What do you do? I ask the old soldier sitting in my chair. He’s come to me for an eye test. I’m a musician in the army band, he says. Aha! Cool! What do you play? asks I.
The Saxophone, he says. The best of all the instruments! I flatter. How long have you been a soldier? Not long, he says, I joined a couple years ago and I’m just about to retire on a small army pension. What did you do before?
I was saxophonist in big bands. I toured the world. Mario Montereggi’s Big Band? I ask. Yes, indeed, I played with Mario.
And then he drops the big one:
I was with the African Jazz Pioneers for years. Wow! African Jazz Royalty in my chair!!
He might even have played with Mario at my fiftieth, where Aitch surprised me by getting Mario’s small ensemble to blow me away:
Is this him entertaining the kids, maybe?
– Tommy charms the sax player; Jess watches in awe . . –
Mom Mary has constipation. Don’t tell everyone, but its just a fact and its not funny. I even put a bomb up and nothing happened. You know, Granny Bland used to get constipation and now here I am getting it. A mere seventy years later you can be struck with a family ailment out of the blue.
Rose is the matron at the home and she loves Mary. I told Rose I had constipation. This morning she came to me and said “Have you been to the toilet yet?” I said no, and she said “You know, Mary, you’re full of shit.”
Its ongoing. There’s even less stuff there, but some stuff is going to have to be pried from his tight reluctant fingers, maybe?
– “No, that’s hardwood for Gavin. He wants to make knife handles . . ” – – “You must take these, they were Oupa’s . . ” –
– the camera probably a box brownie held at waist level? –
The awl and the hand drill brace were Oupa’s in Boom street in PMB. The screwdriver and needle-nose pliers on the right were issued to Dad by the General Post Office when he started as an apprentice electrician in 1938. He had to climb up telephone poles with those in his pocket. Here’s the GPO vehicle he’d drive around in, fixing the phones! They didn’t bother with parcels and letters, no! That was old-school! They were the high-tech side of the Post Office: The telephones!
By the way, everything has a correct name. The screwdriver is a ‘perfect handle’ screwdriver. That’s a specific kind of screwdriver.
– happy apprentices under jovial Wally Coleman in white coat –
~~~~oo0oo~~~~
Today I learnt Mr Buckle didn’t shoe horses. No, he was the blacksmith, upholsterer and wagon-maker. Charlie Rustov shoed horses. He was a few rungs lower down the totem pole, and the only farrier in town. He had a high-pitched voice and would say‘Nee man, Mnr Swanepoel, daai blerrie hings gaan my skop!’when I took my stallion in to be shod. Dad would buy horses, school them, then sell them for a much higher price. I made more on horses than my post office pay.
~~~~oo0oo~~~~
‘Nee man, Mnr Swanepoel, daai blerrie hings gaan my skop!’ – No man, Mr Swanepoel, that blerrie stallion is going to kick me!
blerrie – bladdy
bladdy – bloody; no blood though, just a swearword
If memory serves me right, Sampson the Nazirite who slayed the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass – you remember, right? – had a haircut and then things went pear-shaped. Same with me: Haircut, and next thing . .
It was very Irish: the floor came up to meet me. Also quite biblical: My jawbone was level with my ass, and there was a heavenly host of angels staring down at me. My three special ladies, plus a fella with a stethoscope around his neck and a lady holding a sharp instrument. Know what the worst thing was? I gazed up feeling fine, but a little puzzled when I realised that if you added all five of them’s ages together, they might still be younger than me collectively.
I must admit the night before I also didn’t have me customary glass of red. So maybe the haircut plus the lack of booze tipped me over the edge – or toppled me onto the carpet? It’s a mystery, but the clear message seems to be: Less Haircuts, More Booze, going forward.
I protested I’m fine, but they made me lie down and checked my vital signs. Which were all excellent. Best-ever. In fact positively Trump-like. Nevertheless, they insisted I go home to bed and stay there. When I protested, they pointed out firmly that when the sister said ‘Give me you arm, I need to take blood,’ I started taking off my shoes. Oh. OK.
The boys are lined up outside the tote on the roof of our shopping centre. There’s horseracing at Kenilworth and they have a sure thing running and they can’t miss this opportunity to make an investment and win big and be able to treat the family. Maybe to a treat like getting home early?
Every day there’s races. If not at Kenilworth then at Greyville, Scottsville, Turffontein, The Vaal and elsewhere. Also overseas. In fact there’s hardly an hour when some horse isn’t pointlessly beating another horse somewhere in the world, so there’s always a good reason to be on top of the roof in Montclair rather than at home with all the kak you get that side. At home you say something and they tell you ‘Don’t talk kak.’ Here you say something and the boys say ‘Really!? You Swear!? Don’t choon me man, that’s kif!’ then they have their turn to tell a lie.
