

# Comrade Baby  
...and other South African adventures

By Hagen Engler

Text copyright 2012 Hagen Engler

Smashwords Edition

www.hagenshouse.com

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-0-620-54623-2

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

#  Table of Contents

Foreword: Since you're Interested

Marrying Black Girls For Guys Who Aren't Black

The Colour of One

Early Lessons in the Ways of Earth

The great Gonzo Scooter Assault

The Wednesday Pants

The Girl with the Curl

The Quest for Sexy

Things to Insert into your Head when you're not Spading Hippies

Lovers & Haters. Strippers, Meditators

Windfalls and what they Do to you

The Epic Foot Journey to Maritzburg

The Promo Girl Problem

Cape Town and I

10 Reasons Cape Town can Fuck Off

When my Backyard Ship Comes In

The End of Caring and the Death of the Jol

Robot Guy up your Game

Buying umBhaco for Baby

The Light Snake Winds its Way to Heaven

Island Fever and what Brings It On

The Miracle of Flight: A Change of Perspective

The Unpleasantness in Bloemfontein

The Chip of Kings

Danced out, Sober and Yawning

Jailed for a Joke?

Local Hero Sits Down at the Next Table

The Visitor who never Came Back

Honeymoon Reality Check

Spike's Hangover

The Keys to the Kingdom

Push Play

Going to Visit the Cousins on Holiday

Personal Bests: By Luck or Design?

Respect, Just a Little Bit

Life for the Logic, or the Living

Poetic Path to the Next Stage

Through the Perspectives

In a Car, with a Stranger

Lessons from Uncle Armin's Piccolo

Good Value Drinking Partners

Showdown on the Dancefloor

Bees in the Park and the End of an Era.

I am Your Love

Totally Called it

Fit to be Exterminated: Felicity's first Gig

A Summer of some Urgency

Near-death of a Potplant

Are you here as a Person, or as an Observer?

Night of the Game Boy

Using a bit of that SAPS Shine to get Famous

Smoke cigarettes. Play golf. Don't be fazed

Fun power: Me and Dad Gaming into the Future

Our Cock-ups will bind us Together

Movie Premiere at Tim's Place

Everything is Ready to Go. Any Minute now

Fight Night at 11am

!snhaK morf enohplleC yna yuB

Saved by Reggae. Damned by Corruption

Boys and girls: A day at the Races

It was Hectic, and Okes just weren't into it

Birthday Bungee ain't what it Used to Be

The Beginning of the End

Unwanted Guest at the Snodgrass Residence

The Power of Beauty

It was like Top Scoring on a Sticky Wicket

Naked on the Road to Joburg

A Journey to the Meaning of Pain

White-Boy Things

A Superstar, by the Sink, in Welkom

Faster than the Speed of Dawid Kotze!

Why Sbu's Saloon was out of Business for a Month

Let the People Rejoice!

Racing to my Doom with no ID

The Tip

Easy Money

I should be DJing Tonight

Don't Mess with the Kamuro Bomb

Make a Movie. Make some Chinas. Make it across Town in 11 Minutes

Ploughing through, grimly clung, for what?

Ek Ken van Slang

Bacon, I think we were Scared of You

Turns out the Okes can still Jol

When Talking, Voting, Swallowing your Pride and Patient Hoping Fails

Settle-down time for the People of the South

Getting Back in the Game

Crotch Fight at the Cockroach Café

When the Memories come out to Play

The Queue with the Women and the Book

In the eye of the Metal Storm

Joburg's Metal Kings

Travels with my Ballbag

Stories Scars tell

My Complex Heart

How you know you're Forty

Away from the Timeline

Borderline Short! Ha!

In the Embarrassing words of my Ancestor

Where you taking us, Boet?

What would Wally do? Or 'Die Eensaamste Soutie in Tjoeras'

Things I Learnt about White Guys by Marrying a Black Girl

Just now on my TL

Comrade Baby and the Gateway to Hell

Code Pink at the Front Desk

The Toughest Mute at the Dinner Party

Charlie and the Benoni Taxi Ride

Home Of The Blessed

Cyan

With my Broken Face across the Drakensberg

#  Foreword: Since you're Interested...

It was about time I did one of these things. The written work piles up and you keep looking forward. But after a while it's worth consolidating and going, "Right, what have we been up to?" It's fun, too.

The typings in this collection represent about a decade's worth of activity, during which I wrote, performed solo and with Jedi Rollers, lived around South Africa, by turns in Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and worked as a writer, editor, and copy editor in magazines. Not least of these was the illustrious FHM, where we were in charge of choosing which bikini model to put in which bikini.

The columns appeared in Weekend Post, Sunday Times, Afropolitan, the web mags Mahala and That's How It Is, and on my blog of chaos and creativity, hagenshouse.com. 10 Reasons Cape Town Can Fuck Off, The Colour Of One, and perhaps others have appeared in earlier collections but, like warts on one's elbow, they have stood the test of time.

The ones with rhythm that look like they could be poems if you screw your eyes up and make a leap of imagination, well those have been delivered as part of my spoken-word set, or accompanied by some of the dodgiest guitar this side of an old Persian man with one arm.

These collections – of which this is my fourth – function as a diary of personal evolution, anecdotes starring myself and others, reminiscences, philosophical musings and tales of derring-do. In the period under review I've recorded albums, edited a magazine, run the Comrades, climbed Kilimanjaro, stopped dopping, started again, and fallen in with this stunning black woman I met at the PE Cool Runnings.

She is Nomfundo, the Comrade Baby of the title, my resident Africanist militant, human reality check, lovely wife and the mother of Liso Engler. This book is for both of them.

The path one has walked to this point parallels some South African social developments, at other times it is my fault alone.

I've put it in a roughly chronological order, so you can read it in a straight stripe, and discern themes and evolutions, or dip in at will like it was literary packet of mini-Chomps.

It's a book. You know how it works.

Peace.

Hagen Engler

Johannesburg

October, 2012

#  Other Books by Hagen Engler

Life's A Beach

Water Features

Greener Grass

Magnum Chic

Buttons For Gaia

Planetary Vehicles

#  Marrying Black Girls for Guys who aren't Black

Are you a guy? And you're not black? And you dig black girls?

Not just to look at their asses from a distance, but actually to talk to them and ultimately try pomp them?

And then actually pomp them and start going out in public together and stand in the queue at movies with them and all that? Go to braais and say, "This is my girlfriend Letsego?" or Lonwabo, or Sibu, or Kate because she grew up with a white family. Or whatever.

If this sounds like you, and you follow things through to their natural conclusion, you may even end up marrying your babe, differently coloured as you might be.

It happened to me, so I have prepared a list of tips.

Marrying Black Girls for Guys Who Aren't Black:

Prepare to not follow the conversation

You're not black, so don't even try to be. Maybe you know some Xhosa, maybe you've had black friends all your life, maybe you've been building RDP houses in Katlehong for the past ten years. But you're not black. When you hang with her mates, you will spend a lot of time staring blankly into the middle distance, smiling vaguely, while people bellow at each other in vernac, laugh their arses off and generally have more fun than you. If you stick with it, you'll get to meet her family, where the same scenario will play itself out times a hundred.

Prepare for the speeches

African culture is big on making speeches. Cultural ceremonies are basically extended talk shops where the okes – the men, mostly – get to showcase their thousand-year-old debating skills. African culture is basically a massive, continent-wide Toastmasters club.

While everyone's making speeches you don't understand, nod politely and only ask what was said afterwards. Sooner or later they'll ask you to say something. Keep it concise, because you're about to make a total cock of yourself.

Lobola: a minefield

It's supposed to be a patriarchy, but in reality most black kids are raised by women. Lobola negotiations are supposed to be handled between the uncles of your two clans. A quick check will confirm that you have only three uncles, two of whom now live in Australia, and Oom Johan, currently on probation for assaulting his farm workers.

On her side, there will be roughly 27 uncles, brothers, half-brothers, half-uncles, cousin-uncles and cousin-brothers. They will all insist they are the right person to conduct lobola negotiations with.

You are a racist: face it

You can marry six black babes in a row and you'll still be a racist. We all are. Being a racist is part of being South African. Luckily, she's one too. You okes are made for each other. Just admit it at every opportunity then wallow in your inbred racial prejudice and bigotry.

Park in front of TV talking in ethnic accents, ripping off every race group in turn. Every now and then you'll wade into a political debate with an unthought-through clanger of such ignorant racism you'll shock yourself. Don't stress about it. You can still marry her.

Embrace the B

Choice of music remains one of the most powerful cultural signifiers. So unless you're dating earth's only black female fan of Facing The Gallows, you're going to be listening to a lot of R&B. There will be Beyoncé, yes, but also old-school stuff you didn't know existed.

Try Silk, Tamie, Johnny Gill, Shai and Tevin Campbell. And you will never get to like it. It will be a living hell every time you hear it. On one occasion you'll drive the whole way from Sandton to Kempton listening to Forever My Lady by Jodeci. Oh, and your Bon Iver will not be tolerated. Trivium? Forget about it.

Black babe = gold digger

Ja, I know. Not necessarily. But to your folks that's all she is. So they'll insist on a pre-nup to stop her stealing your family's dynastic fortune. Even if her dad's a company director, and your old man's a caretaker at the Boknes caravan park.

Life will suck at this point. And you'll have a moment in the lawyer's office where you'll want to rip your face off. But on some deep, twisted level, there's a certain pride in being a target of gold-digging. Misguided as that pride may be.

You get a new wife every month

Because black women do hair like nobody else does hair. Your babe will pop off to get her hair done at ten in the morning, and return, like, eleven hours later! When she left she'll have looked like Keri Hilson, and she'll come back looking like Diana Ross the time she dropped her toaster in the bath.

It's disturbing having your lady look completely different and you'll be shocked when she first walks in the door. But don't give the game away. Try not to gasp – she's invested eleven hours in this, after all. Practise saying, "Wow! You look amazing."

You're going to have to defend your territory

When you go out with a white babe, guys seem to at least grant you the basic respect of waiting till you're not around before they try to woo her away from you. Not so much with black ladies.

You can be standing right next to her at the gym, and some dude will grab her by the arm and ask her where she's from. Policemen will wolf-whistle her while you're walking right next to each other. Beggars at the robots will tell her she's phakile. Sooner or later, you're going to have to take someone by the throat and threaten to rip his fuckin' eyes out. Think of it as a romantic gesture, defending your lady's honour. You old smoothie, you.

Cultures clash

Have you ever bought something on lay-bye? How do you rate the taste of umleqwa compared to normal chicken? Do you want some of this delicious tripe? Aren't you dying for some magwinya? Aren't you broken that Oprah's off air? Not? Well maybe you're a white oke going out with a black babe.

Or, to be honest, maybe you're me. Let's stop pretending these things are universal – these are just some examples of what I've experienced in my relationship. And to generalise is to engage in racist stereotyping, and we agreed we're trying to cut down on racism. As if that's possible.

I'm pretty happy indulging my personal case of jungle fever, and if you're into something similar, I wish you the very best of polychromatic good luck. Maybe I'll see you guys out some night. At a Kenny Lattimore concert or some shit like that...

#  The Colour of One

I'm a white man, but I'm an African. Got a house, I got bills, but I got skills, like they show on videos on Channel O. Drop a groove, bust a move, I can improve. But not like they need to in Ibiza, say. My groove's indigenous, close to home, on-going like a Boeing, you know. And this is South Africa. African American, European African, African African... D'you still get such a thing? Such a thang? It's not a nation, it's a cross-cultural pollination, ongoing like a Boeing.

Ja, this is South Africa, home of the Khoi-San. Remember them? Nah, me neither, but I'll tell you this, they got a legacy. It's in the hips and the clicks of the Xhosa chicks, that you digs, but you can't get, 'cos you can't dance. Yeah, this is South Africa, and we're getting browner, reinventing ourselves, a genetic wonder. Give us a generation or three, then you'll see.

Even our roots rockers are browner than, say, a dude from Nigeria. There the colour of unity's blacker, but still just as lekker. And the bigger picture? Unity's black's far less pitcher. You got reds, yellows, every hue. You got planets with beings that are see-through. And that'll be the colour of each of us, when we get back to one.

You're gonna be pickin' up some kind of funky, friendly togetherness.

A united consciousness.

A spiritual Mauritius...

With one sunny shining, one love that's sweet.

One sunny side of one big, round street.

One big conception of one common goal.

A myriad parts of one loving whole.

Kaleidoscope aspects of one creole soul.

But until then, brown will be the colour of one.

Brown will be the colour of one.

#  Early Lessons in the Ways of Earth

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 one day to find he had 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 from kindergarten 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.

#  The Great Gonzo Scooter Assault

Just like every time, we swung by the bottle store after surfing the East Pier. And just like every time, we bought a two-litre scrotum of OB's, from the Solly Kramer's in Main Street.

There were four of us, so we managed to klap the whole thing by the time we got to Grahamstown. Plus a loaf of white bread, a big packet of Nik-Naks and a third of a bankie. Just like every time.

Only as we rolled down Bathurst Street did we remember that it was our residence's annual house party. Luckily the Graham Hotel off-sales was on the way. We got vodka and creme soda, which would go well with the punch.

By 6pm we were slamdancing to Come On Eileen in the common room. The first of the Oriel Hall girls had barely poked their cautious noses in the room and we'd already knocked over the drinks table and torn the curtains off the walls. Then Grant asked me to come with him to PE. He wasn't too sure of the directions to the airport and he needed a local to direct him.

I schemed why not and hopped in his Golf GTS with some aylies for the road. Just like every time.

By the time we got to PE I was no use to Grant. It was dark, all the roads looked the same and I couldn't remember if the airport was in third, fourth or fifth avenue Walmer.

We found it by fluke. Grant sommer parked his car in the loading zone and sprinted into Departures. He ran right past my mate Chappie, who had just landed, or was dropping someone off or something. By this stage I was so blitzed, Chappie must've thought I was on crystal meth or someone. It was about 8pm.

Chappie dropped me off at my folks' place. No one was home, but I still had a key, so I was able to let myself in and then get my sister's scooter out of the garage and head out into the wild unknown towards Bananas, capital of the PE nightlife.

When I got to the Summies hotel, I stashed the white helmet next to a white wall to, like, camouflage it. Soon I was king of the dancefloor at Bananas. B-52's, The Cure, TSOL, Men At Work, eVoid, Oingo Boingo... just like every time.

Kurt Buchner was there and all these ous from Wild Side Surf Club. Me and Patrick Parkins went for a walk on the beach with these two girls when Died In Your Arms came on.

When I came out the club to leave, someone had kyfed the helmet. So began a fraught and nerve-wracking trip back to Central, posted, on a scooter without a helmet.

The cops caught me doing about 40 kays an hour on the pavement outside the Hotel Elizabeth.

I explained to them how I was on my sister's scooter and I didn't have the key for the helmet lock, so I'd hidden it by a white wall because it was the same colour as the helmet. But a thief had obviously managed to spot the helmet, leaving me no choice but to drive home without it...

Not missing a beat, the cop asks, "Het jy gedrink vanaand?"

I reply, "No, of course not."

Just like every time.

#  The Wednesday Pants

Chip couldn't find his tracksuit pants, and that was the start of all the trouble.

"I'm very... I need everything to be just right, you know? So when I go to gym on a Wednesday, I've gotta have my Wednesday pants. But I couldn't find them."

He stands up from the table as he tells it, and when the conversation wanders somewhere else, he steers it back to his story about his tracksuit pants.

"So I decide to go have a look in Karen's closet. I reckon the maid might've packed them away or something."

"So, I look in her drawers, on her shelves, and then I go look in her cupboard..."

"And there's this big, litre-and-a-half bottle of water. Why would she have a big bottle of water in her cupboard, behind her shoes?"

"So I have a sip, and it's vodka!"

And you must know, Chip is a recovering addict. He's been tidy since 2006. He's about to have his big four-year share at NA. He's been with Karen for two years, and now he finds out she's hiding vodka in her cupboard.

"I just flip out, bru. I flip out. I start going through everything. Going through her panty drawers, everything and I start finding all kinds of other stuff..."

He starts finding other bottles of booze... these weird little plastic wrappers... "And the whole time I just know, here it comes. Here it comes. Any minute now I'm gonna find drugs..."

Because it's not like Karen was pretending she didn't drink. She did. But she'd just have a glass of wine or two. And then somehow she'd end up more tipsy than anyone else. But that was just her. People are weird.

"I find these empty plastic bags that might've had weed in them, and then eventually I find this little packet with some white powder in it. Bru, I take all the stuff, all that kak. I just pile it all up on her dressing table and leave for gym."

A week later, Karen and her kids have moved out of Chip's house. By the time of his four-year share, he's single again, at the age of 45.

"It's not the drinking or the drugs themselves, it's the deception, bru. That's what I can't take, you know. The deception! For two years, man!

And now? Karen's doing all the right things. She's acknowledged she has a problem. She's been to a couple of meetings. She's got herself a sponsor, someone who's been through it all before. So if she sticks with the programme, and if she really wants to change, she can.

"But for now, it wouldn't be right for us to be together."

And those missing Wednesday tracksuit pants? Did they ever turn up?

"Ja. They were actually in my other bag."

#  The Girl with the Curl

I have weird hair. It kind of puffs out at the sides when I'm stressing, or if I have a hangover. It makes me look a little wild and woolly.

And sometimes if I brush my hair while it's wet, it dries into this bizarre 1980s kuif like I'm in Duran Duran.

But I don't have the weirdest hair by a long stretch. The oke with the weirdest hair is Rob Church. Rob's hair is everything that's weird about hair, at the same time. It's ginger, curly, receding and it seems like it's plugged into a power source somewhere. It's just energised. And Rob himself has the kind of personality that makes him seem like he's just stuck his pinkie in a wall socket while looking for a lost shoe under the bed.

What's really odd is that Rob finds my hair hilarious. Sometimes he can't stop laughing at it. I can take a bit of a joke, but I mean come on. There's no ways my hair's as weird as his.

But no, he simply can't have a proper conversation with me. Tonight, every time he looks at me and sees my silly cow's lick on my forehead because I brushed my hair a different way, because I'm adventurous, he packs out laughing. It's making me self-conscious, so I decide to leave Toby Joe's.

So what if I've got funny hair! Okes must get over it, especially if they look a bit like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons themselves.

Luckily it's PE and I know lots of people, so I don't have to sit around getting laughed at because I've got crowns on my head.

There's a Cool Runnings round the corner, opposite the post office. I go have a look in there. See what's happening.

Oh, right! Rich and Kendal and them are playing a show tonight. I forgot about that! I can catch a couple songs, sip on a Windhoek and put a bit of a curl in my hairstyle.

There's a girl there who's quite beautiful. Can't help myself, I keep wanting to stare... Not least because she wears dreadlocks. Those short, spiky little ones. Like little antennae receiving info from the universe and stuff.

It's PE, and people know people, so a guy can organise an introduction if he hangs around long enough and makes it clear he's interested in the girl with the strange hair.

And he's gotta make his move, or make his interest clear as quick as possible, because Rob Church has arrived, and he's also got a thing for funny hair.

And so it was that I come to meet my future wife. It had a little bit to do with weird hair, if you trace it back. And perhaps things might have worked out differently if I hadn't brushed my hair that night, and Rob wouldn't have laughed at me, and I hadn't have gone to Cool Runnings.

Maybe I'd have stayed for another ale at Toby Joe's, missed Richard and them... missed my date with destiny.

So do life's greatest opportunities turn on the tiniest little whims. On the curl of a hair.

#  The Quest for Sexy

What makes a hot swimsuit? A killer cozzie? I work in the industry and it's my job to choose costumes for sexy women to wear, so I should know.

At men's lifestyle magazine FHM, we do glamour shoots with South Africa's most beautiful swimsuit models. I'm the editor, so I spend a lot of time on shoots furtively observing models from over the photographer's shoulder. Basically lurking about trying not to get in anybody's way, and endeavouring not to eat too many of the catered chicken pieces.

Then, the snapper will say, "I think we've got it!"

The first shot in the bag, the model will retreat to the styling room, where she will don a gown and check her BlackBerry. Maybe have a quiet chicken wing and a cigarette.

Then there'll be some faffing with the hair and make-up. I'll knock politely and go, "Is it alright if I come in?"

In the styling room there is usually a rail with all the outfits we're planning to shoot. As tastefully as possible, one sets about browsing the garments, looking for something that catches the eye. Something you reckon would look good on the young lady in question.

And what will? Well, I do have a few rough guidelines, when it comes to choosing a costume that'll look hot.

Firstly, see what it looks like on! It's impossible to tell if a scrap of rumpled material on a hanger is going to fit a model properly. Have her try it on. A cozzie that fits is sexier than one that doesn't.

Plain and sheer fabric will always look better than busy. A complicated fabric design distracts the eye and makes it harder to discern, say, the curve of a lady's left boob.

Small cozzies will look better than big. Because skin is sexier than fabric.

Monokinis are a mission. A one-piece swimsuit gets a massive bulge in the front when the girl sits down. Only a front-on pose will look half decent. Go the bikini route rather.

Sheer is better than matte. To bounce the lighting off the lady's curves and emphasise the, er, "moulding", as they call it.

Some costumes look better from the front. Some better from the back. Give every side a chance to shine. Some bottoms can be worn back to front.

Details, details. A little blingy metal here, or a cowrie shell there, makes the whole garment look a little more upscale, a bit more expensive, basically.

The Brazilians make the most amazing cozzies. Dunno what it is about them. But they do. Especially the bums. Brazilians are all about bums.

And finally, a model will always look better in a swimsuit she likes than one she hates. "How do you feel in that one?" is a useful question to ask.

"Okay," is what I say at that point. "Let's shoot that." And I slink back into the background and let the photographer do his thing.

I've been a maid, a deckhand, a gardener, a painter and a shop assistant. I can confirm that this job is better than all of those.

#  Things to Insert into your Head when you're not Spading Hippies

The first time it was brought on by the elegant dreadlockiness of an Australian nature girl. I'd actually just met her brother at a pool bar in Torquay. I'd won the pool comp, he'd offered me a place to stay, and when we got home there she was, in the middle of her pungent patchouli aura.

She was stirring a pot of bean curry and said by way of apologetic welcome, "It's kidney beans. I hope you don't mind – we're veggie."

And before I could help myself, it had popped out of my mouth: "No, that's fine. I'm veggie too."

Strictly speaking that was true – I became vegetarian from the minute I said that. Probably out of guilt for being so shamelessly opportunistic with my dietary morals.

In the end I remained a vegetarian for two years. For the record, it didn't help me one iota in trying to win over the dreadlocked nature girl.

When I returned to SA later, I valiantly tried to maintain my meat-free principles. But after six months of cheese-and-tomato zarms and spinach-and-feta pies, those principles began to falter.

I fell for the yardbird once again.

I found myself driving to the Linton Grange KFC all alone and mauling a guilty fiver in the parking lot. I'd bring chicken-wing sundowners to braais. I'd chow omelettes. Somehow I still managed to claim I was vegetarian.

I was lacto-ovo-pollo vegetarian. This means I indulged in basically all forms of meat-eating except gnawing the warm, still-beating hearts from the ribcages of grazing cows.

Then, one Oktoberfest I found myself polishing off the entire right-rear shoulder flank of a dead pig, and accepted that I was no longer an organic protector of the rights of animals.

This ushered in a halcyon decade of carnal feasting. I dined on the chests of electrocuted sheep, I grilled the fleshy corpses of farm birds, I inserted the dorsal muscles of cows into my head. I fed the stuffed intestines of unknown animals down my throat and swallowed them. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and fry up the ovulations of chickens with a little salt and pepper. It was a delicious, bloody massacre!

Then what happened is, I got old. My metabolism slowed down, my washboard stomach grew flaccid and for the first time the scale at the gym alleged that I weighed 75kg. This is fully 5kg over my fighting weight.

This revelation came at the climax of a particularly carnivorous week, during which I managed to braai six nights in a row. My breath reeked with the grease of animal flesh, my alimentary canal groaned beneath the weight of all those processed tendons, face muscles, lungs, stomach linings and pancreases... I was pretty stuffed.

And then came the second time. I lay on the couch for four days solid, watched every single ball of a two concomitant cricket matches and realised it was time to get my act together.

I charged out of the house and ran until I went puce in the face and felt my heart roaming my chest like an epileptic mole. Then I came home, poured a thousand millilitres of tap water down the hole in the middle of my face and became a vegetarian again.

My two alibis for being a vegetarian speak volumes. The first was to win the admiration of a woman who had not brushed her hair since 1991. The second alibi was to avoid resembling a large rugby ball with limbs.

That's growing up for you.

What I can tell you is that the choice of vegetarian meals has evolved along with my reasons for eating them. No more cheese-and-tomato zarms for me. My deep freeze now bristles with the blood-free likes of vegetarian sausage rolls, vegetable cottage pie, Mediterranean pizza and – somewhat nostalgically – frozen kidney-bean curry.

The first weeks of meat detox involve incessant trembling, constant hunger pangs, heavy legs and gran-like giddiness. You also feel a bit weak and eschew the gym more than normal. But when you eventually return, you're likely to find that the excess kilos have miraculously evaporated and that you're right back at fighting weight.

Energy levels return to normal and one finds oneself developing a mellow, chilled demeanour. I also haven't used a knife for six weeks.

#  Lovers and Haters. Strippers, Meditators

The poetry and the depravity. That's what distinguishes Joburg. That these seemingly incompatible impulses can exist in the same place, with no sense of awkwardness, is the city's great achievement.

Even though they might try to hide it, every one of the city's residents will have a materialistic side and a creative side. These two personalities will live in perfect harmony, and they will be summoned up alternately as an antidote, a cure for the evils and hardships summoned up by the other.

It's the city of the powderhead poets. The artists who order dancing girls for dessert. The philosopher-pornographers. Johannesburg is a city of depraved beauty, elegantly wasted. You're reminded of that every time you venture out of your warm, loving comfort zone in search of entertainment. And why do you do that? Because you're exactly the same!

At one of Jozi's notorious bachelor parties, you can watch a man do some of the most nefarious deeds imaginable, then snap out of it and start quoting some kind of high art!

He will emerge from a cloud of pills, powder, zol and mischief, surrounded by strippers, who have been performing for his enjoyment in a limousine chartered to ferry him back from a shooting range, where he's been firing machine guns at hi-fi sets, and he'll go, "I'm working on a manuscript.

"It's about this nation of deaf people. They communicate telepathically, so their sense of hearing has atrophied. But then this avatar arrives from another dimension. And this oke speaks pure, perfect poetry. He understands! He can't communicate the way they do, but he can express their soul condition to a tee, but these people. The Phomolids. They can't appreciate it."

"The whole metaphor is whether we use speech just to communicate, or whether there's a deeper form of communication that transcends words. Even if you do use words to communicate it. You know? And what is the most sincere form of communication: verbal or emotional? Have you checked my cigarettes? I left a box of Stuyvies here on the balcony somewhere."

And then he'll go back inside to hang with the strippers some more, with panties on his head and a big red welt on his bicep from where he got burnt by the barrel of the machine gun.

Sometimes you'll go to an exhibition of the most gorgeous progressive modern art you've ever laid eyes on in your life and be scandalised beyond belief by the behaviour of the artists themselves.

An artist may invite you to his studio/garage to view his latest body of work, then get so spectacularly caned during the viewing that he eventually chases all the patrons out of his studio and locks himself in with the booze – all twelve boxes of it.

The prospective buyers will be left milling about on the Troyeville sidewalk musing on what might have been. "I was going to buy the one with the neon lights," someone will say.

The most materialistic individuals you can imagine will also reveal themselves to be spiritual souls with a yen for the new-agey.

Magazine publishers will turn out to be Buddhists, TV producers will be unmasked as slavish adherents of ashtanga yoga. And yes, even strippers, they'll be experts in feng shui, who sometimes visit the tiny Overberg town of McGregor to tramp table grapes and meditate in the maze garden.

Joburg's financial consultants will also tend to be "into TM", which is transcendental meditation. The only difference is that they do their meditating in the car in between making deals that cost thousands of people their jobs. They can't spare the time to get out of town, and these days the car is the only place to find some peace and quiet in Johannesburg. What with the gunshots, the car alarms and the traffic noise.

The other incongruity I've noticed is the contrast between the poetically depraved, gun-wielding, stripping, meditating, drinking, drugging, painting, writing, complex Joburg individual on the weekend, and the same person on Monday.

Monday is a work day, so you don't see these people on Monday. The only communication you'll get from them will be an email, reading, "To preserve my relationship with my lovely wife, I told her I was at a sweat lodge retreat in Boskruin this weekend and not at Mike's party. If this should ever come up, please quote these facts to her as stated. Hope you're all feeling as wretched as I am."

Quite an email, hey? Rude, loving, intense, dismissive, corrupting, poetic and depraved. Just like Joburg.

#  Windfalls and what they Do to you

It was a Saturday arvie when it happened. A Saturday arvie in the Fence parking lot at Kings Beach. It was during our first holiday back from varsity – my best mate Cliffie was at UCT and I had gone to Rhodes.

The wind was blowing homping west and it was one of those surf checks where you don't expect there to be waves, but you still gotta go have a look just in case.

And we're old chinas, hey. We met on the first day of Sub A, so we're just chooning each other swak about how cool our new varsity is and how the other oke blew it by not coming to study at our one.

Tuning, tuning, tuning... until we pull up into a parking space at the far end of the lot in Cliff's Opel GSi. The first thing we see is money, cash notes, blowing through the Kings Beach bush.

Fifties, twenties, tens... There weren't hundreds yet in those days. Pink, brown and green banknotes cartwheeling through the scrub.

We didn't say a word, just opened the doors and went for it. It was a gale-force west, so we didn't have a second to spare. We were out there plucking and gathering notes like it was money harvest at the KB cash farm.

Cliff got about R170 and I came in with R140. In 1989, that was like finding a month's pocket money lying in the street. And we're first-year varsity students! So this is like manna from heaven!

But the first thing we do is start guilt-tripping. Where could the cash have come from? We look upwind, but there's only a single other car parked. And that's just empty. No one else around.

No sign of anyone looking on the ground for something they've lost, no one who's just got mugged, no one frantically picking up notes like we were a minute ago.

Maybe it blew from all the way up at Denvilles.

We looked up there for anyone who might have lost a wallet. We checked around, really we did.

After that it was like, finders keepers.

We had three hundred bucks. Now what to do with it?

I still don't believe we said this, all of 18 years old, but our first instinct was, "Bru, it's a unexpected windfall. Let's invest it! Let's open up a fixed deposit."

"No, but first let's check the Weekend Post tomorrow to see if anyone takes out a ad about lost money on Kings Beach."

"Ja, ja. Definitely."

We're sitting there in the Opel with all these banknotes in our hands, counting them. Three hundred and ten bucks.

Dude, by six that evening we were installed at the Marine Hotel ladies bar with a couple of babes who we knew from school. Ordering cocktails like we were millionaires.  
Kerry and Candy, I like to think their names were.

Fully, "Can we get you ladies another couple of Sex On The Beaches?"

We'd only been drinking properly for about two months, we'd never been in a ladies bar in our lives... geez, I don't think we'd even taken girls out for drinks until then.

Until that night, girls had looked at us with a kind of healthy apprehension, mixed with disgust, as if we were smelly little savages who might do anything at any time.

But when we arrived at that townhouse dressed in smart jackets and larney pants and squired them to the upmarketest pozzie in town, they looked at us with new eyes.

And with good reason. The money somehow made us more mature.

I remember having conversations and stuff. Full-on chats. Asking the ladies about their hopes and dreams...

"And you? Tell me about yourself. What are you planning on doing after varsity? You gonna practise accounting or you gonna move into business?"

We were like these urbane, mysterious businessmen, who made their money from shady deals that it wasn't polite to discuss. Men who were into "this and that". We take opportunities where we find them. Smooth operators, like the Sade song.

And then at the end of the evening, we dropped them off again, gave them each a peck on the cheek and said, "Thank you so much for a wonderful evening." Like full-on gentlemen.

That 310 bucks was all gone.

As the last of the girls vanished behind her closing front door, one of us asked incredulously, "What was that all about?"

"Who knows, bru."

I still don't know, because the next day we went back to being smelly reprobates. To this day, I check the surf at Fence, especially during a homping west. But it's true what they say. Money changes people.

#  The Epic Foot Journey to Maritzburg

The Comrades marathon starts at 5.30am. Twelve thousand-odd competitors convene in downtown Durban from about two hours before that.

The streets are well lit, and the weather is still warm. A carnival atmosphere reigns. Runners embrace and exchange cell numbers at the tog-bag tables. Nkalakatha plays on the PA system, followed by a rendition of Shosholoza by a community choir. There's an edge of apprehension too. A couple of running partners share a long, meaningful handshake...

The lone rangers like me loiter and wait for the gun. A few sit cross-legged on the West Street tarmac. The crush and the clamour for positions goes on far ahead of us, in starting pods A, B and C. This is section H. Okes are chilled, we're not racing anybody.

Bah!

You can't miss the blast of that starter's pistol – it comes amplified tenfold over the PA, lest the guys 10 000 places back not hear it and start their watches late.

As it is, it takes us eight minutes to pass the starting line.

I like to start slow, so I allow the pack to surge away from me as I trot west through the business district with only a few enthusiastic spectators jogging beside me.

After a few minutes I hear the growl of motorcycles. I turn around to find I'm being tailed by eight members of the Durban traffic department. I'm coming stone last in the Comrades.

It's time to speed up.

Just before Toll Gate, five kays into the race, I catch up with the sub-12 hour bus, a group of 300 runners under the stewardship of an experienced runner trotting along at a pace calculated to bring us home just within the maximum time allowed.

Thus begins my epic foot journey to Pietermaritzburg.

What distinguishes it is not the athletic exertion required – bus driver Vlam Pieterse's mantra is, "The aim is not to get tired". What makes running the Comrades marathon great is the human stories that unfold during the race. A lot can happen in 12 hours.

In Westville, a woman meets the man she last saw a year ago during the previous year's race. They met then, and she has ensured that they will meet again this year, even going so far as writing to the Comrades organisers.

But there's more romance to come. At Bothas Hill, with 50km to go, a couple of runners produce a banner reading, "Nicky will you marry me". Seconds later I run past the handsome squire on one knee, proffering an engagement ring to a flabbergasted Nicky.

It looked like she was going to say yes.

Soon after, I stop to pee and fall off the back of the bus, ushering in a dark period of lone struggle. At halfway, the guy next to me cries out, "Ek kap oor. Ek gaan dit nie maak nie." He pulls out.

It would be so easy to join him. But we've only done 42km. I've run 50 before, so let's keep going. Next hill is the notorious Inchanga. If I survive that, maybe I can make it.

We maintain the plod until, surprise, we round a corner and there's the bus! I catch them during one of their regular walking spells. Truth is, when you're at the back of the field, you walk the Comrades as much as you run it.

For the next ten kays, Vlam's bus propels us forward. By now we're 400 strong.

"Sorry vlam," I overhear a guy ask him surreptitiously. "Do you maybe have anything for cramp?" Vlam produces a roll of salt pills, as you'd expect from a man running his 17th Comrades.

I decide I'm not going out like that, but sure enough, ten kays later, there's something that feels a lot like cramp going on in my left calf.

I stop for a massage and lose the bus again. Now I'm on my own, with 25 kays to go. I've never run this far before... Luckily the terrain is flat until Polly Shorts.

I will myself that far, and by the time I've walked up Polly's I'm shattered, but I have exactly an hour to run the last eight kays.

Anyone can do eight kays in an hour, but after you've already done 80km?

Dude, especially after you've done 80km! When you've trained for six months, run three marathons, missioned to Durban and run most of the Comrades marathon, there's no way you're going to miss out on a finisher's medal.

I set the controls for pain-override and blunder through the streets of Maritzburg towards Harry Gwala stadium. I'm not gonna blow this.

Two kays from the stadium, with 15 minutes till cut-off, another guy screams and goes down, his body racked by cramp. He's not making it.

But I am. I catch up with the Vlam Bus as they enter the stadium to a tumultuous roar. Four hundred strong, it's one of the biggest busses in Comrades history.

I finish with eight minutes to spare.

I waddle to the tog-bag table, get my bag and sit down. I can't tell you how good it feels to sit down.

#  One Man's Promo Girl is another Guy's Estate Agent

I'm a nice guy. I like to help people, particularly girls in their late teens in their first job. I'm sure everybody does.

Well, maybe rival teenage girls wouldn't fall over themselves to help other teen girls, but everybody else is in favour of them, I'm sure.

Marketers, of course, know this, which is why these young women are deployed as promo troops in the frontlines of the sales battle raging across our nation.

They're all aged between 16 and 21, schoolies or students freelancing for extra pocket money, they tend to have youthful hair that needs little upkeep, they have bright, flawless smiles and they all wear cropped tops that expose their bellybuttons.

Most are at that age where youth, not maintenance, informs their beauty, so they also sometimes have small boeps peeking over their waistbands and sexy little love handles. It's all good, though.

So good, in fact, that on a Saturday morning at your local supermarket, it can become impossible to avoid the promo babes. There will be a cute little minx stationed in every single aisle of the Checkers, punting new products, discount coupons for old products, taste tests of freshly prepared hors d'oeuvres smothered in cooking products and brochures explaining the workings and necessity of products you don't necessarily need.

Go to a nightclub and, boy, the first thing you'll see will be a lycra-clad posse of promo babes brandishing some syrupy alcoholic concoction or offering to pour tequila down your throat for ten bucks a shot.

