Living for Disco

We sit in the new swanky pizza restaurant, sipping our cocktails. This is our recently established Saturday afternoon ritual, brought about so that we can sit in the sun with fancy drinks in martini glasses, saying “I never imagined that being a VSO volunteer would be like this” and then trying to get a better look at the waiter’s bum.

We decided that on this occasion, the thing that would make our lives complete would be a dish of olives, which we could nibble delicately while sipping our cocktails and looking like film stars (albeit film stars with eyebrows like Julia Roberts circa 1988, a wardrobe from Mr Price, and filthy 8 month old plastic flipflops).

“Excuse me,” we said. “Could we please have a dish of olives?”

“?” said the waiter’s face.

“Olives? Do you have olives?”

“Yeeees,” said the waiter, uncertainly, looking at us as if we were dangerous criminals recently escaped from straitjacketed incarceration.

“May we have some please?”

“Yeeees,” said the waiter, backing away.

Now, it isn’t unsual here to be able to get a little bowl of olives to snack on. This isn’t beyond the realms of the reasonable. We could not understand why he seemed so thoroughly discombobulated, especially as this restaurant is relatively posh.

The waiter returned and laid the plate down in front of us. On it, staring gently at us, lay two olives, and a toothpick each.

We thought it best not to ask for any more.

Employment in Namibia is at approximately 30%. This is very low, despite the fact that most supermarkets employ a bunch of people just to weigh your vegetables and stick price labels on them. They stand there, by the weighing machine, staring into space as the seconds of their precious lives dribble from emptiness into oblivion. They only seem to come alive when someone hands them a bag of oranges or an avocado. It must be a soul sucking job.

In the UK, it is not customary to weigh and price your vegetables before going to the checkout, so taking my veggies to the vegetable drone took a little getting used to. I am on a roll with it now though, and I can even punch the vegetable code in by myself if they are unavailable for whatever reason, e.g. busy sneezing wetly all over the tomatoes, trying to hit people with plastic signs etc. Generally, though, if you try and weigh your own vegetables, you will be treated by the vegetable drone as if you are deliberately trying to get them fired, so I tend not to.

However, Woerman Brock have come up with a novel idea – they have dispensed with the vegetable drone, displaying, instead, a nice colourful board with pretty pictures of vegetables on it, so that you can weight them yourself. I like this.

Some people, surprisingly, are unable to grasp this simple concept. Take the sour-faced woman who was weighing her potatoes while I stood patiently waiting to stick a price sticker on my apple. She walked to the machine with potatoes in hand, and put them on the weighing thing. Then she huffed and puffed and looked around for the vegetable drone to come and punch the numbers in, because my god what else are peons for? I expect she’d just had a manicure or something. Or didn’t want to pick up any nasty germs from the clicky buttons.

While waiting impatiently, she inspected the potatoes in the bag and took one out because it had a scratch on it. She then left the potatoes on the machine and went to select a scratch-free potato. Then she got upset with me because I took the bloody potatoes off the machine while she was meandering around, and priced my apple. Myself.

I tend to think that human beings are, on the whole, kind, thoughtful and endowed with a certain level of common sense – enough so that they can function on a day to day level at least. I realise that this is probably naive, and any trip to the supermarket (in ANY country), will disabuse normal people of these fancies pretty sharply. However, I would just get too depressed if I allowed myself to open my eyes and face the truth.

Sometimes, though, I am forced to.

Take my local supermarket. I nip in there most days to buy my lunch. Lunch usually involves fruit, and for some reason whenever I go in there some guy is always mopping up by the fruit and veg stand. He is always shadowed by a fool whose only task appears to be to dry the floor by fanning it.

The first stupid thing is that he is fanning it with one of those bright yellow plastic “Attention! Wet Floor!” signs. Why? Why not just leave the yellow sign on the floor so that people can note it and say to themselves “Ooh, the floor is wet! I should be careful not to slip”.

The second stupid thing is that he does this with an enthusiasm that is almost theatrical. You can almost hear the director in his head shouting “Feel the length of your arm! You can fan wider if you just feel it”. This means that whenever I am in the supermarket, trying to select a pear or an avocado, I have to do it like Indiana Jones – ducking under the violent arm swings of a man wielding a heavy plastic sign.

