One way of being a first-world nation

It's high time South African started becoming more assertive in its foreign policy.

Our nation is founded on values that the rest of the world should be emulating, and they are not. We should therefore begin aggressively exporting these values to the countries that need them.

First off, we should invade Zimbabwe and instil the tradition of a two-term limit on state presidents. In the event that the invasion leads to political instability, we should install an interim government until things calm down a bit.

If they don't, we should remain there with our occupation army indefinitely. After all, having caused the instability, it would be unethical not to stay the course, no matter how many lives are lost.

Having done that, we should launch air raids on all countries known to have nuclear facilities. This would mean bombing the United States, Israel, Pakistan and India especially, since these countries have proven stocks of nuclear weapons, and have demonstrated their willingness to use them.

While we're at it, we should probably bomb Germany, France, Japan, Russia and the UK, since these nations have nuclear power plants. This technology could possibly be repurposed to create atomic bombs. Even though they say they're using nuclear power for peaceful purposes, how can we be sure?

We can't. Therefore we should threaten them with bombing until they dismantle their nuclear energy plants. If they do not do this, it just proves they are evil, enemies of freedom and democracy.

Our successful economic revival also qualifies us to become financial lenders to less affluent nations. When we do so, though, we must insist that the money we're lending is conditional upon their following the same economic policies we believe in. That is, capitalist, free-market policies that privatise everything, and remove trade barriers. That way, we will be able to establish factories in these impoverished backwaters and use their cheep labour, while charging the country massive interest on their loans.

This way we can become de facto governors of these poor countries, and control the way they run their economies.

These policies will probably make the rest of the world dislike us. That is just too bad. Being a leader of the free world is not a popularity contest.

As the rest of the world becomes increasingly unable to understand our superior wisdom, they may resort to violence. We may find ourselves attacked as citizens from these poor nations strike back for what they see as economic and military oppression.

These people will clearly be terrorists, since they are acting against our interests. We will have to pass laws allowing us to immediately imprison them, indefinitely, without trial.

We will simply have to do this to protect ourselves against those who are jealous of our success and our freedom.

It sounds, harsh, I know. But this is what we're going to have to do if we want to become a first-world nation. A nation like the United States.

In 1975, my parents won a pig in a raffle at the German Club.

At that stage we were living in Fern Glen, one block back from Cape Road, and I must have been three or four. Those days I was attending Newton Park Pre-Primary.

This was also the time when I came to myself, when my consciousness was awakened and I became aware that I was a soul housed in a magnificent planetary vehicle.

I could walk and talk, but I had a lot to learn about the ways of Earth.

Then, as I say, my folks won a pig in the German Club raffle.

I came back from playschool to find he'd settled into a corner of the garage. He was a brilliant little pig, bright-pink, with an enthusiastic, wiggly piglet tail and an endearing, squealy oink to him.

He was like a shaved puppy with a button nose, and he was all ours. Me and my sister would rush back every day so we could frolic in the back garden with our new best friend.

We christened him Archie, probably because of my predilection for Archie comics. Archie was my first pet. My porn-star name – derived, as you know, from one's mother's maiden name and the name of your first pet – is thus Archie Handley.

What's yours?

Anyway, I couldn't have wished for a more handsome fellow to introduce me to the boundless joy of being boy and pet. Pigs are actually quite clean, and when they're young they still possess a gambolling energy that makes them great value.

Older pigs are lame. They basically lie in an enormous fleshy heap and wait to die. No bru, piglets are where it's at.

We played with Archie, we bathed him, we fed him, we carried him around, we dressed him up like a little squealing Barbie doll. It was bliss.

Then, one day, we went on what was billed as "an adventure". We loaded up the entire family and headed up Kragga Kamma Road to a smallholding, where Archie was dropped off for a "piggie holiday".

All I can say about that is, if you're ever invited to go on a piggie holiday, do not go.

Archie did return from hollies, about six weeks later. He had been fattened up, slaughtered, and was now the main course at a Saturday-arvie spit braai!

At what was our first-ever spit-braai, we were shown the crisp, dripping carcass spinning on the spit and told, "You know who that is? That's Archie!"

The punchline of our parents' elaborate, months-long joke was even captured on film. There's a very famous Engler-family picture nestling in one of our photo albums. It features my sister and I screaming in dismay, shrieking our heads off, tears streaming down our cheeks. Utterly grief stricken.

In the background a group of grown-ups merrily work the spit and debate whether it's time to start cutting the meat.

Lesson one learnt: The ways of earth are indeed strange.

Baby's colleague Tumi was getting married and we had cracked the nod. It was to be a township wedding at Tumi's home in Refilwe, outside Cullinan. "Dress: traditional," it said on the invitation.

The night before the wedding, Baby said we'd have to swing by her friend's house the next day so she could borrow a sari.

A sari? No, no, no, no, no.

As a white dude of mixed ancestry, I could get away with wearing a suit to a traditional wedding. But Baby is a lovely Xhosa maiden. I was having none of this sari talk.

She would be wearing traditional Xhosa dress or nothing. We set out to find authentic isikhakha, or umbhaco, in Johannesburg on Saturday morning. We had exactly an hour to find it.

We'd seen clothes shops on Louis Botha Avenue, so we headed down there. Our first stop was at a hole-in-the wall shop run by a West-African man named Daniel.

His dresses were of the shiny, green, nylon, party-dress variety, not the thick, cotton, five-piece ensemble in bright red that Baby had in mind.

"No problem," said Daniel, "Come up to my room and see if there's something you like."

We were taken up to this Nigerian guy's room and there was a moment of, "I hope this is okay," as we left the lift on the third floor. Luckily Daniel was cool, unluckily his back-up dresses were worse than his front-of-house selection.

He recommended we try Braamfontein.

Braamies is in downtown Jo'burg, where the Mandela Bridge leaps the Park Station tracks across to Newtown. It's also the site of a Business Improvement District, so it's a pretty safe neighbourhood.

But still, it's downtown Jo'burg. And any place where you need an armed security guard on every corner isn't that safe. Especially not for a couple wandering about and gazing down alleys wistfully, wondering if there might be a dress shop down there.

All morning, Baby ran a cellphone investigation. As we left Ibrahim Tailors in Jorissen street, we got a call back from Penny in Alexandra. She said traditional dresses were usually made to order, with a two-week waiting period. But we might find something at the Market Theatre flea market.

Skeptical, and a little demoralised, we gave the cheesy tourist market a cursory visit. It was exactly as we remember it, awash with clichéd trinkets, paperbacks and woodcarvings of eagles.

By this stage it's 10.30am, two hours till wedding time. It's time to go.

Forlornly, we make a parting query of a drum vendor down the final alley. "You don't know where we can get isikhakha?"

"Down the alley on the left," comes the instant reply.

And there it is, as promised: T&T fashions, owned and managed by Sisi Thandi. Like a saving angel, she welcomes us into her shop and presents the only ready-made umbhaco in the place.

It's a bright-red Xhosa dress, complete with voorskoot, iqhiya headscarf and matching handbag.

Within two hours, Baby would be the most beautiful lady at the wedding. Well, the second most.

A prophecy that took a while to come through

As a young boy of four years old, I remember getting my first lesson in African history from my mother, who was born and raised in the Transkei.

Why, I had asked her, do black people all have to work for white people?

It's because, my mom explained to me, it's because a long time ago a little girl said they must kill all their cattle so that the spirits would rise from the dead and drive all the white people into the sea.

So they killed all their cattle, but the no one rose from the dead and the white people stayed. Then the black people had no food and had to come and work for the white people.

This, of course, is the simplified version of the story of Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse. In 1855, the teenage girl of the amaGcaleka clan began seeing visions at a time when a lung sickness epidemic was decimating the herds of the amaXhosa and the British colonial forces under Sir George Grey where laying claim to the lands across the Kei river.

