My dear family & friends, 3 August
It’s just three weeks today until we go to Portugal on vacation and we are counting the days. Lucia is particularly looking forward to the break after a hard year. In fact, it’s been just over a year since we made the decision to leave SA, and the intervening period has been full of stresses and strains from find a job, to selling the house, packing up, moving and resettling in a foreign environment. I’m just looking forward to two weeks of sunshine and deep blue skies. Our weather up in Warwickshire tends to be a lot greyer than in London and south-east England. The city of London itself generates so much heat that it creates its own micro climate that tends to make the weather a lot milder.
Having said that, we had a lot of sunshine last weekend with the temperatures rising as high as 30C according to my car thermometer. We wilted. It proved to us how quickly we had become accustomed to the cooler temperatures of England. We felt sorry for the street performers during the Warwick Folk Festival which took place over the whole of last weekend. (You can see pictures at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones as usual.) We walked into Warwick on Saturday morning with the dogs to take in the sights and sounds. Edgar, poor soul, didn’t like being too close to the drums. He objected even more to one of the dance troupes which dressed up all in black (with a bit of yellow trimming) and with black-painted faces. He bared his teeth and shrank away with hackles raised when one of their number came too close. I had to keep him on a very short leash after that. I think I’ve mentioned that he’s a very sensitive fellow.
The festival is probably the biggest event on Warwick’s calendar and the town closed off part of the high street and a few of the side streets for the festivities. We searched in vain for a spot shade at a pub or one of the local bistros where we could sit down for lunch and which permitted dogs. We eventually gave up on the idea as an impossible task and slowly made our way home in the humid midday heat. The dogs were glad to hurtle into the river just next to the footbridge over the Avon in St Nicholas Park. An attending swan, however, was most displeased at the intrusion on what he/she believed was rightfully his/her domain. I tried to explain to him/her that he/she would pay in blood if he/she so much as harmed a hair on the head of our darling children. Swans are vicious vermin.
In the evening we were invited to a braai with some fellow South Africans, Keith and Gail Helfett. Gail’s brother, Jeremy, went to school with Lucia’s brother, Justin. Their father was the SA comedian Pip Freedman. Keith is a former chief designer at Jaguar. One of the projects he is involved in now is an electric car prototype which is being built in Cape Town. Even though I’m an eager user of modern technology, I still marvel at how it enables people to work anywhere in the world as if they were just down the road from each other. (Skype, of which I was an early acolyte, reduces telephone costs to zero.) Be that as it may, Keith and Gail went to much effort to entertain us and we had a wonderful evening at their home in Kenilworth (which lies between Warwick and Coventry.) We only got to meet one of their daughters, Charlie, because the other, Nicky, was working as waitress at the Saxon Mill nearby on the River Avon. We know the Saxon Mill fairly well – it’s a so-called gastro-pub which essentially makes it a smart restaurant.
I was really interested what Gail said about how tips are dealt with at the Saxon Mill which really put much of the service I have experienced in the UK into perspective. Let me add here that there has been a big brouhaha about tips in the UK recently because it came to the attention on of newspaper editors (and others who can smell a good headline) that some restaurants were using tips as part of the minimum wage paid to employees. The Hard Rock Café in London, for instance, pays its staff around £2,50/hour against the minimum wage of £5,50-something and robs the tips to make up the rest. This is legal but now but some union and other lobbyists are trying to have the loophole which makes it legal closed.
But here’s my issue: all tips at the Saxon Mill are pooled and then shared amongst ALL staff. Many restaurants do this because it’s FAIR. One hears a lot about fairness in the UK. Now, talking as someone who put himself through university working variously as a waiter, maitre d and barman at Ferrymans Tavern in the Cape Town Waterfront for five years, a tip is about INCENTIVE: fairness doesn’t come into it. I fail to see why anyone would give any better service than was required if they weren’t going to derive a direct benefit from their superior service. And that’s what we’ve seen: the service has been average to adequate at even the better establishments – and I’ve really been trying to understand why. And that is probably it. Where you do get superior service, it’s most often from a foreigner whose incentive is merely having the job.
I made out like a bandit at Ferrymans. Nobody else ever made more money in tips or sales turnover than I did. We had a brilliant manager who taught me the meaning of service and so many tricks to make a customer feel special. I was driven; it was simply a matter of survival. As kitchen closing time approached, when all the other waiters and waitresses were trying not to take any more tables, I would take them all. Then I’d run myself ragged until sometime between midnight and 1AM, but walk away with several hundred rand. I would pick up any and all shifts. I just cannot imagine doing that if I’d had to share the benefit of my sweat. We were expected to give at least 10% of our tips to the runners and barmen, and another 10% to the kitchen staff. But I gave it gladly and frequently gave more for the simple reason that I knew I would get better service from them in the long run. It’s called a tip. I just don’t see the same motivation here.
Another highlight of the week, was our braai on Monday evening. Like the weekend and most of the preceding week, Monday started out bright and hot. At lunch time I decided that we would have a braai for dinner. Admittedly the skies had begun to look ominously dark by late afternoon, but I hadn’t prepared anything else. A few drops of rain started coming down shortly after I lit the fire so I put up the garden umbrella to defend my fire. (See pictures in the usual place.) Within five minutes the few drops had turned into thunderstorm with lightening streaking across the sky and thunder sending Hazel scurrying for cover. (Strangely thunder has never seemed to bother Edgar much.) But the umbrella is a decent size and kept the fire and me dry. I had Lucia join me under the umbrella when she got home. We stayed there and then moved the umbrella to the garden table where we ate our dinner when the chicken was cooked. The evening was warm enough and it was fun. I’m not sure what the neighbours thought though.
This weekend has been a bit more limited. There’s been the Hungarian Grand Prix and Lucia’s had work to do. We did walk the dogs to the Saxon Mill which is on the outskirts of Warwick. It’s a very pretty excursion. One follows the canal (which is a few yards from our house) until you get to the aqueduct over the Avon, and then follow public footpaths along the Avon that take you through a housing estate and across the wheat fields that border Warwick.
That’s it for another week
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn
