Article for 2013 Mar 26

2013

2013 Mar

Mar 26 Tue - 27 Wed

This is going to be a holiday very modern. Cicero would be most intrigued. A manmade machine capable of sustained flight? Cicero couldn’t have seen that. A shuttlebus connecting the two ends of a building? Cicero couldn’t have foreseen that. In a Mediterranean climate, with a colonial history, a multilingual society grossly polarised in wealth between potentially-corrupt plutocrats and paupers reduced to servicing carts and clients on an ad-hoc basis?

I am most intrigued. I may be able to deduce facets of ancient Rome from facets of contemporary South Africa, so that I might better understand the ancient Roman society, so that I might better comprehend the strengths (and weaknesses) of the language(s) they used.

From other facets of the experience I may be able to deduce things to avoid when travelling in future.

Example one: quiche. While you can take a quiche from Manchester to Dubai, you cannot get it past Dubai because the sixteen-year-old boy in your company will have eaten by then. And quiches go off (with other egg dishes?) if left out the fridge more than nine hours.

Example two: apples. While you can take apples from Manchester to Dubai, and from Dubai to Johannesburg, you cannot take the apples out the airport because the sniffer beagle will smell the ethylene evolved by the ripening fruit and get the ripening fruit confiscated. Rather oddly the dog’s name was Doctor; as they say in Jo’burg, a Doctor a day keeps the apples away.

Example three: personal hygiene. I spent thirty-two consecutive hours in the same outfit, a lot of which time was in the crowded fug of the crowded place in the crowded plane. I don’t know what the crowd thought of my squalor, but it certainly chafed with my own style of sensibility. It was good when I finally cleaned myself from clothes and dirt and clothed myself with clean attire, at our accommodation in Johannesburg, in the home of one of my parents’ friends, a successful lawyer who, having not inherited masses of money from his parents, has worked hard at his work for his country. Cicero, similarly self-made, would be delighted by his successful successor, as were we: he is a very nice host.