Backpackers? You just can’t beat them.
Keep your 2, 3, 4 and even 5 star sanitised vacuums and leave me to the reality and humanity of the semi-precious gems that are the backpackers hostels, hotels and congregation points for us strange breed of people who actually enjoy meeting people, having a laugh and living our lives with the most likeable compadres on the face of earth.
Even if they do speak a completely different lingo, eat strange looking food (but tasty enough when you would gladly nibble the jock strap off a sweaty gorilla), and even if they seem to have this ability to be in control of their life; that is the most annoying bit! (By the way that is no reference to the nationality of those I have spent much of my time with, but to the fact that they are ’YOUNG’ and with youth comes an outlook that so many of us old fogies dismiss as the product of hormones, innate irresponsibility and the lack of good parenting.
Anyway, that’s for another time so let me stick to the point, these places are gems!
But like all gems the best, rarest by definition and most unforgettable usually lie outwith the normal trail of either the streets of our plodding feet, or the back doubles and lanes of our imagination. Let‘s be honest here, finding a black diamond in a coalfield is not just the result of it being there, but possibly that it was put there deliberately for only the most astute, the most persistent or possibly the most lucky to pick it up, put it in their pocket and on the most dreich of days to brighten up their hours by taking it back out and polishing the memories till they gleam again.
Walk, drive, cycle, or taxi along the North Road in Dunedin and just after you have passed the Botanical Gardens, you will come to a road to your right, signposted Glendining Street, with a subsidiary sign pointing the way to Arden Street!
You won’t see many goats there; it’s probably a bit too steep! But what you will encounter is people with back packs; those coming down with a smile and those going up with an expectation.
Well when you get to the top you’ll find that this is where smile meets expectation.
Joyce runs the ship, young Jules is her helper and technical expert - he provides the internet access, a genuine 12 meg transfer rate. The best I have come across.
But from the moment of your arrival to the second of your departure you just feel in that hackneyed phrase ‘at home’.
Of course it’s a business, but it is a business run for you by people who understand you, the space that you need, and also when a wee conversation is just the thing to be getting along with.
It is also NOT a hotel! But is a refuge from external as well our own occasionally self-inflicted madness.
The bare facts of what is offered is on the website www.ardenstreethouse.co.nz, but what isn’t there is just how much you’ll think nostalgically of that hill, of the absence of goats and of the welcome.
People make experiences and Joyce is a person who makes her place an experience.
Everywhere I’ve been there have been one or possibly two places that have stood out. People know what I think of the Armchair in Cape Town and the Base in Brisbane. They haven’t heard yet among many others about the Happy Hippopotamus in Durban or the Green Elephant in Cape Town. They will soon! They haven’t heard either about some of the less than recommended experiences. Again they will soon but……when in Dunedin, for me anyway, I’ll be staying at the GarDUN of EDIN- ArdenSt House.
Matt - Who stayed there 13th January 2010 to 16th January 2010 and was sorry that he couldn’t have taken it with him.
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Saturday, 5 December 2009
Magic, The Opposable Thumb and Matt Giteau
Sometimes in the travelling days or sleeping nights, memories though not specifically connected with the here and now, just creep up like a cuddle from that special place where cuddles come from.
This is the first of a few that I don't want to forget and though from a long time ago, has a spine that reaches right to today. Bear with me and we'll get there.
Part 1
There are moments, and only fleeting moments at that when what is simply stunning reaches up to heaven and with a sprinkling of magic it becomes suddenly wonderful - full of wonder!
Outside the look of love, birth of my daughters and the sacrifice that others are willing to make in the service of those who they may even have no knowledge of, it has only happened three times in my life and each of those has been entwined with the marvel of music.
It was 1980 and I was sitting at Paddington rail station in London.
“Stocious. I’m feckin stocious!”
The Cork accent was unmistakeable as it was omnipresent in the bar.
He targeted me as a youthful and well to do mark, and in a life preserving sort of way, we (me, him and his pals) had a few Guinnesses. For the first few rounds I nervously paid, and then as the drink took effect (on me, as they were already blankety blank) I said I was paying for no more - other than my own.
Having told me that they had just been released from the Scrubs I was wary, but with the sleight of hand of a conjuror, a couple of them disappeared and a few minutes later returned with more money than was needed for a week on the batter.
No I never asked! No bloody way!
The band on the concourse started up. It was the LGWR Brass Band. London and Great Western Railways; a brass band whose parent name had disappeared with the creation of British Railways, but a band that would hang on to their heritage and just play their music till either they or the last train left dodgy city.
There was no formation, no acoustic ambience and no uniforms unless you include the demob style coats, flat caps, and shoes that Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t have been seen dead in.
