Cold feat

This would probably have been my typical winter rant about how Capetonian motorists shove their brains into the glove compartment every time it rains, if it hadn’t been for one individual who managed to rise above the steaming masses and really piss me off.

But first, a little digression – one of the ironies of living in Cape Town is that although a lot of our tax money ends up going down the drain, very little of it is spent on maintaining the storm drains. Consequently, all the road muck that has built up before a decent downpour (litter, vegetation, flattened squirrels, paralytic vagrants etc.) gets washed into catchpits that were already clogged with similar city detritus long before the clouds even began to gather. Result: faster than you can say “Holy shit! Where did all those enormous puddles come from?”, enormous puddles appear everywhere.

Most motorists approach these temporary reservoirs with some degree of caution. Most. Just as I reached my place of work, a certain Mr. Look-At-My-Big-Four-Wheel-Drive sent his Idiotmobile* hydroplaning through an impressive road-spanning puddle, thereby creating a wave large enough to make any Hawaiian feel homesick.

Having to dry my shoes and socks on the aircon at work was not an auspicious start to the weekend.

* it is surely no coincidence that ‘pajero’ means ‘wanker’, in Spanish