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strange days
Monday, 20 February 2006 12:16 pmCape Town at the moment is a strangely surreal and dislocated space. Mostly this is about the power cuts, which hit yesterday and have continued into today, randomly and erratically. This means that for the last two days home life has been defined by the throbbing hum of the hospital's emergency generator, and the plaintive meeping of the house alarm protesting its sudden lack of function, punctuated by desperate construction of tea on a selection of the Evil Landlord's considerable collection of gas cookers. Part of my sense of drifting distance is undoubtedly lack of sleep, since the cuts started on Saturday night, and kept me dozing fitfully while the generator (20 m from my bedroom) cut in and out through the small hours of the morning. Part is also the weather, which is, bizarrely for this time of year, rainy, misty and cool.
Driving through town is deeply odd, with traffic lights all out, and everyone slowed down to a sort of contemplative courtesy at intersections. Some parts of town have power; others don't, so one drives through blackout zones followed by oases of light and function. (Kenilworth is clearly home to some kind of vital secret government installation, it seems to have the most consistent supply so far). Coming back home this morning, I found three of the four cats piled up against the front door, mewing pitifully, and clearly weirded out by the generator and alarm noises and the strange, dead feeling of a house without power. They settled down at once when the lights came on. I, on the other hand, was the weirded one when the phone cut out for twenty minutes just after the power had returned. It feels as if we're drifting into some kind of slow-motion apocalpse.
Of course, the apocalyptic vibe is also because of my very bizarre and sad experience this morning, which was to arrive in dead, powerless Wynberg to leave my car with the mechanic, only to discover that he had died suddenly from a heart attack over the weekend. He's looked after my vehicles since Biscuit Tin days, and in fact sold me my current car, the Mermaid. I spoke to him only on Friday. He was a cheerful, efficient man, with a bouncy, slightly manic energy moderated by considerable kindness; although I didn't know him well, somewhere on the edge of my life there's a horrible gap in the world. I drove around for most of this morning in tears, quietly and mistily, like the weather, and with a curious sense of partial deadness, like the city. Strange days.
Driving through town is deeply odd, with traffic lights all out, and everyone slowed down to a sort of contemplative courtesy at intersections. Some parts of town have power; others don't, so one drives through blackout zones followed by oases of light and function. (Kenilworth is clearly home to some kind of vital secret government installation, it seems to have the most consistent supply so far). Coming back home this morning, I found three of the four cats piled up against the front door, mewing pitifully, and clearly weirded out by the generator and alarm noises and the strange, dead feeling of a house without power. They settled down at once when the lights came on. I, on the other hand, was the weirded one when the phone cut out for twenty minutes just after the power had returned. It feels as if we're drifting into some kind of slow-motion apocalpse.
Of course, the apocalyptic vibe is also because of my very bizarre and sad experience this morning, which was to arrive in dead, powerless Wynberg to leave my car with the mechanic, only to discover that he had died suddenly from a heart attack over the weekend. He's looked after my vehicles since Biscuit Tin days, and in fact sold me my current car, the Mermaid. I spoke to him only on Friday. He was a cheerful, efficient man, with a bouncy, slightly manic energy moderated by considerable kindness; although I didn't know him well, somewhere on the edge of my life there's a horrible gap in the world. I drove around for most of this morning in tears, quietly and mistily, like the weather, and with a curious sense of partial deadness, like the city. Strange days.
