The scourge of the Mcmansions

A recent phenomenon that has arisen is the Mcmansion, which I think is mainly due to people having more money than brains.

In the good old days, you could buy a block of land in an area that you could afford, and then build a comfortable house on it. Typically the house would have a three or four bedrooms and one or two bathrooms. There would be enough space on the block to have a proper back yard for children to play in and ample space to park their cars. Some of these houses were quite attractive, and many used the slope of the block to create interesting split-level features.

Alas, all has changed. Developers now try to get as much out of an area as possible by creating tiny blocks of land and having the parks double up as storm-water drains. The latter have been given the fancy name of ’swales’, because ‘drain’ does not sound as good. Worse still, all the new developments have terraced flat blocks retained by limestone walls. The developers then sell these postage sized blocks as ‘lifestyle’ n low maintenance blocks.

Stupid people buy these ‘lifestyle’ blocks at exorbitant prices, and then proceed to build the most inappropriate dwellings on them. The higher, the bigger the more ostentatious the better. Some people spend huge amounts of money on columns that would do the Acropolis proud. For some strange reason, many now tend to paint their mac-mansions khaki or grey. They also love tin roofs.

The main objective of the mac-mansion is to be as big as possible, and to take up as much space on the block as possible. The result is that what could have been a picturesque beach suburb is turned into what looks like an industrial area. The mac-mansions in the front street completely block out any views for those one street behind. This does not stop the houses behind having huge balconies that provide views into the surrounding houses.

When I drive or walk through some of these estates and look at all the ugly houses, I can’t help reflecting on what a stupid animal the human being is.

The cherry on the top is, the people who build these obscene houses never seem to make allowances for parking. They forget that they typically own two four-wheel drives, a huge stink-boat on a trailer and a separate trailer. Their visitors also invariably own huge four wheel drives. This results in trucks and boats being parked over public verges and foot-paths, making the area look like a car lot.

Why do people do this? I think it is for the same reason that men tend to drive large four wheel drives – they are trying to make for some short-coming in their anatomy. Women drive four-wheel drives so ‘my children will be safer’.  Never mind the other peoples’ children in smaller cars who are now in more danger competing with their trucks.  Of course, it is purely out of selfishness.

All I can hope for is that some day sanity will prevail, and the mac-mansions will become less popular. However, I am not holding my breath.

My accident at school

I have always been a “home dumper”. I will only consider taking a dump away from my home toilet if I am travelling long distance or an emergency arises. I am amazed at how some people can quite regularly dump at work, and then brazenly leave the stink to some other poor staff member.

My sad tale occurred when I was in grade 1. Sister Natalie was my teacher, and sister Loosina was in  the classroom next door.

I could feel that a “steamer” was brewing but I decided to ride it out until I got home from school. Sister Natalie noticed that I was getting somewhat agitated and asked what  the problem was. Not wanting to reveal the awful truth, I told her my knee, which  conveniently had a boil on it, was hurting. She suggested that I sit with my knee sticking out. This, of course, only made things worse – so I got really agitated. This annoyed Sister Natalie, so she told me to sit outside, because I was disturbing the class.

I sat on the bench outside the classroom for a while until I realised ‘it was going to blow’. I made a dash accross the gravelled quadrangle to the toilet block. Stupidly, I still did not want to dump there, so I thought that having a wee might ease the pressure. I stepped up to the urinal and started to unbutton my fly. Unfortunately, the concentration of doing this caused me to relax elswhere, and disaster hit. I felt the back of my trousers filling up with a warm mixture, and I just could not stop it. Then it started to run down my legs. The stink was indescribable.

Throwing caution to the wind, I dashed into a toilet stall – leaving a trail of shit behind me. I pulled my trousers off to reveal an absolutely ghastly sight. With a plop, the remaining contents in my underpants fell onto the floor.

I decided that the best course of action was to clean myself up and return to the classroom. To save money, the school did not have toilet paper, but had squares of newspaper in a box. I grabbed these and furiously tried to clean up the mess. There was shit everywhere! I used up all the pieces of newspaper to no avail. The toilet was completely blocked and I was still a stinking mess. I then did what every child my age would do. I sat on the floor amongst all the shit, and I cried.

As the horror of my situation began to sink in, I started to howl. This attracted Sister Natalie, who came running in to see what was causing the noise. I can only imagine what she must have felt when met with this shit covered snotty little boy sitting on the floor. Her first reaction was  anger when she saw that I had blocked the toilet with newspaper. However, she did soften, and ran to Sister Loosina to get some help. Sister Loosina was not impressed, and started yelling at me that they would have to get a plumber to unblock the toilet. I really cannot blame her for this, because it must have been a dreadful thing to confront.

