What happened to all that Parks Board crockery imprinted with the Custos Naturae emblem, wonders Zigi Ekron?
Sometimes, a thing you've grown used to over the years disappears, and you don't even notice. It's only when someone draws your attention to it that you realise it's no longer there.
That happened to me recently when my wife and I visited the Kruger Park.
The man behind the counter took our Wild card - the SANParks loyalty card - and typed away on his computer keyboard. The card is bright green with garish yellow font.
If it weren't for the silhouetted giraffes or the lion spoor that makes the dot of the "i", it could
be an entrance card for a nightclub or a kids party venue.
I'm sure the design was the result of endless meetings with expensive consultants to make SANParks seem more hipster, but it did nothing to reassure me.
Nope, that came from one thing only: the kudu emblem on the man's epaulettes, which was repeated on the signs and posters decorating the walls.
That kudu head is SANParks. It symbolises everything I associate with holidays: seeing an elephant for the first time in Addo as a young boy, and our family's visits to Augrabies.
As I took back my Wild card, I realised that the kudu head looked a little different.
I couldn't put my finger on exactly what had changed until later, when I was sitting on the deck at Lower Sabie watching a herd of elephants bathing in the river.
As I took a sip of my Mugg & Bean cappuccino, it hit me: Where was Custos Naturae? That phrase was the motto of the erstwhile National Parks Board - and most South African kids' first introduction to Latin. It means "guardians of nature".
As far as I can tell, it's still the SANParks motto, but it's no longer part of their emblem or any other official logo.
In the past, it was written on a ribbon below the kudu head, which was inside a shield-shaped frame.
You saw it everywhere - on the booking documents, the uniforms of the game rangers, the tiles in the campsite bathrooms, the paper used to wrap the hand soap…
Rest camp shops sold big porcelain beer mugs emblazoned with the Parks Board emblem.
Ooms bought them and took them home to display alongside similar mugs bearing the emblems of their army unit and town sports club. (You never actually drank from them.)
Custos Naturae was on every piece of cutlery and crockery used in the restaurants in the rest camps. Back then, the Parks Board ran their own restaurants and didn't contract them out to chains.
You didn't drink your coffee from the same old paper cup you get at every other Mugg & Bean. No, the crockery was white, heavy, seemingly unbreakable.
Every plate, cup, saucer, dessert bowl and saltshaker had a green line along the edge, with a kudu looking up at you from just inside the brim.
The emblem obsession wasn't limited to the Parks Board.
I remember the one and only time I travelled by train from Cape Town with my family to visit my grandparents on their farm.
I stared out the window of our compartment for a long time, not looking at the endless Karoo plains between De Aar and Noupoort, but rather at the South African Railways emblem engraved on the glass.
It was quite abstract - an arrow flowing through a circle, which somehow created the impression of a springbok leaping through a hoop.
This emblem was on everything that belonged to the railways, from the train carriages to the bedding.
Sometimes it was accompanied by SAS and SAR at the top and bottom.
It was on all the cutlery and crockery in the dining car, and on all the cutlery and crockery in the station caf in Cape Town.
Somewhere, there must have been a Continental factory with a production line dedicated solely to this government contract.
In my mind, I picture a noisy factory with thousands of cups, saucers, plates, sugar bowls, milk jugs and dessert bowls tinkling past on a conveyor belt.
That same conveyor belt also spat out branded crockery for the CPA (Cape Provincial Administration), the SFW (Stellenbosch Farmers' Winery) and many other associations and organisations. The emblems were mostly one colour - green, maroon or blue, sometimes with a touch of gold.
The winged Jurgens emblem even decorated the crockery that came with old caravans, before the era of melamine plates.
Another popular place to put an emblem was on an ashtray. Back when nobody thought that smoking in trains, planes and shopping centres was a health risk, the presence of ashtrays was a measure of success.
Any company or institution that could put its emblem on a porcelain ashtray could leave its metaphorical mark on the world.
As a child, I associated the smell of stale cigarette smoke with important places like banks and post offices. It was an official smell.
These ashtrays were either round or square and had the bank or building society emblem in the middle. There were usually three or four shallow slots where you could rest your burning cigarette.
Sometimes the emblem was on a raised island in the middle, to ensure that it was always visible and not hidden under ash.
Oom Johan, our neighbour, was a manager at Barclays Bank - he had a big, square ashtray in his TV room, with the Barclays eagle emblem.
This ashtray had multiple slots, allowing three or four important ooms to smoke together and discuss home loans and interest rates.
Remember the ashtray you always found in car spares shops and service centres? It was a round glass disc surrounded by a miniature tyre: Dunlop SP99, Goodyear, "them Stones"…
My mother worked at a university. She never smoked, but when teatime rolled around, she and her colleagues would gather in a room with that same "official smell" and drink coffee from the same heavy Continental cups with the university's maroon emblem on the side.
There was always an ashtray in the middle of the coffee table.
Things have changed. Tearooms made way for staff kitchens and the smokers were sent outside.
The National Parks Board became SANParks and now you drink coffee from a paper cup.
That said, elephants still bathe in the Sabie River and fish-eagles still give you goosebumps when they call.
And the game rangers - the true Custos Naturae - still conserve and protect the Kruger Park with as much passion as in the past, even if the motto beneath the kudu emblem has fallen away.
But can someone please tell me what happened to all the plates?
