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The weather, she says with elegant understatement, continues hot. This would be almost bearable, except that today has pulled heatstress in to support its virtuoso play for Worst Day Of The Year So Far, effortlessly beating aside the previous contender*. It started off on the wrong foot with the second night running of insufficient sleep, because it's basically too bloody hot in my little tin-roof bedroom, and besides, the mosquitos are ignoring the burning of mosquito mats with a heartless insouciance which causes me real emotional pain, not to mention the enormous itchy bumps and relentlessly disturbed slumbers. I am frayed and faintly somnambulistic, but was pretty much in control until 10am this morning, which is the time at which I set forth to campus, planning to copy some overheads in excellent time for my address to students at 11.30.
Except that they opened Parliament today.
Generally speaking I consider myself a pretty civic-minded person: I am at one with the notion of government, however flawed, and the concept of obeying rules for the overall good of society causes me no distress at all. Our Parliament is by and large a pretty useless bunch of corrupt politicians, but they perform what for the want of a better word I could generously describe as a function. However, at the point where they feel the need to deploy apparently the whole of the city's traffic police to close off a massive stretch of freeway for over an hour of a Friday morning in order to, apparently, "open", they lose me completely. I steam at the ears and become a Bolshevik seeking to end all governments, preferably while waving Thabo Mbeki's bloody, severed head. It is the highest degree of narcissistic self-importance to require the city to grind to a halt while you go from A to B. I am put forcibly and unpleasantly in mind of the legendary Mugabe cavalcade, composed of equal parts of arrogance and paranoia.
Today must be a new sort of record. It took me an hour to get from home to campus, a trip that usually takes five minutes at off-peak times, and a maximum of 20 at rush hour. Large, bovine policemen had closed absolutely every exit to the freeway from Claremont to Observatory, and quite possibly all the way into town. In what I can only describe as misplaced zeal, or possibly inane stupidity, they did this at Main Road level, which means there was absolutely no way of accessing campus at all. I was forced to join the streams of hot, annoyed, frustrated drivers in a great, pointless swirl around the environs of Rondebosch. Several instersections, not unnaturally, given that there was ingress for traffic but no actual egress any way except back, gridlocked completely. My car overheated. I was not, in short, amused.
At 11am the police finally unleashed the straining hordes, and I was able to reach campus. Dashing into the department at 11.10 to do my copying, I found it closed for a meeting, with the photocopy transparency supply locked inside. This, shall we say, set the seal on the day. It is a tribute to my basic levels of cussedness that I overcame all obstacles, borrowing transparencies from another department, and making it to my talk with minutes to spare. There was one student in the lecture theatre. Another 20 or so trickled in over the next ten minutes, but half of them left again while I was still patiently explaining course structures.
You know those days when the universe has clearly set out to thwart you on every level? This was one of those.
On the other hand, stv's Thai dinner last night was particularly superlative. Possibly some Powers that Be or other thought I needed strengthening.
* 16th Jan, when my latest paper submission got fired back at me with a page of impassioned argument for its essential worthlessness, coinciding neatly with the start of the Great Week of Hormonal Angst. Ugly.
Except that they opened Parliament today.
Generally speaking I consider myself a pretty civic-minded person: I am at one with the notion of government, however flawed, and the concept of obeying rules for the overall good of society causes me no distress at all. Our Parliament is by and large a pretty useless bunch of corrupt politicians, but they perform what for the want of a better word I could generously describe as a function. However, at the point where they feel the need to deploy apparently the whole of the city's traffic police to close off a massive stretch of freeway for over an hour of a Friday morning in order to, apparently, "open", they lose me completely. I steam at the ears and become a Bolshevik seeking to end all governments, preferably while waving Thabo Mbeki's bloody, severed head. It is the highest degree of narcissistic self-importance to require the city to grind to a halt while you go from A to B. I am put forcibly and unpleasantly in mind of the legendary Mugabe cavalcade, composed of equal parts of arrogance and paranoia.
Today must be a new sort of record. It took me an hour to get from home to campus, a trip that usually takes five minutes at off-peak times, and a maximum of 20 at rush hour. Large, bovine policemen had closed absolutely every exit to the freeway from Claremont to Observatory, and quite possibly all the way into town. In what I can only describe as misplaced zeal, or possibly inane stupidity, they did this at Main Road level, which means there was absolutely no way of accessing campus at all. I was forced to join the streams of hot, annoyed, frustrated drivers in a great, pointless swirl around the environs of Rondebosch. Several instersections, not unnaturally, given that there was ingress for traffic but no actual egress any way except back, gridlocked completely. My car overheated. I was not, in short, amused.
At 11am the police finally unleashed the straining hordes, and I was able to reach campus. Dashing into the department at 11.10 to do my copying, I found it closed for a meeting, with the photocopy transparency supply locked inside. This, shall we say, set the seal on the day. It is a tribute to my basic levels of cussedness that I overcame all obstacles, borrowing transparencies from another department, and making it to my talk with minutes to spare. There was one student in the lecture theatre. Another 20 or so trickled in over the next ten minutes, but half of them left again while I was still patiently explaining course structures.
You know those days when the universe has clearly set out to thwart you on every level? This was one of those.
On the other hand, stv's Thai dinner last night was particularly superlative. Possibly some Powers that Be or other thought I needed strengthening.
* 16th Jan, when my latest paper submission got fired back at me with a page of impassioned argument for its essential worthlessness, coinciding neatly with the start of the Great Week of Hormonal Angst. Ugly.
