A Right Ol' Romp

When I was a lot slightly younger, I’d often spot a gaggle of middle-aged women in a bar. It was always the same. They’d be the loudest. Cackling and heckling. Tipsy and giddy, ordering silly cocktails and knocking ‘em back with gusto. Dancing like loons. Laughing with their heads thrown back, showing their teeth. I’d see them and I’d think. ‘Ag shame hey. How sad. How mortifying.’ I’d wonder how on earth they could behave that way. To me, their social abandon was cringe-worthy and just, like, totally uncool.

Now 15 some years later. I am one of those women. I am the middle-age romper I once scorned. I get all tarted up with my friends. We do our nails. We pluck our eyebrows. And our chins. We tuck our wobbly bits into our spanx and blowdry our hair. We giggle like schoolgirls. We drink frivolous cocktails, make random toasts and flirt with the barman. We dance to music we don’t understand, but we dance anyway. We cry with laughter until we need to go to the loo. Often. On account of the pelvic floor thing. And at the end of the night, when we’re staggering back to our hotel on unsteady high heels, screeching and talking over each other, we’re deliriously and drunkenly happy. Happy to have spent a great night out together. With great food, ridiculously over-priced prosecco and shameful dance moves. 

They say that youth is wasted on the young. It is. The older I get, the more I understand just how much. I wish I could go back to my twenty-something self. To the uptight madam who was so desperate to fit in she simply faded out. I’d tell her to lighten the hell up. I’d tell her to worry less and enjoy more. I’d make it mandatory for her to order a round of pink sparkly drinks, talk nonsense, laugh at nothing, kick off her shoes and hit the dance floor. I’d tell her to embrace her youth and all the freedom and opportunity it represents. And to smile and wave at the marauding troop of middle-aged women as they totter past her on their big night out.

Most Saturday nights I’m tucked up at home. In my pajamas. On the couch. Binge-watching Gilmore Girls. My old faithful laundry basket next to me like a trusty labrador while I untether tights and pair socks. My husband on his laptop, earphones in. My children asleep upstairs. This picture pretty much represents the standard order of weekly domesticity. Weekends are rarely different. 

But every six months or so, my girlfriends and I grab a gap. Away from the socks and tights. Away from our husbands and children. We simply take time out. To romp. To let go. To dance like no one is watching. And it’s glorious. A cherished moment amidst the routine of motherhood, marriage, work and everything in between. 

And when I'm out with the girls and I pass an anxious looking young ‘un clutching her drink at the bar, pulling down at her dress, fiddling with her hair and trying her best to make aloof look attractive, I make a point to catch her eye and smile. I do my best to exude a friendly how-fun-is-this vibe. Naturally she pretends she doesn't see me, whips her head in the opposite direction and angles her body away so fast it's like I flashed her my C-section scar or something. But then that's the young for you. What do they know anyway? I take comfort in the fact that in a decade or so when she's enjoying a long anticipated night out with her girlfriends and she's got a houseful of kids and a husband with his earphones in, she'll embrace a good ol' middle-age romp.
Just like I do now. 

True story.

Truer story still.

The Best of British

So I’m pretty hard on Britain. With good reason at times. The relentlessly drippy weather. The lack of space - indoor and out. The stiff upper lipped locals with toxic teeth. Health and safety hypersensitivity. Wayward-wheel supermarket trolleys. The deafening Heathrow flight path. I bang on a lot about how different life is on mud island. And it is. No big revelation there, innit. But there is good. I do enjoy many things about life here. I thought I’d share the best of Britain, from a Saffa’s perspective:

1) The NHS. Ok, so the National Health Service here is like marmite. People either love it or hate it. It’s mostly the migrants like us who love it. And it's the locals who think it’s shite because they’ve got nothing to compare it to. In my opinion, the fact that the state pays for all of your medical treatment – whether it’s a bunion, a boil or a baby – is bloody (no pun intended) marvellous. Coming from a third world country with no state-funded healthcare to speak of and a medical aid industry that makes a killing (pun intended) from the middleclass it’s a no-brainer for us to embrace a state-funded service that gets it right most of the time. And cocks messes up only some of the time.

