To the Ale House

Out in the foothills of the Magaliesberg, an hour’s drive from Johannesburg, there is a rustic bush-pub, The Ale House – the kind of rural watering hole one imagines one might have found in farming country, in Anglo-Boer War days, or in the Australian outback, or in an Irish backwoods. Chickens and geese roam freely, a large turkey waits with no expectation of Christmas, and mine host hovers amiably, dispensing country humour and pints of artisanal beer, which he brews himself.

On Sunday we were there, under the trees, with Eve and Shaun, Kathy and Gareth – another notch on the stick of memory, on which we find ourselves recording our long (and temporary/provisional) farewell to this land I love, despite my deep misgivings: Kliptown on Saturday, our road trip coming up a few busy weeks from now – but on Sunday, to be sure, and in much the spirit of Virginia Woolf’s novel (what I recall of it, that is – a mood, an atmosphere, rather than a story) To the Alehouse it was.

Cheers!

ale house interior1

the ale house1

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Picture this

Dusk, filling in the deep shadows between the crowded Kliptown shacks, south of Johannesburg and Soweto, forty-five minutes’ drive away from affluent Hyde Park, where we live, and which might as well be a distant planet to the north of us. The Landy picks its way gingerly along a narrow, rutted track, Rob and I feeling conspicuous, out of place, uneasy. Children ignore us, lounging youths eye us stonily. We stop and ask the way. ‘Excuse me. Dumelang. We are looking for the open-air movie.’ A gesture directs us down an uneven side-path, the shacks hemming us in, and then we are up against a wall, a young man waving us forward in the headlights until he gestures to us to stop. ‘Welcome,’ he says, with a big smile as we climb warily out of the car. ‘Thank you for coming.’

In an open enclosure, behind the vibracrete walls, two hundred or more children, excited faces turned upward toward the threatening sky and the big white screen, hoisted like a sail above a modest building, lean forward on their plastic chairs, laughing and shouting. It is the monthly open-air cinema, run by Delphine de Blic, a French woman who during daytime runs a film school for Kliptown youth: their short film, ‘Eat my Dust’ is a small masterpiece of understated, choreographed comedy – showing, in the briefest of gestures and expressions, a concentration of form that takes the everyday out of itself and towards something different and new.

For the next few hours we sit amongst the restless, excitable audience, watching the shadowy images flit across the screen, looming into the night sky, the sound booming out over the roofs of the shacks, the shadowy figures watching from the sidelines, entering and leaving, children’s names called out – ‘Sipho! Tshepo!’ and Sipho or Tshepo slip out, responding to a mother’s or a sister’s call.

There is some gloom amidst all the happiness when we join up with Delphine and her partner after the movie. The crowd has vanished, like magic, and the crew is packing up. A woman has been raped, by someone in the community; someone known to them. The man has been arrested; the community is tense. ‘It happens all the time,’ Sandra says.

We follow Sandra and Delphine down the darkened alley, out into the muddy lane, over the railway bridge and through the outskirts of Soweto, to the Golden Highway. Half an hour later we are in their architect-designed home, in Melville, with a glass of wine in hand and dinner in the oven.

Writing 2011

Taking stock, as we head into November and the last working month before we pack up our house and head out of town on our farewell South African road-trip before Canada, I realise this has been a year of writing: first, a 50 page paper, with Ian Scott, on higher education in South Africa, about to be published by the World Bank; next, six months of research resulting in a 150 page report which I presented, successfully, to the Engineering Council’s Strategic Advisory Committee yesterday and which, I hope, will be published in a variety of guises in the coming months; and alongside all of this, the completion, about a week ago (I have hesitated to mention this, as if it is revealing too much, exposing more than I am ready or willing to) of the first draft of my novel – 58,000 words, in its current, raw, unedited form.

I have been re-reading the novel, over the past week, making a few notes and comments as I went, and today I got to the end of it, all 185 pages. And, I have to say, I think there is the essence of a novel there: there are dead patches, for sure, lame patches, awkward patches, and two middle chapters that I think could usefully be combined into one, shorter one – but, and this is the thing, right, I think the centre holds and I, my own most critical reader, found myself absorbed, engaged, and ready to go deeper, further. Hardening the prose, till it gleams; tightening the story, till it twangs, like a guitar string.

There will be some re-reading on the plane, I think, as I fly out to Zurich and then Toronto in the middle of December; and three months, I plan, early in 2012, on a concentrated re-write. Perhaps, out of the cold of a Canadian winter, snowed in in a Toronto basement, I might yet forge an African summer.

Photos for Canada

With preparations for our departure for Canada steadily getting under way – storage booked, agreement reached with Eve and Kathy (and their partners) as to what items they will keep for us and use whilst we are away, quotes received today for the furniture removal, telephone, DSTV cancelled as of end November, and so on, I took some time out this afternoon to print up a few photos to take to Canada, as gifts for Rob’s sister, her brother and sister-in-law, and her young nephew. Along the way, I printed out an A3 photo of Lions Head and Camps Bay: all of a sudden, I realised I would want a photo of home, in my new home, in Toronto.

The elephants were shot on the Zambezi, on our honeymoon; the leopard was shot in Kruger, during our recent visit with my mother and my children, and my sister Laura.

Picturing Kruger

There was a glitch after, funnily enough, I had upgraded my Mac OS from Snow Leopard to Lion: my computer would no longer recognise the SD cards from either of my cameras. So, while Rob was able to upload her photos from Kruger, I was not – until, yesterday, I popped in to the iStore in Sandton and sought out a young man’s help. No, for the computer, I mean.

