Let there be light (and TV)

Wrapped up in a fluffy blue blanket, I am shivering behind the wheel of my stationary car. It’s night time, somewhere in the middle of a 40-hour power outage, and I am listening to my car radio. It’s the only way I am going to know whether swimmer Cameron van der Burgh has won a gold medal at the Olympics.

A pretty lightshade, and it’s even nicer when there is power

It was bad enough having no landline phones or ADSL internet connections for three days last week. You get quite used to such things down here, and you survive: when you have signal, you use your cellphone for essential calls (too expensive for just a chat), and you buy data so that you can occasionally check your email. Couldn’t get much worse, you think. But it did.

The fact is that in South Africa, our big state monopolies (Telkom for telecommunications and Eskom for power) provide expensive and unreliable services.

With our solar geyser, we at least have hot water when the power is down – as long as the day is not overcast. And we don’t use heaters; we use our small fireplace for heating. But there’s that sick feeling as you think of all your frozen food spoiling in a defrosting freezer!

I do wish there were viable and accessible alternatives to Eskom. Apart from the solar geyser, which Eskom has offered rebates on but only in recent years, the cost of individual homes installing other power sources, such as wind, is still prohibitive.

Work becomes a huge problem without power – I work on my laptop for a while and then drive into town to charge it up. I charge my cellphone in my car.

Of course, we all complain bitterly, and rightly so. But we can’t be angry with the technicians, who seem to work flat out to find the faults and fix them – it’s the monopolies that must take the blame for shocking maintenance, not the techies.

Anyway, at 9pm on the second night of candlelight, V carried a tray of hot coffee and a packet of lemon cream biscuits to the technicians.

Power to you

When my children were very little people, they asked me if I’d been “alive when the dinosaurs were alive”. When I stopped laughing long enough to answer them, they declared with certainty that it was their granny, my mother, who’d been alive with the dinosaurs.

The view from my desk

So even if I’m not that old, I do remember counting characters in headlines manually so that they would not “bust” out of the spaces allocated to them on paper layout grids. A capital “M”, for example, would make up two characters, and a lower-case “i” would be half a character.

You would have to “size” photographs meticulously. And if a story needed radical editing, you would literally cut it up with scissors and then paste it, sometimes line by line, into something readable. This would all get sent to the Works department. Inevitably, one of the sub-editors would follow the bits of paper to hack out paragraphs or rewrite a headline “on the stone”.

Revolutions

Then came the first of the revolutions that I and my generation experienced in newspapers: the introduction of typesetting computers that allowed us to write headlines to fit exactly and cut copy to size in exact column widths. Cutting and pasting features made rewriting a breeze.

Another view from where I work today

The next revolution would have come even sooner if it hadn’t entailed the loss of so many jobs: typesetters and strippers became redundant. It brought the ability to design and lay out entire pages – with pictures, headlines and later even adverts – on a screen in front of you. Things happened much quicker and with a lot more precision.

An adventure

Meanwhile, the growth of the internet and leaps in accessibility and speed made it possible for more adventurous employers to try new ways of doing things. Telework was the buzzword. A string of big companies saw its benefits: for example, British Telecom’s 9,000 teleworkers are reportedly 30% more productive than those who stayed in the office.

Technology has also allowed people like me to work from places like this. This would not have been an option for me 15 years ago. Today, my office looks out onto the sea; incidentally, as I write this, I’m watching at least two whales frolicking. I am about 1,000km from Johannesburg, but am still occasionally invited to a business breakfast in Midrand as if I lived just up the highway, not down a distant dirt track.

Different dinosaurs

My point is that revolutions that fundamentally affect the way we do things – that give us the power to choose how we live and how we work – are taking place in our lifetimes. We have different dinosaurs these days.

Through these great blogging sites, any of us can tell our stories without having to sell them to newspapers. That’s hugely empowering.

It’s also great being a reader in this new world (I confess that I am an utter beginner). On any given day, I may journey with a fascinating array of people on a London tube, have my spirits lifted by young woman’s journey towards her dream in Ireland, be energised by drifting over boundaries in my own city, enjoy this part of my country through the camera of a talented friend, and wait for K’s next post as she articulates how we face up to this era of social media. It works for me.

