Squirreling away

With Autumn upon us here at the Southern tip where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans merge, our Cape Town squirrels are busying themselves before the Cape's rainy Season sets in...

Summer shade
Winter cold
squirrels gather
 in Autumn Gold

is the romantic take on it . . .

this is where my thoughts go, though!

I met a little squirrel, all sat beside my hat
he spoke about the Wirral and I of this and that
my thoughts were on his middle, 
I cannot tell a lie!
me Nan's cast iron griddle, an Autumn squirrel pie

They're cheeky little buggers though.
Hard to catch too, and likely need a whole family to make that pie 🥘.
Put that way, maybe I'll just let them be this time😉

Image (c)2019 Cyril Souchon, All rights reserved.

A day in the life ~ Victoria Yards

 

Excuse moi? I'm trying to find my way to the ArtyBollocks! exhibition . . .

Take a badly depressed area seemingly with nowhere to go. Look around at it, and what are you likely to see? Nothing neat and clean like the little one up there showing me the way ~ More likely ruined pavements, yes almost certainly. Garbage piled up, overflowing into sewers and running across pavements. The primordial sight and smell of the homeless who have no access to sanitation and create nests and nooks in any space that provides a smidgeon of cover. The people who prey on them, and in the absence of policing, are now the landlords of whatever they seize. The few remnants of society who, through obstinacy or need have remained or migrated and are clinging on behind barriers of rusting barbed wire and burglar bars. Everywhere, overgrown grass, weeds and the remnants of abandoned gardens. That's what you'd expect.

What would it likely have going for it? Nowhere to go but up, for one. The prospect of inexpensive land with the potential of services that can be upgraded. The hope crime can be brought under control. The goodwill of the community to welcome it, if that can be gained. Maybe something can be seeded. Which is one reason why I’m travelling south to old haunts this Sunday morning. Besides, there's a touch of nostalgia.

So all of those thoughts, and more, were going through my mind as I dropped out of Hillbrow and travelled through Bertrams before swinging right down towards Lorentzville where a patch of the area near Ellis Park has been carved out for urban renewal and possible gentrification. I used to live in Bertrams when my folks first moved out of the ‘Brow to start a real home for our little family: Free Staters migrating to the big city to make a life.

The apartment block we used to inhabit is decayed, and as I drove past a mental feeling of what it was re-surfaced. Different now. Homies and their piles under the bridge, the garbage, broken sanitation and pavements, tough looking kids and the barriers their parents erect to keep crime at bay ~ all there. What else would I find? On that other side of the coin?

On Sundays it’s easy to find the Yards. The lack of parking signposts it. The pavements are incongruously taken up with late model cars leaving a little walking strip for their occupants streaming down towards entrances. Everywhere parking jockeys with Hi-Viz vests. Hmm. Good thing I know the area. I can inch through and find a spot near the Old Synagogue while everyone else mills around the immediate side streets. Up the rise, swing left and into a lovely empty side road, and there it is, the Old Synagogue.

Deserted now, but not quite abandoned yet. An electric fence keeps the vandals out, the powder blue paint is faded and the magnificent wooden doors sun-bleached and in desperate need of varnishing. Commissioned in ’26, nearly a century ago, its race has run. This area used to have a thriving little Jewish community, now an enormous mosque dominates at the end of the same street. Where there’s a place of worship, that’s generally the roots for community. In its own way, that’s a good sign.

I lock the car and make my way down to the Yards, picking my way past piles of garbage and taking in the sights and sounds of Sunday community. There’s a little stream along whose banks we wild kids used to forage. It’s been fenced off in order to let the water flow freely and uncontaminated. That’s another good sign. From the window of a car the fencing looks forbidding.

Up close and looking through it’s a different story. It’s also the boundary of the Yards, so I know I’m close now.

I’m here to see the ArtyBollocks exhibition, which is a fun concept with a darker underbelly. It’s in one of the converted properties making up the Yards, and I’m also hoping to meet up with one of the artists whose work I enjoy and persuade her to take a coffee & chat about her entry and the that of the other artists, and how well the idea has been realised.

