Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires

A few weeks ago we attended a school carnival. Driving into the designated car park, an uneven and pot holed sports field, I noticed a brand new Porsche parked in a rather unusual spot near the entrance. It was surrounded by orange cones. I immediately recognised that this car belonged to Sinead, a friend of mine who along with her husband owns the recruitment agency Parvana. The Porsche’s Parvana branded number plate was a dead give-away. But why was the car parked there? Well it turns out that the security personnel who were directing cars realised that the low profiled Porsche would not make it more than a few metres into the parking area. So they directed Sinead into this spot and sealed off the area with cones. We all find it very funny and suggested to Sinead that she was doing this as a means of marketing. I decided to make a cartoon of this and sent it to Sinead. That cartoon can be seen below.

Cape Town, 29 March 2020. Hello World All quiet on the Cape Town Front. Almost eerily so. Fandom and I haven’t left the house since lockdown though I plan to take a trip out to the shops on Monday to stock up on supplies. We pulled out the swingball yesterday and had a lot of fun. The windows are coming along too. A bit more sanding today and I should be able to apply the first coat to the side windows and door. I see ratings agency Moody’s downgraded South Africa to junk status late on Friday. This was not unexpected though the timing could not be worse and it will hamper any economic recovery we may have been expecting post COVID-19. Speaking of COVID-19, US death toll is now over 100,000 and Spain had something like 824 deaths in 24 hours. Stay safe.

Cape Town, 28 March 2020. Hello World Day 2 of lockdown and a long way to go. Yesterday we managed to keep ourselves fairly busy. In between the Nerf gun battles – Fandom cheated and stole all the bullets – we were engaged in a number of activities. I used the time to start sanding down some of my windows in preparation for a few coats of Woodoc. Fandom focussed his attention on reformatting Chronicles of Christmas into a paperback format. After lunch and a bit of exercise we beta tested a website on behalf of a friend of mine in the UK. That work will continue today along with more sanding (sigh!). We finished things off by making silly podcast recordings of Emma and Tracy, our female alter egos. News on the COVID-19 side was not good. By lunch time it was confirmed that South Africa had suffered its first COVID-19 related death - a woman from Cape Town. And more bad news, the number of reported cases had risen to just over 1100. There was a steady increase in cases over

Cape Town, 27 March 2020. “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities I woke this morning to an unusual silence. Very little traffic or people noise and while it was pleasant it didn’t seem right. I had to wonder – was I mad, in a coma or have I just watched Life on Mars too much? Seriously though, lockdown has finally reached Cape Town. Businesses, beaches, restaurants and comic book shops all shut down for 21 days. Had Thanos snapped his fingers? Luckily Fandom and I are well prepared: Life on Mars, a shelf full of novels and comics, some PC games, LEGO, Kenner characters and a rather large MCU collection. The thing we may be a little shy on is food but I just couldn’t bear standing in the queues behind all those people and their 300 rolls of toilet paper. One of the main impacts to me is that I now have 22 copies of my Melkkamer book sitting on my dining room table awaiting collection after the 21 day lockdo

A few weeks ago I was guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Cape Town Family History Society. My talk, Forgotten Constantia: The Lost Vineyards of Hauptville, covered the history of Hauptville, a Constantia wine farm, from its humble beginnings as a portion of land granted to Captain Pieter De Waal just south east of his farm Alphen in 1795, through to its ignominious end as it succumbed to suburbia in 1983. At its peak Hauptville had produced wine and brandy (from the farms own still) and grapes were exported to Europe. The first sub division took place when my great grandfather Jasper Albertus (Bertie) Van Niekerk and Pieter Brink bought the farm in 1925 and divided it in two. Bertie’s portion included the Manor House, Haupt Villa , built by PJ Haupt sometime between 1867 and 1874. A highlight of the Van Niekerk era was my grandparent’s society wedding. My grandfather, George D’Alton, was a Springbok rugby player and the Van Niekerks were well connected in the sporting