I threw back my bedroom curtains on Wednesday morning and gasped as sunlight flooded my room. It was soon after sunrise, so the quality of the light was early-morning gentle. There was little heat in the pale gold sunshine, so it was not the need for warmth that made me hold out my arms to welcome the fluorescent beams that danced towards me.
It was the light that streamed into my room, kissing my slippers, floating over my white, cotton pillows that made purring sounds of contentment emerge from my throat.
It made me think of my life in London in the early 1990s, of my diagnosis with the appropriately abbreviation of SAD (seasonal adjustment disorder) caused by a lack of direct light on the cornea. It made me think of the difference between London, characterised by damp, dreary, grey weeks, and New York with its crisp, icy days made bearable by almost constant sunshine.
Tuesday this week marked the one-week anniversary of the arrival of the rains. Glorious, glorious rain fell solidly for seven days and seven nights, an almost biblical event that will be recounted for years to come. Maybe even a movie titled The Week the Parched Earth Sang.
This past week will mark the end of 2019, and — when people look back on the end of the year — they will remember that week in which the rains fell, for seven days and seven nights. That week, when a shroud of mist hovered over Africa’s financial hub, Johannesburg. That week, when a pewter sky was filled with ominous clouds, pregnant with moisture. That week, when trees dripped and wet pavements turned into slippery accident traps and cars swished to the sweet sound of tyres forging through watery streets.
I have never heard the word f**k used so much in my 61 years and for a host of reasons that I never knew existed without a steady supply of electricity
It will also be remembered for being that dark week, when chaos reigned in the city: traffic jams at blacked out traffic lights; Christmas shoppers frustrated by the hordes of people — many, many with small children — escaping the blackness of their homes and lingering (for hours!) in shopping centres.
It was a week spent in frustration as load-shedding reached farcical proportions. Washing machines ground to a halt. Television sets stood silent, many giving up the ghost as the onslaught of rain and intermittent power surges caused them to send out E48-32 error messages.
A friend spent several sleepless nights sitting up in his bed, unable to plug in his sleep apnoea machine, afraid to fall asleep. He says it keeps him alive; it reminds him to breathe when his body forgets to. His wife rolls her eyes and thinks it’s psychosomatic. *Eye-roll*: “Of course he won’t die without that bloody machine,” she tells everyone when he rants and rages about bloody Eskom.
I have never heard the word f**k used so much in my 61 years and for a host of reasons that I never knew existed without a steady supply of electricity — during a week of non-stop rain.
Google released the most googled subjects and “load-shedding” (followed by Black Friday and drawing eyebrows) was the one word that outshone all other contenders, going back a whole decade.
App, app and a wash-out
I downloaded the app EskomSePush, a rather dismal play on the more pejorative term used mainly, I think, in unsavoury parts of the Western Cape. It’s a backdoor, really, to Eskom’s schedules, but you have to know what suburb you are in (easier said than done) and it obviously doesn’t know when the lights go out not due to load-shedding but due to something blowing up. Based on the cheerful message saying “No Load Shedding” today, I put in a load of washing and switched on my machine only to hear it, 15 minutes into the cycle, grind to an alarming swishing halt.
As I sit here writing this column, unable to access the internet, or my spell-check function (so forgive me for not being able to check if my spelling of apnoea is right). I am wondering if the machine will automatically restart itself, or whether I will have to remove the wet clothes (what a mess that will be) and start again? It’s the sort of conundrum deliberated on only when you are stuck in a very silent world.
No electricity really means absolute silence. We don’t realise what an underlying hum electricity causes: the gentle whirr of the fridge, an almost inaudible buzz coming off plugged in computers, the soft hum of the Wi-Fi modum or television. The sunshine has dried out the road so I can hear the quieter hummm and sssshhh of cars passing by.
I live in neighbourhood that empties out over Christmas. A large number of my neighbours have made the trek down to the coast, or flown off to colder parts of the globe and so the streets are quieter than they are during term time. Silence.
Silence is Golden, the 1967 song by The Tremeloes first told us. It makes me think of the happy (remarkably few) silent times in my life.
When I was little, growing up in Ladysmith, my lovely dad taught English to the young brothers-in-training for the Catholic priesthood. They lived in a secluded environment on a working farm in a wonderful place called Besters.
It was a special treat to be allowed to accompany my dad on his Saturday morning teaching trips. I’d roam around the farm on my own, lie in the long golden stalked grasses, walk over anthills, draw circles using a long, dead stick in the red earth. But the thing that I marveled at most was the silence.
I grew up in a noisy household with four children, two dogs, a helper called Patricia who shouted a lot, a mother who constantly complained about noise and asked for silence, a father with a booming voice…
Silence, I discovered, is not the absence of sound. Rather, it is the absence of noise. Sounds came alive in this sacred space on the Besters farm; the rustling of leaves in the trees; the buzzing of bees, the cries of birds in the sky.
And so today, as I sit here writing in the silence of my room, listening to my fingers tapping against the keyboard, it is the only good thing I can think of about load-shedding.
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