Heritage Day

We recently celebrated 'Heritage Day'. Well, others celebrated, and I, like every other 24th September, took a long, hard look at myself. No, not in the mirror. I only do that once a week these days because, well, it's not very pleasant any more.

Indeed if the truth be told, once I passed the ripe age of 45 I made it a personal policy to NEVER look at myself in the mirror, but then I came unstuck I had to start the 'once a week' check after the internet/ police station incident….

Did I tell you about that? The internet/ police station incident?

That was when my daughter posted (on facebook, not in the mail for those over 55) a series of pictures of our family swimming and sunbathing at Jubilee Creek during the Christmas holidays. Of course being the social media mogul that I am, I only saw them a month or so later, and immediately realized there was something horribly amiss. I printed them out and rushed to the police station.

“You may need to call in the Special Crimes Unit!” I blurted as I burst in. Slamming the pictures onto the counter under the desk sergeant's nose I demanded he instruct the whole detective squad to drop everything and set up a manhunt for the lecherous, balding, fat dude in the speedo who appeared in the background of every one of the photographs, sometimes in the near vicinity of my daughter!
“Look at this pervert, he's absolutely disgusting!” I babbled to the bemused man, “And so cunning! He's in all our pictures, yet I never saw him once, and I was there the whole day! Probably a sex starved stalker if you ask me.”

The desk sergeant looked at the pictures, then at me, then at the pictures, then back at me.

Then he started laughing. And laughing. And laughing.

So. Yes. I have started checking myself in the mirror, once a week, just to avoid any more embarrassing moments. I have also made a mental note to write to the manufacturers of Speedo costumes, because they are not supposed to shrink. Not that much.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Yes. Heritage Day. Having a long, hard, look at myself… and my heritage too.

You see I'm a bit of a rolling stone, I suppose, when it comes to heritage. No, I do not bear any resemblance to Mick Jagger (though Mrs Ed has won a prize or two in that arena), what I'm trying to say is I have no real roots. I am a displaced person. I have lost my origins, somewhere, somehow……….

So what is my Heritage? I was born in Birmingham, England but I left when I was six, so I have a very limited 'connection' with my birth place, other than the occasional, strange longing for boiled vegetables and bad cardigans.

Then followed three years in Zambia, but the only heritage I gathered there was one of American Hippy History (we went to an international school, at which it was exceptionally cool to grow long, greasy hair, wear no shoes, and say 'Wow, bro, that's, like, psychedelic!' I also got to learn the lyrics to every Simon & Garfunkel song ever written).

Then, for reasons of which I have very little knowledge (those cannabis plantation stories were just malicious rumours) my parents bundled the entire family (including all our worldly goods and the dog, but sans heritage) into a decrepit Combi, and drove us off down to Zim (then Rhodesia) where I spent the next 22 odd years. Ok, they weren't ALL odd.

So should I look for my heritage there? Hmmmm, I did learn how to drink beer from a 'vellie' (yes, I regret to confirm that it is indeed a shoe), AND to sit on my haunches (after consuming countless Vellie-fulls of amber nectar) round a fire and eat Sadza ne mtombos (mealie meal porridge and cow intestines), with the occasional addition of a mopane worm. I also learned a bit about braaiing….. but more about that later.

Sadly I don't think the president of that fine country really wants me to claim any heritage there at all. One look at my passport would doubtless convince him that I am a BREEETISH SPY WHO WOULD DENY AFRICA'S PROUD PIPPLE THEIR LEGARCE..

Alas. So now here I am, in 'home-country number four':- thoroughly happily living by the sea, and desperately trying to adopt a heritage. The Garden Route heritage. When I first looked at it (on www.choose-your-roots.com) I thought it might include interesting stuff like pot-hole decorating, satellite rugby refereeing and perhaps a tortoise-in-a-potjie recipe or two, but no, nothing of the sort. Indeed when you mention heritage in this area you only seem to get one answer:- braaiing .