But there were three things that to this day repeatedly keep me enthralled.
The instruments from cornets to tubas, from saxophones to trumpets, euphonium to trombone were held and played gently and expertly filling the station with the most marvellous marches, ballads, and all time favourites.
When they played the station stopped; Friday commuters rushing hither and thither froze and a hundred smiles begot another hundred smiles as fingers snapped, feet tapped and an occasional couplet was sung in accompaniment. Time sat suspended and every sound so resonant in the racous life of a railway terminus dulled and softened, exisiting only as an indistict back-drop to the stars on stage.
And then there was yer man! Coat button-less and flapping.
He didn’t play. He wasn’t even as neatly worn and scuffed as the band-members. He seemed to walk the edge of a physical life while his spirit memories and thoughts swum in a million patterns inside his consciousness. He was comfortable or maybe just content to be there; there as he moved slowly among the audience and never asked for a penny, but found not just pennies but silver and pounds being placed in his box.
“Thank-you from everyone of the LGWR Brass Band” it said on that box, every capital letter important; and I could swear with every donation the music got not only better but the smiles got wider and the listening and pleasure more intent.
I had decided by then that my pals for the night had been callously convicted by a politically motivated system and while what they had done was probably illegal in the eyes of the blind scales, in the moral world it was likely to be judged as ethical and right. They were good men and so I turned to them to point out the scene that was being enacted on that litter strewn, concrete cold stage a few feet from out table. I needn’t have bothered!
These hardest of hard men, these incorrigible villains and heartless criminals were as enthralled as everyone else and in every line on their faces, in every twitch of their eyes, every contemplative silence that replaced the forlorn stociousness and every stillness that supplanted the previous restless suspicions, a peacefulness was writ.
As the particular piece finished, I gathered a little collection amongst us.
1980!
Five or six of us. Them with nothing more than what they could gather with their wits and me with not much more.
We got about £30 together.
I was the delegate and I waited till up piped a brass version of Dvorak’s New World Symphony - the Largo sometimes called “goin’ home”.
I loved that piece of music and every time I heard it, I could see an olive branch caught in the gentle swell of a warm sea, being urged by then tide onto an undiscovered land where it took root and humanity was born. I still see and feel that at as the opening strains call to me.
Yer man was still moving among the crowd, his open coat still flapping in the draughty station.
I slipped the cash, not into the box, but undetectably into one of his coat pockets and returned to my pint.
The big fellow I was with, poked me in the ribs and pointed back towards the band.
Time had started up again and the sounds of footsteps, and engines at first echoed loudly and then dimmed to a far away place and time outside the bordering arches designed in the head of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
It was nearing midnight and the band were packing their instruments, shaking hands and heading to the exits at the four corners of the station.
Three stayed to account for the takings, sitting on a slatted bench seat under the platform clock.
The bookkeeper was about to annotate the takings, when yer man reached across and stayed his pen, pulling the £30 from his pocket. The bookkeeper made a quick recount and entered the new amount in the ledger.
They stood and went their own ways, the station now almost empty apart from the brushmen, sweeping discarded papers, cardboard cigarette ends and a thousand stray pieces of meaningless paper into a pile. As they swept they hummed the band’s melodies and as the wind whistled in accompaniment, I headed for the sleeper back to Wales.
I had five new found mates to accompany me mind. They wanted to get to the Cork Ferry and so we all piled into my sleeper much to the consternation but mute objection from the attendant. Being with hard men sometimes helps.
They disappeared in the mist of a cold damp Swansea morning and I never saw them again. I never saw the band again nor ‘yer man‘.
But I’ll never forget any of them or the moment that a man with nothing finds Aladdin’s cave and gives it away!
Magic? Be in no doubt it's music!
To be continued.
This is the first of a few that I don't want to forget and though from a long time ago, has a spine that reaches right to today. Bear with me and we'll get there.
A Story in Four Parts!
Part 1
There are moments, and only fleeting moments at that when what is simply stunning reaches up to heaven and with a sprinkling of magic it becomes suddenly wonderful - full of wonder!
Outside the look of love, birth of my daughters and the sacrifice that others are willing to make in the service of those who they may even have no knowledge of, it has only happened three times in my life and each of those has been entwined with the marvel of music.
It was 1980 and I was sitting at Paddington rail station in London.
“Stocious. I’m feckin stocious!”
The Cork accent was unmistakeable as it was omnipresent in the bar.
He targeted me as a youthful and well to do mark, and in a life preserving sort of way, we (me, him and his pals) had a few Guinnesses. For the first few rounds I nervously paid, and then as the drink took effect (on me, as they were already blankety blank) I said I was paying for no more - other than my own.
