned your calls. I feel as if I've had a group hug (sorry to sound mushy, but there is a cheese-factor involved here) from 3000 people.

Total strangers have phoned and emailed me offering their help in various ways, including one or two dedicated individuals who are moving mountains and cutting red tape behind the scenes in order to nail these predators. (Wow! Three cliches and mixed metaphors in one sentence!.)

I've received messages of support from school principals, from a dedicated police captain (and several of his officers), at the Rosebank police station, from the station's victim-support team, from generous teachers and colleagues and therapists, and from the wonderful mothers of my daughter's classmates. I've had arm-squeezes and big sympathetic ears from supermarket cashiers, garage assistants and all the other people who've taken time to listen to my outpourings.

Friends on Facebook sent messages and greetings. My darling friend C baked cookies, and then the next day delivered two delectable roast chickens, perfect spuds and a dish of cauliflower cheese (recipes coming soon). Not only were they piping hot, but she brought them to our house on her motor bike. My other darling friend, R, a photographer with an exquisite eye for design and detail, accepted the portfolio of Getting Us a New Gate, raced around town photographing suitable gate-designs and doing all the donkey-work I just didn't feel up to.

And as for my husband and kids, and the guests who were involved in this sorry episode - well, words fail me. They have shown such resilience and optimism and kindness (and I admit that I have been a huge girls' blouse in the last few days, with my obsessive arming-and-cross-checking of doors, my frantic padlock-buying and my nasty snappishness), that I feel like the luckiest person on earth to have them in my life.

And here endeth the lesson: the nastiness of this episode has been thoroughly diluted by the milk of human kindness.

What is it with travel agents, estate agents and insurance salespeople?

Before all you travel agents, estate agents and insurance hawkers out there get your knickers in a knot, I just want to ask you this: how is it possible that in the 44 years I’ve been alive, I’ve had (this is a rough estimate) one good experience with a travel agent and six bad; one good experience with an estate agent and 12 bad; and no good experience ever with an insurance salesperson? (I’m talking business experiences here, obviously.)

It just seems to me to fly in the face of the law of averages.

I wish I were making this up but I’m not: an estate agent once ‘sold’ my house, only to discover months later that she’d actually sold the house next door – she’d requested and been given the wrong deed documents by the deeds office, and never noticed. Worse, she actually had the temerity to phone me (but not before banking her big fat commission, of course) and ask me to sort out the mess. (I told her no.)

I can’t tell you how many times insurance salespeople have schnaaied me. I’ve spent fantastically enormous sums of money on short-term insurance and have never – NOT ONCE – put in a claim, genuine and honest in all respects, that didn’t turn into a nightmare of red tape, backpedalling, excuses and the like. NOT ONCE.

I was also once pressured into buying a life insurance policy by a ‘financial adviser’ on behalf of a huge bank that turned out to have been sold to me under entirely false pretences. The salesperson disappeared off the face of the earth; the bank continued accepting my premiums; and when I finally queried the policy, they denied all knowledge of it. It was only when I threatened to take the case to the Ombudsman that they relented – and then all they were prepared to do was refund my premiums, no interest added. By then I was just too bloody tired to fight any more.

As for travel agents: sheesh. If you read about my disastrous attempts to get a US visa for my daughter, you will know that I had truck with a travel agent in securing her air ticket. This same travel agent sold me a travel insurance policy that, she assured me, would cover the cost of a ticket cancellation. FULL STOP.

She now INSISTS she told me that the policy would only cover the cost of ticket cancellation in the case of illness or death. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘But why would I buy such a policy for my hale-and-hearty teenage daughter? If you think about it, you’ll see that it just doesn’t make sense.’

Down to the wire, I asked her to email me a copy of the policy document I’d supposedly signed (I signed at least a dozen bits of paper that day in her office; I assumed the policy was among them). Waddaya know, she couldn’t find it. And when she emailed me a clean copy, I realised why: I’d never seen it; I’d certainly never signed it.

When I pointed that if I hadn’t seen the policy document, I could hardly be expected to know what was contained in it, she informed me (and I am quoting directly from her email here), ‘I recall giving you a brochure when you were here in the office after you had filled in our booking form and terms and conditions. It had the phone number and the web address of the insurance company on there if you had any questions or wanted advice, so you were given the tools to get information from the insurer, as well.’ (‘As well’? As well as what?)

Now, isn’t that alarming: she gets to flog the insurance policy to me (and, I assume, take a commission on it – if not her, her company), but she doesn’t have to tell me what’s in it? Isn’t that like, say, selling someone a mulberry tart (one not made by you), and handing them a brochure at the same time. The brochure has a website address on it. And if you care to go to that website, you may find the following: ‘You are strongly advised not to eat this mulberry tart. It is loaded with arsenic.’

Okay, that’s an extreme example, but you get my drift? It just isn’t right that these middlemen earn bucks off your business (bucks that, make no mistake, YOU pay in the end), and then don’t do their jobs right. And then, when the kakka hits the wookah-wookah-wookah, they turn around and tell you it’s YOUR FAULT!

It just makes me so damned angry.

Nothing sluggish about this South African project

As hard as it is to follow Juno’s post about her horrific experience on Saturday night, I thought I’d share this good-news story with readers of salmagundi. Because as much as life in South Africa seems pretty grim at the moment, there are people out there still fighting the good fight.

