Shrink holiday boredom and help a charity
SCHOOL holidays are approached from different angles by various members of the family. School kids look forward to long, lazy days on the beach, or fun with pals, eating fried chicken in the mall. Holidays are seldom like that in real life. They’re often sheer boredom, hanging out in the mall with the same bunch of kids you dislike in the school playground.
Parents cringe from two weeks of having kids in the house with nothing to do.
The reality is that everybody mooches about wondering what to do next, and the time slips away unnoticed until the “Back to school” advertisements appear in the newspapers to create a pall of gloom over everybody.
If you are looking for something different for your school-going children, I can recommend a visit to a miniature world tucked away behind a hotel in St James.
David Catlin, who has retired to the St James Hotel, has spent hundreds of painstaking hours creating what must surely be the biggest model railway set-up in the Cape.
It’s far more than just trains. His railway – the St James and Regional Railway – takes visitors past villages and farms, a polo club, a dinosaur theme park and an airfield. Tiny workers go about their business down at ankle level and David has a story for each of them. I enjoyed the tale of the spoiled little girl who won all the prizes at the riding school because her grandfather was the chairman of the polo club and made sure all the other competitors were disqualified on technical grounds. Such is life at full-scale, too. As you pass the little village church you can hear the organ and choir making sacred music inside.
The attention to detail is amazing. The buildings are constructed of proper, scaled-down, ceramic bricks to withstand all the weather the Cape can throw at them. This is an outdoor world where one of the daily tasks is clearing leaves from the railway line.
David doesn’t charge for visiting his little world, but there’s a collection box for Rotary of Good Hope Club charities.
If you’d like to take a child or grandchild (or even the inner child in yourself ) to see the railway world, give David a call at 083 272 4340 to book a time and find out how to get there.
I’m definitely going again. It’s a wonderful feeling to be 50m tall and stride about a Lilliputian world like a giant, carefully avoiding stepping on a builder’s lorry.
Or kicking a little girl’s pony (I was tempted).
Last Laugh
After visiting a model railway set-up, a little boy was trying to collect money to build his own model railway. Not having any luck from his friends, he decided to write to the president.
“Dear Mr Zuma,” he wrote, “I know you hand out money to the needy, so could you please send me R500 as I need it to build a model railway line.”
Eventually the letter reached the Presidency and the president was so touched that he ordered one of his aides to send the boy R5.
In due course a thank you letter arrived. It said: “Dear Mr President, Thank you for sending me the money. You should have sent it by courier rather than through the post, because those thieves at the post office swiped most of it.”
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