Wed 17 July, just getting light...

I've been up since 2am, after an early night last night - in the wee hours of today I have managed to create my first Excel spreadsheet for a new business venture - we need a costs & expected profits forecast for the first few years to convince ourselves and our money backers that this business venture will be a winner, and we'll all get a bit richer from it, the way of our constantly evolving World, it seems - apparently the dawn of a New Era is almost upon us though, in which money/profit margins will not count for much anymore - what will count will be things like 'survival preparedness', community cohesion, hard work, growing your own food, etc...

Apparently some big signs of this New Order will show by 25 July [2013] - that's not too far away.

And anyday now, there should be news of Madiba, and then a media fiasco as the world media descend on Qunu and the local Transkeians bear witness to many trucks with satelite dishes atop them, and people rushing about with cameras and microphones and various cables, and filming their cows, goats, fields, sunrises & sunsets, and interviewing whoever they can find that speaks a bit of English - maybe the village ladies can cook up some big pots of umnqusho and imfinyo [is that the name for that dry putu&veld weeds stuff that I like so much & last had as a child]?

Another spell of cold has arrived here in East London - after our first very cold week of winter about 4 weeks ago, we have had some weeks & days of unseasonably warm/hot weather - some days apparently hitting the 31 degree mark [that must be in Fahrenheit] - or is it Celcius?
And how does one spell all those words?

I had a very busy day yesterday, after some time-off over the weekend - yesterday's meeting, about the new business venture, turned into a brainstorming session after our principal member left the meeting, leaving us two hacks to hammer out the nuts & bolts & money numbers - time passed quickly, with a minimal number of cups of tea & smoke breaks - both myself and my new business partner are addicted to smoking/nicotine - I'm not sure which it is, and we had a small but nice balcony off the very nice upstairs executive boardroom which we repaired to for our very few smoke breaks - and then at the end at about 4pm, one last smoke together at our cars while I let my dog out of mine, to sniff at the tyres of the other cars and to stretch his legs - we later went for a long walk at our nearest beach, in the fading light of the day - it felt wintry, a slight breeze, the air cold, and I remember the water washed up the beach in a wide shallow sweep, with its leading edge of foam, a rounded edge about 25mm high, a long shallow arc ahead of me, and suddenly this large expanse of shallow water where the beach sand had been, so that I was looking ahead at the long beach across an expanse of water - all grey/dark blue I think, and pocked with patches of small foamy bubbles - it was a very beautiful & silent moment...

Well, not much stuff of any weight/profundity coming from my two fingertips this session - just a simple chat session then, as I try out this new free blog site from google - I started my first blog about mid June, at a site called Simplesite, very nice & user friendly, and they gave/give a free one-month trial - so now I must try to rescue my previous 8/9 blog entries from there, to post in this my new blog site, as blog-archive, or maybe historical blog, for the grandkids to rip apart & laugh at one day - as I suppose I have, but less unkindly, marveled at pictures of my parents & their friends from the 1940's and 50's - with their Beatles hairstyles and skirts - wide pleated skirts and sandals, precursors to the Woodstock/Beat generation's jeans&T-shirts - which never caught on here in East London - not on my parents' circles anyway - but I marveled at how much the look of people has changed, and with that, certainly, their consciousness - they were simple people, working class, post-World War 2, they all tended to have many children - my mother had 6 of us [one died at age 2/3 - she would have been my younger sister, and maybe my closest sibling - she died of an asthmatic condition] - but again - their mindsets, is what I think I'm getting to/at - they were simple folk, uneducated, but not unintelligent, and kind, and hardworking, and they grew up and lived in Verwoerd's Apartheid system - none of their friends ran for political office - they never thought that big - and they kept their hairstyles in a continuous easy style - nothing extreme, not too short or long, and no tattoos - no disabling addictions, to drink or drugs - my father did smoke all his life, until he died at age 81/2, of hardened arteries and a very sad & tired heart - I wish he could have kept his strength & vigour, and could even have been around still, to spend some time fishing & working & around a fire with me - he was a builder all his adult life, a very good & thorough one.

One last thought, on this very unpredicted ramble - about the speed of change and mindsets and fashions - my favourite author is David Herbert Lawrence - DH Lawrence as he is known - he was born around 1890, in a coalmining community somewhere north of London, I think in the 'Midlands' - Nottinghamshire maybe - and they also had it very hard, little money, a father coalminer who spent every night maybe at the local pub with his mates, and to get away from his tense & hen-pecking wife - and DHL grew up to be a genius writer [my opinion] and died at age 40+ around 1930, in a clinic in France, of TB/consumption, after living bravely with his weak chest for all his 44 years - he traveled much in his life, and spent most of his last 20 years living in Italy, and in Mexico [with a few years in Australia and periods in Britain] - he was looking apparently for a society of men & women, where their blood still ran alive and warm - he found it a bit in Mexico, in the blood of the Older Cultures - even then he felt that the blood in the veins & arteries of the men of Europe & America had gone cold, and dead - they had lost their life force - I found something maybe similar here in Southern Africa, in January 1998, when I went on a field trip to the middle of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana - to a San/Bushman community living there - we spent a week with them - the expedition leaders learning as much as they could from this old tribe about their knowledge of the medicinal properties of the veld plants around them, and I filmed it all - but there out in the desert, there was this group of thin and brown people, who laughed more easily and often than I've ever seen anywhere else, and who had a stamina that enabled them to walk effortlessly all day long across the desert sand - their spirits were a little tired, if I think about it - on the DH Laurentian scale of Blood/Spirit vitality - but their laughter was certainly alive.
And their clothing & skins timeless, and they went very well with their climate & surrounding scenery - all shades of nature...

And to try come full circle - my grandchildren - I actually have very little chance of ever experiencing the joy of grand-daddyship, seeing as I don't have any children as yet [but I AM on the lookout for for a woman with childbearing/very nice hips] - but whatever our progeny, we all develop in one or another direction/s in our time here on Earth - and as one slips by the day toward old age, I hope to keep an alertness, and a sharpness of mind & wit, and a sense of humour, and a growing joy that allows me to laugh & play, and a growing compassion & kindness, that allows me to be father to all children and defenceless animals that enter my orbit, and a growing wisdom that helps me to be silent more often, and to appreciate the beauty around me, and to be thankful for it, and for the few things I have that give me pleasure - and may my progeny, or the progeny of my siblings & friends, feel some kind of kinship with me, and a respect for me, and that they have something to learn from me - unlike me who felt that I could not ever learn anything from my grandparents - they were somehow a 'lost generation' - primitive people who must have loved & suffered in their own ways, but who I don't think possibly ever read a good book - but then who am I to judge & pigeonhole :)

Namaste, as some slightly irritating people say,  in their superior-Zen way :)