There’s a bar in the tote but hey man, bar prices are a squeeze man, also they charge you just for a single and what good is a single when time is short, I ask you? So there’s constant movement in and out of the tote to the cars parked just outside with their boots open. Small drinks are bought now and then and fortified with dop from the bottle in the boot. Polystyrene cups if you’re avoiding the bar altogether.
Then disaster strikes! The tote closes down! What to do now? Still they meet and still they drink and still they talk. But its not the same and it starts dwindling. Fewer and fewer cars arrive until its only the real stalwarts, the die-hards. The ous who will listen to your stories as long as you listen to theirs.
Maybe also the ous who never really were betting on the horses anyway?
Hats off to Alan Turing and his memory and his legacy. We call ourselves civilised but we commit heinous crimes against those who serve humanity well and decently and beyond the call of duty. We have made some progress on the LGBTQ front but we are still far from achieving the right to call ourselves civilised. We are still often ignorant, fearful, hateful and bigoted. We still too often use our prejudices as weapons to divide people and to punish people for being different. We think we have changed since 1954, but right now we are persecuting Chelsea Manning for being brave and principled and serving her country well. And for being different.
Alan Turing was a genius who helped the Allies win WW2, but he had a boyfriend, so he was hauled into court, publicly shamed and ordered to undergo chemical castration – a pointless process administered in utter fucked-up medical ignorance, driven by ignorant fear.
He committed suicide at age 41.
Genius? Mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist, Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
We stamped out his life sixty five years ago today. Because he was different.
~~~~~ooo000ooo~~~~~
epilogue paraphrased from AKALib on dailykos – thanks!
‘Please call the police; my friends are fighting and I’m very worried.’
The sound of a young woman’s voice early Saturday morning, still pitch dark, on my gate intercom. Luckily the intercom was in one of its working phases. They’d had a party, she said. Funny, I hadn’t heard anything. Sometimes the parties are really loud. I dialed 10111, explained, gave my name and address and the man said ‘I’ll send the police there,’ which I found re-assuring. He said ‘I’ll send them,’ not ‘I’ll tell them.’
Later the same lovely voice very politely checking, ‘Did you phone the police? I’m so worried!’ I asked Are You Safe? Do you want to come in? To be behind the gate? ‘No, I think I’m safe,’ she replied, which I didn’t find overly re-assuring.
A short while later the gate again, ‘Thank you so much, they’re here,’ followed by three more Thank You So Much-es.
As far as I can recall, that’s the first time I have ever called the cops!
~~oo0oo~~
But I spose we must have called them back ca.2004 when we had our only robbery – in 10 Windsor Avenue while we were out. Aitch’s Zeiss 8X32 binoculars and her wedding and engagement rings were gone. Typical Aitch, she replaced the binocs only.
Hereditary traits can be passed on so strongly. And then sometimes not at all.
Take my daughter Jessie. In some ways she’s the spitting image of her Dear Mom and Dad: She’s kind, she’s funny, she’s thoughtful, she can crack me up with some of her observations on life. I love the way she teases me – gentle and just a few repeated themes which are well-known, thoroughly old and reduce us both to weak laughter.
She especially loves the ones that sometimes catch me off-guard and get a rise out of me. ‘Dad, can we get a kitten?’ occasionally elicits my knee-jerk response of, Never Jess. They Eat My Birds! instead of the correct response, Sure My Love, But You have To Get Six Of Them, Otherwise They Get Lonely.
But in other ways I don’t know WHERE she gets things from.
Like tonight she came to me and said ‘Dad, getting drunk is such fun!’ I mean, from where . . . I almost gave her a lecture but I was too busy hosing meself. So much so that she said, ‘Dad! What’s so funny!?’
Sane Dad & Mad Daughter
I reminded her about the time – not so long ago – when she asked this out-of-the-blue curveball question: ‘Dad, Why does tequila make you vomit?’
. . raised a whole lot of money for Udobo School. Udobo is a pre-school in Montclair for the special kids of Montclair. Udobo – the name is isiZulu for fishhook – needs to raise funds to keep going and Aitch’s unused ceramics helped. Anne Snyders of Udobo set her kids to painting them, varnished them, and then auctioned them off to those wonderful suckers called parents, who each bid way more than the intrinsic worth cos THEIR kids painted it! Everybody wins!
In the Southlands Sun: UDOBO Pre-Primary School hosts an art exhibition and auction at the major hall of the Montclair Methodist Church on Saturday, 24 November from 11am to noon.
