‘I’m keeping my fingers crossed’

LAST Thursday morning I was on the verandah at home in the city and I noticed a pile of garbage on the parapet opposite my house. The heap included a broken sitting chair, an old mattress and bits of vegetable waste.
I was going out after lunch when a vehicle drove up, with City Police emblazoned on the front door; two men in uniform got out and one asked me if I knew who dumped the garbage across the street. I told them I didn’t know and they went into the yard close to where the waste was.
I returned home early that evening and to my surprise, the opposite parapet was clean.

The garbage pile had been removed. I was so surprised. I hurried into the house and told my wife that the garbage was no longer there. I don’t know who removed it. But I found the swift action most commendable. We’re getting somewhere, I thought.

What, with groups of young people cleaning up areas around the city, with corporate citizens donating huge sums to the City Council for the clean-up, the follow-up which saw the garbage outside my house removed in a few hours is heartening.

The sprucing up of the cityscape began with work on the Independence Arch on Brickdam, and this has spread to parapets and drains and alleyways and now one entity has undertaken to clear the mess on the Hadfield Street end of D’Urban Park.

We had become so used to a dirty city. I was having nightmares. I would dream of piles of garbage coming through my front door and invading the sitting room, the rotting vegetables and fruit and fish stinking to high heaven. Then I would wake up, the sickening smell still in my nostrils.

To paraphrase the old saying, one swallow does not a summer make. But I would like to think that what happened last Thursday is going to continue, as we follow up on what had been started since the cleaning up of the Independence Arch on Brickdam.

I pray that we are on the way to making our beloved capital a garden city once again. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Why not drop in at Castellani House on Vlissengen Road sometime this week. A showing of Abstract Art and Sculpture from the National Collection is on there and it promises to be quite a show. I hope the display includes works by Aubrey Williams (as a matter of fact one of his paintings is featured on the invitation to the show), and Cletus Henriques and Ron Savoury. A visit there will surely give a lift to your day. The exhibition continues until July 18.