The Umfolosi Wilderness is a special place. Far too small, of course, but its what we have. I read Ian Player’s account of how Magqubu Ntombela taught him about wilderness and Africa and nature. The idea of a wild place where modern man could go to escape the city and re-discover what Africa was like, was born and actioned right here in Mfolosi. Experience it – it’s amazing.
My first trail was ca 1990, when I went with Dusi canoeing buddies Doug Retief, Martin & Marlene Loewenstein and Andre Hawarden. We were joined by a young lass on her own, sent by her father, who added greatly to the scenery:
– Martin peers; I grimace; We’re both thinking of the gorgeous Donna next to me! –
A good sport, she took our gentle teasing well and fended off the horny game ranger with aplomb.
We went in my kombi and some highlights I recall were:
Doug offering “bah-ronies” after lunch one day. We were lying in the shade of a tree after a delicious lunch made by our guides: Thick slices of white bread, buttered and stuffed with generous slices of tomato and onion, salt and black pepper. Washed down with tea freshly brewed over a fire of Thomboti wood. Doug fished around in his rucksack and gave us each a mini Bar One (“bah-ronie”, geddit?). Best tasting chocolate I ever ate, spiced as it was with hunger and exertion.
After the five-night trail we went for a game drive on the way out of the park. Needing a leak after a few bitterly cold brews I left the wheel with the kombi trundling along amiably and walked to the side door of the kombi, ordering Hawarden to take over the driving. Not good at taking orders, he looked at me, waited till I was in mid-stream out of the open sliding door and leant over with his hiking stick and pressed the accelerator. The driverless kombi picked up speed and I watched it start to veer off-road, necessitating a squeezed premature end to my leak and a dive for the wheel. Thanks a lot, Hard One!
‘Pleasure,’ he murmured mildly. Hooligan!
~~oo0oo~~
Thirty years later Andre Hooligan Hawarden wrote:
“Hey, remember that cool walk we did in the game reserve when you had the tape recorder and we attracted the owl? Then next day we lay on the bank of the Umlofosi river and watched the vultures coming down for a lunch time drink and a snooze? That was a wonderful experience. I’ve never forgotten it.”
Please wish your mom happy happy from me (if she still remembers me). The daughter of TP who taught them to sing “and the dogs say goodnight” – Louis Armstrong.
Schoolfriend Mariette van Wyk Greyling responded to my post on Mom’s 90th birthday:
My dad was crazy about ol’ Satchmo. He would have loved seeing this. I got my love for music from him. Those last three weeks that he and my mom spent with me on a remote farm in the Cederberg in December 2006, I introduced him to U2 and Pink Floyd. He was smitten. So my last Xmas gift to him was U2’s Rattle and Hum and Pink Floyd’s Division Bell.
~~oo0oo~~
I said:
Oh goodness, Mary will remember you alright! We only had a few families we’d hang out with, kuier with and sing with, and for a happy while that was Theunis and Martie van Wyk. She still often talks about the factory and the characters who worked there. Stan Moseley was one. I learnt recently that Petra Bissett worked there a while. That factory your Dad ran was a HUGE part of Harrismith in its day. Luigi Bellato worked there. He, Luigina and sons Claudio and Ennio were great family friends of ours.
Tell me more about “goodnight” – I remember Satchmo singing Hello Dolly and What a Wonderful World . . .
~~oo0oo~~
I phoned Mom:
Mother Mary; Mary Methodist. She never ceases to amaze!
I said : Do you remember going to Theunis and Martie van Wyk’s home and listening to Louis Armstrong?
I didn’t have to say another word.
Mary said: I heard it just yesterday! Someone played me Satchmo singing “What a Wonderful World” just yesterday! It was so good hearing it again after all these years. Theunis had a record player and he used to play it loud, and Satchmo said “and the dogs say goodnight” instead of “and the dark sacred night”! Mariette was in your class and then there was Anita and Boeta. And you know Martie’s really not well; She just cries and cries.
I asked: Where did you hear about Martie? She said: Oh, Dossie Farquhar tells me everything. She’s in the same home in Bethlehem. She is Dossie de Villiers; She has two sons in Bethlehem, Neil and someone.Dossie is from Scotland, of course. She phoned me for my birthday and she’s also turning ninety this week so I’ll phone her on her cell. No-one sends cards anymore. I got four cards: Yours from Jessie and Tom; Sheila’s that you all signed that was originally a card to Sheila from Annie (in 1974). And two others. I got lots of phone calls instead.
