Sleep is good...

Slept long last night on account of being in bed before 10pm. Not 100% sure how today will pan out. I've a bucket load of work to get through and a lot of washing and tidying to do. The tidying is just so the cleaner can actually see the carpet to clean... it looks a little like an explosion in a suitcase factory here today.

Got to prepare for travel on Monday, and have an optician's appointment at midday. I've been putting off the optician for a while, which is silly. I've been having incidents where my focus seems to be off, which was worrying me until I actually looked at my glasses and realised that it was a small miracle I could see anything at all - scratched does not a good lense make.

The other more worrying aspect of my vision is I've started noticing a distinct need to change my focal length when glancing down at written material close up. Sometimes this manifests as having to move things slightly further away. This is extremely worrying as it would appear to be an early sympton of a particularly nasty terminal disease called old age.

Anyway, I am thinking of having a spell back in contact lenses - I quite like daily disposable ones and I'm thinking of going back to them.

South Africa...

It was an odd trip. M's dad was 80 and her idiot nephew was marrying his girlfriend, M also spent some time with old friend's who've yet to leave RSA. We finally spent a night in Jo'burg which was also interesting, but not necessarily for any good reasons.

In the way that us Brits love to talk about the weather, the white South Africans, and probably other colours too, talk about the crime rate. And, frankly, it is getting quite scary there - even out in the quiet suburbs of Durban. Burglary and home invasion are rife, car jacking is practically a sport and rape is endemic. Everybody has a crime story. As one friend said, a year or so ago, they were all stories about friends of friends. Now they are stories about you or your family.

It's worrying, particularly with the 2010 World Cup coming up. South Africa doesn't need a horror story during the world cup, and that's exactly the kind of thing that could happen. The locals have a lot of coping mechanisms for living with crime rates like this (i.e. red lights at night mean drive slowly, as do STOP signs), they also know what not to do or where not to go. I'm really nervous that a lot of people could be killed during the World Cup finals.

One problem is no safe public transport, another is a shortage of police. Where our friend's in Jo'burg live they have 1 cop car at night for a suburb with around 200,000 people. People rely on private armed police and security forces. Of course, the problem there is then corruption in the private police services, which is also a problem in a country with income differentials like you have in SA.

In terms of the economic split, things are slowly improving, but you only have to drive a little way to see huge poverty close up, which makes the life style of the whites and asians (and a minority of blacks) very hard to take. There's also a dependance on staff by the rich.

One joke I heard was that most white's could not leave RSA, they'd miss the sounds of Africa... that being the maid doing the washing up... Most people get full time staff for as little as R100 a day (that's about £8, or in PPP terms something like £25) - it's a hell of a life style, but you do wonder about how a society can maintain that without something giving eventually.

Finally, there's a state of fear developing around the replacement for the president Thabu Mbecki. Mbecki hasn't exactly been a roaring success, but he has been a safe and steady pair of hands who has allowed a lot of economic progress to be made. Unfortunately, the number 1 contender for leader of the ANC and, therefore, next president is Zuma. Zuma has all the trappings of a conventional African leader (i.e. Robert Mugabe and others). He's charismatic, prone to make promises that can't be kept (a chicken in every pot, a large house for every person, no more poverty etc...) and he's not keen on constituational limits on presidential terms. He's stated he'd want to be around to lead until the "job is done"... yeah, thanks el presidente.

The most worrying aspect of that sort of thing would be what we could do for Ms family if, for example, RSA went the way of Zimbabwe. They're not ancestrally British, or European for that matter (at least not in any meaningful way) - so they'd struggle to get out. Ms already discussed this with them and we'd have to figure out what we could do to help. Which is a disquieting thought.