Keeping the powder dry…

CHRIS BENNETT has been drifting around the Cape and its mountains.

I WAS driving through the delightful tangle that is the street network of Greenhart Village, where I live, when my passenger, Duncan Luthuli, a friend of some years, asked, “Who keeps all the streets so beautifully clean and everything so well maintained”. A revealing question, I thought.

“In a sense, we do, the residents,” I replied. I explained, to the best of my ability, how the share-block system worked and how the levies exacted of each shareholder enabled the management committee of the village to employ workers, some full time, and to prepare a budget.

The king of the roads is Kobus, whose day starts with the sunrise and ends with its setting. A road reconstruction programme has been in place for some months now and the results of this expensive exercise are not only good-looking and safe roads, but roads that help mother nature in those time when her heavens open and the water volume is quite spectacular.

Another reason for the very pretty appearance of the place is the daily sweeping of the roads and the general removal of the permanent detritus of the trees, most of I am told are indigenous, some endemic, and all of which are evergreen, that is they do not loose their leaves at any particular time of the year. They lose them every day.

The budget is the life blood of this increasingly popular and attractive village, as it is of any community. It is derived, as is usually the case, from the levy charged to each shareholder, a modest amount which includes electricity, water, refuse removal and other related chores.

My friend Duncan was rather taken aback. He asked if it meant that we do it all ourselves. I said yes; more or less.

One of the more attractive traits in most people is their readiness to understand the need for maintenance. Fixing something there (remember the old adage a stitch in time saves nine), a lick of paint here and all will be well. The paint, of course, has little to do with the beautification of the house, as some houses in Greenhart show only too clear. The paint preserves the fabric; the investment; the future.

I am writing this in the shadow of the Hottentots-Holland Mountains, my world full of wheeling seagulls, sunshine and the gentle waves of False Bay. Fingers of diaphanous cloud are falling over the great crevasses of this magnificent range, straight into the awaiting roots of what some day will grace our tables

Lunch yesterday at the harbour in Kleinmond in the pleasant company of old, and not so old, memories, reminded me that on the South Coast we enjoy whales; I gather from a local fishermen that they have more sense than to go into False Bay – unless the have to for some reason – but often are seen off the pretty town of Kleinmond.

The Resident Writer at Heathrow Airport (yes, there is such a charmed fellow; and his name is Allan de Botton) wrote: one of our key motives for travelling is to try to put the past behind us, then we often need something very large and time-consuming, like the experience of a month long journey across an ocean or a hike over a mountain range, to establish a sufficient sense of distance.