So you think that living in the country is easy? That all we do is plough a few furrows before parking the Massey Ferguson under a tree, haul out the old Blackberry and get on to Facebook to sow our oats in Farmville?
Well, yes, that’s exactly what most of us do. That’s how we roll out here in Stanford. But not every day. Take Wednesdays. I have to come over all corporate on Humpday. And what a hump. I can barely get my tractor over it.
I had two meetings today. Two. This entails me getting out of my Barney pyjamas at 2pm, washing my hair front and back of my bald Karoo (sounds better than Sahara) and going down the pub. That’s where we have our “informal tourism group” meetings. Informal being the operative word. No tie required. I was going to say “No Jacket Required” but that’s the name of an album by my least favourite musician of all time.
Not entirely the vibe we have going at our Stanford informal tourism group meetings
The cool thing about meetings at the pub (Stanford only does “meetings” in the pub) is that a certain amount of alcohol is required before any ideas remotely worthy of discussion are issued forth. And, boy, do we have ideas. Let’s just say that you are going to be gagging to get over to Stanford soon enough.
Moving swiftly alo… what? You want minutes? We don’t take minutes. We take hours. And you’ll have to ask the ridiculously effervescent and clever Janet Marshall of Stanford Info for the attendance register. I’m not saying who was there in case they were actually meant to be doing some work. We’re protective of each other out here in the wilderness. Reminds me of a saying I came up with a couple of months back… “One for all and all for one”. I should have patented that. It encapsulates our vibe.
So it was home to feed the dogs and the cat and neck a couple of Milk Thistles before rushing back (I was thirsty) to the Stanford Arms for the Rotary weekly meeting. This was even more exciting than usual because four young people from Knoxville, Tennessee (I love how that sounds) were there.
Now I might be breaking new territory here but I fully believe that “kids” today are nicer, better-looking and more intelligent than when I was their age. And more responsible. It’s like they looked at my generation, thought about it for two seconds, held a global conference and unanimously passed a motion to be far cooler than we were.
Erin, Stephanie, Connor and Sam are seriously nice kids. Not only have they been busy helping out with upliftment projects around Stanford but then they come to our meeting and tell us how wonderful our country is, how warm and friendly South Africans are and generally how blown away they have been by their African experience. We liked that.
I mean, we South Africans got a lot of that during our beautiful World Cup, right? But keep it coming is what I say! And now The Knoxville Four are going home to try to raise funds to improve conditions for the disadvantaged people in our area. Like I said, seriously cool kids.
Now I must iron my Barney jim-jams and bomb into bed. It’s been a tough Humpday in the corporate world. And I need to be ploughing my fields in Farmville before midday tomorrow. Yee-ha.
Fred Hatman (AKA Howard Donaldson) knew he wanted to be newspaper journalist at age 13. He has worked as a reporter and sub-editor for the Daily News and Cape Times, both based in South Africa and Wimbledon News, Today, London Daily News, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror, all based in London .
