It is so strange

 Yesterday was the solstice. The sun was directly above and don't we know it. By midday the temperatures here are well above 30 and the only thing to do is to retreat indoors and try to sleep for an hour or two making up for the early rises.It is uncomfortably hot in many ways and for those rich enough and who can get away, this is the time to run southwards to the coast for less intense weather. That means that De Aar is less busy and populated if not entirely abandoned. The shops seem to be busy but there is nothing like the christmas mania that is part of our British way of celebrating Christ's birth. So we look forward to a very different Christmas with small congregations and times of quiet. We expect that will make us feel very sad to be away from all our friends and family but it will be a valuable experience. We are looking forward to escaping the heat for a few days immediately after Christmas when we go to Groenfontein in the Swartberg Mountains for a few days of pure leisure and decadence! So we are far from grumbling because we know from Sky news on our TV that you are all suffering terribly from the weather. We cannot believe that Pershore of all places should have tempertaures of -19 and that the very cold weather seems to go on and on. Each day we look to see if you have any respite only to find that if anything things are getting worse. So we hope that you will all find a way of enjoying this Christmas even if it was not as you planned.

We could not go through the Advent/Christmas period without at least one carol service ( at home by now I would be feeling that I do not want to sing another "Away in a Manger" ever again) so we had a kind of Lessons and Carols service last Sunday at 6pm. We still do not have anyone to play a keyboard or organ but we made a good sound led by the wife of the churchwarden who has a strong voice. We even persuaded her to sing the first verse of "Once in Royal David's City" as a solo. Traditions die hard! We lit candles at the end of the service and sang Silent Night which the congregation (some 30 adult and 15 children) sang delightfully quietly, which is quite an achievement for people who love to blast out everything.

Monday, on our day off, we decided to travel to Cradock which we had been told was well worth visiting. It was quite a journey considering it was only the third town we encountered on our trip; Hanover, Middelburg and then Cradock. The total length of the outward leg was 250 kilometeres and it took us about 2.5hours. Cradock is a very attractive old Karoo town with a huge Dutch Reform church bizarrely modelled on St Martin's in the Fields, as well as beautiful old Anglican and Methodist churches.

Cradock has a museum dedicated to Olive Schreiner and her family. For those of you who do not know, Olive Schreiner was born on the Karoo in 1855 and is considered the first of the great South African writers. Despite her rigid Protestant upbringing she considered herself a freethinker and rejected a lot of the conservative religious views of the time. She had a remarkable life which included periods living in England and being part of the radical feminist scene there. What we did not know was the extraordinary lives of other members of the family and their huge contribution to public life in South Africa. One brother was the Premier of the Cape Colony and her sister was so well loved that 10,000 people came to her funeral! They were all very concerned for the rights of the native peoples and opposed a lot of the legislation to exclude them from voting etc. We had a fascinating time in the museum and it gave us a further insight into the complexity of South African history.

After a short visit to the town museum and to a small exhibition dedicated to the Cradock Four (young men who were killed by the police during the apartheid era) we took our almost obligatory dip in the local swimming pool (cost? all of 3 rands ie. 30p) where we shared a lovely pool with some black youngsters. We have yet to encounter any white people at these municipal swimming baths – perhaps they all have pools in their gardens.

Then it was back to De Aar. We expected the journey to be mostly flat but that was not the case. The road went through some small mountain ranges and in the near distance we had superb views of bigger and grander mountains. So the 250 kilometeres back did not seem at all long especially for two geographers!

So we are gearing ourselves up for a very hot but peaceful Christmas while thinking a great deal of you all back home coping with the snow. Emma is just off to rehearse children for the Christmas morning nativity service so we are not feeling too useless.