South Africa: Getting under some rich Johannesburg skin

Sandton

Having been emboldened to go out on my own, I caught a hotel taxi ride to the Sandton Convention Centre where I had been told I could go to Nelson Mandela Square and Sandton City shopping centre. Sandton is a contraction derived from the names of the suburbs of Sandown and Bryanston.

The concept of a convention centre, I fully understood, but I failed to grasp the essence of the square, because rather than see an open square as one would have expected of square, plaza, place or piazza in Europe, I saw a building. I was not daring enough to ascertain if within the walls of this place a square might indeed exist, I have since found out, one does.

I then circumnavigated the area only to find a stark contrast between the affluent wide roads in the front to the quite different gathering areas at the back. I eventually made it round to the entrance of the Sandton Gautrain Station where I decided to travel down to Rosebank Gautrain Station instead.

Rosebank

This station had stretches of shopping malls adjacent to the train station, it was easy to walk around this Rosebank area and find your way using the touchscreen information boards, the shops had brands I was familiar with, from Nando’s to Dr Martens.

The shop attendants were helpful, constantly smiling and even when technology failed them in the Dr Martens shop, they did not allow their seeming frustrations to dampen their customer service. I was quite impressed with the Dr Martens staff wearing sexy Dr Martens boots and shoes, that itself had its attractive quality.

One other snippet of trivia I have just learnt as I do when writing my blogs is that Nando’s is really a South-Africa export that started in Johannesburg in 1987. Who’ll have thought that?

People

In general, I have found South Africans quite friendly, from the people at my hotel where one of the ladies appears to view me quite suspiciously through to my colleagues, many of whom I have interacted with for over a year by email and telephone conversation until we finally met here.

Despite the earlier difficulties, people deep down are affable, wonderful and good. The conversations on UberBlack rides are just as amazing as with anyone who through driving meets with people with all walks of life.

From ordinary people to extraordinary people, our humanity on this global village can bring out the best in us.

Slips, slippers and saunas

The heat treatment

I find that I get too topical with my blogs and rarely share a basic thought that I have not been able to develop into a full blog.

However, if I do have a number of basic thoughts, I could put them together in a blog and hope that the information flows with some entertainment value.

It was a day in early 1995, I got to work and my boss thought I looked tired if not stressed, he immediately suggested I find a sauna and sweat it all out. That was quite a new concept to me that I first called the sauna and even asked if they welcomed non-Caucasians.

Strange question, you might say, but there have been times when I have walked into places quite boldly and the place falls silent as I try to pick off eye balls all over me.

Under little cover

In a sauna, you are might have a towel as covering, in Budapest, you get the equivalent of a fig-leaf, some luxury outfits might offer robes but if you are more comfortable in other kinds of apparel, you can imagine the self-conscious state of mind you will have – it is not easy for a seemingly assertive person to be somewhere unfamiliar and strange.

It was a wonderful experience, exhilarating too. Many patrons go bare-foot around the sauna, but I learnt years ago to wear slippers after I suffered from warts that took ages to disappear.

I was amused when I saw the same kind of slippers I bought for 12 Euros on the shelf for almost 60 Euros and all because someone had branded the slippers with the DG chain-link of Dolce and Gabbana.

Money and sense

Even where I have had more money than sense, I have tried to call on the sense as much as possible when spending money and my slippers are very good, thank you very, very much – Dolce and Gabbana; my foot and hurting pocket – but you can imagine the accursed victims who would make a beeline for the label even if the product offers no additional function or quality.

Slippers, they are, not like they are made of some luxury chemical in sweat shops where the workers sweat the sweetness of honey, but you have to celebrate the brand and they must be thankful that there are fewer of me than customers who would shell out a fortune and more for tat dressed as superior and classy.

I am not wearing the Emperor’s new clothes, hope you aren’t too. Well, the blog ended up being long anyhow – the words are inspired at the time of writing most of the time.

Official Scrabble loses to Collins Scramble Allwords

Games for a child

I think I have been playing Scrabble for about 32 years, my uncle has just returned from the UK and he brought us a few board games, Scrabble and Monopoly.