~~oo0oo~~
.
.
(the dogs say goodnight about 45secs in)
.
~~oo0oo~~ Mariette: Your mom is incredible! What a pin-sharp mind! Goodness. If only my mother could speak to her, it would mean the world to her. None of her old friends have been in touch. I mentioned to you that I dread the twice-weekly phone calls because she just cries and cries. One-way conversation. But she is trapped inside a body with no motor functions – only has hearing and a fairly sharp mind. Binswanger’s Syndrome.
~~oo0oo~~ Mariette: Mary on piano, Pieter, Martie, Theunis, Hugo and Linda Wessels in a semi-circle around her. All well-oiled, singing What a wonderful world, but my dad said the last line should be ‘and the dogs say good night’, instead of the usual ‘and the dark sacred night.’ Then they would hose themselves, singing it again and again. More raucous hilarity. Me in my room busy with world-important affairs trying to get to grips with Goethe’s Sturm und Drang works, plus they were upsetting my poor dog Nikki. I think I was at that very self-important teenage stage. Couldn’t believe adults were so mal. They loved those evenings. Theunis was so enamoured with your mom’s piano playing. Wanted me to emulate her. Afraid those were my Led Zeppelin years, so please, no wishy washy jazz for me.
~~oo0oo~~ Me:
Ah, I had just sent you the email above and then I saw yours.
One of the enduring warm memories I have of childhood is my Mom on the piano surrounded by dronk friends. Her maximum intake was one brandy and ginger ale. ONE!
They called themselves The Goor Koor. Other members were Albertus and Margie Badenhorst, Steve and Hester Schreiber; Jack and Isobel Kemp; Hugo Wessels; And many others over the years.
We’d get sent to bed and I would wait a while and – unable to resist – crawl on my tummy hard against the wall all the way down that long passage and lie just out of sight outside the lounge door; listening; fascinated. If my folks spotted me, I’d be banished back to bed. If one of the other merry revellers, they would wink and keep quiet.
.
When not surrounded by alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke – remember how they used to smoke like chimneys indoors!? ashtrays all over the place! – Mary would play her classical favourites.
Then of course, every week she would dutifully practice the hymns she’d be playing for the Methylated Spirits on Sunday.
.
I too, took piano lessons! Or ‘lesson’. I went to Miss Underwood in my rugby boots. When the next lesson time came I dodged it.
She phoned home – 260 – and Barbara answered, calling me to the phone. She heard the conversation thus: “Yes, Miss Underwood; Yes, Miss Underwood; Yes, Miss Underwood.” **click** I’M NOT GOING!!
.
Nor did I ever attend another lesson.
Self-driving cars won’t need steering wheels one day.
Reminds me of thinking WTF? Who Did That? at the wheel of my puke-green 1974 Peugeot 404 station wagon on the corner of Musgrave Road and St Thomas near the Robert E Lee nightclub of old after hearing a loud thump left rear. What could that be? I asked my companions, but them being drunk they just thought whatever it was it was hilarious. Irresponsible passengers!
Either the pavement had leaned forward and caught the wheel and whipped the tyre off the rim, or the self-driving car had irresponsibly cut the corner. Nothing to do with me, but now I had to try and change that tyre while planet earth was rotating dizzyingly all round me irregardless. Peugeot having not yet perfected the self-changing tyre. My companions were only a handicap, giving raucous and useless advice. They’d been drinking.
And do you think the planet would just cool it for a minute and rotate and revolve less vigorously while I wrestled with the diplopia, the wheel and the swaying? No, in fact I swear it accelerated somewhat. Probably a Chandler wobble happened just then, moving the wheel about 9m from where I was trying to change it. It happens every 433 days.
Being a superb handyman and able to handle my liquor, and by leaning my forehead against the wheel-arch, I got the wheel changed and we staggered into the Robert E Lee in the Los Angeles Hotel and ordered a round, my rowdy and irresponsible passengers still telling me what I coulda, shoulda.
In the morning I staggered to the window in Wakefield Court Doctors Quarters in Durban’s Point Road area to look down at the Peugeot parked below in Prince Street. That feeling of relief that it was there and the mystery as to how it got there. Auto-pilot. Who needs Elon Musk?
