Monthly Archives: June 2009

Aeroplanes And Odd Water

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It is nearly a month since I last wrote a letter that could also be posted to the website, hard to believe. It gives me a new respect for bloggers and newspaper columnists. How do they manage to churn out a 1000 words a day, every day, for weeks and years at a time?

While it has been an very interesting month I have not achieved as much work as I wanted. The themes have been aircraft, time out and odd water, which, come to think about, it are not bad! Since I was a teenager I have wanted to learn to fly. This desire is quite hard to explain as aircraft were not part of my childhood. When we arrived in Swaziland there was not even an airport, the small planes used to land on the 9th hole of the golf course in Mbabane. I did not get on a plane until I was 19 and heading for university in the UK. In those days the 747s, (which was a new aircraft), took off from Johannesburg, landed in Nairobi to refuel, then travelled on to London. On my first journey I was with two friends who were seasoned air travellers. They ‘kindly’ told me they would let me know when to change into my pyjamas on the plane.

I was bought a voucher for a trial flying lesson for my birthday back in March. Finally in mid-August I booked the lesson. The plan was, provided I did not throw up on the instructor, find myself unable to distinguish up from down or in anyway disgrace myself, I would book some flying lessons. I really enjoyed the lesson and so have started learning to fly. It will take some time, I guess at least nine months and possibly more. The good news is hours in the UK count in South Africa and vice versa.

The Norwich School of Flying teaches their pupils on an aircraft called a Piper Tomahawk. It is an American two seater plane designed specifically for training. It takes off at about 60 knots per hour and the cruising speed is about 90 knots, so it is slow and tolerant. There is a picture of me standing proudly by the plane on the website. Their plane is definitely, from a cosmetic point of view, frayed at the edges. The plastic trim in the cockpit is worn and broken and the exterior needs a paint job. Mechanically it is sound though. While all the lessons have been interesting and challenging I have been astonished by just how long and how careful the pre-flight checks are.

The plane is easy to fly and I am having great fun. We take off from Norwich and head for the coast where we carry out the lesson’s exercises. So far we have been lucky with the weather, beautiful sunny days with scattered clouds. Learning to fly one stays low, at between 2000 and 4000 feet. The mix of measures is interesting, the aircraft flies in units of speed called knots. A knot is one nautical mile per hour, which equals 1.852 kph or 1.151 mph. The height is measured in feet above the ground, but the altimeter has to be set according to the pressure and this can change, even during a one hour flight. The time used to record the flight and period in the air is Greenwich Mean Time.

Also remarkable has been learning how close to the financial margin the industry operates. This school, the one that has been at Norwich the longest, has two planes. One is being serviced and has been out of commission for months. It seems odd to have such a major capital item not available. The instructor is self employed, paid per lesson, so no flying no pay. The other day the wind was blowing across the runway and it was not safe to use the Piper, so we went to visit the control tower instead. Effectively the instructor was experiencing a day without any income! There is a constant turnover of schools. But for the trainee it is not cheap at all. The minimum requirement is 35 hours of flying (and of course passing all the exams) for a National Pilot’s License and 45 hours for a European Private Pilot’s License. In addition each landing costs £9.

The instructors organised a dinner for their pupils at a local restaurant. It was fascinating. I think there were about nine people who had learnt or are learning to fly and we divided into three groups: the boys who want to become pilots, their average age was perhaps 18; those of us with a bit of time and some spare cash who have always wanted to do this; and people who scraped together every spare penny to cover the costs of lessons. There was one woman who took five years to get her licence. All talk planes incessantly and I am not sure it is my natural home.

Oddly when we went away for a few nights this week we ended up staying in a very beautiful Yorkshire village which is adjacent to a Royal Air Force Training base complete with airfield and all that goes with it see http://www.raf.mod.uk/raflintononouse . At the gate of the base was a sign with their mission statement: “To train tomorrow’s fast jet-crew”, alongside the ones warning you not to enter etc. The cottage we were in was not very far from the end of the runway. There was a fairly constant stream of aircraft doing circuits and bumps which is what I hope to be doing soon! There was also the firing range! A military equivalent of a dawn chorus!

The village had the unpromising name of Linton-on-Ouse (the Ouse being a major Yorkshire river). To me Linton is attractive, bringing to mind ethereal beauty, but Ouse just drags you down in the sludge! The cottage was a converted barn at the back of a house belonging to an older couple who have lived there forever. He had been a farm worker and is a keen gardener. They had two superbly appointed cottages each with two bedrooms. At the back was a large games room which had a pool table, darts board and ping pong table as well as a range of other activities, clearly there if the weather was not good, but well thought out. The garden must have been about one and half acres and was planted with the most amazing variety of trees from all over the world.

Getting to the village one had choices, but the quickest way involved going over a toll bridge at a village called Aldwark, the alternative route is 25 miles. This little bridge on a very minor road is one of the last private tolls in the UK. We were told when the toll is put up it has to be done by the Secretary of State. We went over it about six times, paying 40 pence each time, to a range of elderly weather-beaten Yorkshire men who staff it. Actually I think they may have been trolls who only came up onto the bridge when they heard a vehicle approaching. Apparently it is not manned 24 hours though, even trolls have time off.

