take two acetylsalicylic acid and call me in the morning

yesterday, in a moment of feminine agony, i popped over to murray our homeopath/gp. now murray’s practice is almost in the cyclops’s garden, so i do a lot of popping over in his lunch hour. two things happen there, either he dispenses homeopathy or i dispense humour. i feel it my moral duty to him and his patients to tease him and be silly, as all day long he has to have a very serious face, well-disposed ears and an empathetic heart. poor fellow, i would have  guffawed at someone else’s trauma ages ago. i guess that’s why i never entered the healing profession.

nevertheless murray first offered me a myprodol. funny thing is my sister-in-law had just been telling me how great myprodol makes you feel, so i said, “yes please.” my keenness must have triggered warning bells, so he said, i have some neurofen. eish, i said, i don’t usually take such strong stuff. well, he said, do you know you strong panado is? ok, hand over the neurofen.

firstly you must understand that it was necessary to alleviate my pain as i was about to launch into an half hour tirade with autopage credit control, but lets not go there. secondly i must explain that i have a hesitation to down substances with names like nuerofen, tylenol, etc. surely they can think of more friendly names for medication like pain-ease, happyhead, feelsogood etc. i mean panado and disprin are not happy names either, but try these – Solpadeine, Alka-Seltzer, imigra, ibuprofen. scary stuff!  paracetemol makes it sounds like you’re heading for time in a wheel chair and neurofen worries me that further alteration to my brain might occur, which at the age of 40 needs to be done under the supervision of a neurosurgeon. tylenol sounds like a bad name choice for a son and inbuprofen has me flawed.

alternative remedies can be just as dodgy! i have been trying for years to get michele, of feelgood health to introduce snottoblast into her range. imagine you have runny, itchy eyes, blocked nose and as an exodus of snot from the sinuses, you spot snottoblast on the shelf and it instantly cheers you up, even if the stuff doesn’t actually work. oops, now i’m in trouble. michele’s stuff DOES work, very well,  even if she wont give it funny names. (cheque in the post hey michele…)

now i can’t find the drawing i did of snottoblast. damn!

the neighbourhood watch

in every neighbourhood there seems to be a bergie or two that the community takes care of in some way or another. we haven’t had one for quite a while, until i noticed valerie on the street again last night. valerie has managed to keep herself and her husband off the street for about 2 years by cooking at the haven night shelter. it seems she just can’t manage all the standing now and they’re back on the steps below our garden. valerie and koen are a couple who have mostly managed to keep their dignity, at least whilst sober and i have never heard them fight or screech “you ma se….”.  it’s not that i haven’t managed to catch valerie in an undigninfied non-sober moment, but for someone reduced to the bare minimum she does a mighty fine job and all she wanted from me last night, other than some warm things, was some soap and a wash cloth. the rest of us complain when we don’t get a hot bath!

i gave valerie a few things and said, “now don’t end up like hennie!”, by which i think she understood me to mean, don’t end up dead in the dalebrook toilets, but what i really meant was ‘don’t end up smelling like the garbage on the corner with your pants half way down’. hennie specialised in being a nom de guerre. countless times i’d catching him peeing on my shop verandah (when i still had blossom), but it was never him! many people had a soft spot for hennie with his four fingers missing, but for me he should have kept his  5 fingered hand out of his pants.

our favourite bergie was stanley and we all miss him in a funny way. stanley lived at the bottom of our garden for months and was the only bergie i’ve met who would read. locals would pass books onto him and he’d devour anything with words.

stanley never begged, but was always given things. one christmas day he sat outside the supermarket and amassed R800. he bought himself some great new clothes and ice-cream for the children in our complex. stanley loved buying the children sweets, so much so, that we had to get him to space the treats out a bit. on the other hand stanley was not keen on meat and preferred to eat vegetables, which is  a bit tough on the street when someone hands you their left over macdonalds’.

one day adrian and oli went to the supermarket to buy sweets and as usual they got a couple for stanley, who later related to me how, “my mouth was just smarting for something sweet…”  as, i mentioned, a well read man!

vulnerable on the street stanley was often the victim of theft. his jacket, his bag, his books often got stolen, but the worst was his broom. michele over the road came to his rescue so that he could rise early and sweep the cobbled street. what a gentleman!

stanley’s sad story was a life in jail. he proclaimed innocence and knowing stanley he probably was, regardless, it was a real waste of an intelligent man’s life. this made him resistant to night shelter’s and institutions. our neighbour karena tirelessly tried get him into a better situation, but he simply disappeared one day, after borrowing money from Riefa over the road. Riefa is the golden angel of bergies (ok she a stretch from golden, but you get the idea), driving them around, feeding them and making sure they have somewhere sheltered to sleep.