If you're not resolute, you could find yourself on your knees in the middle of a seething club while some girl in a lime green-and-purple catsuit splashes vodka-based alcopop into your eye. And you'll pay for the privilege!

Major corporate and sporting events are also famous for their promo babes. It's hard to go for a hot-dog at the cricket sometimes without tripping over half a dozen cuties glowing with developing pulchritude, brandishing pom-poms and getting ready to do their dance every time someone hits a four.

A lithe young body and an open smile, of course, also qualifies you to approach total strangers and get them to buy one of your new, bright-yellow cooldrinks, which is why you often find promo babes accosting you at the beach.

Of course you always buy one, with a sly wink and a grimace at the prospect of what will surely be a horrific liquid experience. But for a heterosexual man, the glow of being smiled at by a lovely young lady lasts a while and generally sees you through the first couple of sips at least.

I don't want to sound ungrateful for promo babes. Indeed, they're one of the finest inventions on God's green earth, bless their shiny little belly rings. I'm sure most young women go through a promo-babe phase these days. And any nascent consumer product would struggle to be taken seriously without a phalanx of young ladies in corporate miniskirts manning one of their branded gazebos.

What I'm asking is, is it fair? All men – one hopes – are taught to be nice to girls. And for sure, girls are lovely. But when this loveliness is employed in the service of commercialism, is it ethical? Because it's hard to say no.

For the past two months I've been using a brand of toothpaste which is turning my teeth yellow. Yellow!

All because I stumbled into the personal hygiene aisle at Checkers, and there were two of them there. Promo babes. They saw me coming. "Whitening toothpaste? Er no. We don't have any. But we do have this lovely yellow toothpaste made from beeswax and clay. Why don't you buy some?"

So of course I do, because I can't say no to promo babes. And twice every day, as my teeth turn the colour of cheese, I admonish myself for that.

I use shampoo that's meant for black people – it makes my hair curlier than a pile of wood shavings. Why? Promo babes.

I come back from nights out with indigestion and heartburn from accepting freebies of cheap alcopops.

I just surrender nowadays. I see the promo babes and ask them, "What am I buying?" They say, "bubblegum-flavoured lip-ice" and I take one and say thanks.

That's all fine, as long as the products they sell remain confined to the incidental purchases realm.

The real trouble will come when car dealerships and estate agents start hiring promo babes. Come to think of it, maybe they do. Maybe promo babes all grow up to be more intelligent, more sophisticated, more formally dressed, even more sexy sales people!

In which case I'm stuffed.

One of these days I'll be the oke who comes back from the mall one day and starts packing up his room.

My housemate'll ask what I'm doing and I'll just say, "Packing. I live in Wilderness now."

#  Cape Town and I

My greatest contribution to literature – until this tour de force – has been a piece I wrote for a 'zine in the Nineties titled "10 Reasons Cape Town Can Fuck Off". You can still find it on the web if you're interested. There by hagenshouse.com.

Seeing as fate has a keen sense of irony, I got a new job a couple years later and moved... to Cape Town.

It took me a year of living there to determine – in a smug, almost Capetonian way – that most of the reasons still applied. Cape Town can still fuck off.

Unfortunately it shows few signs of doing so.

Cape Town and I now have this ongoing, spiteful relationship, like a divorced couple that can't resist taking sniping potshots at each other.

I'll fly in for a November visit and the rain will be coming in sideways at gale force and I'll mutter smugly to myself, "Mmmph. Atrocious winter weather. In the middle of spring. Ha!"

Or I'll meet some guy who owns a nightclub in Athlone who somehow feels that makes him a better man than I. Or I'll get charged thirty bucks for a shooter at a Camps Bay beach bar and just nod knowingly. Ja. That's Cape Town for you.

Smug, condescending, expensive. A lot like me, sure.

Then, at other times, Cape Town takes its revenge. Like this weekend. I'm there for a quick one. In and out on a three-city nightclub tour that involves me basically sweating non-stop for 72 hours.

We get to our beachfront hotel around five in the arvie and Capey's has brought its A game.

Deluges of sunlight are pouring down upon the Sea Point esplanade like a waterfall of joy and awesomeness. Couples are swanning up and down the beachfront holding hands with blissful smiles, like they're in these little bubbles of love.

The Cape Town football stadium is pretty much built. The sea is a perfect shimmering disc of imperturbability, conveying pleasure craft to Camps Bay, where it is no doubt even more idyllic. A dozen games of family cricket are on the go, Putt-putt is full... There are even people swimming at Rocklands beach, for Pete's sake. Swimming.

There are men and women with the most perfectly chiseled physiques imaginable jogging past. Buttocks of steel. Biceps like twists of shipping cable. Abs like the road to Nieu Bethesda. Flawless beings.

Even my iPod is playing the game. On shuffle I get Muse, True Blood, Miles Davis... and then some psychedelic trance just as I turn around at La Perla.

As I head for home, I find that there are some models walking just in front of me in those tight black leggings that you get.

So Cape Town, I'll concede. You won this one.

For my revenge, I will be coming back on December 30, when I will endeavour to find parking at Clifton Third.

#  10 Reasons Cape Town can Fuck Off

The following is the original "10 Reasons Cape Town can Fuck Off" piece. I wrote it under my pseudonym Haai van der Skyf in 1998 for Skyf! magazine, a Port Elizabeth scene 'zine I published for a while.

The piece was meant to satirise the whole trend of leaving your home town for the big(ger) city because, well, it's a bigger city, so it must be better.

It was later carried in SA Citylife magazine, then ended up on the global email circuit, where it has been steadily orbiting the planet ever since. It also spawned television interviews, radio appearances and other magazine articles. It was generally taken out of context – and stripped of irony – as a full-on attack on the city of Cape Town.

For better or worse, it remains my best-known contribution to English literature.

10 Reasons why Cape Town can Fuck Off!

By Haai van der Skyf

**1. It Exists.**  
If it wasn't for Cape Town, PE would look a whole lot better. Tourists would love us if they hadn't first had a dose of first-world sophistication before embarking on the garden route.

And anyway, if it's first-world sophistication they're looking for, why don't they just stay in Europe or Japan or wherever it is tourists come from?

Cape Town better wake up. This is Africa, not blimming Salzburg or something. Cape Town fuck off.

2. Capetonians are too hip.

They're a bunch of namby-pamby poncey glamour queens who think they live in a magazine.

Prancing around in all their hip designer wear and looking all cool and unflustered like they're in a fashion spread when they could be wearing perfectly good five-year-old jeans and T-shirts. What do they think this is? Marie bloody Claire or something? Magazines are for wankers. Cape Town fuckoff!

3. They've got a mountain.

What is it with their precious mountain? If that was in PE we would have built condos all over its ass, and a freeway across the top of it. For good measure we would put a Playland on Devil's Peak and a fuel depot on Lion's Head. And ore dumps on Chapman's Peak. Exploit the bastard.

Instead the bunch of sanctimonious pricks treat it like it's some kind of national treasure, some gift from the almighty.  
Every time some poor fool tries to built a little timeshare block on the mountain there's a hundred fuckin' protesters chaining themselves to the trees screaming "save the mountain, hey".  
It's not as if they built the damn mountain themselves or anything.

So horse bollocks to them. Cape Town fuck off!

4. Their roads are too damn narrow.

Ninety-five per cent of the roads in Cape Town are too narrow for two cars to pass each other.

How do you figure a town of four million can have a road system built to sustain a seaside village of sixteen-odd and then try to host the Olympic Games?

A case of the little boy whose eyes were bigger than his stomach, or what?

Maybe try host a traffic-jam-free December holiday and move on from there. Baby steps, guys. Baby steps.

5. Their sea is not usable.

Eleven degrees? That's a geometry angle, not a fuckin' ocean temperature.

What's the point of beaches if the sea's too cold to go swimming in?

More proof that the only reason people go on holiday to Cape Town is to get into traffic jams on the way to the beach and then to pose around with their cellphones on the sand, not to go for a ghoef. Cape Town fuck off!

6. They've got a Waterfront.

The best thing Joburg ever did was build the Randburg waterfront. A crap hodgepodge of pubs, stores and restaurants to be sure, but one that well and truly called the V&A's bluff, proving that Cape Town's waterfront is nothing more than a shopping mall with some water near it.

It's just another consumer temple geared to getting you to buy garments with price tags at the child buggery level of obscenity and to be served Labels by waiters more condescending than the whole of America and the ex-smoking community put together. Cape Town fuck off!

7. Everyone's off their tits from drugs.

It's common knowledge that the only people in Cape Town who aren't alcoholics, smackies, E-freaks, charlie-junkies, goofballs, acid-heads or nexus-fiends are Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Tunisian high commissioner.

For this reason, everyone you speak to in Cape Town is mad, either because they're high, or because they spent the whole of the Nineties eating pills and now they've had to stop because they weigh 12kg and they can't even remember what high school they went to any more.

Compare that to PE, that haven of temperance, propriety and good clean fun, and you begin to see all too clearly why Cape Town can fuck right off.

**8. All the best international bands and DJs go and play in Cape Town and none of them come to PE  
** So if you wanna check U2 or Skunk Anansie or Tsuyoshi Suzuki you've gotta mission to Cape Town and deal with the skinny roads and the toxic psychotics and poncey fashion-mag E-freaks and a mountain that makes it rain all the time.  
Pricks. Fuck them.

9. It's turning into another Hollywood.

Every person you speak to from Cape Town is working on a movie set.

Either they're doing the catering or making props or being unit manager or merting zol to the film crew or being an extra in a French cellphone ad.

And getting paid 20 gorillas a month tax-free in Euros.

Why don't they just get it over with? Build a Spago at the Waterfront and a Betty Ford clinic in Rondebosch, and put up a 20-metre sign on the slopes of the mountain that says "Zollywood".

And while they're at it they can just fuck off.

10. It's the new Riviera

Skaapies is so dirt-cheap for Euros and Americans that they've all bought property there.

But it's so incredibly dirt cheap that you don't even have to be an A-league jet-setter to afford a farm-size house in Bishop's Court.

Consequently, all the prices skyrocket because of all the rich bastards around, and you can't even do any star-spotting because the rich bastards are only Belgian record executives or the earl of Derbyshire – crew that you've never heard of.

Waste of time, really, Cape Town. Glad I don't live there.

#  When my Backyard Ship Comes in

I don't know what happened to hobbies, but people don't seem to have them any more. Model aeroplanes, philately, war games, macramé, those kinds of things. You just don't hear about them these days.

In their place, we seem to have a selection of proto-careers, pseudo-jobs that people maintain as a kind of psychological escape hatch from the reality of their real occupations – the ones that actually earn them money.

Let's work clockwise from my desk at work. I'm a part-time novelist, with parallel endeavours in scriptwriting and music. If my ship comes in I could be off to Hollywood. Till then, I run the spellchecker to make a living.

To my right sits a guy who goes to meetings all day, in some of them he gets crapped on, in others he does the crapping. Besides that, he answers about a hundred emails a day and compiles reports.

In his other life, he's a troubadour, composing songs of love and social insight and owner of a unique repertoire of indie rock 'n' roll covers.

The lady along from him is an art director. She spends all day touching up women's cleavages and ensuring that the stubble and razor-burn is removed from the bikini pictures. This is clearly no woman's dream job, so to keep herself sane, she creates works of art.

Oils, lithographs, wallpaper designs, even cunning little lapel badges, all of these flow from the fair hands of the crotch-stubble touch-up lady. She's a feminist, by the way.

The lady needs an outlet.

Then there's Heavy G. His day job is writing promotional copy extolling the virtues of products like jeans, fragrances, whisky and sneakers inspired by basketball. But that's no biggie, because he always has his side project as a drum 'n' bass MC to fall back on.

Now, the chances of any kind of talent scout discovering people like us in our arty-musical alter-egos and whisking us away to become world famous are fairly slim. About as good as the Kings' chances of winning next year's Super 14.

But the chances are there. Every now and then the play-play novelist publishes a book. The troubadour posts a new tune on MySpace. The artist puts on an exhibition of avant garde badge designs at a gallery in Fordsburg. The dnb rapper gets to open for Dieselboy and Messinian at Carfax.

There's just enough progress to convince you that there's a chance of escape, that your day-to-day grind is not all there is to life. This is not it. There's more, there's an escape hatch – even if it's all fantasy.

It's an escape hatch that stamp collecting and model-aeroplane building seldom offer.

These delusional parallel careers serve a similar psychological purpose to those home-built yachts that you see standing in the back yards of suburban houses, particularly at the coast.

Those things stand there for decades, while their owner-builders painstakingly complete the hull and install the internal fittings. They're often completely hemmed into the yard, but the theory is that when the boat is finished, the guy will demolish the vibracrete wall, hire a lo-bed and have the vessel towed to the nearest port.

And then he will be free.

God knows how much sailing knowledge one gleans over 20 years of part-time boatbuilding And it's debatable how free one really is, sailing the high seas. You've still gotta pay mooring fees at every port, and buy supplies to live on while you're sailing about. So you'll need a fairly massive nest egg to finance your escape from society.

But no matter. One could always anchor off Second Beach, Port St Johns and live off fish.

All those boats you see peeking over garden walls, and all those privately recorded albums, those self-published novels you find in independent bookstores, they're a symbol of hope.

They're not just a way for someone to occupy their leisure time, they're a dead serious Plan B, an alternative option to the drudgery of real life.

They're also an indictment of modern life. It doesn't say much for the economic morale when many of those driving the economy spend all their lives dreaming of escape. By boat, by stardom, by landing that dream job, by retiring to the Garden Route... we've all got a contingency plan.

And it gives us hope. Even if these parallel careers are just glorified hobbies, we need the vision of deliverance they provide, so we can say to ourselves, "One day, when my ship comes in, life is going to be better.

#  The End of Caring and the Death of the Jol

Oh what a relief it is to finally not care any more.

It happened fairly recently that I stopped caring. Last Sunday, in fact. New Year's Eve.

I was there in PE. There were two parties happening in Summerstrand and I was invited to both. I could have closed those two parties down, then crawled the city's underbelly till I found a nightclub and rocked till dawn. Then I could have had a bacon-and-egg breakfast on the beachfront and retired after a solid 24 hours of partying.

I could have. But I thought, bugger it, I'm going to bed at 10 o'clock.

Sure, I had a spot of flu, but basically I couldn't be bothered. I've seen dozens of New Years. I know what happens.

You wait till midnight, and then you start wondering when you can go home. Sometimes you party the whole night through. Other times you rock till 12.36am.

On New Years past, I've played electric guitar on a beach in Puerto Escondido while the sun rose over the mountains of Mexico. I've driven golf balls off a sand dune into the sea. I've watched the Hobie Beach fireworks. Mostly I've just drunk whatever's been handed to me and eyed the horizon for that red dawn glow that means you can finally call it off and go to dos.

You can make a strong case for New Years being the biggest anti-climax of the year. And this year I just couldn't be bothered. So I got a nice early night's sleep and did the drive to Joburg the next day.

It's quite kief, not caring. Nowadays I don't even jol much. I park on the couch and watch TV. Chow chips, maybe.

Go out to a restaurant? Ag, who needs it. Rather buy something kief from Woolworths, then stay home and cook. After a couple of years of business lunches and corporate events, going out just seems like work. So now, if I've got some free time, I'm staying at home, broe.

Legend gig by the hottest band in town? Pfft, I'll check them next time. Gigs are smoky and pointless. The sound's always terrible. I'll rather just listen to the CD. Cricket game at the Wanderers? Check it on TV.

Nowadays my best jol is staying home sipping a rooibos tea and reading a book by someone lank clever. It makes me feel I'm learning something. I find that far more productive than spending good money going out on the town and doing something I've done a million times before.

I've already got a super-hot girlfriend, I don't dop and I've got SuperSport at home, so the main reason for going out to bars is lost on me. As far as I'm concerned, the jol is dead.

I know, I'm getting old. But you know what? I smaak getting old. Ageing rocks. As my hair turns grey, my eyebrows get bushy and my belly goes all flaccid, I am steadily becoming so comfortably in my skin that I don't really care.

I know that somewhere in a parallel dimension there's a former Hagen who's extremely disappointed in me, but too bad. If he wants to hang around in Melville drinking Jack till 3am and spading girls from Rosettenville, he's welcome to. I've got work in the morning.

True freedom lies in being able to do what you want to do. Not what you feel you ought to do, or what you've always done, or even what your mates do.

Right now, all I wanna do is stay at home. Unfortunately, what I have to do is work, which can involve anything up to 18 hours away from home. But I'm paid to do that. If you want me to leave home nowadays, you gotta pay me.

I'm getting old. I don't need people wasting my time.

Of course, I am due a mid-life crisis some time soon. In a couple of years time, I may be divorced, bald and in the middle of a boozy carouse through the singles bars of Manila.

It would be one helluva carouse, I'm sure. And I'm certain that if I did do that, it would be exactly what I felt like doing.

But right now I don't wanna shag Filipino girls. I want to sit on my couch, scratch my balls and watch cricket highlights on SuperSport. And I'm going to, just watch.

#  Robot Guy Up your Game

I used to live in Melville. That's a residential suburb near the CBD. To get to graft in Sandton I had to negotiate 12km of back roads and boulevards.

I also passed four separate roadside newspaper salesmen. Two okes selling the Star, one selling the Homeless Talk newspaper and finally a beaming belly-laugh of a man selling Big Issue.

This man, whose name I have never learnt, has the biggest smile in Joburg. Never less than convincing, he's able to employ his supernatural smile in a number of powerful ways. Some days, he's all melodramatic hand gestures and showmanship. The dude reminds me of a game-show host.

"Ooooh yes!" you can just about imagine him bellowing as you pull up to the robots on the Westminster/William Nicol intersection. "You, sir are the winner of this morning's opportunity to buy the world's most wanted jobless people's mag! Congratulations!"

Then there's the "At last! My saviour" smile, where you are greeted like his one reliable customer among Joburg's thousands of ungrateful passers by. "None of them appreciate the value of my services. Luckily you have arrived to deliver me from hopelessness. At least now I can be sure of selling one magazine! Thank you, sir!"

Another champion smile – and generally the most successful – is the one that says, "Isn't life an absolute party! I'm outdoors, the sun's out and I love working with people! And now you arrive, out of nowhere, to make my day absolute perfection! Oh fabulous joy!"

In the face of such irresistible powers of positive persuasion I could generally do little but smile back and hand over my monthly ten bucks. This was then augmented with sporadic top-up payments. I found myself almost apologising for the fact that I already had a Big Issue, and thus could not realistically buy another one. Especially since I barely read the silly things anyway.

They just lie in your passenger-seat footwell, next to the Homeless Talk, so you can wave them at hopeful vendors when they try and sell you another one. What you're really saying is, "Sorry, I'm taken. I belong to the dude on Westminster and William Nicol."

Despite having a grudging respect for my man's sales skills, I couldn't help feeling a bit used. I mean the oke was basically extorting guilt money out of me. Even if it was in the nicest possible way.

So on the days when the traffic allowed me to cruise past him with a wink and one of those backwards nods, I was guiltily glad. At least he didn't get me this time.

Then I moved to Sandton.

This meant my commute shrunk from 35 minutes to two minutes. That's a big deal in Joburg. Commutes are huge. They shape your quality of life.

However, Sandton being the commercial hub of the city, it is overrun by robot people. Within a kilometre of my house there are four robots, and each of them is the turf of a certain robot person.

One robot is manned by a lady with a cardboard sign that reads "Three children. Please help." Another belongs to a rather shifty Homeless Talk oke, who actually refuses to sell you a paper when you try buy one. The papers are really just an alibi for his real mission, which is begging.

The other two robots belong to bag okes. They stand at the robots holding large rubbish-bin bags. Ostensibly they are there so they can relieve you of your car litter for a small tip. But again, it's just a front for guilt-tripping and money grubbing.

The lady looks so sad, you wanna cry every time you see her. The Homeless Talk oke looks ill, another looks like he's been sniffing Spray n Cook and the okes at the other robot give off this vibe like they wouldn't saak to get into hijacking if this robot-hustling gig doesn't pay off.

Smiles are rare currency at the Sandton robots.

Then recently I had an errand that took me past the William Nicol robots. The rhythm of the traffic was such that I had to stop, right next to my old mate. The Big Issue guy with the biggest smile in Joburg.

I tell you what, it was like going back to PE after spending too much time in Jozi. And bumping into your old china at the corner of the same bar where you left him a year ago. I bought a mag for old-times' sake.

Nowadays I commute to find my robot vendors. My local guys are crap.

It's amazing what a difference good service makes.

#  Buying umBhaco for Baby

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 European 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. I was able to convince her to do it, and we soon set out to find authentic isikhakha, or umbhaco. It was Johannesburg on the same Saturday morning as the wedding. 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. Or maybe that I had in mind for Baby.

"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 Joburg, 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 Joburg. And any place where you need an armed security guard on every corner isn't that safe. My traditional-dress fetish battles my white paranoia as we wander wander about, 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 remembered 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 Sis' 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.

#  The Light Snake winds its Way to Heaven

Five upper garments on my torso, two buffs, a beanie and a hoodie on my head, four pairs of leggings, two pairs of socks under my extra-thick hiking boots; two pairs of gloves and a set of thermochemical handwarmers on my cold-prone paws.

This is how I will summit Kilimanjaro. Along with my 17 companions. This I deludedly promise myself, as if my fate were actually in my own hands.

The truth is, none of us know if we have what it takes to make it to the summit. From Barafu camp to Uhuru is 1 300m – almost the altitude rise from PE to Bloemfontein – and we're going to do it on foot. In five hours.

Last night's O2-sat readings have qualified us for the attempt. "The science says we should all make it," says our leader. "I know we're gonna do it."

We gather in the mess tent for a last tea or coffee, stamping our feet and breathing steam like packhorses in the marketplace.

Over the past five days, we've all fought our way through headaches, nosebleeds, nausea, insomnia, loss of appetite, wet, scary coughs, wipe-outs, bizarre eyeball haemorrhages and insane breathing difficulties to reach 4 600 metres above sea level.

"I'm not gonna lie to you," says John, as he tends to at the beginning of his sentences. "This is definitely gonna be the hardest climb of our trip."

Too soon after that, we've skulled our coffees, blearily chanted, "Uhuru" a couple of times and begun our assault on the summit. It is 12.30am.

The world shrinks to a universe the size of a headlamp beam. The heels of the climber in front of you. The growl of loose scree beneath our boots. The shriek of breath through your tortured lungs.

The shattered rockfield is a maze. Only our guides could possibly know the route. But it's so hard. After half an hour I look back towards the lights of Barafu and realise that we've barely left the camp.

And we are not alone. At least a hundred climbers are summitting tonight. Up ahead in the darkness, a silver snake of headlamps slithers up Uhuru, up to heaven.

We stop every hour to hydrate, eat and rest. But soon the pipes of our water bladders are frozen. "Minus twelve," recites one of our number from his wrist gadget.

After the first stop, I find I'm staggering a little and feeling lightheaded. I stuff a length of frozen droëwors down my neck and soldier through it.

Another four hours of this, and the back-up water stashed in the warmth of my backpack is finished. A glacier is just visible to our left. I'm starting to lose feeling in my hands...

It's around five when things start getting truly surreal.

Silence, just the gasps.

The guy in front of me starts stumbling worse than usual and groaning like he's having a nightmare.

The other oke starts lying to his wife, "Kom, ons is binne twintig minute bo."

The guides at the back and the front of our party start hollering at each other. Something's gone wrong down the rear of the company. After another exchange, John the Leader gives us the report-back: "Our party is now fifteen."

Three people have dropped out. Or been evacuated, more like.

There's barely a grunt of acknowledgement from the rest of the company. We just keep on keeping on. The sound of boots on scree is like a spade shovelling limestone.

Chests burning, hearts pounding like never before, we take the 6am break in absolute silence. "Forty-five minutes to Stella Point, " says John.

There's an orange rim on the horizon now. It's just so cold, bru.

The last of the droëwors sticking like something you choke on, I put my backpack on again, take up my trekking poles and start marching again. If I delay another second, the shiver that's taken hold of me will click into hypothermia.

There's ice on both sides of us now. Still the silver snake winds its way to heaven up ahead of us. The sound of shovelling gravel...

And then we're there. We've crested Stella Point. We're on the crater rim! We're as good as there! I crawl over the edge and collapse into a sitting position. The orange glow is phosphorescent now, and the climbers behind me are silhouetted against the sunrise as they summit. Some raise their hands in triumph, others kneel down and start retching.

I turn to my fellow climber Jacques. We share what's meant to be a laugh, but we both just start sobbing.

It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

#  Island Fever and what Brings it On

I have never seen as much French kissing as I saw that night. Not in standard seven, not that time at the Seals caravan park with the Afrikaans girls, not ever.

We were in Mauritius on a magazine shoot, a long one. But after a week on the island we'd managed to get all the work done with a day to spare.

So naturally, that called for a night's proper jolling. Not a few mellow drinks round the pool, not a couple of Phoenixes after supper, the real thing. The kind of jol where you only leave the villa at midnight, drive from Post Lafayette to Grand Baie and only enter the nightclub around 1am. That kind of jol.

We were a handful of men in a sprawling gaggle of women, so don't think for a moment we planned any part of this jol. We were pretty much told that we were going out tonight and we tagged along.

For party guidance, it made sense to enlist the help of our Mauritian hosts, Jean and Louis. During our stay they'd acted as caterers, location scouts, babysitters and tour guides, so we saw no reason why they shouldn't be clubbing wingmen too.

Jean is a neat and tidy restaurateur who runs a couple of patisseries. His brother Louis is a hairy, bearded sailor who dabbles in advertising and works in the clothing industry.

Blind, oblivious males that we are, we completely missed the fact that our lusty lady colleagues had earmarked our Mauritian mates as their romantic targets for the evening.

We're completely innocent as to the whiles of women, so myself, the photographer and the videographer busied ourselves with making transport arrangements.

Twelve people would be going out. That meant three cars. Louis had a car, Jean had a car... could they maybe invite one of their mates over? Then we could get a lift to the club with them.

The logistics came together, and as the models frolicked in the pool, a good three or four cars worth of male visitors came by to check out the situation. Cocktails were dealt with, a few pleasantries were exchanged and a couple of iPods jockeyed for priority in the hair & make-up lady's iDock.

Before long, we had a fully-fledged house party on our hands. We had ten topless people in the pool, Justin Timberlake was on 10 and the cooler box was doing a roaring trade.

By the time we eventually left, Louis was alarmingly beneath the weather. "Hargs, don't you wanna drive," enquired the videographer tentatively, when Louis stopped outside his house to pick up a bottle of whisky and a bottle of wine for the drive. "This oke's monkeyed!"

With remarkable sleight of hand, I managed to con him out of his car keys, before enlisting him as my navigator for the 30-kay drive to Party Central Mauritius: Grand Baie.

Look, it's not the Sambadrome. There's a bar/restaurant called Zanzibar, and a small nightclub. As I say, we got in there around 1am.

Naturally, as we did so, there was a flurry of drinks-buying and shot-shooting. People climbed onto the tiny stage and danced around the stripper's pole.

Then, somewhere around 2am, someone pushed a button in people's brains and men and women began kissing each other with the reckless abandon of Siamese kissing fish when their spouses are out of town.

I don't know what it was, but people were necking something awful. I popped upstairs to explore the upstairs bar and found the stylist playing tongue tennis with Jean. Embarrassed, I returned downstairs, where I saw a pleased-looking French-Mauritian gent with an SA girl under each arm, and alternating!

At the bar, Louis had his massive office checque book out, and was signing off rounds of Jägermeister on cheques the size of life insurance certificates.

The one lady dragged a French-Mauritian man into the toilets and had him back outside, with lipstick all over his face before the toilet's swing door had even stopped flapping.

I check now, why they call it French kissing.

With a moment of clarity I realised I was the only sober person in the club. "Come," I pronounced, "It's time to go."

I'd broken the spell. As one, all the ladies peeled themselves off their beau of the moment and followed me outside, where I hailed three taxis.

"Thanks," mumbled the one girl as we stood outside by the rank. "I don't know what came over me."

It was 3.30am, and still hot and sticky as a toffee pudding. There was a faint rustling of wind through the palm trees. You could smell the ocean on the breeze.

Hell, the very weather was sexy.

Mauritius in summer, island boys with French accents... Dude, the SA guys got no joy that night!

#  Miracle of Flight: A change of Perspective

The miracle of flight is not just social. It did not just revolutionise travel, trade, industry and tourism. Flight is not just a mode of transport. Sex, love, childbirth and death aside, it is probably the most awesome, magical experience you will ever have.

Think back to your first flight. Try recapture that anticipation. The sleepless night before your departure. Trying to imagine exactly how it'll be.

For me it was 1977. I was in Sub A, a big fan of Jet Jungle, Archie and Martin Locke, host of Sport '77.

I'd got time off school, specially, for the six-week trip to go visit my father's family in Germany. It was July, I was six, and I didn't sleep a bladdy wink that night. This was pre-TV, I'd never even seen movie footage, and I was desperately trying to imagine the inside of an aeroplane.

Was it tubular, like a long pipe? And how big was it, relative to a person's size? Did grown-ups have to crouch down when they climbed inside? Did people have to crawl around and sit all hunched up, like when we went exploring the stormwater drains around Lorraine?

The next day would reveal all.

We reported to Hendrik Verwoerd airport bright and early and entered the tiny, art-deco building for check-in. For the first time, we walked out onto the asphalt tarmac. The other two times we'd been there, we had stood on the roof and watched the planes. The one time it was my mom's friend Sonya coming from Cape Town, the other time was Fritz and Susan coming back to visit after they emigrated to Australia.

SAA planes had massive orange tailfins in those days, with a blue-and-white flying springbok on them, to rhyme with the national flag.

In the end, aeroplanes were not tubular inside, but box-like. Grown-ups could walk upright with ease and we had to stop in Nairobi to refuel. We weren't allowed to disembark, though.

I watched the entire flight from my window seat, except for the bit where the stewardess showed us the cockpit and the pilot let me hold the steering wheel.

The clouds looked like silver candy floss and you could see tiny mist trails coming off the engines. The wings sparkled as they flexed in the wind, and they brought you colouring-in books non-stop if you joined the Kiddie Club.

It was like going to heaven with free Fanta Grape and a window seat.

This week I flew for about the 12th time this year. I parked at OR Tambo, checked in, and was typing an email in the departure lounge within ten minutes. By the time I'd written an article and finished reading my novel, I was on the stairclimber at the gym at the Waterfront Holiday Inn in Cape Town.

As for the flight itself, I can't remember a single thing about it. Oh, except for this one moment, just after we started our descent. I looked out the window and the clouds looked like silver candy floss.

That always gets me.

#  The Unpleasantness at the Bloemfontein Breakfast Stop

"Hoe bedoel jy hoe?"

It's risky for me to try Afrikaans at the best of times. What with one's dodgy accent, negligible vocab and the fact that most Afrikaans people speak flawless English. But this is really a terrible place to try it.

It's the Bloemfontein Wimpy on the N1 North, on New Year's Day. It's 10am and there's not a smiling face in the place. Whoever's not hung over or still drunk, is super-grumpy because they're surrounded by seedy jollers still miff from last night.

The rest of the Windmill complex is tightly shut up. It looks a lot like this is the only operating restaurant for 400 kays. The vibe is kak.

I've just completed a record-breaking PE-to-Bloem leg on a single tank of petrol. I've had three hours of sleep. I reek of my own sweat. My stomach is growling like the expansion joints on a Greek oil tanker, and my Afrikaans is lying in neglect at the smoky back of my mind.

I must eat, and this is not the time to stand on one's vegetarian principles. Bacon and eggs it must be. "Sunrise Breakfast, please."

"Hoe wil jy you eiers hê?" the waitress wants to know.

To which the logical answer is: "Hoe bedoel jy hoe?"

What are the options here? Does she mean scrambled, poached, fried or boiled? I don't recall Wimpy offering those options. And I'm out of practice at meat eating to begin with.

"Hard of sag," she says, an orange-skinned Tswana girl who looks about as unimpressed as you'd look if you had to start work at nine on a public holiday. For good measure she fixes me with a stare like I'm a shining idiot who belongs in a home. Do I want my eggs hard or soft? Is that a difficult question?

I feel like explaining to her that I thought she meant what style of egg cuisine was I in the mood for. But I don't know the Afrikaans for scrambled, poached or boiled. I think fried egg might be gebraaide eier. But maybe that means grilled egg. If I try that, maybe I'll make more of a fool of myself. And I'm determined to stick to Afrikaans. I've made my bed and I'm going to lie in it. Changing to English will be an admission of defeat.

So I hedge my bets and say, "Hard, asseblief. En 'n Diet Coke ook."

She gives me an even more disdainful look and says, "Daar's nie Diet Coke nie. Net Coke Light."

Stupid! What was I thinking! What kind of a brain donor asks for Diet Coke? There hasn't been Diet Coke since 1988! I can barely face her condescending gaze, so I just hang my head. Please let her just go and get my meal! Please.

She leaves me alone and I'm left to contemplate my fellow diners. Directly opposite me is an Afrikaner family. The daughter is a gorgeous, supernatural flower of beauty. Fragrant, flawless and 18. Blonde locks cascade from her shoulders, and shy dimples crease her porcelain cheeks as our eyes meet across the crowded Wimpy.

She blushes and I look away... directly into the eyes of her mammoth, beer barrel of a father. He's totally bust me perving his daughter! His eyes bulge ominously behind his moustache. He inhales and inside his two-tone shirt he expands to the size of a mini-trailer.

I'm not even trying to be forward – his daughter just happens to be the easiest thing to look at in the whole place.

I certainly am not. I have been sweating bullets since the sun came up on the far side of Oviston. I removed my T-shirt when it was sweated through, then calmly put it back on before I came in the Wimpy. It has a picture of a hot-rod motor car on it, with words that read, "For peak performance, I need to be blown."

I feel the irony is lost on my neighbours in the Wimpy.

My hair is slicked to my forehead like an enormous flat, brown garden slug and the dad in the next booth is giving me serious eye. I can smell my own body odour. It is the pong of fear.

I open the menu again and make as if I'm feverishly swotting up on meal options. There's no ways I'm looking up again. I don't know where that girl is with my Sunrise, but it's gonna be the fastest breakfast ever consumed in the Windmill Wimpy.

That is for bladdy sure.

#  The Chip of Kings!

The Chipnik has always been my chip. When I become king, you will start to find a royal crest on every pack of Simba Chipniks, reading, "By appointment to His Serene Majesty The King"

And it will not be an appointment made lightly. Those green-and-yellow packets will have earned their royal crest through their years of yeoman service to his Highness. Well, my Highness, to be precise.

By not ever changing their corporate colours, Chipniks have adhered to the first law of chip marketing. But of course they are not alone. Salt 'n' vinegar, Tomato Sauce, Nik-Naks and Big Korn Bites have all done the same thing.

So why are Chip-Niks so close to my heart? Well, it goes back to the Seventies, to my folks' parties at our pozzie in Lorraine.

Dips were big in the Seventies, and as you know, Chipniks are the premier dip chip. Your Chipnik has a standardised shape, unlike potato chips, your BKBs and your crinkle cuts. So with every scoop of cream-cheese dip, you're guaranteed satisfaction.

But the strongest attribute of the Chipnik is its essential nature, its taste and texture. Made from a complex combination of potatoes, maize, wheat, hydrolysed veg protein, MSG and tartrazine, the Chipnik has a salty, almost eggy taste.

It's perfectly moulded to fit the shape of your tongue. So it can be enjoyed plain and sucked until it melts away to nothing. The ideal Chipnik will be bright, primary yellow, resembling a polystyrene packing chip. It is also heavily aerated, so as it melts in the mouth, there is a pleasant crackling sensation.

Not all Chipniks are the same, though. One out of every 20-odd Chipniks is a smoother Chipnik. It doesn't have quite the crackle of the standard Nik, It a fraction chewier and a little more resilient – more suited to sucking than chewing, in fact.

But this is a rare Chipnik. Indeed, some chip eaters may never encounter one in an entire packet of Chipniks. The unobservant eater may snatch one up among a handful of others and not even notice the special treat that has befallen him.

As a Chipnik melts in your mouth, it begins to phase shift. Once the air is fully removed, there is effectively nothing left of the chip. This gives a fair indication of the Chipnik's nutritional properties.

But of course it's not about nutrition. If you wanted nutrition, you'd be eating carrots. And carrots will not be appointed Chip of Choice to the King.

It dips, it crackles, it dissolves, and it does what few other chips do: it tastes better the staler it gets.

Abandoned Chipniks have a chewier consistency, but they retain their flavour. Unlike any other chip, they will remain edible after lying forgotten in a bowl in a smoky home bar made of railway sleepers in outer Lorraine for five, six hours.

This means the enterprising six-year-old can rise at 6.30am, then sneak into the bar and work his way from bowl to bowl, gorging himself on chips.

The future king...

#  Sober, Danced out, and Yawning into my Hand...

I love kids. Lighties are awesome. All beautiful and innocent, sweet-smelling, smiley and inquisitive... Great. But when I don't like them is when they wake me up by pulling my hair and climbing over my face at 6am.

I've been down that road, so this Cape Town wedding, when I organise myself a place to stay for the night, it's gonna be with a barren, childless couple. I promise myself that.

I will wake up in my own good time on the couch, looking hellish, face crumpled like a used chamois and wearing the same clothes I wore to the wedding.

Of course I could have booked a hotel room, but come on. It's December 15th, in Cape Town. That would be, like, a grand for the night. I'd rather spend that on a gift for the wedding couple.