– this colour – but a handsome French wagon like the feature pic – OHS 5688 –
Of course I no longer do that shit. In fact the last time I acted irremesponsibly was LONG ago in Mocambique after a few mega R&R’s (rum n raspberries). I was much younger. Must be eight, nine years ago. And I wasn’t driving. A drunk driver on the sand roads in the dunes was trying to shake me off the roof of his 4X4.
So why can’t my kids just skip this portion of their lives? I ask. I also ask critics of self-driving cars, ‘You really think cars can do a worse job than some of us drivers?’
~~~oo0oo~~~
My first R&R actually astonished me, true. The barman in Ponta da Oura (you guys will remember his name) filled the 500ml beer tankard with ice then poured cheap rum out of a plastic bottle to 1cm from the top. NO! I laughed, Whoa! Not so much! He looked at me in apparently genuine concerned sadness and said in his best Portuguese English, “It is too late. I have already poured it”. I understood then, as I watched him add a splash of Schweppes raspberry. This was how it played in Ponta. I girded my loins. It would have to be done. Not long after, a second one arrived and this time I didn’t try ‘n tell a local how to do things . .
~~~oo0oo~~~
Part of Earth’s wobble may be our fault for driving around aimlessly at night burning up fossil fuels! Seems since 1899, the Earth’s axis of spin has shifted about 10.5 meters. Seems a third of the shift is due to melting ice and rising sea levels, particularly in Greenland. Another third of the wobble is due to land masses expanding upward as the glaciers retreat and lighten their load. The final portion is the fault of the slow churn of the mantle, the viscous middle layer of the planet. I felt that slow churn deep down myself, and that night I think the axis shifted a good deal of that 10.5 metres . .
Stage Three (in yellow on the map) of my Great North American Road Trip started in Cobleskill in upstate New York, where Stage Two had ended.
A red VW Bug swept up the drive and out poured three lovely Okies and a handsome longhaired Aussie. Sherry Porter-Steele, owner of the Bug and twins Dottie and Dale Moffett. Sherry had been a favourite young high school teacher of the girls in Ardmore a few years prior, and involved in Rotary exchange student selection. Jonathan Kneebone was an Aussie, a dinkum character, say no more. Liked a beer.
We headed north to the Canadian border. Five laughing, happy peeps in a VW bug. It wasn’t a squeeze at all, we were having so much fun. At the border the man leaned in, asked “All American?” Yeah, we’re American, chimed Sherry, Dottie and Dale. He stepped back and was about to wave us through when Jonathan and I said “Um, no”.
“Australian” said Kneebone and the man made to step back again and wave us through when he registered what I had said.
“Uh, come with me please sir. I need to check your passport,” he said. An hour later we were off again – to Montreal. That’s where you see Dottie sitting on the grass.
On to Ottawa where we bumped into Indira Ghandi on a state visit to Pierre Trudeau. She chose to arrive while we were staring at some government building or other. That’s the only time I’ve seen a head of state in the flesh ever. And one’s enough.
Somewhere around here I dinged Sherry’s car! “I’ll drive!” I shouted as we headed for the pub. I promptly reversed out the driveway, swung, and BANG! I got out and saw to my great relief – how horrible was this!? – that I’d hit a huge Dodge pickup with a bumper a yard deep; not a scratch on it! We could hop back into the red bug and bug off to the pub. Poor Sherry’s prize red VW wasn’t so lucky. I wrecked her left rear fender and light and I had no money to pay for the damage. DAMN!! Sherry was an absolute star about it, bless her! I still owe you, Sherry Porter-Steele!
Then Toronto, Waterloo and up around Lake Superior, Sudbury, Sault St Marie, Thunder Bay. What a sight Superior was! Biggest stretch of fresh water imaginable. For a Vrystater, awe-inspiring! We camped en route wherever we could squirrel away for free. Only once were we shoo-ed off and told ‘I’m Sorry, You Can’t Camp Here.’ This by a Mountie with a big hat, so it was worth it! Yes SIR!
Here we used a rock for a mattress. We had just woken up but Kneebone was already being Australian!
