Advocate Barbie was convicted recently of, amongst other things, child abuse. Before she was dragged into the underworld she was held in high regard in the legal and fashion stakes of South Africa.

Pandenaughty’s Golfing Promotions idolised her. The Chairman, my father, and secretary, George Dracatos, his attorney, offered support by way of letters and requests for consultation and opportunities for promotion.

The motto at Pandenaughty’s Golfing Promotions was:

“Don’t let it happen to you,

Join Pandenaughty’s Golfing Promotions.

We provide and see to all your golfing needs.

Let us arrange to have your handicap re-assessed.”

They even had corporate insurance. By a company called the Mafia. On their business card small print should have been written:

“Insured by the Mafia.

You hit us, we hit you!”

Pandenaughty’s was a way of elevating a handicapped four ball to a level of competition with near scratch corporate golfers. This promotions company sometimes did play scratch golf: occasionally they scratched their balls while playing!

This handicapped four ball was the life and soul of the local golf course, Reading, and any visiting course they contracted with. They would return home with great prizes, but less of the alcoholic ones. Those were usually consumed on site.

His attorney kept a file of letters from the chairman to his secretary requesting the pleasure of Advocate Barbie’s presence at this or that golfing promotion. The innuendo was high: she was invited to join them for stroke play.

Yesterday I saw a humble patient in the clinic. He has been with me since the beginning of the year. He has been unable to return to heavy work in the factory after I operated on both his shoulders, but is positive that by next year he will be back. He always jumps up from the chair when I call him, gives a slow imperceptible bow and walks briskly in his old, smartly pressed clothes. He always greets me as uBaba, and holds my hand with both his hands when I extend my hand to greet him. He is not much older than me.

Yesterday I noticed his second name. It was Khulumani. After I had completed the examination and we were talking, I asked him what it meant.

“uBaba, the one who talks a lot.”

“And do you?”

“Yes, even as a child I was the one who spoke a lot.”

He is not loquacious with me, but he does speak well. And positively.

It reminded me of a Christmas a few years ago when my father and father-in-law had us in stitches. My father-in-law speaks Zulu fluently and he was having a conversation with my father who he had baptised Khulumani, because my father spoke a lot. My father was answering him in gibberish, with the odd Zulu, English, Greek or Afrikaans word interspersed to add flavour. They went on for a long time, and when they stopped the children begged them to talk “Khulumani” again. For once the children were spellbound by my father’s conversation, as the adults were when he spoke normally or made a speech.

My father had four sartorial setups. Sartorial is not a word I use to impress. It was drummed into me by one of my father’s prefects who later was my English teacher at high school. If we were not dressed properly in jacket and tie for school the teacher would question our sartorial elegance.

My father used to wear a white shirt and tie with flannel pants to work originally. He would add the suit jacket for business meetings. This formal attire included the use of his monkey suit, or tuxedo. As he got older he wore ordinary lounge shirts and flannels. He wore shorts when he went swimming and a tracksuit when he went walking. Otherwise, like the time he was Khulumani, he was well dressed in flannels and a lounge shirt. He used to wear smarter shoes when he was younger and traded these in for comfortable shoes when he developed arthritis in his feet. There was another kit he used to wear, his golf outfit. This belonged to Pandenaughties Golfing Promotions, so I have not described it here, although Pandenaughty was indeed at one with Khulumani.

My father and Khulumani both spoke well. They both could hold a conversation with anyone about any topic. And they could make us laugh.

My father was a very good planner. As he always said, he planned for the worst scenario possible.

I always thought this was inherently a Greek form of negativity. I have come to realise that most Greeks use it as a smoke screen, to talk as if the worst has befallen them, yet meanwhile they are living life to the full, enjoying time with friends, not working too hard and avoiding any responsibility to the nation and fiscus as a whole.

My father was different. He was responsible, and added to the nation’s fiscus.

When anyone else went to him with a problem, be it personal, financial or moral he could easily crystallise the problem for the person who was seeking his help to be able to see the solution. Sometimes the solution was a series of options, results depending on which scenario unfolded. My father was a kind of Clem Sunter, although unlike Clem he often seemed to end up in a negative scenario, and then he would work his way up from that.