There are several communities on our west coast that are in severely dire straits: a report commissioned on the area a few years ago found that many small towns there have ‘almost a complete lack of economic opportunity (particularly for women), a dependency on government grants, a lack of accessible basic services (healthcare, transportation, food security, education) and a culture of debt amassed to cover basic living expenses’.

A small group of people have found a solution to these ills, and it’s surprising: snails. I was offered a commission to do a story about the project, and, given my own experience with eating snails (see ‘Dagga Flashbacks’, below), I jumped at it. And what an interesting wealth of information I unearthed about these slimy little critters.

The west coast Poor People’s Movement Snail Project sees otherwise unemployed workers (mainly women) picking snails in the local vineyards for six months of the year – which has the fabulous run-off effect of encouraging farmers to use fewer dangerous pesticides. These snails are then purged for a few weeks (a very necessary step – don’t be tempted to pluck a few snails from your garden spinach patch and just pop them in a pot), then chilled to the point where they seal themselves and go into hibernation, after which they’re sold to a local snail exporter. This exporter ships the snails, very much alive and very sound asleep, to Europe for use as food.

Now, isn’t that fabulous? I love the notion of some fat French gastronome tucking into his amuse bouche of snails-on-a-stick and having not a clue that they’ve come not from a nearby snail farm, but all the way from the Africa – and that they’ve contributed in a very real way to the financial upliftment of an otherwise savagely impoverished community.

During the course of my research I discovered that snails aren’t only delicious to eat (and that they’re enjoyed in cuisines all over the world, not only in France), but they’ve also long been used in medicine. Pliny, who lived around the time of the birth of Christ, prescribed for patients with stomach pains snails that had been ‘boiled and grilled over a coal fire', and added (very sensibly) that they 'should be eaten with wine’. He also mentioned, flatteringly and mysteriously, that ‘snails from Africa are the best, but they must be prepared in an uneven number’.

I also came across a useful recipe for ‘snail water’, published in 1738, good for ‘skin redness’ and ‘the spasms of spitting blood accompanying tuberculosis’. Snails are crushed in a mortar, then put over a simmering pot and mixed with ‘the fresh milk of a female donkey’ (I’m assuming that milk from a male donkey doesn’t work as well). This potent potion is allowed to sit in the sun for 12 hours before being distilled, then it’s ready for use.

Jokes aside, helicidine, a biological extract prepared from snails, has been used with good results in cough medicines in France for the past forty years, and snail mucus, which has antibacterial properties, is currently being marketed as a salve for various skin disorders including roseacea, and to heal scars and keep skin smooth and supple.

I was thrilled and a little ashamed to learn that the long top two feelers on a snail contain light-sensitive organs – so the huge fun I used to have as a child, touching those tentacles and watching them recoil, was tantamount to poking the snail in the eyes with a sharp stick. (The smaller bottom ones feel, taste and smell.)

And perhaps best of all, I discovered that the common brown garden snail – the very snail that is now being exported to Europe from our shores – was probably brought to South Africa by the French Huguenots in their vinestock in the late 1600s. So all we’re doing, really, is sending them home again. (Sure, it’s to be eaten, but you can’t win ’em all.)

Our family and guests survived an armed attack last night: check out our statistics

I am surprised I managed to type the title of this blog post, considering how tired and shocked I am. My fingers are shaking and icy, my skin is itching, and I wish I was anywhere else but sitting in my own home.

I have had 'several' medicinal tots of whisky today (starting at 5 am, when I woke up with my teeth chattering) and still my legs seem made of water.

It's not a surprise to me that our house should be attacked - I've been anticipating having 'my turn' in South Africa's crime wave for at least twenty years - but it is a shock. I just didn't expect it to happen last night, at the innocent hour of 7.30 pm. I didn't expect to have three gunmen burst like a swat-team through a closed automatic gate, literally bashing the wooden panels out with their shoulders. I didn't expect that I'd be standing cheerfully in the driveway, welcoming dinner-party guests who had just driven in. I didn't expect to be forced to lie face-down on the cold concrete of our driveway, my shivering little nine-year-old daughter tucked into my side, a gun pointed at our heads.

It's a long story (about eight minutes in all, although it felt like eighty) and I'm already tired of telling it, so I'll give it to you in a large nutshell. They burst onto the driveway with guns, put four of us face-down and stripped us of valuables. Then they swaggered into my home, held up my husband and two of our friends, and accosted my teenage son in his upstairs bedroom. They threatened to shoot my dogs if I didn't 'quieten them down' and told me to cover the eyes of my daughter, because, my personal gunman said, he didn't want her to have to 'go for trauma counselling'. They slapped my husband when he told them we didn't have a safe or guns - and we don't; why would we? - and then gave him another slap when they found he was wearing a cheapie watch. They demanded my wedding band, and then threw it back in my face, telling me, 'You can keep this'.

Then they herded the four inside-victims onto the driveway, and told us driveway victims to stand up. ('Cover the baby's eyes,' my gunman said to me. 'She mustn't look'. ) I can't even begin to tell you what went through my head at this point.

But we were 'lucky'. They marched us upstairs and put us in a bathroom. We waited until we thought they were gone, and summoned help.

