Illustrative image: Sources generated with Google Gemini Flash Image 2.5 I’ve found that I often enjoy April and May.
The seasons have started to change, it’s not too hot and not yet too cold.
The first rush of the year is over, we have probably had peak traffic until around October (for some reason traffic is worse in South Africa in summer – presumably we spend a bit more time at home during the colder months).
Some of the schools are on holiday and some are in session, which means people are productive but a little calmer.
But I also enjoy the taste of autumn. As the weather changes it’s a reminder there are some things we cannot control, it reminds me of autumns during my youth.
Soon the Highveld will have sucked all of the moisture out of my skin, it will be bitter in the morning and putting my feet on the floor in the morning will be a breathtaking experience.
But that’s still some weeks away.
For the moment, the other thing I’m really enjoying is that, as I look out of the office window while I scratch this out with a feather and ink (and if you believe that I have an assassination plot to sell you…), the sky is finally a wonderful blue. In Gauteng we’re in that stretch of the year where every radio news bulletin ends with the phrase “fine and mild”.
The rain, which has interfered with my thrice-weekly meditation (known to most people as “mountain-biking”) has finally stopped.
And with the change in the weather comes a particular sense of predictability. I know what we’re going to get for the next little while.
It’s completely different in the Western Cape. Those who believe meditation is best when muddy are about to have a good time. The rest just have to resign themselves to those three weeks of wet.
Hopefully. Because, again, there are warnings that we are all using too much water.
Meanwhile in the north of the country there are dire concerns that this will be an El Niño year.
I’m not sure how they predict these things but presumably someone watched a butterfly flap its wings in the Pacific somewhere and has been able to deduce that we are likely to have a dry last quarter of the year (it’s not quite about butterfly wings but really about the movement of water under the Pacific Ocean and how that affects the temperature on the surface and thus what predictions you can make. The writers of The Day After Tomorrow weren’t entirely insane… just a bit).
Coming after so many water problems in so many places, this is quite frightening.
As Lerato Mutsila reminded us so clearly in DM168 this past weekend, we lose just the most incredible amount of water.
I’m not going to bore you with another recitation of how we can blame the politicians and those leading so many councils for how we got here.
But I do want to point out one thing: Even though the dams that supply Gauteng are full (and Hartbeespoort seems to be winning its two-generation-old war on the hyacinth again), I’m afraid we are all going to have to try to use less water now.
You may remember that I once claimed in this feather-scribbled missive that I said I found it impossible to believe that people in Cape Town used less water than people in Joburg.
I owe the incredibly patient official who corrected me one of my best inkpots.
Because it turns out the big “Day Zero” scare in Cape Town in 2008 really changed the way people use water. They do, in fact, tend to use less now than before.
Some of the habits that were adopted at the time (if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down) have stuck.
Now, the optimistic part of me really wants to believe this.
I have found that I probably use less water now in the shower and elsewhere than I used to. As I’ve grown into early middle age I’ve become a lot more conscious about what I’m using and whether I really need to have the tap on at that volume while simply washing my hands.
I do realise though that this could be incredibly contested. I’m sure some people in Cape Town are using boreholes that they were not using before the Day Zero scare. Others might be buying a lot of the water they drink simply because they got into that habit.
But I do think many people probably do use less water. The happier parts of human history are usually about us being convinced by evidence of the rationality of something, and then adopting that habit (the explosive growth in human life expectancy over the past 150 years is all about vaccinations, sanitation and the simple fact that we now wash our hands after the brown rather than blaming disease on the alignment of the planets).
This is a wonderful time of year. And a good time to remind myself that I must mellow the yellow, shorten the shower and lose the leak.
And that it’s probably time to update my quill. DM