Joburg – where you go outside to warm up

Winter in Johannesburg has made me realise that the difference between a breeze and a draft is about 30 years. Whereas I could never understand my grandmother’s and then my parents’ obsession with leaky windows, I now find myself hunting down a draft as though my life depended on it.

Which it might.

I have no idea when it happened. One day, I was rolling my eyes and getting my parents an extra jacket to drape over their frigid shoulders, and the next, I find myself threatening to fire anyone who leaves the kitchen door open. I have, in the past few weeks, issued more written and final warnings than I care to mention. Most have been to my wife, who is three crucial years younger than I am. I know with confidence that as sure as the earth continues to rotate around the sun, in no time at all, she’ll be joining me in my pursuit of permeable and ill-disciplined doors.

Something I greatly look forward to.

South Africa is a country blessed with a magnificent climate. So much so that in our darkest hours, when searching for something to keep us positive, it’s the weather we turn to. On many an occasion when things are particularly bleak, I switch my weather app to Melbourne or London just to prove that there’s at least one thing that the African National Congress hasn’t yet destroyed.

But that doesn’t mean that winters aren’t cold. Winter might be short. It might on the most part gift us with magnificent and sunny days, but when the Highveld wind blows on an icy winter morning, it’s a bold-face lie to suggest that it’s mild year-round.

Worse than that, our houses aren’t geared for those days. Windows aren’t double glazed, they often don’t seal, and front doors don’t have an additional “snow door” that protects homes in other countries. Heating is minimal and fragmented, and very few homes have a centralised system. The result often is that it’s colder inside than out.

We spent some time living in New York, where we endured one of its coldest winters on record. We were snowed in for days, schools were closed, with the news reporting several fatalities that occurred when drivers were caught on the roads. I recall so clearly parking my car at the edge of the driveway so that we didn’t need to clear the whole area before leaving. And finding a frozen fruit juice in the car in the morning, the temperature having dropped so dramatically overnight.

And yet, never do I feel so cold as I do in winter in Johannesburg in my home when someone leaves the window in the study open.

There are cold people and there are warm people. There are those who wear their K-Ways inside the house, and those who insist that it’s a beautiful day when it’s not. I have always identified with the latter group. Until I reached my fifties. And whereas I’ll fight to my death not to wear a coat indoors, lately I do find myself a little more sympathetic to those who have always been colder than I have.