So here are our personal crime statistics:

Bodily injuries: None (apart from a small tender spot over husband's one eye)
Children involved in incident: Two
First-timers (ie, crime virgins, never been attacked before): Six
Third-timers : Two
Guests in our house who were shot 11 months ago in similar attack: One
Time taken for armed response to arrive: Two minutes
Time taken for police to arrive: 45 minutes
Suburb where this happened: I feel too scared to say, but it's near Zoo Lake in Johannesburg
Evil bastards with guns: three inside, three or more outside
Number of armed guards outside house at time of attack: one private guard standing in adjacent driveway; two patrolmen in armed-response vehicle
Lot of good this did: fat
Valuables taken from house: A bit of cash from wallets. A cell phone. And a... actually, who gives a thruppenny fuck about what was taken?
Biggest topic of conversation among victims: Knysna or Cape Town?
Brave, co-operative, big-balled kids, husband and guests: seven
Mommy who remained icy calm during attack: me
Mommy who can't stop crying: me
Kids who aren't going to school tomorrow: three
Number of times today I've been advised to go, with my family, for trauma counselling: 86
Number of times I've said 'Of course we will' today: 86
Lives changed forever: Nine, including son who was out of the house at the time, but who is so shocked and upset that he is chalk-white and has spoken hardly a word all day.
Number of residents in our suburb who responded to my email alert: Three out of fifty or so recipients
Number of lovely friends, close neighbours and relatives who phoned, visited and lent succour: I love you all.

xxx

All you ever wanted to know in 30 seconds

I love board games, not least because in our circles they often culminate in stand-up slap-down screaming arguments between siblings, best friends and long-time live-in lovers. There’s nothing like board games to reveal the cracks in relationships, and it’s all so deliciously public.

30 Seconds has become my most coveted (it’s a love/hate relationship). I’m not an entirely calm person at the best of times, and being put under pressure to display my wealth of general knowledge by a common-or-garden egg-timer is just designed to bring out the worst in me. Driven half-crazy by the stress, I flush from the feet up and, after losing my power of speech and knocking over my wine, I eventually start giggling uncontrollably, just when I should be putting in a last effort to win the match. It doesn’t make me a pleasure to play with.

[It reminds me of my one and only attempt at bridge. After having been coached for several hours by a serious player, I was then partnered with him in a game/set/match (I’m sure they have a word for it but I don’t know what it is).

[(I’ve just remembered: rubber! What a strange term for something so astonishingly boring.)

[Anyway, after having done a couple of rounds/hands/shots during which I apparently bid as if I were mainlining crack cocaine, my partner threw his cards furiously onto the table/green/baize and said, ‘This is ridiculous! I’m not playing with her!’

[I don’t exactly blame him – I was completely/utterly/irretrievably useless - but I am still just a tiny bit taken aback by his lack of gamesmanship/swordsmanship/whatever.]

Anyway, I mainly love 30 Seconds because people make such delightful blunders when required to think freely under time pressure. And it’s all made so much interesting by the fact that the asker has to be fairly creative with his/her questions: you can’t say any word in the answer, and you’ve got to find a way to point your partner very very quickly to the solution (you have to get five of these right in 30 seconds – seriously, it’s not as easy as it sounds). It’s that ‘Who was Noah’s wife? Joan of Arc!’ thing, but it happens spontaneously, and everyone involved is required to laugh hysterically and not think any the worse of the person who’s made such a twit of themselves (which is why I hate it).

Here are two of my crackers from this evening:

My partner: ‘The movie with the Orca in it?’
Me: ‘Lord of the Rings!’
[Correct answer, for those who have recently have a prefrontal lobotomy: Free Willy. I think I heard ‘Orca’ and processed ‘Ork’.]

My partner: ‘The shape where planes disappear?’
Me: ‘Trafalgar Square!’
[Correct answer, for Robert McBride and his friends: Bermuda Triangle.]

Fortunately for me, my partner (whose questions were, without fail, fabulously incisive) was my son, and he knew that if he got cross with me I’d dock his pocket money.

Drunken South African drivers: Man plus penis-machine plus alcohol equals killer. Shame on you, SHAME.

Huge lucky me, no family member or friend of mine has ever died or been injured in an alcohol-related car crash. If I had lost someone in this way, I would not be able to contain a murderous rage at the fact that there are people in this country - including rich, well-connected, apparently intelligent leaders in our community - who get behind the wheels of their cars in a state of near-comatose intoxication, hit the freeways, and then plough their shiny penis-machines into cars, walls, sidewalks, islands and hapless pedestrians.

I read a depressing story like this virtually every day in the press, and there are four things that strike me: a) the drivers of these vehicles are almost inevitably men; b) they always deny being drunk c) they sometimes get hauled before the courts, but are hardly ever convicted; and d) no one in authority seems to give a flying fuck.

Now, as readers of this blog know, I like a drink. But I would no more get behind the wheel of a car with a few toots under my belt than jab a needle into the eye of a newborn infant. So what is it about South African men (and sorry, it is mostly men) that makes them think it's okay to drink for many hours, and then get into their murder-machines and weave homewards?

Do you think I'm exaggerating? Here are a few examples of men, among them many high-flying 'celebrities' who have been bust allegedly driving drunk in the past year or so in South Africa.

