I took Val to work early in the morning, and a bloke came wanting to buy the Cressida. He had been before to ask about it -- he was an undertaker from Mamelodi. I couldn't find the key, so asked him to come back in the afternoon.Val was supposed to finish work early, so I went over to Brooklyn about 11:00 and spent a couple of hours in Exclusive Books -- a had a R30.00 voucher from them that expires today, and looked for something to spend it on, but it was hard, I really couldn't see anything I wanted. They must have sold all the good books before Christmas. I went round about 5 times, looking at the fiction shelves, the non-fiction, the children's section. But nothing. Eventually I bought "The idiot's guide to getting published", more to spend it on something rather than nothing.
Val and I had lunch at the Hong Kong restaurant, a nice relaxed meal. We can never have Chinese food with the kids, because they don't like it, but when we go out insist on having pizza or something like that, but Simon makes better pizza at home.
When we got home we checked the Cressida, and Jethro found the key. One of the tyres was flat, but no amount of pumping would get it up again, and Val and Jethro went to try to get a valve for the spare, but everything was closed because it was New Years Eve. They got a kind of aerosol puncture repair thingy, which seemed to do the trick. I took the stuff out of the cubby hole -- the log book showing where we had been and what petrol we had bought, and a Greek phrase book. We had hardly used it over the last three years. We had had it for 16 years, and done 100000 kilometres. We got the Mazda 10 years later and it has done 250000 kilometres, and is in better condition. But for the last 10 years or so the Cressida has hardly been out of Pretoria, and we only really used it to travel to different places in the first 3 years we had it, from 1985-1987. Then we used it to pull the caravan mostly - a couple of trips to the Northern Province, and one to Botswana in 1984, and in 1986 to a conference in Grahamstown, and then in 1987 to Howick, where we stayed with Don Stayt, and to Durban, and Salt Rock, where we stayed with the Leitches.
The undertaker arrived, with a battery, as I had told him. We started it up, he gave me R2000 in cash, and I gave him a receipt, and his friend got in the driving seat and it disappeared down the road. I suppose it was the end of an era in our lives, but the era was so long ago that the Cressida was more a rusting wreck than an old friend. But eariler in the year we did lose two old friends, our dogs Lucy and Gilgamesh. We had had them since October 1988. Lucy died in January, and Gilgamesh about a month later. Our remaining dog, Ariel, was so depressed after Gilgamesh died that we got a new puppy, an Alsatian, a couple of days later, and called her Alexa. Now Ariel is getting agitated with all the fireworks going off to celebrate the end of the year, though it's only just after 9:00 pm. She never used to be like this while Gilgamesh and Lucy were alive, though they got frantic enough, and got worse as they got older. Young Alexa doesn't seem to be worried at all.
And so ends the first year of the new millennium. It's a year since we planted our floss silk trees, and I watered them. They nearly died after the winter, and are actually smaller than they were last year. It's been the year of the new Archbishop, Metropolitan Seraphim, and the resumption of involvement in diocesan mission work. A year of terrorism and war, with terrorists killing 3000 Americans by flying planes into buildings, and the Americans killing 3000 Afghanis who had nothing to do with it, thus showing that the US government was no better than the terrorists.
So the first year of the 21st century is not much different from the first year of the previous one. The Anglo-Boer War was drawing to its end here. At least the big wars this year have been on other continents, but Zimbabwe is melting down, while its neighbours look on in helpless horror, powerless to prevent it. And if things get much worse there will be more refugees, and more xenophobia here, with people complaining about foreigners stealing their jobs.
At the beginning of the year I thought I would write a lot more than I actually did. Oh, I kept my personal diary OK, but there wasn't much that I wanted to put up in public view. Most of it is just too banal. And next year, the phone rates will be going up, so I'll probably be even less likely to post much.
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