2) Security. This one is bound to be raised. Or not raised is more apt in this context. The absence of burglar bars. Firearms. Alarms. Panic buttons. Razor wire. Armed response. Electric fences. Guarded entry. Gated communities. It’s not to say that crime doesn’t happen here. Of course it does. It’s just not in your face. All of the time. People don’t live with a panicked vigilance to crime. It’s refreshing to sleep with the windows wide open. I creep downstairs in the early hours often. But it’s to check that I didn’t leave the oven on. Not to see whether there's human-shaped shadow lurking in the darkness.

3) History and tradition. The Brits do love to bask in a significant historical moment. They go positively ga-ga for a bit of pomp and ceremony. With bunting and a windband of course. Buildings and architecture are revered. As are statues and monuments. And everything is old. Like proper old. We’re talking centuries old. There’s a real passion for history here. And how it impacts today. It’s pretty cool to have such a sense of respect for the bygone era and the diligent preservation of historical artefacts to share with future generations. I mean a woman recently received a 7-month prison sentence for urinating on a war memorial while she was on bail after urinating on it before. Actual jail time she's getting. With robbers and abusers and murderers. This war memorial is that important. And rightly so. In SA, we seem to be smashing or burning ours. Makes for a nice change.

4) Parks and recreation. It has to be said that there’s nothing more pleasant than a well-manicured bush. In a park full of well-manicured bushes. With flowers and fountains. It’s all so civilised. The children’s playgrounds are immaculate. No rust or ramshackle. The sand even gets combed daily by the council for shite. Climbing frames, zip-liners, pirate ships – it’s all here. For the children. And for the adults? All the wifi, coffee and cake you can debit your card at.

5) Walking culture. So in South Africa we drive. Everywhere. Here, we walk. Everywhere. To town. To the park. To the river. To the station. To the pub. To the hairdresser. To a curry night with the girls. Or a braai with mates. It’s just what people do. And you don’t need pepper spray or a walking buddy either. I march home on my tippy-toes (for those who’ve seen me walk) from the station, along the river, under the bridge and I don’t look over my shoulder once. I used to. Every 10 seconds. Until I realised that I’d become the threat. To other people. Who started to give me a very wide berth. A twitchy white woman with a spastic neck lurching forward and backward in a nervous gait must've been a pretty scary sight. I now walk forward. With my head forward too.

6) Education. State schools are free. And depending on where you live, they’re good. Really good. The teachers work hard. They don't get paid like someone in Zuma's cabinet. But then they're not on the breadline either. Education is proper here. It's competitive. In the classroom and out. I've mentioned before about how my daughter is 4 and she can read. She'll be doing my tax return in a year or so. I do worry though about where the play went. And the sports. But this is what the world looks like now. And unless I homeschool my kids - which is about as likely as Donald inviting Syrian or Mexican refugees to take up permanent residence in Trump Towers - I go with it and hope for the best for my kid's education. Which is pretty much my own attitude to my own education all those years ago. The point is - with a British education it's not going to be long before my children will be a lot more clever than me. Without Google backup.

7) Inflation of 0.5%. And I’m only using this in terms of groceries because what do I know about anything else, really. So grocery prices very seldom increase dramatically. The consumer price index is low. They take the cost of food very seriously here. You pay for bread and milk pretty much what you paid a decade ago. Even petrol doesn’t really change dramatically in the way that we’re used to seeing down South. 

8) Public transport. In South Africa if you don’t have a car, you’re pretty stuffed. Unless you live and work from home, buy your groceries from the supermarket that’s next door, all your mates live on the same street, the beach is around the corner and the doctor/dentist/pharmacist are your other neighbours – you’ll need a car. Here if you don’t have a car it just means you live in London. Trains, tubes, buses and taxis are how people get around. It’s safe. Mostly. Unless you’re on a night tube and someone vomits. That’s never safe. It’s reasonably priced. Mostly. Especially when you consider what it costs to own a car: petrol, road tax, MOT, licensing, services and parking. And it’s extremely convenient. Mostly. Unless someone decides to off themselves on the tracks and there’s a moerse mess and an even bigger delay. Then it’s pretty inconvenient. But all in all, the public transport infrastructure in the UK is fantastic.

9) Online retail. I shop for my groceries online and a cheerful chap wheels them into my kitchen in very handy demarcated freezer, fridge and cupboard compartments. Every week. At a time that I choose. He’s polite, yet professional. He never accepts the tea and chat that I proffer. But he’ll always check that my plums are firm, my baps haven't been squashed and my eggs aren’t cracked. From clothes to camping pegs, beds to braai accessories - we even order plants for the garden online. There is nothing that can't be delivered to your door. And if it’s broken/wrong/late or you’ve simply changed your mind, you can return it. No one gives you grief or charges you for stuffing up a size or making ridiculous fashion choices after you've had too much vino and decide a midnight retail binge is a good idea. And no one steals your stuff. Even a big shiny parcel that the postie leaves on your doorstep with direct street access. Discovering a parcel propped up against my door ready and waiting is a thrill that never gets old. Like having my melons assessed for bruising or my rump delicately handled by the ever-faithful supermarket deliveryman. Never gets old. 

10) The humour. It’s not for everyone. But to me the British humour is hilarious. From sarcasm and sexual innuendo to intellectual wit and banter with deadpan delivery – I love it all. Ok so I've got a pretty low bar. I laughed until I cried at Bridesmaids and I think I may have wet myself a little when I watched American Pie and The Hangover. But the British do it best for me. You know how I feel about Ricky Gervais. British comedy is funny when it's clever. And funny when it's not. When it's just coarse and crass. I laugh a lot here. And that's good. As Charlie Chaplin famous said: "Through humour, we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, the unimportant." So I'll just go with that.

The Big Issue of Little Space

I’ve written before that when we moved to the UK and I first opened the door to our modest end-of-terrace, my then four-year-old son immediately asked where the rest of our house was. He genuinely couldn’t understand why we’d left his spacious home in South Africa and travelled across a continent to live in a tiny half-house in Windsor. He kept saying: “But why? I just don't understand why.” I did what I always do as an emotional cripple mother when I don't know what to say and the cracks start showing, I fobbed him off with a distraction. But actually as is often the case with the unwitting wisdom of the fledglings, he touched a nerve. And not the emotional cripple mother one. That's another nerve. For another day.

As I've mentioned craploads a few times, I was raised with a blue horizon that stretched as far as the eye could see. Hills and valleys formed the backdrop of my day. Every day. This supreme sense of space framed my reality. It’s a part of who I am. Losing it still feels rather unnatural. More unnatural than having shite weather for 10 months of the year. It’s one of the most difficult adjustments to life that I’ve had to wrap my head around. It’s something that you never quite get over either. You just try to learn how to deal with it. Like fat corrupt incompetent politicians stealing from the people to line their pockets and the curtains for their mansion. A screwing from Sars. Inflation at 6.3%. Forking over a small fortune to DSTV every month for 400 channels when you only ever watch four. 

Properties sprawl in South Africa and a terrace is a flat grass or paved area built up alongside a slope. In the UK urban areas, properties are stacked like dominos and a terrace has a completely different meaning. Terraces are a row of mirror-image houses that share side walls. Built as a means to provide high-density accommodation for the working class in the 19^th century, terraced houses remain popular today. By 2011, a fifth of all new houses built were terraced. They’re easier to convert as few are listed (which means they're architecturally or historical important and therefore protected from major alteration) making planning permission unnecessary. And, according to The English Heritage Trust, they're 60% cheaper to maintain on average than semi-detached or detached homes.

As a person from the South, life in a terraced home takes some getting used to. Before moving to the UK, we knew our neighbours in that we knew they existed. There was a house next to ours. People lived in it. We exchanged numbers for security purposes, but we rarely saw or heard them. Here, it’s rare not to see your neighbours. Or your neighbour’s neighbours and theirs, and so on. You see them parking their cars in the street. You spot them over the fence in their garden. You hear when they come home late. You hear the scraping of chairs on their patio. The sound of bins being dragged on to the pavement on bin day. You smell when they crank up the gas braai. You’re aware of people around you. All of the time.

Just as aware as we are of them, they must be of us. Unless they’re stone deaf or blind, there’s no way they don’t notice us. They hear when my kids bawl in the bath because the one clubbed the other over the head with Dora the Explorer and the third has rubbed an entire bottle of shampoo onto their genitals. They hear the shrieks of delight when their dad chases them around the garden or I come outside carrying ice-cream cones. They see my eldest climbing a tree buck-naked, my daughter watering the walls, buck-naked. They see when my toddler son, yep you guessed it... buck-naked, squats and poos on the decking and then uses a plastic spade to smear it all over the outside furniture. They see me hose him down and dash inside for the disinfectant. They hear both of our howls.

