Former Courier reporter Jacqui Herbst sent me a screenshot of the temperature reading in Umhlanga last week – a deathly 3 degrees C!
The weather station at King Shaka Airport confirms that the mercury was floating just above freezing at 7am last Friday morning.
However, there is often frost on the Compensation Flats in winter, so this hasn’t necessarily been unusually cold this year.
It just feels that way.
And every year, as the bones get older, the North Coast winters bite a little more.
Vaalies and other upcountry folk who’ve just moved to the coast will find this hard to believe.
When we first arrived in Ballito in 1985, we chuckled to see Umhlali’s only dress shop, Beba, run by the late Jilly Reynolds, advertising winter fashions.
We were still Vaalies by nature, treating the beach as if it were mid-summer and thought it hilarious that anyone could think the North Coast had anything approaching winter.
We’d come from Jo’burg and before that, London.
Now that was serious cold!
North Coasters, we have long since learned, have evolved to become like lizards.
They are designed to survive the brutal summer months, when it is almost too hot to move.
Like the lizards that scurry around in the rocks, North Coaster old-timers know how to function when everybody around is dying.
It also used to be the reason the old ‘Lali pub was packed to the rafters every night, farmers replenishing lost liquid, a role now taken over by the Karibu pub, I’m told.
Long exposure to this climate must make your blood thinner.
Lizards lie in the sun to get moving in the mornings, and so old North Coast hands get out the jerseys and parade their winter fashions from June to September.
So Beba was right and we were wrong to make fun of it!
And as we go into this particular winter of discontent, so the mood about lockdown and the coronavirus seems to have shifted.
There are five well-defined stages of loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
There have been three definite states so far stages: Disbelief at the first 21-day lockdown way back in March, irritation and anger at some of the ridiculous rules when Level 3 was reached, and in particular the extended ban on alcohol and cigarettes.
There was intense bargaining over opening the bottle stores and allowing tobacco sales, followed briefly by relief when the alcohol ban was lifted.
There was a brief flare of anger when alcohol was banned again and lockdown reaches 115 days on Monday, but now the mood has moved onto the fourth stage, with a distinct air of resignation and depression.
And a creeping realisation that this virus may be a lot more serious than we all first thought.
A salesman I was dealing with last week said three of his colleagues had died in the past week and a lady from Durban told my wife that 11 members of her family had died. What??!!
There are far fewer people out exercising on the roads than a month ago.
The cold weather doesn’t help, but I think the novelty has worn off and people are just resigned to the long haul.
This business is not about to go away in a hurry, however you might wish it would.
If you hadn’t realised it before, we now know that life is going to be different for a very long time.
At a holiday destination we might be lucky to have freedom of movement by December, but I have a bad feeling a lot of the regulars will stay away.
That will be because of cost, having lost income for so long, and worries about health.
Strange days, indeed!
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