As described by Zakes Mda in his novel The Heart Of Redness, Nongqawuse encountered two Strangers, who told her to relay the message to her people that their cattle had been contaminated by people practising witchcraft. They should all be slaughtered, and all their granaries burnt to the ground. Once they did this, the dead would arise and cattle would fill the kraals.

The armies of the resurrected would then supposedly drive the occupiers into the sea.

Not everyone bought Nongqawuse's prophesy, but many did. Between 300 000 and 400 000 head cattle were slaughtered. Conventional wisdom tells us that no new herds appeared, the armies of the dead never rose and the white people remained in charge.

But on further reflection, that might not be strictly true. A theory I recently stumbled across, has made me reconsider my simplistic understanding of Eastern Cape history.

Newspaper reports about increasing rates of white emigration from South Africa have also helped me formulate my new theory.

Bear with me now.

Let's say the whole cattle killing episode did impoverish large parts of kwaXhosa, and robbed the amaXhosa of their independence, forcing many of them to come looking for work in the Cape Colony.

The Xhosa thus became the first of the South African tribes to enter the capitalist economy. A recent theory holds that this meant they were also the first to organise and form trade unions.

So the Xhosa became more politically savvy and were busily learning the ins and outs of labour and struggle politics while the Zulus were still waging war against the occupying British.

Perhaps this early integration into the colonial establishment – even if it was on a deeply oppressed level – helped lay the foundation for the organised struggle and the liberation movements flowing from the establishment of the ANC in 1912. Perhaps that's why Xhosas still dominate the ruling party.

The liberation movements eventually lived up to their names and liberated the country from colonialism and apartheid. South Africa has now been a democracy for more than 12 years.

Sadly, democracy has brought a fair amount of social upheaval. Many white South Africans have found this difficult to deal with. It has been difficult to deal with.

And this has lead to a surge in emigration to popular Anglophone destinations like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.

Hotly disputed population statistics seem to show that there are half a million fewer white people in South Africa than there were ten years ago.

At the same time, the SA economy is booming. A rising black middle class now has the income to embark on a consumerist spending binge that shows no sign of abating.

So let's recap. Nongqawuse predicted that the herds – the wealth of the nation – would return. And she predicted that the ancestors would return and drive the whites into the sea.

If you ask me, that's exactly what's happened. Wealth has flowed into the pockets of abantu. And the Xhosa generations that followed generation of the cattle killings learnt the skills of struggle early. Eventually they took power. Now the whites are leaving.

And a lot of that was because of the cattle killings of the 1850s. So my theory is that Nongqawuse's is not a story of folly and superstition that humbled a proud nation. I think it's a story of faith that was rewarded, a prophesy that came true. It just took 140 years.

Here's a surfing kind of piece, just like I used to do in the old days. It came out a recent issue of  Zigzag magazine

Leofwin was the local hero. He'd come second at the J-Bay SA's the year before, the first time a PE surfer had done anything at champs since, like, Gavin Rudolph. He was sponsored, managed the surf shop and ghoened chicks like he was in Def Leppard.

Me, I was 15, no-one's hero, and wanking about eight times a day at that stage. All I knew about ghoening chicks was from what I heard Leofwin rapping about in the surf shop and from what Mrs Baker tuned me at Catechism. I was getting paid R2 an hour to be an assistant at Lifestyle surf shop. Cruising down to surf the Fence every day was about the only thing keeping life livable at that stage.

The surf shop sucked in retrospect, but at the time you think it's like working in Hollywood. What a privilege! Going through the entire Surf Rats sticker catalogue for 12-year-old girls who don't even have a cent to their name, rearranging the wetsuit racks from XS to XXL three times a day, recounting the sunglasses every time a customer leaves the shop and giving telephone surf reports about conditions you knew nothing about - coz you'd been stuck in that miff shop all day.

About the only perk was getting to meet all the name surfers about town when they came in to hang out over lunch. That and getting lifts to somewhere besides the Fence with Lefty when we  finished work.

He seemed to have some insight into the way surf actually worked. Like which spots would be working at a given time. For me, surfing meant getting on my boney, going to the Fence and staying out until the sun went down. Lefty only seemed to be out at the Fence when it was cranking, otherwise he'd be nowhere to be seen, only to reappear later with tales of epic waves at some place called Noncoms... stories about that, and boning babes on the bowling green behind Faces. It was the Eighties, I think they called it "lifting" then.

Lefty was a pretty hip cat, and in 1987 I was a virgin with min mates, no sporting skills and a shyness problem - pretty much a contender for the most unhip cat in the whole of Port Elizabeth.

So we knock off the one Saturday and Lefty squints out the window and schemes, "North West! There'll  be waves at the mouth today," and then after a moment's contemplation, "You wanna come?"

Did Def Leppard rock? Was Bon Jovi the coolest band in the world? Of course! Dude, I was so damn up for it. I could never surf the Bluewater Bay rivermouth because you had to take the freeway and I only had a fifty, and besides, they had some pretty hectic locals. But riding on the coattails of the best surfer in town, I was sure to get a couple of those dredging right-hand cylinders to myself. I could almost taste those barrels. Jeez, I was drooling like when girls came in to try on those neoprene bikinis.

So we shut the shop, load up our boards and cruise onto the N2 in Lefty's yellow Renault. From the first glimpse of the ocean we could see the wind was indeed north - quite a rarity in PE. You can even smell the Karoo fynbos in the air when the berg wind blows. We surged across the Swartkops river bridge, craning our necks, "I can check spray, bru. There's gotta be waves. Wooh!"

Alas not.
There was swell, the wind angle was perfect and there was no-one out. Grinding right-hand peaks were lurching onto the sandbar. But the tide was so wrong. It was surging towards high tide, dragging tree limbs and all kinds of flotsam into the mouth, and from there the next landfall would be Redhouse, about 10 kays inland. We watched some oke on a surfski getting shunted backwards into the mouth like he was on a conveyor belt, under the bridge and out of sight.

"Uh-uh. Too missionous," said Lefty, who was never a fan of exercise.
"It'll be a bit cross-shore back at the Fence, but we can go check it," he speculated.
"Oh, okay. Cool," I schemed, dropping huge lip because I'd surfed the fuckin' Fence a million times and this wasn't the way this movie was supposed to pan out.

We gooied a U-ey in the parking lot and headed back on the N2. We crossed the river bridge and the city revealed itself across the bay... with reeling beachbreak peaks in the foreground!

"Check that," we chorused in disbelief. "The pier!"
Approaching the mouth, we had been too preoccupied with the Bluewater Bay peaks to check the pier on our immediate right. Brighton Beach pier, after, all is a blind spot on most PE surfers' wave radar. It almost never has waves, and besides that it's across the road from a catalytic converter factory, a sewage farm and a sulphurous swamp. It's also the nearest beach to Red Location and Soweto-on-Sea. Oh ja, and all that the fishermen ever catch there is sharks.

It's a risky option at the best of times. The "pier" is really the sewage plant's outlet pipe, protected from the waves by concrete pylons, with a kind of blender at the end of it to chop the shite into smaller chunks. Or that's what the urban legends say. But still, there they were, four-to-five foot peelers pitching just off where the shite emerged and reeling down Brighton Beach like it was a brown, chunky Malibu.

"Fuck that," quoth Lefty, "we out there, bru." I was so young and malleable I'd have willingly surfed a lava flow if someone cooler told me to. Indeed I would begin underage drinking six months later for just that reason.

I got the impression Left was a bit apprehensive about surfing the place too, because he hid his keys in his wetsuit, and when we paddled out next to the pier he was at pains to avoid getting his head wet. I obviously followed his lead, but of course getting wet is pretty unavoidable when going surfing.

