All Change...

I am. I am still in February on here, crazy crazy. And so much has happened that I can't even sit and do an email to family about it because there's just Too Much to write about. So I can't possibly sit and do a bit by bit account here... I'll just jump in.

Grahamstown is lovely. But it is terribly terribly loud. Students don't do sotto voce. Their cars don't have silencers, or shock absorbers, or volume control. I was woken at 0300 yesterday by Ram Jam's Black Betty playing at full, FULL volume outside our bedroom window. It says much for my old Rhodian status (which is now a full fourteen years old) that I merely thought dreamily that the last time I heard that song was at the Vic, and then went back to sleep...

The Vic isn't here anymore. I knew that, in my head. I'd been told. But to wander past the scene of so much debauched jollity and find it a hideously over decorated chintzy 'grown-up' cocktail bar and restaurant was a bit of a shocker. Not nearly so much of a trauma though as finding out that the truly gorgeous Victorian house I rented the granny flat of (English, much?) is now the Kwikspar and Tops bottle store. I still haven't got over that. I went in to buy Coke and crisps, and could still see the wooden panelling and coving I remembered. It was a horrible experience. Everyone boycott Spar, please.

Other than that, it hasn't changed much. Even the students are, essentially, the same. I keep seeing people I was at Rhodes with, still wearing their tie-dyed Festival bought wraps and not wearing shoes. It always take me a second to realise that it's not actually the same person I knew. Just the same genre. It's lovely. And it wouldn't be nearly so noisy if we weren't living on campus, opposite the Great Field and the Union. So, one day, when our house in Durbs sells definitively, and we buy something here, we'll probably go back to being in a grown-up world. But I will NOT go back to the new Vic. Uhuh. No way. Yuck.