They sold tickets for R50 which included a meal and light entertainment. The children’s artwork was on sale, and the pottery pieces plus tablecloths decorated by the children were auctioned.
The pottery before
Hey! and they gave me a free plate, painted by Eli! Look how cheerful a kid can make a plain white plate!
Recently I took another load of Aitch stuff – books, picture frames n stuff, which occasioned this letter above. Hopefully they can put it to work for them too.
Udobo’s main source of funds is from Action Udobo in the UK. Their website has pics from Udobo just down the road from me in Montclair.
Just in case anyone was thinking Aitch only had Mom’s Day, I gotta tell ya – not at all!
She had her birthday 6 January; She had her second birthday 6 July “‘cos it’s unfair my birthday is so close to Christmas, everyone used to give me one present, and my day was lost in the Xmas/New Year hype”. Right.
Then she was really big on the kids’ joint birthday 11 December, making that a big day, plus the two separate parties she would organise for them, there being a four-year age gap. I tried to combine it after she was gone – whatta disaster!
Then she always remembered the day we met, 27 August, I think. We would celebrate that. Also wedding anniversary 27 February. Celebrate.
Then CHRISTMAS!! An Aitch Day if ever there was one! She was BIG on Christmas. Much planning, buying and the whole house had to be changed: Xmas decorations – putting up the tree was an event! – Xmas crockery, Xmas coffee mugs, Xmas lights, Xmas pictures on the walls, all other paintings had to come down. Mantelpieces would be festooned.
Then she had Mothers’ Day when the kids made a big fuss – she’d see to it. And last but definitely not least there was All Fools Day, April Fools Day – my birthday. You won’t believe how she went to town. She’d get a Big Brass Band to play!
I’m not joking:
Whoa! What a surprise!! Mario Montereggi’s Band! No flies on Aitch!
Jess picked the flowers, Tom did the braai. We had chops, ribs and wors with garlic bread, plus some fried beans and mushrooms. I had beer and vino. We raised a glass to Mom!
. . till we have concreted the whole planet and burnt the last scuttle of coal and barrel of oil.
We won’t.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit 415 parts per million (ppm) last week for the first time in 800 000 years. Scientists have warned that the world must keep CO2 emissions below 350 ppm to avoid dangerous levels of climate change – but emissions keep rising.
The record high was measured on May 3 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, part of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) global monitoring division.
This is the highest level recorded at this station since it began keeping records in 1959. Analysis of the ice cores in Antarctica show that over the last 800 000 years the CO2 levels in the atmosphere fluctuated between 170 ppm and 300ppm.
Climate organisations say this record high level is a strong indicator that governments must take climate change seriously and move away from fossil fuels.
I’m sorting out a lady’s new computer glasses. She’s a clerk in the tenders office of the municipality. She’s taking strain, there’s so much to do, figures to check, rules to follow, but they’re being pushed to get things through much quicker than usual.
She’s stressed and she’s suspicious.
Last year she decided to retire. Things were very quiet in the tender office, there was nothing to do. But her superiors urged her to stay. They said it was going to be very busy this year.
‘You see,’ she says matter-of-factly, ‘It’s an Election Year.’
Our services were like this – except for no silver caskets, no drums n bugles, and no liveried employees!
When Bella died we buried her in the garden under the copse of trees over the birdbath. Then Aitch died and we – well, “we”, read about that! – buried her ashes there too. Then Blackie the gundwane (gerbil) and Cheeky the other gundwane (hamster) followed.
Then Janet and Trish’s dear old Dad Neil died and not too long after that – a year or two – their Mum Iona died. Neil’s ashes waited for Iona, and then when she was ready, Janet laid them both to rest in the same spot as well, with good ole Tobias Gumede’s help. He needed to re-cut the path so she could get there, the lovely remembrance spot had become very overgrown!
Lots of laughter and tears. Just like life with them all, come to think of it!
~~oo0oo~~
Since then Sambucca the 12yr-old labrador has been plugged into the Elston Place earth, as has Flaky the 12yr-old American corn snaky! Both buried by TomTom – for a fee! Talk about a garden of remembrance!!
~~oo0oo~~
gundwane – mouse; rat
Bella – dog; Aitch would say ‘doberman-ish; I’d say Canis africana-eish
Aitch – Trish; Mom; dear wife; boss of the household; dog purchaser
Back in 350 BCE, Aristotle regarded the essence of species as fixed and unchanging. He wrote his Historia Animalia, grouping animals according to their similarities of looks, actions or dwelling place: animals with blood and animals without, animals that live on water or on land, etc. Aristotle grouped his animals hierarchically from ‘lowest’ to ‘highest’, with, of course, himself – or us, the human species – on top! This view was pretty much unchallenged for the next two thousand years.