After that I’m intending to roam around and see how an abandoned industrial estate is being transformed into a budding site for entrepreneurs: Artists (of course, they are always the first!) printers, manufacturers of this and that, foodies, studios and so on and so forth.

An immediate win! The gallery is right there by the southern entrance! It’s mid-day though and most people have decamped to the Food quadrant leaving the space largely empty. This is great for gallery viewing, but sadly the hoped for chat isn’t going to happen.

Anyways, I could move about the space as though I owned it (and of course did!) It also gave me the time to pause and detach the 3rd paragraph of the bollocks (which went to "intent") and see how close the artists came to mirroring it back thematically (you see how easily we start talking that way!); & that was REALLY interesting. Some of the artists seem to have treated it ironically/playfully, and others had taken the challenge head-on ~ a much more difficult exercise. I had a half hour or so of uninterrupted viewing in which to reflect on the more (to me!) interesting works. I also enjoyed the curator's role, sometimes placing artists work tightly bound and others letting works from different artists interact.

Right! Time to explore a bit, a slow walk around the studios and buildings, lurking in the background and watching as people looked over wares and haggled. The studios are often both the workplace and the sales point. When it works this works really well, and for many of the smaller enterprises this is the norm. There are three different kinds of spaces: Large barns with that typical flea market feel, small studios, and somewhat larger more retaily type spaces that felt as if the owner(s) are already well established, or have capital behind them. This gave a nice eclectic feel to the Yards.

The passageways between the buildings have been designed with the visitor in mind, with enough space to allow for an up stream and a downstream, with the space between the walkways and buildings taken up by gardens.

Gardens. That's an abiding impression I took away. The shopping and browsing and studios are definitely the key reason why anyone would visit the Yards, but there are other rewards for exploring the space. The gardens that proliferate around the buildings are both decorative and functional. Mixtures of flowers, herbs and vegetables make a great show and some of those gardens really are good enough to eat!

For the next year or so this site is a work in progress. Which means lots of empty building shells to explore, many buildings that have been cleaned and so you have an appealing "raw" feeling both inside and outside. You can look up and see people circulating and chatting in what anywhere else would be a derelict building. It's often like moving about in a surreal noir movie, but where noir has Alice-like become the norm. Beware the rabbit hole! and watch what you eat ~ one bite could make you smaller, another make you tall. Unlike, as Grace Slick sang, the pills that mother gives you, which don't do anything at all . . . Ask Alice, when you're ten feet tall!

Lots of nooks and crannies, interesting views, people popping in and out of corridors and stairwells, light cascading and fading. If you're an artist or photographer, a short lived opportunity. If you're an explorer, you can let your inner child run free. Take it all in before it becomes settled. It's like Maboneng, before it all congealed into solid spaces with defined boundaries and borders.

And the hope? what about that? The community? any clues there? Just this one, as I was exiting for the day and heading off to the Radium Beer Hall in OG. A little spaza shop selling everything from clothes to sweets and ciggies. And 2 games machines solidly taken over by the youf of the day. If we'd had them back in my day, Id've been found doing something similar.

But since I'm not, it was down to the Radium for Beer, Burger and solid Sunday Jazz.
I like the Radium, its got no airs or graces and is tolerant to all sorts. Its the kind of place that I'd take my mate Piotr to. He has Asbergers, a sort of high functioning Autism. The Radium's the kind of place where difference doesn't matter that much and mostly they leave you to get by.
Just don't mess with the Jazz . . . .

Images all (c) Author (all rights reserved) Apr 07, 2019

A day in the life ~ Navigating the Mad Giant

It hadn't started that well.

Saturday coming up for one-ish and we think we'll drop into 1 Fox in downtown jozi and poke our noses about, pick up a pint & pizza and that'd be a nice way to set up the rest of the weekend.

We'd circled around in the drizzly wet heading for a parking spot I knew which was good on busy weekdays and offered free parking if you drink at the Mad Giant.

