Not all sunshine and roses…

At the checkout she digs in her wallet for money and sighs: “Where are the good old days? I grew up in the platteland, you know, and those were such cheap times.”

The woman reminds me a little of my grandmother, but my grandmother certainly didn’t long for days gone by, because, while there were indeed good and beautiful things, it was definitely not all sunshine and roses: dung floors, drawing water in a bucket from the furrow, the slop bucket, chamber pots and the long drop… a life with few amenities and appliances.

Think back to the world of the quack and midwife, miscarriages and infant deaths, home remedies, superstitions and fear. What do you know about laundry starch, paraffin lamps, tallow candles and snuffers, dung-fuelled fires and donkeys? (And here we’re not talking about the animal but about a woodfired hot-water system.) Would we really want to return to the days of using a termite-mound oven, rain or shine; chewing tobacco, spittoons and snuffboxes; bedbugs and cockroaches?

And yet the woman at the till has a point, because everything was cheaper and life was less rushed, and neighbours still sent one another karmenaadjies (a gift of fresh meat). People knew, respected, helped and cared for one another. Childhood was blisfully free and safe. People would visit on a Sunday and nobody ever left empty-handed. Christmas was a time for family feasting and sharing in one another’s joys and sorrows.

Perhaps these are the “good old days” we get so nostalgic about and long for. Marie du Plooy, BLOEMFONTEIN