– Me, Dottie, Dale & Jonathan Kneebone (can you guess where from?) –
Once we stayed in an old railway station converted to a sort of backpackers, the track ripped up and turned into a beautiful trail through the pines.
Then, suddenly, we needed to go canoeing. When in Canada, canoe! So we hired two boats in Quetico National Park, Lake of the Woods. All names may not be exact or current – these are 45yr-old memories!
– internet pics of the stunning lakes in Lake of the Woods area –
We planned a three-night trip, but after one night we turned back and ran, tails between our legs! We had spent the day trying to dodge dark clouds of midges and no-see-ems, or black flies. When you ran your hand through your hair it came out covered in blood. That night we pitched the tents on an island in a cloud of mozzies. We lined up with our kit, zipped open, dived in and zipped up immediately. So fast that we only had fourteen million mosquitoes in the tent, a fraction of the hordes that were hovering and zeeeee-ing outside!
– internet pics again – we were too busy to take pictures! –
Ama-azing! Canada sure has bugs! But what beautiful country:
As we’d cut our canoe trip short we decided to carry on into Manitoba, but Canada is vast and we realised we might bite off more than time would allow us to chew; so we soon cut back and headed south for the US border at International Falls, into Minnesota, across the Mississippi River where it’s still quite small and headed south for Iowa, where I had to leave the gang.
They dropped me off and buzzed off into the sunset, three lovely ladies and an Aussie, companions with who I had just spent one of the most unforgettable times of my life. That REALLY was special. So uncomplicated and relaxed and unstructured (unless Sherry was planning as we went – she was, come to think of it! I bet you she was!), and free and friendly. Wonderful people.
– the FOUR legs of my road trip – Summer of ’73 –
My host family from Apache Don & Jackie Lehnertz were up there and would be driving me back to Apache via Iowa, Missouri and Kansas on Stage Four. I’m afraid I slept a lot on this leg of the trip!
Jim n Katie Patterson, wonderful host family in Apache, took lovely girlfriend Dottie Moffett and me on a special trip out west in the summer of ’73, driving across the Texas panhandle to New Mexico. Dottie and I went part of the way with the Manars in their beautiful new car towing the newest of the Jeeps.
– crossing the Texas panhandle to New Mexico, the Manar’s Lincoln Continental –
Jim’s Mom Merrell Patterson had a lovely cottage outside Red River in the Sangre de Christo mountains. It could sleep a whole bunch of people if they were good friends! Some of the families did stay elsewhere nearby though, so we weren’t crowded. It was great fun.
– Granma Merrill’s Cottage outside Red River –
Here we stayed with the gang – the wonderful group of Apache friends the Pattersons hung out with: Manars, Hrbaceks, Mindemanns and Paynes.
Jim & Mary-KateThat’s what Seagrams will do for candles! Glen’s worried!Peggy, Glen, Jim. Pug, Walter, Katie. Jim blows Seagrams breath– Jim had a birthday – his breath didn’t dowse the candles, it flared them up! –
The Jeeps were perfect for the mountain trails
Hebcoolers on the tailgates – Beer & Bloody MaryOld Red leads the pack in the Sangre de Cristo mountains
After a terrific stay there, we headed off to Vegas in the Patterson’s Ford LTD via Colorado and Utah
– the LTD, with Dottie Moffett, Katie and Jim Patterson –
Then via Utah, where we visited Bryce Canyon and Zion NP.
In Vegas we stayed at The Stardust on The Strip. I learnt to gamble, I learnt to win. I battled to lose. Dottie was a good luck charm! I kept winning small amounts so kept on and on gambling, determined to lose. Finally as dawn approached we were down by a considerable fortune – $10 – and could go to bed.
We saw Joan Rivers being delightfully rude and Petula Clark warbling away (also Joan warbled a song and Petula told a joke!). I learnt a Vegas rule when I saw Jim slip the doorman a cri$p note to get us a good table!
– internet pic of 1973 Vegas strip scene –
After Vegas we stopped off at The Grand Canyon: We stared down at this awesome sight from the lookout on the south rim. We only had a few hours there, so we’re just look-see tourists. Suddenly I couldn’t stand it! I had to get down there. I told Dottie I was going and she said me too!
We started running down the Bright Angel trail. It’s about 10km to the river. I’ll give us an hour, I thought. The run was easy on a well-maintained track with the only real obstacle being the ‘mule trains’. Only once we had to step off the trail and let a bunch of mules pass. We made sure we were on the upside!
