Of course, Christmas is all about celebrating family. (Unless you happen to be a Christian, in which case it might be about celebrating something else.)
So here I am with Roy, appropriately ensconced in the bosom of our family for the next month and more. We have our own self-contained guest suite – sounds a bit better than granny-flat, doesn’t it? – in the house of son Carl and his wife Carrie in Iluka, 30km north of central Perth, Western Australia.
How many Christmas cards did you get this year? I mean the genuine analogue kind: a festive card sealed in an envelope and delivered by the postman/person. Fewer than last year, I’d guess – and maybe a lot fewer than five or 10 years ago.
If you received one from Roy and Verne, custom-designed and postmarked Singapore, I must confess it had little to do with me. I would have joined the rest of the world and given up on this particular chore a long time ago. Roy, however, is not only CEO of household administration, but also a staunch traditionalist*.
* A jolly good thing when it comes to platinum wedding anniversaries and such. Roy has never forgotten our anniversary. When I did, once – around 15 years ago? – I was allowed to live, perhaps only so as to rue that dark day for the rest of my life.
Plenty. Durban has quite enough to keep me busy, and that’s the truth.
By comparison to my home town, Singapore is a major world city that offers just about every entertainment you could possibly think of – everything from world-class concerts and exhibitions to international sports events and more. New restaurants of every level and description, from hawker stalls where a meal costs around US$3 to global celebrity chef restaurants where you’ll easily pay $200 or even $300 a head. So, after our nearly 16 years in this amazing metropolis, am I missing all that? No, not really.
Back in Singapore for a far-too-short nine days, I pull on my running shoes one morning and set off to see if anything has changed in the past seven months. (Meanwhile, Roy snores gently, eagerly awaiting my report-back.)
As Roy and I prepared to head off to Modimolle in Limpopo Province (previously Nylstroom in the Northern Transvaal) for Mathilda and Leon’s hugely enjoyable wedding a few weeks ago, I found myself questioning my cultural identity as an “English” South African. What does that strange expression even mean?
For white, English-speaking Durbanites, an invisible yet undeniable divide lies to the west of us – somewhere between 100 and 200 kilometres, I reckon – that separates us from the mainly Afrikaner hinterland. Julie Simpson calls it “the boerewors curtain”. (That’s why the Limpopo game-farm buck in the photo look so nervous; they know they’re only a stage away from biltong.)