Today, he was just using a piece of cardboard. He still managed to whack me a good one on the side of the face though. No apology, no “Oh my god, how stupid I am to be accidentally hitting the customers with soggy cardboard. I certainly look stupid with this gormless expression, but really, I had no idea. I will mend my ways. Would you like me to get the manager so you can bully him into giving you the fruit for free?”

He just carried on trying to start a hurricane in the pacific and staring into space with his mouth slightly open. Next time I’m going to try and get him to break my nose with his plastic sign, so that I can sue and live in clover for ever and ever. Those yanks are onto to something, truly.

I promised almost two years ago that David, the security guard next door, would have first dibs on my bicycle when I leave in September. I said he could buy it from me, but really I’m just going to give it to him. Anyway, since then he’s been in somewhat of a lather, asking me on frequent occasions just how long it is until I leave and the bike will be his. I give him the same answer every time. September 2007. I get various responses:

“Eish, that is a long time.”

“Oh, it is September next year not this year?”

“Oh ok. [counts months off in his head; looks dismayed] Don’t forget it is my bike!”

Usually while he says these things, he’s clinging to the handlebars and admiring the bicycle’s fine lines and extraordinary streamlining. Well, he’s admiring something anyway. He absolutely cannot wait until I leave.

So, last week I came home on the bike, and he said “So, I am going away. I will be here tomorrow, and then the next day, and then I will be away in the north for two weeks. When I come back you will give me the bike? And also you must tell me that place where you get the bike mended and their number*, and I need everything. OK, I must go now, I must open the gate for these people!”

And he’s gone before I have a chance to argue. He’s trying to wrest the bike from my posession a full six weeks before I’m actually due to give it up – that’s how excited he is about it.

I feel a bit bad that I’m going to make him wait even longer for something that has been the object of his desire for almost two full years, but I reckon it’s character building. I mean, I’m going a bit frothy at the mouth waiting for my placement to be finished – it feels so close now, I just feel a bit limboish – but I’m going to have to learn to be patient. Some might say that if I haven’t learned how to be patient by now, I’m a lost cause, but it’s never too late in my opinion.

God, is it only 11.25? Sigh.

*It’s these people. They are wonderful, and have a really interesting bicycle ambulance project going on. You might want to give them some money. They’d really like it if you did.

Julia, our receptionist, walks into my office, and says the same thing she always says – pointlessly, because the answer does not matter one jot.

“Rachael, are you busy?”

“Er…”, I look at my screen, which is probably showing my email, or a blog, or occasionally the google home page, for when I am struck with an urgent need to know something obscure, like “contents tartare sauce”, or “dream of corpses significance”.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

“I don’t know. What’s up?”

“My friend had a dream last night when she had shit all over her hands”. She extends her hands to me as if to demonstrate where the shit was. “What does it mean?”

I’m stumped. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“No, it’s ok, I’m looking it up on the internet. But how do you spell shit? Is it s h i t?”

I pause, trying to work out whether she’s likely to find a dream interpretation website that uses the word ’shit’, and wonder whether to tell her to use an alternative, like ‘faeces’ or ‘excrement’, and decide against it.

“Yes” I reply. Succinct, if nothing else, that’s me.

She wanders off, wiping her hands absentmindedly on her skirt.

************

Some kind visitors from South Africa brought a copy of The Express international edition into the office. I fucking hate the tabloids, but it was a joy to see a British newspaper, even if it is crap. I leave it lying on my desk and Kennedy walks in and absentmindedly starts to leaf through it.

“Wow, that palace is big”, he says, showing me a picture of Buckingham Palace. “Where is that palace? Is it in Liverpool?”

I stare at him, confused. “Nooo, I don’t believe it’s in Liverpool,” I reply.

“But the Queen, she is from Liverpool, isn’t it?”

“Er, no. No, the queen isn’t from Liverpool.” I’m trying not to laugh, even though there is no earthly reason why he would know where the queen is from.

“But she supports Liverpool in the football.”

“Does she? I didn’t know that.” I’m struck with a mental image of our monarch sat in front of the TV in a Liverpool shirt with a can of Heineken, shouting “You’ll never walk alone” at the TV, while Prince Philip plays keepy uppy in the corner.

“So where is this palace? Do you have one in every city?”

“It’s in London. No, there’s just that one. And a castle in Windsor. I think that’s it.”

He goes back to the paper, looking thoughtful.

**************