The bridge across the Klaserie on the Argyle Road was partly washed away during floods more than two years ago. The floods of January this year further damaged it. Instead of fixing it, the local roads agency has found an innovative solution: put up a stop sign telling people the road narrows from two lanes to one.
One wonders what they will do when the bridge is finally unusable, as it will almost certainly be after another flood.
A lot of Joburgers, like me, enjoy getting away from Joburg by going to the bush. There we go to disconnect from signal, unplug from our laptops and get in touch with nature. Occasionally, nature would also like to get in touch with us. Last night I lifted my bath mat to find this:
Normally I disapprove of people who kill spiders and Parktown prawns. But I’d be a hypocrite if I told you I had the same compassion for scorpions. This one was very small, but the relative thickness of that tail had me thinking that I might not want to encounter it barefoot in the dark. Also, I’m paranoid about the possibility of Parabuthus. So I thwacked it repeatedly with a slipslop and despatched it to the afterlife.
I feel bad about this. I don’t like killing things. I tell myself that there are lots more where this one came from.
Which is rather worrying, when you think about it. Perhaps I should invest in the special scorpion torch they sell at the Khamai Reptile Park up the road.
This morning, while scrabbling in the drawer where I keep my medication for nausea pills (you never know if you’ll need them when travelling.
I have no idea who this money is from. No recollection of where I got it. And I don’t recognize the handwriting. It’s all very strange.
So far I’ve spent 2 of these notes on lunch at Harrie’s Pancakes. I’d rather someone else got to keep them.
Joburg Storm, lipstick on board
Today, I am doing something I’ve been looking forward to for ages. No, “looking forward to” is the wrong term; it implies the excitement of a kid waiting for Barbies in gift wrap under the tree when in fact my current emotional state is more akin to that of the shipwrecked sailor clinging wide-eyed to a passing beer crate.
I usually love Joburg in December. It’s lovely and green, the weather is redolent of afternoon storms and the chlorine tang of swimming pools. Importantly, everybody buggers off and leaves the streets to the ones who, in the word we used at Bryanst0n Primary, were going to “Romania”. At work, you while away the hours catching up on filing, surfing the net or finding creative ways to fill in your time sheets.
December is the best time of year in Joburg mainly because most Joburgers aren’t around. Only every year, in a distressing trend, it seems that more and more of them refuse to leave. This year I haven’t noticed that pleasantly dramatic full-off in traffic (though, since freelancing, rush hour is something I seldom encounter if I can help it).
For the first time since I can remember, I’ve desperately wanted to get out of town. I escaped to the bush a month ago because I wanted to do a last road trip in the Evoque, but I was running a social media campaign at the time and had to commute to the Hoedspruit Wimpy every day to find a decent 3G signal. So while I internalized Benjamin Franklin’s goody two-shoes mantra about early to bed and early to rise, I failed to unplug and recharge (yes, it’s a confusingly mixed metaphor) and now find myself completely and utterly exhausted. When I saw an email this evening titled “3 ways to kickstart your new year”, I wanted to weep.
I don’t want to kickstart my new year. I don’t want to think about the new year at all. Instead, I want to sleep a lot, write my book and read no emails or tweets until after January 1.
Goodbye Joburg. I’ll see you in 2013.
A note on the illustration: the photo on which this painting is based was taken just past the New Road bridge on the M1 while traveling back from the bush in January this year. I hope I feel as energized and inspired by the city next year as I did then. You can see the real thing on exhibition at The Eatery.
Joburgers are obsessed with shopping. It’s our favourite leisure activity; we don’t have a mountain or a sea, so we go to the mall instead. Shopping centers before Christmas must surely be the closest we have to one of Dante’s circles of hell. (Limbo, greed or anger, I’m not sure.) Yesterday morning I agreed, in a moment of madness, to accompany my mother to the Pick n Pay Hyper at Woodmead.
It was a good trip: I avoided a queue to get in by taking a sneaky back route past Newscafe, the parking fairy smiled upon me and felt that rare sense of accomplishment when you try a strategy different to the woman in the luxury SUV and it pays off.
Doucheplate in the Woodmead parking lot
I sometimes wonder whether Joburgers use shopping a way to avoid dealing with real life. All this ceaseless acquisition, this hunt for special offers – it seems to become an end in and of itself. I watched so many couples arguing in the Pick n Pay Hyper and thought, thank heaven that isn’t me, even as I lost my mother while she went to find the HTH and I was distracted by the Verimark stand.
I don’t know how he does it
I don’t enjoy shopping except in very specific circumstances, which must mean that
a. I am not a real Joburger, despite having been born and grown up here and
b. I am missing an extra X chromosome.
Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps shopping is real life, and pushing a trolley through a parking lot is the closest we get to expressing our true selves.
