Jesus Christ, roll on the week-end when milder air moves in, it is so bloody cold I can’t bare it much longer. I went to Salisbury shopping today with my girlfriend and I saw a little old bloke with a slight limp shuffling alongside me through the High St…………………..it was my reflection!!! Even Diane commented about how hunched up I was and told me to walk properly, but I couldn’t. It was horrible, my ankle and knee joints are in agony. If I am like this at forty three what the hell awaits me in the coming years, trips to the shopping centre in a wheelchair with a checked blanket on my lap or even worse a mobility scooter??

In a bid to gain heat, I took Harry swimming tonight at the Gym and headed straight for the steam room sauna. It was in the sauna that I met a man who had encountered the same problem with the cold, he said it was the first time he had been warm for over a week. He was a bit younger than me which made me feel better, but a double take of his voice made me realise that he had an Afrikaans accent, which kind of explained why he was suffering quite badly with early British winter. The next ten minutes in the Sauna passed without him cracking a smile or saying anything that resembled humour, if anything I found him a bit aggressive. I don’t like to generalise about race, but I am about to because I have never heard a more sinister accent, it lacked any aspect of friendliness or ability to communicate in a way that wasn’t smacking of total arrogance.

I have found this a lot with white South Africans when I have worked with them and interviewed them, and I can only put it down to years of being a minority race controlling majority (the blacks). They can often dominate and overpower in conversation and can be very confrontational, not so much in a violent way, but more in a battle of wills. Try telling a South African that he is wrong and you will have your work cut out, probably because there is a history to there culture that has made them force through laws that are morally dubious, but are the only way to control the masses. You could argue it is a bit like the laws and cuts the Old Etonian elite are trying enforce in this country, only with a bit more subtlety. Old Etonians want all the land and riches to themselves just like white South Africans, it’s just a bit easier to crush creed rather than colour.

It is probably wrong to make a sweeping statement that South Africans are arrogant racists, because I have never met one who has decided to stay in the country and embrace change, I have only met the ones who come here, and boy oh boy are they definitely racist. There is a girl who works at our local pub with a face only a mother could love and an accent to frighten the birds from the trees who makes Nick Griffin look like a luvvie Guardian reader. There is a black chap with a major disability who lives locally (this isn’t a Bernard Manning joke) when he came in to the pub I thought I was in the middle of a Little Britain sketch, the look of disgust she gave the poor guy was incredible, I thought she was going to vomit. I have never been to SA so I am in no place to make comment about life there, but it would appear that the many white South Africans who have moved to the UK have done so because they see change as a legitimate threat, maybe they see a major black backlash coming. Who knows what they fear, I don’t.

Predictably I left the Sauna room before my new South African friend, I could have stayed there all night and macho pride would still have meant that he would have refused to get out before me. That’s just the way the South Africans are when they are in the UK, no weakness is allowed to be shown to anyone and they will swear black is wh…………………..oops wrong term on this occasion one thinks!!