This list is just shameful. SHAMEFUL.

Robert McBride. Suspended police chief, anti-apartheid activist, convicted bomber, struggle 'hero', alleged gun-runner ... read more about McBride's infamous career, if you have the stomach for it. Crashed his car, while apparently dead drunk. Allegedly used all sorts of shallow suberfuges to cover his guilt. No conviction so far.

Herschelle Gibbs South African cricketer. Arrested for drunken driving. No conviction so far.

Kershan Naidoo At the age of 17, Kershan Naidoo, an unlicensed driver, was 'heavily intoxicated' when he lost control of the car he was driving and caused the death of Quinshae Snead, the cousin of American R&B singer Ashanti.

Doc Khumalo. Football legend in South Africa. Arrested for drunken and reckless driving after allegedly smashing into a taxi. Three people injured. No conviction so far.

Judge Nkola Motata (yes, you read that right. A JUDGE) . Drove into and demolished a wall in Sandton, while allegedly intoxicated. Denies all charges. Case ongoing.

Tony Yengeni. Ex-whip of the ANC, struggle 'hero', convicted fraudster, jailbird and currently member of the ANC National Executive Committee. Appeared in court this week on a main charge of drunk-driving and an alternative count of reckless and negligent driving. No conviction so far.

'Prince' Sifiso Zulu. A car belonging to one Sifiso Zulu smacked into another vehicle packed with church members, causing two deaths and multiple injuries. Sifiso Zulu denies that he was driving his car at the time, but has since appeared in court on an earlier and allegedly unrelated charge of drunken driving. Cover-up suspected by the media. No conviction so far.

Rudi Laws The mayor (yes, mayor) of the Eden municipality, in the Southern Cape, arrested for drunken driving.

I could go on and on, and list the accidents that have been caused by people who aren't famous, or politicians - or men, for that matter. (I'm not saying women don't drive drunk: but draw your own conclusions from the list above.)

And where does this leave us mindful, careful drivers who pootle innocently about on the roads, our kids in the back seat, our old mommies in the front, not suspecting for a moment that we may be snuffed out in the twinkling of an eye by some... by some...

(I am struggling to find words to convey the contempt I feel)

... by some sorry-arsed, pathetic, moronic losers who just don't get the fact that alcohol + car = unbearable tragedy.

And if you are someone* who has put a little fragile wooden cross up on the side of a road, or nailed a bunch of flowers to a tree, or tied a ribbon round a branch, in memory of someone who has died on the road, and if you are so heartsore that you can't speak, well, I feel for you.

Shameful.

* I drive a 5 km-circuit every day between my house, my daughter's school, and the point where I pick up my teen boys, who catch a bus home from school. On this route, there are four - FOUR - spots where bereaved family members have erected wooden crosses, or place fresh flowers, in memory of car-accident victims.

The unabashed avarice and arrogance of the US Embassy in South Africa (and probably elsewhere)

Regular readers of salmagundi might remember my raging post about the hoops I would have to jump through to secure a holiday visa to the States for my 17-year-old daughter. It began with the frankly greedy requirement of buying a PIN number from Pick’n’Pay, just in order to phone the Embassy and make an appointment.

Which I did, and everything has gone downhill from there. The man I spoke to at the Embassy gave me a list of requirements, each more ridiculous than the last: an unabridged South African birth certificate (which no South African citizen actually ever needs for anything else, including quite important things like buying land or getting married); a letter from the school principal; letters from both mother and father; a full itinerary; etc. I sat with my diary and a pen and listed the requirements as he gave them to me, so I am absolutely sure that I didn’t miss anything (about which more later).

After he’d given me this ridiculously extensive list, he then deigned to make an appointment for my daughter (because the person applying for the visa has to have a personal interview at the Embassy before a visa application can be considered). It was for 7.30 this morning. I told the man that we live over 100km from the Embassy but he was immovable: 7.30am was the only time-slot available.

In the run-up to this morning’s appointment, I jumped through many hoops. I applied for and eventually received an unabridged birth certificate for my daughter (not without endless frustrating phone calls to Home Affairs, who refused to fast-track the application for me; it finally arrived yesterday, in the nick of time, and I had to drive to the next town and queue for an hour to collect it). I got letters from the principal and from my daughter’s absent father. I wrote a letter myself. I checked the itinerary, the validity of her passport, the correctness of the air ticket, etc. And by this morning, when we left home at 5.30am, I was sure we were all set.

It took us over two hours to reach the Embassy through morning traffic. When we got there, we were told by the guard at the gate – who was lording it over a huge, almost empty carpark – that visa applicants weren’t permitted to park on the Embassy grounds. Instead, we had to drive to a nearby shopping centre, park there, then walk the +-1km up the hill to the Embassy building. (What the hell is that about??!)

This we did, and when we got there for a second time, we were directed to a long queue of about 40 people – all standing outside in the drizzly cold. I asked the man in front of me if he was queuing for a visa. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I’m really pissed off. What’s the point of telling us to be here at 7.30am if you’re only going to queue for the next two hours?’ Quite.

