Dr Wamuwi Mbao: A winter's tale

There’s something about winter that makes one irascible. Nowhere is quite warm enough, or dry enough. Or everything is too dry and every building you enter is a furnace. If you must be somewhere public, everyone around you will have a Victorian cough or be doing that thing with their throats that sounds like an Old Testament summoning. Everyone either drives as if in a delirium or as though the rain falling from the sky will dissolve the metal box they’re sitting in. Terrible, all of it.

The problem with this time of the year is that our winters, the odd couple of weather-divergent days aside, are not pretty, and therefore they are innately unsellable. Everyone wants to be inside, under 23 layers of fleece, watching a surly detective suspensefully investigate a face-peeling murder in a little Scandinavian town. Between Joburg’s lacerating winter winds and the misery-inducing rains that batter the Capes, both Eastern and Western (yes, yes, good for farmers, I hear you say), winter is a tedious visitor to this part of the world.

I mean, sure, you could romanticise things a bit: the way the glinting morning frost on what remains of your lawn conjures schoolyard memories, or the crackle of fire that awakens in you a charitable attunement to the world at large. But because most South African dwellings are demonstrably built with no thought for warding off the cold, it’s difficult to generate the necessary bonhomie.

Worse still, that part of the human consciousness that cannot tolerate inactivity is driven to madness by the short days. Unless you’re given to desperately crepuscular habits, you have to wait ages for there to be enough natural light to go out into the world — by which point it’s practically lunchtime. Just as you feel like you’ve gotten going, the day, and what feeble approximations of light and warmth have journeyed with it, packs up and leaves again. And because in this country leisure is balkanised such that few bookstores or coffee shops remain open when the sun goes down, you feel like a child being put to bed well before you’re ready.

The dread of darkness is atavistic, some handed-down loathing of the night’s uncertainties. It leads to an intensification of boredom’s idiom: interminable puzzles, incoherent crochet, taxing soups. You might occupy your time hate-scrolling the socials, wondering how everyone you know has conspired to be in San Remo at the same time.

You want to be where they are: not the exact place, but the snapshot of warmth and happiness in linen shirtsleeves, while some cold unfortunate soul observes your Mediterranean debauchery from their bed, the only warm place in their house. You know that you too could be that happy, Stanley Tucci-ing at a plate of whimsically arranged sardines on the Italian seaboard. But you’re not happy and warm and abroad because, in a way that feels like a galling indictment of your personal failings, you didn’t plan. More fool you.

It dawns on me that there’s a solution to all this. How about repurposing one of our very many retail malls as a sort of modern Club Tropicana? Strip out the weird homages to ancient Rome and refit the cavernous shopping container with a bit of artificial Iberia. You can do your best Wham-era George Michael impression under an electronic sun while the cold front blusters away outside. Think of it as padel for those of an otiose disposition. A place to shake off the winter blues, open till late.

I know that we have been programmed to regard artificial nature with suspicion, and rightly so, but are you saying you wouldn’t swap cold toes and the incessant rustle and sniff of the puffer-jacket chorus for a bit of linger-longer paradise?