Only no-one had said anything to the parking jockey and he nicked a twenty off me which annoyed her because CLEARLY there were empty bays outside the lot. And a misty off-on drizzly which didn't improve the mood as we walked past the empty bays down to the entrance. A girl doesn't like her hair getting frizzy before the weekend has kicked off.

So you can't blame Mrs T-Potts because she offered a moment's pause from the wet and if there're two things herself loves its books and flowers. Even if the books were leaning over a bit. It wasn't the books or the flowers that delayed us though ~ Tea pots, Tea sets. and teas, teas, teas everywhere. A quick moment to catch breath and warm fingers and toes and plunge on became a drifty "oh that's nice", "what about this" "I really can't afford ..." (~ wistfully, that one!) and it was a good 20 minutes before we stepped out to head to the Mad Giant and his inhouse brews and tables.

Looking up bits of sky were visible and the light much brighter, even though the clouds had deepened to black and steel. That was a warning sign, should've taken note!

Now, I really like the Mad Giant. Fridays the team'd trail down from the offices and fill the bar and tables with chatter and work-related stories, slag off the bosses and wipe the foam from the mouth as the brew sipped down. By the time we dispersed the stress of the working week'd be dissipated and its all become good.

You don't notice in that atmosphere that really, this is a fine dining place, with fine dining waitrons (hate that word!) and menus. Something that's glaringly obvious when the place is mostly empty and the fine waitrons are amusing themselves ~ well somewhere. Still and all it's a nice place to look at, the high ceiling, the copper vats and pipes, wooden counters and benches contrasting with the fine dining tables.

So by the time we'd done that, and decided the food hall across the way was the answer, those black clouds had closed off the sky and the light outside had dimmed. The sound of hail on a tin roof is very distinctive! and we knew as we stepped out under the afdak that we'd waited just a little too long.

So here we stand under that same afdak and think . . . "just a measly 3 meters or so from the warmth, the smells, the happy chatter in the food hall. Beers & Pizza! just 3 thundering meters away . . . " and then we lean back up against the wall. Soggy underwear and squelchy shoes? somehow just don't go that well with beer & pizza. The gods will be kind. We'll get there soon enough.

and so they were.
and so we did.

And as we sipped the beer and piled into the pizza the thought was also that here's something quite fine about standing under a sturdy tin roof with the hail clattering down, waiting for that moment when you can duck across skipping puddles and torrents and into that warm waiting space. There's nothing quite like beer & pizza to restore the blood-sugar level, is there? Time enough for a little Scientific Research!

Images all (c) Author (all rights reserved) Oct 20, 2018

a day in the life ~ Saturday morning at the Pantry Market

After a deeply thought provoking walkabout hosted by the artist Robert Slingsby at the neighbouring Circa, I wandered over into the Keyes Pantry Market to give it the once over, it being new there and all. Lots of lovely little stalls, all in a carefully coded corporate livery and not at all like the usual little market stall places.

The people manning the stalls are lovely though, and the goods yummy and worth the trouble and expense. Frequented by the kind of people whose 4x4's traverse the urban landscape, climbing pavements for parking on the weekends and shuttling hockey sticks, cricket bats and footballs during the week. The clean middle to upper classes, if you know what I mean.

This place really works for them, and curiously I very much liked it too. Space enough to gather and chat to the stallholder, try some of the wares and not feel jostled and forgotten. The stall holders like it too, they can go to the loo and not worry that their goods will be stolen or mishandled. Sometimes less definitely is better! Especially if the less has enough to satisfy the need. And I picked up a really nice pesto for a friend whose cooking talents are legend. A win all round.

And that's how it was for most of the stalls, excepting one joyous little corner in the bottom section, run by Bilkees who is Creative director at KolorKids in Parkhurst. If you go to the Who we Are section on their website you will see the very image of a director gazing professionally back at you ~ "How can we be of Service, Sir or Madam?" But here, Oh here she was simply beaming from ear to ear as she stepped away from the weekday business to just have fun with the kids coming by.