Not that I'm getting them a gift. I've come down from Joburg for the wedding. I've paid for return plane flights and brought them the benefit of my vibrant personality. I make them a gift of myself.

As the wedding unfolds, I begin my networking, sizing up potential candidates, contenders for the privilege of putting me up for the night.

Neil and Marce? Two kids, eight and eleven. No thanks. Garve and Kendall? Two toddlers. Pete and Lee? Got a lightie...

Mmmm. Even the wedding couple, Chris and Juwayhir, have kids. I really need to start breeding. A man must spread his seed. Prolong the family line.

But first I need a spot for the night. Ah-ha!

Gerry and Francoise! She's seven months pregnant, but it's their first child. You know what that means! Empty couch, long, late mornings of sleeping in...

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our winners! They're old varsity mates, and they graciously agree to be my hosts.

"Just let me know when you ous are going home..."

The booze moratorium expires at 4pm and the bar opens. The punters attack the waiters like a parched desert landscape soaking up rain.

By 8pm all the good work of the period of abstinence has been undone and people are getting smashed. Francoise takes her leave.

I'll be bringing Gerry home in my hired Ka. This makes sense, because I don't drink. Always a reliable driver, me. Tidy.

But I can't leave until Gerald finishes jolling. And Gerald is a colossus of a man. He could jol until Judgment Day and not have a hangover. He's a jolling athlete.

So are the rest of these okes. These are party skills 20 years in the making. No one's giving up. By 1am, we've been skopping for 13 hours straight, the DJ booth has been taken over and selections are all over the charts. The bar staff have started dopping with us in exasperation and they're here on the dancefloor, hooting. The wedding guests are behind the bar, pouring triples...

No one's gonna quit. Gerald's just kicked off a passionate conversation with someone about snowboarding. "Dude, we need to talk for at least 12 hours!"

I'm sober, all danced out, and yawning quietly into my hand, scheming, "Shoulda picked a couple of parents."

Serves me right. I wanna mos be sober.

#  Sringok Nude Girsl, and the Jailable Joke

Gordon seemed a cool guy. And he sounded English, so he had to have a sense of humour. That's what got me into trouble.

We met at a function and I found out Gordon works at MTV. He mentioned they'd caught some conman going about soliciting money, claiming to be an MTV director. I'd heard about that dude too – he's quite a legend around Joburg. Apparently he's been bust now, though. Sitting in jail awaiting trial.

Anyway, it was one of those busy parties. Gordon and I mingled into each other. I didn't have a business card, but he gave me one of his and said, "Send me a mail. Let's do business."

A few days later I found Gordon's card in my money clip and remembered what he'd said. I was feeling mischievous, so I thought I'd wind him up.

I composed the following email:

"Hi Sir,

"I am Ngoro Peter, CEO of MTV Europe. I have received you name as being well respected in the field of music and events. We are organise a MASSIVE entertainment event to the value of $41 million at the venue "Ellis Park" featuring Madonna, Jay-Z, Metallica, Prince, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and "Sringok Nude Girsl".

"Unfortunately our funds are now trapped in financial quarantine. We cannot access the funds in time for the concert. This is why we have approached a person of your reputation.

"If you will pay the service charge of R110 000, we will release the funds and you will receive an amount of $10 MILLION DLRS."

I gave Gordon the bank account to put the funds into (X419-Slush, at the Bank of Nigeria in Hillbrow) and promised him a photo opportunity with Madonna or "Sringok Nude Girsl", when the concert happened.

I thought it was hilarious. South Africans aren't known for our sense of humour, so a practical joke was a good way of putting one over on the Brits. And my letter was so over the top (X419-Slush!), he'd obviously realise it was a joke. My email address was another give-away. He'd obviously remember me from the party.

Wouldn't he?

I started getting worried when I got no response for days. I considered calling him, but then again, maybe he was thinking of a suitably cunning response.

Then, a week later, I get a mail from my company webmaster saying my email has been used to send fraudulent emails and that the matter has been forwarded to the SA Police!

Now I'm wondering whether this is in fact Gordon's cunning response, or a straight-up threat of arrest from someone who didn't recognise the subtle tone of irony in my silly email.

Come to think of it, I never told him my surname, so there's no way he would have recognised my email address!

I'm sitting staring at Gordon's business card as we speak, thinking. I'm just imagining some massive Afrikaner cyber-fraud cop giving me a working-over in the interrogation room.

"So!" he'll be growling at me, in between kidney punches. "You try to be funny?"

And I'll be biting my knuckles, sobbing with regret. "Yes! Yes! I try to be funny!"

It doesn't always translate, hey, sense of humour.

#  Local Hero sits down at the Next Table...

This arvie Danie Gerber was sitting at the next table at Blue Waters. He was with people, so I didn't go over. But ah, the memories...

Within seconds, it was 1981 and I was at the Boet with Grant Morgan and Charl Foreman, watching EP play Natal in the Currie Cup B-section.

Greg Heydenrych is sandboy, and we're all so jealous we can barely watch. He sprints on and pours the sand mound for Giepie van Zyl to kick off. Our nylon blazers bristle with caterpillars of expectant sweat. Our bums itch that cold-cement itch, we dig frantically into our greasy packets of popcorn and wait for someone to pass to Danie.

The enormous men with the brandies and the tiny blue shorts start swearing ever more passionately as George Rautenbach is sent to the cooler for donnering one of the blerrie Natal souties in the first lineout.

Their poor inside centre gets a hospital pass and Dennis Campher tackles him so viciously that he has to go off with concussion.

All of ten years old, we cheer every flurry of violence, in solidarity with the massive ooms by the "Geen uit-jouery" signs with the hair-trigger tempers.

Hugh Reece-Edwards steadily slots the regular penalties and EP fall behind by nine, then 12 points. By late in the second half the usual open-stand procession has begun as another bunch of disillusioned EP supporters calls it a day.

But we're going nowhere. Because just as you can bank on EP breaking your heart, you can guarantee at least one moment of pure, shining rugby genius from Danie Gerber.

Here it comes now, as he dummies his way through the Banana Boys backline. Instead of sprinting for the tryline, he slows down and sidesteps behind his opposite number, so he's shadowing the poor guy. Whichever way the guy tries to turn, Danie sidesteps the other way, so the oke's desperately whipping his head from side to side, unable to even see Danie, let alone tackle him.

Eventually he just falls over, leaving Danie to trot over in the corner. He does his trademark slide, where it looks like he's scored, but he doesn't actually dot the ball down. Then, when the cover defence has given up, he jumps to his feet again and jogs around to score beneath the poles – the second-highest poles in the southern hemisphere, you know.

No Currie Cup semi for EP that year, again. But we'd got our dose of Danie Gerber magic at the Boet Erasmus Stadium/Stadion.

Danie, you were the greatest. We watched you play for EP from when we were eight years old, and you made us believe that people from PE could be world class. Me and Grant Morgan were rooting for you when you made your Bok debut in 1980. We watched every one of those 19 tries in your 24 tests.

By the time democracy and unification arrived, you were still in the mix. When you played your last test in 1992, we were 20 and we'd grown up watching you play rugby. So I just wanted to say thanks, man.

#  The Mysterious Visitor who Never Came Back

"Did you hear Father Christmas last night," my mom asked me.

Did I! Boy, how could I not! The guy had a walk like an earthquake. Doef! Doef! Doef! Doof! Down the passage, into my darkened room and all the way to the foot of my bed, where he went on to leave a small gift in the stocking appended to the bedpost.

Mere centimetres away, trembled my tiny, six-year-old foot.

In the sticky, unrelenting warmth of summer, I hugged my wall, the only source of coolness in that dark vault. It would be 9pm. And this year he could be bringing any one of five possible gifts. The set of Top Trumps playing cards, sports-cars edition. Or a bouncing ball. Or Springbok rugby smurf, the one smurf necessary to complete my collection.

It could be any of these. It didn't matter any more, in fact, I couldn't remember what I'd asked for. My mind was a complete blank. All I felt was sheer terror.

Father Christmas was in my room! There in the dark! With big, stomping footsteps and a massive bag of presents for all the good children in the world.

I just lay there and trembled until, pretty soon... He had filled my little stocking and gone on his way, this enormous, mysterious, hulking stranger of the same general dimensions of my father...

When he finished in my room, he closed the door as gently as he'd opened it and then stomped on down the passage to Brigitte's room, no doubt to deliver her Malibu Barbie.

From there it would be on down to the lounge, where the big stuff would be laid beneath the tree. With any luck, that would mean a cricket set this year, or a swingball pole, complete with bats. Did I even dare to dream... that remote-control Formula One racing car that ran on real petrol?

So, yes. Yes, I did hear Father Christmas delivering presents that night. And yes, I did peep and see his red-and-white suit and his bag of gifts. Not that he would've known, because I hardly moved a muscle!

I was such a scaredy-cat!

The next year I would be braver. When I was seven I would be ready. Then I would be poised and ready to jump out of bed and turn on the light and catch Father Christmas in his full regalia. I'd be primed and ready to grab him by the sleeve just as he reached out to deposit that pair of slip-slops into my stocking.

And I'd see once and for all what he looked like, this Father Christmas... I'd also ask him what happened to that Redline BMX I never ended up getting.

That was the plan, but a lot happened before that next Christmas arrived. There would be many magical family Christmases, but Father Christmas never came to deliver presents in my room again.

It was a bit disappointing, but it was the best of all possible worlds.

#  The Great Honeymoon Reality Check

So here we are, on the beach in Ballito, on honeymoon. A man with what look like breast flaps on his back waddles precariously down the beach and enters the shorebreak.

To the left an 11-year-old repeatedly punches his younger brother on the shoulder until his mom half-heartedly admonishes him. "Johan-nn!"

A yellow-and-red lifeguard strides down the slope and whistles a couple of pre-teen girls back into the bathing area. They blush and grumble under their breath, unaware that they were two steps from being sucked out by the rip current and drowned within minutes before a beach of their peers. Or dragged, purple and vomiting, onto the rocks to have their chests pumped and their mouths mouthed. How embarrassing would that be?

I wrestle the newspaper onto page five, fighting the freshening south-westerly. Zim's in trouble, Bullard's in trouble, the Proteas are in trouble, the Bulls are trouble...

I'm cool.

Bit of a sunburn coming on. Some lower-back pain and some vague indecision over whether to order another couple of beers. Standard honeymoon complaints, really.

To our left, a blonde kid detonates a cracker in his brother's hair. The boy runs squealing into his mother's arms. Dad, a shaven-headed, tattooed bodybuilder, sits unmoved behind his shades. He sucks a Camel and leaves his wife to mop up.

Back in the La Montagne lobby, a timeshare salesman lurks with ill-concealed desperation, intercepting scurrying holidaymakers as they run the gauntlet from the lifts to the carpark

By the swimming pool, an eight-year-old girl and a middle-aged depot manager in rugby shorts both get bingo at the same time. The kid beats him to the claiming booth by a good 30 seconds. Doctor Alban follows Midnight Oil in the DJ mix, and another kid misjudges her cornering on the paving by the deep end. "Waa-aaah! Mommy!"

A waiter picks up a 25c tip from a poolside lounger. A woman on a break from the kids powers through a tequila sunrise and a few of pages of The Kite Runner.

On Willard Beach, a brand-new Magnum, just out of its wrapper, drops to the sand, and shrieks of dismay pierce the thick, salty air.

We could take that as our cue to retreat back to the room. But that would be admitting defeat. This is our holiday. Let our superiority complex not sully the loveliness. We got a flat on the beach in balmy Ballito, South Africa's family holiday playground.

Sure, a condo on Clifton Three would've been preferable, but that's for the rich folks. This is us, and this sticky, noisy, Eighties timewarp of a timeshare resort is the best we can afford. God, we can't even afford this, this is a gift from my parents.

Long live RCI.

This is the middle class. This is the Easter holidays. These are my people.

And Baby, slowly but surely, is starting to realise that. After the wedding of your dreams, you get the honeymoon you're entitled to.

#  'Boet, I've Got the Worst Hangover'

Spike's hangover was a monster.

The debate was whether it was the kind that might actually be alcohol poisoning. Then we remembered that all hangovers are actually alcohol poisoning.

But the true joy of Spike's hangover was not so much in the naming, as in the observation.

"I'm not gonna lie. I'm feeling toilet, hey."

The oke was pale as a ghost. And unable to open both eyes at once. His brow was damp, he was shaking like a diabetic and he was supplying a running commentary on the severity of the hangover.

"Shees. I'm sweating bullets here," he groaned, leaning against the headrest of the seat in front. We were leaving the game reserve where we'd had the conference that caused all the anguish. Joburg was four hours away.

It was gonna be hell on wheels.

"Boet,"

Spike says Boet a lot these days. He picked it up from Alan, who's from the South.

"Boet, can't anyone in this country make a decent road any more?"

The bumps were making him carsick. By now he was lime green and we were taking cellphone pics of him, and laughing at his predicament.

"Hey Spike. How did you manage to do your presentation? It actually wasn't bad."

Spike was one of three people who presented sitting down. The one was pregnant and the other was ill with the flu. Spike gave the talk, took questions and then made for the toilets, muttering, "Has anyone got a bit of a Panado?"

The consensus is that he must have still been drunk at the time and that only now is his hangover beginning, here on the bumpy N4 east.

"I should never have changed to brandy, boet."

After half an hour, he's getting saliva build-up. He starts hanging his head out the window, braced for vomitation.

With miraculous self-control, he pulls himself back from the brink.

"I thought of the trailer, and the fact that we the lead kombi, and I told myself, no, I'm not gonna kotch."

Indeed, spraying hurl all over the kombi carrying your boss, will not do much for one's career prospects.

Still, looking at Spike, I don't know how he managed to hold it in.

There follows a period of consolidation. The ride gets a bit smoother, he even lies back in his seat and closes his remaining eye for a bit. He phones his girlfriend when we get reception.

"'Ell, I'm getting no sympathy there, hey."

We roll into town an hour late, thanks to a traffic jam on Malibongwe Drive. Chose the wrong route.

Traffic clears as we get into Randburg, though, and the driver accelerates for the final surge into Sandton.

It's the surge that finally does it for Spike.

On the corner of Republic and William Nicol, that iconic Joburg intersection, Spike finally loses the battle against nausea. Right out of the window, in front of a oke who's handing out flyers for some rave.

It's volcanic and brown, emerging in three powerful pulses.

He manages to get impressive clearance, so that later, when I inspect the side of the kombi, not a speck is visible. It's like it never happened.

There will be no evidence of Spike's hangover, although it will live on by word of mouth. The hangover of legend.

#  The Keys to the Kingdom

There are a couple of recording studios in Port Elizabeth, but we'd never been in any of them. Our introduction into the Valhalla of a real recording booth came at Studio 1 at the SABC in Conyngham Road.

It just seemed the logical next step. We'd been a band for six months, we had about ten songs, so we figured we should record some of them.

The booking was made, and next thing we were all squeezed into the mixing room under the stewardship of studio engineer Andre van Rooyen. All eleven of us.

The mixing room is all leather couches, upholstered walls, darkness, the digital wall clock with its red digits and the massive 24-track mixing desk dominating the space like a glistening, throbbing mainframe, demanding to be fed. And you feed it information. Kilobytes of sound files, from the sound booth on the other side of the window.

The sound "booth" is the size of a small aircraft hangar. A triple-volume cube of cold, dead air, stagnant, acoustically sterile. A vacuum. Deep space must feel like that. Cold and unforgiving.

Boy, it's so cold.

To a bunch of rookie musos, it's pretty intimidating. There's just no support. Sure, there's a hundred cables hanging off the walls, the best drumkits, vintage mics and all the equipment you could wish for, but sonically there's just no safety net!

It's not like the lovely, friendly Lizard Lounge, the tiny first-floor nightclub where we could pack in all 50 of our fans, crank all the amps to 10 and play distorted loops of our four-chord pop songs while everyone bellows conversation at each other, tries to sing along, or drops their drink on their foot and the manager forgets to turn off the house music, mercifully drowning your vocals in a mysterious, woolly cocoon of noise.

In the studio, by contrast, every note stands naked and unadorned, unassisted and without camouflage. And Andre sits like an unforgiving sonic taskmaster, demanding quality, timing, and note-perfect renderings of these songs that we now realise we don't actually know that well after all.

But stuff it. We'd been given the keys to the kingdom. Recording in a proper studio was like being allowed into the Springbok changing room at Loftus. Like cooking in Jamie Oliver's kitchen, like being taken onto the set of Egoli.

We were doing what the real musicians did. Recording our songs like proper pop stars. Laying down tracks, eksê!

Guide track, drum track, bass track, guitars, keys, percussion, turntables, vocals, backing vocals, followed by three days of mixing till we never wanted to hear any of those five songs again in our lives!

We emerged with a single blue CD-R that we were never going to sell unless we carried on playing gigs.

We were exactly where we started, only seven grand poorer.

But that week, just like The Strokes, System Of A Down and Perez, we had an album out. And you can't beat that feeling for any money.

#  Push Play

Red Rover, Red Rover, 'nother Roller coming over. All schizo, bipolar, 'nother red-eye joller, but still so satirical, lyrical, never hysterical. Same weird fkn rhymes at the best of times, while crimes fill the papers, dictatorial neighbours make the rand drop like gauges on scales when you buy bankies. Thank you, dankie, thank you, now where's my ovation?

Oh god, what an occasion. Manene nani manenekazi, my cuzzie. Humour built in like Barry Hilton, but don't wake the children, coz my seed's been spilt in some dozens of women. I'm reporting for testing, like, Monday morning.

It's a crazy life, and you never know. But what makes it life is you never know.

Feels like something killing me, got this weird fkn chill in me, but it's really just the pillin'. Me out till all hours and hours and hours and hours. I was suppose to play tonight, but I got in a fight with a mert about his skirt or his whizz. It's mad-niz-thiz-biz-niz. Well, well, well, well, miss, my friends got me in this. Now I can't find my penis!

D'you think you can tell, this does not feel like wellness. I'm going through hell, miss. Just look at my helmet! What's that spot on the end of it, and the ooze drippin' out of it? Those pills must be counterfeit, I just feel so out of it, now can I show you the toilet? Hope my pubic boils don't spoil it. Need to make an appointment, get tested, but nooit, man. I been meaning to go, but you just never know.

It's a crazy life, and you never know. But what makes it life is you never know.

Paddy-oop, skip, hooray, Master J push play. Rollers roll another joint from the Bay of Bit Skei. Might look back one day, see our names written large on a movie-house screen, could be fendin' off screams of hysterical teens, you never know.

You never know.

It's a crazy life, and you never know. But what makes it life is you never know.

#  Going to Visit the Cousins on Holiday

Kizimkazi is in the south of Unguja, the very south-west tip of Zanzibar's main island. If this was the first world, there'd be a skills evaluation, a 20-minute safety briefing, and we'd all be issued with flotation devices, helmets and rash vests.

But there's none of that. We're motioned towards the racks where the snorkels and flippers are kept and encouraged to find ones that fit. Then we're ushered onto several open-deck boats, the outboards are gunned and we set off for the horizon.

To the south-west, we can make out a cluster of boats. It takes us a quarter of an hour to reach the spot, where we join the other vessels in circling what must be a submerged reef.

"Bit of a wild goose chase," opines the British guy after a while, and as if that's the very signal they've all been waiting for, we see the first one. The first fin.

"Stand by!" says the boatman, and it's the first words he's spoken all day. "Stand by!"

I tear off my shirt, and my snorkel is on within seconds. I plunge my feet into the tiny, ill-fitting flippers – the one blue, the other lumo yellow, its perished rubber foot bindings darned with dental floss. "Stand by... Okay, Go!"

I flip over backwards, clear my snorkel and open my eyes.

The ocean is a deep green. Visibility? Seven metres? Nothing great.

Luminous sea worms are everywhere! And fist-sized lanterns of phosphorescence like... Eina! Jellyfish!

They sting my arms as I make my first exploratory strokes. I stop to tread water, clear my mask and orient myself.

"There! There!" the boatman gesticulates to my left. I propel myself underwater, swallowing brine. The stings! Ah!

But here they are! Before my eyes. A mother and child!

They give us a cursory sniff, then sound for the bottom. Erik and I share a moment of spellbound wonder, then we give chase. They sound and come back to the surface, giving us time to reel them in. We're right above them now as they rejoin their pod.

We're moving right among the dolphins now. In a group of at least twenty! Swimming with dolphins! We're swimming with dolphins!

We're at full pace. Fins splashing, swimming a clumsy crawl stroke to somehow stay within reach as the family effortlessly surges away from us.

We descend a little to see them better, and for a few seconds we find ourselves swimming the same stroke, an undulating, pulsing kick. For an instant we're right there together. Man and dolphin, in sync.

Then we're into another jellyfish forest, the stabs of pain are back, and the humans need to surface for air.

We come up coughing, blinded with sea water and snotty with joy. We're still getting stung to moer and gone. We're tripping on jellyfish poison and adrenaline by now. And nothing's going to match this for awesome for quite some time.

Kizimkazi, Zanzibar. The Dolphin Tour. If you get a chance...

#  Personal Bests: By Luck or Design?

The biggest meal ever? Why, that was that breakfast in Dopiewo, Poland.

I think each of us ate an entire rabbit. Thirteen years later I would read that the Polish style of eating calls for a big breakfast and then nothing much until dinner. This is true.

The biggest sleep happened in 2000 following a big Friday at the Shine-I. I went to bed at 11am on Saturday and dossed till Monday morning. I think I got up for a pee somewhere around supper time on Sunday. Supper was not a big meal that day.

The biggest-ever haircut? I'm going to go with July 1997. The end of the hairy grunge era and the point where Kurt Cobain was finally laid to rest. I think they got a kilogram of hair off me that day in Thomas's hair salon.

The biggest drinking session was at St George's in 2001. Proteas versus England. We took the Barmy Army on at their own game and lost with honour. I think the Proteas might have won, though.

The most money I ever made was R2 an hour at Lifestyle Surf shop during the Eighties. I was living with my folks and all I ever needed money for was petrol for trips to Seal Point. I couldn't spend that money no matter how hard I tried. Today I earn a salary of thousands, and it's gone before the month is out, every time.

Personal records, I got a lot. I got one about most dangerous encounter with a monkey. On the platform at Thornhill station taking the Apple Express in 1979. Ian Bezuidenhout's monkey jumped on me and bit me in the neck. Thing ran off and was ten metres away before I felt the pain.

Worst accident: Being tackled from behind while sprinting for the tryline against the Altona under-9As. Most expensive accident: trying to squeeze through an intersection in front of a purple XR3 in J-Bay during the Billabong.

Heaviest load ever carried? Let me tell you about that. It was a refrigerator, carried up a flight of stairs by me and Gavin Vos, into the flat of a couple of sisters. I was just starting to date the one sister, and he was just serving his notice of termination with the other one. It was sort of like a relay, but instead of a baton, we used an old fridge.

I like to think we both set a couple of personal records that Saturday afternoon. That was one hell of a heavy fridge. The flat was named Derry Court and it's in Central, up the road from the law courts.

I'll never forget that, because it is a personal milestone, one of the Guinness Personal Records I have set on my path to greatness.

Sadly, most of these records have been set in retrospect. Even greater personal records are those we set as goals and then head out and achieve.

It takes a special kind of awareness, but it's quite fun to do, to tell yourself, "Today, I am going to run the quickest treadmill five-kay of my life."

Or eat an entire KFC bucket between two people for the first time ever. Or finish a case of beers before half time. Paint a canvas and frame it...

It's just a nice thought to have, that some of your personal bests are still to come.

#  Respect. Just a Little Bit

My lovely wife is a really lovely wife. I know I'm biased, but she's hot. She goes to gym all the time and she's curvaceous like a cascade of cellos.

But she has a problem. She's being harassed on her way to gym. Most of the robot guys in our neighborhood are cool, but the one new guy, on the corner of Grayston and Helen, has been giving her kak.

She walks to gym, in her body-hugging gym gear. It's about a kay away, and every day, this guy whistles at her and makes all these suggestive comments.

On Friday she's had enough, and she cracks and has a screaming match with the guy in the middle of the intersection.

The guy is defiant. "No one is going to stop me from standing here," he says. "And I can say what I like. What are you gonna do?"

She loses it and tells him, "My husband is going to come down here and kick your ass."

She's freaked out about this now. Her walks to gym are going to be unpleasant, and she doesn't want to now start driving because of the guy. That means he wins.

I've got to talk to the guy.

So what do I do? Do I go and kick this guy's ass? Can I kick his ass? There's a whole bunch of guys on that corner. I'll be outnumbered. What if he's armed?

I haven't had a fight since standard nine!

Baby is all for me to bring down a world of pain on this guy, but no. Violence never solved anything. I'll try talking to the guy, and if he's unreasonable then we'll escalate it.

Maybe go to the neighborhood patrol. Maybe the police. But would they care about a thing like this? What do you do?

On Saturday morning, I go to gym, pump myself up as big as I can on the rowing machine, and then take a walk to the intersection. He's chatting to some guys in a red bakkie as I come up, so he doesn't notice me till I'm right behind him...

"Molo bhuti. Unjani?"

"Khona, sbari. Khona."

I tell him that I've got a complaint. My wife walks here every day and she tells me that yesterday one of the guys here was harassing her.

He laughs sheepishly. Looks down and shakes his head. I'm a good six inches taller than him.

Ja, it was him. His name is Donald. He's working here to pay for his room in Alex. The normal robot guys live in the bush near here and they let him work a couple of hours a day.

I tell him that we're all part of the same community, and the only way we can live together is if we treat each other with respect. So I ask him please to treat my wife with respect when he sees her passing here.

I wanted to discuss this with him like a man because we all need to live together in this place, and it won't help if we turn this into a physical thing.

In the end it seems to work and he asks me to pass on his apologies to my wife. I tell him to apologise in person when he sees her next time, and we shake on it. Right there at the intersection.

So we agree on it like men. Respect. No violence. But Baby is a woman. We'll see what happens on the next gym day

#  Life for the Logic, or the Living

I'm becoming an expert in drunkenness. Of course I don't drink a drop myself. I'm straight-edge, which is the hip way of saying tee-total.

Straight-edgers are like reborn Christians, except we're allowed to swear. Not that there's any hard-and-fast rules.

Basically when you stop drinking, you get used to it. But it doesn't catch on, so everybody else keeps drinking, and you get to hang out and watch them get drunk.

Meanwhile you're completely straight, watching them, and marvelling at this magnificent and ancient drinking culture that suffuses our society and marvelling at what it does to us.

Oh, I could tell you stories...

Drinking makes people brave, like they made my boy Chris go up to an international supermodel and invite her on a date. She said yes too!

But when he woke up in the morning he didn't follow up with her and they never went on that date. It's almost like that Dutch courage happens in another dimension, and when you come back from there, you're embarrassed to go back.

Drinking makes people repeat themselves. And the more they drink the more often they repeat themselves. I've seen people on a three-minute loop. Of course, by the time you're on a three-minute loop, booze also makes you drool on yourself, knock your drink over and get injured.

You probably don't want to be on that loop.

Booze also makes people depressed on Monday, and miss work on Thursday. It gives them super-mysterious gout, skiets, flu, migraines and those random drinking injuries that you get tired of explaining.

Primarily, dop affects your judgment. It makes driving across town to the nudie bar after the last bar closes at 3am sound like a good idea.

Dopping itself is a terrible idea, for so many reasons, but ah. Dopping is not about the logic, it's about the living.

And straight-edge living can never match the mellow calm of an evening ale on the balcony as the sun sets over the canals in St Francis Bay.

The warm camaraderie of hooking up with some old mates you haven't seen for five years, that's just not the same without a whisky on the rocks or a couple of beers to at least clink and say, "good times. Good times".

A night out with the babe, sharing a bottle of wine over dinner... Isn't that why wine was invented? Bliss.

As anyone who's ever tried to organise a get-together will tell you, booze helps to get the party started. It's been part of human culture for 10 000 years and you can see why.

Without a case of beers, coupla bottles of wine and some Jägermeister shooters, your party is dead in the water. Ask me, I know. I'm an expert in drunkenness, mos.

That's the thing with us straight-edgers, we like to go to boozy parties, where we have a whale of a time watching brave people repeat themselves, act irresponsible and give themselves migraines. We'll be the ones lurking around the periphery, eavesdropping on drunk people and skulling glasses of tap water.

It's the most fun you can have sober. In fact, when I go to a party I insist that there be at least one drunk person. It just mustn't be me. Don't wanna get gout.

#  The Poetic Path to the Next Stage

Brixton is one of Joburg's marginal suburbs. One of those working-class neighbourhoods forever poised between collapse and gentrification. It lies – physically, and psychologically – between the bohemian chic of Melville and the gangland desperation of Westbury.

So it's not the kind of place you go to, unless you need to. But I needed to.

To explain why, I must take you back to the latter days of last millennium, to the heyday of the Epsac poetry evenings in Bird Street, Port Elizabeth.

Thanks to people like BA, Margaux, Heidi and Solomon, there arose a cosy little night of poetry, art and red wine on a particular weekday evening.

Knowing you were among friends made it a great place to take your first hesitant steps as a performance poet. And many of us did, to unanimous acclaim and applause, before launching ourselves at the box-wine table.

By the time I arrived in Joburg a few years later, I had become an enthusiastic spoken-word try-hard and a denizen of many an open-mic night.

The beauty of the open-mic night is that it favours the performers. The patrons have paid to see amateur performances, and they're often there to perform themselves, so audience response is always positive and uncritical.

Do it a couple of times and you get hooked.

I found a few open stages in Jozi, but somewhere around 2004/2005, after the Horror Café poetry nights died, the trail went dead...

You'd do it once at some art gallery, another time at someone's house. Some short-lived bar in Bertrams... and then nothing for another year.

For a poetry scene to prosper it needs a regular night, a venue, where creative showoffs can gather to inspire each other to greater heights of poetic insight and shamanism.

Without that one regular night every week or fortnight, the poets wander the city alone and uninspired, their mindfields fallow.

So it was with me. I had not performed a poem for about a year, when I got the email about "Sheila's Day, a night of poetry, music and performance" at The House Of Nsako in Brixton.

Immediately I knew, this could be it! A scene! I had to go.

Of course it was in dodgy, marginal Brixton, forever poised between collapse and gentrification. The first time I went, I couldn't find the place. Or maybe I didn't want to, I wasn't ready to find it, located there in the heart of sketchy High Street in the former ladies' bar of a low-rent, single-star hotel that reminds you of the Belvia in Govan Mbeki.

But on the second visit, I was ready, and I spotted it, a massive mural announcing the place: "House of Nsako: Nuff Said Kollektive".

I pay my forty bucks at the door and duck through the curtain into a retro-kitsch wonderland of Nu-South Africana. Wirework sculptures, posters from the Sixties advertising Athol Fugard plays, bookcases stuffed with books, rare copies of music mags, Y-mags from the Nineties... plastic flower décor, township-style lounge suites, corrugated-iron wall-cladding, dozens of newspaper posters... A jazz band doing sound check...

And there, eight inches high, framed by zinc sheets, some old tekkies, dozens of streetpole bills of The Star and five metres of twinkling Christmas-tree lights, there it is...

A stage.

#  Through the Perspectives

Where we at, all of us hip cats? It's all international, I guess that's a fact, but what do we bring to all that? Does the international worldwide bit have much at all of us in it? It does do, would do, should do, doo doo-doo, but we can rack a whack of African concept attack to go with all that.

I hear you, I hear you, no tsotsis coming near you, got a god that makes it clear, you sign up to spiritual contracts made many miles from here. Are you aware? Are you aware, more Aids babies go down than Obama can shake a drone attack at, Jack. But we know which of those poor late-lamented we can really be expected to have a plan to have protected by this time next year, so...

Skei for skollies, skort for scammers, sorry ek's jammer can be a bummer for the karma like a half-rhyme at the best of times, but times change, and chop-chop, china, so check out the chops and changes. Know what I'm saying? Check out the chops and changes.

You can go solo, or you can go blow-by-blow, but there's no low blows on Blow-By-Blow with Bert Blewitt, so get down to it, put your body through it. Know you wanna do it. Punch through the perspectives, screw the invective. Zackly what I'm saying, you know what I'm saying?

Nothing can be taken with you, can't even take the issues. Ah-ti-shoo, Ah-ti-shoo! The world's going brown, you need a car to get around, to get ahead to get to Maun to get the girl with the curl that you dig, that you check around town, but then again, where's town? It's hard to get to. Can you?

#  In a Car, with a Stranger, in the Dark...

"Which way you heading?"

This was a bit of a trick question, because the inevitable follow-up to a query like that, as the venue begins to empty out at Kitcheners Bar in downtown Joburg is, "D'you mind if I get a lift?"

And the guy was slightly dodgy looking. He'd arrived alone, then set about hitting on every woman in the place. Dude had this ego thing, total I-specialist. There was a woman who'd just been smash-n-grabbed and he launched into this massive story about his smash-n-grab experience, without even commiserating with the poor girl who'd just had her bag stolen.

The other girl Cherilyn had just played a killer set of quirky pop songs, and all he could say to her was, "I also play guitar, you know".

And the guy had these weird sores on his forearms. He kept picking them and then dropping bits of scab on the carpet.

So when he asked Bruce which way he was heading, Bruce tried to suss where this guy might be from. From the looks of him – slightly unkempt – he's either from the inner city or he stays on a smallholding out by Honeydew somewhere.

He has to pick one, so Bruce goes, "I'm heading out to Fourways,"

"Awesome," says the guy. "I stay on a smallholding in Muldersdrift. Can I get a lift?"

Next thing, Bruce's on the M1 north with this guy in his car. Total stranger, and a rather scary one at that. As they're getting in the car, Bruce checks this tattoo, "Road Duke's Motorcycle Club" on his neck. Ja I know. With the apostrophe. Luckily the guy just gets in the back seat and passes out.

Bruce takes the N1 west, then turns off onto Beyers Naude. Muldersdrift is somewhere up there. He'll wake the guy up now-now.

The oke must be some kind of biker... Hope he's not, like, violent when he wakes up...

Bruce's just scheming about this, musing, and he kind of zones out. It's a pleasant evening, and he rolls down the window and has a cigarette. Two cigarettes. Listens to some beats on Metro FM...

Next thing, he starts noticing game-farm fences by the roadside and he realises he's not in Joburg at all any more. He's somewhere in the country.

He decides to wake the guy. Just as soon as he's finished overtaking this truck.

Or not!

The chevron up ahead turns out to be not so much a truck, as a T-junction. Thwuck! They "overtake" the T-junction sign and go panelling into the bush. Next thing they're in the ditch. And stuck! No way to reverse out.

The oke wakes up. "Are we there?"

"No dude. Bad news."

It's 3am. And with no idea where they even are, there's no point even phoning for help. They need to head back along the road and hope to flag down a car. And now this dude with the scabs has woken up paranoid.

"Dude! Are you mad? I hardly know you," the guy responds. "I'm not walking out into the dark with you! For all I know you drove off the road on purpose!"

And so Bruce finds himself coaxing this oke out of the car. Convincing him that he isn't an axe murderer.

In the end they walk back on opposite sides of the road. In case the other oke is a serial killer, to make sure they won't get strangled.

They had to walk for three hours, till they got to a trout-fishing resort.

#  Lessons from Uncle Armin's Piccolo

I lose stuff. I'm just the losingest guy you've ever seen. And it's because I'm loskop. I really must shine up.

As in, "The oke's lank loskop. He sommer left his car door wide open when he went shopping. Just forgot to close it!"

That kind of thing. I leave my front door open sometimes, then I get all freaked out and think I'm being burgled. Or I leave my wallet at the ATM. I drop money on the floor and don't notice. I forget a bag full of my shopping at the supermarket. Leave jerseys and jackets hanging over the back of chairs in restaurants,

The one time, I lost my wetsuit because I hung it over a sign to dry after a surf and then went home.

So ja. This means I lose a lot of stuff. If I had a rand for every thing I'd lost through being loskop, I'd be able to buy it all back.

But that's all my stuff. I kinda deserve it. The worst is when you lose someone else's stuff. Like the time I lost Uncle Armin's piccolo.

That was the worst!

Uncle Armin was one of my dad's mates, and he had this piccolo. I don't know why, but he brought it round to our house to show my dad. It was a family heirloom or something. I still don't know anything about piccolos. To this day, I haven't had the courage to google them. They're some kind of flute.

Anyway, Uncle Armin brings his piccolo around to cards night with my dad. They probably had a look at it and said, "Cool piccolo," then set it aside and got down to playing skat.

I, being eight years old, am on the loose in the house, and ready to investigate. Also, I'm more loskop than a swingball machine that's had its head loosened.

I find the piccolo on the sideboard, pick it up and take it off to play with it. God knows where.

I really don't know what I did with that bloody piccolo, but by the time the guys had finished playing cards, there was no sign of it. We ransacked that house high and low, but the piccolo was gone.

And it stayed gone. Uncle Armin's family heirloom from Germany.

My dad was so embarrassed, he made me look for it every day after school. But I honestly couldn't remember what I'd done with it. I hadn't even found it that interesting.

After about three months, my dad wanted me to hand myself over Uncle Armin for a hiding in lieu of the lost piccolo.

It never quite came to that, but still. No piccolo.

Then, one day, six months after the disappearance, I was looking for my rugby socks in the back of my sock drawer, when I found it. Uncle Armin's piccolo, like it had been there all the time.

But I opened that sock drawer every day. I'd looked in there hundreds of times. I know what happened, though.

A ghost took that piccolo. And he put it there that day for me to find. To teach me some kind of lesson.

And the lesson was that I'm loskop. And I must shine up.

