Perhaps the glass isn’t half empty

I should have wondered whether I was tempting fate the other night when I grabbed a torch to look for something under a couch: long time, no load shedding, I thought…

The next day, City Powerless reminded us that competence doesn’t always go hand in hand with high tariffs.

All told we were off for 19 hours and the ducking and diving was what we’ve come to expect from our power uselessly… I mean utility. Team on site investigating. Later: team on site investigating. Power restored. Oops, it went off again…

What was interesting, this time round, though, was that the complaints on X were far fewer than at the height of our power issues, when City Power took up where Eskom left off in terms of keeping us in the dark.

Maybe people are just ground down into accepting mediocrity.

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I had been working from home and it was only when my wife got back and announced “the power’s out” that I noticed.

We’ve got a small solar power system, inverter and battery, which powers most of the lights and plugs so computers, TV and Wi-Fi will run for close to a day if used judiciously. We have a small gas stove and, as a final backup, a petrol generator.

When I walked out in the garden that evening, it was quieter, too, because there were fewer generators.

South Africans get by somehow. But should we ever, in our permanent “work around” state, be dreaming we could ever hold the Rugby World Cup again?

Former Springbok AJ Venter – not a “woke” liberal, going by his comments on Gaza anyway – doesn’t think we can. World Rugby doesn’t hate us, he maintains, despite the shabby treatment of Rassie Erasmus being snubbed for the Coach Of The Year Award.

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AJ says no-one wants to give us the tournament because of crime and the collapse of our infrastructure. I wonder, though.

In 1993, heading back to Joburg from the Free State town of Koppies, nursing three broken ribs from cowardly right wingers who wanted to teach someone from Die Engelse Pers a lesson, I heard Louis Luyt on the radio saying that, in less than 18 months, the World Cup would be coming here.

He’s mad – was my thought. In a country going up in the flames of a civil war?

Yet, the rest is history… as was the Fifa World Cup in 2010, when we reached for, and touched, the stars once again. It would be nice to see unity of purpose and a resurgent patriotic spirit.

Maybe the glass isn’t half empty, AJ…

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