Twenty minutes into the surf we'd each been barrelled off our mielies and had a couple of waves to the beach. The water was unmistakably rank, though, and I could feel the kleintongetjie at the back of my mouth had swollen till it was about 10cm long, wobbling down the back of my throat like a sour, flaccid dick would feel like, I imagine.

Twenty minutes after that, Lefty had landed a couple of aerials and I'd got a couple of freefall floaters happening, but otherwise, things were going a bit weird. I couldn't seem to focus my eyes properly and was feeling feverish. And I hadn't even swallowed much water.

There was sulphur and carborundum smoke in the air, stringy processed shit in the water and dodgy cats on the beach looking at Lefty's car. I looked across to warn him but his face was swollen and pink, so I rather warned him about that. He wanted to know why I looked like I had two tongues.

Within an hour we'd bodyboarded to the beach and crawled back to the Renault, the sight of two scabrous radiation victims being enough to scare off the potential carjackers.

We just lay on Brighton Beach in our wetsuits, inhaling the sulphur fumes from the swamp across the road and watching the carborundum ash settle gently on the scene. I picked a bit of turd out of my eyeball.

"I checked you have a awesome floater," said Lefty. "Ja fully," I said, proud that he'd spotted my move. "You mean the one over the section, or the one I almost swallowed?" I had dysenteric diarrhoea for a week after that and I never went surfing with Lefty again.

When I grew up I bought myself a flat across the road from the Fence and surfed it every day, big or small, wind or chop, with no complaints. Three or four foot peaks is the best you can hope for, it's next to the harbour and there's a bit of coal dust in the air, but damn. It feels like bloody Tavarua compared to Brighton Pier. Fact is, the waves can be peeling perfectly and you can still have the worst surf of your life, so watch where you paddle out, and don't be too easily led by your peers.

If you're going to surf in liquidised shite, the waves need to be a bit better than Brighton Pier. They gotta be at least as good as... Nahoon Reef, I reckon.

Back to the top

Me and Dad save the day in the '81 floods
By Hagen Engler
 

At the moment rain is bollocking down over Jo'burg, from where I write this column. A glance out the window show Randburg wreathed in grey, with a black lump of a cloud depositing lashings of rain on that wretched suburb.

But no suburb has been spared. I don't think I've seen the blue of the sky for about a week. It's living proof that God has a sense of humour that the moment someone said, "drought" it began raining like it would never stop.

And motorists were treated to the ironic sight of newspaper posters warning, "Water restrictions loom" while actually dissolving on the lampposts from the amount of rain that had lashed own upon them.

And every time I see that starting to happen, every time it rains for more than three days at a time, I find myself guiltily wishing my guilty wish upon the land: "I hope it floods!"

It's terrible. I can't believe I actually wish such a terrible thing upon the poor people of the country, but I do. I know where my urge to curse the nation in such a manner comes from too. It is traceable to the 1981 floods in Port Elizabeth.

Anyone who was around at that time will recall that they were the biggest floods to hit the city since the 1968 ones, which are acknowledged as the worst. If I'd been alive in 1968, perhaps I'd have witnessed some extreme drama and destruction and been put off floods for life. Sadly I did not.

The reason for my psychological imbalance, my unhealthy love of floods can be linked to the fact that for me, the 1981 floods were the biggest jol ever.

It turns out that the Latin words for flood are eluvies or inundatia, so let's call it eluviophilia, or inundatiophilia, whichever sounds best to you. Either way, I contracted it back in 1981, when my sister and I awoke to the sight of rivers of brown, muddy water surging down our street in Lorraine like it was a river.

We were unable to get to school - hell, we were barely able to get out of the house - and I started to like it already. Then the pool overflowed. Ours was your standard suburban yard, surrounded by precast vibracrete walls on all sides. So naturally, when it buckets down, your yard fills up like it was a bucket.

It was quite entertaining looking at the yard through our window and seeing it as a small brown lake, with the bright-yellow kiddie slide parking forlornly in the middle of it, suddenly completely meaningless.

It rained and rained, and the muddy water level rose and rose. It seeped beneath the steel lounge doors and flooded the lounge. It was a sunken lounge, so luckily we were able to drag most of the furniture up the two stairs to higher ground. We had to abandon the sideboard to its fate and the lounge carpet would rot steamily over the next fortnight.

Then the floodwaters began licking at the top of the stair which led to the rest of the house. The surface tension was bulging over the sill of it as a couple of Family Radio & TV mags floated around, when my dad decided to take action.

He went in the garage and emerged carrying an axe. "Come, my boy. I need you help," he said, donning his jacket. Bursting with excitement, I ran to get my school raincoat and my yellow plastic Wellingtons.

Like intrepid guardians of the household, we waded across the backyard. The water was just about waist-high to me, so my dad held my hand as he led me across the muddy lake which our yard had become. "Don't fall in the pool," he warned, but it was easy to see where the pool was thanks to the kiddie slide, which served as a handy marker.

Our house was immediately adjacent and down the hill from the local park, so all the sheetflow from the park had seeped into our yard, as well as all the rainwater bucketing down upon us directly. Dad obviously felt we were getting more than our fair share of the water and set out to relieve it.

We waded to the vibracrete wall across from the house and I held Dad's belt to hold him steady as he hacked away at the lowest slat of the wall with the axe.

When the slat gave way there was a whooshing sound and the yard began to drain into our neighbour's property. The water level began to drop, and the house was saved!

I fancy dad gave me a sly wink as we waded back to the house.
To this day, floods evoke the very spirit of being swashbuckling. As I look out the window, it's still drizzling a little, I'm still hoping it floods.

This bit was included in the Laugh It Off 2003 annual

I got nothing to say. I could say some about the way that we've been, but the tyranny of youth refuses. Angry young voices call and call and call for change, respect, Africanism and all the rest. But all that came, it's been and come, if  not implemented it'll all be along. Sommer nou-nou.

But the tyrannical youth just don't wanna know. The time is now and what came before they all just ignore, though it was heavy, harsher, hectic, Homie, harder fought, but nought. You hear what they say - today gotta be the day. More guys are rhymin' than ever before, 'bout their wicked ways with words and with the girls. How many homies they have, what crew they move with, how the rhymes that they drop are just so tight, a'ight?

But rhymes about rhymes and words about words have all been heard. The poets of the past weren't so into it 'ay. They had some things to say. Proper power protest points to make. Nowadays, tell me what's at stake?

Gangster rap comes back, tell me where's the politics in that? Tell me what does society lack that its poets all got their booty back. What up, Black? I'm down with that, I got mine too, but what up with you? You got the lyrical gift and what not, you got your way with the words, man, I heard what you got. But what?

Pedal to the metal drop a letter for the better bit o' big-time broken-down telephone-style messaging you got so many rhymes I just can't scan those lines. How many times you can rhyme your name, MC? Respect for that. Maybe you been shot at. Ay, I've had that. Does that make me an MC? Li'l ol me? Lemme see...

"Is my microphone on? Is my microphone on? Can you hear me explore the letter of the law? Though it try to ignore the needs of the poor we know who it for. Still the money be the power and the power be the law, though might might be right a tight, cold night in New Brighton got none of that. No power, maybe light at night, but no cash, no pull with the pigs as well, hell, no road to the shell that my guy and his gal got. S'not so swell Monwabisi Beach beats Silvertown streets but without a job only just. Guy got a sea view but if you just knew how the southeaster blew right through. I knew... no-no-no-no. Now I know whose microphone's not on, Mr Leon."