#  Good Value Drinking Partners

They used to call themselves Zimbos. Some of them used to drink beer out of their shoes and peroxide their hair white for no reason and never have any money and fail absolutely every one of their subjects and then drop out at the end of first year. But ah, what a year that would be.

Zimbos were from the school of anti-fashion. They would own about three outfits of clothing. Variations on the theme of rugby jersey, PT shorts and slops.

They would never leave rez, because the beer was more expensive in the outside world. The rez-bar beers were two bucks.

And so it was that I met John Brown and Warwick Broad in the rez bar at 3pm on a weekday, clad in shorts and rugby jerseys, drinking two-rand beers, smoking bummed cigarettes, which they called pots, and speaking heaps.

It was a peach of a day, and a conspiratorial September sun was angling into the Bengal Rifle Club, which was how we named our bar. The BRC's dust particles danced merrily on the spring sunbeams and gradually more of us drifted in, pulled a Carling Black Label out of the fridge and signed our name on the accounts book.

The year was pretty much over, and if you'd been failing all year, there was no real chance of pulling off a pass now. Much better to perch yourself on the BRC windowsill, stare out over the lawns in front of rez and suck on pots and Black Labels.

On the walls were team rugby photos from rez rugby teams of years recently past. In the rez team from a mere three years earlier, every single member wore a moustache. We'd just missed that era, we mused with a shudder.

But so what, John reckoned. He'd look pretty good with a mouzer. He declared himself to be growing one. "A proper one, not one of those Metallica ones."

We got into a debate about the Metallica 'tache. Was that a handlebar, or a horseshoe moustache? No, came the counterclaim. There's no such thing as a horseshoe moustache. It's called something else. A handlebar is the kind that comes out sideways. The one with the pointy bits that you wax.

How long would it take to grow a decent tache? A centimetre a month for the hair on the head, so maybe a month for a good moustache. Although facial hair will grow faster because it's shaved so often.

Is that true, though? Does shaving in fact make your hair grow faster? Of course. That's why the hair on your arms never grows. Because you never shave it.

"Are you telling me that if my mom had never given me my first haircut, My hair would never grow longer?"

"Look," said John, with a dead-straight face. "It would grow, but very, very slowly."

These were the days before the internet, so no facts could be conveniently verified and the art of speaking crap was at its zenith.

The sun began to set, a warm beer buzz kicked in and a couple more okes came in after lectures for pints. John and Warwick were just hitting their stride, They could talk kak for hours, Zimbos. Good value.

#  Showdown on the Dancefloor

They say he's into yachting and polo. Drives a Maserati. And he bought part of the Kebble assets at auction. Just some of the art, and the one property. They say he's quite a good oke, though.

The new girlfriend seems to think so. They say she was in Miss SA. Didn't win it, but she did well. Top five in 2004 or something. You'll recognise her from somewhere... She also did some bikini modelling.

I preferred the previous one, the brunette one.

He's got the VIP booth with the good lighting. It's like they're on stage. Bottle of Moët on the go all night, and the ou's got a awesome build, you gotta hand it to him. Can't be just polo. He must gym. Unless horseriding is quite harsh on the biceps...

In nightclubs, the alpha male doesn't really have to do anything, he's just the most talked-about guy in the room. The centre of attention. Great hair. Great suntan.

And it's been raining like a bastard these last two weeks. It's a really deep tan, that. His girl too. People are tanning these days.

They don't dance so much, though. More chill in the VIP booth. And people come up and have cellphone pictures taken with them.

Then, somewhere around midnight, the axis of power shifts with the arrival of a rival male. The cricket professional!

Now here's a guy everybody knows. And dressed smart, hey. Not like you see him on TV. That must be an Armani suit he's got on.

He does nothing. He just comes in and stands. Surveys the dancefloor. He's tall, hey. Gravitas, they call it. You find yourself staring at him for a couple of minutes before you realise, hey, that's who it is! They were supposed to play at the Wanderers tonight. Rained out, so he came out on the jol. Nice.

The nightclub millionaire lurks ignored in his VIP booth, but here he comes now! He's wading through the dancefloor throng to get to the cricket star. A showdown ensues. The cricket guy is at least a head taller than his rival, who does all the talking.

The shorter man is intense, pointing in the other dude's face in a "who do you think you are" kind of way. The model girlfriend screams and tries to drag him off. Bodyguards materialise from somewhere. Not bouncers, bodyguards! They squeeze between the two men. Testosterone is dripping off the ceiling by this point. You can smell it – it has the scent of sweat and Jäger-bombs.

The man in the Armani doesn't move. He doesn't even make eye contact. He stands, unfazed, while the nightclub millionaire screams and gesticulates, before being bundled out of the club.

The cricketer turns and makes his way to the bar, where he and his entourage order whiskies. It's quite an entrance, and we now have a new most-talked-about guy in the room.

Elsewhere, the newly redefined beta male goes home with a supermodel. There are worse consolation prizes.

#  The Time with the Bees and the End of an Era

In Alsace Road, Lorraine, there is a park. It may have changed now, but in the Eighties, it was one of those open space-type parks. No jungle gym, no swings or roundabouts, just a field, were they'd come and cut the grass every couple of months.

It was the main entertainment zone in the neighbourhood, and also the pinnacle of the Lorraine Primary social scene, circa 1983.

The top end of the park, near Stephen-John Lawler's house, was dry and thorny, with a hillock where they'd left some builders' rubble and a stand of trees. The bottom end, next to our house, was where the action was.

That was where Anton Vosloo scored his famous park-cricket century, occupying the crease in front of the vibracrete wall for an entire afternoon. That's where I watched Michael White wheelie his Scorpion the full distance between two lampposts – the first time I'd seen it done.

No grown-ups intruded into this world. They got home in the evenings and retreated into their homes, where they would prepare dinner and then summon us for another night of bangers and mash, homework and TV.

Sometimes you'd report to the park and there'd be a complete surprise waiting.

Like today. Here's Stephen-John, his cousin Ricky and Carlo and Deon du Plessis. They've got the concrete stormwater drain open.

"I dare you," says Stephen-John. "I did it yesterday. Went all the way to Bordeaux Avenue."

Ricky's not too sure. "I'm not allowed in the drains..."

"I've been in the drains," I interject. And I have. Me and Cliffie went the other way, down Alsace Road, where the bush starts, and came out outside Melanie Doyle's house. "It's easy."

Somehow we peer-pressure squint Ricky Blackmore into climbing into the drain. "I dare you to go to that one there," says Stephen-John, indicating the drain across the road.

Hands shaking, Ricky descends into the bowels of Lorraine.

"Look! He's scared! He's gonna cry!"

"I'm not! I'm not crying!"

As his feet vanish from view, into the first section of pipe, a shriek emanates from the drain. It seems to echo throughout the neighbourhood. "Aaaaah! Bees! They stinging me!"

Up on ground level, Stephen-John Lawler goes pale. The drops of perspiration behind his glasses throb with sudden urgency. "He's allergict to bees!"

Ricky's panicking. Stuck down there, shrieking and getting stung more and more. Bees are emerging from the drain now. He's in the middle of a hive!

"Ahhh!" One of them stings Deon on the eyelid.

We all run screaming for our homes. The idyll is shattered. It's time to call in the adults. Our house is right next door. I come sprinting into the kitchen and breathlessly tell Gladys, "Ricky's getting stung to death in the drain!"

Gladys waddles outside, impervious to the angry bees, reaches into the drain and pulls Ricky out by his foot, like she's retrieving a skipjack from the hold of a trawler.

Ricky was taken to the Walmer clinic and lived to ride another day. But he was never again seen in the park. And nor was Stephen-John Lawler. People get banned from the park for that kind of stuff.

#  I am Your Love

I am, I am your love

I'm your deep affections made manifest.

And what I do reflects on you

Like you reflect me too

Look at me,

I can ride mountains.

I can play guitar, it's not that far

From what you did.

If I lose my way

Give me directions

If pride allows, I'll take 'em.

I'm tryna find my

purpose here.

Getting to the bottom of it.

I'll let you know

I'll let you know

I'll let you know

How I go

And if I lose my way

Give me directions.

If pride allows, I'll take 'em.

#  Totally Called it

My mom's a bit psychic. Almost clairvoyant. She gets these premonitions, which are often pretty accurate. Well, she believes them, and sure enough, some of them come to pass.

So this one time, we're going on holiday to Durban. Timeshare at Cabana Beach. We're driving there, because we want to go to Grahamstown festival afterwards.

And my mom gets this premonition that we're going to have a car crash in the Transkei.

Ever helpful, my dad offers us his BM for the drive. It's a stable, safe car, and seeing as we're going to be having an accident, it might as well be in his new 5-series instead of Ma's Honda Prelude.

We also choose a super-quiet route through the Transkei. Up the top, via Queenstown. That Mthatha route has so many hectic trucks. You don't wanna be crashing into a truck.

My mom also joins the Avis Club. Gets herself a pre-approved Absa card, so that when we crash in the Transkei – hopefully we don't die – then we can try get to Mthatha airport and hire an Avis car to get us to Durban.

It was totally going to happen. We were going to crash in the Transkei. Mom had called it.

We leave early in the morning, before sunrise. If you're going to be having a car crash, you need to start early, because it's going to be a long day. You need sandwiches.

We get onto the freeway in the pitch dark, head through Ncanaha and then keep barrelling up the N2 east in our doomed BM. The whole way, we're wondering when it's going to happen.

Not before East London at least. There, we take the N6 North toward Queenstown, where I take over the driving.

We have the car crash shortly after that.

It's my first time driving my dad's BM. First time driving power-steering. First time driving in the TK. We come over a blind rise and there's a goat there. I swerve right off the road, up the embankment, off the embankment, back over the road, up the other embankment and finally back into the road. Crashed, but safe.

It's not so much a car crash as a goat crash. But I've gotta hand it to my mom. She called it. Called it with her psychic, clairvoyant premonition.

From there we were passengers of fate. As we ever are. A kind mechanic gave us a lift to Engcobo, whence we took a taxi to Mthatha. My surfboard in its boardbag was awkwardly squeezed down the side of the minibus. We're going on holiday, mos. From Mthatha town, we had to hitch a ride on the back of a bakkie to the airport. There my mom Betty, bless her clairvoyant heart, whipped out her Avis card and booked us a red CitiGolf.

The Avis CitiGolf then ferried us away on the next leg of our holiday trip to Durban. We were pretty calm the whole way. Things were going as planned.

#  Fit to be Exterminated: Felicity's First Gig

Felicity was fresh out of varsity in Durban. Arts degree. She'd blown them away at her first interview and walked into a dream job at an advertising agency. She was all set for the big time.

The agency had some awesome brands. Fashion and grooming, motoring, banking, telecoms, food...

Of course, she accepted that as a junior staffer, she would not be getting the plum jobs first thing. But still, she was surprised to get Dyroach!

I mean, Dyroach!

Felicity worked on the creative, for the print, billboard and radio campaigns. She also went on the Dyroach roadshow... They love Dyroach in the townships!

Then it was time for the TV campaign.

The Dyroach unique selling proposition is that Dyroach kills cockroaches dead in ten seconds. So the concept was to have real cockroaches being sprayed with Dyroach, then running a stopwatch on them and timing how long it took for them to die.

Simple, you'd think.

They were shooting in Durban, but apparently you get the best cockroaches in Joburg. Big, scary-looking ones that are good on TV. So for the TV shoot, they had to fly some roaches down from Joburg.

But the thing is, the agency does things by the book. And according to the rules, any shoots with animals, the SPCA has to be there to make sure they're treated humanely. So the cockroaches had to get chaperoned down from Joburg to Durban, by two people from the SPCA, just to check that they weren't harmed before they were killed.

The cockroaches made it down to Durban safely, and they began shooting. Another problem was that they needed about a dozen takes to get the cockroaches to die on time.

The first lot died too quickly. In four seconds or so. The script called for the roaches to give their last death spasms only milliseconds before the clock ran out. So they had to do it again.

They worked out that they were spraying them from too close.

Then, the second lot, they took too long to die. Like, twelve seconds. And that wouldn't do either. So they worked out an ideal spraying distance and the optimum hardness of spraying and went again.

Luckily they had about a hundred cockroaches, so when the one lot didn't die on time, they could just get out another bunch and exterminate them slightly differently.

And the whole way through, there were these couple of SPCA vets, carefully monitoring the treatment of the cockroaches. Checking that when the time came for the cockroaches to be pest-controlled into oblivion by noxious vapours, the roaches were calm, the picture of health and fully at peace with the world.

All to ensure that Dyroach could sell thousands of cans of insect killer and wage genocide against the entire cockroach nation.

So, if there are any cockroaches reading this, let this be a warning to you. It's a bit like a piggy holiday. If anyone approaches you and offers you and a bunch of your mates a free plane ticket and a guided tour to Durban, proceed with extreme caution. Just be careful. There's probably more to it. That's all I'm saying.

#  A Summer of Some Urgency

I'd just got back from overseas, but that job description was already starting to wear thin. I'd been back for two months now, so actually I was just unemployed.

And so was everybody, really. The rest of them had just finished varsity. And moved to Mowbray, where they were all living in one big old house just off Main Road.

Ace was running a garden service, so badly, that he had not got one piece of repeat business. Let him mow your lawn once, and you would never let him do it again.

Gaz? Trying to get into the movie industry. He'd met some oke at Blues in Camps Bay who did chaperoning and he reckoned he might be able to get him into that. Gaz would party for a week and then phone that guy and see if there were any gaps yet. Then party again.

Rich? Well, he was always the most handsome of us, so he'd come up with a new stage name, Hank Ronson. Then Hank had some test shots done and signed up with a modelling agency. Hadn't got any work yet, but he would soon, surely.

Heck had this idea about joining the army. Not the South African army. The Royal Marines. He was probably just about crazy enough to pull it off. Some day. Just not now.

After four, five, six years of university study, everybody had now decided that the most useful qualification they could earn would be a two-week TEFL course so they could teach English in Thailand, or Japan.

Garve was barmanning at Blues, and making more money than he could possibly spend. Manson was doing a permaculture course. Some of the other girls too. Aromatherapy. That academic education our folks had paid for wasn't adding up to much, that summer in Cape Town.

It was also the first, proper, post-democracy explosion of dance culture, so there was some serious partying going down. Hank had these silver platform boots that only a committed rave bunny could pull off. And he was pulling them off.

But like I say, it was summer in Cape Town, and there was a bit of disposable income around – not enough to do anything sensible with, but more than enough to do some really silly things with.

It was the business end of our twenties, just about time to start choosing partners, choosing careers, choosing where to settle down... Well, that's when our parents had done it, but we got the sense that we could probably get away with not making any big life decisions for another couple of years.

We'd have to support ourselves, and it was getting tight, but we wouldn't have to grow up quite yet. We could still be kids for one last time, one last summer in Cape Town. And that gave it quite some urgency.

It was one helluva urgent summer in Cape Town. Lemme tell you. Those platform rave shoes of Hank's saw action.

#  Near-death of a Potplant

It was the wild Nineties and we weren't really on top of things. Priorities ran to getting to know the hottest girls in town, ensuring we could get in free at any given nightspot, and catching the Fence every time there were waves.

Thanks to our friendly demeanour and our lax attitude to houseguests, we were soon inundated with official and unofficial digsmates. There were comings and goings, leavings for overseas and chaotic house parties.

Even personal grooming and health began to suffer, witness my mate Ready D's famous spiderbite wound of 1998 (not that Ready D), the World Cup mumps epidemic and a spate of shingles that still makes my ribcage itch on a warm day.

So things were dire. Someone needed to take charge. I decided it would be me, and I called for a thorough spring clean.

We began by dragging all the lounge furniture into the yard and giving the place a good sweep, scrub and polish.

The lounge furniture included a hideous foam-rubber sleeper couch, a cupboard, coffee table and a large potted palm tree in a square plastic pot.

So we dragged this plant into the yard and gave the Oregon pine floorboards a proper going over. There were also about a dozen cigarette butts in the pot, so we dug those out and gave the soil a bit of a brush.

Unfortunately, what happens when you take an indoor palm tree out into direct sunlight is that it gets violently bleached by the punishing rays of the sun. Thus, when we went back outside after half an hour of diligent scrubbing, we found a snow-white potplant! Within minutes, the fronds had faded to the colour of pristine drinking-straw wrappers. The poor plant had been bleached to within an inch of its life!

We were shocked! Who knew the sun could do that? Closer inspection revealed signs of life down in the stalk. So we quickly got the pot out of the sun, then trimmed all the leaves off, cutting the poor plant back to a small stump the size of a hotdog.

Who knows, maybe the thing would recover.

Otherwise, spring-clean went well, ushering in a couple of weeks of semi-tidiness and self-respect.

This was shattered with the arrival of our old mate Bruce at the front door of our digs. "Howzit," he gushed, "I'm back from overseas. Just came to pick up Priscilla."

Priscilla?

No one told, me, but apparently the potplant belongs to Bruce, and we're only looking after it for him. And he loves this potplant! He's so attached to it, he's even given it a name. Priscilla.

In his absence, we've managed to absolutely destroy his plant! He left us with a majestic tree and returned to a pale, withered swizzlestick of death!

It was like we'd been baby-sitting his child and let him run into the traffic.

The shame of it!

If there was anything that finally encouraged us to get our act together, it was that, the Great Potplant Tragedy of 1999.

#  Are you here as a Person, or as an Observer?

"How much you pay for me?" she wants to know. And she's not just asking it to be provocative, or to get a reaction, or just for something to say. She really wants to know, how much would you pay for me?

How much would you be prepared to pay to have sex with me? How much to nod your head, take my hand and lead me into the Aussie bar for a couple of hours, down three beers and five shooters, then lead me to the Lotus Hotel and Bar at the top end of Bangla Road, where the event can take place.

How much would you pay for me? One thousand baht? Four thousand? Five thousand? Ten thousand?

How much is that in your South African rand?

Let's see... roughly 3.5 Thai baht to the rand makes it...

Let's see... yes, let's see. Let's see this scene on Bangla Road, Patong, Phuket, Thailand.

Let's see the men with the photo-op iguanas the size of toddlers. How much you pay for that? Let's see the nightclub touts. Club Seduction! The Tiger! The Aussie Bar! The backpackers, the pavement vendors. Is that rat? I think that's rat! The fortune tellers, the T-shirt shops, the tattoo parlours, the lit neon sign declaring welcome to Patong, all of this... Will you just take a look at it and believe all of this in full effect at 2am!

Let's see the 50-odd go-go bars. Beers 300THB all night! Genuine Aussie Owner! Live Rock Band! Sexy Dancing Girls! Let's see the hundreds of go-go dancers. The schoolgirls, the cowgirls, the model girls, the disco divas, the cheerleaders!

Let's see the beggars on their knees, crawling to retrieve those guilty banknotes. Or let's not see them. As you please.

But let's see the girls. Can we ever not see them, these ladies of Bangla Road? On the kerb, in the road, alone, in pairs, threes, fours, fives and sixes. Parlaying your vaguest curious glance into meaningful eye contact. "How much you pay for me?"

Let's see this poster: "Help us find Peter Burnett. Last seen Full Moon Party, Kho Pha Ngan, November 11."

The diligent police presence, the Guns N Roses cover band, the SuperSport on cable, the flaming sambucas, the lady-men, the man-ladies, the gorgeous Thai visions of beauty with the bottomless mini-skirts. In pairs!

And the men! My God, these men! These swarthy European men, grinding their jaw as they stalk Bangla Road. In their dungarees and their gym bodies and tattoos and their no eye contact and their palpable self-loathing.

Will you take a look at this, and then take a look inside yourself and see the mass of prejudice you carry around with you. Big, liberal, open-minded you, with your free and easy attitude. What do you say about this? Are you sure you're not judging? Are you sure you're cool with this? Are you open to this? Are you cool, or are you a bit of a square? A bit uptight? A little prudish?

If you're not, then what are you here for? Are you here as a person or as an observer? And did you come here to Bangla Road to ask yourself that question?

#  Night of the Game Boy

That Thursday at the Standard Bank Arena, The Game was having a pretty poor night.

He'd taken the stage with a dozen of his Compton Bloods homies, done versions of all six of his hits and another handful of hip-hop classics by Pac, Biggie, Snoop and NWA.

He'd dissed rival crew G-Unit, professed lifelong loyalty to his red Bloods bandanna, tossed a brick of banknotes into the crowd and prayed that he might one day enjoy carnal knowledge of Keyshia Cole. Halfway through the show, one of his West Side dogs brought on a bottle of what might have been vodka, and The Game downed the entire thing in a single draught.

"I'm an alcoholic," he declared with some pride. From there on out his performance only got worse.

He'd do 45 seconds of One Blood and then sabotage it, "Whoah, whoah," he'd tell DJ Chris Styles. "Play some else."

"Turn on the lights," he ordered, "I wanna see everybody".

He burst into tears. He ordered us to salute the late Mama Afrika, "Even though I don't know her music." He also didn't appear to know her real name – Miriam Makeba.

The crowd – mostly young men – became restless and fights broke out. Someone in the crowd hit him with a lobbed beer can. He ordered the other crowd members to beat him up.

Things went from bad to worse. So he invited the crowd on stage. Guys started clambering over the barriers. Pretty soon there were 30 dudes up there, and there was a real chance of Game being jostled off the stage into the press pit.

"Let's get the ladies up here," he bellowed, and the women began grappling their way over the barriers onto the artist's space. It was chaos.

Then someone in the crowd caught his eye. "Come up, man," he said. "Send him up. Pass him up!"

A nine-year-old boy was handed over people's heads and deposited at Game's feet on the edge of the stage. The Kid had been singing along to the songs and Game wanted him to sing into the mic.

But the kid wasn't there for a novelty moment. He grabbed the mic and began busting out in full voice. Displaying perfect flow and timing, and knowing all the words, he strutted across the stage, stirring up the crowd with a stunning version of Dreams, ending it off with a straight-up dig at Game: "I'm not supposed to be you!"

All 10 000 people in the house were gobsmacked. The kid had mad skills. The DJ mixed straight into Hate It Or Love It, and the tiny rapper rolled right along with it in his youthful treble, again word-perfect and with tight flow. He was beating The Game at his own Game!

The West Coast Crew started worshipping the kid, Game was bowing down! He took off his chain and hung it on the kid's neck. Pretty soon all ten of his homies had taken off their massive chains and hung them on the kid's neck too.

And still the kid was rapping! With a couple of kilos of bling hanging off him. The kid just wouldn't quit. After three songs, The Game wrestled the mic off him and laid down 40-odd bars of pretty fair rhymes. Maybe his best of the night. The kid had shocked him back into form.

"What's your name kid," he asked, but the kid indicated that they had to give him one. Game sidekick Jersey Devil whispered in his ear and then they had it. Game Boy.

"I say Game, you say Boy," Game commanded the crowd, and we obliged in full voice. "Game... Boy. Game... Boy. Game... Boy!"

"Welcome to Black Wall Street, " Game told Game Boy at the end of it, and presented him with a shirt as tall as he was, and a chain of his own! Then the kid and his brother walked off stage with Game and his West Coast crew.

As they did so, he indicated to his friends in the crowd, pointing to the exits stage right. He would still be needing that lift home...

#  Using a bit of that SAPS shine to get famous

For a bunch of ghoefballs like us, the stars couldn't have aligned any better.

We were a band with a full-on stoner image, largely because we were full-on stoners. We were the Jedi Rollers, which was a play on the name of old bands like Rolling Stones and Bay City Rollers and also implied that we were the best joint rollers in the entire Friendly City.

Also, brand-hijacking was in fashion that time, so it was semi-hip to steal George Lucas's Star Wars reference as some kind of subversive, anti-consumerist statement against mainstream culture.

So we're a bunch of bladdy ghoefballs with a band. We're also tryna be media savvy. In those days that meant photocopying posters on the work computer and then sticking them up in Parliament Street, there outside Angelo's. Also, we got our album reviewed in The Herald and someone mentioned us on some website. So if you Googled us, our name came up.

To be honest, we had no wys at all. But I had this idea...

I was checking out a police car the one time, with its stylised sheriff's badge and the aloe plant on the front. Wouldn't it be the ultimate subversive culture jam to put a dagga plant on the front of the SA police badge?

Of course! And then we put "Jedi Rollers Rolling Service" instead of SA Police Service! Genius!

If only we could do it. Unfortunately someone would have to know design and scanning and stuff. And you probably get into trouble for scanning police badges...

But there was this guy Steve. He was a mate of the band, and at that time he was busy making these stickers that say, "End Marijuana Prohibition" with a big dagga leaf. He tunes maybe I should go speak to the guy at the design house that does it. Maybe he can help draw the idea and at least get close.

So I go by his studio, to see if he can help. I'm in his office, waiting to chat, when I glance over the work he's busy with. There, on his very PC screen: a massive SA Police badge! This guy is doing work for the cops! Making their kitbags or something. He has the police badge on file!

I outline our plan, and the guy agrees to help us out. Soon enough, we are all kitted out in our fresh, new, Jedi Rollers  
T-shirts with a dagga leaf on a police badge. We put "Groove Police" on the back.

Those T-shirts remain the Rollers' greatest legacy. I wore mine last night to a poetry thing at the Bassline and ous were blown away. "Killer T-shirt!" they were saying. "Ja," I replied proudly, "It's my old band T-shirt from PE".

The poets show little interest in hearing the music that the shirts were meant to advertise. They're fascinated by the irony implicit in the T-shirts themselves. And that's as it should be, because the band ended in 2003 or so.

So the advertising has outlived the product. And that's because, well... In some ways, our T-shirts were better than our music.

#

Smoke Cigarettes. Play Golf. Don't be Fazed

Mike isn't usually fazed. He's a chaperone in the movie industry, so he's used to celebrities.

But Nic Cage and Colin Farrell are bigger than usual. These okes are, like, A-list. So Mike can't help it. He gets starstruck. He's checking these okes on set every day, and he wants to meet them.

But the rule is, no eye contact. Let alone conversation. So how's he gonna meet them, there's no chance!

But Mike knows how it works. It doesn't mean you can't talk to them, just if you talk to them, you gotta make it count. So he goes online and checks out, what are these guys into. How can he get their attention?

And it says there, no, the okes are into golf. They golfers. So then Mike knows immediately what he's gonna do. He's going to invite them for a round of golf at Silvermine Golf Club!

The thing with Silvermine, though, is it's about the most exclusive club in Cape Town. You can't get in there. It's, like, a one-year waiting list.

But Mike's not fazed.

That kind of stuff you can sort out later. The first step is just to invite them.

He's actually chaperoning the DOP, so he's allowed to be right there on set. And he makes out how Colin Farrell smokes a lot. The oke's forever roking, and forever bumming smokes.

So he just makes sure that he's standing just near Colin's trailer when his shot ends, smoking a ciggie.

Colin can't resist.

So he bums one, and Mike drops a quick, "So Mr Farrell, I hear you're a golfer."

Again, he can't resist. And he's heard of Silvermine. And again, he can't resist the opportunity of a game there. And he'll tune Nic as well. They'll be delighted to come play a game with Mike this Saturday.

By the time he leaves set that day. Mike's down to play a round at Silvermine with Nic Cage and Colin Farrell.

Remaining obstacles: Mike's not a member of Silvermine. He doesn't have a booking. He can't play golf.

But it's fine. He's not fazed. He just goes for it. Picks Nic and Colin up at the Mount Nelson at 10am on Saturday, in the special Mercedes from work, and heads down to Silvermine.

They roll into the parking lot, a bodyguard/manager's car behind, and Mike tunes, just wait here a second, I'm gonna just go chat to them inside.

He jogs into the pro shop and says, "I'd like to play a round of golf. And hire some clubs."

The pro tunes him. No ways, you can't just rock up and play! You need to book at least a year in advance!

Mike tunes, "What? No, no, no, no no. We have to play right now! I work in the movie industry. I've got Colin Farrell and Nic Cage in the parking lot. They want to play now. Can you put me in touch with the club chairman?"

It turns out Nicky Oppenheimer from Anglo American is the chairman. So they get him on the line, and Mike says, "Nicky, listen, you gotta help me out. I've got Colin Farrell and Nic Cage here and we want to play golf right now!"

Nicky says, "Hmm. Okay, listen. I'll make a plan, but I'm also in Cape Town at the moment, so you've gotta give up your slot for me. I'd love to play a round with Nic and Colin and their bodyguard."

Mike's not fazed. He tunes fine. As long as I get to drive the golf cart.

#  Fun Power: Me and Dad Gaming into the Future

During the Seventies and Eighties, there was an upmarket shopping centre on Main Street, Port Elizabeth, called the Constantia Centre. It was where Pier 14 is now.

In my mind it will always be distinguished by being the location of the first set of escalators I ever saw, and for a spectacular display piece that occupied the triple-storey foyer.

It was a massive cylindrical piece, with a couple of hundred vertical strands of wire, and these drip-fed streams of oil pouring down each strand. And all the drops were synchronized! Descending in formation! So it looked like sheets of heavenly raindrops were falling into the foyer of the Constantia Centre, which was also the first new-school shopping mall in Port Elizabeth.

The Constantia Centre was the scene of a vital bonding ritual that my father and I shared in my boyhood.

Every few months, perhaps three nights a year, my dad and I would go to the games arcade at the Constantia Centre and play arcade games.

It was our special night out, just me and him, driving out into the darkness on a Friday night to share our thrilling boys' ritual of pinball, Ms Pac-Gal and motor-racing games.

Dad would wear his leather jacket and I'd wear my favourite light-blue one, the one with the military epaulettes and the corduroy patches. We'd park in the upstairs parking garage and stride through to the arcade in formation. The boys out on the town.

Dad would buy several pockets worth of tokens and we'd unleash ourselves on the place.

This was the heyday of Space Invaders, Tetris, Exerion, Galaga and those sit-down, table-style Asteroids games.

Then there were the old foozball tables, real pinball that you could tilt and get free games off, and one of the original Pong arcade-games consoles. We challenged each other to game after game, and I scarcely minded that I lost every one.

Ah, maybe Dad let me win a couple, but the point was I got to spend an entire evening with my father, who was usually so busy that he came home after dark every night.

Another reason was that Dad had worked out that I had an addictive personality. Given the chance, I would easily have spent all my free time and pocket money playing video games.

I guess he figured regular, sporadic doses would help alleviate my games craving without having it take over my life. Give me more time for sport and homework.

Whatever the reason, it must have worked. I've generally managed to keep my various addictions under control, I'm still into sport and I always get my homework done in time – as the Weekend Post editor can attest.

In addition, Dad and I have remained the best of friends. To continue the gaming theme, I recently gave the guy a Wii gaming console for his 70th birthday. We played a couple of Wii golf games against each other and it was just like old times. The boys gaming together again. Awesome.

I hope he doesn't get addicted.

#  Our Cock-ups will Bind us Together

We're in the bus, heading north to the conference in the bush.

It's 7am and we're deep in the traffic. Travelling in the opposite direction, the N1 South is chockers, rammed bumper to bumper. Turning around and heading back, for instance, would be impossible. That would make us an hour late. We would never be able to do that.

The conference has gotta start at 10am.

Nico gets a call from the boss in the other bus.

"Ja. Ja. No, I've got all of it. Ja, It's here in the back..."

As he says that, the colour drains from his face, like he's just realised something awful. He stands up and dives into the luggage section, digging frantically among the bags. But while he's doing that, he stays on the phone, and his voice doesn't falter... "Ja no, we'll be there about half past nine," he says. "We in Midrand at the moment."

He hangs up in a rabid panic. "Dude," he asks G, "did you pack that box?"

"What box?"

"The one what was in the car! The one with the digital picture frames! Did you put it in the bus? Did you maybe put it in the other bus?"

"No! Why must I pack your stuff!"

"I was upstairs getting the pull-up banners! I said, 'can you just put my stuff in the van...'"

"No you didn't! You just got out the car and went upstairs."

Hear that? That's the sound of Nico's career going down the tubes.

All the while, we are inexorably moving north. We're less than an hour away from the conference venue, and Nico has forgotten the picture frames. They were going to be the special gift for the guest speakers!

By this stage Nico is sobbing on G's shoulder. "No! I'm dead!"

Ah, the career-threatening cock-up. Pure terror when it happens to you. Utter comedy when it happens to someone else.

"We've gotta turn back!"

"We can't turn back. It'll make all of us late, and delay the conference. It'll turn a small cock-up into a massive cock-up"

"Urgh-hu-huuuuh"

"Bru, stop crying."

When does the first of the guests leave? When's the latest we can hand over the picture frames?

"Probably when John goes back tomorrow morning..."

And he hasn't left Joburg yet! Let's phone him, and ask him to pick up the picture frames before he leaves town!"

Genius! We're going to have to tell the boss, though...

And so it comes to pass that the guest speaker gets to drive around Joburg to pick up his own gift of thanks. The oke earns his special picture frame. And his presentation isn't bad either.

Before that, Nico phones Erin. "Guy, we've left the picture frames in Joburg. We gonna have to get John to bring them this afternoon. Ja... Ja... So we've made a plan. Can you just tell the boss so long?"

We have done terrible things. We must sort them out.

We.

We stand or fall as a team.

The spanbou has begun, and we haven't even got to the game lodge yet. Our cock-ups bind us together.

#  Movie Premiere at Tim's Place

So I made a movie. Not a great movie, but not a total cock-up either. Could be better, could be worse.

Actually, I just helped on the screenplay. At any rate, after several years of sporadic work on it, it was finally written, revised, produced, shot, edited, mastered, saved onto a disc and couriered to me.

Immensely proud of myself, I told my mate Tim about it. He was keen to check it.

So I cruise down to his spot in Central with my laptop, all ready for the grand premier showing of my debut film.

I'd always imagined my movie premier was going to be a red-carpet event in Cape Town, London or New York, at an independent theatre, with a select audience of credible, respected industry insiders.

Instead, it was going to be at Tim's spot in lower Richmond Hill. That's fine. I respect Tim's opinion.

Tim has these two massive dogs. So Baby isn't able to come to the premier. She drops me at his front door and goes for lunch at Cubana.

The dogs are restless too. "I normally take them for a walk around this time," says Tim. "I normally take them to Dodds Farm. Tonight I'll just take them to the school. There round the corner, the old Dagbreek"

Tim's been renovating his place. So his folks come round to check on the progress of construction. It's coming along bloody well. The place is going to look awesome. The cabinet making's done – cupboards are built from recycled wood, new beams in the ceiling, the whole top floor, hectic steep staircase built with his own hands to an unforgiving tolerance.

Concealed lighting, bar counters, restored, luckily there wasn't any borer beetle in the downstairs floorboards...

The view from upstairs is awesome. Quite romantic, actually. Tim plays me a bit of that Bon Iver album.

"Oh ja." he remembers, "You must still show me that movie."

We go downstairs and crank up the laptop. I'm keen to get his opinion on this one part where there might be a bit of overacting. And the tone, generally is quite bleak.

Just after the opening credits, Tim's mate Lloyd comes by. The lady from across the road warns him about leaving his scooter parked there. You can't be too careful nowadays.

Lloyd picks a few notes on Tim's acoustic. He's more of a vocalist, Lloyd tells me. That reminds me, I must get Tim to play me some of his new stuff.

Tim thinks the lighting grade's a bit bright and flat. But he laughs at the bleakest scenes, like when the one guy's getting a revolver shoved up his bum. Maybe it's not so bleak after all. Black humour, maybe.

His other neighbour Rob the Plumber comes in, demanding beer. There are a couple of quarts in the deep freeze. Amstels. "What you ous watching?"

Well, we're watching my movie, about a bunch of PE okes. Skebengas that get caught by the cops. Three mates from Central. These guys have probably seen this movie before.

#  Everything is Ready to Go. Any Minute now

The Mini will have been delivered during the day while Baby's at gym. So she'll come home and find it in her parking space. She'll probably mumble something under her breath, nqgukul' a bit and take the space next door.

When she gets to the flat, she'll find the keys to the car hanging from an elastic band in the doorway. With a romantic note. Something like, "A Mini Cooper for a Mini Superstar!" Or something. It'll be a second-hand Mini, but still. No more than two years old.

Then, with the goodwill earned from that magnanimous gesture, I will resign my job to begin research on my masterpiece novel. Baby will become the breadwinner. And your correspondent will commence three months of diligent carousing in the nudie bars of northern Johannesburg, for this will be a novel about carousing in nudie bars. The poetry and the depravity of it all.

At a Rivonia striptease restaurant, I will meet an Armenian arms dealer named Toros Mazmanian. We will strike up a friendship and soon after, I will become the PR manager for defence contractor Ilyusholev NPO, at that time supplying a Central African government.

When the African deal is done, I move to the Ilyusholev headquarters in Odessa, where I become privy to the most dangerous secrets in all the world. My first posting is to New York, where I handle the PR for the sale of a new range of ultra long-range antimatter attack bombs to North Korea and Iran.

For some reason, the sale is not popular among the world's opinion-makers, and our strategy of celebrating the improvement of trade relations with Pyongyang fails epically.

With my retrenchment package, I am able to purchase a share in a transport company operating out of Santiago de Cali in western Colombia. The company has a subsidiary that makes nutritional supplements for top cycling teams.

I move to Cannes to handle the Tour de France race preparations of one of our sponsored riders. In Cannes I meet an estate agent named Charles Pascale, who's in Cannes on a convention.

He needs someone to advise him on some Joburg property investments. I'm from Joburg, so I offer my services and we leave on the Wednesday.

I tell Charles that the best houses are all in Sandhurst, and in Cape Town you want to be staying in Clifton. For this intelligence I am paid R17 million. By this stage, Baby needs a new car, so I buy her a Koenigsegg CCX with Gucci seat fabric.

