The Third World As Seen From The Saddle- August 4
Tackling the Blue Cross Endurance Challenge and Angolan FOMO.
This is my first blog since New Zealand. Apologies for the long time no hear, but Jenny and I have been flat out busy trying to figure out how to restart our lives after our worst day ever.
We sold our old home, packing up 36 years of life and memories into not-nearly-enough cardboard boxes and are currently trying to squeeze them into our not-nearly-big-enough new home, all the while suffering Angolan FOMO. NB FOMO is a dreadful disorder, and the Angolan variant is worst kind known to man, even far much worse than the FOMO Donald Trump will suffer if he comes second in November.
As I type. Adam and Linda Selby and their intrepid Old Legs Class of 2024 are taking Have Fun, Do Good, Do Epic to the next level on their 5000-kilometer Angolan Odyssey, through deepest, darkest Africa, where no man has been before, apart from David Livingstone and millions of Angolans.
As I type, the Team should have just crossed into the great unknown that is Angola, unless of course they’ve blundered off course on another of Adam’s shortcuts. As always, the Old Legs Tour are riding to raise money and awareness for Zimbabwe’s pensioners. Please follow them on Facebook and help them to change lives and save lives.
Packing up your life is almost as daunting as Angola, especially when your sock drawer looks like mine. Jenny and I have been utterly ruthless in downsizing. Veronica has come into her inheritance early and is now the proud owner of Jenny’s Tupperware collection, but not the lids, while I’ve binned my khaki shirt and quite some few pairs of underpants and socks, especially the odd ones and those with holes in them.
But before you can move house, first you need a house to move into. Our new home wish list was short. I wanted something out of town, Jenny wanted single storey, and definitely not thatch. We ended up buying the second house we looked at. Apart from being double storey under thatch, it was perfect. Jenny christened it the Ugly House at first sight.
But before we could move in to the Ugly House, first we had to renovate. Having attended Allan Wilson Technical High School and having watched every television renovation program ever made, I am imminently qualified to renovate. But because camping can get tedious after the first 16 months, and because the human body contains only 7 pints of blood, and because I don’t want to get divorced, I hired in a professional called Clint to bash holes in the walls and make them good again. It was an inspired choice, so much so, my next grandchild will be called Clint, regardless of gender.
When Jenny and I got married 40 odd years ago, the exact year escapes me but I do know we were married on a Saturday, I promised Jenny a house with a fitted kitchen. And now please let the record show that I have delivered on my promise. And already I hate her fitted kitchen. Previously when looking for my pancake pan in the old house, I had a one-in-five chance of picking the right cupboard. But those odds have now ballooned out alarmingly to one-in-seventeen. And worse, the cupboards all look the same from the outside. Trying to find stuff in his fitted kitchen is most probably why Gordon Ramsay swears so much.
One of our new cupboards is a spice cupboard. I know this because I spent the best part of an afternoon arranging the contents in alphabetic order. Basil, Cumin, Cinnamon on the top shelf on the left, down to Pepper, Salt, Thyme and Tarragon on the bottom on the right, etc, etc, etc, with three shelves in the middle for Mixed Herbs and mystery spices, where either the labels are missing, or where Jenny’s handwriting has faded. Jenny is big on recycling. She’s not that big on following the alphabet. Already I hate our new spice cupboard almost as much as I hated the Tupperware cupboard in our old kitchen.
Other than arranging the spice cupboard, mostly I’ve been very involved in hanging pictures. Within renovating circles, there are two schools of thought when it comes to picture hanging- the die-hard centrists, who obsess on finding the exact centre of the wall, down to the last millimetre, before they commence hanging, and the free-thinkers who are happy with a plus minus approach to positioning pictures. Free thinkers also don’t mind if the wall plug goes in a bit sqwonk, on account of the fact it will be hidden by the picture. Turns out, I’m a free- thinker. Turns out, Jenny isn’t.
The actual move itself was a doddle, mostly due to my white board planning. Obviously minor hiccups happened, like trying to move into a house still full of builders, plumbers, painters, tilers, electricians, and carpenters. And then having paid little or no attention to the whiteboard, one of the cats went M.I.A. on the day of the big move.
We returned to the empty house a week later and the poor cat came bursting out of the bush at the sound of our voices. Shame, she was that overjoyed to see us, she ripped Jenny to absolute shreds whilst being captured, causing significant blood loss, including in my car.
We stuffed the cat into Ted’s empty cage, Ted being our malevolent parrot, and she yowled variations on ‘Woe Is Me’ and ‘We’re All Going To Die’, loudly, plaintively, non-stop for an hour and a half.
I was in charge of smearing butter on the cat’s paws when we got to the new house. N.B. Butter on cat’s paws is an old wife’s tale invented by either a butter merchant, or a company that makes oily stain removal products, which don’t work by the way.
But enough domestic waffle and on to the cycling part of the blog. To get me out of the fitted kitchen and to ease the Angolan FOMO, I’ve signed up to do the Blue Cross, starting this Tuesday.
The Blue Cross Endurance Challenge
The Blue Cross Endurance Challenge is Zimbabwe’s most iconic endurance challenge which takes participants from Zimbabwe lowest point to her highest, 500 kilometres on rough, tough backroads in 6 days, with 10,000 meters of elevation gain. We are riding to raise money for the SPCA who fight to prevent cruelty to animals and provide relief to their suffering. Please help them by following the donate prompts https://www.backabuddy.co.za/campaign/spca-blue-cross-2024.
And in other breaking news, Zimbabwe continues bonkers, especially Harare. In the middle of a generational drought with the biggest hungry looming large, because President Ed is having friends to stay for a weekend in August, suddenly we’re building new highways complete with instant lawn and instant palms left, right and centre, although I do worry that some of the palms won’t make it to the weekend. True story, we have potholes in the city that are 40 years old.
Until my next blog from the confluence of the Save and Runde rivers – stay out of the kitchen and on your bike if you can.
Eric Chicken Legs de Jong
* Names and images may have been changed for privacy reasons
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