My father could easily read an architect’s plan and visualise the structure. He could improve the efficiency and allow for future expansion in his mind. The simplicity of it all was encapsulated in his Flexihome concept of the seventies. An affordable 3 bedroom house, lounge dining room and kitchen with a car port that could be closed in later to add to the lounge. There was also a bedroom wing that could easily have rooms added on as if part of the original design. I remember printouts from the accountants on A3 paper, narrow blue and white horizontal stripes allowing one to read the figures easier. I would sit unfolding piles of this paper doing the costings on the houses as a teenager. It would probably take an hour or so now with a spread sheet, but then it took me a whole day to do one style of house. My father frowned on the use of a calculator. He would sometimes look over my shoulder and look at a column of figures and say:

“Let’s race. I’ll add it up in my head and you use the tin brain.”

He usually won!

That’s not to say he did not use a calculator. He was a pioneer in the use of the HP financial calculators, which were really small computers that used Reverse Polish Notation. I was quite proud at university when I mastered the use of this calculator in the scientific realm. I felt disappointed when I could not use it in medicine.

The last bit of planning I saw my father had done was after he died and we were clearing out his office. He had an exam pad with cash flow calculations for the business, going three years ahead. His untidy left hand converted to right hand scrawl sloped this way and that, with the final figure double underlined and circled.

I thought it was only in marriage where I had this sort of conversation:

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“But something is bothering you?”

“Just leave me alone.”

But as the years have passed and egos have softened more often than not, with a bit of space we can share the problem and halve the worry.

I thought about this because this morning I felt like I had nothing to write about. Just for now. I know I have to cover the Alberton Hellenic Community, the Greek Federation, SAHETI, the Bank of Athens, Pandenaughties Golfing Promotions, my sister and business in Greece. How that built the man up and how the one thing broke him. But those stories will come. For now I felt like I should write about nothing.

So when I started writing I remember there were many times when I was younger and moody and my father would ask the same question:

“What’s the matter?”

I would fob him off, my ego being too big in the beginning. He would persist sometimes, at other times he would just give me space. I suppose that defines our relationship. As the years passed I came to understand him better and could ask the same question of him. If he was really negative about something I would ask how bad the situation was.

“Very bad” he would answer.

“So, has someone died, or is someone really ill?” I would ask.

Looking offended, he would say: “what do you mean?”

Then he would realise what I was asking and we would talk.

Greek family philosophy is at odds with existence in the modern world, and there was always something the matter. It was certainly never “nothing”.

Like instead of playing sports some afternoons, we would have to attend Greek School. Or like we were not allowed sleep over at South African friends’ houses. Or like we were expected to marry a Greek. I put paid to that expectation with my lovely Italian wife whom my father loved dearly. Or like in July instead of going to Durban for a holiday we would fly out to Greece, be the envy of everyone and come back a week after school had started. One just could not travel for four weeks only. It was a long trip and one needed time, at least six weeks to recover the flight and have a good time. Or like we were not allowed to have a girlfriend at high school, and even when I was at varsity things were odd in that respect.

But all that has passed, as has my father, and it really does not seem to matter anymore. It’s nothing now. Not the kind of nothing that does not matter, but the kind that has passed and become part of one’s life.

Two nights ago I escaped the first snows of Vienna to watch Madame Butterfly at the Volks Opera. This is not quite as grand as the State Opera, but opera is about the music, the singing and for me, the acting. That’s because I just cannot understand what they say. I might catch a few words here and there, mainly amore, and then I get lost following the story almost through mime. Except there is some really beautiful music to accompany the mime. For me the voices become instruments with beautiful sounds.

I was looking for something to write about. I was in the opera store at the State Opera the next day, and I saw the cover of a biography of Maria Callas. She died in 1977, two years after Onassis died. She withered after his death. She was born in Manhattan, and after her father ran out on her overbearing mother, she moved to Greece with her mother where she knocked on the doors of the arts and became an opera singer.

Her surname came from the shortened version of Kalos, which her father chose in America to simplify Kalogeropoulos.

My father was known as Stat in high school. But he always used his full surname, and it’s surprising how problematic it can be just in terms of pronunciation, never mind spelling, for other people.

My father was never an opera fan, but any Greek worshipped Maria Callas, and also her marriage to Onassis. The interesting thing is that there is a Kalogeropoulos wine estate in Mantinea, near our village. My father loved music, and was a piano player. His favourite song was La Paloma. It was written by a Spaniard, but the motif, a dove, can be traced back to the just before the invasion of Greece by Darius, the Persian king, in 492 BC. The white dove had not yet been seen in Europe. The Persian ships were caught in a storm off Mount Athos and the doves were released as the ships fragmented and sank. The Greeks on shore, seeing this, started the legend that white doves herald a lost sailor’s love.

That story in itself deserves to be an opera.