As is the way when you’re standing around in the rain with a bunch of strangers and know you’re going to be there for quite a while, we all got chatting. There wasn’t a person who wasn’t in fits of fury about the list of requirements and the numerous roadblocks put in the way of ordinary people trying their damnedest to organise a simple holiday. ‘I’m travelling with my son,’ said one woman, ‘and they wouldn’t give us an appointment together – or even on the same day! I’m here today and he has to come tomorrow.’

But it was only when someone said, ‘And non-standard visa photographs? I mean, they haven’t made it difficult enough for us already?’ that I went cold (well, colder) all over.

‘Visa photographs?’ I asked. This hadn’t been on my list of requirements, given to me by the Embassy official over the phone two months before. (Perhaps this was stupid of me – of course a visa requires a photograph! – but last time I applied for a visa to the States, I didn’t need a pic; they just stamped the visa into my passport then and there.)

‘Quick,’ I said to my daughter, ‘let’s run back down to the shopping centre. I’m sure there’s a photo place somewhere there.’

‘No, no,’ said someone else. ‘They’re not standard passport or ID pics. They’re 5x5cm, completely non-standard for South Africa, and only a few places do them. And they have to be in full colour.’

‘And you can’t smile, and you have to have your ears showing!’ added someone else, and there were incredulous murmurs of agreement.

So already we were buggered – clearly, we wouldn’t be getting the visa this morning – but out of interest I asked a fellow would-be-applicant to show me her list of requirements. According to her list, this is what was missing from my package of documents: three months’ worth of bank statements from me, proof that I hold a mortgage bond, proof that I had already paid the R1 000+ for the visa into a specified account (I had the amount in cash – ‘No, they don’t accept cash,’ the woman told me) and R40 in cash for postage. Also, an extensive form of personal information which had to be downloaded from the Internet, printed out and filled in – but which I in any case wouldn’t have been able to obtain as the website address given to me by the Embassy official on the phone was invalid! (I couldn’t phone back to get the right or another address, of course, because they don’t answer the phone unless you have a prepaid one-time-use-only PIN number to enter, and I’d already used mine – it’s a ghastly Catch 22.)

‘And you do have your letter from your employer?’ she asked.

‘No, but I’ve got a letter from my daughter’s principal.’

‘Well, that’s okay then,’ she said. ‘My husband had to get a letter from his employer…’

She was interrupted by someone else. ‘You mean you’re here to get a visa for your husband?’

‘Yes, why?’ asked the woman.

I tried not to look smug (as this was, apparently, one of the few things I’d actually got right). ‘Your husband has to come for the interview himself, in person,’ a few people said in unison.

The woman said a very, very rude word and not one person was offended by it. We all knew just how she was feeling.

My daughter and I walked back down to the shopping centre and found a coffee shop. We were drinking our cappuccinos in silence – I was thinking, with a sinking heart, of having to gather the additional documentation, get another PIN number from Pick’n’Pay, make another appointment, and repeat the whole depressing crack-of-dawn-and-morning-traffic exercise all over again – when my daughter said to me, ‘You know what, Mom? I actually don’t want to go to America any more. They don’t want me, I don’t want them.’

‘You sure?’ I asked her (trying not to look as delighted as I felt).

‘Ja,’ she said. ‘I’d rather go to England. At least they don’t make us feel like terrorists before we even set foot there.’

So I’ve cancelled my daughter’s tickets to America (the cancellation fee was staggering, but at this stage I don’t actually care) and she’s going to England instead.

America can just go fuck itself.

An open road and big African skies make my heart go da-doef

Did your heart do a somersault as you hit the open road on the way out of town this last long weekend? Did you get a soaring, giddy feeling as you zoomed free of the sooty city outskirts and watched the landscape unfurl into singing golden grassland? Did you pump up the music, roll down the window, crack open the salt-and-vinegar chips and put your bare feet up on the dashboard?


Do you like long weekends?

Are you incredibly lucky to live in South Africa?

If the answer to all the above questions is yes please join me in a furtive little group hug.

I can't help but come over all touchy-feely and sentimental. I've just downloaded the photographs I took last Wednesday as my family headed out of town for a four-day stay in the Drakensberg, and each one of them makes me want to go down on my knees and beg for more public holidays.

The pictures of the resort where we stayed - the hikes, the landscape, the waterfalls and forests - are pleasing enough to look at, but it's the photographs taken on the way to the Berg that make my heart quicken, and my stomach sicken like a seven-year-old.

Any outward journey is bound to be more exciting than the homeward journey, but I don't think there's anyone on the planet who gets more excited than I do about the drive between Johannesburg and the Kwa-Zulu south coast, via the Free State town of Harrismith. (This weekend, we went only as far as Harrismith, before turning west towards the Drakensberg, but this didn't diminish my hysteria at all.)

I first made this journey as a babe-in-arms in 1962, and have done it three or four times a year over the past four decades, aiming either for our family cottage south of Durban, or, latterly, for the Drakensberg. As a six- or seven-year-old, I was so excited about driving to the coast that I packed my bags a week in advance. I ached with anticipation the night before we left - literally rolled around in my bed, clutching a gnawing stomach. My Dad shook me awake at 5 am, and bundled me and my sisters, wrapped in our eiderdowns, into his old Ford Fairlaine parked on the driveway, which was thundering and chuffing and smoking like a tethered dragon. We curled up, seatbelt-less, three dozy puppies in flannelette pyjamas.