At first it was all open desert trail, but at Indian Gardens I was surprised by the amount of greenery in the canyon. From the rim it looks like all desert, but in the protected gorges there’s green shrubbery and even some tall trees.
In well under an hour we got to just above the river. I stared in awesome wonder at the swiftly-moving green water. I had never seen such a large volume of water flowing clear like that. Our South African rivers mostly run muddy brown, and I wasn’t expecting clear water. Right then I thought I MUST get onto this river! I’d started kayaking a couple of years before, but if I’d been asked I’d probably have said on a raft, little knowing that in eleven years time I would kayak past that very spot, under that same bridge in 1984 on a flood-level river!
– in 1973 on foot the water looked like this –– our kayak trip in 1984 – these are our supporting rafts –
The hike back out was steep, but hey, we were 18yrs old! Cross-country running had been my favourite obsession the year before, and Dottie was Oklahoma’s No.2 tennis player, so no (or an acceptable amount of) sweat!
Then we headed home, by and large following the new I40 – which replaced the famous old historic Route 66 in places. Flagstaff Arizona, Albuquerque New Mexico, Amarillo Texas, and back to Oklahoma. To Apache and then on to take Dottie home to Ardmore. What a wonderful trip with amazing people!
I learned later:
The name Colorado was for its muddy colour and its clarity is in fact an undesirable artifact because of the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell upstream;
The 10km climb down Bright Angel is about 1000m vertically, and every metre down you’re going back in geological time! Fascinating. When we paddled through we had a paddler who is a geology prof with us, who regaled us with tales of how old each section was.
They tell you Do Not try to hike from the rim to the river and back in one day! Why, we thought?
Jim has hiked the rim to rim hike through the canyon a number of times since – an annual pilgrimage – the last time he did it he was 70!
~~~oo0oo~~~
***most pics off the ‘net – I’ll add my own as I find them!***
My four-stage 1973 Road Trip North started in Apache Oklahoma. In Stage One Katie Patterson drove us down in her Ford LTD to stay with her folks, Mama and Papa Hays, in Shreveport, Louisiana. There we ‘visited’ as Oklahomans say; We were spoiled – I was a third, older, honorary grandchild! We played golf – I recall smacking the ball into one inch ‘rough’ under big old trees draped in lichen, or old man’s beard; And we ate superbly.
Papa Hays gave me a beautiful old book:
– Ginny, Katie, Mama Hays, Papa Hays, Jimmy, Larry, Mary-Kate – in Shreveport Louisiana –
Larry and his sister Ginny joined us, having driven down from Cobleskill NY and we got ready for Stage Two of my Great North American Road Trip: Heading north-east in a light greenish-grey Volkswagen Bug, 116 SHE.
– Larry, his ‘red’ VW and the U-Haul –
Larry and Ginny had packed their camping kit on the back seat; One more passenger meant we now needed a U-Haul carrier on the roof.
I remember surprisingly little about this trip north-east! We left the Red River and crossed the Arkansas River near Little Rock; I remember camping:
– Larry, Boy Scout! –
I remember crossing the mighty Mississippi River in or near St Louis, where the Missouri joins it;
The only thing I remember clearly is hoping my ID would be checked at the door when we went for my very first legal beer at a TGIF bar in Missouri. I had drank beer as a schoolboy in the Vrystaat, led astray by good friends, then as a seventeen yr-old in Oklahoma, in a 21 state, I had drank beer in Louisiana and Arkansas, but I turned 18 in the interim, and now at last I was eighteen in an 18 state! Legal at last!
I held my SA passport ready . . I now know (maybe not, it was more likely June or July by now) it was a Sunday; Richard Nixon was the President; We were listening to Killing Me Softly With His Song, and Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree; and NOW, at last, I would be checked and blessed for the first time . .
But the man at the door just waved me through. ** sigh! ** why have I always looked much older than I am? Nowadays people think I’m a hundred in the shade. Next they’ll be wanting to cancel my liquor licence, take away my drivers licence and mop my dribbling . . .
Oh, well, at least some other world-firsts happened that week: The first cellphone call; The World Trade Center twin towers opened; the first international rugby sevens tournament took place; the last American soldier ignominiously left Vietnam; and Pablo Picasso died.
