Time

Well, time goes by and certainly waits for no man. The last entry was in May and I promised myself that there would be at least one for June, yet here we are in July with barely time for an entry before August! So much of interest has happened since the last entry, but try as I might, I haven't found the time or the inspiration to jot it down here.

This weekend I took a welcome break from the usual routine of Friday night pub, Saturday home renovations, Saturday night party with close buddies at home, Sunday sleep in and spend afternoon in pursuit of leisurely activities close to the heart. Instead, I slept the weekend away with no alcohol and lots of healthy food. This fine Sunday morning found me wide awake at 06h30 and raring to go. Of course, after years of fine-tuning the family to one's personal needs, it's not easy to change the routine, and so at around nine in the morning we got going on a fine walk through the forest that surrounds our little village here in the birthplace of federalism and rösti.

Our stroll on the flatlands below the forest to the next village was accompanied by the early morning summer sun, just breaking through the flatland mist that lingers over the wheatfields before dissipating in the full heat of late morning. After 20 minutes of brisk walking, the morning cool had bid us adieu, and we were happy to hit the hill path that leads up through the dappled forest to the small plateau on which the southern remnants of my beloved black forest remain. The older one gets, the rarer the feeling of pumping heart and quivering muscles a simple, brisk walk can bring about becomes. On occasions such as this, I thank my lucky stars for the love of reading that I learned as a child. It seems to me that only through the shared experience of the written word can we truly begin to appreciate all that there is to be appreciated. If one truly reads, voraciously, one can experience certain things that others take for granted, or that no longer have a place in our modern lives, and which would never normally form part of the 'normal' course of one's own life. It's all too easy to succumb to the stress and pressure of responsibility and forget the things that our grandparents considered essential.

Imagine how it was just a short hundred years ago. What we take for a good round of exercise would have been a normal "business trip". Go to the forest, fell the right tree, cart it home, saw it up, plane it and make it into the perfect bedroom cupboard and then transport it by wagon to the buyer in the next village. I sit in a local pub and observe the sausage-like fingers of a weathered old man in his 80's and can only imagine the physical duress that his life entailed. I wonder at the health of men like this too. Back home in South Africa (in the bad old days of Apartheid) when one saw a small little black man with his wiry arms and calloused fingers, one wondered at the strength he possessed, yet now I see that it's the honest work that one does that creates the man. A short while ago I was forced through circumstance to work like our blacks back home did during my childhood. It made a man of me, in more ways than one. You are not complete until you have sweated blood and tears and have had to PROVE yourself to your fellows in order to get ahead. In my case this lasted nine years here in the land of cheese and wine, and I can only take my hat off to those generations of hard-working, striving black people back home who, no matter how hard they worked, or how capable they proved themselves to be, were destined to remain in the same, hard jobs they were allowed to do. I like to emphasise the "back home" part, because in my heart I will always be a South African. I wish that there were no criminals, no money-hungry beaurocrats and no race problems in South Africa, but I know that I can't change this. I used to wonder at the fatalism of the Rhodesians that flooded our land during the 80's, but now I understand. The land I knew no longer exists, and the reality of what should be can no longer be realised. Not until the race-hate that we engendered dies down. How many generations will it take before South Africa settles down and gets on with modern life?

Anyway, this is not a forum on South African race relations, so let's get on with it, shall we? Once we descended from the forest and reached our village again, we stopped off at a local restaurant to buy the kids an ice-cream. Naturally there were a bunch of locals having their Sunday afternoon beers and lunch, and what with rural Switzerland not being a place where you can sit apart from others, we were drawn into a discussion on the entry of Switzerland into the European Union. This is a very big thorn in the side of the Swiss peasant, and as I consider myself to be a proud Swiss peasant of note, I found myself listening with interest to what was being said. In the interests of saving my readers from my usual long-windedness, let me quote a few things that were said:

"Ha! How can they keep on forcing the issue of us joining the EU? How many times do the Swiss people have to say no?!!" (Gotta love the Swiss referendums, don'tcha?); "How can anybody expect that hard-working Northern races who get up in Winter at 05h00 to go to work are going to support Southerners who get up at 07h30 and sit in the coffee shop until 09h00 before starting work?"; "Why should Germans, who can't even meet the grade here in Switzerland, work hard (for them) and diligently all their lives and retire at sixty-five, only to ensure that the Greeks, who work 32-hour weeks and retire at fifty-five, can have the same currency, liquidity and status as them?"; "Do they think we're ready to give up our status and reputation as a hard-working race just to have the benefit of free trade and open borders with Portugal and Spain? There are enough of them begging to work here and take our strong currency out of the country to show that their own systems and ethics don't produce like ours do!"

Need I say more? Echoes of South Africa....I don't know. I hope not. I wish a happy and prosperous future on my wonderful, rich (in people and resources) country. Just hope they can get over it and get on with it. As I keep on promising, this is supposed to be a blog on the oddities and fun of life in general, with excerpts from my own rich experiences, but somehow I don't seem to ever get around to it!

I promise my few readers a tale of the past in the next entry. Though some of you are bound to have heard many of these tales over the years, I will attempt to put each little story into a comprehensive package that we can all laugh about. Interspersed, of course, with current snippets of life in Heidi land.

Yours,
...