Anyway, he fixed it – I don’t know how, and neither did he, frankly, but somehow, unexpectedly and inexplicably, it all works again, and here are some of the results.

The lion kill, incidentally, is Rob’s photo, taken on my Nikon, as she was on the side of the car where the lions and the slain buffalo were – and with the dirt road crowded with more cars than a Sandton shopping mall on payday, there was no way I was going to be able to turn the car around to take the pic myself.

Tiger Fish

If I have not written here for a while, partly it is for the usual ‘reason,’ or at least excuse. I have been busy. I have also, more honestly and legitimately, been taking some time out, from work at least, after sending off my engineering report.

Honestly, what I needed was a week on a deserted beach in Mozambique. What I got was a week at home, reading, attending to chores, beginning the clean-out of my office and the rendering down to essentials that is needed before – in under eight weeks – we pack up and go, first on our road trip down to Cape Town and back, and then to Canada.

The other reason I have not written is that it is, in an odd way, hard to grasp and to explain what has been going on. On the face of it, nothing too far out of the ordinary – Eve’s graduation, Kathy’s husband Gareth passing an exam, the children coming over on Sunday for a braai and a chat. But the exam Gareth passed is the first, essential step on the path towards specialisation as a surgeon – and along with the marvellous news come all the big questions of work and career and where to live and when to have children. And what it will mean when there are children – grandchildren – and a father and grandfather is living on the complete other side of the world. I will come home, of course, I will be there, make no mistake – but you get the point.

And then there was the family braai – honey and mustard glazed pork fillet, a fresh home-made date and sage chutney, Rob’s famous chorizo and caramelised onion tart, chopped roast Mediterranean vegetables (damned if I can remember what it’s called), followed (after a suitable period of digestion) by Rob’s fabulous dessert – a picture-perfect cake with macadamia nuts, lime, and a topping of zingy icing. But it was not the food, of course, so much as the family that mattered – and the family was there for a reason, which went beyond just food and saying hello to the old fogies.

They were here to go through the house with Rob and me, and to decide what they could store, what they could use, and what they didn’t want or couldn’t keep. From room to room we went, with Rob taking notes: the lounge – sofa, coffee table, bookshelf, hifi, television, lamps. Our offices – desks, office chairs, desk lamps. Books. Cook books. Art work. The bedroom – bed, mattress, side tables. And so it went, with a sense of strangeness about it all, as if we were walking together through an auction room and all of a sudden our settled home was no more than a fiction, an act of the imagination, about to fly off through the open windows and away over the rooftops.

But most of all, it brought it home, to Eve and Kathy and to me especially, but also of course to Rob and Shaun (Gareth was sleeping between shifts at the hospital) what it is that is happening. We are leaving, packing up, getting ready to go. Before Christmas we will be in Canada – and Eve and Shaun will be hiking in Nepal, and Kathy and Gareth, quite possibly, will be home alone for a Christmas together, without family and probably without friends. Everyone who can, gets the hell out of Johannesburg in December. So we chatted away lightly, and tucked into the food and toasted the various successes and accomplishments, and along with the fun and the relaxation was just a tinge, a tinge mind you, of melancholy, of wondering what it would all mean, and what would happen.

One of the things we toasted, of course, was Eve’s graduation. Rob and I attended the ceremony last Tuesday, and afterwards we took her and Shaun for a late afternoon lunch of seafood and white wine at a little Portuguese restaurant just down the hill from the university. Her Masters thesis: a study of tiger fish, in three environments.

Tiger Fish. Somehow that seems fitting.

Engineering Report

‘Improving throughput in the Engineering Bachelors degree: Report to the Engineering Council of South Africa’ – bang on 5, at the last minute of the working day (not that there’ve been too many ‘normal’ working days lately!) I hit the send button, and off went 40,000 words, two dozen tables and figures, and six months’ work.

I have just sat back in my office chair, and the depth of the sigh that came out seemed to come from someone else.

Time for a damned good whisky, I think.

‘Here I am’

Dark-browed and glistening, the thunder danced and cavorted all night long in the roiling skies above us, stamping its feet, banging its pots and calabashes. Lightning ripped the sky, with a sound of tearing cotton or bamboo splitting and lit up the bedroom where we lay, warm and safe, under the duvet. The rain sluiced down, rinsing the bowed trees that swayed in the wind outside.

Energetic and boisterous, the thunder spoke, in the spaces between waking and sleeping. ‘I’m back,’ it said, ‘I’m back. Here I am.’

Thirteen hours

It has been a while since I pulled a stunt like this – thirteen solid hours, 4.30am to 5.30pm, sat at my computer, editing, formatting and in parts rewriting my 130 page report to the Engineering Council. My brain, when finally I pushed back my office chair with a sigh, was a mess of mushy peas. But the job is done, the culmination of six months’ work. Or very nearly.

On Monday I shall write the final chapter – conclusion and recommendations – and post it through the ether, with my invoice. Meanwhile, I have given myself the weekend off – Rob too, in a sense, I guess. Later this morning we will go out for massages, then perhaps have lunch somewhere, and a stroll through Art in the Park, at Zoo Lake.

It’s been a fascinating project, hopefully it may lead to further things, and it is a piece of work, anyhow, which pleases me quite a bit. But it is a wonderful relief, too, to be about to wrap it up, and hand it on; to have time again to go back to my writing; to begin sorting out all the dozens of things that will need to be sorted out, over the next two months; to have discretionary time, and space to think, take stock, and ready myself for The Next Big Thing.