Today Tom has driven to Kimberley for a meeting of the archdeaconry clergy, taking Father Joseph but refusing to use the parish car without aircon. Temperatures have risen well into the 30s again in the last week and at night we only use a sheet again not the light quilt we had started to use. I have repositioned my cheap thermometer amongst the branches of the vine, more or less in the shade and out of sight now that the kids have no reason to come here looking for grapes. It had been inside the kitchen door but the temperatures varied so little as the house retains its heat. A week or so ago I found the morning temperature to be 10C; now it is 18 or so. So we thought autumn had definitely arrived but since summer style thunder storms have also resumed we are not so sure. Our house fans are once again sometimes in use as temperatures are into the low 30s in the afternoon and the evenings are uncomfortable without them. I insist on windows being shut by dusk as mosquitoes continue to plague me if I am not careful. Apparantly there are summer and winter varieties. I think the latter may have arrived as my bites are even bigger than before. But thanks to a pleasant skin oil produced by Avon, Skin So Soft, and Raid plug-in mosquito killers I mostly avoid them.
We had a perfect day on Monday when we decided to try the dirt road north from near De Aar to Hopetown mostly following the railway, 123 km going straight as opposed to going on tarred roads which is much further. The sky was a brilliant blue with puffy clouds here and there lighting the relief in interesting ways. We took our time, stopping to use binoculars to try to identify birds and to take photos and just to take in the silence and beauty. Every so often the karoo scrub is broken by a group of large trees and even a few fields of maize or alfalfa where windpumps bring water from deep underground.
The farmhouse and small workers homes are usually found amongst the trees and often this coincides with what used to be a train halt, still marked on the map but no longer in use. We got very excited when we saw a train in the distance; it proved to be just a diesel engine but a later one passed us pulling a huge length of wagons. Tom managed to catch it on his small video camera and later counted that it was pulling over 100 open wagons, probably with stone or ore.
The sense of being at one with nature was so strong; apart from a rusty wire road fence and a partial surface of stone or grit on the natural mud there was nothing man-made between the farmsteads, no billboards, filed boundaries. We have been reading a fascinating book 'Circling the Great Karoo' by Nicholas Yell where the author describes a solo journey on a scrambler bike around the Karoo giving details of conversations with the locals in the small towns and decribing the history and geology. This was one of our ventures into the real Karoo. Not knowing how long we would take and knowing there would be no towns we had packed some lunch and folding chairs and we found a thorn tree that gave just enough shade for a picnic. The silence is incredible. No aeroplane ever passes overhead, no road was remotely within earshot and we met about four cars during all our time. It may reduce the mileage to Hopetown a good deal but since driving speed is halved it doesn't reduce travelling time. But it was a thrilling experience for us.
Later we diverted on our way home on the usual route to go into Orania, a white-only settlement started post 1994. It had the blessing of a good clean swimming pool to cool us off, empty except for one family, but the small town seemed very dead, no children even though school would have finished. Black flags flew at half-mast in honour of its Afrikaans founder who recently died. I was strongly reminded of the kibbutz I stayed on back in the 1960s, newish soulless buildings and very tanned white people doing manual work, which you otherwise never see here.
Our week since has been enlivened by the arrival of Lyndsay, a young American doing research in Cape Town who has come to work at the FAS house mostly inputting data. I continue to go and help on a couple of afternoons a week. This week I got eager children using (Play)dough on one afternoon and playing matching games on another. My inablity to speak Afrikaans doesnt help in controlling their noise and enthusiasm for attention but they get such a lot of fun from whatever they can get their hands on that it is worthwhile I hope. My one regret was suggesting they be allowed to use some plastic motorbikes and a nylon tunnel I spotted in the store room. Play had to be in rather a small room so as to not get completely out of control. As their body temperatures rose from dashing about so my nasal senses suffered! Cleanliness is difficult I guess in the sort of homes they come from.
Tom has spent a lot of time on practical jobs this week, eventually succeeding in fixing a bad leak from our toilet cistern (only to have another develop from the pipe, but the sort that is manageable with an old ice cream tub beneath). Yesterday he again spent ages trying to attach a rather ingenious draught excluder on the chapel door after we had noticed leaves had blown in during the night. He and Danny the caretaker so nearly succeeded until they realised the door-frame was metal not wooden and a roller stop had to be fixed into it. More ingenuity eventually solved the problem using the draught strip in a different way from that intended.
A few priestly tasks came Tom's way but he is having to resign himself to the fact of his paid ministry ending in about a month from now. Our time here is in some senses a gentle slowing down.