Where's the voice of the urban poor, the rural rich, the transsex dispossessed? The rural Apalacchians got no voice, no freedom of choice goin' on. Man that mic shaw as fuck ain't on. They can get as white as they like but they way past the Jersey Turnpike. Ol' Georgie W mightn't ever trouble you, but the man don't give a damn about a vet of Vietnam or a one-adult fam with no medical plan. No matter what colour they are. Even Dean and Gene Ween have seen how obscene 'at scene is. Look at the guys Bush got on his side. See what a guy means?

Same this side, the colour you are's no saak my bra. Afrikaners kannie kla nie but my old mate Lindani still blocks in a two-room block with his girl and the lightie some lezzie couple stole the brother of and kept coz they got the bucks and court cases are what it takes to get back your baby, maybe after a hundred clips or three or two.

Yeah so white's still alright, brother black's not bad but I starting to think that perhaps we been had. Trade a national oppression for international versions, a fucked-up class excursion. Sure-sure-sure-sure, we better off then before today, but that's not to say it's how it's all gotta stay. While way, way wack rappers rhyme their lines about cars and shorties, piece 'o blunts and those forties. What about the old songs? What about Babylon? That shit's still all wrong. Since the day that the slaves moved within the city gates do they no longer see their chains? On your hips are those Levi's tabs or bloodstains?

Hey? Wanna know what up today? Get out and Google some shit. It's the only way.
Me? I got nothing to say.

Here's a surfing kind of piece, just like I used to do in the old days. It came out a recent issue of  Zigzag magazine

10 Reasons Fame Can Go Fuck Itself
By Haai van der Schyff

1 Famous people are cunts
Even if famous people are cool, the okes who hang with them suck. Once you're famous, you end up hanging in places that charge forty bucks just to get in and then fifteen for a bladdy SAB beer. And the mellow normal cats can't even get near you coz they don't fit the dress code. So eventually you become a cunt yourself, just because you're famous. That's why fame can go fuck itself.

2 Famous people can't smile
Ous say things like, "That's fuckin' funny," with a straight face and don't even smirk, in case someone takes a photo. If it's so funny, why don't you laugh, you fuckin' famous cunt? Also, most celebs are on the cat and the charlie and all those drugs that take away your expressions. So they feel totally fabulous inside, but from the outside they look like someone sprayed them in the face with botox. Either that, or they are on botox! Fame. You can fuckin' have it, bru.

3 Famous people never fall in love
Famous cats are always dating other famous cats. Everyone they go out with is just another prop to enhance their careering quest for fame so they can make the mags with pics of their fucked-up designer lounge in fuckin' Parkhurst and pics of them with their black doberman. As if normal cunts don't have lounges and dobermans. Then when one of them stops being famous, they either become good okes again, or they find another famous person to go out with, like a cunt.

4 Famous people work too hard
Even if they only on the radio for three mingey hours a day, the rest of the time they're in the gym or doing appearances in shopping malls or pushing play on some fucked-up CD player in some kak club in Boksburg or judging shows where desperate laaities humiliate themselves for half a chance at ten seconds of semi-fame, which is fucked up to begin with anyway. Ous should find a chick that they dig and marry her and have kids, coz love is all that matters. Fame is a load of kak.

5 Fame makes people dumb
To be ultra famous, you have to appeal to as many people as possible, and most people are as dumb as fuck. So your shit becomes so mind-numbingly, lowest-common-denominatorly stupid that even a retarded dog is entertained by it. Is that ever gonna help humanity evolve? Not a fuck, bru. That's why no-one wise is famous. And if a famous person ever does anything wise, okes will just tune, "No, man. Don't try to be clever. Do that one where you fall on your arse again."

6 Fame is public prostitution
Whenever a famous person looks in the mirror, they tune themselves, "You poes! You sold out!" Nothing of any quality is ever going to make any money, so every poor fucker has to compromise their youthful idealism to make a living. Except famous okes hate themselves more than normal people. That's coz their fans keep telling them how awesome they are, meanwhile deep down inside they know they're a poes.

7 Sex is too easy
Wherever famous people go, people want to fuck them. They hope a little bit of their famous specialness will rub off on them. But it doesn't, coz after a famous person fucks you they phone their manager on their cell, and go, "I'm in a suburb called Walmer. Come get me the fuck out of here." Real people only have one sex partner per year and are bladdy grateful. So they learn that sex is special, even if it only lasts 48 seconds.

8 Fame makes you buy kak
Famous ous sign endorsement deals for the biggest load of crap, because crap sells and only the makers of crap can afford famous spokesmen. So you buy a razor coz the famous oke says it rocks, meanwhile it sucks just as much cock as every other overpriced motherfuckin' razor out there. That's why fame can go fuck itself. And whoever makes razors can too. And those expensive fuckin' tops for electric toothbrushes. Cunts.

9 You meet too many people
Famous okes are for ever bumping new okes who tune them the same kak about, "I checked you on the TV," and they're always being fully polite, without actually getting to know the dudes. So famous okes have met millions of fans, but they've probably got fewer friends than you have. The oke who's probably got the most friends in the world is this oke called Boz, who used to live in Grahamstown. He's fuckall famous.

10 Fame makes people waste their time
Okes end up watching kak TV or reading fucked-up, bullshit magazines and shit because they wanna see all these famous fucks, just cause they can play rugby or they had a boobjob or their face is fuckin' symmetrical. Meanwhile they should be reading some proper ancient wisdom or getting to know each other properly and learning to love. Because love is the answer and chasing celebrity is a load of kak. Fame can go fuck itself one time.

So listen, mate. What moisturiser do you use?
By Haai van der Schyff

Guys, just humour me for a minute. I'm testing a theory of mine. Imagine this scenario, if you will . . .
You're going to Nieuwoudtville with your babe for the weekend to see the flowers and to boost your pollen count. You pack a coupla pairs of jeans, a jersey, socks, a towel . . . now think of your toiletry bag. What you got in there?

Shaving kit, of course. Razor, shaving gel, sure, but what else? That's not all you guys are taking to Nieuwoudtville, is it?

I'm willing to bet that more than one half of you - your upper torso and your head at least - have moisturiser in there.

And not just one moisturiser. There's the nice big aloe vera one you just bought for rubbing in after you've shaved, the tea tree oil spritzer thing you bought on impulse at the flea market, the lovely greasy hand cream and the Body Shop elbow grease your sister brought back from London.

Then there's the eye cream, the tissue salts for stopping baldness and the one for keeping the skin fresh. Admit it, your toiletry bag looks like a girl's doesn't it?

Of course it does, and why shouldn't it?  Women want their men to be smooth-cheeked and to smell fresh and there are only two ways to do that -- by being 20 or by buying product.

I'm the first to admit I'd rather be 20 than have to use beauty product, but due to a terrible misunderstanding with father time I am now staring down the barrel of my 30s and considering buying a nose-hair trimmer.

Product is what it's gonna have to be . . .And trying to impress the ladies isn't the only reason I resort to personal grooming. It's just nicer. I've been camping in the Kei, so I've pushed the limits of personal laizzes faire as far as they can go. I know what grease-dreadlocks feel like. I've had dandruff in my beard. I've cultivated a monobrow and felt my tooth fur thicken into wood pulp.

From there the only way left to go is back to pleasant respectability. Eventually one just gets used to it.  You know the way your skin feels if you shave in the morning and forget to moisturise -- dry and scaly, with that razor burn starting to itch under the collar?

There's no need to live with that. Not when there's such a fabulous selection of products out there. Have you seen there's a shaving oil on the market now? I've tried the foam, the cream and the gel, so I can't wait to try the oil. Ah, the smoothness. Can hardly wait.

And the fragrances! Look, I can't tell an aftershave from a toilet water from an eau de cologne but I could sniff those elegant bouquets all day. Sometimes I wander into the cosmetics store at the gym and let the porcelain-perfect perfume lady apply them to my forearm so I can groan orgasmically and promise to come back when I've got R350 to spend on a new scent.

