South Africa is not just about colour.  It’s much more subtle – and much more fun – than that.

When I was here three years ago, I spent quite a bit of time in suburbs like Bellville learning about the Dutch Reformed Church and its community.  It’s almost always unwise to think that people and situations may be alike – but I sensed that they would be a bit like the Ulster Protestants.  And they were – decent, kindly, hospitable, upright.  A bit cautious about outsiders.  They were people who had put their faith in a package which combined religion and politics and now felt that they were losing.  They kept home baked biscuits in Tupperware boxes.  I liked them and felt at home with them.

Yesterday, Mark and I decided it was time for a haircut – if you want to know about a place, get your hair cut there.  My hairdresser turned out to be a long way from Bellville – coloured, frizzy hair died auburn and very camp.  I don’t have much hair so there was time for a chat.  I always have problems with the sticky-out hair at the top – ‘No problem’ he murmured.  ‘My ex-partner had hair just like yours.  I’ll cut it the way I used to do his’  And so he did.  And we chatted about how South Africa is changing and how he wanted to move to Italy – because Australia is too much like South Africa.  And he did ears and eyebrows and beard – eyes covered in case bits of beard jumped up and stung them.  And with a waft of talc and perfume it was done.

Welcome to the new South Africa!

Can’t resist a holiday blog from here – still early spring and not too warm.  I was last here three years ago during a sabbatical from work – looking at it the ‘miracle’ of political change through slightly envious Northern Ireland eyes. So it’s interesting to see how it has moved on.  It still feels good, flexible and positive – the talk radio is still optimistic where the equivalent in Northern Ireland is still angry, bitter and full of recrimination – unless BBC NI’s Talkback programme has changed.

It is, of course, about colour.  But more often I find that I experience South Africa as a series of collisions between first and third worlds – and the gaps are felt as economics as much as race.  We have Mark with us – he took us back to a donkey farm on the Cape Peninsula where he spent a summer volunteering two years ago.  Turn left off the tarmac opposite the township and suddenly your pure white Avis Polo stands out as a first world alien being.  We met the redoutable Sonia who runs it.  I gave her some plastic ties to replace the orange string which holds together all the pens and the 17 donkeys. Mark intends to go back to have a few beers with some of his friends – one was orphaned in Namibia at an early age; the other fled Rwanda when his father who was a judge was murdered – now living in a windowless building next to the farm.  We’re also going to visit the massive Khayletisha township to see an Aids project with which we have links.

There are some impressive signs of progress – the townships/shanty towns are gradually being replaced with prefab buildings and there are new schools.  But it must all seem painfully slow if you are living in a packing case.  We debate the massive over employment.  Drive into the filling station and several black workers rush forward to help you do what you could perfectly well do for yourself.  Is it good for their self-respect to have what – to first world eyes – appears to be a non-job?  My view is that, if we are as wealthy as we must appear to them, we have almost no right to a view.  At nearly 14 rand to the pound, South Africa is cheap for the visitor even if it is expensive to get to.

For the rest, it’s tourism in a place of staggering beauty.  Mark and I walked the hills of the cape on Sunday with James and Mike.  We’ve just been down to Hermanus to see whales – Hermanus is a bit of a Bundoran but the whales are amazing.

And finally – given my recent preoccupation with the position of the lavatory seat – I have to report that the only bit of non-PC material I have encountered was in the Harpic ad [I think] on TV.  Smiling white housewife and smiling black domestic worker rejoice that Harpic has brought them a shining white toilet.  Could they really be serious?

Time to go – after a very breathless period since we were in Donegal.  My tendency to crawl the internet cafes while on holiday may mean that there is the occasional surfacing …

It’s been a busy few days – over 500 miles busy in the last three days and I haven’t had time to sort out the demisting in the car. The websites say it’s likely to be the heater matrix.  That sounds inaccessible.

Went to Aviemore last night to meet the Ministry Enabling Group of our church in Rothiemurchus. This is the group of people who share leadership and pastoral responsibility for the congregation – there is no ‘Rector’ or designated clergy leader – so it’s collaborative ministry. We were supposed to be doing an introductory session on Christian Ethics. And we did do a bit of that although the group [and I] found the material tough going. But it was very interesting to hear the story and progress of the congregation under this new form of leadership – sharing of tasks, mutual support and a confidence which communicates itself to visitors and newcomers. As in our congregation in Alloa, it’s capable people with great commitment learning to work together and support one another.

Sermon for 150th Anniversary Service of Mission to Seafarers in Aberdeen 5th September

Mission to Seafarers Aberdeen 5.9.06.doc

Area Council Service Kirkaldy 3.9.06.doc

Interesting and encouraging day yesterday.  One of our Area Councils decided to have a shared Sunday morning service – always difficult to close the doors in the local church – in the beautiful worship space at Bryce Kirk in Kirkaldy.  It turned out to be, as I experienced it, one of those moments where people experience something very different.  It was bright, warm and encouraging.  And on to Dunblane for the Ordination of Giles to the Priesthood.  Another of those moments where I find myself a bystander at the commitment of a candidate and his family .. and wonder and admire.  Things do move steadily.  The things that move are usually nothing to do with anything which I do.  But that’s ministry and leadership.

Meanwhile the faithful Passat has a slight problem on the demisting front which leaves me travelling the diocese in a slight haze.  It needed water so I called in to a filling station in Dublane  – the very one where I got stuck in the snow drift while being interviewed by Sally Magnusson.  What goes around comes around …

In Fermanagh where I grew up, a real soft day was a day in which it was sort of raining – it was not altogether clear whether the rain was going up or day.  It just sort of hangs about a bit.

So I have had a day in which I have tried to keep my feminine side on top – soft power all round.  All E Mails carefully screened for any sign of incipient episcopal authoritarian tendencies.  Much use of, ‘I know you will already have thought of ….’ and ‘I wonder how you feel about …. ‘  What one learns, of course, is that much of the way in which we communicate today is not at all conducive to the use of soft power.  E Mail, text and, to a lesser extent, the telephone are all dangerously one-dimensional.  One constantly has to read back, open out the cryptic, soften the conclusion …. and learn to be touchy-feely in a virtual world.

Just driven to Edinburgh Airport while listening to a programme about Hard Power and Soft Power on Radio 4. There is much to debate in working out whether a society actually needs both – even if the soft variety feels more subtle than the hard. But why link the difference to the politics of gender? And then go on to suggest that if Condy and Mrs Thatcher are examples of hard power, it is because they had learned to act like men in a man’s world. By the time I reached the contra flow at Kinross, I was getting really irritated that some women seem to feel that it is all right to speak of men in general in terms which one would not now dare to apply to black people, members of the gay community, Jews …….  And just while I am having a rant, when did the default position for the toilet seat get fixed as DOWN?

Great time in Donegal – relentless socialising left little time for the beach, etc. 

‘Slight smell of gas here’ said the nice man who was servicing the boiler.  Donegal convention places the gas cylinders in with the central heating boiler.  It was when the sweet potato and lemon grass soup flew across the kitchen later that evening that we realised that something just might be wrong.  A mighty explosion blew the door and roof off the boiler house.  Alison, of course, dived for the cat.  I went out the back to find flames coming through the roof of the boiler house. 

So I rang the Fire Brigade – speak to Dublin and then to Castlebar who send the apparatus from Falcarragh – it then gets lost.  Fortunately our neighbour Bob dived in and removed the gas cylinders before they caught fire and – once the gas had burnt off – the fire went out very rapidly.  And we hope no damage to the house itself.  We were fortunate.