SA Rocks

Tea & biltong with the Queen: Droewors, Ma’am? Or maybe sliced kudu?

If you’re lucky there is no need for an alarm and you drift slowly and naturally into consciousness. You half open your eyes and peer over the edge of your duvet – the room is dark, lighter than pre-dawn, but darker than the usual curtain-filtered outlook. There is a quality of gloom to the light, and the pattering that woke you so gently makes itself known. It’s raining. And it sounds like it’s really set in. You snuggle back down into the sleep-warmed covers and curl up for a lie in. Responsibilities be damned: you’re having a rainy day in.

Well, that was the old Saturday or Sunday mornings, the pre-UK weekend mornings – when “rainy” was not the norm and thus could be enjoyed. The stereotype a South African would have you believe is that if you waited for a dry day in Britain, you would never get anything done. That’s not really fair – and even if it was, the real problem is not the wet but the familiarity of it. When it is not the exception, you can’t excuse not getting it all done.

The wet conditions are so common that the weathermen have had to invent new euphemisms for crap weather, e.g.: “all in all, it’s going to be a very unsettled day” – which means “it’s going to rain all day but because it may stop for a minute or two, we won’t use the word ‘constant’ ”.

To make matters worse, you don’t just nip into your car under the cover of your garage, drive to work/shops/friends, and, at worst, take a quick run through the rain from your parking spot to the entrance. No such pleasures for us travelling-working plebs in the UK; most of us aren’t here long enough to justify getting a car with requisite UK driving license, annual MOT and exorbitant insurance. So for us, it’s a five to ten minute slog to the bus/tube/train stop, half an hour or more dripping into your boots, in a damp chair, squinting through the fogged and streaked windows, and then back out to negotiate the busy high street, in and out, shop to shop in a black-umbrella-raincoat world.

You make the necessary adjustments. For most of the year, there is no possibility of nipping out for a quick anything. You hang your coats near the door, but if you’ve woken just in time for the garbage collection – how quickly can you throw clothes over your pyjamas, gets socks, pull your boots on, find a scarf and gloves, zip your coat up and run out the door?

Even when it’s not freezing the matter of staying dry is paramount and the best defence is a peak cap. Forget keeping the sun out of your eyes, a peak cap is rainy day wear. Umbrellas are cumbersome and unwieldy, especially in the wind (they never warn you about the wind), and in Scotland umbrellas spend most of their time inside out.

I miss Highveld thunderstorms on summer afternoons, and I miss driving through puddles on a dirt road. I miss sudden down pours and walking on the beach when the sea spray mixes with a light warm drizzle. I miss the smell in the air after the rain hits the super-heated highway at the peak of South African summer, but mostly I miss enjoying a rainy day in.

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Ed’s Note: Welcome to Tea and Biltong with the Queen. This weekly comes to you straight from Edinburgh. Kate Thompson is taking up a weekly here on SA Rocks in an attempt to explain to people what exactly it is that you might miss were you to leave SA. LEAVE SA??? WHY, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??? Kate will be explaining! Thank you Kate, lets hope you stay on and make this a great weekly.

Let Kate explain:

It took a few weeks for me to realise that I wasn’t comfortable in the cold “developed world” of the UK, and it was more than the creep on my morning commute giving me the “heebie jeebies”. I explained it to myself with a fairly practical “Ja, well, it’s bloody cold”, but I knew I hadn’t figured it out. I was missing something about home, something other than biltong and sunshine, and it was not something I could pick up at a regular “Saffa shop” in SW London either.

After four months of my first year in the UK, I started to see the first hints that Winter may actually end – daffodils emerge virtually overnight in every green space London has to offer, and the mercury cracks double figures (just barely) for the first time since November – but most significant for me was the day the windows opened -and I’m not speaking figuratively here either – I hadn’t noticed that in all the homes, houses, digs and dives I’d stayed in so far, the windows were never open. And then it clicked!

The thing that I had been missing was space and fresh air! Literally the very stuff that surrounds you in South Africa, the stuff you breathe and move through, that you’re never aware of, until it’s missing!

It’s quite simple really. The United Kingdom is a small, cold country. It’s smaller than the Free State, but with over 60 million people in it. The houses and flats are clumped together in terraced rows, making use of all available space. Furthermore, they are specifically designed to keep the outside world just that: outside. Keeping the heat in is most likely the primary interest of your average housing developer in Britain, and certainly your house buyers. These homes with central heating, double glazed windows, and compartmentalised spaces, not to mention the horror that was the window tax of the 1696, are so far removed from the open plan, sliding door, ceiling fan world of my upbringing!

I’m not writing off the UK entirely. When Summer finally dawns, the UK is marvelous. The population seems to shrug off the weight of the grey skies, and there is a virtual stampede to strip down to your knickers in the nearest park. A very European air settles about the place as the bars and coffee shops set out their tables and chairs on the pavements, and your must-have accessories are a Starbucks iced Something-or-other-pucino and a bottle-tan.

Unfortunately, the Summer with its glorious daylight-savings, and Pimms and lemonade in the 9pm sunshine, lasts just three months, give or take a couple of weeks. Then you put away your bicycle and get back on the tube/bus, sucking in the eau-de-armpit of public transport – and, to give your heating a fighting chance, you close the windows again, as an eight month winter looms.

Maybe it’s because I’m an Eastern Cape girl and my home is in the least developed province, maybe it’s because I learnt to drive on deserted dirt roads, and I prefer the rolling dry hills, aloes and white hot horizon of the Transkei to the cityscapes and smog spires of The Big Smoke, maybe I’ve been spoiled, but I miss space and fresh air.

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