For what seemed like hours and hours, I'd stare out of the car window, dazzled and carsickened by on-off on-off sulphur-yellow street lights. Then the sky went inky and I'd doze off. Two hours later, I'd wake to the sound of my mom popping the top of the coffee flask and peeling the wax paper off the mashed-sardine-lemon-juice sandwiches.

And always, it was the same wonderful, Free State landscape: mile after giddy mile of tawny hill and golden mielie field, a dizzying dome of pale-blue sky, and, in the distance, the grey smudge of Harrismith's Table Mountain, beyond it, the Drakensberg, and beyond that, two weeks by the sea.

I've never forgotten or grown out of that YIPPEEEEEE feeling of going on holiday, and I got it again, last Wednesday, driving the beautiful stark stretch of road between Harrismith and the Oliviershoek Pass. Me and Mr Husband have been to the Berg dozens and dozens of times over the past 30 years or so, as singles, on our honeymoon, with our babies, toddlers and tweens, and now with our teens, and the drive just gets better and better.

It's listed on maps as a 'scenic drive' but the word scenic doesn't even begin to describe how lovely this landscape is, with the vast glittering Sterkfontein Dam stretching chilly and wind-whipped to the horizon, and the little puffs of white cloud. It makes me want to burst into song. (In every case, a Juluka song - it's a family tradition to listen to Johnny Clegg on this stretch of road. All together now: E-Africa book-arla Benguela, e-africa book-arla Benguela, hey, now. Joking.)

Okay, enough of that nostalgic nose-wash.

Did you enjoy driving out of the city for the long weekend, or what?

The indestructible wife and other festival stories

Once a year our quiet little town goes fabulously festive. Every hay bale from miles around is commandeered to block off streets and provide impromptu seating; there isn’t a spare bed to be had for love or money in hostelries or private homes; supplies are trucked in for days before; artists beaver feverishly at their easels and pottery wheels; foodies amateur and professional slave over their stoves deep into the night; new outlets for plants, food, clothes, furniture, jewellery, tit-tat and bric-a-brac suddenly fling open their doors in previously unused corners; stalls appear where before there was … well, nothing.

What was once a humble annual display of the town’s arts and crafts (and olives, for that’s what the festival is nominally held for) has become something of a yearly juggernaut, and by the Friday evening – the day before the official start of the festival – the town is already overrun with hawkers and gawkers; by midmorning on Saturday it can take a visitor arriving by car a good hour to inch their way in, and a wander around the town square is fraught with both frustration (my deah! the people!) and temptation (ooh, the food! the clothes! the jewellery! the mirrors! the books! the… you get the idea).

Most locals do something to participate. My contribution is an olive-themed kick-off dinner at my home on the Friday night. I source all my ingredients from the locals, and having wined, dined and accommodated my guests, I then squire them up to the square on Saturday morning and insist they spend vast sums of money. It’s not much, admittedly, but it’s something.

Others are far more ambitious, and one of these is V, my friend Johann’s indestructible wife. (She’s not really his wife, although they do co-habit; but then, I’m not really his mistress, although any time he doesn’t spend with V, he spends with me. They’re only honorary titles.) V, who is a Woman of a Certain Age, has an extraordinary ability to work hard and party harder. While that’s not entirely unknown in this village (except for the ‘work hard’ part), most people need, after one of our infamous gatherings, to stay in bed for two days drinking bottled water and reading nothing more challenging than heat magazine.

Not V, who began partying in the simmeringly exciting run-up to the festival on about, oh, Wednesday, and whom I last saw on Sunday night, her hair exotically dressed in bright-green plastic curlers pinned with wooden kebab skewers, pole-dancing outside a local restaurant. According to Johann, she had not had what could be termed actual sleep for about five days, despite his sincere and well-meaning attempts to get her to rest from time to time. (During this, she also managed to organise, open and run a busy shop.)

The assumption was that by Monday V would be, if not dead, at least a little frayed around the edges. Not so! Johann SMSd me on Monday evening: ‘V has escaped. AGAIN!’ Astonishingly, she had taken herself off to the city for a spot of post-fiesta partying. Now, there’s a woman who simply has to leave her liver to medical science.

Our Friday night dinner was, while long-lived (it ended at about 5 on Saturday morning), remarkably tame. Or so I thought until Johann asked me if I’d seen the pictures, yet, of the ‘naked boys’. ‘Gosh, no!’ I said. ‘Where do I find them?’

‘On the camera!’ he said. ‘When you all whipped off your clothes and leapt in the pool, I started snapping.’

Whipped off our clothes and leapt in the pool? Surely, I thought, Johann had gone on to another party and taken the pictures there? After all, not only had it been quite chilly on the Friday night, my pool is simply not swimmable at the moment – the pump has been broken for weeks and frogs have begun spawning in it. And I can tell you right now: no way would I be whipping off my clothes and disporting my 44-year-old self with delicious 30-year-old boys. I’m just not that sort of girl.

Alas for the power of the digital camera, for on Sunday afternoon I was forced to face myself – and my balloon-boobs and my jelly-belly – when pictorial evidence was presented to me. How embarrassing! (But at least it explained why, when I woke up fully dressed in bed at about 10 am the next day, my clothes were wet. I had been wondering about that.) (And also the slimy stuff in my hair – that really had me going for a moment there.)