You really do see people as they truly are when catch them engaged in what they love to do, don't you? If they weren't so old & ugly I'd have my kidz there too! (well, maybe the grandkids, one day. They, of course, are perfect!)

A Day in the Life: The passing of the Boekehuis

Champagne and Cake, Goodbye and Good Luck

"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got til it's gone" **

The Boekehuis has closed, it's gone: Goodbye.

It's passing will be mourned for many years to come, not only by those who visited it regularly, but also by the occasional visitor, looking for something specific. I can picture them arriving, and then wondering "Now where on earth are we going to go?!"

There is a distance between author and audience that's rarely narrowed. The commercial imperative of a book signing, the hidden agendas of TV and radio interviews ~ these create and maintain the distance.

If you dropped down the hill from Melville, travelling along Lotherbury Avenue, then turned left at the first traffic light, you would have found yourself at the Boekehuis. For 12 short years, this is the place that you went to if you wanted to narrow the Gap. Most Saturday mornings between 12:30 and half past one, and often well beyond that, the Boekehuis played host to an array of South African talent and their works. And yes, they sold a lot of books afterwards; but not because of hype: no, you bought them because you understood enough to know that you really had to have them.

The formula was simple and straightforward: a 10 to 15 min reading from a particular work, followed by a panel discussion, then an open discussion with whoever was in the audience. The audience was not chosen, the agenda was not fixed, and the interaction between all the people there spontaneous, revealing, often deeply insightful; but never trite, commercial or (most important of all!) boring.

There were special occasions ~ a conversation with a person or group whose work and life had contributed in some meaningful way to the enrichment of the South African landscape: Politics, Art, the Struggle, Literature, or even just Social engagement.

How do I explain the experience? There is so much to be gained by sitting in a small room crammed with deeply interested and engaged people and listening and understanding what drives them to do what they do, how this has changed them and the communities that they live in, and then seeing how this played out in our own lives.

But the space itself is not enough.
The intention, no matter how well conceived counts for little unless you have the right people driving the process through. Rudyard Kipling has his Roman General say to his two young lieutenants "It is always one man's work—always and everywhere!" – before giving them the impossible task of defending the Wall from the Barbarians.

For these last 12 years, this has been the work of an extraordinary person~ Corina van der Spoel is an artist at getting the most out of people: persuading them to take the brave step of engaging directly with a spontaneous, critical, and sometimes aggressive audience. And then ensuring that the whole process is rewarding to all the stakeholders, prompting questions, stepping back when needed, and engaging firmly to keep the conversation at its best level.

Corina keeps a watchful eye:

standing, as always, and

ready to step in when needed

There is a peculiar talent that some people have, of being able to lift or lower their conversation to the level of the person they are talking to, so that the person feels its all about them, that they are being heard: and so they open themselves up. Corina has this knack, whether it is the author, the panelists, or the audience. No matter who you are, you feel you have a voice, and its a valuable voice.

Drive, energy, commitment: a large network of people whose lives have been touched directly by her; the demands to take forward some new project will come streaming in from many sides. I should say her difficulty will be in choosing between opportunities, not in finding them.

I'm not sure what persuaded Nationale Pers/Media24 to bring the project to a close. Maybe the economy is biting too deeply. Maybe they think it's not part of their core business: maybe, maybe, maybe. Who's to know?

What I do know is that so much of what I have absorbed about South Africa, its culture, its people, its failures and successes has been given context from the understandings gleaned from arbitrary Saturday mornings, listening to people who have researched our world, reflected on it, or merely speculated. From the funny to the serious, I will miss them all. Let me say this: for a while I became somewhat reclusive: the only place where you would find me out and about would be the occasional visit to (where else?) the Boekehuis: at 12:30 in Auckland Park for an hour or so, before slipping back to my hidey hole.

Now, like Joni Mitchell, at last I know what I've had.
And that it's gone.
But unlike the singer, we are the richer for the experience: and we can ignore the parking lot :)

All Images copyright © the author
** From Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi Cab song

A Day in the Life ~ My one wish for Rosebank

It's a short walk from my apartment building to the Rosebank mall.

