Karoo Life

You know you’re living in the Karoo when…

Anyone ten years younger or more will call you tannie or oom. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. A couple of years later, they begin calling you oupie…

• The crimes in the local newspaper routinely include possession of sheepskins and illicit mutton.
• You learn to look out for low-flying swallows, unusually energetic tortoises, visible termites and the sound of the langasem grasshopper. All mean rain is coming. Very heavy ones if you see a bloukop koggelmander facing north. Flash floods are coming.
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• The word ‘kuier’ is an infinitely more satisfying encounter than can be conveyed with the translation ‘visit’. And for some of us in the Karoo, kuier also means a time of telling long stories.
• You’re affronted at having to wait for more than five cars to cross the road before you can.
• You’re on first name terms with shop owners, bank tellers, municipality employees, teachers, policemen and even Telkom officials.

• You can walk practically everywhere you need to go.
• Good plumbers, electricians or handymen are treated like royalty in a Karoo town.
• Big City traffic scares the bejeebers out of you.
• You prefer shopping in your home town – you go in looking for a pumpkin and you come out with a bandsaw.
• Every social gathering after dark ends with people peering upwards and admiring the stars before saying goodbye.
• When quoting your telephone number to a fellow resident, you seldom bother with the first six numbers, because they’re always the same.
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• Every second house has a big dog and a little dog, barking in disharmony at the slightest hint of movement on their street.
• You eat way, way too much lamb and mutton.
• Everyone knows someone who suffers from gout. Come winter, the local doctors all stock hundreds of Voltaren shots to deal with the red-meat gout attacks.
• Midwinter means hunting season, and every home is packed with biltong.
• You lose all your arm-wrestling bouts to locals with huge muscles.
• Your haircut, including highlights and blow wave, costs less than a trim in the big city. And the salon doggie sits on your lap all through the session.
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• Good greens are like gold dust in small towns, so you grow your own when you can. And then you swop vegetables with neighbours like city folk swop crime stories at dinner.
• No one arrives fashionably late at a church bazaar. All the best stuff is gone within five minutes of the doors opening.
• It’s considered unusual not to have an after-lunch nap.
• Most shops close over lunch-time.
• Your Woolworths is Pep Stores, who sell silly hats which everyone wears without shame or fear of mockery.
• The best boots for the Karoo are the industrial Batas you buy at the local farmers’ co-op.
• The schools are the financial mainstays of the town.
• People are usually in bed by 9pm.
• Most people play tennis.
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• The tallest high-rise is the church steeple.
• It’s not unusual to find sheep shit in the street, or a stray donkey thoughtfully munching on a shopping bag.
• The people at the post office know way more about you than you about them.
• Houses with wooden floors and sash windows are more common than those without.
• Shutters are not a décor item. They’re actually used.
• Almost everything is cheaper.
• Most Karoovians speak fluent Afrikaans. The souties speak ‘Graaff-rikaans’, which involves mangling both English and Afrikaans into a constantly-evolving word-goulash.