Antipodean autumn and Eastern Delights

Getting chilly in the evenings, Johannesburg is. One of the biggest adjustments for Northern Hemisphere folk coming to South Africa must be the plummeting night-time temperatures in the middle months of the year. Houses are, by and large, not insulated well, never double-glazed and seldom heated to any meaningful degree so if it's minus 3 outside the chances are it's pretty cool inside.

Our new home has underfloor heating in most rooms, designed to take the edge off the bone chilling shock one gets when stepping out of bed onto a ceramic tiled floor. This is great in theory, although the miserly trip switch on our distribution board means running more than three of these at one time is not possible. Also in the master bedroom some of the heating panels don't work, making the morning dash to the loo a kind of Russian roulette across a chessboard of alternately warm and freezing tiles.

The family is adjusting OK after a pretty grim flight here from the near East last week. Overall it was a fairly new Airbus, reasonable seat pitch and a good line in food and little giveaways. Typical of a new and aspiring operation I guess, they have concentrated on being very friendly and smiling a lot while bombarding the customers with toiletries, food and drink. I'd personally rather that they had looked at the overall customer experience from booking to disembarking, and re-engineered that so we were not left crammed into a fetid waiting room without airconditioning or announcements over the causes of our delay; boarded eventually using the "stampede" method which meant that those carrying babies (like us) were too slow to be among the first hundred to so passengers on the plane; sat on the plane for three quarters of an hour watching an exceedingly strange selection of humanity stroll up and down the aisles chatting merrily (no explanation for the delay again, nor for the fact that this airline seems to use neither competence nor pulchritude as criteria in its stewardess selection); then an eventual very long taxi, punctuated by random hard braking and equally random loud, profound groaning noises from the undercarriage and thank Allah finally a takeoff at 01h00 instead of 23h00 - and a leisurely meal service with all main cabin lights on until 04h00.

My increasingly acerbic comments to the stewardesses about the light were met with complete incomprehension. We had two sporadically hysterical, vomiting or hopelessly sobbing infants trying to sleep under a tent fashioned of airline blankets wedged between the seat backs of the enormous Afrikaans couple in front of us (dislodged regularly by their bibulous and elephantine romancing, which looked like colliding icebergs) and the seat fronts of the happy Brazilian soccer fans behind us who sang gently and greeted Harry every time he popped his tear stained pink face up for a look. A helluva way to spend nine hours - and I was so glad to be in good old Oliver Tambo Airport I nearly danced - well, if my legs had not been sciatically numbed from sitting on the arm rest of the airplane seat for hours as the only way to let both kids lie down simultaneously I might have indulged in a happy waddle.

Now to settle in to our new life and hope I am not transferred again inside of the next year. My poor wife is exhausted to the point of death with having lived in 6 different places since January 2006 and that, coupled with my very high Life Insurance cover in this job means telling her we are moving to Jeddah or Walldorf may be the last thing I ever do.