I know the Camel Man would be turning in his grave to hear me go on about beauty products like this, John Wayne too. But it's a fact of life -- men care about their grooming nowadays.

Why this is I can only speculate.  I've never seen my dad applying moisturiser, so perhaps there's only been a surge in grooming awareness among men recently. Or maybe the hole in the ozone layer has made our skins drier.

Maybe it's all the female growth hormones they're putting in the food these days. Or the impossibly hip and youthful male icons we're bombarded with in the media that we somehow have to measure up to.

Pick an excuse, really, I couldn't care. All I know is I like the feel of moisturiser on my skin. I love the top note of ambergris and citrus in a heinously expensive fragrance and I think I may need to start using eye cream for the bags under my eyes. Either that, a dab of base or cosmetic surgery.

And not that I care what you think, but I'm every bit as manly as the next man. I've travelled the world, been punched in the face, had my heart broken and held down a proper job. Maybe that's why my complexion needs a little taking care of.

And like it or not, yours does too. So you're either off to Nieuwoudtville looking like Hugh Grant, with a toiletry bag like a chick's, or you're a tough guy like Clint Eastwood and starting to look like him too -- and we all know who gets the better-looking co-stars.

So what's it gonna be, About a Boy or Dirty Harry? The question is how lucky you're gonna get on your weekend in Nieuwoudtville.

And do you feel lucky with razor burn, facial dandruff and crows' feet?
Well do ya, Punk?

From Land's End to Port St Johns

She was a proper lady. From a family estate in the English countryside. Near Land's End, she would say enigmatically, years later. She was the daughter of a doctor.

Her sickly mother seldom left her bedroom, they say. What brought her to Africa, no one knows. Wanderlust, probably, or the threat of war. It was the 1930s.

She was raised in an artistic tradition. Painting and music were her favourite pastimes. She kept a diary of prose and poetry throughout her life. But music was to become her career.

On a whim she applied for a post teaching music at St Johns College in Johannesburg, and got it. She left her family in the countryside, for darkest Africa.

But the sterile rehearsal rooms of St Johns reminded her too much of home. This was not the Africa she'd come to see.

 On another whim she took up with a vaudeville troupe on a tour of Southern Africa. She played the piano in support of the skits, sketches, and musical numbers by the theatrical members of the company as they visited each little outpost, entertaining the populace.

Where would they have played? Pretoria? Salisbury? Lourenco Marques? Pietermaritzburg? Durban? Surely. In a rickety old van, as travelling musicians still do. There would have been more men than women, as it still is with travelling musicians.

The troupe came to Port St Johns in the Transkei, some time in the mid-thirties, in the days before there was a bridge across the Umzimvubu. Here she met Tommy, a crippled mechanic who ran a garage on the outskirts of town. He lived with his sisters. He had a pronounced limp, and the pickings of white women being what they were, they planned to look after him into his dotage.

It was not to be. The night after the performance they spoke long into the night on Second Beach and he asked her to be his wife.

She agreed, but she left the following day on the next leg of their vaudeville tour.

 She must have returned to England, because he went to fetch her at Durban harbour. He slept in his car on the Bluff and waited for her ship to come in at dawn. She disembarked with her luggage and her furniture and contemplated the rough, unshaven mechanic from the Transkei who'd slept in his clothes and was to be her husband.

They made the trip back to Port St Johns and made their home there, behind the garage, at the edge of the forest.

She bore him six children, one of whom died shortly after birth. She kept house, taught them music, painted and wrote poetry. Her writings were included in various collections and twice her poetry was read out over the wireless.

Their children were educated in Umtata, Queenstown, King William's Town and Grahamstown. They grew up to be strong, independent South Africans and made their homes in East London, Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg.

Tommy died in his beloved Port St Johns in the 1970s, having seen his grandchildren. The Transkei in the 1970s was not the place for a middle-aged white lady living on her own, they said, and she came to live near her daughter in Port Elizabeth.

In the 80s she visited England, trembling with excitement, and met her older sisters, whom she hadn't seen since before the war. There hadn't been money until then.

She grew parsley and primroses, she painted, she played piano and she kept her hair long - silver-smooth and flowing. She died in 1995, aged 87 and her ashes were scattered in Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.

She was Molly Francis Handley, and she was my grandmother. 

TWENTY minutes on the stairclimber should do it.

And that's just for the beers, sweating out of my pores like liquid bullets as my heart palpitates wildly all over my ribcage.

After this it'll be the toning circuit for me. The long one with the hectic stomach machines and those agonising leg-extension machines that make you cry real tears and scream in pain.

And let this be a lesson to me. Bladdy four in the morning jolling missions. Good grief! What do I think this is? Blimming freshers week? I'm a respectable pillar of society, dammit. Of an age where the exuberant overindulgence of youth has lost its novelty, theoretically. After you've gotten heinously, embarrassingly, John-Travolta-moves-at-3am drunk a couple of times, you're s'posed to grow out of it.

You're supposed to have bigger fish to fry. Have business to attend to. Work in the morning. A meeting with someone.

All of which I've got. But I'm a bad grown-up. I still go jolling regardless. So if I don't want to learn, then I must feel. All day at work with a vague aloofness and trembling like a virgin bride, but also now at gym.

In a nation with a strong puritanical, Anglo-Saxon-derived guilt tradition, gym as penance is proving to be a growing industry.

Half the people who go to gym aren't going to keep themselves healthy, they're going to undo the damage they did the night before, or over the past week.

The exchange rate is roughly seven minutes on the treadmill equals one beer, or an hour of step class per three chocolates.

I sometimes think I wouldn't go to the gym if I didn't do so much bingeing. Or maybe I wouldn't go jolling if I didn't feel I deserved it, having spent two hours in the temple of pain and vanity which is the gym.

They feed off each other, gym and nightclubs. You go to the gym so you'll look all sleek and sexy when you go out to the clubs, then you wake up the next morning filled with beer and loathing and resolve to go to the gym to repent.

Then you go out again the next night, because pecs that firm are too good to waste, and require urgent showing off before they go flaccid again, which normally results from too much beer-drinking.

It's like a vanity-loathing cycle. Mercifully, summer arrives, offering a chance to break out of the cycle, because you can show off your pecs, or whatever else you feel is your most impressive feature to excellent effect on a beach. And you don't even need to drink beer while you do it.

Of course, three hours on a beach staring at women's pectoral muscles, and you feel a lot like going clubbing that night. Next morning, the guilt's back. I was raised as a Catholic, so I know a bit about guilt. It's an amazing feeling when it's eventually lifted.

But the punishment must fit the crime. As I recall, playing with yourself gets you four Hail Marys, whereas stealing from the tuck- shop will earn you four Our Fathers, a Hail Mary and two Glory Be's. Even then, you'll still have to go and hand yourself in to the tuck-shop master before the guilt will be finally and mercifully lifted.

By the same token, it's pointless burning off 800 calories when you only had a couple of mellow ales the night before. So there might be scope for a confessional booth at the gym, staffed by a personal instructor who can prescribe exactly what form of punishment is justified in each individual case.

"Bless me, O gym instructor, for I have sinned," you would say. "It's been three weeks since my last gym."

The instructor would then mumble on for a bit about the need for regular exercise, but it was good that you at least came this time.

"My sins are that I drank brandies at Indies till 4am three Wednesdays in a row," you would then say. "I've eaten about a kilogram of chips every week for the last 15 years and haven't been doing my crunches every night."

"Very good, my son," the instructor would say. "You have shown admirable remorse. Please do 20 minutes on the exercise bike, a super circuit and three sets of ten reps on the pull-up machine.

"Go in peace to groom and buff your body."

Back to the top

It was the 80s, and the garment in question  was a pre-release issue of a new wetsuit called a Second Skin. My team discount meant I got it for R50, when the shop price was an exorbitant R185 or so.

