Dust to dust...

CHRIS BENNETT has been buying appliances for his cottage and its idyllic lifestyle in Palm Beach.

A SIMPLE, or so I would have thought, task like buying a hoover or a washing machine has taken on new meaning in recent years.

These fairly rare events (how often do we have to get a new one?) are now made hard by the handbook that comes with the thing.

In my new house I have very little space, and so the old hoover was donated to a worthy cause and the washing machine and tumbler were sold.

The old vacuum cleaner had been a symphony of pipes, cords and fiddly little devices for cleaning curtains, books, soft furnishings, mats, especially the black mat that came with a cat, tiled floors, carpeted floors, ceilings and just about everything. However, you needed a train of bearers to carry the thing around the house.

So it was with no small air of triumph that I arrived home with the new device. The box bore the legend, in large letters, ‘Made in Korea’. It didn’t say which one, but I have since worked out that it must be the south.

Inside I found what at first appeared to be a large plastic rabbit, in crouched repose as only rabbits and cats can be. It was instantly named ‘Harvey’.

On closer inspection I noticed that it had two very big wheels at the back and two very small wheels at the front. So far so good.

The handbook looked at me and I looked at the handbook. I braced myself for something that had been written in Korean by a committee, and then translated into English by another committee. Usually brochures of this sort carry questions such as, “Or what this are?”

I settled myself down for an enlightening break in routine. The cleaner, which is decorated with flowers as though it were Meissen porcelain, is rather fragile looking. I had visions of my trusty Zulu friend dragging this lot around the house. We both had a surprise in store. He found it very effective, and treated this rather superior device with the respect I am sure it would have received in the Orient, and I found it was almost silent.

Few things are as numbing as the sound of a vacuum cleaner, with the exception maybe of a chain saw, and one of those over-revved and blighted devices with which what appear to be inhabitants of Tattooine progress through the village and de-weed the place.

So here was peace. A nearly silent vacuum cleaner and a nice clean house.

The instruction book, by the way, posed little problem.

Petal and the talking cat…

Whereby CHRIS BENNETT ends an electrifying month in Gauteng.

LIFE is seldom dull; or so I find. Take the weekend just passed for instance.

As I looked back over the preceding month I remembered shopping for crickets, rose petals and basil leaves, and the kindness of the surgeon who fitted my shining new pace maker. And believe you me, life is now being taken at a shining new pace.

I also had some fairly serious conversations with Harry, the ginger tom and the delightful company of Smiley, the dog.

My family’s house at the lake in Hartbeespoort is a delicious wilderness of indigenous, in fact endemic would be a more accurate word, flora and fauna, although I should perhaps not include Harry and Smiley in the fauna.

I was under, and still am under, a driving ban until the middle of this month for medical reasons and was therefore confined to this earthly paradise. My time was spent largely in the exquisite company of George McCauley Trevelyan and his sparkling account of England before the great civilising swell that was the Norman invasion.

Across the road from the family home is a small nature reserve, haven to a little stand of bluegum trees, which are protected because they have been the domain of a colony of fish eagles for longer than anyone can remember. It pays to exercise a little common sense when rooting out alien species.

The lake, an unfortunate body of water if ever there was one, is sorely troubled by the relentless activities and unbridled greed of man.

Sounder and greater minds than most are now dealing with the problem at an international level, for Hartbeespoort is not the only fish in the seas of the world’s pollution. The dawn may soon be visible, both figuratively and literally.

The reserve is also home to the earth’s most preposterous creature, the ostrich. These dinosaur-beaked-and-legged creatures used to roam the plains and valleys of this part of the world in huge numbers. They are interesting to watch. They are the embodiment of the ancient human perception that the grass on the other side of the fence is always greener.

The sturdy, but not unattractive, fence of the reserve allows the birds to put their heads, and therefore their long, sinuous necks through it and munch happily on the greener pastures of the roadside verges, turning their backs on the acres of lush grass in the reserve. The do this in a row, like cattle at a stall. And all this with a brain the size of a pea.

I wondered what the collective noun for ostriches is, or should be. Flight can hardly be the word. Any ideas?

Oh, yes; I nearly forgot.

The crickets are to feed Hermione the bullfrog who, along with about twenty of her relatives, will soon be released into the welcoming wetlands of the lakeside; the rose petals and basil leaves are for my friend Alan’s Bearded Dragon, which lives on a diet of rose petals and basil leaves, which must be a fair equal to drinking champagne and eating caviar whilst listening to Haydn’s quartets; preferably the Amadeus recordings.

There is no place like home, is there?

Crying foul…

CHRIS BENNETT has been looking at the ticket buying process for the coming Soccer Beano.