Autumn in the global village

Today, we all live in the “global village” that Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan first spoke about in the ’60s. That’s why people like me can work from remote places like this for people anywhere.

Arum adds dashing white to the autumn party

In this world made small by technology, quite a lot of my paid work comes from Europe and some from the US. I love the global perspective that I get through this work. But I am still thrown by the insistence of so many writers in those Northern Hemisphere countries – when they are writing for global audiences – on talking about “spring”, “autumn”, or even “fall”. They will usually be talking about a meeting or a decision, very often concerning low-income countries, most of which are in the Southern Hemisphere – and nothing remotely related to the seasons. 

Delicious wild plum, savoured by all

Strange, hey? At first, I saw it as some kind of arrogance (even the seasons were more legitimate in the North, it seemed). Now I see it as a habit, one that could be quite endearing if wasn’t so confusing for readers in the South. So at this time of the year, I’ve seen quite a few uses of “spring” pop up in documents.

Spring time

Crown of thorns, simply beautiful

Clivia nobilis, an early flower

After winter in the North, I’m happy that it’s spring there. But it is most definitely autumn here in the South, and believe me, after our summer, we’ve happy that it’s autumn.

My cousin, Vick, sends me pictures of the stunning “Lady Night” tulips blooming in her London garden. And my sister, K, reminds me of the tulips and daffodils that grow like weeds in her Geneva garden. In spring that is. Both of them have also sent me pictures of their snow-covered winter gardens. 

And then I look around and take conscious note of what is flowering and fruiting in this frost-free, summer-rainfall area as winter approaches. 

There’s not much leaf fall here. It’s too warm for that, and the oranges and reds of deciduous trees never fail to delight me when I am visiting colder places in autumn. But there is a lot of orange here right now. It comes from the things that are flowering: among them, bird of paradise (Strelitzia reginae), gazania, and wild dagga (Leonotis leonurus).

A party of colour

Barberton daisy, still shining

Not all is orange. The Euphorbia crown of thorns (E. milii) is a riot of red. The ribbon bush (Hypoestes aristata) is in full purple haze. What we believe is a streptocarpus from Pondoland is sneaking out dainty blue blooms. The arum lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica), wild daisy (Osteospermum), and camellia join the party with dashes of pure white.

The clivia nobilis are beginning to flower: the clivia miniata will follow in winter and spring. The Barberton daisy (Gerbera jamesonii) continues to throw out gorgeous flowers, mostly in orange, which are fabulous in a vase. On the good advice of the woman at the farmers’ market, use only the tiniest amount of water, just enough to cover the tips of the stems; otherwise, they rot.

 

Dripping

The amantungula (wild plum, Carissa macrocarpa), which followed fragant white flowers, are dripping off the trees. All kinds of wildlife love these, and even humans are fond of them, but the fruit has to be very ripe: just a trace of milkiness makes them bitter.

Ribbon bush, a purple haze

We grow both indigenous and non-invasive exotic plants in the newer beds that hug the old naartjie (heavy with fruit now) and cherry guava (just finished fruiting) trees. These beds are behind the house, and far from the indigenous forest that lines the garden.

The roses are putting on a beautiful autumn show in this part of the garden. We never use poisons on these roses; splashes of “worm wee” now and then, and sprays of garlic and chilli, when needed, seem to help. So we have lost a few, but those that remain are survivors in an area that’s not really known for roses: they are more successful, usually, in places that get frost.

Roll on, summer … uh, winter.

Inside the storm

Living here, on the south-eastern edge of South Africa, we experience some really wild weather. I once watched a black thing ooze over the sea from the west; it took about 10 minutes to reach us, and it was vicious. Add that to some real infrastructure issues, and power outages and interruptions in connectivity become a regular part of life. In fact, I’m on a first-name basis with the technician for our telecommunications parastatal. 

But little has come close to what we got this week: a massive storm that knocked out power for the night and internet connections for a couple of days. Our little village was literally inside that storm. Terrifying, exhilirating, spectacular. Fortunately, my grown-up boy-child is home for a while, and he’s pretty good with his camera. Here are some of his photographs:

Pics: CHE