In return I was expected to punt the brand to my mates as well as to any walk-in punters who came to check out suits at Lifestyle surf shop, where I worked on weekends.

But the main perk was that that team discount gave me the right to place strategic Second Skin stickers on both sides of my board, on my 50cc boney, on roadsigns and really on any surface to which a sticker would adhere. Lekker day-glo  stickers in either lumo orange, lumo green or lumo lemon-lime.

In retrospect, I'd have to say that my Second Skin was the worst wetsuit I've ever owned in my life.

And  thanks to the miracle of team sponsorship and the enthusiasm it generates in its 16-year-old team members, there are a dozen surfers around the Eastern Cape who can now say the same thing.

Geez they sucked, those wetsuits. They were two-mil all over, in this grey kind of rubber  that perished within a month. The fabric part of the neoprene pulled loose from the rubber as soon as it was exposed to sea water, so you looked like you were entering  a wet T-shirt contest.

The stitching looked like it had been done by hand with a darning needle by the Standard 4 sewing class at the special school. The crotch stitching unravelled alarmingly the minute you tried to sit astride a surfboard - clearly a quirky act never envisaged by the suit's designers.

The zip also functioned primarily as a water inlet valve, as did the collar, short arms  and ankles.  It was, I suppose you could say, a summer suit, in that it lasted almost one summer. It  self-destructed well before winter came along, so I was spared the agony of wearing it at Supers in July, which would have been foolish of me, and asking a lot of a team surfer, no matter who loyal.

There aren't enough lumo stickers on earth to make me do that.

About the most use I got out of my Second Skin was to use the detachable arms as beer coolers. You could fit about three ales in each arm, end to end and then wrap the arms in a towel and you'd be waxed for cold beers after your surf.

So basically I paid fifty bucks for two beer coolers. And it's,  like, four bucks for the polystyrene kind at Game.

After this I became disillusioned with the whole team surfer scene and abandoned my plan to turn pro and win the title for SA.

Nowadays I only surf when there's waves and not because I feel I should.

Otherwise I drink beers. Kief cold ones.

Back to the top

From my EP Herald column, Life's a Mission:

Nits and the revenge of the three lice pariahs

LOOK, I know I don't have  AIDS. I can't possibly have AIDS, because this year I've had more AIDS tests than I've had sex, and they've all come out negative.

The AIDS tests, not the sex, one hastens to add, rather blushingly, because I'm a shy boy and I don't like to talk about such things. So I don't have any HIV antibodies present in my blood, and thus I also have an insurance policy, a flat and a medical aid.

But I have been socially stigmatised because of my disease by an uncaring, ill-informed public, when I could have been  a productive member of society.

It was lice and it was in Standard 3 or so. There was one teacher who apparently had the gift of being a lice-diviner, and she was installed in the hall for the entire seven standards, English and Afrikaans and both special classes to submit to her inspection.

If ever a gift can turn out to be a burden, that teacher  must have felt that this was such an occasion. I remember feeling some empathy for her, as I dutifully queued up for my turn and watched her shrivelling up her nose in stoic disgust as she plunged her fingers into the hair of smelly Gregory, the boy who collected moles.

She rummaged around for a while, intently picking through his thatch like someone who doesn't eat olives going through their  Greek salad, before eventually pronouncing him lice-and nit-free.

That Gregory passed - in fact the only thing I remember him passing -  gave me confidence. When all three of the Kimbreys, who kept monkeys, managed to earn  the teacher's grudging approval, I thought I was home free.

 But no. I was among only three boys in the entire school with lice. "But I'm from a good family," I protested tearfully, "and I never play with the cat."

It was to no avail. "Lice is no respecter of social status,"  the teacher told me gravely. "No one is immune."

I think it was probably  the time we crawled from Alsace Road to Bordeux Avenue via the stormwater drains that did it. Or the time we built the underground fort in the bush at the bottom of the road.

Either way, there were three of us who were eventually left standing  like lice pariahs at the side of the hall by the time the inspection was over. We were sent home that very afternoon with a letter excusing us from school for the next week and outlining the course of treatment that our parents should follow to  allow us to be readmitted.

This included a powerful alcohol-based spray-on treatment which apparently worked by exfoliating all the skin on your scalp and causing patch baldness.

But before that, once the shame had faded, our little group of outcasts undertook a small cranial inspection of our own. Nitpicking, I think it's called.

From what we could tell, lice were tiny  black dots, while nits were the little white ones. It wasn't the end of the world, we decided, we still had our self-respect and even if we were temporarily cast out into the wilderness, at least we still had each other.

As luck would have it, we all played tennis. So, for the next week we contested what came to be known as the Lice Bowl, a marathon series of American singles challenges, where two played one, in each possible permutation.

The Lice Bowl was contested on the school tennis courts during school hours, when there was no chance of us infecting the populace. It was a masterstroke, and I recommend it to all recovering lice sufferers.

The only complaint came from the art teacher who had the classroom by the tennis courts.

"You can't play tennis during school hours," she bellowed.

Now comfortable in our role as outcasts, we bellowed back in a remarkable show of gall, "Get away from us - we've got lice."

She did actually recoil a bit, and went to find the headmaster, who confirmed that, yes, those were indeed the lice boys.

By the end of the week we were putting salt and pepper in our hair, to approximate the appearance of parasites, and got the next Monday and Tuesday off as well.

Back to the top

THIS is the story of a walk I took on the night of August 8th.

This was the Sunday night of the Women's Day long weekend, with the public holiday on the Monday. It was a balmy evening, the stars were out and a north-west wind rustled the leaves of the Shark Rock palm tree. I was getting dropped off for a birthday party at the Hobie Beach Yacht Club.

Nightclub owner Roger Hilligan was turning 30 and his friend and associate Craig Potgieter was also having one.

They're well-connected gents, these, with deep roots in the local club and pub scene and they keep the company of beautiful people. One was therefore quite chuffed at snagging an invitation to this evening of spit-roasted lamb and celebration. As an unrehabilitated nightcrawler myself, I shared certain of those deep pub/club roots  with these two gents.

I spent the evening mingling warmly with former Baron DJs, former Einsteins doorladies, ex-bouncers and club managers, many of whom now had  careers, but made just as excellent company as they ever did.

It was found that warm nostalgia goes well with Schnapps, music emanated from somewhere, and the tone was set. Slivers of spitted lamb were laid on, drinks were enjoyed, and eventually, rare eighties dance moves were polished off and put on display.

Having broken the embarrassment barrier a few too many times, bruising my burn on the last one, I vacated the dance floor.

I took leave of my gracious hosts and companions - or more likely just upped sticks and bailed, an old habit learnt at the Baron. Sorry guys.

I bailed with my sore bum and my shattered embarrassment barrier on a walk along the beachfront. There was a rave on at the harbour. Public holiday, and it was the first big rave in ages. Definitely gonna cook, was the word. Munro was down to play and Shane and Speedy probably. All the ous.

There had to be a pedestrian route along the beachfront to the harbour tavern, and I resolved to find it.

Back to the top

Walking briskly, I soon reached the little stream beneath the Humerail bridge -  musing vaguely on the fate of my mate who got bust for drunk driving, so he started walking more and eventually got mugged.

Right below the bridge is a weir, and a path into the harbour. I skirted the tank farm, following a fence, probably below Humerail station, but otherwise pretty lost. It was dark here, and quiet. I headed instinctively north, the distant campanile as my guide.

I passed a pair of desolate railway cottages that looked abandoned, but somehow creepily occupied. After a few hundred metres, I noticed I was coming to the end of the fence and would be rounding a corner. There was light coming from around the corner.

