Picture: Alexa from Pixabay
THE GOOD old doctor nailed it – Dr Seuss, that is – when he observed: “How did it get so late so soon? It's night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”
It’s hard for me to believe that we’ve negotiated our way past the half of 2024 already, and we are hurtling towards the list of resolutions for 2025 … all the while hoping that ’25 holds more promise and offers more hope.
But it’s not only the year; even our own bodies have a way of springing surprises on us. For instance, one day you look at your fingernails and think, “Hmmm … I should trim these”, and what seems like a heartbeat later you are digging for your manicure kit with an impressive set of talons, your nails having had a growth spurt overnight.
Yessir, if you don’t keep an eye on things, those things can get away from you quickly! Ask any frog.
The age old myth goes that if you plunge a frog into boiling water it will immediately jump out. But if you place the padda into room temperature water and slowly heat it to boiling, the frog, apparently, won’t notice and will slowly cook to death.
Now, for the record, a Dr Victor Hutchison, emeritus research professor from the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, is a herpetologist who has dealt with frogs all his professional life, and he says the slowly boiled frog myth is just not true. In actual fact, he says, as soon as the water gets uncomfortably hot, all the frogs he’s had the pleasure of knowing would make a beeline out of the water.
We are also reminded that dropping a frog into boiling water would render it unable to hop out, and result in its untimely death.
Now though I am not a frog, I have found myself toying with the urge to hop. I sense that the “water” around me is getting way too hot for my delicate constitution. And when I say “water”, I am of course referring to the prices of items on our supermarket shelves.
I may not be a doctor, but I am tempted to ask, “How did the prices get so high? I’m eating crumbs, no longer pie. Payday passes like a sigh. It sommer makes me wanna cry. How did the prices get so high?”
These days I walk through supermarket aisles, wondering why the stores still have so many of those deep, maxi-sized shopping carts. These days a hand-held basket of goods can set you back a good few hundred rand; I shudder to think what a shopper would have to shell out for a deep shopping cart’s items.
Yet, I have seen families pushing two, and on occasion three, of them through the aisles. Such folk have earned my respect – that takes some doing. These days, shopping is not for the faint of wallet!
But it’s not only grocery prices that are staggeringly high. Someone told me recently that after seeing the price of insurance these days, he’s decided it’s cheaper to just get robbed.
And then there’s something else; a new development that is rather distasteful to me. While shoppers are traumatised by trying to figure out how to stretch their budget, balancing the food to toilet paper ratios, sometimes looking at items they used to buy, and trying to remember what it tasted like, a new peril has arisen and is prowling stores in our malls. I call them “Tablet Terrorists”.
Yes, I do realise jobs are scarce, and giving a young person employment by getting them to interest shoppers in whatever it is they have on their tablet screens is a noble thing indeed. But I must admit I find it unnerving to be approached by a stranger who often requires me to explain why I am not interested in taking on “another” special offer.
To their credit, these young people are friendly, confident and well-spoken. It’s just that I honestly find it irritating to be “harassed” at every turn. I have found that a simple, “No thank you” will not do as you’re pushed to “at least hear what is being offered”.
Isn’t there an armband or a reflective vest one can wear to indicate that you are not interested in being approached by roaming salespeople?
One day I was walking in a mall, having a conversation with someone, when a young person stationed at a kiosk in the middle of the mall’s walkway interrupted us, pushing us to listen to his sales pitch instead.
I wondered if it was his parents or his employers who had trained him to be so rude. I mean, as if dealing with high prices were not traumatic enough.
And it’s not only humans who are struggling. The other day my neighbour’s dog called me over and told me how worried he is about the rising price of groceries.
Ranger told me that with a can of dog food now costing almost R40, what humans didn’t take into account is that’s almost R280 in dog money.