We had days in Knaresborough, York and Harrogate. In Knaresborough the main attraction is Mother Shipton’s Cave and Historic Park which claims to be England’s oldest visitor attraction. This may mean it attracts old visitors! According to legend Mother Shipton, England’s most famous Prophetess, lived in the cave during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Beside the cave is the Petrifying Well, this is a little steam with a great deal of dissolved lime which fans out into a small waterfall. As the water falls over the edge it deposits small amounts of lime and this, similar to the development of stalactites and stalagmites, builds up. Apparently as early as 1538 people started travelling great distances to bathe in the waters as they were believed to have miraculous healing properties.

Water was also the theme of the visit to Harrogate which is a Spa Town. This is beautiful and has an expanse of open area called ‘The Stray’, it would be called common land in other settings. It was developed around the Spa waters, which contain iron, sulphur and salt. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these waters were a popular health treatment and lead to an influx of wealthy but sickly visitors. The pump room is a museum (not visited), but on the outside is a tap so visitors can taste the water from this spring. It is totally disgusting, it smells and tastes of rotten egg, and the tang lingers at the back of one’s throat. Just walking past the tap one gets a whiff of the rotten egg. It is quite astonishing how the bad smells and tastes were assumed to have restorative properties.

The summer is over. Driving up to Yorkshire it was hot and sticky. Norwich was really dry and we desperately needed rain. On the Wednesday afternoon a front swept across the country, tipping rain everywhere. Thursday morning was very wet and when we drove back on Friday it was cool and grey. Some varieties of trees are already loosing their leaves. This seems quite early, but may be due to the stress of a long dry spell. There is no doubt it was a glorious summer.
The school year starts on Monday and this is a really critical time for Douglas as he has GCSE exams to get through. Rowan enters her second year of University. I have a book and five articles to complete before the end of the year as well as heading back to Durban and take up the reigns of HEARD again. Of course that does mean that in October I will be going back to the Southern Hemisphere summer, so I guess I come out of this as winner, not having had the Durban winter – not that it is really cold. Even my time in Cape Town in July was pleasant.

I feel I have been really lucky this sabbatical because I have seen most of a northern spring and summer, and will see some of autumn. My year began with the end of winter and first few days of spring in Ottawa. By the time I depart the first frosts will be here. It is, strangely, a privilege to enjoy the seasons and see how the land and wildlife reacts to the changes. Being in Yorkshire on the cusp of autumn was deeply fascinating. I don’t think seasons are usually so clearly demarcated, and it is not something I take a lot of notice of normally. We are isolated in our various urban settings.

Desperate In Durban

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I am back in the UK after about three weeks away. It was generally a good trip. The other day I was listening to the news and was hugely amused by a very South African item. A road block was set up in the Cape in the run-up to National Woman’s Day. This is a public holiday and is taken very seriously. The initiative was taken by women: female police officers, community leaders and so on – powerful women one and all. They were, it seems, effective; catching vehicles without road tax or that that were not roadworthy and arresting drunk drivers. I had to smile when the (female) announcer ended the piece by saying: “the roadblock was ‘manned’ by…”.

There is much going on in South Africa and some of it is really good. Last week President Zuma made a surprise visit to the little town of Balfour in Mpumalanga where there have been protests over non-delivery of services. It was so unexpected that the ANC mayor, who goes by the delightful name of Lefty Tsotetsi, had already knocked off the day. The press reported that his secretary dropped her lunch at the sight of the President walking into the council offices. It was 3.30 in the afternoon which begs the question as to why the mayor had gone and what was the secretary doing eating lunch at that time of day.

The Mayor was hastily summoned back to the office. The Mail and Guardian interviewed him and his municipal manager and got a lot of prevarication and banality. To quote: “The function of the municipality is contained in the constitution. It focuses more on basic services, so issues that pertain to health, education, safety and security are not in the competency of the municipal offices”. There are many challenges over service delivery and growing frustration about the slow pace, so it is good to see the politicians taking this seriously. Indeed one of the other senior ANC leaders Tokyo Sexwale, spent a night in an informal settlement.

During the two weeks I was in Durban HEARD hosted a number of meetings that I was able to attend. One interesting meeting was on HIV/AIDS in cities. A striking statistic bandied about was that there are more HIV infected people in Durban than there are in the whole of Brazil. Having checked the numbers and found that in 2003 there were 660 000 infections in Brazil I suspect this may not be true and it is being thrown about as a good sound bite. However what is certain is in Southern Africa AIDS is an urban epidemic. Ironically this may be a good thing because it allows us to put service delivery in place. I was not the first to suggest that the project we develop be called “Sex in the Cities”. The agenda is being driven by UNAIDS, Southern Africa AIDS Trust and HEARD.

