The best of times, the worst of times

Tintin my man! 

If I hadn’t have fallen in love I wouldn’t have had my heart broken. But if I hadn’t had my heart broken I would never have found out that I am related to Tintin! 

OMG can you believe it?! 
It’s almost worth the pain.

Mysteriously, there is no Belgian blood in my veins. I am thoroughly South African, but ancestrally English, Scottish and Irish, and I had a bit of Welsh in me recently until the fucker betrayed me and went back to the environs of Cardiff.  But Tintin himself actually wrote to me in person the other day, and the fact that I had a cat called Snowy once is now extraordinarily auspicious.

“Dear Bridget”, wrote Tintin – after my last blog about meandering morosely and miserably about the local cemetery - “What a wonderful blog. You are my 1st cousin of the husband of my 6th cousin Eleonore Dorothy Melck. My Mum’s ashes are in the Haenertsburg cemetery and so will mine and my partners be one day. Also buried there is the wife of my 2nd great-uncle. Eliza Devenish nee Short. She knew General Piet Joubert and her father was a friend of Charles Dickens.”

Tintin Joubert 

At this point I feel I must mention that this Tintin’s surname is Joubert. Not that that changes anything of course. If anything, it adds a certain frisson to the overall mystery. I am obviously delighted to be connected to Tintin, who according to both popular mythology and Wikipedia, “had a sharp intellect, could defend himself, and was honest, decent, compassionate, and kind. Through his quick thinking, and all-round good nature, was always able to solve the mystery and complete the adventure.” That’s pretty much me, isn’t it?  Apart from the completing the adventure part, perhaps, and er, maybe solving the mystery. Mmmmm, decent, compassionate, kind, ok well whatever…

But to be entirely honest, I am not that happy about the Joubert connection, since Commandant General Piet Joubert was the man who ordered the beheading of Chief Makgoba, a local chief here in Magoebaskloof in the 1800s. During what they call the Boer-Makgoba Wars, Joubert ordered a team of Swazi bounty hunters to flush Chief Magkoba out of the deep forests, and return with his head, which they did. There is a great deal of local lore and legend about Makgoba, and the whereabouts of his head remains a mystery although I have it on pretty good authority that it’s somewhere in Germany in the household of the family Altenroxel.

Deep in the Magoebaskloof forests 

Never mind. The fact that my Tintin’s relatives – and therefore mine – knew Charles Dickens is of course a huge upside. So let’s skip the heartbreak and the beheadings and the torrid stuff – and let me leave you with this Dickensian profundity, which could apply to anything from politics to heartbreak. It’s from A Tale of Two Cities, and it reads thus: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”