I HAVE recently had a request for help from two young friends keen on seeing one of the great football matches to be played as part of our country’s involvement in the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Nothing startling there, one would have thought.

Before me is an Official Ticket Application Form. It is a 16-page A4 sized glossy brochure, the cost of which cannot have been inconsiderable, as it was doubtless distributed around the globe.

The ‘fine print’ at the end of this brochure takes up two pages of, well, fine print. I haven’t managed to trawl through it all yet, and doubtless never will, but it strikes me as being a bit over the top for the local people. It is not so much that they cannot read and write as that they should not be expected to cope with bureaucratic claptrap at this level.

The little blocks provided for the personal information of each applicant (you are required to apply to be included in a draw for a ticket, but there is no guarantee you’ll get one) are small and require a good level of careful printing. I, for one, would be a bit hard pressed to do this.

What I cannot understand is why was this whole ticket business has not been approached from an African perspective? We are dealing here with people who are passionate about soccer but whose daily existence is a battle for food and, in some cases, water. These folk do not operate at the email address/credit card level of life. Surely something simpler could have been devised. I wonder how many will simply give up and watch the game on TV.

This elaborate brochure is introduced on page two with a few words of welcome from the eminent gentlemen at the top of the gigantic FIFA pile, Jérôme Valcke, the FIFA Secretary General, and Danny Jordaan, the Local Organising Committee CEO.

The blurb between these two messages, headed South Africa welcomes the World, is a puzzlement. After the first sentence comes this string of words, “Between the 11^th June and the 11^th July 2010, 32 national football teams will participate in this match festival of football in their bid 10 venues culminating in the Final on the 11^th July 2010 at the Soccer city Stadium in Johannesburg, where the World Champions will be crowned in front of a crowd of over 80 000 spectators.”

Pardon ?

This makes no sense whatever. I am surprised, to say the least, that someone, somewhere along the production line of this extravagant document didn’t bother to call in a proof reader to put an eye over things. All the time, effort and money that must have gone into what, at first glance, looks like a professional job, have been dashed on the rocks of slapdash and careless work.

It is devoutly to be wished that this attitude is not allowed to creep in to other aspects of what will, surely, be the most spectacular and the most expensive (especially to the host) sporting event on this continent since the gladiator tournaments in North Africa some 2 000 years ago.

On getting carried away…

CHRIS BENNETT has been indulging in the ancient art of travel.

THERE are fewer pastimes that I find more engaging than driving my car. It is a small, economical car, quite powerful enough and, for me, ideally suited to long distance travel.

I do not like flying any more. When I was young the thrill of an airport and the prospect of being fussed and comforted by charming air hostesses for twelve or eighteen hours were sparkling in their attraction.

Not any more. The aircrews of today are just that, crews. And who can blame them? The world is awash with nutters trying to blow them out of the sky; a prospect designed to cool any flush of hospitality or compassion. And, what is more, it seems to be getting worse.

For those of us lucky enough to live on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast the drive to the airport is a bit of a pain. Given that the new airport will something in the order of another hour further away I thank providence for my love of long distance driving.

Last week I left home at 4.30am and headed for Hartbeespoort, to see friends and family. The drive was spectacular. I prefer to drive alone; I cannot hold a conversation and drive a car; and I prefer not to listen to music. I think about the car and its remarkable manifestation of man’s skills and ingenuity. I have even been known to talk to it, but the less said about that the better.

The number of gigantic haulage trucks on the road served to remind me of how we have allowed our railways to sink to what must be about the lowest level in the world. They’re all but non-existent.

The trucks also reminded me of the apparent steadiness of our economy, a steadiness untouched, or so it would appear, by the antics of those in high office.

Johannesburg, as I’m sure you know, is trying to come to terms with the fact that it was napping some years ago. The middle class, car owning segment of the population burgeoned, but nobody did anything about the roads. The penny seems to have dropped.

For a year or two now there has been the most extraordinary programme of road building and road rebuilding.

Unfortunately this means that movement around the city’s perimeter requires a lot of patience, time and, preferably, a flask of tea and some sandwiches. But my friends tell me the results will be worthit, and I am sure they will.

Getting out to Hartbeespoort on a road that has not been enlarged since the 1950s is a seriously unnerving experience. The little road is built for travel at about 60km/h and everybody (well nearly everybody) does about 110km/h. I can’t help wondering what the rush is for. Yet more impatience, I suppose, or maybe everybody, like the March Hare, is late again.

It was rather reminiscent of home, still the best place to be.

On being wait listed…

CHRIS BENNETT has recently had a three-chamber pacemaker fitted. He reports from the panelbeaters.

