Rob in the ‘Hood: Last chance saloon for our holiday season
Seems we have some 'really nasty pieces of work' living amongst us who are hell-bent on ruining our tourism business trade.
Greetings everybody, you do realise it is only 21 days to the end of 2020? What’s that you say? It cannot come too soon? Point taken, but in retrospect this year hasn’t been too bad. Look on the positive side: your petrol bills and motor vehicle running costs have been drastically reduced for a start. True, the girth round the old rum-tum-tum has grown somewhat, but you are alive and kicking…just! On with the show.
Time-Honoured Custom: No Water
Of course, it’s that time of year when our ‘invisible friends’ like to give the South Coast its usual scare and despair: I mean the ‘cutting off the water’ ordeal. In time-honoured tradition it never fails to disappear, just in time for the start of the Christmas holiday season.
This is supposed to be the period of peace and goodwill to all men (not forgetting our good ladies). Seems we have some ‘really nasty pieces of work’ living amongst us who are hell-bent on ruining our tourism business trade. This is going to be the Last Chance saloon, make-or break time for our annual holiday season, so don’t blow it.
Your Last Chance, Ugu!
The CO and I decided to get away from it all, if only to get a proper bath or shower, and all those things you need to do with water. Plus a bit of Christmas shopping. We ventured north of Durban to Umhlanga and Ballito. The places were booming, tourists flooding in, restaurants were full and lots going on. It was also Matric Week, which can be a bit of an ordeal for the old folks, I’m sure. But the message was loud and clear: there are many other places who will snap up tourists, and we will be the losers. Perhaps a lesson for our own ‘ruling classes’: if you want to allow the destruction of local tourism, you are going about it the right way.
Water, Water, Everywhere, But Not Here
Of course, everything was not perfect. The rains came down in buckets: there’s nothing quite like being soaked to the skin, eating spicy Mexican food in wet clothes, looking like a wet lettuce. The rains followed us everywhere, and put a damper on a jolly holiday. Whether you are sampling Portuguese, Italian or other foreign fare, the miserable wet weather made for miserable wet visitors. Wittily, I told the wife we’d be better off in Blackpool (even Grimsby). She was not amused. Finally, after five days of non-stop lousy rainy weather, the sun came out, with nothing but blue skies, the warmth returning to our innermost souls.
Guess where we were? Right, first time: back home in Uvongo! The water had also come back on. The moral to the story? There’s no place like home.
Merseyside Medicine
True to my promise never to speak or write about a certain Manchester football team, just in passing, I noticed that ‘they’ are back to their winning ways. This is making fans of a certain Merseyside football team getting quite twitchy, and turning to ‘demon drink’! All is fair in love and war, they say: I ‘come in peace’. Whilst up north I came across a sure-fire winner, ‘soothing of the savage breast’ medicine. I’m sure this will help alleviate the pain and turmoil going through those worried Scouser heads. There you go, whack!” Which is Liverpool lingo for saying…
See you, Rob.
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