Every year it happens.
And every year I'm disheartened, like most other people around town, when we get a tantalising few days of real spring and the temperature hits the 20s° C, only to plummet back down into near single figures for what feels likes weeks...
Abhik, who is one of the Factory's correspondents in Africa, leapt last year through a window of opportunity for change, from a posting in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to the very different life and kinds of news stories Johannesburg has to offer.
Last week, we exchanged his impressions of South Africa after a few months with those I had at the end of my stint there two or three years back. Like me, Abhik is struck by the friendliness and warmth of a lot of the country's people, but also the remarkable capacity many of them have to put themselves down and to underestimate all that has been achieved in a society so fractured and warped by apartheid and its legacy of artificial barriers, guilt and fear.
He soon found that people in Joburg spend a good deal of their time carping about what they see as appalling traffic problems ... and has as little sympathy for them as I did. "If you think you've got it bad," Abhik tells them, more or less, "you should try Paris. Or India!"
I have many happy memories of this odd and occasionally surprisingly beautiful place. I came to see Joburg as an oasis of more greenery than expected in the middle of the veld, a gold-rush mushroom of 1930s urban American architecture, intellectually enlivened by the "Wits" university and a few other institutions, but otherwise part of an arid cultural desert -- except on the thriving musical scene.
But the internal combustion engine is the bane of the town.
While Joburg's drivers are perfectly "civilised" on any international yardstick I've acquired in my own travels, I couldn't bear to live for very long in a place where people use their cars for everything. Indeed, it was the first big town I've ever lived in where you can't do without a car (that's also one of the reasons why I'd like to go, say, to San Francisco one day, but have no desire to be anywhere near Los Angeles...)
So I was amused to learn that Abhik is doing what I quickly started doing myself. He's rebelled. He walks everywhere he can. This notably includes trips to the shops, which is "just not done" when you live, as most comparatively wealthy foreigners do, in verdant and security-fenced suburbia.
When I asked "the Colonel" before going there to borrow his house how long it took to get to the shops, he said: "Oh, around a quarter of an hour, 20 minutes at most."
That was true -- if you used the car. On foot, it took little more than ten and was good exercise too, with a fairly steep hill to climb. But ah! the looks I got from the occasional white people out in what you could see of their lovely gardens through the grills in the barbed-wire topped walls, as I strolled past with my shopping bags.
It was evident they took me for a madman.
Once, somebody came out to warn me. A kindly middle-aged lady, she looked cautiously up and down the road on opening her electricity-powered gate, her eyes lingering for a long moment on the only other people in sight: a couple of fat black maids gossiping on a distant corner, and a pair of wirily thin black gardeners sitting with their lunch of sandwiches and a small bottle of beer in the shade of a tree on a grass verge.
"It's dangerous to walk around by yourself like this," she said, in an accent which sounded even more English than my own. "You never know what might happen."
It was like meeting an alien. It was hot, sunny and obvious that I was taking less of a risk than I regularly had cycling to school as a kid through equally leafy, respectable suburbia. I scarcely knew what to say.
With an edge of rudeness quite unbecoming in a foreigner, I told the genteel woman that "if more of you people walked to the shops and bothered to talk to your neighbours sometimes, you wouldn't be remotely as paranoid as I'm afraid you all seem to be. But thank you, anyway."
She looked more surprised than miffed, but it was very hot on her side of the road and the bags were too heavy to stand around, so I wished her a good afternoon, crossed back to the cooler side and forged on, saying "Hallo" to the gardeners and the maids as I passed.
I wasn't in Joburg for much longer than it took to escape the dreariest of a Parisian winter, but Abhik's good for at least a year or two yet. So I was delighted when he told me of his own little adventures on foot and something of all the people he does stop for a chat with on his way.
"It's begun to pay off," he said.
I'm quite sure it has. I don't imagine that my friend is going to start a small suburban revolution in manners as his contribution to burying apartheid, but I don't doubt that every little bit helps.
The Wildcat, well acquainted with such parts of the world herself, has also cheered me up occasionally during a week of unremitting grey gloom, a rare blood moon and that feeling of distress, sadness and emptiness I'm beginning to fight off while waiting for the sun to show a bit of mercy on us Parisians. Even at such a time, the woman has seen fit to seek my counsel -- heaven help her -- in affairs of the heart, which is probably about as unwise as it has been flattering!
Of course, I'm not going to blog her next potentially amorous adventure, though I dare to hope that if my contribution yesterday wasn't wise, it was at least practical. Unable to imagine that she's any less savagely attractive than she was when last I saw her at the turn of the year -- whatever she may care to say on the 'phone about "the rot setting in" and other calamities -- I can only offer her every encouragement.
She certainly needs that now. It's not revealing too much to say that where the Wildcat is, the allegedly intelligent male of the species is scarcely renowned, in general, for his charms, appeal and anything much more than a fearful pretentiousness, especially when he moves in what passes there for "sophisticated society". But that is a generalisation. The woman has been informed by one of the few local friends she's now learned to trust that the whole city only has two seriously interesting and eligible men and that "you've now been introduced to both of them."
This may be a difficult notion to credit, but believe it I do. I wish her joy of what could prove to be a most interesting day...
I'll probably never understand why it is that women have for many years now resorted to me, of all people, to make the most intimate revelations and even seek advice about the conduct of their love lives.
However, now that the Wildcat and I have achieved the mutual if not especially carnal knowledge that makes for the kind of friendship that seems able to survive even the worst of offences, fights and any insult apart from betrayal, she wonders why I even stopped blogging about my own latest happy encounter. After all, she was the first to observe, almost immediately, that I was falling for somebody again!
But that's simple.
I consider it most unwise to pursue certain adventures or make dates until I've recovered a certain stability of emotions, sense of perspective and, above all, sense of humour and fun.
Meantime, also postponing today's planned trip round the blogosphere, since I'm feeling very tired and dull of wit, I've spent a good long while getting away from it all at a community I didn't even know existed until this afternoon.
Normally, when preparing a trip in a non-professional capacity, I'd take a look in French at the Routard site (the people behind some excellent books), and in English at 'lonely planet', of course. Being the kind of intellectual snob who hates being described as a "tourist", it wouldn't have occurred to me to seek out the Virtual Tourist site until stumbling across it!
It's a vast place, offering exactly what it purports to do: "Real Travellers" and "Real Info". Many of the scores of thousands of contributors evidently don't spend much time mooning around when they could be enjoying themselves.
Whether it's Provins you're after, Port Elizabeth or any number of places in between, somebody seems to have been there and found something not only interesting but sensible to write about it.
5:51:22 PM link 
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