Life In The Past Lane

“It’s terrible, terrible to grow old and, Meneer, if you live long enough your time will come,” Afrikaans literary master Karel Schoeman once warned Herman Lategan. But now that he’s become a nostalgic old fool, Herman finds reminiscing about rural life in towns like Trompsburg strangely comforting.

- Herman Lategan

There was a time in my life when I thought I was done with rural areas… Farms, dorpies, the people in them – even the animals had no appeal. I loved New York, Sydney, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Cities with a decadent vibe.

I was more of a smoky nightclub and disco man: rather take me to a cha-cha palace where I could hide in dark and dingy corners. I yearned for the smells and noises of the city – petrol, hooters and revelry in the air.

Even a traffic jam had the under tones of drama. I’ve lived in Cape Town most of my life.

The sea? You must be joking. A walk on the mountain? Don’t make me phone the police. Close the front door as you leave, please.

And then, before I knew it – time passed so quickly – I didn’t recognise the man in the mirror anymore. Like many men who grow older, we start to look like women of a certain age.

I thought years of hard living would make me tough.What I saw in my reflection was a sentimental old fool, someone who’d become melancholic and nostalgic.

I’m the embarrassing uncle at the Sunday lunch who gets too drunk, says the wrong things and in the end sobs into his drink. But hey, so what?

I have my memories of visits to the platteland and they are wonderful. Life is too short to stuff a mushroom or to look back in anger.

Oh, now they flood back, those sweet recollections of me as a city boy of 10, milking a cow with Oom Gert at 05:00 in the morning. He was a worker on a peach and sheep farm, and showed me how to treat Blommie the cow with gentleness.