It's a particularly rewarding walk on a late Sunday afternoon.
Especially in spring and summer, when the jacarandas are either in full bloom or bursting into a canopy of spring purple. Stretching from either side of the street and touching at the centre they drop just enough dappled shade to soften the Highveld sun.

I couldn't help but compare it to the other malls that I spent most of yesterday fruitlessly travelling backwards and forwards to while I hunted down a decent Bluetooth mouse. The biggest of them all, the Sandton mall, well you'd expect it to have everything, wouldn't you? Not a chance. Lots of the same stuff in a hundred and one different shops, just different markups, different salespeople, different storefronts. But that's another conversation for a different time!

Aside from Rosebank, there's not a mall that you can get into without going in by car. Even the short walk from the high-speed Gautrain terminus to the Sandton mall is fraught. There, even the pavements disrespect feet! They are small and cramped, often dirty and populated by the people who keep the place working, not those who shop in the mall. No, you wouldn't see a consumer (with or without kids or partner!) walking along those pavements. Its a place of work, not a thoroughfare for shoppers. Shoppers enter by way of the car parks ~ pavements are for workers or people who can't afford cars.

These malls are built like fortified cities: Everything from tasteless Tuscany  to faux Tudor, and not forgetting the gleaming blandness of glass and steel.

In Rosebank, however, feet are respected. Its pleasant walking there, and no great shakes going home either:

All the major entrances have wide avenues and open doors expecting people to come in from the surrounding suburbs, hotels, and B&Bs. Residents of the area can walk from one tree-lined avenue into the mall and then right across into another. The open-air restaurants, cafes, and sidewalk coffee bars are open both to the sky and to the avenues and walkways that lead to them.

So, if I have one wish for Rosebank, it would be this: that developers will always remember that people are more important than transport, and make sure that all of the people who come in by car or rail do so in a way and using routes that leave the rest of us using pavements that respect ordinary people's feet :-)

There is nothing more satisfying than being able to stroll up into the mall, have a quiet a cup of coffee, drop in to the grocers, or supermarket, bookshop or store and then stroll on home in quiet of the evening.

Please don't change it until after I die, no, definitely not a moment before!

all images copyright (c) the author

A Day in the Life: a Monster Muscles in

(click image to enlarge)

 There's an old Saying that goes ~ you can take the country boy out of the farm but you can't take the farm out of the country boy.

Johannesburg is a Mining city. The City has left the mines behind now, but you'll never take the Mines out of the City. A place is being prepared for this big fellow. He's 80 tons if he's a penny weight, in fact he's so heavy that they had to build a special foundation for him to rest on.

He's arrived early, before the area has been cleaned and the sign erected ~ but what would you expect? When they found gold here, they didn't wait around for the town to form first. Oh no Sir, they just got in there and started digging. Who arrived early went away rich, who arrived late never ate.

That's about the sum of a mining town, and it hangs around for only as long as the gold can be scratched out. But this one didn't hang around and die the death of ghost towns the world over: oh no Sir.

Oh no Sir, it sprawled and bawled and went on to become the Financial bully of Africa, the biggest city not on running water: and along the way (by the way) built the largest man-made forest on the planet. It's a city now, but its still a mining brawl at heart. The mining spirit and culture will always be found here. we don't hang around and wait for the world to decide. We move on and make things happen.

So when I stumbled on this monster muscling in down at the end of Anderson, well I thought to myself, that's just about right. You have to be tough to live in Africa. You have to look out for yourself and your community, because this is not a world of soft pastels and gentle rains. When the rain comes it crashes down, and the thunder and electricity reminds you that you are alive. Even the 6 day Peach rains have that edge to them.

Its a rough and tough area that he watches over, and its a rough and tough city that welcomes him. But walk a short distance East and you will find the largest Financial institutions in Africa, and due North are the Mining Houses that kicked it all off. And just to the left: the Magistrates court. Just in case anyone gets the wrong ideas about whose the who in the zoo. Or veld.

Don't you just love this city?

All images (c) the author.