And this is where I come unstuck (again?) because, well, it's not that I'm not a good braaier, it's just that 99% of the male population, and probably 93% of the female population, are better at it than me. And as social etiquette demands that the best braaier always gets the tongs, it stands to reason that I won't ever get the opportunity to improve my standings on the braai-ladder.

Let me explain, and forgive me for this little lesson in anthropology.

In England the braai serves a totally different social function. Firstly it's not even called braaing, and so it shouldn't be, when you think they only cook patties of suspicious origin (and that's out of the horse's mouth) and er, 'pork' sausages. When one takes into consideration that, other than mince, this is probably the only meat they've had since great Aunt Agnes accidentally dropped her fingernail in the plum pudding, one can understand that they still manage to whip up a bit of excitement about eating this. But the actual act of braaing, sorry, barbequing? Let's just say that 90% of the time it's done ‘solo’, in the rain and cold where it really is miserable and much more fun to be sitting inside with everyone else, sipping ale, humourously debating politics and discussing why the Australians are too Neanderthal to play cricket.

The bottom line is in England there is no 'queue' to barbeque.

In Zim we did a lot of braaing, and I pride myself that we could make braais out of anything (shopping trolleys and wheelbarrows included) and anywhere. But it was more 'coarse braaing'. Wood, matches, newspaper and, if it was a smart function, a grill.

Oh, and petrol.

Posh people who had contacts at the border post used 'firelighters', but behind their backs we'd always point out that such things made the meat taste odd.

I think what I'm saying is that braaing was a means to an end. You did it to cook your meat, so you could eat something nicer than 'mtombos' with your sadza.

But there was no such thing as a 'Braai- Master'.

So I fall somewhat short here in South Africa. I've tried. And failed. Numerous times. Indeed I thought I knew what I was doing until we had guests round for a braai on my first Heritage Day in South Africa. I hadn't met them - Mrs Ed had chatted to the wife a few times in the car park at the nursery school, but as we had been in Sedgefield a few months we thought we should make some sort of attempt to break into the local social circle.
“What on earth are you doing?” the husband squawked as he rounded the corner and found me standing over a wheelbarrow, frantically fanning two old planks, a handful of grass cuttings, a ripped up cornflake box and a damp cross-section of a log about 45cm in diameter. Admittedly I was quite convincingly disproving the well-known 'where there's smoke, there's fire' theory.
“Hi, pleased to meet…” I put out my hand to introduce myself, but the poor man was too distraught for formalities. I was murdering something he held sacred. I was insulting his forefathers. I was haemorrhaging his heritage.

Wincing, he snatched the tongs out of my hand, and tucked them under his arm. Then he started rebuilding my braai fire. My! But it was impressive. In less than seven minutes he had turned the whole fiasco around, with a neatly stacked, disciplined tower of blazing 'Hardekool' logs (of course “You can't get better braaiwood”, and, also of course, he had a bag of them in his car boot, for just such emergencies).

He was a very nice man, and didn't seem to have any problem with cooking ALL the meat. In fact he insisted (I must admit, his Wildebeast rump steaks, hung for three weeks in a cold room, marinated in his special braai sous for exactly 52 hours, then peppered with freshly ground spices and lightly brushed with olive oil, looked and smelled a lot nicer than our QF drumsticks and viennas). But he never handed me my tongs back. In fact I think he took them home with him. I'm sure I saw them there when we went to their's for a 'returrn braai' the next year. He suggested I be in charge of fetching the beers and buttering the bread for the 'braai-broodjies'. But just when I was falling into a head-hanging ‘I Have no Heritage’ pit of depression, he shouted after me.
“Hey bru', whaail you there, Chuck some choones on the Haai Faai. My Waaif's got a whole lot of lekker ol' music, so choose whadeveva you smock!”
“Aaaah,” I smiled, looking lovingly at the 'Simon & Garfunkel Live at Central Park' cassette tape I discovered hidden in her collection, “Bru? You know what? I think
I'd be mad if I didn't!”