Something deeply amiss
IT'S MOST distressing this story about the Durban art teacher who was locked in a police cell after her dachshund, named Napoleon, bit a security guard.
Distressing because it sketches something deeply amiss in our society. As anyone knows, female art teachers are about the most dangerous anti-social malcontents we have. When this is combined with ownership of vicious dachshunds named after notorious warmongers with imperial delusions, we are in deep trouble. Dachshunds today, rottweilers tomorrow!
And then she was acquitted on the charge of "keeping a vicious dog".
Tut! Tut!
No beer
A MARITZBURG reader tells me she went to the post office the other day to buy stamps. She was greeted by a large sign: "We have NO stamps – out of stock."
A post office without stamps is like a pub with no beer, but this seems sadly true of so much in our capital city these days. Perhaps it's just the equivalent of Eskom's regular electricity outages.
Bushbaby
THE ONLY previous occasion I can remember a post office running out of stamps was in Nongoma, way back in the sixties when a school friend spent a glamorous gap year working there.
They kept the stamps in a large book on the counter. One morning a client came in with a pet bushbaby on his shoulder. Next thing the bushbaby had jumped off his shoulder, clung to the brass grille and widdled all over the book of stamps.
Some of the stamps were ruined, some not. But word gets around fast in a small town and nobody was going to lick a stamp that came from the Nongoma post office. They'd rather drive across to Vryheid.
The Nongoma postmaster had to send the entire book back to Pretoria and request a new one. It took some time as the incident sent the entire bureaucracy in Pretoria into shock. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
I wonder if anyone with a pet bushbaby was in the Maritzburg post office? There just has to be a logical explanation.
Patrician liberal
STILL with Maritzburg, an unusual book has come this way. Titled Simon Says, it's a collection of the speeches, book reviews and other writings of Simon Roberts, who practised as an attorney in the capital for many years and was a leading light in the worlds of music, art and architecture. He died at an advanced age only about a year ago.
A product of Michaelhouse and Cambridge University, Roberts combined a patrician liberalism with a wry humour and a wonderful turn of phrase, which made him a much sought-after speaker at all kinds of occasions. His secretary, Caryl McMorran, kept all his speeches and other writings and his widow, Joy, has now published them.
They provide a rewarding trawl. For instance, when he addresses the annual dinner of the Natal Flyfishers Club, he draws on the Book of Job: "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord." Very funny.
And when he addresses the Bushman's Nek Diners' Club (is there still such an organisation?) he pleads eloquently for the preservation of Victorian architecture – "Natal English", as he calls it – as an expression of the values and confidence of the Victorian era. "In my belief, these Natal English buildings, as I have chosen to call them, are a valuable contribution to the overall fabric of our culture and if we allow them to disappear, we do so at our peril. It is for this reason that I regard the preservation of both the Cape Dutch and the Natal English buildings as a matter of concern to all of us."
Roberts served in the South African Navy during World War II and spent almost his entire professional and personal life affected by what happened after the shock Nat election victory of 1948. The book has the kind of stuff that future historians in a calmer age could find useful in analysing what the real values were of the community he moved in, and their contribution to the greater fabric of society.
Tailpiece
THE TELEPHONE rings in the police station.
"Police? I want to report a burglar trapped in an old maid's bedroom!"
"Who's speaking?"
"This is the burglar!"
Last word
Never confuse movement with action.
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