OUT TO LUNCH

One of my worst fears is being stranded at an overseas airport with no hope of finding a hotel room due to them being fully booked, having no idea when my flight will ever leave and wondering how in hell I am expected to survive the next forty eight hours. This probably explains my reluctance to travel internationally at the moment.

Last week’s global computer collapse by a company appropriately named ‘CrowdStrike’ stranded airline passengers all over the world, affected bank payments, made it impossible to book doctor’s appointments or for doctors to be able to access medical records, forced TV and Radio stations off air, closed some stock markets for a while, interfered with cell phone connectivity and brought back very welcome cash payments in formerly cashless stores.

The timing was superb. It is the beginning of the summer school holidays in the UK and many better off citizens had booked flights out of various UK airports with their families for a couple of weeks in the sun somewhere in Europe. The summer in the UK has been virtually nonexistent and desperate poms who can afford it can’t wait to get away to somewhere sunny. But that’s not without its own problems.___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Many of the traditional holiday destinations favoured by pale and pasty poms at this time of year have been making it quite clear recently that foreign tourists are not welcome. Despite the fact that foreign tourism almost certainly props up many places financially, the locals have decided that the rising costs of rentals as a result of short lets and Airbnb’s has made it almost impossible for lower paid workers (many in the tourist industry) to be able to afford accommodation.

If you plan to holiday in Tenerife, Florence, Venice, Malaga, Amsterdam, Majorca and Barcelona be prepared to be sworn at, spat upon and told to go home in fairly colourful language. In Barcelona diners at restaurants in the popular Las Ramblas district were squirted by hostile locals with water pistols as they sat down and attempted to enjoy a meal. My impeccable sources tell me that it wasn't water in some of those pistols but urine. After all, if you’re going to demonstrate real loathing towards visitors supporting your economy, why on earth would you want to douse them with cooling water in the middle of a European heatwave?

I have visited Barcelona many times and it is a wonderful city. Or rather it was. The Mercat de la Boqueria in La Rambla which has the most amazing displays of fish, meat, cheese and vegetable stalls was almost empty when I visited and what would a visit to Barcelona be without a paella at the iconic ‘7 Portes’ restaurant? But that was fifteen years ago; a time when it was possible to spend an entire morning at the Sagrada Familia on a rainy morning with maybe only another twenty visitors before going off to look for a restaurant. It was a blissful ten day holiday in what was then a very civilised part of Spain.

Holidays in Florence, on the Amalfi coast, in Venice and in the Canary Islands also hold very special memories from a time when tourists were welcomed and the destinations were empty enough to guarantee an unbooked breakfast table at Caffe Florian on St Mark’s Square in Venice.

The irony of the CrowdStrike IT collapse is that it wasn’t caused by a malevolent power such as Russia or North Korea hacking into the system. It was caused, as I understand it, by a system update which was designed to smooth out some failings of the existing software designed to prevent people hacking into the system.

What it did though was give us all some idea of what life might be like when a malevolent power does manage to hack into the computer systems we all take for granted. News reports suggest that it will take days to sort out the problems caused by CrowdStrike and, particularly, the backup of airline passengers still waiting to reach their holiday destinations (probably just in time to fly home again).

This is when it’s a distinct advantage to live in a tech backwater like South Africa. While there’s plenty of SONA chirping about a 4th Industrial Revolution, computer driven driverless trains crisscrossing the country and smart cities popping up all over the place the reality is that we are still in the Stone Age of tech relatively speaking. Sure, the know-how is all there but we tend to be late adopters in this country.

I know there are people who get quite excited when they can point their Smart phones at a machine and pay for their Cafe Latte at Woolies but they tend to be in the minority. The reality is that cash is still very much king in SA and those stores who proudly claim to be cashless a) don’t get any of my business and b) look very glum and dejected when the ‘system’ goes down.

The idea of a centralised digital currency controlled by the government is pure madness and yet it is supported by all sorts of swivel-eyed geeks who just love the idea of a computer controlling all of our lives. The fear of ‘social credits,’ applied by the government, which would affect your ability to purchase certain items, is realistic but probably a bit farfetched when it comes to SA which can’t even run a functional DNA data bank.

The concern about social credits as part of a centrally controlled digital currency is that if yours truly writes something (heaven forfend) mildly critical about our beloved leaders then they will freeze my credit card when I try to buy an airline ticket or a bottle of whisky. This is apparently the sort of thing that happens in China but who am I to criticise another country’s sovereignty? But it wouldn’t be much fun if it happened here. Or if people had their doors kicked in at four in the morning and were arrested for making rude comments about the CiC of the EFF-luent party on social media.

Fortunately, that’s unlikely to happen. Thankfully we live in a country where a gas explosion in central Johannesburg is still waiting to be fixed and much of the country looks more like a war zone thanks to a combination of corruption and incompetence. This suggests that any pipe dreams of a centrally controlled digital currency and a system of social credits are about as likely as a court appearance after all these years for Jacob Zuma. So relax.

However, our huge advantage ahead of the summer months is our very welcoming tourism. If European countries want to turn wealthy tourists away and squirt them with a urine pistol then we should be heavily marketing ourselves as an alternative destination.

We have the advantage of offering summer during the European winter, we are within the same time zone, we are ludicrously good value and we have stunning scenery. Add to that great restaurants, superb wines, magnificent local beers and wonderful people. It may even pay us to partly sponsor the ten hour flight to SA to attract Euro tourists. Hopefully the Min of Tourism will come up with an aggressive marketing strategy aimed at discrediting unfriendly European holiday destinations while heavily punting our own.

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Try as I may, I have never quite grasped the ANC’s concept of ‘privilege’. According to the new Minister of Health the provision of health care in this country is massively unfair because it favours the privileged few to the detriment of the unprivileged many. Does it favour them on the basis of skin colour, religion, gender, sexual preference, political affiliation or tribal membership? Apparently not.

It favours them because they pay a large chunk of after-tax income into a medical aid scheme which, depending on the level of care they can afford and have chosen, may or not be able to provide the medical care for a full recovery. What the Minister isn’t prepared to acknowledge publicly is that those who are paying into a medical aid scheme have already paid for the public health service through their taxes.