My dear family & friends
I am greatly disappointed that so many of you are rooting for the foxes. There is some debate as to whether the Conservative Party will overturn the ban on fox hunting if it comes to government in the general election next year. This has no bearing on my intention to vote Conservative in the election. I will be voting Conservative because Gordon Brown is a one-eyed, Scottish idiot who really seems to have no idea that it was his policies, and those of the people like him around the world that brought the global economy to the brink of collapse. Be that as it may, I shall invite the local Hunt around to our place ... when Lucia’s not looking. I don’t care how cute they are – nobody fucks with my lawn and gets away with it.
Quite a bit has happened since I last wrote, but it’s fairly mundane stuff and I don’t want this letter to you to be called a Newsletter. I was somewhat offended when somebody recently told me that they had really enjoyed my “Newsletter”. I explained that this is not a Newsletter, but a personal letter to each of you my friends. I write this in the hope and expectation of keeping contact with each of you. I look forward to your responses and am disappointed if my letter doesn’t elicit anything.
Top of mind over the past couple of weeks has been Lucia’s passport which is running out of pages. Lots of countries get really sticky if there aren’t enough pages for them to make their mark when you arrive at the border or airport. This means that Lucia had to apply for a new (South African) passport. But we needed to find out if she would have to surrender her old passport to get a new passport which would not have been acceptable given that the current passport holds her UK residency Visa and that we have plans for travel at xmas and in the new year.
The problem was that the telephone numbers listed on the South African Consulate and Embassy websites were disconnected. That means you physically have to go to the Consulate to find out what you need to know. That’s fine if you live in London, but costs a shitload of money for transport if you live anywhere else. I wondered how the hell the SA legation would handle any and all enquiries for the soccer World Cup next year if the telephone number doesn’t work. This allowed me two trips to London – one, to go and ask the question (about holding on to the current passport) and, two, to go with Lucia to apply for the new passport. But I’m sure the Consulate (and the Department of Home Affairs) knows how I feel about this really ridiculous situation because I emailed my experiences to my former editor at FinWeek in SA who published my rant on the back page of the journal.
Whereas the website (and published telephone numbers) was useless, the Consular staff were fantastic. They were knowledgeable, helpful, polite, sweet – everything that you would expect from a modern service organisation; they were really good. I never got this level of service from the Department of Home Affairs in SA. The only person I didn’t like at the Consulate was the doorman/security bloke the second time round. Given South Africa’s history, you would think that the Consulate might avoid employing a tiny-minded white man in a uniform with a superior attitude. What a prick! Maybe – as a local – he doesn’t quite understand the sensitivities.
So the first time I went to London (with regard to Lucia’s passport) I arranged to meet Tred Magill, an old acquaintance from Cape Town, for lunch. Tred called me out of the blue one day after his brother, Rob (who lives in Exeter), had told him I was living in the UK now. (Tred and I share a former girlfriend.) After leaving the Consulate I made my way to the western terminus of the District Line in Richmond where I met Tred in his converted camper van. We followed the road down (up?) the Thames and had lunch at a restaurant opposite Hampton Court Palace. Well, when I say lunch, I mean we spent the whole afternoon catching up on seven or eight years and setting the global economy to rights. I eventually caught the 19h30 train from Marylebone back to Leamington Spa.
The next adventure into London was to go and apply for Lucia’s passport. We/I decided that we should drive into London because it’s the cheaper option if there are two of you. What a fucking mistake! I now know that I do not want to drive into London anywhere near rush hour. It took us an hour to get to the outskirts of London, and another hour to get to Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London where the parking is free. I’d rather catch the train in future – it’s so much less stressful.
Anyway, after applying for the passport Lucia went back to work and I went to lunch with Julian in the City. We had Club Sandwiches at a pub which had something to do with Christopher Wren. Afterwards, I made my way past St Paul’s Cathedral and over the Millenium Bridge to the Tate Modern gallery where there was an exhibition I particularly wanted to see. “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” has garnered quite a bit of controversy for some of its’ explicit exhibits, which was probably what brought it to my attention in the first place. The exhibition starts with works by Andy Warhol and follows Graphic Design and Graphic Art into the 1980s and 1990s. The advertising blurb for the exhibition says: “Pop Life examines how artists since the 1980s have cultivated public personas and conjured a dazzling mix of media, commerce and glamour to build their own brands.”