We share a space simply divided by two walls. Side by side, we raise our children. We deal with the drama of the day. We dream for the future. We lead our lives in such close proximity, and yet we’re strangers. I have a friend who uttered the first word to her neighbour after a decade of living alongside one another. How utterly bonkers. A space oddity indeed. When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to find a field and build a house. With no up-close view of another house. Where my kids can crap unnoticed on a lawn that takes longer than 10 minutes to mow. Our neighbours will be cows. Of the bovine variety. Not the other kind. I'll happily swap Costa Coffee, Tesco and Gap on my doorstep for a space to call my own. When I'm a grown-up... so in a few years yet. But you saw it here first. Our neighbours heard it first of course. They hear everything.

I'm coming for you.

I'm an Alien. I'm a Legal Alien

So I’m South African. Born and raised. I carry with me a distinctive green passport and I speak with flat vowels and use the words “hey” “yah” and “bru” a lot. Most of my loved ones live in the land of green and gold, I get choked up when I hear Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika and I often dream of the rolling hills of KZN. I’m undeniably South African, however I am not a resident of South Africa. I am a resident of Britain, however I am not British.

I am able to vote in both countries. I pay taxes in both countries. In my homeland though I’m a native. I can get a mortgage. I have a credit rating. In the country that I’ve chosen to make our home, I’m a migrant and I tick a box for ethnicity that reads “White Other”. I cannot get a mortgage. I have no credit rating. My children attend a British school, speak with a British accent and learn about the 66 monarchs spread over a history of 1500 years. They are being raised in Britain by two soutie Saffas whose only previous experience of royalty was an encounter with a queen in a pink feather boa and silver stilettos in Greenpoint, Cape Town. There was no castle either, except of the lager kind. 

I instinctively refer to South Africa as “home”. It’s my default setting. It’s not correct though. The UK is technically home. It’s where we are. It’s where we live. Even though our resident status is currently subject to a visa. Even though we can be asked to leave our home. “Pak jou goed en trek” would be the Afrikaans version of the UK Border Agency’s courteously worded instruction that would most likely come via same-day recorded post. The British do love their Royal Mail.

Three and a half years in I feel slightly at odds with where I belong. I’m having what can only be described as an immigration identity crisis. On the one hand, we haven’t lived here long enough to warrant citizenship. And on the other hand, we’ve been away from South Africa long enough to feel out of it.

Sting wrote a song about being an alien. A legal alien. An Englishman in New York. I’m neither English, nor am I in New York. But I can understand those lyrics. I feel a lot like a legal alien. I stand out in my Saffa-ness. The way I raise my children with little respect or regard for health and safety. How they run kaalgat like mountain goats in the garden. How we all like to go barefoot. The braais we have in the depths of winter. I’m proud of my heritage, but having to constantly link the dots for people gets tiring. “Why are you here?” they ask. “How long do you plan to stay?” The former is easy to answer. A career opportunity for my husband and an adventure for our family. The latter – not so much. I leave things open and vague. The Brits are happy with that. It’s just up their street of aloof where you turn right at polite but stop at over-share.

Being as I am a human being who needs a piece of paper backed by a very good business reason to live in this country, this whole Brexit debacle struck a chord. It seems crazy to think that in a world intrinsically connected by trade, technology, knowledge and so much more – it’s still perceived as good governance to impose borders to restrict the freedom of movement for people who seek to work, study, travel or gain asylum. Borders intended to block those who simply aspire to their best life. I still think of the majority of humanity as good. Some may call that naïve. I call it being a South African who lives with hopeful heart and a spirit full of Ubuntu. As Madiba famously once said: “A fundamental concern for others in our individual and community lives would go a long way in making the world the better place we so passionately dreamt of.” 

Every human being is searching for a place to call home. No government should have the power to intervene in this pursuit. It’s a basic human right as far as I’m concerned. I am not alone in my quest for a sense of belonging or in my feelings of unsettledness it appears. It’s a problem very close to home at this moment in time. 

And so for now, I shall make like a local and with a stiff upper lip live with my head in one country and my heart in another and hope that the two are reunited soon. And I’ll look to Sting and his wise lyrics for guidance and “Be yourself no matter what they say.” There’s got to be something in that. I mean look how well it turned out for him. Alien and all.

I had to tick that box. True story.

Truer story still.