The novel will still not have come to fruition, but there'll be plenty of time for that.

My destiny is preordained, written in the stars. Baby's new Mini waits in heaven's great virtual showroom, alongside the Koenigsegg, the shipment of nutritional supplements and the PR briefing for the antimatter attack bomb sales.

All is ready to go. Everything will fall into place like tapwater down a plug hole.

As soon as the economy turns.

#  Fight Night at 11am

Mom and I. Mom and I. Mom and I. Ma-ma-ma-ma-mustn't hear nnnnnnnn-mmmmmmm-nnnnnnnggggggg. No information must enter brain. No! No! No! Keep brain empty. No news! No media! No sports! No! No gossip! And especially, no boxing!

No! No boxing news till 11am.

Only then can we watch the Manny Pacquiao-Ricky Hatton fight with virgin eyes and blank brains. The way boxing matches are meant to be watched.

The thing is, no one deserves to wake up at 3am to watch it live, not even boxing fans. Nobody should suffer like that.

And we all know how they run boxing tournaments. There are about five support bouts on the undercard. The first one starts at 3am. It's a six-round bout, but you've no idea how long it'll last. It could go the distance, which is 25 minutes, or it could be a first-round knockout.

Same with the second, third, fourth and fifth bouts. They could end with an uppercut to the jaw in the first minute, or they could turn into hour-long marathons.

So when you tune into Supersport 2 at 3am for the Manny Pacquiao fight, you could still wait till 6am till you see your fight. So you'd be waking up at three to watch arbs fight while you battle to stay awake, then finally fall asleep around dawn, just as Pacquiao is about to start.

It's a stuff-up. Watching a Las Vegas boxing match live, when you're in South Africa, is cruel and unusual viewing.

Hence the delayed broadcast. At 11am Sunday morning. A far more civilised hour. So that's the plan for us on the Sunday of the Pacquiao fight. Watch the 11am fight, over coffee and croissants, then braai, dop and tjop till our colons burst.

The catch with this plan, is you need to avoid finding out the result until 11am. So you have to maintain a total media blackout until late morning. In this day and age, that's not easy.

Me and Smiles walk into the bakery at 10.30am Sunday, on a last-minute pastry run. We running late. Running late.

In the bakery, what do we need, muffins, croissan... My god! They're playing the radio in here! And he's talking about... the Samas! That's current events! From the Samas to boxing is a chip and a putt! I've gotta exit the bakery pronto, or I'll hear the result! The whole Pacquiao project is in jeopardy!

I go sprinting out of there like a robber. "Sasha-Lee faces a final showdown with Jason in tonight's..." Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-mustn't hear mustn't hear!

We seek shelter in the car, and send Baby back into the bakery to buy the buns. It's far too dangerous in there.

In the car, Metro's playing Tomorrow People. "What were you doing when this was a hit?"

Turn it off! We can't be exposed to media! Off! Off! Off! Play a CD! What? That one! Miles Davis? Fine, whatever! Just not a DJ, talking! A DJ might have watched the Pacquiao fight at 3am. He might be watching it on SuperSport Blitz in the studio right now. He cannot be trusted!

Everything is dangerous when you're living in a media-ban time warp.

#  !snhaK morf enohplleC yna yuB

I was at Supertubes, Jeffreys Bay, for the first time in yonks, and I had dug out the ancient big-wave gun for the occasion. That extra length is just right for that down-the-line speed, you know what I'm saying?

When I came back from Hawaii in 1995, one of the first things I did was ask shaper Greg Smith to recreate the big-wave performance board I'd ridden for all those months on the island. A swallow-tail 18,5" wide and 7'2" long, it's the kind of board everyone was riding on the North Shore, but that you never see in SA.

Meanwhile, everyone should be riding J-Bay on something like that. It lets you make every section, gouge turns and keep projecting down the line, gives you stability in the tube, helps you get onto waves earlier, so you can sit right out the back and pick off the bombs. It's the path.

My one's got a spray design in ANC colours on the underside. Tragically, now, with me living in Joburg and only getting to surf every December, the trusty gun hadn't seen much action.

So I get the boards out of the back room, jam it in the car and hit the Bay of Jays. It's a Thursday and, sure enough, there's waves.

Now, I've been out of the surfing loop for so long I'm an embarrassment. My boards actually have fins glassed onto the underside of them. They're all yellow and stuff, and hey! What's that!

I tell you what that is. Some time in the Nineties, when I last went on a surf trip with the big ANC board, I had placed a sheet of newspaper between my two surfboards to stop the wax from the shortboard melting onto the bottom of the longboard. But it hadn't helped. The Sex Wax melted through the newspaper and left a layer of wax on the bottom of the long board, complete with a negative print of whatever was on the newspaper!

It was like the Rosetta Stone, man! Like hieroglyphics, a message from the past! Imprinted on the bottom of my surfboard in smudgy black mirror writing and surf wax, was a record of my former life. A back-to-front page of the newspaper from the last time I had seriously gone surfing.

What did it say?

It was an advert, screaming, "!SNHAK MORF ENOHPLLEC YNA YUB" Which means "Buy any cellphone from Kahns!" Do that and you could win a new Ford Tracer worth R40 000! "Get to Kahns Cape Rd today to meet the MTN Gladiators!"

Next to that is a fragment of a report about some kind of mining accident "...assistant could warn the others," I thought I could make out. "They were trapped between the explosion and the rock......bo-Ngcuka said a full investigation would be conducted."

What you reckon? 1998?

In an hour and a half, I caught four waves and rode one of them past the parking lot. I was a bit rusty. I think that board was too.

And a bit sluggish from all that wax on the bottom.

#  Saved by Reggae. Damned by Corruption

I'm bad. I'm evil, touched by the twisted left hand of Satan. I am no doubt cursed to wander the desert of hopelessness and damnation for eternity.

I snuck into an LKJ concert.

And Linton Kwesi Johnson is my god! He's my legend, since I first heard my sister's Bass Culture LP. The man is the voice of black pride, respect and self-defence in the face of oppression. He is also the king of Afro-Caribbean dub poetry, pre-figuring hip-hop, dancehall and still the inspiration behind the modern spoken-word revival.

I'm at Newtown early. I want to see every support band, the entire line-up, encores included. It's the day before payday, but I've made a plan and I've brought my R205 admission to begin my tutelage at the feet of the dub master.

But I battle to find the entrance. I go in the wrong way, and end up behind the stage.

"Is this the way in?" I ask a security guard.

"No, you're far from the entrance," he tells me. "But I can help you out. This is the artist's entrance. We can make a plan. Just go through."

I look around. We're completely alone in the back section of Newtown Park on the way to the Bassline parking lot. Next thing I know, I've slipped the guard R100 and filtered through the artists' backstage area into the audience. Someone called Niza is playing.

My mate Shoul is here, with his babe. Nadine from the castings... A solid delegation of rastas... And a lot of us old whities from the Eighties.

Spoken-word poet Kgafela delivers a series of passionate raps in deep vernac. They seem pretty awesome, but with no Tswana, we've only got the staccato consonants of his verbal attack to go on. His backing singers have this bewitching Sixties jazz harmony going on.

I meet Tim Parr during the Tidal Waves set. He says Zap Dragons are gonna put a new album out.

The smell of smoked marijuana attends everyone like a manservant. You can identify about five various strains of herb. By the time LKJ illuminates the stage and blesses us with his gifts along with the Dennis Bovell Band, I am ripe for enlightenment.

And enlightenment he delivers, prefacing every militant musical poem of rhythmic defiance with an eloquent contextualisation. "I wrote this number following the death of Blair Peach, who was killed by racist police officers at an anti-Nazi protest in 1979. This is Reggae Fi Peach."

I start feeling so guilty for bribing my way into the concert, that I consider going back up to the entrance and sneaking two hundred bucks into the cash box.

Karmically, perhaps I won't go to hell, because I doubled the earnings of a poor Newtown security guard. What do you reckon?

Still, it's LKJ for god's sake! An international icon of the struggle against oppression and capitalist exploitation. He's the musical Desmond Tutu! And I ripped him off! I've loved every minute of my evening, I've been skanking for four hours, but I deserve none of it! I want to rip the entire experience from my soul, then go backstage and hand it back to him.

After playing for a full hour, he encores with More Time and takes his leave. "We want more!" bays a small element of the crowd. Then, then! Like a redeeming angel, a rasta with a foot-high load of dreads appears, brandishing LKJ CDs for sale. I set upon him like a mugger, forcing R150 on him, grabbing the disc and lurching off into the night like a ghoul.

I'm still going to hell. Just probably not for so long now. I looked at the CD. It's LKJ Live in Paris. Haven't listened to it yet. But that's not what I bought it for anyway.

#  Boys and Girls: A Day at the Races

Former Miss South Africa, blonde, tall, widening, with more of a bob now. Almost making eye contact like she knows me but we've never been introduced. Or maybe that's the familiarity. In takkies and jeans, casual, but sexy, tanned. And those freckles women get across their shoulders. On champagne with ice, then still waters. With girls. Girls day at the races.

Mr South Africa: forty. (I know these things) Maybe he's 42. Fighting it, though. Still has all his hair, and the colour – dark brown. Garnier number 300. Biceps like hams, slacks and slip-on sandals, leather.

"I just think abs at the beginning tires you. That's your core. It throws you off balance for the rest of your workout."

Former soap star listens in, nods, says nothing. Or, something to the other guy, not me. Smaller than you think, but most of them are. And narrower about the face.

Catherine speaks, though. With jade eyes and Arabian hair, but she's Irish. From her days air stewarding. For Emirates. Says she'll try LA. Stunning, stunning. She should've gone earlier. She's thirties now. Gorgeous for all that, but LA's a hard one to crack.

Denim miniskirt and loose floral blouse off the shoulder. Heels that flatter the calves. She gyms too. Boobs, teeth perfect, but the front two overlap slightly. Non-smoker, probably. She's not smoking.

Boyfriend lurks, heads off to do something. Ignore him. Speak about Joost & Amor, drug smuggling on aeroplanes and gym. She alternates Old Eds and Sandton. Crows feet. She should've gone earlier and she would've made it.

French wife, forty too. Boobs big, blonde, bum all tight in white bermudas. Tired, exasperated? Inspecting the A1 trophy here on the landing. Striding. Sex. Husband grey in white race top. A1! A1! A1! Off somewhere else. On one of the teams. France? You'd think.

She struts. Boobs too big. Three-fifties. Could've got away with a couple of two-fifties. Bum like a teenager. Teen boy? Maybe. Stairclimber. Could be road running – makes the face tired like that.

Two guys, the standard hairstyle. For large white guys. Guns. Bench their body weight. Swaying at the top of the stairs. French wife notices. Glances sidelong from the trophy. Chintzy, ball-end sceptre. To the right along the carpet, a sidelong glance.

They don't notice. Teeter. Stairs yawn beneath them, sucking them down. The one in the white chuckles at it. Green too busy concentrating. It's been a helluva day.

No music. Only roars of vehicles. And only earplugs for respite. The television for interpretation. Dozens watching intently. Rush to balcony to see a bunch pass. New Zealand run off up the drag. Switzerland won, they say. Monaco third. That guy here in the white was from Monaco. Tall, blond ponytail. Headphones on. Listening to the commentary.

SA withdraws on lap ten. Over. Only Monaco cares. Mr France rushes off. Second? Leaves wife, exasperated. Catherine speaks. Mr South Africa. Miss South Africa. Guns, bench their body weight. Still teetering on the brink of the stairs, chuckling.

People are going to want to drive home after this.

#  It was Hectic, and Okes just Weren't into it

Okes have got a thing going. Okes make out. Okes know what's on another oke's mind.

And there's okes and there's okes. But okes are okes, hey, so it doesn't matter if a oke is another kind of oke. Okes still make out.

Take Jayce. Jayce is a oke. He's 18 months old, he's still rocking a nappie, he's dopping formula out of a baby bottle, but he's a oke. He can stand, a little wobbly sometimes, but ay. Sometimes okes get a bit wobbly. Nothing wrong.

It's Sunday arvie. Lekker weather for chilling in the back garden and jolling a bit of Baby's First Shapes Board and then moering the hell out of it with your plastic hammer.

So okes are doing that. The chicks are chilling there, doing chick things. Molly's on the picnic blanket with her crayons out and she's got the creative juices going. She's drawing pictures of her mom, and lank little heart shapes.

Babes are into that kinda thing. You know how it is. Okes are more into just chilling on the front stoep, sucking on a bit of formula and just rapping to yourself. Maybe go for a trap down to the birdbath and splash the water around, fart in your nappie and then come back and chill.

Molly... ag, you know how it is. The girl's four, she's got a vivid imagination, so she smaaks playing make-believe. She's basically writing one-act plays in her head and performing them on the fly.

This latest one is about turning the picnic into a nuclear family. "I'll be the little girl and you be the little boy and you be the daddy. Now they have to put us to bed!"

"Come on Jason. You have to be the little boy! Come get into bed!"

At this point Molly has wrapped the entire picnic blanket around herself and is busy rolling around on the lawn like she's a large squealing tartan cocoon with a tuft of blonde hair sticking out the top of it.

"Come on, Jason! You the little boy! You must come let them tuck you into bed!"

But Jason's not feeling the play-play vibe. He's standing on the edge of the stoep checking this whole thing out, his sister rolling around like a human hotdog, gurgling and squealing and demanding that he come do the same.

He raises the teat of his baby bottle to his lips, then cradles it in his chest, the way you do. He's going nowhere. He looks across at me, and we have a bit of an okes moment.

Jayce checks down at his older sister having her amateur-dramatics freakout out on the ground, and he checks at me. Then he just shakes his head.

#  Birthday Bungee ain't What it Used to be

Next time you get a shirt for your birthday, or a thing of aftershave, just be glad you didn't get a bungee jump.

I got a bungee jump for my last birthday. It's hectic, because you have to do it. There's no looking a gift horse in the mouth, as they say. Also, it was a present from my wife, Baby. So there was a manliness dimension to it as well.

She didn't hand over a present or anything. She just called up a web page, Sky Riders Power Swing – off the cooling towers at Orlando Power station in Soweto. One hundred and ten metres off the ground! "That's your present. Happy Birthday."

Unfortunately, I have just enough experience of adrenaline sports to know that 110m is bladdy high.

I hopped out of a plane about ten years ago, and I also did a bungee and a kingswing at Gouritz outside Mossel Bay. After that Mossels kingswing, I hung up my bungee pants.

Thank god that was over. Now I could say I'd done it, no one could call me a pussy and I would never have to do anything as stupid as that again.

Sadly, no one told my wife that.

Of course, we both insisted that it would be alright if the other one didn't want to go through with it, but in the end we peer pressured each other into it.

Next thing, we're at the foot of the left-hand cooling tower in the heart of Soweto, and Vaughn from Sky Riders is showing me how to make a special front pocket in my jeans to avoid the straps squashing my gonads when I bottom out at the end of my 50-metre plummet.

Then we're putting a brave face on things as the cage ascends up the side of the tower to the jumping platform. I've got a little video cam, and I'm filming the ascent through that, hiding behind it, hoping it'll shield me from the horror.

The vertigo hits as we exit the cage, clambering up the fragile staircase on the lip of the chimney on the roof of Joburg. Don't look down don't look down don't look down.

Shhhooo. The wind's gusting up here, and it's bright as blazes. I've got the camera thing going, anchored to this tiny bench they have, as far as possible from the edge as I can get.

Then Baby goes and volunteers to go first. It's gonna be like that. No hanging around. Before you know it, she's inching her way to the very edge, and the instructor's counting her down.

I'm giving her encouragement, all the while trying not to look down. That's not easy when everything there is to look at is below you! There's Orlando lake. I can see Maponya down there... This other girl can check her house from here. She's waving to her mom!

Now Baby's gone. Plunging into oblivion. Four seconds of silence, then just shrieks. Shrieks of relief and adrenaline.

In less than a minute that's going to be me. I've just got to go through those steps. Clip on the cord, walk to the edge, feel the terror of the oblivion sucking me over, and after all that, to step off into the abyss.

Thirty seconds to go now. Happy freakin' birthday...

#  The Beginning of the End

"It's the beginning of the end," moans Disco.

I didn't realise how long it had been since I was in Greenside. It wasn't anything personal; I still loved Greenside, it has a very special place in my heart. But apparently I hadn't been there for two years.

When I was last in Greenside, it was a pleasant strip of affordably upscale restaurants with attractive elements of residential suburbia. There was a Portuguese seafood place, an Indian restaurant, a couple of trendy eateries of indeterminate ethnicity, alongside a Kwikspar, a laundry and a petrol station.

While I was merrily going about my life in Sandton, with some tangential encounters with Newtown, Melville, Fourways and Bryanston, I somehow contrived to avoid Greenside. God, I'd been down Barry Hertzog at least four times, I'd been jolling in Parkhurst, been for a chow in Mellies. So close! I'd even paddled in a canoe race at Emmarentia dam...

I'd taken Greenside for granted. In my mind it was always there, inscrutable, eternal, like the Grand Canyon. Meanwhile it was changing, reimagining itself, becoming scrutable.

And now it's the beginning of the end!

Disco is a Greenside resident. He stays right on the strip, and he has witnessed the change. The devolution.

Where once there was an upmarket eatery there is now a rock club. Gin, it's called. And it represents the end of Greenside civilization as we know it.

"It's not the rock club as such," Disco clarifies. "It's what happens when the club closes and the place starts emptying out. You get people hanging around on the street, chatting till all hours. Cars driving up and down the street..."

"Mmm... noisy."

"I think the answer is double glazing. If you think of the Kempinski Hotel in Moscow. It's right on the main road, and you hardly hear the traffic. Double glazing is the way forward."

"Ja, and this is how it started in Melville," I find myself saying. "Yeoville, Rosebank... It always starts with a nightclub, next thing it's a couple of nightclubs, then the larney restaurants close down. Next thing the merts arrive..."

"Ja, and you know what it does to the property values."

"Ja, if you think about it, twenty years ago we were sitting having a dop on the roof of Tandoor."

Indeed we were. Tandoor in Rockey Street, Yeoville, was the coolest nightspot to hang in 1990. The pulsing Bohemian heart of Johannesburg. A mix of eateries, rock clubs and elements of residential suburbia. These days I wouldn't go to Yeoville unless I needed to try sell my car to a drug dealer for five grand.

"Should we get one more round?"

"Might as well. Make it the last one."

Ja. Okes are pushing forty. And we can't be staying out as late as we used to in our heyday. So we'll make this the last one. Disco gets up and heads downstairs to fetch that last round.

Downstairs at the bar. At Gin, Greenside's finest new rock venue.

#  Unwanted Guest at the Snodgrass Residence

Stef's at work, doing an edit, when he gets this weird call from his girlfriend. It's ten in the morning and she sounds scared.

"There's this strange guy in the house. He came in the security gate and he hung his bag on the tree and he's in the house! He's in the house! He's making himself breakfast... We've locked ourselves in the bedroom. You gotta come help!"

He immediately calls the guys in the office. "Come, okes. We gotta go down to Donna's house. There's some intruder there. Come, let's go!"

The guys are, like, "Ah, I've got lank work at the moment..." Talk about finding out who your friends are!

Steph's, like, "Okay, stuff you guys! I'll go by myself."

He screams down to Bryanston in, like, two minutes. Gets there and the security gate's open. And there's this miff satchel hanging on the tree by the gate.

He parks the car and comes in the garage, even though the front door is open. He looks for some kind of weapon and finds an empty All Gold bottle in the garage cupboard.

By this stage he's pumped. Tense like a coiled spring, as he comes down the steps between the garage and the kitchen. He can hear the sounds of someone eating in the dining room.

He sticks his head around the door and, sure enough, there's this guy having a chow at the dining-room table. Gif-looking white guy in a vest, with a tattoo of a shark on his face. Steph's like, "What are you doing here? Who are you?"

He comes in and stands on the other side of the dining-room table. The guy stands up, and they start circling the table. Steph's got his All Gold bottle and the oke's still holding his knife and fork.

He's in a vest, baggies and slops and the shark on his face looks like somebody scanned it and then pulled it sideways on Photoshop without pressing Apple-shift. It's all stretched out.

By this time the mom and the girlfriend have come out of the bedroom and they're peering over the balustrade into the dining room as Stefan and this oke are chasing each other around the table. "Go away!" Donna's mom's screaming. "Get out of our house! Leave us alone!"

Stef's scheming, yuss. I'm gonna have to bottle this oke!

Just then another car arrives. It's Donna's dad's Mercedes. Kief! Reinforcements!

The guys keep circling until Mr Snodgrass arrives. He walks in the dining room and goes, "Barney?"

Barney's, like, "Chris!" The okes know each other!

Turns out Mr Snodgrass and Barney were at varsity together. They all did a bit of drugs, but Barney never got over it. He freaked out and stayed freaked out. Now he just drifts around the country looking up his old varsity mates and coming to make himself a chow.

Stef's still so pumped, though.

Dude!" he tunes Barney. "This isn't normal! I almost sconned you with this bottle!"

#  The Power of Beauty

It was in the OR Tambo arrivals' passport control queue that I first realised the true power of beauty.

The lovely Stella had lost her passport. Left behind on our bikini shoot in Reunion, most probably. Ordinarily, this would be a serious fuck-up. For you or me, this would mean, at best, a night in the OR holding cells, followed by a swift deportation back to the point of embarkation.

Not for Stella, though. She made it through passport control before I did! "I just told them I left my passport in Reunion. They said I should just come by Home Affairs on Monday."

Behind her, a flustered male border official mopped his brow, and grinned sheepishly. Pretty neat trick, hey?

And the fascinating part was, she never doubted it. Not for one moment did Stella question that she would be able to cross an international border with no form of identification beyond an ATM card and a smile.

It is a winning smile, though. I would let her through most lines. Nightclub queues. Traffic fines. Car services. Restaurant bills... You get the feeling Stella has been on the winning side of all these negotiations since the day she entered puberty. Not least because she's intelligent and beautiful.

In Mozambique, Barbara and Leila are needing a ride from Tofinho to Maputo. They get one, with no petrol charge. Kelly wants someone to walk her back to her hotel room. She gets a half-dozen willing escorts.

Nadine pitches a campaign to a potential sponsor. She gets the business. Through talent and professionalism, and also her sheer, disarming beauty, which has rendered her male business partner a giggling, obliging shambles of a man.

The power of a beautiful woman is something to behold. In my position as men's magazine editor, it is my privilege to meet many beautiful women. On a good day, we may hold castings where we get to interview more than 100 models in their bikinis.

Sometimes you'll stick your head out of the boardroom where we're doing the castings, and there'll be 25 of the most beautiful supermodels you've ever laid eyes on, sitting chatting with their modelling portfolios on their laps, ready to come in and strip to a bikini so you can decide whether they're quite what you're looking for, for this particular shoot.

On any normal day, each of these ladies would be the most beautiful woman in the room, but seeing them together in one place, you start getting picky. Evaluating them. Ranking them.

This one had signs of cellulite. That one had too manly a jaw. That other one might have been slightly squint. Another one of them didn't seem that into it. That girl at the end, her jeans were muffin-topping her a bit...

And here you are, saggy older guy, balding, carrying a bit of a belly, haven't been to gym in a while, and you're judging these stunning, gorgeous models.

Of course, this is the material we deal in; beauty. And at times like these, we're on a quest to find the sexiest among the sexy. We advertise for women with the greatest powers of sexuality, and then evaluate them to find the most awesome among them to perhaps put them on a cover, in a calendar or take them on a location shoot somewhere exotic to help us make a supplement.

It's not just a superficial beauty we're after, either. Because modern media demands web-video and TV platforms, any woman hoping to succeed as a glamour model must also have a screen presence. She must have a sexy voice. She needs to be articulate. She must be charismatic and vivacious. She also needs to be physically flawless – airbrushing's not so easy with video content.

So here you have the preposterous situation of the most gorgeous, supernaturally attractive women imaginable competing for one not especially lucrative job.

Which makes one wonder.

If you accept that beautiful women have a strange, almost spiritual power over puny, oaf-like men, the last industry they should really be entering should be modelling. That is the one arena where an attractive woman's power will be neutralised.

In a room full of similarly flabbergasting beauties, a stunning vision of preternatural loveliness becomes just another model. Another girl in a minidress, heels and make-up.

Clearly the goal is to be the loveliest of the lovely, the best of the best. And a handful of women will make the grade.

But in some ways, this cheapens beauty. For it to be made to scrap with its rivals for recognition.

It almost seems to be in poor taste. If you'll pardon the allegory, it's similar to if religious leaders, community workers and development activists were made to battle it out in some kind of integrity contest, when the real point of their gifts is that they should be spread around society and used to enlighten and improve the lot of their fellow humans.

Because being in the presence of beauty is a kind of blessing. And beautiful women – indeed, beautiful people – owe it to the rest of us, us round, slightly scruffy, averagely faced individuals not endowed with symmetrical features, to brighten our lives.

And should these lovely, beautiful people choose to go into business, law, finance, media or events, they will find themselves amply rewarded in the form of professional and career success.

In an ugly world, beautiful people do pretty well for themselves.

So ladies, if you're beautiful, consider not going into the beauty industry. Go into the rough 'n' tumble, hardscrabble real world. You'll need to work hard, just like the rest of us, but you'll do better, simply because humans like pretty things, and pretty people.

It'll be like bringing a gun to a knife fight.

#  It was like Top Scoring on a Sticky Wicket...

It was a sticky pitch. That's my line and I'm sticking to it. It had been raining the week before and the pitch was laid with dark, loamy soil. It was almost black, that soil.

A black and sticky pitch, the day the Under-14N team drove out to play Westering. The problem was also that we relied too much on our top order.

Our captain, Dave Mallett, had played EP Schools, so we were always expecting at least a fighting 30 from him.

Anthony Marriner was good for ten, and Steve Griffin could wield the long handle in the lower order. So we were always guaranteed to put together at least 50 runs, which, in the under-14 league, is a defendable total.

That isn't going to happen this Wednesday. We roll up Cape Road and spend the customary 15 minutes getting lost in Westering. As we get out the kombi, we check the opposition and are relieved to see they don't have too many big okes.

Alas, big okes aren't going to be the problem. It's the sticky pitch, which stops the ball coming onto the bat. At least that's how Dave Mallett explains it when he trudges back from the middle, having been dismissed for nought.

Grey are batting first, and we are one for one, with our only decent batsman already out, and dejectedly sipping on a tuck-shop Fanta. At least we still have Marriner... Oh! Looks like that's him – out caught 'n' bowled. What's the matter Ant?  
"Yussie! The pitch is sticky, hey!"

If we don't watch out, I'm going to have to bat! Oh no! There goes Ant Foster! Good grief! Where's that Gunn & Moore? Time to head out to the middle...

Guess we're about to find out what "sticky pitch" means.

"Middle stump, please sir," I enquire of Mr Crankshaw, who duly grants it. The Westering bowler stands poised at the top of his run-up. A breeze ruffles my school shirt, I adjust the sticky team ballbox in my white Judrons. A quick glance around the field to try memorise the field placing, and here he comes. A short, tubby, tanned kid with a strange action...

It's all side-arm. Right arm round the wicket. His first ball pitches outside off stump and bounces up in slow motion, begging to be hit. I shift onto the back foot and crisply late-cut it down to third man. Me and Sean Corcoran run three.

The next ball I face, I hack baseball-style straight up and am caught at mid-on.

And that's it. I am the top scorer for the Under-14 N team. If you don't count extras.

But when they read the scores out at school the next day, I don't get to stand up in assembly. Because we lost by ten wickets. We were all out for 18.

#  Naked on the Road to Joburg

Allan almost got rabies when he was eleven, from a cow bite in the cane fields above Tongaat. They were actually hunting rats when it happened, with pellet guns. Him and his boet.

In those days the preventive treatment for rabies was a hectic course of injections. You had to have thirteen thick injections in your abdomen over three weeks.

Allan reacted strangely, in that he developed epilepsy almost immediately after the treatment. And it was a kind of epilepsy combined with hydrophobia. Really weird.

But Nico knew none of this. He only knew Allan through work at the jewellers.

So the opportunity comes to take a trip up to Joburg. Allan is driving up to visit friends, and Nico has an aunt up there. And The Mission are playing at The Doors, so why not.

They drive out of Durban early-ish. They aiming for six, but it is almost seven before they pass Tollgate Bridge.

Allan's got this weird hydro-epilepsy, and he's not on medication, so he shouldn't really be driving. And Nico's blissfully unaware.

Until just after Mooi River. They've just had Nando's. Half chicken & chips meal, hot, to eat here with a Coke, and a cheese 'n' pine burger, mild, with wedges and a red Grapetizer.

They're on the first hill out of town, when Allan starts groaning in this creepy way and going, "No! Not now! Please not now! Nnnnnng!"

He starts having a half-fit and swerving all over the road. He's barely able to pull into a culvert. By now he's screaming! He jumps out of the car and starts running around, tearing his clothes off, shrieking like a stuck pig at a Beatles show!

Nico gets out with big eyes. "The water!" wails Allan, stark naked by this stage. "Pour the water on me! Aaaaargnnnnnn!"

But there is no water! All they bought at the Quikshop was biltong and chips. They mos had those Cokes at Nando's. By this stage Allan is rolling around kaalgat in the road, just inside the yellow line. So Nico has to think fast.

He pops the bonnet and pulls out the water reservoir for the windscreen wiper. He charges up to the frothing Allan and splashes some on his back.

"Aargh! Aargh!" he screams with every splash, as if it's red-hot lava being poured on him, or as if someone's whipping him with a sjambok.

There they are. Allan stark naked, frothing and rolling around in the emergency lane. And poor Nico, straddling his naked form, dribbling windscreen-wiper water over him to gasps and screams, as the pantechnicon trucks on their way to Joburg come flying past, hooting.

Ous must have had no idea what was going on!

#  A Journey to the Meaning of Pain

"The main thing is not to cry," he tells me, then reels a length of thread from a roll, snaps it off and ties the thread into a loop.

He is Daniel, a large Egyptian man. The last time I was here I only wanted a haircut, and we discussed middle-Eastern politics for a solid hour. It was a long hour.

This time it's going to be longer. This time I'm doing a presentation for a grooming client. I need to be impeccable. There must be not a pecc to be pecced on any peckish part of me. Impeccable.

So I've come for the full package. The haircut, the cutthroat razor traditional shave, and something called "eyebrow threading".

Macho to the max, Daniel will tolerate no crying in his salon. Not during the eyebrow threading, especially. So I've gotta be brave. I'm not even sure what exactly Daniel is doing. He leans in close to my face, brings the thread up to the region of my eyebrow, and then there's a white flash of the most exquisite pain. Good grief! It's like a laser beam has sliced off a line of flesh from my upper eyelid!

Everything goes a bit blurry as I realise exactly what I'm in for. It's like dentistry without anaesthetic. A cold sweat condenses across my forehead.

"Not too sore, no?"

Er, no. It's cool.

I'm lying, this is the most pain I've experienced since the great shingles episode of 1998. And I've still got another ten minutes to go!

Eyebrow threading apparently originated in the middle east, which is why middle-eastern women have such flawless eyebrows. Those are tough women. Strong women. Women prepared to endure the searing pain of twisted thread tearing hair from their faces every few weeks.

Those women have my undying respect.

But the scary thing is that men have a lot more hair on their faces than women. We have tufts growing out of our ears, for god's sake. Nostril hair! There's that downy virgin hair beneath the eyes, just above the shaving line.

And all of that must be threaded if a man is to emerge smooth and hairless enough to impress your grooming clients.

But people, people. You have not felt pain until a large Arab man has turned your nostril inside out, twined all your nostril hairs up in sewing thread and then... pung! Torn the lot of them out by their roots.

Cry? By the time he got to ripping the hair out of my earhole, I was weeping onto Daniel's shoulder like a jilted bride. It was like getting twelve fillings at the dentist, except the fillings were all over the soft parts of your face!

I still had the haircut and the cutthroat razor to look forward to, and we hadn't even started discussing middle-eastern politics yet.

The next day I would be delivering a presentation to a room full of grooming execs.

Hell, by the time Friday arrived, I had earned those beers.

#  White Boy Things

I'm the kinda white boy who clings to all of his white-boy things.

If I could rock a mic like one of those hip-hop homies, perhaps this track'd be more like that and not about that. But you can't help that, any more'n you could make a coloured guy like Nkalakatha, if he doesn't already. Like, maybe he's into R&B, unlike me. I'm into U2. Since '92. I dug them then an' I still do. Achtung Baby, bru. And the one called Zoo. And the one with the big lemon too.

Cos I'm the kinda white boy who clings to all of his white-boy things.

I buy two-tone tops when I'm at the shops. I get my chops sommer cheap-cheap at my china's chop shop. I get tattoos that go round my arm, but skip this section here by my bicep where the skin's lank sensitive. I got lank sensitive skin, I scheme I'm getting skin cancer or something. Got these spots on my arm, on my nose. Scheme you can get rid of those? It's a helluva thing.

But I'm the kinda white boy who clings to all of his white-boy things.

I support the Lions coz they good on attack, and they got the best backs. But they still a bit crap, so by the end of the season I'm back to backing the Bulls, even though the closest I got to the land of Victor Matfield is the time I threw up my monkey-gland off the Richter in Hatfield. Some clubs 'at side and some in Sunnyside, but I reckon I'll stay this side.

Cos I'm the kinda white boy who clings to all of his white-boy things.

DStv? I got it.

Now 53 CD? I want it.

New Mercedes? I'm on it.

Wicked Weber braai on my balcony? You better believe I got it. Cos buddy, I'm a kinda white boy like any other white boy, unlike any other white boy you seen. You might think you know me, but nah. You don't know me, so bra...

I'll give you respect, you give me respect back and we fine.

I'll give you respect, you give me respect back and we fine.

#  A Superstar, by the Sink, in Welkom

Chris was on the Silverado Brake Pads team. They sponsored him. And they paid for his travel on the circuit. He was 33, and him and his wife had just separated.

So he quit the investment firm and went on the tour full-time. Well, actually there were only seven stops on the track-racing tour that time anyway. So he just added East London, PE and Welkom.

The Silverado sponsor meant he also got to appear in their magazine ads. It was him in his racing leathers, next to his bike, and holding a Silverado brake pad under his arm. The big, shiny one. He actually had three. The one under his arm and there were two on the ground in front of him.

So the tour gets to Welkom. It's the Friday night before the race, and they're at the track testing till late. He was third row in qualifying, so they had a few things to sort out.

They only get back to the hotel at 11. The whole place is closed, so they head to the Longhorn to try find supper. But it's so late. As Chris and them get into the Longhorn, the okes are packing up. You just check all the chairs are on the tables. There's a hot blonde manager lady behind the counter, so Chris figures he might as well try. They all full of oil from the track, but the ous are famished, hey. He has to ask.

Tunes, "Hi, I'm really sorry, but I have to ask. I know you guys are closing, but we're really hungry. Maybe you can just make us some take-aways. We'll just have six burgers to take away... If it's possible."

And the lady says. "Normally I'd have to say no, but for a famous motorbike racer... I'll make an exception."

Turns out she's actually the manager. And she's seen these brake-pad ads with Chris in his leathers. She keeps the kitchen open, lets them sit there and finish their chow, and then Chris still shags her in the kitchen afterwards. By the sink. He just tunes the guys to go back to the hotel without him. She says no fine, she'll give him a lift.

After they were finished she did give him a lift to the hotel. She was very cool about it, just giggling to herself a bit.

The next day Chris came third.

He came second in the championship that year. The next year he did his CFA and went back to being a financial adviser. These days he just does mountain biking. For fun.

And the next year, Chris and his wife got back together. They've been married 18 years now. They just took that one year off.

But that night in Welkom, Chris got a little taste of what it feels like to be famous. Maybe that's all he needed. Maybe it was just something he was wondering about.

That night, in the kitchen at the Longhorn, there by the sink, Chris felt like a superstar.

#  Faster than the Speed of Dawid Kotze!

Dawid Kotze was the fastest sprinter at Laerskool Lorraine. Yooss, he was rapid!

In the inter-house athletics gala, he would beat me in the 100 metres by about 40 metres. That's why he jolled wing and I jolled hooker.

When Kotze gave it flat box, he made this "sss-sss-sss" sound, like a steam engine venting steam.

My mate Glenn, on the other hand, was a loose forward. He was a fetcher, quick to the breakdown and good at foraging for ball. We used to ride bikes together. But Glenn was never as fast as Dawid Kotze.

But then the one year, Glenn had a growth spurt. He came back for standard five and his voice had broken, he'd started shaving and he looked a bit like Gerrie Coetzee.

The oke was massive. And as inter-house athletics time rolled around, we knew. This was the year we could take Kotze. This was going to be Oranje span's year.

Sure enough, that year Glenn Wasserman beat Dawid Kotze in the 100 metres. When I spoke to him afterwards he said, "When I was behind Kotze I could see clearly. Then when I passed him everything just went black!"

Glenn was one of the heroes of Lorraine. Another was John Nel, the best dodger. Dodging was big at Lorraine – it made you excel at the lunchtime open-gates games. John was the all-Lorraine open-gates champ and therefore the u13A rugby captain as well.

Michael Bense was the king of cycling. He came fourth in the 1982 Oosterlig Sirkel on his salmon-pink Le Turbo. He won a popcorn machine and got to stand up in assembly.

Gary Gibson was the only oke at our school to master swing bowling. Shaun Paton scored 30 or more in every innings he played in the B section of the under-13 cricket league. He was the best until Gert Nel's dad bought him a thigh pad and he scored 90 against Diaz.

