Reunion

South Africans really love their shopping malls. Menlyn Park, near our hosts’ house, was around the same size as Lakeside Thurrock to give at least South East Englanders a sense of perspective. Every large city seems to have three or four of them. There doesn’t seem to High Street culture as with the UK. Sad, but not so bad when the rain is tipping down as it did for a few days before we left for home.

Our arrival in Johannesburg was a bit momentous as neither ourselves or our taxi driver could receive mobile phone coverage and hence we could not let one another know where we were (platform 16, a rather obscure, out of the way place as it turned out). What might have been a disaster turned out to be a minor glitch. Just as we were considering making our own way to Pretoria, our driver found us and transported us through the congested northern suburbs for over 1.5 hours. The traffic is easily as dense as London’s.

I won’t name them here. All I want to say is that it was pure delight to meet our friends and their young children (who had been babies last time we were there). Most of the next few days was spent with them catching up on old times round the bra’ai, talking into the night with plenty of Windhoek beers, good South African wine and Johnnie Walkers (which I’ve grown a taste for thanks to our hosts).

We visited the local shopping mall, I bought some specs – much cheaper there and of equal or better quality than the ones I currently own and wandering round the Pick ‘n’ pay. Pretoria is not a hotspot on any tourist trail of South Africa, but that wasn’t the reason we came. Mrs D found a fellow wordsmith with our lady host and plenty of female bonding took place.

And their kids were charming, intelligent littl’uns. I had been quite nervous in case we didn’t get on with each other, but that wasn’t an issue as they at best ignored or and at best asked us to read to them and in turn tell us some of their stories. I feel a career in writing may be in order.

I feel a little bland not mentioning their names, but for sake of their privacy I won’t.

To our hosts though – THANKS. Your boundless hospitality was and still is most appreciated by me and Mrs Dukc. I hope we’ll be able to reciprocate in the not too distant future – though sadly I can’t see how we’ll squash into our postage stamp sized house, unless it becomes suddenly blue, makes strange growling noises and sprouts the word “POLICE” above its door.

Tomorrow, I’ll write about a momentous, perhaps life changing event, which won’t name anyone.