Two Bits – 19 June 2015

The big story of last week must be the announcement by the governor of Zimbabwe’s reserve bank that it will be honouring the Zimbabwean dollar.

This is the dollar that everyone said was absolutely worthless.

Now we know that must have been a lie spread by the colonialist, capitalist media.

The truth is that you can take your old Zim money into the bank up north and get US$1 for 35,000,000,000,000,000 old dollars.

All those zeroes stand for 35 quadrillion Zim dollars.

For the whizzkids, that’s 2 x 1018.

To give you an idea of the size of a quadrillion, if you start counting every second from now, it would take you six-and-a-half years to get to one quadrillion.

The number is so big that it really defies anything on a human scale.

Humans don’t do quadrillions of anything – at least not usually.

Or think of it this way: There are about two quadrillion stars in the “El Gordo” cluster, the largest cluster of galaxies we’ve observed so far.

If you laid one quadrillion Zimbabwean bank notes side by side, they would paper the Earth.

Every desert, every mountain, every valley would be carpeted in Zim dollars.

So good luck on getting that amount of money to the bank, if anyone ever had it.

I’m a billionaire.

In fact 80 times over and as you can see in the photo there is also a million dollar note, but I think we can leave that out.

If I took my Zim$ 80 000 000 000 to the reserve bank in Harare, it would be worth R0.0000274 – not even one South African cent.

If you wonder how I came to have such riches at all, was it because at some point I sold my emerald mine in Zim, or tapped into Bruce Hulett’s bank account?

Unfortunately no, the truth is that I bought the notes from a very persistent street salesman at Victoria Falls some years ago.

I gave him R10 for them, which shows that they have far more value as curiosities.

* * *

Not to belabour the point, Umgeni Water told us in writing several times earlier this year that the emergency pipeline between the Tongaat River and Hazelmere Dam was intended to pump 8-10 million litres of water a day.

When it became apparent that the pipeline was delivering nothing like that quantity, Umgeni Water told the Ballito Ratepayers Association that they had never mentioned such a figure, and that the Courier was “sensationalising” the matter.

Umgeni Water took a half page advertisement in one of the Durban papers last week to explain their position.

Strangely enough, the figure has now shrunk to four million litres a day.

Apparently Umgeni Water has discovered that it is winter and the river doesn’t contain enough water.

Well, hello!

They said in the advert that all water shortages on the North Coast would be solved by the Lower Tugela water project, which they say is due to come on stream in July 2016.

We have been asking for permission to visit this project for two months now, and have been shunted from pillar to post. I wonder why?

* * *

Longtime journo and Simbithi resident Erica Platter, author of the book Durban Curry, tells me the book came second in the Best Book of the Year category of the Gourmand World Cookbook awards.

It was runner up to a very serious tome on French cuisine from the leading chef’s school in Paris!

A tribute to all the brilliant cooks and chefs who contributed to the book.

And to Durban curries, which have proved that local is fabulous!

* * *

And the Lord said unto John, “Come forth and you will receive eternal life”. But John came fifth, and won a toaster.