The two nuns got a bucket of water and stripped me completely to clean me. They wrapped me in a large sheet of newspaper and carried me into the boarding house. Unfortunately, they could not put my sodden clothes back on and they did not have any replacement clothes. Not wanting to leave me naked, they had to find something else for me to wear. This was a girls boarding school, so they found pair of panties and a dress that would fit me, and there I sat in a convent girls uniform. This was the ultimate humiliation.

The nuns then phoned my long-suffering mother and told her that I had had an accident. I imagine the shock would have aged her appreciably.

 I can’t recall how I got home that day, because my mother did not drive. All I know was that, thankfully, she brought some clothes for me, so I did not have to go home in a dress.

Sisters Loosina and Natalie, I salute you!

The convent

I was brought up in Springs, a town just east of Johannesburg in South Africa. It was a really nice place in those days, with its own shopping centre, theatres and restaurants. It also had a Dominican convent, complete with a Mother Superior and a squad of nuns. We got to know and respect these nuns because  I and my five siblings all went to school there.

The Mother Superior was a wonderful woman. She was kind and gentle, with a strong character. She reminded us all of our beloved Pope John 23, both in looks and temperament, and she is very much the reason why I refer to my darling wife as the Mother Superior.

A true story about the real Mother Superior is that she was once travelling in a car with a group of nuns and a black woman. They decided to stop at a road house to have some coffee. This was during the Apartheid era, so the coffee was brought in china cups for the nuns and a single cardboard carton for the black lady, as was the iniquitous practice those days.  Without hesitation, the Mother Superior grabbed the cardboard carton for herself, much to the dismay of the waiter.

The convent was essentially a girls school that also had boarding facilities. All three of my sisters went there from pre-primary right through high school, and they all did reasonably well there. My two brothers and I did our early primary years there before moving onto the sadistic clutches of the so-called Christian Brothers. At one stage my parents had all six children at Catholic schools, and I understand that the nuns were very generous with school fee concessions.

My father was an accountant by profession and, for as long as I can remember, he was the treasurer of the Convant School PTA. We always did things as a family, so I remember being involved in all sorts of school functions, like fetes and sport carnivals.

As a pupil at the convent, I was absolutely terrified of the nuns – and who wouldn’t be?  Nuns were scary creatures in those days – with their habits, wimples and long black veils, they reminded me a bit of ET! All you could see of them was their faces that appeared to bulge out of their wimples. They also had an uncanny knack of seeing what was going on behind them, in spite of their heavy clothing and veils. And then there were those enormous rosary beads that they wore with their habits- you could hear them rattling from metres away. They must have really suffered on hot days. 

After my  time there as a pupil and, as I grew older, I got to know these nuns for the wonderful women they were. They had given up ther lives for the service of mankind, and ended up teaching brats like me. Some of them, particularly those of Irish descent, had a wicked sense of humour. I also witnessed some of them get a little tipsy on wine at the annual Passover meal. I didn’t always agree with their teaching methods, but I still have a healthy respect for them.

As I have already mentioned, some of these lovely nuns were unfortunate enough to be my teachers. Three that spring to mind are Sister Manus, Sister Natalie and Sister Loosina.  Sister Manus was my pre-primary teacher, and Sisters Natalie and Loosina taught me in grade one an two respectively. Sister Natalie also prepared me for First Communinon and Confirmation, and was very special to me. Sister Loosina was a short fiery woman whose favourite form of punishment was to lock a child up in a dark room with no windows.

Interestingly, Sister Natalie is still very active. I discovered a web page with her picture at http://www.knf.co.za/Site/About%20Us.html. When she taught me, I thought she must be about 100 years old, but I see now that she had only been teaching for a few years when she had to experience me in her class. Now wonder that she often appeared uncertain as to how to handle me.

It was rather odd being a boy at a girl’s school. One of the things I had difficulty with was having to sing the School Anthem, “Oh convent girls are we”. When we tried to sing “O convent boys are we”, we were told to sing the song properly. I also thought that the girls in my class were gross, particularly when they wore their gym outfits comprising white tee shirts with black panties. My, how things change as you get older. I still knew some of those girls as a teenager, and they were really hot!!! They certainly were not looking at me in the same way!

 My future blogs will tell of my experiences as a convent pupil, and will include the time when sisters Natalie and Loosina had to clean me up after I shat in my pants.