I was sweating heavily. Surely I would have got to somewhere  I'd recognise by now? Rounding the corner, I was blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car. I was at that hairpin turn near the yacht harbour. But this car wasn't turning. It left the road and slowed as it reached me.

I realised with extreme relief that it was Shane. DJ Shane, with his car packed with a mixer and records, on his way to play at the warehouse rave.

It's about 1am. I know him from around. From old Baron days already. He wants to give me a lift. He leans across to the passenger door to speak to me, but he can't unlock it, apparently that door's broken, and with the records on his seat, he can't even roll down the window.

I signal that I'm going to sit on his bonnet, and since it isn't far, he can  just drive there slowly.

Thus it was that I rode up to this outrageous public holiday jol, with 300 people queuing outside dressed to impress, on the bonnet of DJ Shane's car.

Two minutes before I was so scared it felt like I was in The Shining, and now I was making my entrance of the year on the bonnet of the hippest DJ in town like a confused hood ornament with a Schnapps fixation. And I kept having deja vu about the whole thing.

Shane slowed, and I slid off and trotted to a halt by these mates of mine like we'd being rehearsing the whole move for weeks, and just said ."Howzit".

"WE want alternate!" the girl chanted. "We want alternate!"

She wore a mesh vest over a black shirt and a tartan skirt with black stockings. From Jo'burg, she might have been someone's cousin.

"Alternate to what?" I asked her, because I was 16 and only knew about surfing.

"You are trendy people," she said, indicating Smiler and myself, trendy beyond compare in our pin-striped Instinct drawstring pants and luminous orange T-shirts.

"I am an alternative," she said proudly, and not a little condescendingly fingering her black shirt.

"Alternative to what? Look around you," I said. "We're in the middle of the mosh pit at a Winthrip Mindwarp and The Mangleheads concert!" Indeed we were.

"And it's surfers that organised this jol as well. The ous in the band are surfers too. We may be trendy but without us your alternate ass would have no gig to go to. So don't come here in your tartan skirt and tune." That was basically my chance with that girl, but it was 1988 and there would be other women. Not quite as many as one envisaged in the 80s, but there you go.

And that Mangleheads gig at the Walmer Town Hall was a hooligan show like you never saw. Fully rocked. It was on the Saturday of a two-day interclub surfing contest. There were all these surf clubs in Port Elizabeth those days - Club Fence, Pipe Surf Club, Wild Side - and they also had J-Bay Boardriders and Defence and UPE in the compo.

I think the Wild Side guys organised the contest, which is how the Mangleheads got hired for the gig. East London band, and the Wild Side okes always seemed to have a couple of Slummies connections.

I don't know if there was ever punk music in Port Elizabeth before, but that was the first time I saw it. It started off tamely enough with a fashion show. The girls were all in black, I remember that, and they turned off most of the lights for the duration of the show.

The models were coloured girls, and no one knew whether it was okay  to whistle and clap and hoot, because we were all white and it was 1988.

In the end it was quite a regal, respectful silence which greeted the models, with polite applause, while we did some reprehensible underage drinking in the dark with Kevin and Dave.

There was no one called Winthrip. It was just three okes from Slummies, but I'd never seen anything remotely like them before in my entire life. The bass player was about 6 foot 10, it looked like, with a blonde Mohican and black lycra tights on with safety pins in them.

The singer was shorter but more aggro looking - Peter Briers I heard his name was later. He had a sneering, disdainful delivery, a vest on and jammed guitar as well.

They did a whole lot of covers - in fact they may have done nothing but covers, but I'd never heard any of those songs before, so it made no diffs.

That Violent Femmes song Blister in the sun featured, and the Vapours' Turning Japanese, and The Monks tune, Nice Legs, Shame about her Face. Killing an Arab by The Cure was another.

There was headbanging. It was one of those skops where the lighties were jolling in the throng right next to the ballies and no hierarchy. Actually banging our heads against the stage. Eventually the whole event burnt out in a blaze of chaos, as such things are meant to. Someone threw a beer bottle at the band, it shattered on the drumkit and cut the drummer so he bled a bit. 

After this, the singer began abu-u-u-u-sing the crowd at large and whoever it was who had thrown the bottle. The Mangleheads refused to carry on playing until the culprit came up on stage so he could get stuffed up by the bass player, who was huge and had boots on.

No one ever came up and the thing became a minor riot for a while. Some arb guy who'd just arrived was half-heartedly roughed up by the crowd, but when this didn't get the band back on stage they let the oke go and gave him a beer to say sorry.

Winthrip Mindwarp and the Mangleheads never played Port Elizabeth again.

Back to the top

One wants, obviously, to approach a subject like this with delicacy, but when do you women fart? Not when men are around, clearly, because I'm a man and I've witnessed but one solitary female fart in my entire life.

Shy, flat, lacking bass and cut short in its prime, it certainly wasn't much of a fart to begin with. But that's been all I've had to go on as I've endeavoured to answer the question: "Do women have digestive systems or do they just hide their food in small plastic bags when you're not looking and throw it away later?"

Because that's where gas comes from, isn't it? Eating. Of course it does. Now you and I both know you don't eat enough, but still, surely, it must happen. Coke and popcorn at the movies, say. I know that kind of thing gets the old gaseous exchange going.

And yet women are somehow able to watch a medium-popcorn-and-a-large-fruit-juice's worth of Cider House Rules, go home, pet heavily, graciously consent to sex and then lapse into a transcendental sleep of post-quadruple-orgasmic euphoria, and not fart once.

Operating on the assumption - and it is only an assumption at this stage - that women are normal, and in the course of their day will have occasion to fart coyly to themselves, one has to wonder why they don't do it with men.

It seems women are more prepared to share a sexual encounter with a man than a good fart. Because even if your relationship scales such blissful heights of sweet union that even hetero partner-farting holds no taboos, I'll bet you'd have been having sex for, oh, months before you eventually broke the fart barrier.

And then it's always the man who broaches the subject - quietly at first, but emanating from under the duvet in no uncertain terms.

"Sis! Did you fart?" is the inevitable rejoinder to the man's first broach, with one of those girl-punches on the shoulder. This often ushers in a policy of firm disapproval of male-partner farting by women.

Women, quite rightly, feel that if they're polite enough not to fart, you should be too.

But where does politeness leave off and primal bodily expression take over?

If two lovers have experienced a sexual communion of souls and are lying well fucked on the bed afterwards, a celebratory post-coital fart could almost be seen as part of lovemaking itself, I would contend. Afterplay almost.

Some women share this view, bless them. A friend of mine tells with pride how he "blew Liz out of the water" in a one-for-one farting contest while they were in Israel.

So maybe it's the female disdain for competition (you know you'd lose) that prevents them from relaxing the fart ban and unleashing a fart war from which there'd be no going back.

Men see it differently though. For us farting is a bonding ritual. If a guy farts discreetly and goes all misty-eyed in the corner of the back seat, you might roll down the window and stick your nose beneath your T-shirt while birdseye chili and noodle farts overshadow the air, but you'll be laughing while you curse him.

And on a deeper level you don't really mind, because you know you'll get him back, soon as that Nando's half-chicken combo kicks in. Politeness doesn't come into it.

But maybe what the female disapproval of farting symbolises is the civilising effect of women on society in general. Or maybe women are just anal about farting.

It's also difficult being the only farter in a relationship. You don't always want to be the dirty boy, so you try and keep it tidy, but occasionally you slip up. Men's digestive tracts produce more gas than women's, so it's not surprising.

And then you're scolded by the goddess of fartlessness for your contravention. It's enough to erode your self-esteem.

No wonder men eventually seek solace with their male friends. All those late nights at the office, you want to know what we're doing when we come home late? We're not having affairs, we're hanging around in pubs with our mates, farting. And not feeling guilty about it.

