It’s Day 83 of the South African lockdown. In celebration of this entirely unremarkable and insanely high number, I bought myself a Basotho blanket.
I am not a therapy shopper; I generally don’t self-soothe through buying stuff. I also don’t have much spare cash at the moment. But for the past several weeks, as the lockdown drags on and the temperatures dip ever lower, my instincts have been driving me to buy a Basotho blanket.
Welcome to Day 82 of the South African lockdown. It’s both freezing-cold and raining in Joburg – a very rare occurrence. It’s also Youth Day, a South African public holiday commemorating the 1976 student uprising in Soweto.
Over the weekend I went with my friend Michelle to Krugersdorp – an outer suburb on Joburg’s West Rand. (You may remember Michelle as the proprietor of the Junkie Charity Shop, and former human to the Melville Cat.) Michelle was donating a large potjie (Afrikaans for “stew”) pot to a feeding scheme in Krugersdorp, and she asked me to come along to take photos.
It’s Day 78 of the South African lockdown. Today I don’t care.
The cold front has finally descended and the low temperatures have turned my brain to sludge. We had a high of 9 degrees Celsius (48 Fahrenheit) today. This morning it was a blustery -2.
For the last couple of Thursdays mornings, I have intended to get myself to Heritage Baptist Church and the Melville food distribution by 6:00 a.m. The food parcel recipients have been lining up as early as 4:00 a.m., and the whole process is more or less finished by the time the sun comes up. I’m supposed to be documenting the program. But last week I arrived at 7:00 and basically missed everything.