ALL things medical start with the waiting room. This may resemble the assembly hall of the people at the Pushkin Station on the Leningrad underground in about 1957, reminiscent of the Port Shepstone hospital waiting room today, or it maybe be wood-panelled and discreet. The nurses curtsy.

After a period spent reading a dog-eared three-year-old magazine I am ushered into a cubicle - through a door with a handle that has clearly been designed to be operated by the knee.

I am now in a telephone kiosk. But there is no telephone. Panic rises. A small folding chair, upholstered in hideous blue plastic, stands belligerently against the wall. I am facing a grey plastic concertina door of the sort that seemed a good idea at the time, but they never quite got the design right.

On the chair is a piece of folded synthetic stuff. Like cotton, but not cotton. A voice without tells me to undress and put on the gown. The humiliation is now complete. Or so I think.

The gown? My mind, also rather antique, conjures up names. Balenciaga; Worth; Lanvin; Coco Chanel (“If you dress shabbily they will notice the clothes; if you dress beautifully they will notice the woman”).

You know the sort of thing.

I undress, only to find that the cubicle has been designed in such a way that it is not possible to lift both elbows, like chicken wings, simultaneously. The panic that has made itself comfortable in some little corner of my mind precludes the simple trick of standing on one leg. Good manners will not allow me to put my foot on the chair to remove a shoe. So I bang my head on the concertina door, which promptly threatens to collapse and expose me to all and sundry as an utter clown. I develop a purple face while trying to undo my shoe.

There is only one thing for it. Have a heart attack. The form I’d had to fill in suddenly makes sense.

But back to the gown. Or should I say back to front to the gown. You see, the gown is worn back to front. I am putting my arms through the sleeves wondering how it is that people are employed somewhere on this planet, in a country like Croatia or Belarus, to actually sit down and design the ‘gown’. The ‘gown’ is secured by two flimsy tapes that are to be tied in a neat bow behind my back. By me.

I beg my pardon? Have you ever tried tying a bow - or anything else, come to that, behind your back? I didn't think so. By now I can hear the hoots of laughter from the snow-capped fiords. Now about the two flimsy tapes. There is, naturally, one missing. Now would be a good time to have another heart attack.

I am summed to beyond the concertina. I am led like a bewildered child to what appears to be a stainless steel wall, against which I stand as if awaiting execution by firing squad. A folded blanket is wedged behind my head, obviously to catch the blood and save all that messy cleaning up afterwards. At this point the whole world revolves though an arc of forty-five degrees and I am now lying flat on my back. After a few clicks and whirrs and a bang I am told to get up and go back to the cubicle. A bit of an anti-climax, really.

And so I face the world armed with snapshots of the stony road that is my innards; more especially my lungs and surrounding paraphernalia. On the light box I peer at what look like photos from a satellite of the Mekong Delta; or maybe the Rann of Kutchchh. I think they look more like the latter.

Besides, I prefer the spelling.

CB

5/3/10

Tummy tickling…

CHRIS BENNETT has been to see the heart reader again.

I HAVE just a few days ago been released from the Zuid-Afrikaanse Hospital in Pretoria. Maybe I should say Tshwane, but until the abysmal newsreaders on SABC3 learn to pronounce the name properly, and not make it sound like ‘Swannee’ belted out with all his bootblack gusto by Al Jolson, I shall continue to call it Pretoria. It should be something like: tʃwʹane.

This fine institution, the hospital, not Pretoria, in which care and compassion are everywhere, offers a glimpse of maintenance and management at the cutting edge of that tedious but critically essential discipline, so to speak. It is shiningly evident in the floors of the wards, the corridors and theatres, in the eyes and attitudes of the staff. Many of the staff actually listen to what you are saying.

I was admitted for the fitting of a pacemaker, a fairly simple process, but a life-changing one when you don’t know where the next gulp of air is coming from.

As is usually the case during the procedure, I was not present, my mind having been put in a box marked, “Mind in neutral; do not shake, rattle or roll. This way up”. My innerds had become bit confused, and the pacemaker was making the pace for the diaphragm as well as the heart. I looked as though I was permanently doing the rhumba.

Once again, when welcomed back into the world of reality, I found myself listening to the surgeon’s reassuring words about what he had done. A bit like hearing confession from the Pope.

It was quite a salutary lesson, becoming aware of the role of oxygen in out lives and our environment.

Tourism is the oxygen of our chosen home, here on the incomparable South Coast. A visiting friend from France once exclaimed, on seeing my view of the ocean, its life and its business, “Who needs the Bahamas?”

Who indeed.

Like the oxygen supply to our hearts, everything down here depends on our delivering the supply of enthusiasm and respect we owe to our visitors. We shouldn’t falter.

CB

26/02/09

360 wds