Hold on! How Eurocentric! The earliest pharmacopoeia was written by Shen Nung, Emperor of China around 3000 BCE. Known as the father of Chinese medicine, he is said to have tasted hundreds of herbs to test their medicinal value. His ‘Divine Husbandman’s Materia Medica’ included 365 medicines derived from minerals, plants, and animals.
Then
around 1500 BCE medicinal plants were illustrated on wall paintings
in Egypt. In one of the oldest papyrus rolls, Ebers Papyrus, plants
are included as medicines for different diseases. They have local
names such as “celery of the hill country” and “celery
of the delta”.
OK, now we’ve shown it was first Asia, then Africa, let’s go back to Europe and Aristotle . . One of his disciples or students, the philosopher and naturalist Theophrastus, classified plants into three categories: herbs, shrubs and trees. He classified local specimens as well as specimens sent to him by Alexander the Great, collected during his expeditions to Asia and elsewhere in Europe.
Then in Europe came, in no accurate order – and probably missing out many! – an Italian, Cesalpino (1519-1603), a Swiss, Bauhin (1560-1620), who described about six thousand species and gave them names based on their ‘natural affinities,’ grouping them into genus and species. He was thus the first scientist to use binomial nomenclature in classification of species. By the time the Swede Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was born, there were already many systems of botanical classification in use, with new plants constantly being discovered and named. He became famous for ‘sorting things out!’ His book Systema Naturae is regarded as the start of modern nomenclature.
The more people classified things, the more they realised they were related. And so came the first ‘Tree of Life’ that I could find – there are sure to be more, earlier, better?
Hitchcock 1840
Not only is MAN on top, he gets – we get – a crown and cross. Palm trees get the plant crown.
Then came Haeckel’s Pedigree of Man, still with animals and plants separate, even though this is a real tree!
– Haeckel 1879 –
Most of the subsequent line of naturalists, zoologists, botanists and herbalists worked on classifying, describing and naming. The first departure from this approach was probably by Frenchman de Lamarck (1744–1829), who launched an evolutionary theory including inheritance of acquired characters, named ‘Lamarckism.’ Others, like Erasmus Darwin, who, like most people looking into classification accepted that evolution happened, but HOW it happened was not known. He – the elder Darwin, Charles’ grandfather – proposed his evolutionary theory that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament.’
The next big step in evolutionary theory was when in 1858 in London Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace proposed that evolution proceeded ‘by natural selection’. This theory of Darwin’s and Wallace’s changed EVERYTHING.
Huge jump here: When DNA and genes and genomes were discovered and worked out, everything changed again. No longer did one have to painstakingly study an animal’s anatomy and habits to classify it, its DNA classified it accurately even if you looked on in astonishment and thought ‘can’t be!’ If the DNA says they’re related (or not) then they’re related – or not.
– 1969 tree of life –
So our 1969 school Tree of Life , seen right, was still intent on showing how single-cell animals were low down and we were high up. But at least we were starting to learn we weren’t the crown of a tall tree. But – we were separate from plants and fungi!
Well . . . the more we know, the more we know. And we now know it’s us and fungi. Get used to it, us and fungi.
So next time you scoff a plate of mushrooms, feel a bit guilty. And when you see a live mushroom growing, say ‘Howzit Cousin.’ And get used to it.
– us opisthokonts –
See near the bottom right the little word opisthokonta? That’s us. And fungi.
Oh, I do love this! When you do careful examination of DNA you find out where animals – and all living things – fit in the Tree of Life. You’ll also find the old tree we learnt with ‘humans’ proudly at the top as the crowning glory, was done before we knew much about DNA.
. . is more closely related to an Australian crow than it is to the bird on the left! They look and behave the same due to convergent evolution. Same with the next two: Look the same; only distantly related in the bird world:
Great Auk – North Atlantic – – – Penguin – South Atlantic
So for decades and centuries ornithologists knew the two birds were related as they had the same beaks and the same habits, so you can imagine some of them were none too pleased to be told in 1988 by relative newbies that what they thought – heck, what they ‘knew’ – was wrong!
Just like zoologists had known for a long time that mammals in Australia had evolved to fit various niches. These two are more closely related to each other than they are to dogs or squirrels:
thylacine and sugar glider – both marsupials
And so we come to the even more recent discovery: That cockroaches arecrustaceans.
Not only should we eat insects as a better way of producing protein, we should charge higher prices for them! The menu at my new restaurant will feature in future – Cockroach Thermidor SQ