what amazes me most about many bergies is their loyalty and honesty (bar hennie). they will keep an eye on your things and if something goes missing they sure as anything know where it went and it gets returned. armed response should actually give them some walkie talkies! it’s not like they never get drunk and behave badly, but the same can be said of the people who frequent the brass bell in their designer jeans and coiffured hairstyles. unlike bergies these people get into cars at the end of the night and drive home. give me stanley any day!

on the wings of a wasp

it concerns me that you may be thinking that i’m not giving enough credit to the cyclops so let me tell you about our little….

vespa!!!

we were before our time actually, not that we had any idea, however, we did relish somewhat in the coolness that we unwittingly pre-emptied. you see, we had each longed for a vespa before the longing for each other. it was not the scooter that united, but united we found it. my two-tone 1964 mini was slowly dripping brake fluid into the gutter outside my mowbray home, until it returned to my father for surgery, so i was left with tim greene’s bicycle, to charge off to work to at a montessori pre-school. i do admit that the journey was particularly sweet as adrian had graffitied my name along the route: on electricity boxes, phone booths and yes one white wall. i must add that this was prior to tagging and graffiti artists, although defacing public property, it was at least out of passion and not fashion. nevertheless these two wheels became someone else’s transport one saturday afternoon after it disappeared from outside adrian’s tree house flatlet.

i was left with legs and then there was adrian’s… well i hesitate to call it a car: one of those 80’s models whose engine doggedly outlived its bodywork. i often wondered if the noise of the engine was an attempt to compensate for the lack of structure. finally the engine fell very silent and then like the bulk of south africans we were transportless, until…..

it was waiting for us in tableview, of all places: a primavera, or ‘piece of shit’  according to our vespa mechanic, due to its resistance to being fiddled with by men with greasy fingers. still in its original fawn colour it was love at first site, but first we had to get it home. (after bartering the price down to our collective savings.) i was the only one with previous vespa training, altough i  had not revealed that i’d actually been taught by a 14-year-old on a dirt road in houtbay. thus highly qualified to drive a vespa from tableview to town i managed to impress my beau as he followed with an exhausted and over excited three-year old in the back of the borrowed car. i think i earned uncountable points that evening. (i’m still riding on that glory).

we shared this vehicle until i disappeared to america for 4 months and then returned to claim my part ownership. by this time the 80’s renault was hopping from mild competence to mechanic to further incompetence and so on. vespa had to take us everywhere in between. that discernible putter, putter, putter and inimitable squeaky parp, parp is imbedded in our blood.

it goes without saying that two-wheeled transport, cape town winters and wind are not destined for nuptial bliss. i was often soaked through and haggled by the wind. my best memories however are of returning home at 2 or 3 in the morning after working at the ‘magnet’, adrian’s bar in bree str. i would make sure that i would drive to the magnet. (adrian was the only man in south africa who thought it sexy to be driven around by a woman on two very low wheels.) that would entitle me to cower behind, whilst adrian buffered the freezing wind on the return trip. we  either did the highway, or my favourite: salt river and woodstock by night. don’t guffaw when i tell you there was something mystical about the silence of those quiet, dark, run down buildings, which burst at the seems with third-worldliness during the day. we were invincible and at the height of coolness on our vespa, not to mention bloody cold.

sadly, vespa was dismantled to be painted and de-rusted on the day i found out i was pregnant with hannah. she’s now 13 and vespa still has body parts in various parts of cape town. the flight of the urban cowgirl was not entirely grounded though, as we baby-sit my brother-in-law’s green beauty whilst he was in australia. my fondest memories will be of picking up my hannah from kindergarten whilst my 1964 cortina was filling the coffers of the mechanic. hannah’s route to school involved, two rivers, horses, cows, geese, hadedas, ibises and as a rare treat a pelican. we flew like wild women on horseback through the air (at a child friendly speed of course), united on an italian design wonder, which has changed little since its inception.

the vespa was designed after the war by aeronautical mechanic corradino d’ascani. enrico piaggio was looking for a light-weight vehicle to flood the market with, whilst he got his aeroplane plants back into the swing of things. d’ascani was not a man fond of motorbikes, preferring to keep his trousers clean and his hairstyle intact. the design did and still does feature a covered chain, to keep your bell bottoms clean, gears on the handle bar, which can cause very embarrassing moments at traffic lights and much easier changing of wheels than a motorbike. of course this did not vouch for your ability to stay on the bike in the event of a flat wheel, nor did they take into consideration changing wheels at deserted petrol stations at night, which i managed to survive on my virgin wheel change. thanks, anyway d’ascani for giving us the ‘wasp’, but just to let you know that your little wind shield does nothing for the hair style during a south easter.