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…”

A tragic comedy

Perhaps it is as Charlie Chaplin said that life is a tragedy in close up, but a comedy in long shot. Here I lie weeping because a man I truly loved has lied, betrayed and left me. I run out of toilet paper. I get an electricity  bill from the Greater Tzaneen Municipality for R 1 546 426.80.  Then there is a power failure. 

Edison, Edison give me the medicine.

I head for the local bottle store. It’s the fulcrum of the village in which I live, it's a daily news source, informal bush telegraph and modern confessional booth all rolled into one. Obviously very little is secret. Not for us hushed voices and delicate sips of communion wine, this is Jagermeister bomb country, plus brandy and coke; tequila, shooters if you must.  

The bottle store can tell by the nature of my purchases not only that I am having one moerse pity party but which friends I am rallying to my side. She likes a Springfield, she only drinks a Cab Sauv; he prefers that brand of Scotch. Don’t even think about dooswyn for that one! 

In exchange for baring my soul-pain and vulnerability, I get to hear all the local news and cross paths with couleur locale. On Monday, I heard about a young man who died after being beaten up at our local pub a few weeks ago. By cage fighters from Polokwane whose fathers are apparently lawyers and make dockets and hospital files disappear. On Tuesday I chatted to a local Alzheimer’s resident about her former love of breeding Beagles. On Wednesday I heard that a rich old man who was recently robbed and beaten by a gang, is recovering well. Yesterday I heard that the local schizophrenic, a beautiful woman of 47, blew her brains out with a gun. Today I got the number for a guy who delivers firewood at good prices.

You can read two things into this. Either I am visiting the bottle store too much as I dance on the hell-coals of heartbreak. Or that the country is caught in a bad magic and we are all going crazy from apartheid’s sequelae - the aftereffect of the disease, or we're going crazy at the sheer disbelief that things have gotten so Zumalarly fucked up. Or maybe it's just cold and wintry and as the country loadsheds and dims its lights, we all stare down our own darkness. Perhaps it is as Robert Ardrey said: It is not in our powers but in our paradox that we should search for the essence of man.