A trip down memory lane
2009-06-16 09:01
I'm sitting on top of a hill in Grahamstown - though by the time you read this I'll be enjoying a hearty Wimpy breakfast somewhere along the N2 - watching the mist break apart slowly in the valley and waiting for the bloody hadeda that woke me up this morning to come closer so I can stab in the eye it with the braai fork I'm holding in my hand (I can type just as eloquently one-handed).
Apart from a single occasion where one of my digsmates made us a dinner of oil slicks, hard carrots and (her) hair, which she claimed was chicken soup, my memories of Grahamstown, if a little hazy, are largely of the happy variety. I studied here, so it's been a cheerfully nostalgic trip back to a town that holds a special place in my heart.
The "S" is still missing from the "Welcome to Grahamstown" sign as you come in off the N2, the donkey carts still amble down the streets, though the fleet seems to have been upgraded with a far healthier looking breed of ass to those of my era, and (Kev, you'll be pleased to know) the goddam staffie that used to keep our whole house away awake has still got it's head stuck through the front gate, whimpering for some attention (how long can those things possibly live for?).
The differences between now and then are telling, though. For one, you actually have to queue at the shops. But far more unsettling are the signs of fearful big city living inching their way across the small city landscape.
Everywhere you look security measures are migrating across Grahamstown like the slow-moving mist that engulfs seaside towns in horror stories, eventually smothering everything and leaving no one in doubt that something wicked this way comes.
Unsightly steel fences, venomous coils of barbed wire (the first thing I noticed outside my hold house - that and the fact that our old pet cow, Clarence, was gone), panic buttons dotted across the Rhodes campus and uninviting gates menacingly guarding driveways to once-quaint properties are all becoming part of the package here.
It seems, too, that you need a swipe card to enter some of the university faculty departments. A few years back you could just wander into the Journalism department through a wide-open front door, all you had to do was avoid the drama students being a tree and you were in.
I'm not naïve, and I'm not looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. There was crime when I lived here too. Residences got robbed on occasion, Kevin's wheels got swiped off his car (which, until we sobered up, was pretty hilarious) and after three years of barely paying attention, I pretty much robbed the university of a degree. But it never felt like, or looked like, a panicked suburb of Cape Town or Joburg.
There are no booms or golf estates, thankfully, but walking around a sleepy town and spotting barbed wire, or the horrific sharpened tin-foil fence they're putting around DSG (which, on reflection is probably to protect the boys in town from the DSG girls) is slightly depressing.
This all comes hot on the heels of an interloper wandering around my mate's garden in Cape Town while his child and wife were playing around the corner. Luckily he was sick at home too and so chased away his sticky-fingered visitor.
He's now gone to "defcon five" in terms of security arrangements, installing interior gates, more electric fencing and purchasing an electric prodder that could jumpstart a Boeing. I give him a hard time about being the typical suburban whitey, living in fear that at any moment the disenchanted invading hordes will overrun their plush little world. But after seeing what I've seen in a dozy place like Grahamstown I’m more inclined towards his way of thinking.
I won't be stocking up on small arms, but you do have to ask where and how things can possibly improve, especially when our small towns are practically under siege from petty theft.
In his State of the Nation address, the increasingly impressive President JZ said that we must all fight crime. It's an entirely valid point, but when the have-nots are only increasing in numbers around the world, it's a little bit like King Canute trying turn back the tide with the flick of his wrist.
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