A Day in the Life: Window Boxes in the City

Its a long steady walk up Ferreira street from 45 Commissioner.

Its a walk I do often enough, several times a week, and its always a there and back between 45C and the Simmonds street Superblock complex. To the left and right are the magnificent Anglo American buildings ~ some built in the earlier part of the 20th century during the Oppenheimer hey days: low and powerful and redolent of the Mining Magnates who once held sway in downtown Joburg; and one at least, to the left, the stunning Anglo Head Office structure built in the late 80's shows the shift to corporate respectability.

Normally there's not much time for reflection, you head on as quickly as you can because at the nether end of each trip is a meeting room and a waiting group of people. I could take the shuttle bus: but unless I have a laptop under the arm I prefer the walk.

Yesterday I nearly stumbled into the granite "decoration" around the pavement trees, and that started a train of thought. I was headed North down towards 45C, and today, as I made my way back up South, I was wondering about those window boxes.

Well, there you see how blind you can be to small touches of beauty along the way!

Now, my mother loved Geraniums and Pelargoniums.

There wasn't a holiday or a trip where she didn't embarrass the family by taking cuttings, and she would snip them carefully (as all good gardeners do) and bring them back into one of the many pots and corners of her garden and verandas. Even at their scraggliest, the flowers are rich in colour: making up for their lack of perfume, I suppose. And if you watered them often enough, then the greens of the branches are a pleasure in themselves.

So there I am striding South, and blow me if I don't have a mommy moment ...

Up against the walls of the Ashanti building, doing their best to cover the steel mesh burglar protection, are 6 window boxes planted with my mom's favourites. And there they have been, if the bird's droppings are any indicator, for any length of time.

And all that has kept me from seeing them in these many months (years?) of walking backwards and forwards has been the meeting rooms at the ends of a long stride up and down Ferreira street.

And we have, I suppose, the answer to the window Box question: accross Anderson Street and not 40 meters from the Rocks in the City the answer is ~ Yes, Joburg is getting soft in some of it's corners.

And all the better for it, I should say.

All images copyright (c) the author

A Day in the Life: Rocks in the City

Look at them ... just a pile of rocks around a nice shady tree.
You'd know all about it if you stubbed your toes on them, let me tell you!
Which I nearly did ...
And which made me think ...

What does a pile of Rocks tell you?
Especially a pile of rocks in the city centre?
All neatly arranged around a tree trunk, and every tree on the pavement with its own community of pet rocks?

Rocks

Well now, these are granite rocks, Crushed to size after being blasted and brought up from the depths of the gold bearing reef, deep below.
mini Boulders really, as you would quickly tell if you tried to pick one of them up.
Stop you dead in your tracks if I tossed one at you!
Yet you wouldn't notice them, just to walk by, so tastefully arranged around their trees.
The Pavement runs the length of an office block, and fronts a residential hotel in the heart of the City's business district, right around the group of buildings which the Anglo American corporation owns and has its people in.
... and a short walk from the Johannesburg Magistrates courts, where unruly crowds have been known to congregate. Although, not so often any more.

So, maybe the Building owners don't want you to walk too close to the trees?
Possibly, they like the artistic effect of the stark granite against the bark?
Maybe they are aligning themselves to the mining activities which they service?
Maybe all, maybe nothing at all.
Certainly, it would have taken a pick up truck to deliver the payload. There's more than a wheelbarrows worth there, and they would've been carted quite some distance!

Rocks around trees ...

So what should we read into that pile of Rocks?

Progress.
That's what I read:
I read progress.
After all, whose going to stack piles of granite-hard rock in handy sizes if they thought -
if you thought for even one moment -
that someone might pick them up and chuck them back at at you.
or your nice plate glass windows!
or cars, or ... or ...
Ah.
So is our uncivilised, dangerous, scary city centre being tamed then?

(truth to tell ... it never did feel that scary to me, but, well -

 - you know -

tourists and the media do know best ...)

They do look rather nice, though - don't they?
All we need now is a flower box or two ...

All images copyright (c) the author