Surf…

Cape Town has gone a bit iffy today, grey, cool, drizzly: the precursor for the big storm coming through this evening and tomorrow.

But Cape Town hasn’t always been this way. This weekend, for example, Cape Town was lovely. Warm, sunny, pleasant. And, according to many of my surfing friends and contacts, “Dungeons was firing!”. I had to go and look this up, because the obtuse reference to a castle prison and some odd hat tip to The Apprentice didn’t make much sense at first.

But they meant the Dungeons surfing spot just around the corner from Hout Bay. And they meant that there were some good waves to surf there. The Guardian had also done some translating and gave us a couple of lovely images to visually indicate what was going on.
Here are they:

Big wave surfing in Cape Town, South Africa

Big wave surfing in Cape Town, South Africa

Gorgeous, ne? Just look at that wall of water. Wow.

You wouldn’t find me playing in waves that big, but that’s not to say that you can’t pop out and have a bit of fun if you want to. Just make sure you have some decent medical insurance and a reasonable funeral plan in place first though, ok?

Photo credit: Nic Bothma via The Guardian

Not jealous

The following are photos sent to me this week by my parents.
The first depicts the Isle Of Man Steam Packet Company ferry, Manannan, while second seems to indicate the kind of holiday they ate currently enjoying. Note the subtle inclusion of the sunglasses.
Ok, ok. We get it.

image image

Of course, it hasn’t been half bad here either. After a breakfast of note, I took the kids to Maynardville Park, where roundabouts were ridden and slides were slidden. The City has installed one of those outdoor gyms there, but it was being used more as an extension of the playground than for any serious adult exercise.
We’re all eleven different sorts of tired now though. So it’s going to be an early night, and early to sleep, perchance to dream of ADSL reconnection in the morning.
Hold thumbs.

Yes, Bryan races a plane, but…

BA are flying their new Airbus A380 aircraft on their Joburg route (but not Cape Town because the runway is too short) from February 2014 and they recruited local rugby hero Bryan Habana to let us know about that by racing the plane along the tarmac.
England Rugby captain Chris Robshaw came to watch, presumably to provide the Heathrow side of things, and Bryan also brought South Africa Rugby captain Jean de Villiers along with him.

Bryan takes Jean everywhere he goes. Except Toulon.

Here’s the video:

Wow! What a finish!!

But it’s actually not the finish that bothered me so much. It was the start.
Who was that waving the flag to get them going? Why, it was model Georgia May Jagger.
But again, it wasn’t so much the model that bothered me. It was the flag.

ba flag

It’s upside down.

We’ve been here before. And this isn’t great for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it’s just plain (no pun intended) bad form. Damn rude.

And, in addition, were BA’s creatives not aware of the specific instructions with regard to the use of the National Flag, as found in the Government Gazette 22356, Notice 510 of 8 June 2001? Obviously not, because otherwise the flag would not just have been the right way up, it wouldn’t have been there at all – check out section 15(d):resflag

Oops.

Fortunately, no-one in South Africa is very good at remembering which way up the National Flag should be flown anyway. And they were far too bothered with Bryan Habana racing a big plane to notice that the flag was being used inappropriately and waved incorrectly.

Still, once this post is published and the South African public is awakened to this heinous act of disrespect, I expect outrage, several open letters, possibly an online petition and (almost certainly) a boycott. Oh, and accusations of some sort of -ism.

And in other news, I’ve just heard that Airbus have demanded a rematch. At 35,000 feet.