Two Bits – Declaration of Independence

This week we are hard at work finishing off two bumper supplements, one for The Courier and the other for our Get It magazine, for the new Ballito Junction regional shopping mall. They are both going to be well worth waiting for!
Like everybody else in town, we are looking forward to the opening next Thursday. I know, it doesn’t look like it’ll be ready in time. But with hand on heart, the developers promise that it will.
I thought it fascinating what the Lifestyle Centre has come up with to redefine itself in the North Coast market – food markets, al fresco dining, new stores. The revamp will cost R80 million, about what it cost the Renckens to build the centre in 2003.
I’m not sure whose idea it was to have two Dischems, one across the road from the other, but what the hell, you won’t have to wait long for service, will you!
All this goes with my argument that the new developments in town will, in the long run, benefit the consumer with more stores to choose from, competitive pricing and better facilities.
Something has to be done about the absurd situation that exists, that doesn’t allow for pedestrian traffic between the centres at a convenient position, such as by an overhead bridge across the road. The P445 is a provincial road right in the middle of a suburban scenario, and province will not allow direct access to their road except at a traffic intersection. People do walk across the P445 and somebody is going to get killed if common sense does not prevail.
* * *

As I think I have mentioned before, I inherited a rather fine writing desk from my mother. It belonged to her mother and if memory serves, my grandmother got it as a wedding present.
At 130 or so years old, it is old fashioned. It has a fold-down lid, which then makes the writing surface. There are pigeonholes for envelopes, stamps, notebooks and inkpots and a single drawer underneath the writing flap.
It is therefore by definition, old-fashioned and not designed for the computer age. A laptop could fit on the lid, but nothing bigger.
When I received it I opened it, browsed through the contents and, deciding I could not bring myself to throw anything away, closed it up. And so it stood, mouldering in a corner for the past eight years.
Emboldened by a recent successful attempt to restore an old table, I took a deep breath and approached the desk. It was now almost black with age, dirt, and countless layers of wax and polish, liberally mixed with farm dust and probably a fair amount of cow dung.
After stripping it into its component parts and scrubbing it down with soap and water, which made quite a few buckets black with dirt, I scraped it down with methylated spirits and very fine steel wool to remove the layers of wax and furniture polish.
Slowly, what emerged was a rather beautiful reddish-brown wood, very fine grained. I haven’t worked out what it is – could be stinkwood, maybe not.
Anyhow, many weeks of work with cabinet paper and several coats of a polywax finish, the desk now has pride of place in my house.
But now came the hard part – to sort out which of the papers I had removed for the restoration should be kept. There are sewing patterns (that Rose says not to throw away . . .), lists dating from the 40s of Christmas presents given to family members, photographs, stamps, fountain pens – you name it. Long story short, I put the whole lot back in and closed the lid. About my indecision, I am quite firm.
But the sorting turned up a poem, a chant which I apparently made up at the age of four, and used to sing in the bathtub. My mother wrote the whole thing down and titled it my Declaration of Independence. Here goes:

He will just do nothing at all,
He will just sit there in the noonday sun.
And when they speak to him,
he will not answer them,
Because he does not care to.
He will stick them with spears
and put them in the garbage.
When they tell him to eat his dinner, he will just laugh at them,
And he will not take his nap, because he does not care to.
He will just sit there in the noonday sun. He will go away and play with the Panda.
And when they come to look for him
He will put spikes in their eyes and put them in the garbage,
And put the cover on.
He will not go out in the fresh air or eat his vegetables
Or make wee-wee for them, and he will get as thin as a marble.
He will not do anything at all
He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

It is the most extraordinary piece of nonsense, don’t you agree? Looking at it now, I think there is some hint of Rudyard Kipling, who my mother used to read aloud to us kids.

* * *
Which reminds me of a postcard of the early 20th century, showing a man holding a book, and a girl sitting beneath a tree. He asks her:”Do you like Kipling?”
She replies: “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!”