Thankfully, I lived in a home where my parents had a sense of fun, whilst my mother sometimes wanted me to revise my schoolwork, what I learnt in class was enough to get me a good examination result – I am glad they exhibited a keen interest in a lively childhood than many typical Nigerian parents afforded their children.

I do remember that my mother spent her salary raise given in the Udoji review on buying my first bicycle.

The Scrabble lifestyle

In any case, Scrabble became the social ice-breaker, you made friends through battles on the board, in school competitions you won prizes and even played for money.

I am sorry to say, it was not designed for the dyslexic, you had to be able to spell right and if you didn’t, you hoped that your opponent(s) were unaware and you took away the spoils with high scores.

Obscure words, smart placings, multiple words on premium squares and everyone wanted to take you on to serve you a whopping defeat only for you to triumph.

The rules are clear, some house rules too like – timed turns, tiles placed on board must form part of the word for that turn, reusable blanks – anything to give the game a bit of excitement.

The matured player always played within the extents of the dictionary used to adjudge the words spelt out on board, in many cases it was the Chambers’ Twentieth Century English dictionary until we got hold of the Original Scrabble Words where two-letter word plays might just have you storming off in a tirade of four-letter expletives with the confirmation of the four-letter word – lost – as your gift.

No rules for fools

Rules are there for a purpose, any game without rules is a riot, a barbarian’s orgy, a lascivious bounty of reckless abandon to which there can be no restraint.

The news today [1] should have arrived 5 days earlier on April the first when Mattel the copyright holder of Scrabble announced a rules change which was not tactical or functional but just a typical lapse to invite stupidity into the pretence of being erudite, to "introduce an element of popular culture into the game", they said with vacuous glee.

Proper nouns would be allowed – this would include names of places, people, companies or brands – whilst it is not a free for all since it would be restricted to a Collins dictionary word list; woe betide the place, person, company or brand who has not seen the business and competitive opportunity of being able to brag about being a new Scrabble word.

Brand your game

Honestly, that rule change creates another game that could better be distinguished as Scramble as the fashion victims with their trousers halfway down their legs jive with Burberry as chavs, drinking Courvoisier with their LV caps and Gucci teeth wearing a mix-and-match of Crocs on one foot and Jimmy Choo’s on the other – all legitimate words of Scramble.

Only Scramble can best describe this change as a sense of chaos, disorder, the lack of rules and a riot of meaningless jumbles of letter arrangements that would be comfortable in, well, the game Scramble.

To call this game Scrabble would be sacrilegious to the extreme, tantamount to having the players of a typical game of football carry the ball with hands into the net and being able to score in any net for your team – ditch the goalkeepers, they are useless.

Maybe chess might also consider a rule chance, pawns can move in any direction regardless of where they are on the board and the king does no have to bother about being in check.

There is a wisdom that followed the time-honoured rules of Scrabble, just as constutions do not get changed on a whim – those rules have stood the test of time.

Just imagine how cross I would be because my village Ijesha-Ijebu does not appear in Collins Scramble Allwords and Walsall where I was born does, the hyphen is immaterial was we flip the board in unsettled dispute and depart in disgust.

Your name is not in the book of …

There might be the case for discrimination for including certain names and not others because they are Anglophile but Sinophile, Arabic, Asian or African names receive no prominence in the new hegemony of games, gamesmanship and an incipient preponderance of inferiority over those not blessed to be counted amongst the chosen,

No book will be big enough to contain all legitimate names in the whole wide world just because some smart chap thought that was a market for idiots to play Scrabble rather than their consoles.

For once, I wish I were a lawyer; I would be at the forefront of a class action suit and sue the pants off Mattel for this inane insight of faddism that leaves a majority of the global community that is their market place out of the exclusive Collins Scramble Allwords – Oh! Deliver us from this travesty.

I will be back on the matter, I am not finished yet.

* Since Scramble seems to be taken, a synonym might well do like scamper, scuffle or scurry but NOT Scrabble.

Source

[1] BBC News - Proper nouns come into play in Scrabble rule change