Day 680 – Just popped in to say hello

Another blip on the recovery radar. Nothing big, I hope, but worth documenting. Today might be day 680 of SA lockdown (such as it still exists), but if I still had Covid, it would be Day 200 of that. Those adept at Kwik Maffs will already have worked out that my Covid Day 1 was Lockdown’s Day 480.
And yes, you’d be right.

Well, yesterday, Covid popped back to say hi. Thankfully, these episodes are becoming more and more infrequent, but all those telltale indicators were around once again. Weird tastes, breathlessness, aches and pains, chills, and the signature symptoms: stiffness in my hands and fingers, and absolute frikkin exhaustion. I was broken from about 5pm last night and in bed by 8.

Flattened.

A lot of sleep, but I’m still not mended. So today is all about taking it easy and making sure that I get over this and back to full health asap. Well, apart from the shopping trips and other jobs I have to do.

And tomorrow is all about another 5km. Fingers crossed (if I can do that, I know I’m better).

Right now though: a nap.

Day 679 – Pittsburgh Pepper Pitcher

Spotted in Pittsburgh. (Not by me.) (And I fear that there may be many more questions than answers here, but let’s do this anyway.)

Right. Spotted in Pittsburgh, this:

“Who does it?” asks the poster putter. And it’s a very reasonable question. Who is flinging peppers down his chimney each evening? And why?

And how? Well, actually we know that from the helpful diagram supplied.
I’m amazed that you don’t hear the sound of several crashing peppers and some muffled swearing each time before your fireplace gift arrives, though. That’s some aim to hit first time, every time.

But then, those aren’t the only questions raised here. “I worship the lord and have never made an enemy” is clearly not quite correct for at least two reasons. And I’m not even counting the rookie error of the lower case “l” at the front of “lord”. As any fule kno, all the major deities are quite insistent about the capitalisation of their nomenclature.

But “I… have never made an enemy” doesn’t square well with the fact that some random bloke is lobbing capsicums bearing the legend “I HATE YOU” into your house each night. Your friends and acquaintances don’t tell you “I HATE YOU”, it’s generally the enemies that do that. Not often on peppers, but… whatever.

And then that weird threat down at the bottom. No, not the talking about it bit: that might be quite threatening if you have any sort of social anxiety…

Pin on LOL

…but I was talking about the box above that.

“Christ… has harmed people for me”? Who were these people and why did He [well done with the H – Ed.] harm them? Could they have been… perhaps… enemies of yours? No. Because you’ve never made an enemy. But what if you were born with an enemy? Does that count? And would the people know that Christ had harmed them, or was it well disguised as an accident? And if it was disguised that way, do you think that they would alter their behaviour towards you simply because they had a minor prang in their car or caught their finger on a rose prickle? (It’s not a thorn.) How would they associate that with their veggie-flinging (or other) campaign against you? Why were they hurling the veg in the first place?

Were they even chucking salad?
Who knows? I told you that there wouldn’t be many answers here.

Pittsburgh is weird.

Day 678 – AGM tonight

I have an AGM to attend tonight, and I’ve had a frustrating day in the weird (but welcome) Cape Town drizzle. The AGM is online, but still requires my time, and dinner isn’t going to cook itself (because we’re ordering burgers).

So… quota photo time.

This one is another from the top of the mountain. I was trying to sleep when some of the others came back from an (alleged) trempette maigre and told me to get out of bed, find my camera (and tripod) and shoot the moon. I clearly wasn’t going to find any peace and quiet until it was done, so I just got it over with, thus:

Go look at it here too.

You have to wonder who designed and built the monstrosity of a second house next to the original Victorian cottage, but in its defence, it’s got amazing views over Cape Town from the deck, and it makes for an OK silhouette on moonrise photos.

Day 677 – London-centric Weather Experiences

Don’t be fooled. There’s much more to the UK than just London.

After a weekend of stormy weather in the UK, in which Storms Malik and Corrie brought winds gusting to 150kph, killing at least two people and leaving tens of thousands of homes without power, residents in the South East of the country are still harping on about their hurricane back in October 1987.

And that was a very windy day, but it’s always interesting to note that it’s the storm that most people remember, even though there have been many, many worse storms in the UK during the intervening 35 years. The difference, of course, is that those storms didn’t affect London, and so ended up way down the list of things that the news programmes reported on. Even the events of this weekend only made it into this morning’s BBC radio bulletin after articles on politics and covid, politics, covid, and house prices. You can be damn sure that if the storms had been in London, it would have been a different story.

This sort of thing leads people to believe that storm warnings in the UK are blown (no pun intended) a bit out of proportion. But they get that impression because they live in London. If they lived in Newcastle or Belfast or Inverness, they’d maybe get a bit more of a genuine UK experience (especially weather-wise!), but for many people (much like the BBC) the UK = London = the UK. And talking/reporting about the weather is often a really good example of this London-centric approach.

“The UK has completely closed down because of the snow, but it was ridiculous, because there was only a tiny covering,” exaggerated one Saffa friend living in – you guessed it – Putney. Never mind that there were 20ft drifts on the Pennines, and Hexham was cut off for a week. Those places don’t exist to people living in London.

I guess it’s the same in SA. We hear about all the stuff in Cape Town, Joburg and Durban. Less so Gqeberha, Upington and Bela Bela. Is it because nothing happens there, that they don’t think we’ll be bothered, or that it’s just too much effort for the news crews to get out into the wilderness?

Having lived outside London for all my UK life, I can tell you that it’s almost certainly that third reason. And I do think that the BBC are getting a bit better, now that at least some of their operations have moved to Salford in the godforsaken North.

But once again, that improvement was sadly missing in today’s order of stories.