So while I don’t have the staying-power of V the Indestructible Wife, I can at least lay claim to the title of Muriel the Naked Mistress. Even if I don’t have the vaguest memory of it.

* Following Catriona Ross’s drubbing in the Sunday Times Lifestyle for writing an irreverent piece about drunk driving (after, coincidentally, a visit to our village), let me assure loyal readers of salmagundi, who I’m sure are generally sober and always law-abiding, that beds were provided for all revellers.

A fine and beautiful wedding

About five years ago my children – who are imbued with a deep streak of sadism, inherited from their father’s side – persuaded me to go on The Cobra rollercoaster at Ratanga Junction in Cape Town. I’ve never been so scared in all my life, and I cried like a baby for about an hour afterwards.

Other than that, though, I’m not a big weeper. Physical pain makes me curse, not cry; movies that try to tweak my tearducts irritate me; and it takes a serious emotional hammer to smack a few snuffles out of me.

So you can imagine my consternation when, at a wedding on Friday afternoon, I found myself not just shedding one or two modest tears, but actually blubbing – the kind of crying that makes your nose run and smudges your mascara all over your cheeks.

Why?

Perhaps part of the reason is that weddings aren’t common occurrences in our circle of friends. Divorces and separations, yes (depressingly common, in fact); but not weddings.

Also, one of the partners was getting married for the first time – at 40 years old. This wasn’t a kiddie commitment: it was the real deal.

To put this into perspective, the last wedding I went to, last year, was between a 20-year-old groom and his equally youthful bride. I suppose I’m not the sort of person you really want to invite to your wedding, under normal circumstances – I’m far too cynical about marriage and always feel like snorting when it comes to the ‘till death us do part’ bit. I feel dishonest bearing witness to a union that statistics show has only a 33% chance of going the distance. And really, what does anyone know about anything at 20? It’s almost criminal to make a lifelong vow at that age and think you’re going to be able to keep it.

But back to Friday’s wedding: the other partner is older (53) and this was his second attempt at marriage – but the wonderful thing was that his entire ‘previous’ family was there: not only his ex-wife and two grandchildren, but also his grownup son and daughter, who were the ring bearers, and various other relatives. And they didn’t just pop across from down the road; they came all the way from England. So this was a genuine show of love and support, very much from the heart.

Also, the people who got married on Friday – and who have already been partners for over a decade – are both men. What a long way we’ve come, from the days when I would be prevailed upon to pretend to be my gay friends’ girlfriend at their company do’s and family get-togethers (the better to deflect rude and unwelcome enquiries), and queerdom was a maligned and misunderstood subculture that involved assignations in public toilets and invited late-night bashings – the love, as Lord Alfred Douglas wrote in his poem ‘Two Loves’ in 1896, that ‘dare not speak its name’.

Douglas was the lover of Oscar Wilde during a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence in England, punishable by imprisonment and hard labour. During Wilde’s first appearance in court on a charge of ‘gross indecency’, he was asked by the court what this unmentionable love was. Knowing what awaited him should he admit his sexual orientation, he did some typically nifty wordwork around the answer, saying (I’ve shortened it slightly), ‘It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect… It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo… It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection... That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.’

That’s why Friday’s wedding was so heartening. It was so gorgeous, this lovely and loving public declaration of an enduring private love affair, so beautiful and fine, that … well, it made me cry.

Is this the world's rudest food label?

I picked up this tin in a little shop in Randburg yesterday. My first response to the label was, 'You too, mate.'

Anyone know what 'Fu Kuei' really means?

Dagga flashbacks

I was a card-carrying dagga-smoker for most of my life, although you would never know it because I always forgot where my card was, dude.

Okay, I’m kidding about the card but not about the dagga. I loved dagga. It relaxed me and made me happy; it de-stressed me and made me dance; it let me sleep. (My sainted late mother, who was a very proper Scotswoman and never touched anything stronger than a glass of white wine, liberally diluted with ice, in all her life, learnt to love dagga, too, when she was dying of colon cancer: she sometimes preferred the dagga banana bread we made her over her morphine.)

I don’t do dagga any more. My teenage daughter is just way too fond of it and it’s not a good thing for a depressive (which she happens to be). So it’s no longer a staple in my house, and my jewelled dagga box now contains nothing more illicit than a few lonely Rizzlas and some pungent reminders of a time that’s passed.

But the dagga stories never lie down, do they? My favourite dates back to my leftover-hippie days in Noordhoek (the old Noordhoek, before the invasion of 4X4s and Woolies, when horses had right of way and surfing was king), when me and my then-lover lived in a rickety house clinging to the edge of the cliff, which became so waterlogged in winter that the paintings grew mould. The house was always filled with city-based escapees – in those days, driving to Noordhoek from Cape Town for the weekend was more or less as adventurous as heading for Dubai is now; in fact, I remember a Capetonian-born-and-bred friend not even knowing how to get there – we had to draw her a map.

We grew spinach and mushrooms in our garden – hey, that’s what people did in Noordhoek in those days, okay? And after we’d had a couple of joints, one night, I went out and harvested a bit of food for the party. To the mellow vibes of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, I chopped up the spinach, grilled the mushrooms, topped the lot with cheese, and presented it for dinner to the gathering. It was enthusiastically received and hungrily devoured.

