Mental Arithmetic is not dead

So I went to buy my lunch today and the change came to some odd amount of cents.
"Bother", I thought, "A credit note".

Let me explain.
For the past few years, Zimbabwe has been a "multicurrency economy". What this means is that you can officially use US$, sterling, South Africa rand, Botswana Pula, Euro or even Zim$.  Officially.  In practice, in Harare, you use US$.
But we have notes only, not coins.  What coins are in circulation are rand or occasionally pula.
So if I hand over US$5 for a $4.32 burger and chips, the normal 68c change is not going to happen.  The normal is that the store will issue a credit note for 68c and the next time I am in that particular store (and remember), I cash it in.

Not this time.

I was handed, without so much as a pause, R2.05 and one pula.
Mental arithmetic is not dead!  Who in a normal world can calculate that USc 68 = R2.05 + P1 and calculate it in less time than that?

I might spend my days working in the Payment Industry and helping people do clever things with electronic money.  This helps the coin dilemma.
But it comes no where near close to the cleverness of the Mental Arithmetic at the shop.

The light of truth; the lunacy of reason

Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep
matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express
sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one
created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of
which we look at everything—Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains
everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility—Detached
intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all
moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light,
reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made
Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the
patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a
special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which
all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We
are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something
both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle
of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable,
as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly
reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them
all her name.
G.K Chesterton - Orthodoxy

From which C.S Lewis presumably drew his own and better known
extrapolation:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only
because I see it, but because by it I see everything else
"Is Theology Poetry?" (1945)

Apathy or irony

At Saturday night's NAMA Ceremony, Dr. Tony Mhonda was awarded "Outstanding Arts Reporter"
Unfortunately, the nation's Outstanding Arts Reporter didn't attend the ceremony. 
Maybe he had a crisis, I don't know. 
Or maybe the National Arts Merit Awards are not of interest to an Outstanding Arts Reporter.

No matter.  At least his home paper publishes his picture on their report of the evening!

Honoured!

It's more than a question of being recognised. 
It's more than realising that there are many great performances that have not been recognised. 
It's more than the rosy glow that comes with other people being prouder of you than you are of yourself.
It's more than an opportunity to stop and remember that I am nothing in my own strength.
It's more than a trophy, a certificate, a program (and some cash).
It's more than the tantalising allure of things to come.
It's more than I can understand.
But I am honoured, and grateful.