I also remember getting to Larry’s hometown Cobleskill, a beautiful little town in upstate New York, and meeting his parents. I’d heard about Cobleskill since 1969 when Larry breezed into Harrismith and we spent a fun year making memories and amok; early experiments mixing beer and petrol – which he called gas. Well, we had a gas! Fun times!
That’s a really vague and sketchy recollection of a magic route! Larry doesn’t remember much more. In fact he confidently remembered the VW Bug as being red! ‘Tis not only my memory glands that are dodgy, I’m relieved to tell.
He’s going to ask his sister Virginia. She’ll know more. I know we went here, cos my trusty Olympus trip 35 camera recorded it, but where is it?
– someone will know where this is – Missouri River? Mississippi River? –
~~oo0oo~~
A few days later, another VW Bug arrived, full of gorgeous Oklahomans; and one less-than-glamorous Aussie (where are you, Jonathan Kneebone?) . . . and this Bug was red.
– l to r – gorgeous Oklahomans Dottie Moffett, Sherry Porter-Steele and Dale Moffett –
Subject: Lost in the USA Hey Larry – Help a lost Vrystater who can’t remember where he has been! I know we left Shreveport in your lil greyish-greenish VW Bug and headed up to Little Rock (I guess on highways 49 and then 30) but after that I’ve hit a blank. And I know you took us to some interesting places. Do you remember the route you took? I’d love to hear it. Sort of a trip down Forgettery Lane. Cheers – Koos
Larry:
Forgettery Lane? You’re talking to someone who’s pretty much strolling down Alzheimer’s Avenue! (at least where 40+-year-old memories are concerned). BTW, if we traveled in a VW Beetle, it must have been red.
Fortunately for us both, Ginny tends to be much better in the recall department than I am. I believe we started the trip as a way for me to check out some law schools (which I was sort of seriously considering at the time, but — fortunately — never pursued). She was good enough to volunteer to come along as a companion/navigator, though I’m afraid I was a bit tough on her in that latter capacity, especially when I got freaked out driving in Washington, D.C., where the traffic was a bit intense for a kid from the country and the city center is famously laid out like the spokes of a wheel, as opposed to the more traditional grid pattern. Not what I’d call intuitive.
Thankfully we’re still on speaking terms, which I fear I put in jeopardy there for a while, so I’ll ask her (by means of CC-ing her on this e-mail) for any details she may recall. Unless I traumatized her so badly that she’s repressed the entire experience! Or perhaps it had the opposite effect and seared it into her memory — let’s hope for that. We were just together (in Roanoke) over the Easter holiday; wish I could have asked her about it directly.
That’s a very long way of saying no, I don’t really remember our route — sorry. I’m still hopeful Ginny may be able to save my bacon.
Me and Sarah. When one of my favourite comedians Sarah Silverman wrote her autobiography she compared herself to Ernest Hemingway and Fyodor Dostoevsky, classing herself as a brilliant and serious writer . . that’s Sarah. Bashful.
And also bashfully, her book’s ‘afterword’ is by God. He – yes, HIM – writes about Silverman in the year 2063, on the occasion of her death at 93, with the epitaph “She loved dogs, New York, television, children, friendship, sex, laughing, heartbreaking songs, marijuana, farts, and cuddling.”
In the book she tells how at age two she would make her father laugh by saying “fuck”; She admits to avidly smoking marijuana; and she tells how she wet the bed until age sixteen. It was an important enough part of her childhood that she titled the book after that fact. That’s what I love most about Sarah: Her honesty.
Well . . I wet my bed until I was eleven or twelve or thirteen, too. So I am glad to find out other good people did as well. I also love the leveling effect: You know the boy who was so clever and in the first rugby team? Teachers’ favourite? You envied him? Well, he wet his bed. My message (and I think Sarah’s)? – You’re OK.
=======ooo000ooo=======
Nocturnal enuresis, also called bedwetting, is involuntary urination while asleep after the age at which bladder control usually occurs. Bedwetting in children and adults can result in emotional stress. Can and did!
Bedwetting is the most common childhood complaint. Most girls achieve bladder control by ages 4–7 and most boys by ages 4–6. By ten years old, 95% of children are dry at night. I was a five-percenter.