And so the evening went on.

The next morning I woke up to the usual: a devastation of used crockery and cutlery, cigarette butts in every conceivable place, supine bodies wherever I looked, and the toilet blocked. Bleary-eyed, I put some music on the tape deck (yup, we had tape decks then) and began clearing up: gathering plates and glasses, stacking bottles, emptying ashtrays, putting clothes in a pile for later reappropriation, etc.

When I began washing up (no dishwashers then, of course: we didn’t even have electricity, only a temperamental gas water-heater that worked, apparently, according to the phases of the moon), I discovered some odd leavings on the dinner plates: hard, black bits mixed in with what was left of the spinach and mushrooms.

I looked closer: the mystery pieces were on all the plates. What on earth could they be?

When the truth dawned, I quickly scraped the plates clean and got on with the washing up, ensuring that all evidence had been eradicated before the first hungover party-goers began emerging from Nod. No need to freak people out, hey.

It was snails.

Our eco-friendly veggie patch was infested with snails, and the armful of spinach and mushrooms I’d gathered the night before – it was dark and I was stoned – was liberally studded with them. Wonderfully dagga-bevok, I’d gone ahead and prepared a meal of mushrooms, spinach and cheese … and a robust helping of garden snails.

Tellingly (for the effects of dagga) not one person ever commented on the unusually crunchy texture of the meal.

And I’ve never told. Until now.

Days like that: letting loose with a long, loud, primeval scream

You know those days when everything goes wrong? When, if your horoscope were something you could actually run your life by, it would read, ‘Don’t bother getting out of bed’?

I’ve just had one of those. It started early when I missed the garbage truck and segued seamlessly into a fight with the Kreepy-Krawly (the Kreepy won).

Then, in short order: I opened the fridge and a bottle of milk fell out and exploded on the floor; the dishwasher’s soap dispenser inexplicably forgot to release the soap (and in the ‘eco’ cycle, which takes almost 3 hours, this was a huge waste of time); the geyser overflow turned from a drip into a torrent; I fell over my own feet and wrenched my big toe (which is only just recovering from an injury sustained while clambering about the rocks at the seaside in the middle of the night, and the less said about that the better); I tore my favourite tablecloth while folding it (it’s a precious hand-me-down from my mother, and is fragile from many washes); and I stood in a dog poo.

In between these minor disasters, I was preparing copy for a financial e-newsletter for which I’m the content editor, writing the first draft of an article from notes taken during an interview, and trying to put together a press release about a campaign for which I had no prior knowledge and precious little source material. The e-newsletter is both boring and complicated (a terrible combination) and requires real concentration to get right. My interview notes were scrawled in my egregious handwriting and I couldn’t work out half of what they said. And after about seven attempts at the press release I finally thought I’d got it right – only to be informed via email that someone else had already written it (admittedly, their version was miles better than mine).

Then a colleague phoned to tell me that the course notes I’d painstakingly updated and put onto her computer about 18 months ago had gone astray when the company upgraded to a new system. ‘No!’ I said, my throat closing up, ‘they must be there somewhere!’ My frustration communicated itself as snittiness, and she was snitty in return.

On my ‘to-do’ list for today were also nasty stressful chores like grocery shopping (my daughter is going away on a Geography camp for the weekend, for which she needs specific and ridiculous things), fetching shoes from the mender, speaking to the insurance people (who have, after the only claim I’ve made in 12 years of paying dues, raised both my premiums AND my excess – it seem so unfair!), organising my son’s 18th birthday party (which I took my eye off for a few moments and in the absence of my control almost turned into a four-day teen-fest based at my house and for which I would be footing the bill), and finding a suitable gift for a wedding I’m going to tomorrow.

(And because of all this crap, these are the things I didn't do : make my bed, take my dog for a walk and read the newspaper. Perhaps I'm too bound by routine, but I just don't feel right if I don't do these things every day.)

Finally, rushing around Pick’n’Pay at the end of a terribly trying day, conscientiously filling the bizarre list of things my daughter needs for her camp, I realised I was bleeding down my legs (sorry for those of you who are squeamish, but these things do happen to women). I seriously considered for a moment just letting loose with a long, loud, primeval scream. Then I sighed, parked my trolley, and resigned myself to the indignity of shuffling through the mall to the Ladies’ (approximately 22 kilometres away, or so it felt).

When I got home, I poured myself a big fat whisky and put Van Morrison on the CD. The first song? ‘Days like this’ (‘When there’s no one complaining… When everything falls into place like the flick of a switch… When you don’t need to worry… When all the parts of the puzzle start to look like they fit… When people understand what I mean… Well, my mama told me there’ll be days like this’).

‘Ja, Van, ja,’ I said, and downed the whisky in one.

Strange, evil, riveting: a book about a polygamous sect leaps into the news

What a peculiar and interesting reading experience I've had these last two weeks. There I was, doing a spot of lurking in my local branch of Exclusive Books, looking for something interesting to read over the weekend, when my eye fell on a new release: Escape by Carolyn Jessop.

I love a juicy autobiography, and I particularly appreciate Amazing Tales of Survival and Derring-Do, and this book caught my eye because it looked rather promising. First, it was at least seven centimetres thi