The cleverest in school was Sharon Hill, coincidentally also the cutest. Strongest was Jonathan Bartlett. Richest, Michael Thompson. Best BMX, Michael White. Best at kleilat fights, Michael Nel.

These were the heroes of my childhood. All of us shepherded towards maturity by the likes of Mrs Ridden, Mr Frauenstein, Mr Lötter and Mr Van Rooyen.

Where are they now?

I don't know. And I don't think I want to know.

Growing up changes our perspective and shifts our priorities fundamentally. What was worthy of massive respect and admiration yesterday can become utterly meaningless today. And our heroes, the kids we held in such awe, they can be reduced to the level of the mundane and ridiculous.

I don't particularly want to see a race between Glenn Wasserman and Dawid Kotze now. They might be faster than they were in 1983, but their showdown wouldn't have the drama, the gravitas of that epic under-13 Laerskool Lorraine interhouse athletics final, with Oranje and Blou tied on points.

I'm sure Sharon Hill is still as lovely as ever, even if her name is different. But I prefer to remember her as she was when she sat in front of me in Mr Frauenstein's class.

When I think of Gary Gibson, I see a shiny, red, medium-paced away-swinger being edged to first slip.

The name Michael White conjures up images of a blonde kid on a metallic-red Scorpion wheely-ing two whole lampposts up Alsace Road towards Stephen-John Lawler's house.

And for me, that's where Michael White belongs.

The golden days of childhood were golden especially because of the boundless infinite possibility that stretched out in front of us.

I see more than enough podgy, slightly cynical thirtysomethings in my daily life. I don't need to see any more who can make me think, "Sheez, look how he ended up. Used to be the hippest guy in standard five."

While they no doubt think the same thing about me!

I've got a couple of mates I've known since childhood and they've done extremely well for themselves, thank you. But the others, I'd prefer to imagine the rest of their lives for myself.

To me, Sharon Hill went on to become Miss Universe, and chief actuary for Investec. Gary Gibson played cricket for the Titans. Shaun Paton emigrated to Australia, where he's now batting coach for New South Wales. Michael White now designs BMX bicycles out of San Diego, California.

And somewhere, in a parallel dimension, Glenn Wasserman and Dawid Kotze are still tearing down the straight of the grass athletics track at the back of Lorraine Primary School. Kotze's got the, "Sss-sss-sss" going on, and Glen's surging past him, arms pumping and his vision going all black.

The fastest oke in the whole of Lorraine.

#  Why Sbu's Saloon was out of Business for a Month

Sbu disappeared. He just stopped answering his phone.

The result was that half the black ladies in Sandton couldn't get their hair did. The northern suburbs of Joburg have more than a hundred salons that'll charge you R5 000 a pop to put extensions in. All the celebs will tell you they go there. All the ladies who lunch in their Gucci sunglasses at Tasha's and the Design District and Madiba Square, they'll all tell you they go to those upmarket places.

But Sbu is where they really go. If you bring your own hair, you can be in and out for three hundred. Five hundred, maybe.

So when Sbu stopped answering his phone, a lot of ladies didn't get their hair did. A lot of weaves started growing out. A lot of flying dog didn't get dealt with. A lot of undergrowth started becoming visible.

And when Sbu eventually picked up, he had a lot of explaining to do.

Turns out he's been arrested for smoking weed. In this day and age!

Ja, arrested for smoking weed outside the Randburg Mall. He was smoking a joint by the bins in the parking lot and this cop comes and tries to arrest him.

So Sbu tells the cop, just give me a fine, or tell me what I need to pay you. That's the wrong thing to do, and the cop decides to teach him a lesson. Arrests Sbu, and charges him with possession. Can you believe, but he gets a month in jail!

And Sbu has his phone with him the whole time.

In the van on the way to prison, one of the experienced prisoners says his phone'll get taken away from him when he gets booked in. He says they usually put their phones up their bum when they come in. He kindly offers to put Sbu's phone up his own bum.

Sbu politely declines and takes the responsibility upon himself. Gets his Nokia right up there.

The smuggling goes all according to plan and Sbu's Nokia makes it inside undetected. But the problem comes with the retrieval. The foetus has shifted, in a manner of speaking, and delivery is impossible.

After five days of agony, Sbu goes to the prison doctor and tells him his predicament. His phone is engaged. He can't get reception. He's been trying to log a call, but the number won't go through..

The doctor sends him for x-rays, then removes Sbu's Nokia without too much hassle.

Then, with Sbu in the delivery room, the nurse takes his phone into the next ward. Fatal error! He never sees it again!

When he's recovered, Sbu demands to know what happened to his phone. The doctor tells him, no, the screen was damaged. Five days of gastric acids and stuff. They weren't able to save it. He's sorry.

Within a few weeks, Sbu's salon is open and he is back in the game. The ladies of Sandton are able to get their respective hair situations sorted, and Sbu gets a new phone.

He needs to move on, and the new phone serves him perfectly well, but he still wonders, in his quiet moments, outside the Randburg Mall, what happened to that old Nokia.

It could still be alive. Somewhere. New screen. Someone else's sim card. But Sbu likes to think if he ever sees it again, he'd still recognise it. He would know.

#  Let the People Rejoice!

"Ah! Zanexhoba!"

"Zanexhoba!" The crowd of guests respond! Hail to the king! Hail Zanexhoba! Here present, at home in his kingdom! The land of amaMpondomise.

The king himself sits serene on the podium, calmly resplendent in his embroidered robes of raw cotton, a crown of animal skin upon his head. He wears a pair of dark glasses and wields a sceptre of polished, blonde wood.

We are here to pay tribute to Bhut' Magida on the occasion of the opening of his homestead. We have crossed the Maluti mountains, crossed the frozen Barkly Pass to get here, but eminent guests have come from across the region.

Indeed, nine kings are present. Ah, Zanokhanyo! Ah, Zwelixolile! Ah, Zanomvuso! Ah, Dalubuhle! Ah, Gwebindlala! Ah, Zwelobusi! Ah, Bhatobele!

The Qadi clan convenes to pay tribute to their brother. The speeches begin at noon. The imbongi praises the noble bloodline of maQadi. The kings are introduced by their praise singers, and they in turn outline the values of the community, which are in turn manifest in the building of this house, by Magida, who grew up just over the hill, on the south side of the sharp pinnacle of Tsolo mountain.

"I have worked as a traditional healer since 1974," screams a lady speaker in yellow traditional dress. "In Elliot! I have never stood back for a man."

Family, community and mutual support are emphasised, as the temperature in the marquee rises. Outside, in the kraal, men chop the limbs of a freshly slaughtered cow, and cleave the flesh from the bones with their Okapi knives. The meat is salted and boiled in enormous metal pots. Or blackened over naked flames. Soutvleis. In the rondawel behind the homestead, women prepare umqombothi.

A cultural group of bare-breasted virgins sings the songs of affirmation, dancing and whistling to the beat of the cowhide drum. Doe-doef, doe-doef, doe-doef, doe-doef.

As Dr Luyenge prepares to take the stage, there's a commotion outside. The speeches are suspended as Mr Magida's gift is presented. A bull, specially dressed for the occasion, and donated by his parents' kraal as umgido, a gift to mark the ceremony.

Led into the marquee by the nose, the bull is wearing a duvet cover, a dress and a scarf. Two oranges are impaled on its horns. A bouquet of yellow flowers is perched daintily on its head.

As the speeches stop, the guests crowd forward to get a glimpse of the gift. The band breaks into song and the people dance around Magida's gift. The lady from Elliot dances forward and flicks the bull with her scarf.

Wide-eyed children crowd around the bull's hindquarters. A forest of hands surrounds the animal, brandishing cameraphones.

The bull remains stoic. A man in a wig holds the bull by a rope. Soon there will be dancing and umqombothi. The band will play. There will be horse races. More speeches, and singing throughout, as the sun sets behind the Maluti mountains, here at the homestead of Bhut' Magida of AmaQadi in the land of amaMpondomise.

#  Racing to my Doom with no ID

My day starts 13 minutes after my plane takes off. Sadly I'm in bed when that happens, and SA 603 is already taxiing into position on runway 14 at OR Tambo.

Oh my god! I'm late! I'm late! I missed my flight! I missed my flight! My god! But I set my alarm. I set my alarm. I thought it was getting late! It was supposed to go off at 4.15am!

I pack within 35 seconds, and I'm out of the door within a minute. I scramble into the car and I'm on the highway in a freaking state! Oh! My flippin'! God! I missed my flight. We're off to Cape Town, our whole management team, to go to this conference. And I missed my flight!

I don't even bother checking my phone, but I know what happened. I set the alarm for 4.15pm by mistake. Hallelujah, the traffic hasn't quite started, and I'm able to absolutely plant it down the N3, over Gillooly's and onto the R21. I park in the expensive parkings by the airport building, and sprint over the boardwalk. I check the flight board. It's 7am. There's a 7.30am flight. It's already boarding, but it might be possible...

I sprint to the SAA ticket-sales counter and meet Arushan. "Dude! You gotta get me on the 7.30 to Cape Town." It's R341 for the flight change. By fluke I've got cash on me.

"Just go to the check-in counter..."

I lurch across there and immediately forget the flight number that Arushan's just told me. "I'm on the 7.30 to Cape Town!" I'm schvitzing like a rapist.

I show the guy my driver's licence. Come on, come on, come on. Ag, no. He's a rookie. My stress transmits to him, and he starts fumbling over his keyboard. "Er, I'm having a problem with the system..."

After an eon, he hands me my boarding pass and my driver's licence and I explode into middle-distance stride across the marble check-in hall. I show my boarding pass to the lady, then ram my phone and keys through the scanner. On the other side I stuff the things into my pocket and...

My driver's! Have I got it? I check my money clip... no. My pockets... pants, jacket, inside and out... Oh god, where's my driver's! I've lost my driver's! I've dropped it somewhere in the check-in hall. (Tick, tick, tick...)

I'll end up in Cape Town without any ID! They won't let me on my return flight!

I grab the nearest security guard. David, his tag says...

"Calm down," he tunes me, "Calm down!"

I've got him by both shoulders, I'm six inches from the end of his nose. My flight takes off in a minute's time. I'm not going to miss two flights in a row. I'm not!

"My friend. David. Here is my phone number. Remember my face. Somewhere in this airport is my driver's licence. Please! Please try to find it for me. Please!"

Tears are coming. I'm at a low ebb. I've got thirty seconds to make the flight that'll take me to a meeting I'm late for anyway, so my boss can kak on me massively. I'm racing to my doom without any ID.

It is 7.12am on the worst day of my life.

For now, though, that's a subsidiary nightmare. I first have to get to this bloody conference. I'm so late!

This may yet be salvageable. If we touch down in Capeys at 9.30, I could taxi it to Stellenbosch pretty quick.

But first, two hours in the clouds, in transport limbo. Alone with my terror. So bladdy late...

A fitful sleep. A blank, uncomprehending flick through the in-flight mag. Finally we're touching down...

I sprint through arrivals. They've rebuilt Cape Town international. Like a target on the run from a sniper, I sprint aimlessly through the terminal, scanning for a taxi logo.

Quarter to ten... There! Taxi! With this intense, urgent vibe I've recently developed I round on this oke with a walk-talkie and a bib. "I need to get to Stellenbosch. Fast!"

Suddenly I'm hot property. The trip to Stellies must be lucrative for the drivers.

After a tug of love, I'm bundled into a taxi and we head. I've got my phone out, trying to download a map, plan a route and explain it to my driver. I identify a cunning approach through Kuilsrivier, then you hop on the M23 and come into Stellenbosch the back way.

The M23! Ah, we missed it! Missed the turn-off! We gotta get off this highway. It's after ten. I've officially missed the start of the conference. Phone's losing charge...  
It rings! "Hallo! It's me David. I've got your ID!"

"Awesome! You're my hero! Can you get it to Cape Town? Find someone who's getting on a plane to Cape Town. Any flight! Anyone."

"Get off here!" to the taxi driver, "Take the M23!"

"Hello! Who's this?"

"My name is Angela."

David in Joburg has handed the phone over to Angela.

"Angela, please. I've left my ID in Joburg. Can you do me a huge favour and bring it down to Cape Town with you?"

"Here! Here! Bottelary Road. The M23"

"You will? Angela, thanks so much. Please leave it at baggage enquiries at Cape Town airport. Thank you, you're a lifesaver!"

I may yet get back to Joburg. In the meantime it's 10.20 and I'm lost on the Cape Flats, trying to find Stellenbosch, so I can burst into a conference in mid-stream pale as a ghost and looking like I've gone through hell backwards.

Will my boss be angry or even worse, "disappointed"? So bladdy late.

I'm still schvitzing. The taxi meter's on R500. Racing to my doom. And paying top dollar for the privilege.

The price of an education. If you're gonna set your alarm, Make sure you do it properly.

#  The Tip

It's about two, which is always the watershed time of the evening. Zouk was never going to get super packed tonight, but it's a nice, comfortable kind of full. There's room to dance, but enough interesting people to make the face-browsing fun.

There's French okes. There's always French okes. These guys are here on an IT contract. They like the place because of its Francophone Africa vibe. I like the place because of the sexy girls' bums and how they gyrate like a water snake, when the DJ puts on that Lady Gaga.

By two, the Red Bull's worn off and it's time to bail. Last pee on the way out, wait for my babe and then we hit the road.

The men's room has an attendant. Hands you a paper towel after you wash your hands, and a tip box conveniently placed there by the basin. Luckily I've got some coins, so I drop 'em in the box and go wait by the ciggie machine.

Still no Baby. Oh! I just remember I'm going to need to tip the car guard! I've just given all my coins to the washroom attendant. And besides that, all I've got is notes.

So, lemme see. Perhaps I can duck back into the washroom and steal, say, four rand from the guy's tip box. Six bucks was actually quite a generous tip, come to think of it.

I wander back into the toilet. There's a few other guys in there, so I go lurk in the stall and pretend to pee. I peer over my shoulder. Tip box looks like it's out of the guy's line of sight...

I make a pass for it, but as I get there, the other dudes turn to leave. I quickly change plan and start washing my hands. The attendant returns warily to his post by the tip box. You can see him thinking, "But this guy was in here a couple of minutes ago..." He passes me a towel. "Shot, dude," I mumble without making eye contact. Then I duck out of there kind of shiftily. I don't even consider tipping him this time.

By now Baby's back, and we head for the car. I check my cash. It's a couple of hundreds and a twenty-rand note. I guess I'll have to give the guard R20. Twenty's a serious tip, but at least the car guard'll be stoked. I'll probably make his night!

We're parked just across Fredman Drive. Right opposite the club. The car's still in one piece, so I get out my money and hand the guard his tip. "Thank you, boss. Thank you," he comes. Super grateful.

Just then I notice that, Oh no! I've given him a hundred and twenty bucks! No no no no no! I give an involuntary gasp and lunge for the blue note! I simply cannot afford a R120 tip!

I just manage to tear the hundred out of the guard's grasp before he pockets it, leaving him with a now rather forlorn-looking twenty.

I find myself apologising to the guy, as I retreat into my vehicle. The guy gives me a click of disdain and trudges off without even directing me out of my bay.

I've been a generous man tonight, but my PR has been kak.

#  Easy Money

Easy money makes the drink 'n' driving go away. Sleeping lovers breathe their lovers in deep. The third succeeds the second hand of fate. Mashoabane buys a round for the BEE guys. Mashoabane buys a round for the BEE guys and it's late meanwhile at Eight but a bottle comes to those who wait, we-e-ell. Well-dressed and penniless but dearly blessed with the only currency that counts.

Super-fabulous, the only currency that counts. Tell me now, what you gonna sell it for, what you gonna sell it for? Could be cars that drive you far, it could be shoes, it could be money, could be people make you think you're funny, tell me now, what you gonna sell it for?

Ndizalelw' eMambozana kodwa ngengandizalelwe naphina.

I was born right here, but I could've been born anywhere and it doesn't take a lullabye. Thula-thula lullabye. Integrity sleeps so deep. Deep as sleeping lovers breathe their lovers in, so deep. So deep.

And it doesn't take a lullabye. Thula-thula lullaby. Integrity sleeps so deep, so deep. Deep as sleeping lovers breathe their lovers in, so deep. So deep.

Precious child, prepare yourself again. Maybe Daddy gonna come to your birthday weekend.

Precious child, prepare yourself again. Maybe Daddy gonna come to your birthday weekend.

#  I Should be DJing Tonight

I should be DJing tonight at Taboo or Zanzibar, or Latinova, or Movida or wherever the kids of today are jolling. I should be being flown all over the country by promoters just so I can play at dodgy events and then spend the night on their couches...

I should be on the front cover of tabloids complaining about how Arthur stole the beat for his latest song from my single, Umleqwa. I should be living the life, I should be being sued for child maintenance by some presenter on SABC1.

I should be spending a night in the Rustenburg charge-office cells after a scuffle at the Samas between me and the guy from Prime Circle. That's what I should be going. All because I'm SA's foremost DJ.

I've always had the DJ skills, sure. Great taste in music, timing, handsomeness... All that was missing was the opportunities. So back then, the key was the first big break.

Me and Bopper had been playing around town. We had a night on Mondays at the Brass Monkey. We'd been playing house parties. There was a particularly sweet one in Lansdowne Place. The night I first played Come Out And Play by Duke Mushroom and Acorn kissed this one girl under the tree across the road.

Bopper was jolling at Einsteins that time on alternative nights. But over the one December, he got a gig in Plett for matric rage. So he organises for me to play in his place at Einsteins.

In those days Einsteins was the mainest jol. Alternative night at Einies: Tuesday and Thursday night. The playlist never varied. It was the last days of rock music in the mainstream. Dance culture was just starting to make waves, but for now, alternative night at Einsteins was the pre-eminent social event in PE's southern suburbs.

I'd been going there for years. I could list the playlist by memory. Where Is My Mind, Roadhouse Blues, Blister In The Sun, Loser, Been Caught Stealing, Killing In The Name Of...

Then there's a spell where it gets more mellow, and you play a bit of a reggae/rock vibe. That's the place where you play D'yer Mak'er by Led Zep and I Love You by Springbok Nude Girls. I knew it off by heart.

So I make my debut at Einsteins that December. There are girls there. This one blonde girl even came down from Cradock especially...

I play my first half-hour note perfect. Every song in its place. The dancefloor fills up... Then I get to the reggae place. I play D'yer Maker, then I get out the Nude Girls CD, the one with the big eye on it. I pop it in the CD tray. And – no need to even listen on the headphones – I know this disc like the back of my hand. I fast-forward to I Love You on track 12...

As history shows... I Love You is in fact track 11. Track 12 is a shite, self-indulgent song called Rabbit. It sounds like someone drumming on a paint tin with their fingers. It is the kakkest song on that whole album.

Its ability to clear a dancefloor is probably unrivalled in all of popular music. My major-venue DJ debut is terminated shortly thereafter. By the time I get to the bar, that blonde girl has gone. Back to Cradock, for all I know.

Suffice to say that now, a decade later, I am not in the holding cells for a shabby, drug-fuelled scrap with a celebrity. I am in my lounge. I go to work at 9am. Not as a DJ.

#  Don't Mess with the Kamuro Bomb

The guy shouts, "Carol! Relax man! It's perfectly safe. I've done this a thousand times before. I'm following the directions to the letter."

We were alerted to the goings-on next door by a low-level firework rocket flying across the lounge window. We came out on the balcony to investigate, and there was the next one, at about telephone-pole height. It fizzed and wobbled, struggled to about ten metres into the air, before expiring above our thatched lapa.

We could just about make out the sound of some oke arguing with his wife in between launches.

"I've gotta teach the lightie about fireworks. Otherwise he's going to be a sissie for the rest of his life! Come, Jakkie, you can light this one..."

The next one barely makes it over their conifer. It clips the electric fence and zigzags into the middle of the road with a limp squeal, scattering sparks in its wake. From the balcony I can see the security guard from the next-door complex run out into their courtyard, eyes to the sky, trying to work out which unit the rockets are coming from. Looks like number two.

"Gary, it's illegal! Stop it, man! You ganna hurt yourself. Please, I'm asking you nicely! If you don't stop now, the police are gonna come. Jakkie! Jakkie! Don't go near that thing. Come stand here by Mommy!"

"Ag, for god's sake, Carol, don't be ridiculous! Look here, man. Just watch..."

This is a good one. It gets up beyond roof height, before exploding into a pleasant shower of green sparks that soon rains down upon us as a drizzle of black cinders.

"You see that, boy? You check the lekker sparks? Nice, hey?"

"Gary, please man! Please stop! Make this one the last one..."

"No man, we still got lots left... We still got the Multi-break and this one... We gotta try the Kamuro Bomb!"

"Jakkie, come hold Daddy's drink..."

At this point there is a few seconds of silence followed by an urgent hissing sound and then an almighty explosion. BAH! A flash of white pyrotechnics illuminates the yard of number 2! Nothing comes over the wall. There's more silence and then smoke begins rising from the garden, sifting gently upwards like a UFO has just crash-landed in their yard.

Their outdoor lights are sheepishly switched on, and there is a sense of a scurry.

Straining to hear now, from my balcony, I can make out the scrape of patio chairs being hurriedly rearranged. Gary can be heard insisting, "I'm okay. I'm okay. Leave me!"

Neighbours pour into the communal parking area and the security guard comes out again. He's on his walkie-talkie. He goes to number 1 and knocks on the door.

At number 2, I hear them pull the sliding door closed and all the lights are suddenly turned off. The okes are having an early night. Off to bed at half past eight.

Bladdy wallies. And what are they celebrating anyway? It's the end of March!

That's the end of the evening's entertainment. As I close the balcony door and go back to watching IPL, I can smell burnt hair...

#  Make a Movie. Make some Chinas. Make it across Town in 11 minutes

"Clear?"

"Clear."

Kurt guns the Aston Martin, and they fly through their fifth consecutive red robot. Just the ones on Empire left now and they'll be on the highway. Then they can open it up proper.

Francis is desperately burning a copy on his laptop. Just in case. But the USB is in the bag, ready for the handover.

Five minutes till deadline.

The brainstorming had gone relatively well, largely because Kurt insisted his idea was the best. And he was paying for the movie, so we went with that.

It helped that it was as good an idea as any of us were likely to come up with.

It was about a dude who steals someone's charity scratch card and then becomes a millionaire, but karma fucks him over and he ends up with no friends.

The way Kurt tells it, the story should have six locations and three parallel timelines, plus a Jacuzzi scene.

Kurt runs an IT company and has never made a movie in his life, so the idea needs a little tweaking. Luckily there are twenty people on this project, and lots of them look like they know what they're doing.

It's Friday evening on the 48 Hour Film project. And we need to get something together fast. I pull out my laptop and start typing up a script.

Francis the director points out that moving locations will add several hours to the project and pretty much torpedo our chances of finishing a flick in two days.

So we write it so it all happens in the lounge.

And scratch cards no longer exist, so we make it about a lotto ticket.

An oke steals his mate's lottery ticket but the maid sees him do it and she blackmails him.

Actually that's the whole story, in one sentence. But I type it into a lengthy five pages, so it looks official. It's gotta be four minutes long after all.

We scratch together some kind of script and agree to reconvene for the shooting at 5am next morning.

When we do so, we spend a couple of hours queuing to read the script off the screen of the lappie, because we have no way of printing out the, er, "screenplay".

Most of my teammates' read-throughs of my attempt at a script end with the kind of verbal shrug you give after hearing that Argentina beat Wales at rugby. "Hm."

The director can smell shit a mile away, and all weekend maintains a proud record of not reading the script once.

The script having been read and grudgingly accepted, the people who know what they're doing take over. Myself and a cute Greek girl named Marianthe go shopping for props.

They're for the big party scene. The rich-dude character throws himself a big 40th and no one comes, except his old mate whom he schnaaied back in the day.

Marianthe and I pick up some cheesy, sequinned polystyrene wall hangings, some streamers and a gold plastic hat. They look so crap, I'm embarrassed to hand them over to Anel, the props lady. But she accepts them with alacrity and somehow manages to make the lounge approximate an upscale millionaire's soiree, with R189's worth of streamers and some balloons.

Meanwhile the people who know what they're doing, do what they do – including three people who act the hell out of our shocker of a script and the director, who is also cameraman and announces "roll sound... camera speed... action" while shooting everything from several angles and generally working himself to a standstill.

At this point, people start hitting the exhaustion wall. Roxy the AD and co-producer shows the first signs of sense-of-humour failure somewhere between takes 12 and 13 of the big drinking scene. "I'm a bit tired," she understates in a blank deadpan, while gradually turning the colour of a Chuckles packet.

By now, the first tapes have reached the editing team – a mellow couple called Sean and Tanya, but they're soon back. Apparently the sound hasn't been synched and the two of them are now set for a ludicrous editing process to have any chance of making tomorrow night's 7.30pm deadline for hand-in.

Tanya reckons "Lucky" would be a good title, and she should know. She's looked at every scene of this sucker twenty times.

I cruise into their home editing suite just before lunch on Sunday to find our editors frazzled to the point of nonsensicalness, but loving every minute of it.

As the afternoon progresses, we sit downstairs in their lounge skulling Pepsis. Every hour or so someone ventures upstairs into the edit suite to take the temperature. In the course of the day, I daresay it drops a couple of degrees. Whether we're gonna get this fucker done is now seriously touch and go.

By 5pm, commenting in any way is an emotional minefield, as Tanya and Sean have now invested a solid thirty hours of their lives in it, and are poised on an emotional knife edge.

Our lofty editing ambitions have been trimmed to a straightforward "start–flashback–end" concept that is unlikely to challenge audiences' conceptual faculties.

That is, if anyone gets to see it. At 6pm, with 90 minutes till submission time, no one has actually watched the movie right through. We do have a fair idea what it's gonna look like, though. Thanks to the acting abilities of Jason and Tom, our male leads, and the dedication of the team, we may have conspired to create a fairly entertaining movie.

But first, rendering! From where I'm sitting, rendering seems to be the process whereby the grades, effects and transitions are generated. But of course, I know nothing. I'm just standing there, wired to the tip of my brain stem on Pepsi Max, watching a dialog box.

By this point, we're all in the edit suite, staring at the progress bar, as the rendering process inches toward completion. "It's coming down," remarks Greg the sound guy. "29 minutes... It should be done at 7.03pm."

We're in Greymont. Hand-in is at 7.30pm. At Sandown High. Google Maps says that's 36 minutes away. There no way we'll make it.

Except!

Except, we have an ace up the collective sleeve of The Chancers. (I should've mentioned that. Our group is called The Chancers.)

This is our ace: Kurt drives an Aston Martin.

It's revving out in the street as the status bar completes its final update. We plot a route. Some way where there aren't any road humps. And some freeway. I'm calling M1.

It's 7.12 when the render update finishes. Another 90 seconds are spent saving it to USB. Then the memory stick is torn from the port, dropped on the floor, lost for a couple of seconds, retrieved, handed to Greg, rushed out to the Aston and screechingly taken on its way.

It is 7.15pm.

We Chancers sit huddled in the lounge watching Sean and Tanya's enormous gothic wall clock count down the too-few minutes to deadline. And we wait for the phone call from Sandown.

"They made it!"

Sean gets the call. Kurt and Francis have made it from beyond deepest Northcliff to the heart of Sandton in 13 minutes.

Awesome.

Sean starts setting up the DVD player. Let's see if this movie's any good. We'll watch it when the guys get back.

#  Ploughing Through, Grimly Clung, for What?

There was a certain amount of pressure.

My parents had both grown up poor. And they'd made good, risen above their circumstances to make a magnificent life for my sister and I in Port Elizabeth.

So good that, by the time we were in our early teens, they were able to build a holiday house on the canals in St Francis Bay, so we would be able to have the privileged upbringing they could not.

We would frolic joyously in the summer gorgeousness, play tennisette on the sand, surf like the Beach Boys and waterski like champs. That was the plan.

To this purpose, the minute we moved to our new house, we attended an auction, where my father purchased one speedboat, one set of waterskis and a lifejacket.

He also bought himself a captain's hat resembling that of Kaptein Stubing from Die Plesierboot. So he was always going to be driving the boat. But who' d be doing the waterskiing?

My sister was more into beach braais, boys and socialising. My mom wanted nothing more than a round of golf and a tan. So me, I was the waterskiier.

And I was the guy who found himself, late that summer afternoon, neck deep in riverweeds, on the rocky north bank of the Krom river, clinging to a ski rope.

By that stage, we'd failed seven times. My 14-year-old arms were battling with the strain of trying and failing to pull myself out of the water. Neither my dad Fred, nor I, had ever been waterskiing before.

The sun was low in the sky, so all I could see was these massive fields of glare off the water. The wind was up, and the chop was ankle high. We'd drifted onto the rocks and crunched two propeller blades, so Fred was in a towering, sweary rage.

We tried again. Fred floored the gearshift and the bow lurched skyward against the glare, tombstoning in the chop. I ploughed through, grimly clung to the rope, submarining, half-standing, till my fingers couldn't any more and I had to let go. I sank miserably into the green, bathwater murk of the Krom. The wind blew Fred's curses past me as he circled again.

"Try again. I go a bit steadier this time," he shouted as I grabbed for the rope. We were drifting into the rocks again. The lifejacket was riding up to my ears and chafing me. The sun was orange now, and half down. We'd need the last of the fuel to get home.

This would have to be the last try.

I floated in the riverine debris, some responsibility I couldn't quite place, heavy on my scrawny shoulders. Fred eased forward and took up the slack.

I was still battling to align my skis when he floored it.

Then I was dry! The wind in my hair! The view! I was up. I was up! I was waterskiing. My dad looked back and saw. And I saw he was proud. Of me, and of something else.

Like with many successes, I couldn't work out what I'd done right. But together we rode the chop, up the Krom river, him in his speedboat and me waterskiing. Me and my dad.

# 

#  Ek Ken van Slang: An Evening's Entertainment

Resorts are fine as far as they go, but you don't want to stay there the whole time. They'll shelter you from the more nefarious evils of local cuisine, you'll probably have a nice room, and there'll be a salubrious lounge somewhere to sip drinks that've been brought to you.

But for local flavour, you'll probably have to leave the gates of your holiday sanctuary. To swim with dolphins, explore Stonetown, go paragliding or tour the spice farms, you'll need to leave. Want to go for a drink at Africa House and sip gin and tonics as the sun plunges into the Zanzibar channel? Yip, you gotta head out.

But the resort's not throwing in the towel. They're not about to let themselves be painted as some kind of lame-ass holiday club. They bring the action for your satisfaction!

Take tonight! They've got the Maasai traders from the market next door in to do a dance display. It's not how you'd expect. It's more a series of short dances lasting no longer than thirty seconds, where each of the half dozen dancers gets a chance to execute his three biggest hops while they all chant mesmerically.

But the Maasai are regal and aloof. They lack audience interaction. Perhaps this next dance troupe will offer something more.

They're clad in floral fabric, either skirts or trousers, singing and dancing, accompanied by a three-piece rhythm ensemble of djembes, cymbals and bass drums.

The exertion of dancing and singing has the dancers drenched in sweat – all except one guy. The leader of the group is wiry, with the muscle tone of a martial artist, skin like ebony and abs like a case of black eggs. He is not perspiring a drop.

He's also completely possessed by the power of the music. And he has our undivided attention.

After the trance journey of song two appears to have reached its climax, he takes things to another level. The man runs off and returns with an enormous python around his neck!

The dance now takes a more terrifying turn as the man wraps himself in the irate animal, which tries in turn to strangle him. Another dancer follows him, painstakingly unwinding the snake from his torso as he inserts its head into his mouth.

We recoil in terror, but he follows us, wading into the rapidly vacated seating as we climb onto chairs, over them, people running for safety...

Some loiter warily. What outrage has this resort visited upon us in the name of entertainment? The dancer begins licking the snake, which rears up in attack mode...

He puts the snake on the ground and it immediately thrashes towards us, slithering across the concrete. All the chairs are empty, audience chattering with fear, clutching our cameras and manically firing off pics.

As the python cuts across the performance area, a large Afrikaans housewife strides up to intercept it. The reptile reaches the first row of chairs, and she takes her seat. The head of the python is five centimetres from her toe.

She flinches not an inch, and the snake quickly retreats. He heads back to his boss, who swiftly folds him back into his box.

"I'm used to big snakes," she mutters under her breath. Two seats down, her husband blushes furiously and goes for another gin. Notch one up for the resort. That's entertainment.

#  Bacon, I Think we were Scared of you...

In the old days, before Lorraine Primary built the new section, the school was basically just a quad with classrooms around it.

The kindergarten classes were in a wing running off the one side, and the headmaster's office opposite that. So it was really like a big capital A. But if you write an A like the Germans do, with a square section at the top.

And we were in the corner where the right-hand ascender meets the crossbar. Standard One. Miss Jonker.

Break times, well, they happen in the quad, mos. In the netball court. Girls playing that game where they loop a length of pantihose around their legs, and the other girls jump over it. The boys play stingers.

Well, most of the boys. This one little kid didn't play stingers. He wore his blazer buttoned up, even in the middle of summer. And he was a bit chubby, so we called him Bacon.

He just sat there on the benches, watching us. He must have been Sub B.

We were merciless. "Come on, Bacon. Why don't you come play stingers? Are you scared? Bacon! Bacon! Why don't you go play pantihose with the girls!"

Until he ran off and cried into Mrs Bruwer's dress.

We were like assassins. Like torturers. Mass murderers, we were that cruel.

Bacon was new. Within weeks of his arrival, we'd been called in by Mr Van Rooyen and told to stop calling him Bacon. We didn't. We smelt blood and we went in for the kill. We were like sharks circling our prey, there in the corner of the quad near the netball net, where Bacon used to sit, all by himself, in his blazer.

"Hey, Bacon! Are you coming to rugby practice after school? Or are you gonna play netball? Did you remember your netball skirt, Bacon? Hey Bacon?"

We were just stabbing him in the heart, this little boy who'd come from Sunridge, or Rowallan Park, or Kabega or wherever, without any friends. And we just broke him down.

Bacon didn't come back for the second term.

And I know it was because of us. We broke him down and chased him away. We never even bothered to learn his name. It might've been Grant, but it probably wasn't. We were such little arseholes.

And perhaps we were afraid of him. We'd never seen individuality before. Never seen anyone resist the peer pressure to conform and go along with the group. So we looked at him, found something distinctive and picked at it until we chased him away. I just hope it didn't last.

I hope he moved to Charlo, and it was a hundred times better and he made lots of friends and he grew up well adjusted and happy.

And most of all, I'd like to say sorry to you, sir, the boy we called Bacon. I apologise. We didn't know how much we'd hurt you. But rest assured, we got our turn later in life, and we learnt our lesson.

Crumbs, man, Bacon. You've haunted me all my life.

#  Turns out the Okes can still Jol

The ales started going down at three. The paintball was at five. The weed came out at six. We got the bus to stop for brandy at six-fifteen.

The first arguments started at half-past seven. We were back at the bar by eight-thirty. The oke in charge got kicked out by nine. He was passed out in his car by 9.05pm and we were on our own after that...

We started losing each other around 9.30. I'd made friends with two strangers by ten. Tried to blag my way on stage at someone else's show at 10.15. We fluked back into each other around eleven. Still in the same parking lot where we started.

One oke was still able/prepared to drive. The rest of us let him. By 11.15 we were in another parking lot. Footwear became an issue. Visible drunkenness too. There were some like us in the parking lot.

We made it inside by midnight. There were guys from school days in there. Bouncers were unimpressed. Talking to them only gave the game away.

At 12.20 I met another guy from the old days in the toilet.

At 1am I went to check the place round the corner. The search party found me at two. The driver went missing at 2.10am. He was found at 2.25. We were at the nudie bar at 2.40. Again, footwear. We dummied them by splitting up. Two went in, the rest went to the ATM, then we returned individually. The ATM slip says 2.46.

We were watching the stage show by three. There were guys from the old days at the bar. We needed a chow. There was no chow. There was a 24-hour down near the beach. But first there was a lapdance in the office.

At 3.17 there was an awesome song on the car stereo. By 3.22 there were police. By 3.30am there was a compromise. Somewhere between 3.30 and 4.11 there was a hamburger.

Some time after 4.30 we were back at the house. There was a brandy poured before 5am. The television was turned on, loud, at 5.02am. Phone calls came at 5.11. The hi-fi was on by 5.12. Everyone in the house was awake by 5.14. Harsh words were spoken at 5.22. The hi-fi was turned off. Also at 5.22.

A sandwich was made at 5.24. Marmite and apricot jam. A brandy was spilt at 5.23. A broken glass was quietly discarded in the kitchen bin at 5.26.

A sandwich was used as a pillow at 5.28. A television was turned off at 5.29. A blanket was cast across a sleeping figure at 5.31pm. The lights were turned off at 5.32am.

A short goodnight was spoken at 5.33am. "Ja boet. The okes can still jol."

The lord of the house went to bed at 5.37am. A bachelor, for now. But not for long.

#  When Talking, Voting, Swallowing your Pride and Patient Hoping Fails

The Last Poets, of Chuck D or not, were not right in this case. A revolution had been televised, since first the flu of freedom flew, as such things do tend to do, through our fragile neighbourhood.

Even we, freed before though we might have been, are not immune. Are those complaints, those demands of our North African semi-brethren, any different to ours? Do our youth have prospects any better than the million men in Tahrir square? Are their certificates any less useless? Less meaningless? Has economics failed them any less than it has us?

