After watching the Boks neatly despatch with Japan and a celebratory lunch, I drifted into a late Sunday afternoon nap.
I dreamed that I was in a foreign country. I had lost my luggage and was down to one cigarette, which was strange as I haven’t smoked for 20 years, and asked a companion where we were going. He replied: “This is the road to Ignatio,” and then I woke up.
Ignatio in Spanish is ‘fiery’. Is it a metaphor for hell? Am I on the road to hell?
I’ve been confused of late, finding it hard to make up my mind about anything. So much was riding on last weekend and the Springbok victory was positive, but was Boris Johnson’s defeat on his Brexit vote good or bad and what does Helen Zille’s election as the DA’s federal chair mean? Is the government ever going to fix Eskom and when is the economy going to come out of its nosedive?
I am building a new house in Sheffield for our retirement and at least have firmly made up my mind about some things – I aim to be as “off the grid” as possible.
The house will have a very large basement/garage, which will easily house a couple of the biggest Jojo tanks to take care of water needs and, as unsightly as they are, an array of solar panels and inverter batteries will run the whole house, especially when Eskom is playing up. I don’t think we will see the last of the effects of load shedding for a very long time, whatever promises they make.
Watching Stockwatch the other night, financial guru Wayne McCurrie proposed that if Eskom desperately needs downtime to maintain the power grid, that they run Stage 1 load shedding permanently.
Stage 1 requires the least amount of load shedding, three times over a four-day period for two hours at a time, or three times over an eight-day period for four hours at a time.
It doesn’t mean no load shedding, it means that way we would know well in advance when the lights would be off, instead of this terrifying “will they, won’t they” situation, and never knowing when Stage 2 will run into Stage 3 etc.
ALSO READ: #TwoBits: More than positivity…
Onto other but equally disturbing matters, will the return of Helen Zille be good for the official opposition? It certainly suggests a firmer hand on the tiller, and may lead to a showdown over the future of Mmusi Maimane and others.
It certainly will have the twitterati in an uproar that the party is on the road to hell. Maybe it will split the party, maybe not, but one thing is certain: the DA is in a very weak place at the moment with no apparent leadership and almost any decisive action will be good for it. As irritating as the opposition might be to some, our young democracy needs a strong opposition.
My hairdresser keeps a stack of Hello and You magazines, which is the only time I see what the royal families are up to, though it’s sometimes hard to work out who is more ‘royal’, Meghan Markle or Beyoncé.
Young Prince Harry has been lecturing whoever will listen that we all need to reduce our ‘carbon footprints’ to save the planet, then was promptly in the dwang for flying off to Elton John’s Monaco hideaway for their hols. The couple then toured Africa and I assume they didn’t get here in a rowing boat.
I’m hard pressed to say what size of carbon footprint I have and if I did, what can I do about it. Even if I buy a toothbrush, apparently there is a long line of carbon-emitting factories and processes that go into producing said toothbrush, so unless I’m prepared to brush my teeth with a frayed twig, which I’m not, there’s not much I can do about it. I haven’t flown anywhere for simply ages, so I haven’t left a trail of carbons behind me.
It’s embarrassing that, not to even have a significant carbon footprint. Perhaps that’s the road to Ignatio.
* * *
Do you ever experience that awkward moment when you leave a store without buying anything and all you can think is “act naturally, you’re innocent”?
Download The North Coast Courier mobile app, now available free from the Apple iStore and on Google Play, for IOS and Android phones.
