The pain of lockdown travel

“The summer sun is once again warming our skin. Rather than defeating the heat with an air conditioner, simply dress for the weather to keep cool whenever possible,” read the tweet, accompanied by a photo of a hot woman in a flimsy top.

“Keep cool and dress for the weather,” she says knowingly. Many of us struggle with this kind of thing. I often find myself out in the summer sun wearing a polar fleece beanie, thermal underwear and fur-lined jacket, wondering if there’s not something I could be doing different to feel less hot.

Thank heavens there are companies out there, like Eskom, helping us to make sense of this crazy world. Dress for the weather? Of course! Why did nobody tell us this before? It’s an excellent idea for the national power utility to dispense advice to the sartorially challenged. Eskom is, after all, a master of putting lipstick on all sorts of pigs. I’m looking forward to getting tips from Louis Vuitton on how to build a wind farm. Yes, yes, I know.

Eskom couldn’t give a damn about what we wear or how comfortable we are. All they’re trying to do, in their usual specious manner, is get us to use less of their product.

Speaking of lunacy, I’m in Durban visiting my old curmudgeon of a father who, for once, made a visible effort to pretend he was happy to see me. Thing is, he loves Shakespeare more than he loves me and I’m a terrible disappointment for not sharing his fierce passion. I have other passions, many of which can be explored through the use of a language that everyone understands.

Eskom would be pleased to know that nobody in Durban used an air conditioner last weekend because the weather turned Arctic the moment I arrived. In Durban, anything below 20ºC is Arctic and it’s not uncommon to find people wandering about in shorts and T-shirts in the early stages of hypothermia as they battle to comprehend what’s happening.

I was going to leave my car at Cape Town airport but decided against it because it’s suffering from a faulty oxygen sensor and uses a tank of fuel every 10km. Being a Subaru, it thinks in Japanese and nobody who isn’t from Japan can understand why it even needs oxygen in the first place. It’s a car, not a bloody Covid patient.

The other reason I decided against driving to the airport was that I would have had to sell my house to afford the parking fees. Airports Company South Africa is an extortion racket and not even the Hawks can do anything about it because they also can’t afford to park there. It would be cheaper for them to fly in, make the arrests and fly out.

So I took an Uber. I think it’s only the second or third time I’ve taken one. It might even have been the first. I have found myself slumped in the back seat of a car being driven by a stranger on more than one occasion, so it’s hard to say for sure. I think he said his name was Paradise. It’s difficult to make sense of anything when you’re both wearing masks and sitting at opposite ends of the car.

Being an Uber neophyte, I wasn’t comfortable getting into the back. To be honest, I wasn’t altogether comfortable getting in at all. My phone had died and there was no way of knowing if it even was an Uber. The back seat thing bothered me for the same reason I’ve never taken a rickshaw ride, even though I grew up in Durban where it was a rite of passage for white children to be hauled up and down the Golden Mile by an elderly black man wearing skins and horns.

Sitting in the passenger seat of a taxi sends a message to the driver. I do not consider myself your superior. You are not my servant. We are equals, sitting alongside one another. It also encourages conversation. I got into the back. “Social distancing,” I mumbled. The implication was clear.

I assumed my driver to be riddled with Covid-19 on the grounds of him being black. I wondered if he would be less offended if I offered to drive and he sat in the back. This is why I don’t take Ubers.

Cape Town International was a misanthrope’s dream. Not a soul around. I could see myself living there. A masked man appeared out of nowhere and asked to see my form. Taking a deep breath, I did two pirouettes, a pas de chat and a backflip, losing it on the dismount and crashing into a trolley. “How’s that?” I said, disentangling myself. He gave me the lazy eye and handed me a piece of paper.

It wanted to know if I had travelled abroad recently, been among large crowds or sneezed in the last seven months. I admitted to experiencing a minor trouser cough on my way in, but apparently those don’t count.

An unwieldy woman with the social graces of a prison warden off her meds took my form and pointed a gun at my head. Everyone lies on forms, but they can’t lie about their temperature.

Another test passed, I sauntered through the glorious emptiness and breezed through security without any of the usual hoo-ha of being dragged into a windowless room for a full cavity inspection. Nobody wants to touch anyone these days. There’s never been a better time for smuggling.

The far side felt more like an airport, but with an overpowering smell of cheap government-issue sanitiser and shifty people rubbing their hands together like modern yet equally loathsome versions of Uriah Heep (the character, not the band). I’d forgotten it was the start of school holidays and was quickly reminded that hell is other people’s children. Parenting should be legislated. I can’t veer all over the road and do whatever I want behind the wheel of a car. The Good Parenting Act would make it illegal for children to veer all over airports and restaurants while wilfully disobeying the basic rules of civilisation.

The airline announced that those with priority boarding could go through. These people paid extra so they could sit in a metal coronavirus hotbox from hell longer than anyone else. What kind of benefit is this? Priority boarding should be reserved for people who don’t deserve to live. Oh, wait. That’s the wealthy elite. Smart move, FlySafair. There wasn’t a spare seat on the plane.

As I wedged my backpack into the overhead compartment, I heard a loud buzzing from inside. I knew it was my electric toothbrush. The other passengers didn’t. They obviously thought it was a bomb, or worse, one of those items more commonly found in a woman’s bag. I wanted to pull it out and show them, but I don’t think they cared. Vibrator, toothbrush, IED, murder hornets. Nothing mattered. All they wanted was to get through the next two hours without being infected with the plague or dying in a giant fireball.

I am currently holed up on the north coast slowly being driven insane by a pair of hadedas nesting outside my bedroom window. Between the Antichrist of the avian world and the old curmudgeon explaining, in great and ponderous detail, the themes and subplots of King Lear, I fear for my mental health.

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