Are we not smoking cigarettes of silly, privileged apathy in flammable frustrated nations suffused with fumes of anger, crushed hopes, deferred dreams and any-minute-now igniting points?

Are we any closer to the bone, to mix a messy metaphor? I mean shees, man. How much tinned food do you have on you? When the three in four who don't work decide they've nothing left to lose by taking to the streets in protest instead of job search, drivers' tests, and your daily dose of sustenance is suddenly no longer there, how long do you reckon you'd last then?

How long before you join them? Would you? Would you watch it on TV? Would you watch it, wait it out, or would you want it? Are you waiting for it now?

Are you inspired by the sight of people taking charge of destiny, or a bit unnerved? Disturbed? Have you heard? A million men marched to make Mubarak move. And when more people are invested in changing the status quo than in trying to make it stay just so, and when the thin blue line of play-play peacekeeping policing can't hold things back no more, then it won't be held back, for sure.

Don't wanna be a doomsayer, but I'm just saying. You don't need a dictator to be oppressed, as many are. And many are. And we are not immune.

Angry people make things happen for themselves. When talking, voting, swallowing your pride and patient hoping fails. Then the spell that keeps us tied together breaks. And it's time to make another one.

It happened here once, it's fertile ground. Sound in principal one time, not so much in implementing these days, I'd say. And it's that way in plenty poorer places these dark days.

The people get their way, one way or the other, one day, whether we would wanna wish it any other way. And one day we will be those people, like we were one time.

Many were and will be one day too again in many shapes or forms of ballot boxes, some, or revolutions other times. Marches make things happen, cyber stuff does too. Communication's better soon. Talking, listening and acting on it. There's many ways to get a message through.

So be cool not cruel all you who rule. There's many ways to get a message through.

Angry people make things happen for themselves. When talking, voting, swallowing your pride and patient hoping fails, then the spell that keeps us tied together breaks. And it's time to make another one.

#  Settle-down Time for the People of the South

The South is a strange place to most people, but if you come from there, it's like home. Not, like Rosettenville, more Oakdene, Bassonia. Me and my mates all still stay there. We grew up together, and we still there.

There's houses in Glen Vista that are about R900 000 for a two-bedroom townhouse. That's not cheap, hey. It's the same as Bedfordview, boet.

But we all still there. We can just call each other up and braai. It's not like the one oke's staying in Honeydew and the other guy's in Illovo or whatever. We all still there where we went to school. I'm renting a place in Mondeor... It's lekker in the South. It's probably a bit like the Eastern Cape. Okes are genuine, you know what I mean?

We all used to play roller-hockey together. There in the parking lot of The Glen shopping centre. And we still all staying there near each other.

It's just... Yussie, that commute's killing me. You know, boet, I leave at seven on the dot to get here by nine. And if I'm five minutes late, you can add another half hour to that. Two and a half hours, boet! Just to get to Sandton!

It's a joke, man.

But I'm 26 now and I always said I wanna have lighties before I'm thirty. It'd be lekker to be able to play with my lighties. Even my grandkids. My one mate's grandpa even comes and plays seven-a-side football with us sometimes. It's lekker, that. The guy's in his sixties, but he can play football with his grandson.

I've just gotta propose some time this year. Then we got two years to hang out, and we can have kids before I'm thirty.

She's just started working here in Sandton, so I'm waiting for her to crack. I'm saying nothing. It's been three weeks so far, but I can check she's getting moeg. That commute's starting to get to her. Two hours to Sandton. Two hours back. I'm just waiting for her to suggest that we buy a place here in the north.

And then it's on. We get a place in, like, Parkmore. Have you checked that place? It's not so steep. It's about a mil and a half for a three-bed place. And close to Sandton, boet. Five minutes!

I've always said, I must have my own house when I get married. You know what I mean? You can't bring your wife home to a rented flat. I scheme by the time we got a place here in Sandton, I'll propose.

Kim, Her name's Kim. Also from the South. I'm a proper South boytjie, boet. But it's time for a oke to get serious now. You know what I mean?

It's time to settle down now.

#  Getting Back in the Game

Much has been written about drinking and its debilitating effects on the human body, mind and spirit. All largely true.

Taken with the wisdom of such insights, I once stopped drinking completely for five years. Half a decade! Five years of not one drop of booze.

The benefits were many: fresh, energised mornings of joy and happiness, promotions at work, more disposable income, the admiration of vivacious women... For the sober man, the very fabric of time expands with loveliness and possibility.

The thing is, though, it gets a bit boring. You can only be the one straight person at a house party for so many times before you stop going. And watching a ska band like Fuzigish perform live without a beer in your hand feels like a crime against nature.

Also, World Cup 2010 was coming up. SA's biggest party ever! I wasn't going to be the only straight person at that thing. Bugger that.

So some time in late '09, I resolved to start drinking again.

It may sound simple, but relaunching your drinking career after five years off the sauce is easier said than done.

For one thing, your alcoholic tolerance has vanished entirely, so you have the drinking capacity of an eleven-year-old choirgirl. For another, booze tastes absolutely terrible!

When your tongue's no longer accustomed to it, even a light beer will taste like carbonated Rand Show mop water.

It was a lot like being back in Standard Eight and trying to get into drinking for the first time. Except I was a grown-up.

In those days in early 2010, I would be at a table in a bar, we'd order a round, everyone would finish theirs and I'd have, like, 90 per cent of mine left. "Yoh! You only nursing that one, hey," would be the jibe.

So the next round I'd try keep up, forcing this stuff down my gullet every minute, dry heaving all the while. I'd skelmly pour a bit out into the potplant when no one was looking.

Sometimes I'd take my beer to the toilet with me and pour some in the urinal, hoping no one would catch me.

I found myself drinking stuff like Spin, because it was sweet and went down easier. Manly drinks like whisky... that stuff was like paint thinners with fishing hooks in it.

But I persevered. The World Cup was too important for Project Relapse to be abandoned.

In the months leading up to the tournament, I would take myself off to the Brass Helmet, my local, and force-feed myself three Windhoek Lights in one sitting. With two Sparkles sweets in between each one to get rid of the taste.

Pretty soon we'd all started buying our merch – vuvuzelas, Bafana jackets and those scarfs like a long SA flag. By that time I could have three proper beers and a shooter without kotching. I was still far from competitive match fitness, you understand, but I was no longer an embarrassment.

My tolerance being what it was, though, my hangovers were on another level. One morning, after a night where I made new breakthroughs in my training, I woke up convinced we were having an earthquake.

But the body is a marvellous thing and much like Spain striker Fernando Torres, I was able to complete my comeback in time for World Cup 2010. There I was at the Innisfree Fan Park: feeling it, nicely pissed and freezing my arse off.

Even today, in a lot of ways I'm the Fernando Torres of dopping. After my enforced lay-off, I will never be the same player I was in my prime. But given the right man-management, decent service and the right attitude, on my night I'm still capable of greatness.

#  Crotch Fight at the Cockroach Café

It's the last moments of the evening and we're just calling things off. Brushing our teeth and deciding whether it's cold enough to wear a T-shirt to bed.

As I'm throwing the last of the beer cans in the bin, I notice a cockroach scuttling across the floor of the room. It's heading diagonally across the carpet, from the pool table towards the refrigerator.

We're about to go to bed, and I start flashing on images of cockroaches scuttling across my face while I sleep. I'm not having it. The cockroach is gonna have to go.

With nimble stealth, I prance over to the fridge and give it a shake. Sure enough, the cockroach emerges from underneath the appliance and makes a break for it.

Stomp! But I've missed. He heads for the little side table.

On top of the side table is an ebony coaster, a nice, solid, wooden placemat. Perfect for squashing a cockroach.

But I need to get within range. It's a light, little table he's hiding under, so I get down, sit by the side table and prepare to lift the corner, revealing the roach and hastening its demise.

But it's a cunning bloody cockroach. As I lift the corner, I'm just, just aware of my enemy shooting to the left, underneath my outstretched legs, as I lie on the floor, peering beneath the side table.

Tjoeps! It sprints under my shorts and... Jeez! What if it's gone up my shorts! It could be on me! Where's it gone? Where's it gone?

I jump to my feet, desperately scanning the floor and patting myself down for the renegade crawler. The thing could be anywhere. Oh-my-god! There it is.

There, poised on the bulge of my crotch, stands my nemesis. The cockroach.

Reared up on his hind legs, he's in full attack mode. His antennae swivel wildly; cold, merciless eyes fix me with a death stare. As he brandishes his forelegs like pincers, he's about to plunge his claws into the flesh beneath his feet!

There's not a second to be lost! I'm still holding the ebony coaster, so without a moment's thought, I smash the daylights out of the roach, as he stands defiant on my crotchal bulge. One swift, downward blow to the genitals.

A white flash of pain shoots through my entire body and I drop to the floor like a stone. I've just punched myself in the testicles as hard as I can.

My wife emerges from the bathroom, having just finished brushing her teeth. I'm in a foetal ball, pale and speechless, between the pool table and the fridge and an up-ended side table. I'm making a strange sound: laughing hysterically and moaning in agony at the same time.

"Oh my god, Baby! What happened? You look like you've been in a fight!"

"I have!" I croak. "Been in a fight."

"You so pale, my babe! Are you okay?"

"Nnnnn. Should see the other guy."

#  When the Memories Come out to Play

"There aren't many Pirates fans in PE," says Xolisa, gesturing to the expanse of Zanzibar, Parliament Street, which, on match days is packed with punters.

Right then, a guy walks into the bar in a Pirates shirt. It's Baby's old mate Trevor. He's known. He's a successful guy.

Just as we're saying howzit, our companion Fred is like, "Bob Kernohan's next door at Café Blend!"

We pop outside and there's Bob, having a tramezzini. He's the guy who taught me the ropes. Taught me sub-editing, which to this day is about the only useful skill I have.

Nelson Mandela Bay tourism are taking us on a tour of the Bay, even though we're from there. Tourists in our own city.

And that's the old Farmers Home hotel. Where Hally had to go fetch his drunk father in Athol Fugard's Master Harold & The Boys. Tourism should start an Athol Fugard tour, they really should.

They could go visit the Donkin, Bob says, there where Hally and Sam went and flew the kite, that time in the play.

That's where we're headed next, The Donkin. It's just down the road, we can walk it. And as we're doing so, just there, outside the old Wu's café, a bakkie hoots at us and stops.

It's Steve! Shabba Schultz! From the old days. He's on a work mission, but he stops and we have a lekker catch-up, there in the middle of Parliament Street.

Steve's in flooring, but he's still jamming, still rocking the bass like back in the day. He's busy with an awesome contract out at Krom. So lekker to check him again... "Have I still got your number?"

The rain is coming back, and in the meantime, the peeps are waiting for us there at the Donkin. There where they've put up that awesome artwork with the pipes. It looks like a pipe organ that melted in the sun.

There opposite Donkin Terrace, where there was a Vodacom agency once. There where me and Jerome bumped each other the one time. Near the old Grey Institute where Robbie used to work.

Next to the Edward Hotel, where I made my modelling debut in the old Images 2000 competition. Across the road from the old Up The Khyber where we played pool with Rodriguez after his show at UPE.

At the same intersection with the Grand Gardens hotel, where Napalm Death played that time, where I went and played pool with my old man and we checked Sandon and Jules.

Up the road from the Opera House where I got hypnotised by Max Collie. He made me passionately kiss the lady next to me. And I was only 15. She was in her twenties. It was a good time to get hypnotised.

And it's a good time to be a tourist in your own town. When you're from a town as full of memories as this, coming home is magical.

Even on a rainy day. The weather is atrocious, but somehow it brings the memories out.

#  The Queue with the Women and the Book

The queue is moving slowly and the Shakespeare book comes in handy. Henry the Fourth part one. Published 1926, it's a family heirloom. The price is still inside the title page in pencil: 4/6. The Works Of Shakespeare.

Behind me in the queue is a polite blonde woman who resembles my standard four teacher, and wears her same nylon, green floral dress.

Another woman joins the line, behind the blonde, floral lady. She's a pushy German woman and asks where the numbers are. Apparently where she's from you need to queue with numbers. I tell her no, there are no numbers, around these parts we just wait.

She realises I speak German and attaches herself to me, cutting in front of the lady in the dress. I get back into my Shakespeare, hoping that'll throw her off.

It's the one with the poncey Sir John Falstaff and there on page 478 I find an ancient bookmark that must have belonged to my grandmother. It's an A6 sheet of artist's sketch paper. On the one side is a black ink sketch of the roof of a cathedral and lots of huts. Dozens of huts. Maybe Grahamstown? She lived in the Transkei.

"What's wrong with the woman's foot," the pushy German lady wants to know. I look, and she has a club foot. It resembles the foot of an elephant, or a hippo, but pink, with an angry septic cast to her ankle.

"She says the foot," I tell my old teacher. Mrs Rider. "She wants to know what happened to your foot."

Of course she's not my teacher. Now I look closer, I see she's more like the woman from the SPCA who slept with JM Coetzee in Disgrace.

"It was a stomach leech," the SPCA woman tells me. "It went from my stomach down to my foot and ate it away."

Who knows the German for stomach leech? Not me. "It came from her stomach," I tell the pushy German woman and get back to the Shakespeare.

The queue moves up one. They're looking for models. The woman I'm with is a lithe Zimbabwean girl that I cast yesterday afternoon, with mysterious bruises on her arms and an oriental look to her.

"Where are your models," I ask the ladies. "We are the models," they tell me, and move up one.

Inside Henry the Fourth, I turn the bookmark over. Written in blue pen are the names of three of my aunts and uncles. "Rick R25, Margie R12, Johnny R13" It looks like a sum about pocket money from 1961. Scattered about are more numbers, 6, 4, 12=4, 4, 18, 95, 5, 5.

The page is torn and folded, brown and beige with age, and you can see blots of ink coming through, from the art on the other side.

The maths on the one side, the art on the other, the German, the queue, the models, it's almost like a dream. The kind of thing I would dream.

#  In the Eye of the Metal Storm

A man with a bra on his head lies sunburnt on the floor of the Black Dahlia tent. At a glance you'd say he had forty seconds of consciousness left. A girl approaches his prostrate form, straddles him and lowers herself onto his crotch. It's a stunt, all for the benefit of her mates, there by the bar, lagging and having Labels to celebrate Haggis & Bong's killer set.

They haven't got all their Celtic war paint off yet, but they've put away their bagpipes. You must, though. You must put away your bagpipes. Those things can get destroyed at a Thornfest like this. And they look expensive.

The mechanical horse claims another willing victim, as does the brandy, and the skateboard ramp and the moshpit at Deity's Muse. Two for the halfpipe and a tattoo voucher for your troubles in the pit. And some Jägies merchandise if you make some noise at the Heroes Wear Red show.

The promo girls might kiss each other if the moment takes them, and everyone's sunburnt now. And upright, at least.

"Drink it or drive it," says the poster by the bar, "choose one". That choice has been made by the gallon. The Is That Blood show is empty. Twenty-odd die-hards face it on their own at the main stage, clinging to the front railing, where some shade has appeared. The first Wiccan whiffs of rain as they finish, coming to bless us and wash away the more obvious of our sins.

The camp sees action. The metal massive repair to there for a snooze or a whatever, till the big names come on. Probably from about five, when Chromium play. After that it's gonna be war. People are going to need their rest.

It's definitely rain, so muddy war. Trench warfare, to the screams and power chords of the apocalypse. Heavy metal till dawn, my friend.

You'll be lucky for some ska punk to catch your breath. And your neck will never be the same.

Devil horns everywhere. Applause is almost non-existent. Who can clap when you've got a beer in your hand all weekend! Some whistles and a forest of raised metal-horn salutes is all the acknowledgement an ambitious young metal band craves, anyway.

But just off the pool area, near where the bucking bronco is pitching punters into the cushions is an oasis.

Just in case the metal's getting a bit much. Maybe twelve hours of non-stop death metal is just a little over your limit. Maybe no one told you you're supposed to wear earplugs. If this is you, you wanna be on the funky disco floor.

In the corner, DJ J-P sits by his PC in baggies and slops. The dancefloor is exclusively women, screaming and squealing, alco-pops aloft and bumping hips with each other, play-play lesbian style.

J-P has a sip of Amstel and looks at his screen as Get Down On It starts finishing. He puts his finger to his lips. We need a killer follow-up.

Here we go. Dan-Dan. Dan-Da-Deet! Boogie Wonderland by Earth Wind & Fire. That's the metal antidote right there.

#  Joburg's Metal Kings

I saw Joburg's metal kings, through the haze of too much drinking. I saw Pestroy live, at the Roxy, changed my life. Man was rockin' a rad sunvisor those days, it was in between the dreadlock phase and the man said to reconnect till we connect to reconnect till we connect or words to that effect.

Another man said, chinning ching-ching chi-ni-ni-ning. Remember that thing? It was Jimmy's thing, made the guitar sing, made the strings scheme chinning ching-ching chi-ni-ni-ning. I saw Joburg's metal kings, through the haze of too much drinking.

Another man threw up two devil horns, tunes whaddo you scheme? I tune, "Fuckin' metal." I saw Joburg's metal kings through the haze of too much drinking. Chinning ching-ching chi-ni-ni-ning. I saw Joburg's metal kings through the haze of too much drinking.

And one day when your drinking and drugging and fucking turns to fucking out, tune fuckin' A. I might be pegging today, but back in the day, when it meant something, I saw Joburg's metal kings, through the haze of too much drinking. Chinning ching-ching chi-fuckin'-ni-ni-ning. I saw Joburg's metal kings.

And I'm not gonna lie, It's a helluva thing.

#  Travels with my Ballbag

I would've inspected myself for lumps, but my right ball was too painful too touch. It was pretty obvious that I was dying of testicular cancer.

I reported to my doctor on the Monday and gave him the bad news. He wasn't quite so sure. "It's probably epididymitis," he yawned, before giving my delicate bollock a squeeze and confirming it.

Just another day when I thought I was going to die. Another day in the life of a person preparing for the Comrades marathon. Yusses, boet. You know how they say ultra-marathons aren't good for you? Well they not lying.

When I started training this year for my second Comrades marathon, I was ready for shin splints, back pain, torn muscles, plantar fasciitis, joint pains and transcendental levels of chafe. But what I was completely unprepared for was the toll the running would take on my ballbag.

They call this condition epididymitis and it's an inflammation of the epididymis, the reservoir at the back of the testicle, in which sperm is stored. The epididymis is linked to the deferent tubes, the cables that link one's bollocks to the penis proper.

How does that apply to ultra-distance running? Well think about it. In training, you're running two, three, four hours with your testicles bouncing up and down inside your ballbag the entire way like a couple of fleshy karaoke prompts. By the time you run the race itself, you could be doing that for 12 hours! Twelve hours, where your two lychee-sized scrotum globes, suspended on their tiny sperm wires, are being bounced up and down repeatedly all morning and afternoon.

Your traditional nylon running shorts, besides being shorter than something Corné and Twakkie might wear on Eighties-tribute night, also contain a nylon gauze lining, which is supposed to support your undercarriage. In my case, this is simply not good enough.

This year, the early part of my training went as well as can be expected, but my first marathon of the season was where the problems started. (The Comrades is in early June, and most runners spend the first half of the year in training, the second half drinking beer.)

Anyway, I came out of that first training marathon feeling like a rabid weasel had been gnawing on my right gonad all morning. I could barely walk, and by the time I got home from Pretoria, it was all I could do to lie spreadeagled on the couch with my legs akimbo like someone about to have their piles taken care of – all the while becoming more and more convinced that I was dying of ballbag Aids.

Luckily – and hallelujah to you, Dr Du Plessis – my doc was able to put my mind at rest, and prescribe some meds that had me pretty much sorted within a week.

But for the next time out on the road, I would require a lot more crotch support. So for my illustrious return, I donned my cotton under-rods beneath my running shorts. I got through the magnificent downtown Nike #runjozi 10km race without damaging my testicles, but here's the thing: nylon doesn't give you a rash; cotton does.

So by the end of my sprint through downtown Jozi, I had given myself the worst penis chafe you can imagine. The end of my helmet was rubbed raw! I tell you, it looked like I'd been using my eleventh digit as brake shoes on a go-kart.

As any man will tell you, this is quite serious. One's helmet is, how shall we say, the business end of the penis. You don't want to be grinding that thing too hard. But I had to keep running. I've committed to Comrades. I've gotta have extra support for my ballbag, but not at the expense of my helmet.

So on my next run, I stuck a plaster over the end of my penis, right where the friction burns were occurring. This was a masterstroke, and I completed a massive, four-hour training run without incident.

Well, until I had my first visit to the men's room upon my return. Having taped my pee-hole shut and then completely forgotten about it, I was in for quite a surprise. A little jaded from the run, I stumbled off to the toilet, relaxed my bladder valve and proceeded to experience a full-body pain-gasm, during which the stream of urine backed up all the way from the tip of my penis, through my bladder and into the kidneys. It felt like a Russian hotel maid was cleaning my pipes with a toilet brush!

So look, my genitals present a rather beleaguered prospect at the moment. Suffice to say I'm not going to be doing any crotch modelling soon.

But I might just about be able to give a decent account of myself in the Comrades come June 3. Wish us luck. Me, and my ballbag.

#  Stories Scars Tell

Every scar tells a story, they say. In the old days, these would have been tales of glory, conquest and victory on the battlefield of nations. These days, scars are somewhat more prosaic.

Actually, I just looked up prosaic. Not prosaic. Embarrassing. As I cast about my body for disturbances in its otherwise ruggedly handsome surface, every scar I encounter tells a tale of utter ignominy, cringefulness, face-palming doom and failure.

What amplifies the embarrassment of these scars of shame is that for a week or two you get to retell your tale of how you sustained the injury, totally out of context, and seldom to a sympathetic audience.

You're in a pitch meeting, and your prospective client will notice you've scorched the crook of your right elbow. "You've burnt the inside of your elbow! How'd that happen?"

"Er, it's a friction-burn, actually," you'll reply, "we were having a long-jump competition out the back door of my mate's kitchen. I hooked my arm over his washing line as I jumped and... zzzrrkk!"

"Zzzzrrkk, indeed," he'll muse ironically. And you'll begin the presentation, all the while trying to suck your entire arm back into your T-shirt.

The scar will fade, but never quite disappear, a lifelong reminder, to you at least, of long-jump night at Glen's house in Summerstrand.

"Elke sport het sy besering," my other mate Smiler keeps saying. Every sport has its injuries. And drinking, in so much as it's a sport, has a fine catalogue of injuries.

Among these you would count the facial carpet-burn from tripping over the ottoman trying to high-five your brother-in-law during the Champions League final, the torn bicep from bodysurfing down Stanley Street behind an Isuzu KB and the bloody thumb-blister from snapping your fingers for two hours listening to DJ Speedy at Truth.

A subset of drinking injuries are what I call UDIs – Unidentified Drinking Injuries. These ones you wake up with, but can't quite explain. Here I would include twisted ankles, wedgie-burns and of course the slight stiffness of jaw that implies getting a snotklap you deserved in the back of the Mokopane Dros.

Not all scars of shame come from drinking, though. Oh god, no. We humans are eminently capable of being stupid on our own steam. Who here has not tried to remove a staple with their fingers and impaled the thing six millimetres deep into their fingernail flesh? Carefully oven-gloved a baking tray from the oven, then immediately picked it up again with your bare hands? Touched an electric fence "to check if it was working"?

I'm guilty, guilty, and guilty on all counts, I'm afraid.

Life's not easy. It presents us with so many opportunities to top ourselves, let alone scar ourselves for life. I'm surprised we get beyond playschool.

There's also flopping into bed with an earbud still in your ear, the inadvertent headbutt during overzealous lovemaking and tripping over your earphone cables while cueing up Born This Way on the treadmill. You'd be surprised what we're capable of!

I propose that we own those scars. Think of them as a form of body modification through lifestyle. Say to yourself, "I've spent my life navigating the complexities of modern existence, I've picked up a few nicks and scratches, especially this DIY ear-piercing that went a bit miff, but I'm still standing."

If you came out the far side of a modern life without a single mark, scratch, scar, or wound upon your body, then you wouldn't have got the most out of it.

Yip, if life doesn't scar you, then you haven't been doing it right.

#  My Complex Heart

When the gunshots come at 3am, please please

let the guards in the access hut not sleep.

Let the 'lectric fence be active and charged

when the cars of men in black are at large

Cos god knows that I been burgled before.

Let their two grand salary suffice, please please

to keep 'em honest when they on my beat.

Cos I can hear sirens, or are they car alarms

outside, where the siege of me's in the stars.

I built it strong and hard and high and well-nigh

impenetrable, but still.

You found a breach in the wall around my complex heart.

#  How you Know you're Forty

While you're snogging to Purple Rain, watching Ferdi in the garden on Big Brother and queuing to buy nappies at Woolworths, time is marching on.

Next thing you know, you'll see fresh-faced cherubs purchasing liquor, someone who must be still a child driving a Polo... A bearded beast of an MMA guy will recite his ID number at the gym reception and it'll start with 940226...

People this young can't possibly be adults! But they are. And you, sir, you may well be forty. In case you've been too busy on the driving range to be sure whether you are, here are some indications.

You don't have a sixpack, and you don't care

You stopped taking your shirt off in public at the '05 Oppikoppi. The one where you glimpsed your side reflection in the window of a Hi-Lux double-cab. That was roughly when the point of going to gym became "avoiding a heart attack" instead of "attracting the attention of a Red Bull promo girl". Not having a sixpack also removes the responsibility of displaying it at places like H20, which exist largely for that. These days, the only person who sees your exposed abdomen is a party who asks diplomatically, "Do those jeans still fit you?"

Sport "veterans" are ten years younger than you

And you find yourself even agitating for them to retire because, "the oke's too slow to the breakdown, and our scrums are suffering". This in between asking the Brazen Head waiter to please pick your dropped wallet up off the floor for you, because you did something to your back getting the coffee plunger out of the bottom cupboard.

Kids are dropping oom bombs on you

An incidental, "Skies oom" as the young scamps hurry past you on the moving walkway at OR is fine. But when a greying, mustachioed man with a boep and a clipboard outside Spar wonders if he can interest oom in a funeral plan, things have gone too far. I mean, how old does it look like we are? Forty?

You get to go sit with "the men"

There was a time when an African family gathering meant you and the rest of the young people gathering in one place to smoke and drink away from the eyes of the grown-ups. These days, if you attend an umsebenzi, you find yourself seated in the shaded side of the garden with a bunch of madalas speaking Xhosa so deep you need a submarine to understand it. At least you get first dibs on the booze.

Music is starting to proper suck

That Janelle Monáe has got some talent and Rihanna and Nicky Minaj are not hard to look at. But if anyone left you in a room with those guys from One Direction, there'd be slaps issued. And if there's ever a competition for who wants to burn Dave Guetta's fringe off with lighter fluid, you want fifty entries. There is some decent music stuck away on the back end of the multipipe, on Simfy or lost.fm, but the best stuff's on your iTunes. Mbongeni Ngema in his prime! Now that was music!

The world's getting a bit scary

Maybe you're losing pluck. In your glory days, you once got picked up by these Senegalese guys while hitch-hiking from 206 to Melville at night, drunk. They invited you to a nudie bar in Hillbrow, where you spent the whole of Saturday morning, before walking, barefoot, to the Troyeville Hotel for a pub lunch. These days you take a longer route through Sandton to avoid the one robot where the beggars are a bit rude.

You have glory days

The very fact that you have stories to tell about the distant past implies you may be past your prime. As does the way people wince slightly when you tell them, like they know this one about the roadblock in Green Point verbatim. And the one about the time in your car outside the Purple Turtle, after Nude Girls played, that you always tell after that.

People are polite to you

The days when you hung out at Ba Pita, where your barman mate could give you sneaky tequilas? What'd he used to say when you came in? "Yo, dog! How's the head today?" with a full shoulder bump! These days it's, "Afternoon sir. Table for four? Near the kiddies' jungle gym?" And you find yourself demanding quality service. "Can we clean up this table? And maybe get some focaccia?"

Beggars stop asking you for money

Even when you do find yourself at a patrolled robot, you get snubbed. Preying on the weak as they do, beggars eschew anyone resembling a grumpy hard-arse. Presto, the minute you turn forty, you'll find the guys with the empty bags at the traffic light head straight for the lady with the poodles in the mini SUV.

You took your birth year off your Facebook profile

Just the year, not the date. Because it's still nice to get all those birthday wishes. But there's no need for everyone to know your exact age. And if you ignore it long enough, hopefully you'll start forgetting it yourself. Unfortunately, 41 messages saying "Happy belated" and "Have anything special planned?" aren't guaranteed to prevent depression.

You still have clothes from the last millennium

And you don't just own them. You're wearing them! Those Facebook pics of you guys at St George's, when Symcox and Donald had that stand? The T-shirt you had on then is the same one you wore for your monthly gym visit on Tuesday. You might've pulled a rotator cuff. Could probably do with some physio.

If this is you, then by the sounds of things you should go to physio. Those people know what they're doing. They'll be able to conduct a thorough physical analysis and confirm whether your body is forty years old. But I'm telling you now. It's not looking good for you.

#  Away from the Timeline

(One two three four.)

First verse. It doesn't get any worse. Me and Missing Link on the floor with guitars. We are family. We're up against the door, by the stage, beside the girls. In the name of Jesus Christ we were bless-ed at birth. Family. Only space in the house. Family.

We are family. Pata Pata come to praise. (I know it I know it I know it.) We family! Missing Link is polite on his nerves. Siya bear him load. Inan'out from di road. Family. Electronics bring the people to a night in the town. Monday Blues, Maboneng. The Soil upon the stage...

(Know it I know it I know it.)

Joy! Jo-o-o-y! Jo-o-o-o-o-y!

I know it's the kind of feelin'

Missing Link nurse a drink, just the one to ease the nerves. The Soil play a fourth "last song" in a row.

I got love in my heart. I got love in my heart. And you know it's the kind of feeling. Mama wam ndiyabu-le-la!

(I got my mother-my-father-my-sister-my-lover!)

Master P want to say that today the born day. Thixo wam wakudala!

Namhl' ek'seni. Ilanga libeth'ebsweni. Ndahamba nday'ecaweni. A capella get down as down can ever get and the audience is swooning. Lovely ladies in the house got the songs verbatim! Usis'thandwa sam, You! Get up and dance! Now, you! Get up and dance and get as down as you can. Family. I'm saying this coz we are family. Family. I got joy in my heart. I got love in my heart. I got joy in my heart. And you know it's the kind of feelin'... We are family. Family. We are family. I know it, I know it, I know it. We are family.

We come to praise. We come to know. We come to play our maiden show. UBongeziwe udlal'ingom'ethi uGunuza! Family! We come to stand outside. Shake the hand of a man, be smokin' all that time. Coz we are family!

Family. Family. Family.

Meanwhile, in a twitterverse far away, racist bile vomits across cyberspace, as the repulsive, the evil and the stupid fight for microphone time with the self-righteous and the cuntish. Bigotry rides side by side on your timeline with wilful ignorance; condescending sarcasm passes for communication. The deaf fight the dumb. All talk shit and nobody listens. Griffiths Mxenge died so spoilt children could spit on his grave. But also for this...

Coz we are family! Family! Family!

#  Borderline Short? Ha!

I had a recent exchange with a few ladies outside Kitchener's Bar in Braamfontein. In between grooving to Kid Fonque and waiting for Blk Jks to start already, we began comparing heights. Anele believed she was the tallest person in our group. I had to disabuse her of that notion in the time-honoured way. We took off our shoes and stood back to back.

As I thought. I am a good ten centimetres taller than Anele. But it was Nomfundo's parting shot that really got to me: "Okay, you're taller than Anele. But as far as white boys go, you're borderline short."

Borderline short! I'm 1,76m tall! Shortness does not sit well with the male human. If I'm short, then Usher's short. Then Brad Pitt is short. Flippin' Zac Efron is short!

I mean, I know I'm not tall! My height has never been my distinguishing feature. But my shortness has never been either!

I was gonna clear this up quick-quick. First thing the next morning I was on the multipipe, googling stuff. According to the South African Department of Health survey of 1998, the height of the average South African male is 1,69m. For women, it's 1,59m. So that puts me, and my girl Anele safely in the realm of "quite tall for a South African". Fact is, though, South Africans are a rather short nation.

According to this one table I found, average male heights are greater than ours in most countries in the world. The odd exceptions are to be found in Asia and South America. But we're truly overshadowed by countries like The Netherlands, where men average 1,837m in height. Dutch women come in at 1,667m. Germans are similarly tall, Norwegians too, and Czechs as well, but the region with the tallest people on earth is the Dinaric Alps in the former Yugoslavia. Here men average 1,856m in height. That's 6'1" – on average! Their women (1,71m) are taller than our men!

Other tall populations are the Nilotic people of Sudan and Polynesian populations in Tonga and Samoa. These genetic trends can be attributed to centuries of taller, more muscular warriors having their pick of the breeding-age females, or being favoured with the attentions of the females who were themselves the offspring of older warrior kings.

The chief determinant of human height is genetics, but environmental effects like nutrition and local health care for mothers and children also play a role. The amount that genetics affects height varies according to population groups.

Among white people, height has an 80% heritability. In developing countries the heritability is less. In China and West Africa, height heritability is around 65%. In the words of molecular biologist Dr Chao-Qiang Lai in The Scientific American, "When a given environment maximises the genetic potential of a population for a given trait, this population tends to have a higher heritability for that trait, and vice versa."

So for instance, the Nilotic populations, which in the Fifties were found to be taller, are today relatively less so. Dinka males in the Fifties measured an average of 1,83m in a study by Roberts and Bainbridge. But a study of Sudanese refugees published in 1995 found them to average 1,759m in height. That's the same as me. And according to the ladies of Kitchener's, I'm not even tall!

But I'm a white South African of colonial descent. Interestingly, when my British descendants arrived in SA during the 1800s, the average height of an English man was below 1,68m. A century and a half later, SA white male average heights in the 1998 survey were 1,77m. In the UK they were 1,744m. So, given the same genetic heritage, white people have grown taller in South African than have those who remained in Britain. Probably due to all that braaiing.

And yes. It turns out I am of slightly below average height for my population group. If you want to be picky about it. "Borderline short" for a whiteboy.

A lot of good all that research did me.

#  In the Embarrassing Words of my Ancestor

I recently read a travel journal written by my great-grandfather on my mother's side, and published in 1906.

---

I've been aware of the book for a few years now, but been unable to lay hands on it. Thanks to advances in online publishing, though, the document has been digitally captured, and I was able to download it on a site called scribd.com.

For years I thought I was going to have to special request the book on an inter-library loan, but these days you can find long-out-of-print books on any one of half a dozen sites. The book is Briton, Boer And Black: Ten Years Travelling, Trading and Prospecting In South Africa.

Having got all excited about finding this artefact from my family history, my excitement was soon replaced by trepidation. What was in this thing? The title is self-explanatory, it's a tale of derring-do, gold-prospecting, swashbuckling battles, intrepid journeys and savvy business dealings in some pretty remote outposts across Southern Africa.

But what about the politics! Great-gramps was a British imperialist in the heyday of colonial conquest of our subcontinent. One couldn't be sure, but it was likely he had participated in establishing a global empire by exploiting, double-crossing and exterminating indigenous populations worldwide. It was quite possible that 105 years of hindsight would do him no favours. So it was with some nerves that I loaded the document onto my iPad and opened page one.

Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain all showed the bigotry of their time in their work, so there was no reason my grandfather should be immune. Indeed he was not!

The book made harrowing reading for a white liberal who's always fancied himself an enlightened soul.

Great-grampa peppers his account with k-bombs, n-bombs and paternalism, before segueing incidentally into the most benighted racism one could imagine. At one point a group of BaSotho gun runners await their colleagues, "squatting, like so many baboons".

Later on, in what was either present-day Zimbabwe or Zambia, he encounters all manner of "savages". He remarks, almost anthropologically that the "blacks always beat about the bush, especially when they have something important to discuss". There's worse too.

The Boers don't escape my tribesman's gimlet eye either. They get off quite lightly, though, being found "a very hospitable race, friendly to the English as individuals, especially if one can speak their language".

Disappointed as I was with the tone and the attitudes displayed, there was hope. As I say, the bigotry is almost incidental, unquestioned. In fact, the dealings of the protagonist with the other characters (almost all either black or Dutch) are just about all positive. Even a spell he spends held captive by a tribe in darkest Matabeleland is a fairly polite experience.

We're hardly talking Mein Kampf here. The narrative is not a conscious justification of white supremacy. The right of the British to rule the world and look after its primitive inhabitants is simply taken as a given.

It's just bizarre how the penny never drops. He spends weeks lost in the desert, saved from certain death only by the ingenuity of his black companion, and the guy is paternalistically deemed "a decent sort of fellow".

In fact, almost all the adventuring is made possible only by the assistance of the locals, who consistently bail the Brits out just when all seems lost. In one case they're lent a new span of oxen when theirs have all died. Another time, Mac is given a set of clothes once his kudu-skin suit starts falling off his body. His gun-running exploits see him smartly out-negotiated by a Basotho chief. And the book concludes with the abortive Jameson Raid ending in ignominious failure.

Mac, the protagonist, speaks Dutch and a couple of black languages, and he seems in the process of becoming Africanised, but throughout there is an unquestioning faith in colonialism.

Africa seems to be the white man's playground, as well as a place that must be managed on behalf of its wretched inhabitants.

So ultimately Briton, Boer And Black gives a decent insight into the colonial mindset. There's some brave adventuring as well. Lions are slain, Boer maidens are met, guns are run, deserts, forests and swamps are traversed.