The cities meeting was held at the Balmoral Hotel on the Durban beachfront. If the room had a window then we could have seen the surf, but it was an internal dungeon. Although the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day we sat in a dark room. The air-conditioning had two settings: freezing cold and airless and stuffy.

There was also a small meeting on designing interventions for schools. It is clear that older female children (or learners, as we call them in South Africa) are very vulnerable to infection. I think that with the right environment in schools it will be possible to begin making changes, because educational establishments can do so much. They can be places of safety, pick up on social issues and provide food. In Swaziland school and early childhood development are core policy areas needing attention.

The one issue that I want to work on is the role of faith based interventions. It seems to me that there are real issues about religious organizations being involved in prevention because of the nature of sex, sexuality and what they are prepared to accept as norms. Perhaps only the Catholics – who have the possibility of forgiveness on earth – can deal with this, and as we all know their view of condoms is unhelpful. So here is my thought, it is a P x problem. P is the probability of something being ‘wrong’. So having sex before marriage is wrong, using a condom is wrong. P x P= P2 which is of course worse that P + P=2P. Add additional issues and the P value goes up exponentially P x P x P=P3. This is really something we need to consider in our messaging and perhaps in who does the interventions!

One initiative I had not heard of before has a catchy slogan: “Fifty/fifteen”. The goal of this would be to halve the number of infections by 2015, the year of the Millennium Development goals. That would be a significant achievement, although would still not stop the epidemic.

When I am in Durban I support local theatre. I got tickets for three shows and went to two. The first was a stand-up comedian at a theatre called The Rumbelow. This is an odd place in a former white working class suburb called Umbilo. The theatre is in an old M.O.T.H. hall – this stands as the Memorable Order of the Tin Hats. It is an organization that was set up after the First World War for ex-servicemen. It was, of course, a totally white organization and was a source of social cohesion and halls for this particular group! The hall and grounds are quite substantial and patrons are encouraged to come and braai in the grounds before the show, and are seated at tables rather than in rows in the theatre.
The comedian, Mark Banks, had a go at various sectors of society – from poor white beggars, who always start off with ‘let me tell you my story”, to the ANC women’s’ league via politicians and budget airlines (people who travel on these should be taking the bus!!). He did a good routine on geckoes and how to get rid of them. There were four of us in the group. None of us knew quite what to expect and we had not eaten. At the end of the evening (9pm) we tried to find a restaurant but all their kitchens were closed! We ended up with take-away pizzas and even then ours were the last pizzas out of the oven.

The second show was also at a supper theatre the Barnyard at Gateway shopping centre. Gateway is a monument to mammon. Durban has beaches aplenty with great surf. Gateway has a mechanical wave! You can ride a board while looking at the real thing less than a kilometer away. The show was called ‘LM Radio’ – the first ‘pirate’ radio to broadcast into South Africa. This was based in Lourenco Marques as Maputo was known under Portuguese rule. Apart from the old tunes they played the jingles and adverts. The station closed in 1975, one of the side effects of the Portuguese revolution that brought down the Salazar and lead to the independence of Mozambique and Angola. A scan of the audience showed that most of us had listened to the station in our youth. Older white people! The music was great.

The show I did not go to was an Athol Fugard play ‘Master Harold and the Boys’. The reason is that it is a serious and rather depressing play about the relationship between a youngish white boy and two middle aged black men who work for his father. I think it would have been difficult, but I do need to see it.

Durban was incredibly beautiful. It is a magnificent time of year. One of my colleagues described it as: “the time of year when I want to kiss the sky”. Soon it will be spring and the jacaranda trees will begin to blossom.

I left Durban and flew to Johannesburg where I met with one of the people who is conducting the mid-term review of HEARD. She needed to interview me ‘formally’, and it was good to be asked some searching questions. I then hopped on the plane from Joburg to London, an SAA flight which does not have the range of movies that I expected. The purser commented, “I am really sorry we have a rubbish video system on the airbus 200’s, most people (that is people in business class I think) catch the earlier flight to London because of this”.

This ticket was bought with air miles. I have been a member of the SAA Voyager programme for many years and had never succeeded in spending miles. I was determined to manage this time, with about 460 000 miles it seemed silly not to. So I went to the SAA office and it was extremely simple and they could not have been more helpful. The payment required was for the airport taxes and this came for R5000. However my last trip to London on SAA was marked by a non-functional video system and a strong letter of complaint was duly sent off to them. They responded by sending a voucher worth £150 for future travel, so I only had to pay R3000.

Books

Sadly most of my reading over the past couple of weeks has been work related. I bought myself a copy of Lord of the Rings. On the bookshelf in Durban are the first two books of the trilogy but not the third. This story is my comfort reading, which means that if I don’t know what to read I will pick it up. However missing book three was proving to be increasingly frustrating.

There is an excellent report by the British All Parliamentary Group on HIV/AIDS called “The Treatment Time bomb” which asks some of the difficult questions about how we are going to manage to provide treatment to the many millions of people who need it.