Most bedwetting is a developmental delay – not an emotional problem or physical illness, so most treatment plans aim to protect or improve improve self-esteem – and my Mom certainly did that. At first she’d help and reassure, but as I grew older, I would kick almost automatically into a procedure Mom gave me: I would wake up horrified, jump up, roll up the wet sheets, soak them in the bath, wash, put on dry piejams and go back to sleep. The mattress would be protected by the plastic sheet we put under the bottom sheet. Usually only me and Mom would know. Thanks to her, here I am, relatively unscathed!!
than a bad memory – Franklin Pierce Adams (1881-1960), American columnist & wit
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Steven Pinker has data and figures for important things in this world we live in and how these things have changed over the years.
And some people hate him for it! They know the world is worse than it was in the ‘good old days’, but he shows data that shows how some things – a lot of things – have actually improved.
Wars still go on, including the worst war in a generation in Syria, but by and large the trend in war has been downward. A fraction of the number of people are killed in wars today, compared to the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.
In fact, five-sixths of the earth’s surface is free of war. That’s an example of a kind of trend that you can’t really pick up from the news because when a country doesn’t have a war, it’s not news.
Child mortality is down.
Maternal mortality is down.
Illiteracy is down. Ninety percent of the world’s population under the age of 25 can read and write.
We’re even getting smarter: IQ scores have been rising by three points a decade for almost a century. (The Flynn Effect refers to the observed rise in IQ scores over time).
We waste less of our waking hours on housework.
We work fewer hours.
We have wider access to culture.
Many, many more people who would have lost contact with their families can now phone home.
Its much easier for people working far from home to send money home.
All these developments won’t make the news, but give you a bit more confidence in the way the world is heading, says Pinker, to boos from people who seem to dislike – and distrust – good news.
Part of the problem is when pessimists speak they speak in serious, sober tones and people tend to nod gravely. Optimists tend to be more upbeat and human nature looks on that with misgiving – as though the optimist is being (heaven forbid!) frivolous! Years of listening to dominees and politicians have made us think pessimism is serious – and thus true.
If we could go back to the good old days of our youths we would hear our elders seriously complaining about how bad things are!
========ooo000ooo=======
See this TED talk: Steven Pinker: Is the world getting better or worse?
Sheila asked: Hi Koos. What make were our bikes? Something with an R. Ruttludge? Rudling?
I answered, ‘Rudge’. The same Rudge ridden by the English King.
‘Strue!
Sheila’s and Barbara’s were red, mine was blue. Given to us by Mom and Dad around 1960 to 1965, I’d guess. We were certainly in the Kleinspan School and Barbara would have started there in 1958 or 1959, Sheila in 1961 or 1962 and me in-between those dates. They made the level, less-than-one-mile trip to school and back a breeze. We’d park them under cover at school in special bike parks with a slot in the concrete for the front wheel to go in and metal hoops to hold them upright.
Ours were WAY more basic than the one above though. Only a back brake, no gears, no cables, no light. They did have a little L-shaped attachment in front of the handle-bar where we could attach a battery-powered square silver torchlight.
The company Rudge-Whitworth Ltd. Coventry, Englandwas one of the prominent pushbike makers of the classic British era … Eventually bought by Raleigh in 1943, the Rudge name takes a rightfully prominent spot in England’s cycling history.
Dan Rudge built the first Rudge high bicycles in 1870. In 1894 Rudge merged with the Whitworth Cycle Co. to form Rudge-Whitworth. They made an excellent reputation for themselves over the next twenty years for producing a full range of beautifully made machines with many clever and unique features. Rudges were ridden by King George V and family. See?There it is! Royal bums sat on seats just like ours!
The name was finally killed sometime in the early 1960s in Britain, but may well have been used in export markets later.
Later on, in high school, I got a bigger black ‘dikwiel’ bike – a ‘balloon tyre bike’ – tougher more adventurous! Somewhat like these:
I asked Pierre: Can you remember what we called our dikwiel bikes? Each one had a nickname. His immediate reply: Bolts, Schlump and Arrii. I had only remembered Arrii, named after a desert camel joke. Pierre continued: Like yesterday. Also recall the (world’s) first mountain bike race now known as MBR’s down Queens Hill and Tuffy whipping out the barbed wire fence. Regards Pierre
Vrystaat Confessions 