One way for men and women to get to know each other better would be for the doors to be thrown open, as it were; if we could just get more relaxed about farting.

We really don't mind if you do it now and then when we're around either. It'll be quite a laugh.

Keys are important.
Keys keep us safe.
Keys bind us together.
Keys mean we're afraid.
Keys mean "I love you".
Keys get lost in the laundry.
Keys get locked in the car.
Keys mean you're 21, which means you're grown up, for some reason, but at least they're easier than having your foreskin chopped off.
Keys make a jingly clink sound that lets you know where they are about your person.
Keys in your hand mean you're about to leave, or you won't be staying long.
Keys can be a weapon, they say, if you're mugged in a parking lot.
Keys get old and smooth, like the smoothed iconic stone feet of the Virgin Mary in Rome, caressed by pilgrims for centuries, but not like that at all.
Keys might as well be screwdrivers when they get like that.
Keys make handy pendants, if you're a latchkey kid. Like plectrum necklaces for musicians.
Keys are about eight bucks to cut at a hardware store.
"Keys, keys, keys," is what you say to yourself while turning your room upside down so you can find them and leave the flat for a photo shoot with a rock band you're already 20 minutes late for. And you haven't even started looking for your wallet, your sunglasses or your phone yet. So they gonna have to wait.
Keys will all be smart cards soon. Or iris scanners, or fingerprint readers, or voice recognition devices.
Keys can also be allen keys, those L-shaped spanners that are also shaped like honeycombs.
Keys was the last finance minister - Derek, not Allen, and no relation. He was the one before Manuel. Keys was very good, apparently, but now, it turns out, so is Manuel.
Keys are little islands between the swamps off the southern tip of Florida, apparently. There's one called Key Largo.
Keys rhyme with quays. You get them in harbours, apparently. There's one called Victoria Quay.
Keys are what songs are in. There are 14 in all. It's to do with root notes and you have to end on the same note you started with, most of the time.
There's one called E, which most blues is in.
Keys can be buttons, and occur on keyboards, for typing, or playing the blues.
Keys can be verbs, adjectives, nouns and adverbs, like all the best words.
Keys give you a sense of belonging. And belonging is a key sense.
Keys come in bunches, like bananas, but they taste of metal, like iron supplements, so they must be good for you, like a long holiday in the Comores. Because sometimes all you need is a change of environment to feel completely invigorated, and that's exactly what keys give you.

You can go solo or you can go blow-by-blow but there's no low blows on Blow-by-Blow with Bert Blewett. So get down to it, put your body through it. (Know you wanna do it). Punch through the perspectives, screw the invectives . . . 'zackly what I'm saying. Nah'msayn'?

Nothing can be taken with (you can't even take the issues). Ahtishoo! ahtishoo! Our world's goin' brown, but you can't find town, 'coz the town's all round. (And pretty brown). You need a car to get around, to get ahead, to get to Maun. To get the girl, with the curls that you want, that you check around town (now 'n then) but then again where's town? It's hard to get to. Can you?

Mid-town, uptown, don't go downtown (ngumntu ngabantu believe what you want), nditheth'inyaniso believe when I say so. Isidingo's okay I dig that one babe but I don't feel the need to do that everyday. (I mean hey) I forget her name but she's cool. Got things to do this summer. Check out chicks on the Stairclimber . . . big gigs and bad hummers.

(That's what they call blowjobs in New Jersey. Hummers. I was a mama's hummer subject, you check. But the girls, or the guys -- so say some -- don't hum, you don't come. They so skanky.)

Got caught wanking by the maid coz I never get laid coz I don't get paid coz I don't have it made, coz my daddy was a self-made man not anudda one a dem damn third- or fourth-gen men of wealth, nahmean?

Reminds me.
I'm Inspector Ras MC kakking rhymes since 93 in PE. You heard me, PE. So don't tune me, show me a full-time MC then I'll bend a knee just don't tune me -- my daddy was a refugee begging sweeties off invading armies (For fuck's sakes)!

Now the ou's doing fine in a kinda mercantile, Merc and child kinda way.
I get pissed in the day I let my best girl get away, I don't know what to say, she was cool now she's gone, got her mail but c'mon, she's gone 'n got it goin' on wit one, well, one of my guys. I realise when you break up she gonna make up with your mates (dem's da breaks). Lots at stake. But you make out what you got when it's gone.

Number one's always gone by then so then a man gets down to one of them "franchise" clubs in Midrand and blows grands to lay hands on some glands or some grams or goddamn.

My mom is from the TK, 'kay. Kay?
Fuckin' A, broe. But white like me and you (you check my move?), 'coz if you were as black as all that you'd be reading Y. Am I right?

Is the page full yet, mister Ed? Try to pull that headline deeper. Make that picture bigger my nigger, try to figure these words don't come easy. My lyrics are loony, I'm the East Cape's George Clooney, Miss PE wanted to do me. (Now I think she just likes me). I'm hooked on porno movies. Had seventeen at last count -- that a large amount? Now how's that word count?!

Nah worry Honey, punctuation is funny. Git wid dis "Comma Coma'' shit, Git. If you could just hear the beat'at go with this shit I could bet you'd get down with that, 'n it it'd put a bit a what's missin' in it 'n all'at. Can you sense the American accent I'm sayin'nis wid? (Respek, Waddy. Buddy-buddy. Ay; it's okay. It's pretty normal to wish you were Max Normal. Though I never met you, I stood on your shoe one time at Joburg. Sorry broe)

I'm the source not the subject of all kinds of skinner, a five-times Hansie Cronje, poes-of-the-year sweepstakes winner. Now the ou goes 'n becomes a martyr. (Huuu-uuh). Now there's T-shirts with him as Che Guevara. (Tomato)

You say tomayto, I say fuck you. (Still buy your jeans, though). And buckets of fried chicken skin off you too, broe, mister Colonel.

Used to perve Donna Wurzel, jacked off like Goebbels on my TK 'erbal, right-hand attack, solo wack aphrodisiac.
Please come back baby? I'll be . . . I'll be . . . I'll be . . . I'll buy 220 YDE bits for two clips each for us and we, baby. Just understand, any brand in the land could be planned to handle a lil' love hiccup so look up beyond all that and check it:

I dig you . . .
So I'm gonna buy you some nice new shoes too.
And a bracelet!

Our lives are interwoven but colours of the same hue aren't always woven together. They blend with others to create still other colours, maybe crossing once, twice or a few times.

They form pleasing patterns for the observer although  the threads may twist a tortuous route through all the tight strands it must cross, giving strength and warmth to those who walk upon those threads.

But can a thread choose its place in the tapestry or is its role merely to follow its preordained path, to meekly submit to its small fated role in the tapestry of life? What can one thread do after all?

Even two, three, a hundred threads cannot make a carpet.

One thread can snap like a blade of grass, but nothing can break a tapestry.

No thread can hope to achieve alone what thousands can do together. Only when the thread submits to the will of the weaver and allows itself to be dyed, woven, twisted, knotted and chopped can it become part of a thing of beauty.

But a thread itself is a thing of beauty. It has been spun from a ball of rough fibre, harvested from the field where it was formed by the sun.

The thread itself is a tapestry of many fibres, the fruit of the soil, the rain and the sun and the ingenuity of the craftsman who spun it and the generations whose wisdom he stands upon.

A thread can darn the hole in the sock of the warrior who marches and kills the oppressor. A thread can hold the hook that catches the fish which feeds the sage who writes the book which leads the nation out of darkness. The thread can launch the arrow which kills the bull which feeds the clan as it marches through famine.

The humble thread can secure the hem of the queen whose beauty inspires truth and love.

So marvel at the patterns of the tapestry, at the splendour of that magnificent symphony of threads, but do not forget the simple thread.

For a thread alone and free can do more than a tapestry could ever dream of.