The book was published in 1906 in London by T Sealey Clark, and one can sense that it was tailored to reinforce the attitudes of its intended market. Perhaps in the years following the Boer War, the climate was not quite right to cast aspersions on imperialism.

My discovery of my ancestor's book has helped me get to know a family member who died decades before I was born – warts and all. Mr Handley appears to have written a couple of other books and those will be the target of my next trawl through the internet, even if I read them with one eye, flinching with embarrassment.

You should have a look too. Quiz your family elders and google the names of your ancestors. That's what I did, and I struck gold. The writings of one's elders give you a level of self-knowledge far deeper than any photographs or family trees.

It's not always pretty, but it does bring the evolution of our cultural values into relief and underline the distance that we've come. It's also an incentive to question the values we take for granted today.

There's no doubt that our current daily scribblings, our tweets, updates, blogs and posts will far outlive us. So it would probably pay to look deep and interrogate our personal values, lest we embarrass our descendants a hundred years from now. We probably will, though. And sooner than that!

#  Where you Taking us, Boet?

I don't know about this place, hey. We been here a month and already I just want to get back to Joburg, to my friends. To people I can trust.

I mean, my chick's here at the hospital, and you wanna support her and that, but fuck, that commute is killing me, and there some weird people here.

So last night we go out for a bit of a jol. To this club in town. You know mos how we dig a bit of a boogie.

So we go to this thing at this bar and you must check this place. Super... I dunno what you'd call it... Super unpretentious. It's just a square room with tables and chairs, a couple of pool tables...

We checked the end of the Cheetahs game there.

And they got this little stage in the corner and this DJ oke comes and sets up his little PC set-up with some speakers and some CDs and shit. Bald oke with two big silver earrings like a pirate. And one of those flat caps and a little chin beard. You know what I mean?

So we have a couple of dops and they turn down the lights and this oke starts playing this music. Commercial dance and all this kak. Lady Gaga.

But my babe digs it and anyway, we have a coupla dops and get into it. The oke's jolling Rihanna and Katy Perry and that, but then he jols that new one with Eminem and Dr Dre, which is okay. So it's not too bad.

So we get a bit pissed and stick around for a bit. A couple of cats pull in, it's quite a little community jol, you know. You know, like, in a small town there's all kinds of okes. There's... these guys that work in IT in Alberton, and school lighties in goth outfits, some couples... Those old okes that just sit at the end of the bar having a Windhoek and not saying fuckall to nobody...

We play some pool and that. Then the oke plays a bit of David Guetta – you know that one with, um, with the chick who was in Destiny's Child... Not Beyoncé. Ja, so he plays that one. When Love Takes Over! Ja, kief tune.

I check he's drinking Peron is, so I bring him a Peroni and ask if he's got that Black Eyed Peas song Boom Boom Pow.

And the next thing it's late and there's hardly anyone left and the oke starts playing this weird music. I don't know if you know that, um, what do they call it? It's like reggae, but it's more like... not dub, it's. Ja! Dubstep! He starts playing this dubstep shit.

You dig it? I don't know, hey. Anyway, he starts playing this stuff, so I ask him about spliff. Does he have any zol?

You know how I normally get from Oscar, but now I'm here and I been missioning to get, so this ou schemes ja he's got some and we go for a spliff outside with this oke.

Bra, I'm telling you. I'm sure this guy spiked us with tik or something. I've never been that fucked ever. Even now, I'm still like trembling. It just went on and on and on. From one mini-blader!

I'm sure there was some tik in this oke's zol. Me and my babe, it just klapped us so hard! We get back in the place and I just feel, like, I dunno. You know when your skin suddenly feels all grimy? And I don't know if I wanna pass out or dance or, like, have another twenty drinks or what, but the dubstep starts sounding a bit better, so we jol a bit more and have a few more Peronis or whatever.

But you know me, man. I'm not a lightweight, hey. I'm used to my proper zol, okay. But this shit was summing else. Fucked, hey! My chick's been kotching...

And then the next thing the oke invites us to this "afterparty". Ha! More like a personal afterparty!

He tunes us he lives just round the corner, so we think ja, why not. So when the place closes, we follow this oke. Broe, he lives in, like, Sasolburg or something. And we rushing the whole time. I dunno if it was, maybe, cat or something.

After an hour of following this oke I flick him and I pull over. I tune him where you taking us, boet? He's like no, it's just round the corner. Just follow me.

But now I'm getting serious misgivings about this. Something just doesn't feel right. I scheme the okes were going to rob us, hey. He was probably taking us to his drug den, where they were gonna mug us and take the car, I scheme.

Or maybe I was just paranoid. I don't know.

But in the end I just turned the car around and fucked off home. Just got the fuck out of there. I scheme we dodged a bullet there, maybe.

Only feeling kak now, though. Haven't even managed to get out the house.

But I'll come up to Joburg next weekend, though. We must hook up. Go for a beer at the Brazen Head or something. Ja, somewhere safe!

#  What would Wally do? Or 'Die Eensaamste Soutie in Tjoeras'

It comes on quick. At 29 kays I was fine. By 30 I'm fucked. The hopelessness descends halfway up the M10 freeway. I'm not gonna make it. I don't have another 12 kays in me.

Marathons are trippy as shit. There's ten kays of quirky banter, another 20-odd of serious road-running, and then the psychedelics kicks in. Squeeze all energy reserves from your body, then feed it cups of Coke every fifteen minutes and you flip out.

Your vertical-hold is out, so you're weaving down Krugerlaan, some shamelessly suburban avenue in deepest Centurion, water sachets glinting like condoms of crystal cum in the vertical sunlight. You're surrounded by strangers. Down to your last.

There's leg pain that can't carry on. Your body's not having it. The shin splints and the calf cramps and the thigh spasms and the ITB and the left knee. There's some kind of scrotal torsion going on, somewhere beneath your retracted penis... The right toe is one part arthritis, two parts gout. Blisters just starting to burst now. That must've been the one on the left just now.

It's impossible. 31 kays. I can smell myself: shit, piss, crusty sweat. Suppurating scabs of crusty, salt skin weeping beneath my armpits. Tears dry in the corners of my eyes even before they can merge with my diabetic spittle.

In the change pocket of my shorts I have some kind of energy sweet. A last, vain shot of sugar. Without water, it congeals in my mouth like a dry turd. Its brownness clings to my teeth. I gasp through my calcified mouth, like a rectum. Even the other runners look away.

I give up, slumping to the sidewalk. Broken. My race is run.

The first old lady to pass mutters, "Wimp." beneath her breath. Pride stung, I stand and stagger on like a desert refugee. I can't swallow. I can't breathe. This turd in my mouth. The pain! Underarms bleeding freely. My face a death mask now, gasping and swearing involuntarily.

Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus Christ! Oh my fuck! Fuck sakes! Poes, man! Ah, fuck! Fuckin' hell!

A first-aid station appears. "Guys, I don't think I'm going to be able to finish this race. I'm going to have to stop. It's these shin splints... My legs..." Ek kannie meer nie, korporaal.

But there's no sympathy here either.

"Ag. You can stop, but... have you got someone to come fetch you? Thing is, the sweeper van is only coming past in another hour and a half. So you might as well just carry on. If you don't make it, they'll pick you up. So you might as well be on the road..."

Fuckers won't even let me stop. What kind of first aid is that? I stumble out of the emergency gazebo and immediately go into complete bilateral leg spasm. I lunge for the guardrail, paralysed! Gingerly stretch some circulation back in and then stagger on down the highway. Can't anyone plant any fuckin' trees in this fuckin' place? There's no shade for fuckin' days!

Ogh! What's that one say? 32 kays. It's too fuckin' far. If I had my phone, I'd phone someone. But I'm in fuckin' Centurion. No one would come. It's not fair! I'm stuck all on my own. I've got no energy. I can't.

I can feel a spot in the middle of my exposed back, where the sun is cultivating a cancerous melanoma of death. There's no shelter for miles, not that I could get to it if there was. I've stopped sweating now, the first sign of dehydration and eventual death.

I'm lost in the wilderness here.

"Sal ons maar shuff tot die stopstraat?"

It's a lady in an Irene Running Club strip. Shuff? I've never heard that. As in shuffle? The stop street is probably twenty metres away. I can probably shuffle that far.

And then walk, blissfully walk. Heart hammering, weeping for mercy.

"Ons stap tot daai klomp asblikke. Dan draf ons weer."

And so we form a partnership. Myself and this lady from Irene. We walk to the bins and then we jog to the second lamppost. Then walk to the orange cone. Jog to the corner, or just round the corner. To the stop street. To the bakkie. The intersection. Allie pad tot die volgende waterpunt.

Dying a thousand deaths all the way. But dying them together.

This was to be my Comrades qualifier. But it's long been clear I'm never going to make the qualifying time. My greatest achievement would be finishing this outrage of a race. I arrived 15 minutes late for the start and then killed myself trying to get up to qualifying pace. Blew out at 30 kays. But still finished. If I can say that, I will have done something.

I'll not be going to Durban this year. Those three weeks off training with the shin splints probably did it. Running Comrades in this shape would have killed me anyway. I've barely got enough to make that distance marker on the bridge... 35 kays!

This is it. The Lifegain Wally Hayward Marathon 2012. This is my Comrades. Being carried by my fellow traveller in her blue-green Irene strip. My experienced Comrade with her method. We chop it up into digestible chunks and we eat up the kilometres. Even if every step is sweet agony.

We hit some kind of second wind entering the business district of Centurion, such as it is. We're not running a qualifying time, hell, we're probably not even running an official finishing time. But we're finishing.

And it's the Wally Hayward. Even if I've mismanaged my race so brutally, travestised it, made a filthy animal of myself, I can still finish.

Through my psychedelic haze I recall the only time I saw Wally Hayward on TV. He was running the 1989 Comrades, trying to become the oldest Comrades finisher ever. The broadcasters were waiting for him in the stadium as the 11-hour cut-off approached.

He made it by two minutes, vomiting blood on live TV on the finish line. At 80 years old. If Wally Hayward could do that, I can certainly shuffle a couple of hours through Centurion.

Even if it is pure, living hell.

#  Things I Learnt about White Guys by Marrying a Black Girl

There I was thinking I was the Derek Hanekom of Saxonwold Extension. Turns out I'm exactly as white as I look, and no closer to transforming myself into an honorary black person than when I was a sandboy at Boet Erasmus in the Eighties.

But marrying my lovely black wife did give me some interesting insights into the white man's condition, as gleaned from the wisdom of her eagle eye. As a final and ultimate follow-up to Marrying Black Girls for Guys Who Aren't Black, here are some sweeping generalisations about white guys.

We're learning Xhosa

The problem is, we've been learning it for ten years and all we can really do in vernac is buy weed and ask bhuti to fill her up with 93. Probably at the same place. On the reverse side, her family speaks English, but no more than necessary. There certainly won't be any family squabbles with the white dude, because no one can be bothered to speak that much English.

Maxhabis' abelungu

...or "white people's prices". Us white people get ripped off everywhere we go. Because if we see a price on something, we just pay it. That counts for everything from haircuts to buying Persian carpets to getting weed at the petrol station. When it comes to bribing traffic cops, black people get away with twenty bucks. White guys, it's two hundred. Entry level!

We don't eat enough meat

Cucumber salad, soya tacos, baked eggplant with rice... It is a worry. At a black people's umsebenzi, you'll be given a plate of meat with two lettuce leaves and a tomato. It's like white people want to turn every meal into a salad! For black people, it also appears to be deemed a waste of resources not to chew your bones into mush and leave them on a little pile on the side.

It's true. We really cannot dance

Except me, of course. I'm the only white oke on the planet who can dance like Zakes Bantwini. But somehow, bring me to a black wedding and I'll stumble onto the dancefloor the minute people start doing the bus, lose my place, start going against the flow and wreck the whole bus.

White people are having it!

Even the middle-class ones are rich. More than the richest black diamond. The first time you bring your wife to your parents' house, she'll almost be offended at the opulence. It'll be all she can do to stop herself from starting a toyi-toyi and demanding her land back. And meanwhile you're like, "This old place? Opulent?"

We're all mommy's boys

No one loves their kids like white parents do. If a white dude decides to run for body corporate, his mom will rally her whole golf club behind him, start a "Friends of Keegan" Facebook campaign, pay for posters and tell everyone he's the next president. It's the same with young white kids. They all get taken dead serious, even if they are four years old. If a black child speaks during a grown-up conversation, he gets a klap upside the head and told to fetch tea.

We dress like bums

You can tell how rich a white guy is because he can get away with dressing down. A white dude won't look poor, even in rugby shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt he got for free. In fact, the downer they're dressed, the surer you can be that they're stinking affluent, live at the Michelangelo and drive a bulletproof Merc.

Most white guys feel no need to front

Despite all our piles of riches, and our platinum bog brushes, a lot of us white guys are embarrassed to show it off. There's little inclination to floss that shit. A guy on a million bucks a year can quite easily choose to drive a Toyota Corolla. He'll probably pay that thing off in six months and then start settling his home loan.

Even the ugly ones are handsome

If a black woman starts going out with a white guy, no one seems to look at him properly. Even if her man looks like Happy Sindane, if he can pass for white, her aunts will halala like she's hooked up with RJ Benjamin. "Yuh! Ujola nomlungu!" Her dad will still be asking for bottles of lobola whisky four years after the wedding.

We all want to be Johnny Clegg

We're all on a quest to find our inner African. Bring us to a Xhosa clan function and we'll willingly don a bead headband, smear imbola all over our face and force down six tots of brandy, as long as you tell us, "it is part of our custom".

We all vote DA

Sure, you will never catch us wearing a DA T-shirt. But Helen and the guys didn't get 19% of the vote without every single white person on the roll dutifully ticking the blue box. It's got something to do with potholes and Cape Town.

We can braai

We do get props here. White okes can braai a chop. We will lovingly monitor every minute that our meat spends on the grill, poking and flipping those suckers like precious, meaty little playing cards in a game of braaivleis solitaire. Black guys will burn the chicken black as a brake pad and declare it ready.

So ladies, you feel inclined to sample the joys of the piglet (the other white meat)? Prepare yourself for delicious but scruffy braais at your mother-in-law's palace, people dancing to Johnny Clegg like they are cutting a hedge, and a large side salad to go with that.

#  Just now on my TL

@SteveHofmeyr stepped up to debate @Sentletse while somewhere in Mdantsane a 12-year-old blew a shebeen owner for airtime. Bheki #Cele got his marching orders while @LindiMazibuko did something with her hair. @Euphonik showed up in court while @MiCasa started shooting their latest music vid ko Alex. @Spillly can't stand religion on his TL, so @ChrisRoper told him to turn the other cheek. @Brodiegal had a serious rethink about Israel's attitude to foreigners and Palestinians while @BluntSlut said #ECSucks. @NikkiTemkin weighed in on Israel and @Brodiegal said the fear of the other, it's the same as what they did to us. Four hours after it started, @KhayaDlanga considered joining the @Sentletse-@SteveHofmeyr debate, then changed his mind. @kuliroberts curled up with #GumsNNoses when she saw @fayepeters was in it. @jaxonrice found an old flyer for the #DevilsMusicRockOrgy cc @FrancoisVanCoke @RamblinJayBones, when he moered that one oke in the face for pulling zaps. #moeredintheface. RT "@jaxonrice You make it sound bad. I think of it as giving something back to a fan". @AusiDineo changed her profile pic to one of Rafa Nadal. #RobVanVuuren couldn't wait for #pantsonfire. Meanwhile @texxonfire hit #tuesonfire @AndUnion for @lucy_kruger and we ran out of time to vote for @MissJenjo @FHMSouthAfrica #FHM100Sexiest. @ewnupdates came in five at a time and one was about #Euro2012. The receptionist offered the other guy coffee, but not @LeboMokwena. Now he's going to insist on it. @Mich_Kaplan wants this outfit. @HipHopPantsula says Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try. @greg_dennis is at Land Rover 4sq.com/Nsxtsq. @GhislaineGM cried at the doctor while @IAmLawry googled "micropenis" to make himself feel better while @JoanneOlivier might be five minutes late @ShotGunTori while @Kyle_Lippert said If there aren't enough tacos in heaven then god can fuck right off. Then I went to gym.

#  Comrade Baby and the Gateway to Hell

We entered the Gateway to Hell just outside Krugersdorp.

It was only the conversational Gateway to Hell. But it can be just as uncomfortable.

Let me explain.

I'm married to a magnificent black woman of glory, strength and wisdom.

A lot of people who don't know her, and with a simplistic idea of how marriages work, assume that we must share each other's views.

That's not how it works.

When a black person marries a white person, they don't stop being black. And not this lady. Baby is one of the most militant black women I know.

Me... Look, I'm not apolitical, but my political views vary with the weather, my mood and the headlines. Also, one's whiteness is hardly an asset in any political debate, so I tend to follow a path of discreet armchair liberalism.

I've voted for five different parties in my time. I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool anything. Once I even voted DA, although that time I had to get drunk first, and scrub my hand afterwards.

Baby has never forgiven me.

She, on the other hand is so militant there's barely a party in the political spectrum radical enough to deserve her vote.

Her political heroes are Biko, Sobukwe and Chris Hani. She still hasn't got over the decline of Azapo.

So there we are. It's a bit like Justice Malala being married to Joe Slovo, except one of us is a white liberal.

If ever the conversation lags, it's fun to drop in little bombs like, "But we achieved equality in '94, mos", or "There's lots of blacks in the Proteas team. They just mostly coloured."

Living with a militant positions you at the coalface of flammable race relations, which is why I've learnt to keep the banter as secular as possible and to say, "Yes, Baby" whenever she gets up a head of steam. Like, say, when Lindiwe Mazibuko comes on TV. Or during Third Degree.

Other people don't quite appreciate this aspect of our relationship. So, for instance, some of my Twitter followers will follow her, drop one thoughtless Malema reference and within minutes join Comrade Baby's graveyard of blocked followers.

Dinner parties are great sport. There are statements that are pretty much par for the course in Joburg's northern suburbs. Say them to Revolution Baby and it's like a red rag to a bull. You unleash all the fury of an oppressed nation upon yourself.

Another time we were on a road trip with another couple to the Cradle of Humankind, of all places. We were driving through the countryside, so our friend OR – he's with a black woman too. We sometimes find ourselves on the mixed-couple circuit. Anyway, OR... we were in the country, so he thought it opportune to raise the land issue.

Cue the most heated outburst since that one journalist got tjatjarag at a Youth League press conference.

"It is our land! It was stolen from us! They must give it back!"

Baby was just about toy-toyiing in the passenger seat as she bellowed it. Meanwhile, I winced to myself behind the steering wheel.

"But the boere know how to farm," was her opponent's response. "This country needs food security." Then he added, a touch unwisely, "Willing buyer, willing seller..."

And so the gates of hell were opened. There on the road to the Cradle. Just after that T-junction near Krugersdorp. "Willing buyer, willing seller" is the worst trigger, marginally more incendiary than "There were no proper blacks here when the whites arrived".

Baby was turning puce and hyperventilating. She was making fists. Things had gone beyond a joke. We needed to change the subject.

I put the radio on Umhlobo Wenene FM and said, "Yes, Baby. Do we turn left or right for the Cradle of Humankind?"

Just then we hit a pothole. There was a pause, Baby rolled up her sleeves, and within seconds we were arguing over service delivery.

Boom! Flaming conversational hell. Discussing politics and race. But hey, we're South Africans. Most chats go there sooner or later.

#  Code Pink at the Front Desk

We were in Cape Town for a conference at one of those four-star hotels on the Foreshore.

That day I had quietly distinguished myself from my conference peers with my intelligence and wit. Which is to say, I asked two questions and came up with a funny tweet during the one bizarre presentation.

So I was pretty chuffed with myself that evening and we had a few celebratory drinks in the hotel bar to toast the stellar heights my career was no doubt headed for.

I retired to my room just before midnight, determined to remain on top form for the next day's conferencing. It was a warm evening, so I slept in the manly buff.

Now, those hotel rooms have heavy curtains. When those suckers are drawn, not a particle-wave of light will penetrate the space. You sleep in a vault of inky blackness, alone with your beer breath and dreams of conference glory.

So it was in absolute pitch dark that I stirred an hour later, when my bladder started pulsing like a due foetus. I urgently needed a pee.

At least that's what must have happened, I had to piece this together later. I must have got up in the pitch dark, knyping for a pee, and felt my way to the toilet.

In the dark, a hotel-room door is easily mistaken for a toilet door. And those room doors have those self-closing mechanisms on them.

When you go for a pee, you're pretty much sleepwalking.

So this is how I wake up: bang! Door closes behind me. I'm standing, naked, in the blinding light of the hotel passage. Locked out! And I'm dying for a piss!

What am I doing here? How? Am I... Oh my god, I'm naked. NAKED!

Oh, no.

It was like one of those childhood nightmares where you forget to put on your uniform and go to school naked. Except I'm a grown-up, and it's real.

I'm naked in the hotel passage. And locked out of my room.

I need to formulate a plan. But first I need to pee.

Covering my shame, I scurry to the end of the passage, where I find a window and I'm able to relieve myself out of that. My bladder's full, so it's one of those long pees, the longest forty seconds of my life. And the whole time I'm peering over my shoulder in case my boss comes back from late drinks just then.

Eventually I get that done, but now, how to get into my room? I need to go down to reception.

At the lifts my courage fails me, and I decide to rather creep down the fire escape. It is an emergency after all.

At ground level, I come to the back of the kitchen. I peer around the door and see a lady cleaning the sink. "Sisi! Tssst! Sisi!

Have you ever whispered so loud you almost popped a tonsil? That was me, peering around the sink, naked, in the hotel kitchen.

"Sisi! I'm naked! I need to get into my room."

Permitting herself only the slightest of smirks, she leads me through the kitchen, into the lobby and hands me over to the front desk.

"Room number?" the reception guy asks, like he's seen this one a million times. Code Pink at the front desk.

I tell him, he runs me up an access card and I scarper. This time I take the lifts, armed with my access card, which offers a bit more to hide my embarrassment. Okay, not much more, but I was coming from a pretty low base!

I should have kept this to myself, but the next morning I tell everybody, becoming the talk of the conference for all the wrong reasons.

What still amazes me, though, is that reception clerk. A naked guy comes up to the front desk demanding the key to room 412, and he gives it him! I mean look, I'm glad he did, but I could've been anybody!

#  The Toughest Mute at the Dinner Party

Any guy will tell you. Eating is far more than a social ritual and a handy way of getting nutrients into your body. It is also a crucial test of manliness.

And wherever two are gathered in the name of food, opportunities arise for men to demonstrate their resolve, their ropness, the steel of their very intestines, by eating macho.

For a man of my inestimable manliness, then, it was a bit surprising how poorly I handled that one pickled jalapeno at the Greek restaurant the other night.

My man Chris had said something like, "You're not going to eat that whole thing, are you?" with a look of pretend-shock.

I knew what it was, though. It was a challenge.

So I took off my jacket and got down to it. It was 9pm in the restaurant, prime time. We had a couple of lovely ladies with us and my manliness was going to be on full display.

It was one of those pickled chillies. Enormous, about the size of a cow's heart. I took the thing and shoved it so deep in my mouth the pointy bit was playing speedball with my tonsils.

Then I sank my teeth into that sucker like a multinational tearing a cobalt mine out of a rainforest. That is to say, I took a massive bite.

The thing with pickled chillies, though. They are full of chilli-flavoured vinegar. So when you plunge your incisors into one, that vinegar's gotta go somewhere. In this case, about 70 millilitres of chilli-vinegar squirted into each of my eyes at the same time.

I gasped in phantasmagorical agony, and breathed half of the biggest chilli I've ever seen into my left lung.

Now in danger of dying in public, I turned purple and began coughing, dry-retching, and crying vinegar in lateral streams like I was squirting tears out of my eyes with syringes.

Fortunately the chilli piece popped out of my ribcage and came to rest on my lapel like the angriest snollie of all time, quivering and half-digested by lungbutter.

I had now lost control of my body to such an extent and was making such strange, involuntary noises, that I began headbutting the table to try reboot my constitution.

"No, no! Really, I'm okay!" I blurted, as an 11-year-old girl got up from her table and prepared to give me a Heimlich.

Cutlery rattled and fell from the table with my every convulsion. I was now officially making a scene anyway, so I grabbed my napkin and ran for the toilets, sobbing like someone who's been in a crash.

As I sprinted for the bogs crying tears of green hell, I kneed a Greek widow in the bicep and she poured her glass of Graça all over her front. I heard a waiter's tray crashing to the floor, but that must just have been from my turbulence.

I locked myself in the bogs and began climbing the wall upside-down, so that I could lie with my head in the basin facing the ceiling and run a stream of cold into my eyeballs at full blast until my entire skull filled with water and I resembled Jabba The Hut from Star Wars in chilli flavour.

I felt like one of those girls who get drunk and poo themselves at the office party and then refuse to come out of the loo until everyone's left the jol. But I wasn't quite that bad.

So when I had regained my sight, and the Parkinson's symptoms subsided, I sauntered back to the table, chuckling. Ready to make light of it. I was greeted with some alarm as I'd developed a rash of raised bumps across my face, like on rubber basketballs.

To my dismay, Chris was completely unaware that we were having a manliness competition. He was sipping a water, having given up drinking for his wedding or something.

Struck mute by the trauma, I simply nodded meaningfully at each of my companions in turn. My eyes were bulging like Chinese-checker ghoens. These people knew who was the toughest bastard at the table. The dumbest too, probably. But tough, in a certain way.

#  Charlie and the Benoni Taxi Ride

With any luck it'll be platform 6.

Park Station is in the middle of a power failure, so the bowels of the building are cloaked in a clinging darkness. Flitting shapes of commuters pour down the subterranean causeway like miners down a shaft. I'm swept aboard the 8825.

"To Springs, hey?"

To Springs.

"Sweetsie! One rand for five!"

"Amabanana cakes! Amafruitcake! Amarock cakes!"

An hour later I hop off at Dunswart station and join the flow to the taxi ranks.

I need to get to Fairleads on the outskirts of Benoni to pick up a car from my long-suffering mechanic. Timing belt again this time, all the valves are bent. But they say it was the water pump that caused it. The minute it's fixed, we've gotta sell that thing. It's end game for the Clio.

The guy directing passengers at the rank seems surprised, like I'm someone he hasn't seen for years, or maybe he hasn't seen someone like me for a while. Maybe I'm overdressed.

I end up in a newish Quantum driven by a guy in a 2010 Bafana shirt. I don't know Benoni well enough to even be sure where I'm headed...

"Near Crystal Park?"

"Er, I think it's past the Bunny Park. On the M44?"

We're not going the route I would have chosen, but we're travelling in the general direction.

"Don't worry, Charlie. We get you there. You before or after Spar?"

I don't know. I'm not sure where Spar is.

I'm in the passenger seat, so it's my job to pass all of the ten rands to him.

"Val' ucango, man! Close the door!"

The guy by the door doesn't understand the Zulu, and the driver seems exasperated that he now has to speak to his passengers in English. Like, what's the world coming to!

"Don't slam! Yesses! I must pay that door! Nxim!"

He's hooting constantly, as he describes a Z-shaped route through the suburbs and out of town. Landmarks are starting to look familiar to me. Piep. Piep. Pie-piep.

"Charlie, you coming to fetch a car?" He manages to work me out.

I'm not a regular taxi user, this experience is special to me. My synapses crackle with awareness as I soak up every moment of the journey – in contrast to the other passengers' bored commuter faces.

He senses my excitement and gives me a polite commentary – "I just drop these guys here at Spar, then we go to you, Charlie."

I'm trying to fit in, trying to look as black as possible, and feigning chilled ambivalence. But I'm like a lightie on an outing. I start dropping in my well-worn Xhosa phrases, then second guess myself. Am I being patronising? I'm probably overthinking this.

"Oh! So it's almost in Petit! Okay. You can relax, Charlie."

Everyone else gets out at Spar, the sexy girl in the jeans with the earphones, the two guys with the car battery and the older lady with the bags.

We continue up Pretoria Road, him chatting away in English, me, trying out my Xhosa. Me half trying to be down with the people, half embarrassed about it and half like the new kid at school.

Two weeks later, the timing belt snaps again, and I find myself at a bus stop in Gandhi Square. We're becoming a one-car family.

As my circumstances change, I find myself being absorbed into the public commuter network. Me and some of my white homies. The guy on the Metrorail with the brandy tan and the kitbag getting off at Germiston. The tannie in the tracksuit waiting for the 413 bus to Roodekrans. The bearded kid hustling for small change at the MyCiTi stop. "If you've got either one rand or eleven rand..."

This hardly heralds the arrival of an egalitarian society, my forsaking of middle classness or the installation of me, Charlie, as the hippest man in Fairleads. But it works.

My mission fifty kays out of Joburg on two trains and two taxis cost me just 45 bucks.

#  Home of the Blessed

They've been letters from home, but not stayed the same. Then they became letters for home. Home of Garth Wright, Springbok of legend, who scored that runaway try down the grandstand touchline at the Boet in the Currie Cup semifinal.

Home of Athol Fugard, the bard of the Bay, who knew our people, spoke as we do and told our stories. Told human stories with courage, touched the world, inspired, revealed. We helped him tell it through us. He helped us know ourselves.

Here in the home of the underachievers, the launching point of champions, breeding ground of quality people for export. Of quiet heroes, shy champions.

Gavin Cowley, Peter Pote, Keith Butler Wheelhouse, Anton Calitz, the tortured, guitar-wielding wordsmith on his one-man crusade for self-expression. Turtle Morris, Richard Rath, Vincent Barnes, Mush Hide... the watermen who passed down the wisdom from the days when there was still a wall at the Pipe, when you could play sticks at the Summies Hotel, even before you could get pissed at Lillies and laid on the bowling green behind Faces, while the ballies queued round the corner for Irish coffees at Angelo's and you had to have a meal to drink on a Sunday, at El Cid, at The Ranch, Blackbeard's Tavern, The Bell, De Kelder. You had to tuck in your shirt to jol at Cassidy's, Daytoga's was illegal and you queued your arse off if you weren't mates with big Gord at Indigo's.

Here in the home of big, mellow, Joe van der Linden, Gino Fabbri, Steve Schultz, Worm, Wang and the ones that made it. Made it out, made it back, made it big.

Black Coffee live tonight at Pizza Palace, Sticky Fingers at the Festival. "If you enjoyed yourself, my name is Craig Mischief. If you had a kak time, my name is Barry Hilton."

Things to see and things to do. Places to go, minds to blow. But just not so often, you know? Paul Simon at St Georges, Indecent Obsession at the Westbourne Oval in the rain while Kiss Me was number one for 27 weeks. Van Coke at Pool City, Nude Girls at Einsteins, Napalm Death at the Dungeon, Kerkorrel at the Tech.

With Gary Hemmings, impresario of Bar None festivals. Centrestage when it was still at the harbour. The harbour when you could go raving there. When you could still go raving, when Munro, Shane, Vimo, Karmi and them played till 8am and we stopped jolling at Cadillac Jacks and only went to Barneys on a Sunday afternoon for a draught or two or three and to bump into Bruce and Colleen and to stay for a last one even though we had a 4pm subbing shift at the Herald with Bobby Cheetham on the night desk and Bob Kernohan chief-subbing and Sue Ramsay copy tasting and a Mike Holmes pic for the front page and Rick Wilson said we'd lead with the Cape Town pipe bomb and Fredlin and Deon were meeting us at the R-Bar when we got off shift and the Red Bull girls were doing a promo and it was good and we were going to the Shine-I later. And then maybe watch the sun come up on the couch on the pavement outside Jules and Mia's house there by Peas and Carrots.

Home of the brave, home of the hesitant, home of the beautiful that don't know it yet. Barbara Robertson making sure they find out. Nicole Marais, Jane Simpson, Lauren Harper, Taryn Miller, Kim Danoher, Danelle Bhana, Reeva Steenkamp, Zipho Zokhufa... at the Feather Market Centre in the same suit you went to court in, with Mandela Mazibuko saying, "Thanks for the support," to the well-wishers as we get set for our winning weekend in Sun City, or the Fish, or Plett or The Halyards, or just a day at Seals with no wind and the beginning of a west swell and Duncan Scott in the water doing head-dips at the outside peak on the low tide, while Big Red checks the waves before work and Brad and Darren tune up in the parking lot for an acoustic set at Legends, while Gerry van Wyk plays the ladies' bar of the Cape St Francis hotel, where Thulani was the king, when he wasn't playing the Skyroof, or was it the Room at the Top, or was it the Markham, when there was a passage through to the Herald so the reporters could squeeze in a extra dop during supper break, till they moved to the Maritime, where Dave Goldblum played Say Africa at the Four Winds Folk Club while Gavin Weeks unloaded the amp from his boot outside Tico's and Gerard had just moved back from Cape Town, but Matt was on his way there.

With Karen and Toni and Trent and Tani and Gary and Meegs and Smiles and Bean and all the ous, if they didn't go further, Joburg and London and LA and Adelaide, where Craig Pottie still gets a wave, but it still says there on the second line of his Facebook profile, "From Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape".

Home of the blessed, the fortunate, the friendly, the real, the cheap, the priceless, the not too big, the not too small, the real right regular know-it-alls. When all's been said and done it's the one place we all look back on. It's where we're from. Where we did all the things we've done. Where we're remembered when we're gone.

#  Cyan

When my day comes, it be sweet.

There'll be angels everywhere,

selling absolution in the street

for next to nothing, strands of hair.

And no kind of absolution's gonna fly

at all,

beneath a sky of perfect cyan.

My conscience will be clear, and my children will be yellow.

Pain of absolution will be sweet,

green will be of perfect cyan.

My colour-coded consciousness subsists.

My conscience will be clear, and my children will be yellow.

If only will become and then,

and so easy turn to all of this.

So easy, just so easy.

So easy, just so easy.

It's so easy, just so easy...

So do little thinkings, turn to pretty things.

#  With my broken face across the Drakensberg

In a recent soccer match, I kicked the ball at exactly the same instant as an opponent, then found myself pitched forward into his shoulder, breaking my face.

I believe I cracked my left cheekbone. There was a week of exquisite pain, and a blue-ish, off-green bruise that gradually abated. But today, about a month later, I still have a sore face.

Not only that, but my face looks different. And not only that, but because I look different, people treat me differently. Superficial society that we live in, I attribute all of this to my cracked face.

Since I broke my face, I have not fielded a single glance of glad-eye in a public space. Not at the mall, at the gym or any place of business. Not that I would have acted on the glad-eye. Fact is, I'm generally dispensing generous doses of glad-eye everywhere I go, so to have it reciprocated is more of a pleasant surprise than anything else.

But there will apparently be none for the likes of me, with my broken face. I'm not blessed with a medical aid at the moment, so there was little chance of me ever getting my face seen to. But I went and had a look online, just in case.

Here's what they prescribe for a fractured cheekbone on surgerydoor.co.uk: "However, if there is a deformity of the face, surgical correction may be needed. This involves incisions inside the mouth or under the lower eyelid, and then application of a titanium plate and screws to stabilise the bone."

No thank you! I'd rather go through life like this.

But I'm so ugly! My face has lost its symmetry. I can see it in the mirror. When I can bring myself to look! I've got a broken face!

But you know, I let go of my modelling career a long time ago. The days when women would give me admiring glances have been consigned to the bank of pleasant memories, along with my round-the-world surfing tour and the time I played pool with Rodriguez.

So in some ways, breaking my face was a symbolic fracture, marking the end of youth. My response to it too. When I was the biggest swordsman in Port Elizabeth, I might have gone running to the plastic surgeon to repair my precious visage. Now, not so much.

Back in the days of my intact face, I was lucky enough to pique the interest of a lovely young lady in the events industry. In a moment where she wasn't quite concentrating, I proposed marriage, and she accepted, little suspecting what deformed horror she was letting herself in for.

So now I have her in my clutches. And life is good.

My asymmetrical bonce, my broken face, has not so much freed me of the burden of handsomeness, as blown the last shavings of youth from the woodpile of pride we towed behind us on our wagon of self-regard during our trek across the Drakensberg of young manhood.

Today I stand naked. Shaven headed, greying, droopy-eyed and with one cheek three millimetres lower than the other. My only weapons are my intellect, my skills, my humanity and the love of a beautiful woman.

I may not be much to look at, but I'm confident that those weapons will be all I require for the next leg of my journey, across the undulating highveld of middle age.

Well, those weapons, and some beer money.

####

About the author:

Hagen Engler is an independent operator. Let's rephrase that, _I_ _am_ an independent operator. I've been self-publishing anthologies, novels and magazines on my **Pocket Assegaai Publications** imprint for years. There have also been albums of music with Jedi Rollers, a short film, spoken-word poetry, and an eclectic blog of chaos and creativity at hagenshouse.com. In between, we bestrode the mainstream media firmament as editor of _FHM_ magazine, freelance writer for numerous titles and web platforms and as **wordsmith** for hire.

Hagen Engler is **the greatest export** of Port Elizabeth, South Africa after **Melissa from Idols** , Athol Fugard, John Kani, Graeme Pollock, Peter Pollock, Shaun Pollock, _Jeremy Maggs_ , **Danie Gerber if you count Despatch** , Schalk Burger, Siya Kolisi, **Evolver One** , Garth Wright if you count Uitenhage, **Sashi Naidoo** and _The Finkelstiens_.

Connect with me online

For more information or to **purchase other books,** email hagen@hagenshouse.com, or visit www.hagenshouse.com.

**Twitter** : http://twitter.com/hagenengler

**Facebook** : http://facebook.com/HagenEngler1

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/hagenengler