Afterwards, I thought I would make my way along the South Bank to Blackfriars Bridge and thence to the Underground at Blackfriars – completely forgetting that Blackfriars is essentially under construction at the moment as a new station complex is being built. That meant I had to walk along The Embankment to Temple to catch the tube. The point is that this all took me quite a bit of time and it was after five o’clock when I eventually got to Lucia’s Mercedes at Brent Cross. And I had to join the peak hour traffic out of London. I’m not going to do that again.
Other major interesting events over these past few weeks include the purchase of a new home entertainment computer. Well, it was like this, you see. The sound card on the old laptop we’d been using as the home entertainment centre (truth be told, it probably entertains me quite a bit more than it entertains Lucia) was bombing out. That led to me looking around for what might replace it ... and I alighted on a particular Hewlett-Packard machine with the latest quad-core 64bit processor and a 500GB hard drive. The price dropped quite dramatically over a couple of months (given the current economic doldrums) to a level that I felt that I could justify the purchase to anybody who felt that it might not have been justified. I bought it with my South African credit card because it was about to expire and I had some money saved in the card that I wanted to use. But I wasn’t completely certain that the credit card company would authorise the purchase because I hadn’t used it for over a year. But this is one of the great wonders of modern technology. From the moment I pressed the “Buy” button on the Currys website until my mobile phone rang was no more than 90 seconds. It was Silas or Simon or something from First National Bank’s fraud department in Johannesburg who wanted to know if I had indeed just made a purchase with my credit card and whether he could authorise it.
Okay, I was quite impressed – so I began to wonder whether or not FNB would send me a new credit card in the UK. I didn’t hold out much hope – but I was wrong. I have the card which was couriered to me. But I needed the PIN number, so I called FNB again and asked them to make a plan. I received a telephone call a couple of hours later and, after LOTS of tricky security questions, my PIN number was given to me over the phone. I haven’t tried to see if it works yet, but I’m sure it will. Once again, the service was so good.
Two days later, a courier delivered the computer to our front door. I unpacked everything, read the instructions, set it up next to the TV, plugged it in ... and set about looking for the “ON” button. Twenty minutes later I was still looking for the “ON” button and feeling fairly dumb. I had to call the HELP number and ended up talking to Eisner at a call centre in Johannesburg. I picked up the accent immediately. We had a chat about the weather in Johannesburg, he registered my details and purchase with HP, and directed me to the “ON/OFF” button which was in plain site on the top of the computer. It’s a really cool computer – I only need to figure out a few networking issues to link all our computers together. I also need to design and build the cabinet to hold all the home entertainment devices – satellite receiver, amplifier and computer – that I promised Lucia.
More recently we did some exploring last weekend. On Saturday morning, Lucia went to a Polish hairdresser in Coventry recommended by a Polish colleague at MillwardBrown. Lucia had become disaffected with the hairdressers here in Leamington Spa because 1) they never did what she asked and, 2) they were vastly expensive. The Polish hairdresser charged less than half the rate demanded by the hairdressers Lucia had tried in Leamington, and she came away more-or-less happy with the cut – which, as any man will attest, must be regarded as a great success.
In the afternoon we went to Hill Close Gardens in Warwick which was holding their annual apple festival. The Gardens are, according to their own literature, “rare survivals of Victorian gardens once used by townsfolk who lived above their business and wanted to escape from the crowded town centre. Owners and tenants came here after work on or on Sundays to tend their flowers, fruit and vegetables, or to relax.” The real success of the afternoon was that we found some replacement wicker chairs for the wicker bench in our conservatory which died in questionable circumstances some time ago. You can see pictures of the new arrivals in the usual place at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones. On Sunday we went to Stoneleigh Abbey between Leamington Spa and Kenilworth again to spy on how the upper classes lived in days of yore.
And that sort of brings us up to date (with a few gaps in between)
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn
