dear little explosions

Cape Town has, alack, suddenly woken up to this Spring thing, and, in a burst of misplaced enthusiasm, is being summer. It's stinking hot, with emphasis on the stinking - that classic Capetonian windless hot-day pong. Of course, it may help that our beloved city is clearly afflicted with bi-polar affective disorder (it's hot! it's cold! it's hot! it's sulking in the basement!) and a multiple personality. Right now, once again, the voices in its head are telling it it's the highveld, and the heat is building up to thunder and rain*. I live in hope. Inured to the vagaries of the climate, the city's floral denizens are making the most of the few hot days and are pumping out pollen with misplaced zeal. My eyes are scratchy, my sleep is disturbed, and my existence is wracked with explosive sneezing. Sigh.

On the upside, it's the last day of term, and some of my classes even have students in them. However, I am receiving about as many excuses as actual essay hand-ins. The problem with the end of term is that everyone is so stressed and brain-dead that the reasons for lateness aren't even inventive. Inventive student excuses are one of the few consolations of an academic's life. I feel cheated, but am also too fundamentally in sympathy with the poor little buggers to make much of an issue of it.

My reading matter has been desperately varied lately. In between battling with Mieville's Iron Council, a difficult read, I'm still catching up on the reading list for my Honours student who's writing on classic girls' fiction. This means that in the last three days I have read all the Little Women series, all three of the What Katy Did trio, two particularly nauseating doses of Pollyanna, and a random selection of Anne of Green Gables. If I take up spitting, cussing, rampant promiscuity and kicking puppies in the next little while, you'll know why.

On the other hand, I was very impressed with this article, which discusses, at some length and with insight, the problems the demands on our attention made by our madly technologised lives. It's a lovely set of excuses for non-productivity, and I shall adopt it forthwith. Victims, that's what we all are. Victims.

* Diana Wynne Jones has that amazing novel called The Merlin Conspiracy in which cities have giant personalities who both inhabit and represent them. Cape Town's would be a massive, stern, serene, Athena type whose robes are fringed equally with sea-foam, and the tatterdemallion rags and scraps of a baglady, and who occasionally breaks her monolithic calm in order to cackle and dance.

spotted on the way home

These things made me happy driving home this evening:

• One dog with floppy ears, hanging out of a car window and being joyous and canine.
• Three girls running around the Common in identical goth black outfits.
• In the next door car at a red traffic light, a man with truly beautiful, long-fingered pianist's hands on the steering wheel.
• The smell of rain.

Arriving at home, I was further gratified by a piece of junk mail advertising an ADSL line that had cunning little elastic-loaded boxes that sprang into sudden, energetic 3-D shape when I opened the envelope. It was the visual equivalent of a trio of concealed dwarves leaping up to shout "Surprise! ADSL!" It made me laugh. In even better news, the Evil Landlord is gradually overcoming his Telkom-hatred as ADSL prices come down, and is vaguely inclining towards acquiring a line.

The Army of Reconstruction have been building walls all day, and have made a start on two sides of the garage. Their new walls demonstrate inexorably the resemblance between our old garden wall and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Over the weekend the Unpleasant Neighbour bent my ear for twenty minutes about the way in which the Army of Reconstruction's cement residue was clogging her gutter, forcing me to be mendaciously outraged before she'd go away. The nice foreman has promised to clean it up posthaste, but I'm plotting ways to get him to accidentally drop the old garden wall on her later. (He is a jolly fellow who also wanted to know if we'd had good tennis games over the weekend on the concrete slab.)

It's raining. I am deeply content.