If Joburg is a city of trees it must also, surely, be a city of swimming pools. Fly over the city and one of the big differences between the suburbs and the townships still, is the presence of green and blue.
This evening I went for a swim. This is something I have done many times in summer over the past three years. As a child I hated swimming – went so far as to take deliberate overdoses of my asthma meds to have an excuse to bunk school on Tuesdays – but the swimming pool is the place where I sought solace during the worst of the depression, and where I searched hardest for meaning. So it’s hardly surprising that this should end up in my paintings with lipstick. This was the first time I painted the experience of swimming at night:
Here is another example:
And another:
And:
Amazing, isn’t it, what visions a suburban pool can lead to. I often moan that I need a muse – preferably an Interesting Man with whom I form a temporary infatuation before becoming bored – but perhaps I’ve had one all along: this maddening, exhilarating, frustrating, boring, wonderful, horrible city.
This is 58 18th Street, Parkhurst. It used to be the house I owned. Or at least, I owned a third of it (my ex-husband owned the rest).
This address still holds power for me, because it represents the last time I was a person of consequence in Johannesburg. The city of gold is a city of stuff, and to matter in this town, you need to have a lot of it.
Back in 2008, I mattered. I owned property. I was paying off a car and I had a good job in senior management. Then I moved to a new life in Sydney and that fell apart and so I came back and then things imploded. I’ve been trying to put the pieces back ever since, something I’ve chronicled fairly extensively elsewhere.
Now, I am a demographic anomaly: at the very age at which I should be solidifying my place in comfortable, middle class society, I have nothing. No children, no spouse, no car, no house, no job. I am free in ways that very few people my age can conceive of. But at the same time, I feel completely out of step with the expectations of society and the lives lived by my peers – and that’s a very uncomfortable place to be.
Every now and again I meet people who remind me of my own situation, like Fatima (below), who sells hummus and chickpea fudge at the Bryanston Organic Market, and used to work as a project manager for WPP before she moved back to South Africa. She sells the hummus because she has to, she says. She’d love to earn a salary again.
Everything is up in the air. Besides the schlep of packing and the availability of seats, there is nothing to stop me from getting on a plane and flying to Sydney tomorrow. Now that the Land Rover contract has come to an end, the only things tethering me to this life are family ties and the fear of having to start all over again.
You all have things that keep you tethered to the lives you lead. I used to resent some of the things that kept me tethered; now I long for them even as I fear committing myself to them. Not knowing where you’re headed is a very lonely place to be.
Suburban certainty. I miss it.
This is what the suburbs look like when you have to walk everywhere.
Walking is about the most unJoburg thing a middle class Joburger with a K53 license can do. I don’t mean walking to reduce the size of your bum – lots of people in LSM 10 do that. I mean walking to get somewhere. Many Joburgers do walk to get from one point to another, of course. Just before I took this photo, a matronly woman creakily making her way up the hill climbed into that taxi, while I paused to record the moment and then strode determinedly on. (If you want to burn calories, you have to push hard up hills.)
I was on my way back from the Bryanston Organic Market. I’ve lived around the corner from it for donkey’s years, and yet I’ve never actually walked there. Madness, really. It was a hot day this morning, and I invested in a new hat to reduce the likelihood of requiring Botox in the near future. (The hazards of being incredibly pale.) But I really did enjoy the walk; it ensured that my experience was truly, well, organic.
I could have borrowed a car to get to the market (my mother’s or, if I were feeling very brave, my grandmother’s). But that would have been too easy. If I’m going to learn anything from this time without a free luxury car to tool around town in, I need to make sacrifices. Get a little uncomfortable.
Comfortable is the enemy progress, after all.
Sisyphus in Newtown
In the myth of Sisyphus, a king is punished for his arrogance and trickery by being made to push a boulder up to the top of a hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom, where he has to start all over again – for all eternity.
I see reminders of Sisyphus all the time in Johannesburg now – perhaps Camus would recognize them – the men who collect vast trolley loads of scrap paper and cardboard and push, pull and roll them all over the city, often presenting terrifying traffic hazards. I never use the left hand lane to drive up the hill on Jan Smuts Avenue heading south just after crossing Empire because it’s too dangerous. The other day, I had to swerve for one of these guys dragging his load along the fast lane on William Nicol, where cars frequently travel well over the speed limit of 80kph. Continue reading
I’ve always thought that you can tell a lot about a person from the way they behave at a four way stop. Even more so when the robots aren’t working: that’s when there’s more at stake, and a lot of drivers seem to think that the rules at a four way stop, which are pretty straightforward, suddenly don’t apply.
When there’s no Outsurance pointsperson to direct traffic, it all gets a bit Darwinian. These are the types I’ve identified in my years of battling Joburg traffic:
The Red Robot Project 