Having told me that they had just been released from the Scrubs I was wary, but with the sleight of hand of a conjuror, a couple of them disappeared and a few minutes later returned with more money than was needed for a week on the batter.
No I never asked! No bloody way!
The band on the concourse started up. It was the LGWR Brass Band. London and Great Western Railways; a brass band whose parent name had disappeared with the creation of British Railways, but a band that would hang on to their heritage and just play their music till either they or the last train left dodgy city.
There was no formation, no acoustic ambience and no uniforms unless you include the demob style coats, flat caps, and shoes that Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t have been seen dead in.
But there were three things that to this day repeatedly keep me enthralled.
The instruments from cornets to tubas, from saxophones to trumpets, euphonium to trombone were held and played gently and expertly filling the station with the most marvellous marches, ballads, and all time favourites.
When they played the station stopped; Friday commuters rushing hither and thither froze and a hundred smiles begot another hundred smiles as fingers snapped, feet tapped and an occasional couplet was sung in accompaniment. Time sat suspended and every sound so resonant in the racous life of a railway terminus dulled and softened, exisiting only as an indistict back-drop to the stars on stage.
And then there was yer man! Coat button-less and flapping.
He didn’t play. He wasn’t even as neatly worn and scuffed as the band-members. He seemed to walk the edge of a physical life while his spirit memories and thoughts swum in a million patterns inside his consciousness. He was comfortable or maybe just content to be there; there as he moved slowly among the audience and never asked for a penny, but found not just pennies but silver and pounds being placed in his box.
“Thank-you from everyone of the LGWR Brass Band” it said on that box, every capital letter important; and I could swear with every donation the music got not only better but the smiles got wider and the listening and pleasure more intent.
I had decided by then that my pals for the night had been callously convicted by a politically motivated system and while what they had done was probably illegal in the eyes of the blind scales, in the moral world it was likely to be judged as ethical and right. They were good men and so I turned to them to point out the scene that was being enacted on that litter strewn, concrete cold stage a few feet from out table. I needn’t have bothered!
These hardest of hard men, these incorrigible villains and heartless criminals were as enthralled as everyone else and in every line on their faces, in every twitch of their eyes, every contemplative silence that replaced the forlorn stociousness and every stillness that supplanted the previous restless suspicions, a peacefulness was writ.
As the particular piece finished, I gathered a little collection amongst us.
1980!
Five or six of us. Them with nothing more than what they could gather with their wits and me with not much more.
We got about £30 together.
I was the delegate and I waited till up piped a brass version of Dvorak’s New World Symphony - the Largo sometimes called “goin’ home”.
I loved that piece of music and every time I heard it, I could see an olive branch caught in the gentle swell of a warm sea, being urged by then tide onto an undiscovered land where it took root and humanity was born. I still see and feel that at as the opening strains call to me.
Yer man was still moving among the crowd, his open coat still flapping in the draughty station.
I slipped the cash, not into the box, but undetectably into one of his coat pockets and returned to my pint.
The big fellow I was with, poked me in the ribs and pointed back towards the band.
Time had started up again and the sounds of footsteps, and engines at first echoed loudly and then dimmed to a far away place and time outside the bordering arches designed in the head of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
It was nearing midnight and the band were packing their instruments, shaking hands and heading to the exits at the four corners of the station.
Three stayed to account for the takings, sitting on a slatted bench seat under the platform clock.
The bookkeeper was about to annotate the takings, when yer man reached across and stayed his pen, pulling the £30 from his pocket. The bookkeeper made a quick recount and entered the new amount in the ledger.
They stood and went their own ways, the station now almost empty apart from the brushmen, sweeping discarded papers, cardboard cigarette ends and a thousand stray pieces of meaningless paper into a pile. As they swept they hummed the band’s melodies and as the wind whistled in accompaniment, I headed for the sleeper back to Wales.
I had five new found mates to accompany me mind. They wanted to get to the Cork Ferry and so we all piled into my sleeper much to the consternation but mute objection from the attendant. Being with hard men sometimes helps.
They disappeared in the mist of a cold damp Swansea morning and I never saw them again. I never saw the band again nor ‘yer man‘.
But I’ll never forget any of them or the moment that a man with nothing finds Aladdin’s cave and gives it away!
Magic? Be in no doubt it's music!
To be continued.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
Armchair Theatre
Bland, that’s how it always appeared. But it was a disguise, a ruse that it was long comfortable with and one that would see it bore its way into my brain, sit unsuspected, poised for its moment of triumph ….that fleeting vulnerable second when the imagination of the hour just past, drained away leaving the even blander prospect of another night’s sleep and work or school when the sun rose from its own slumber.
Armchair Theatre for those of the generation of two television channels, was never quite what it seemed. It was ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ rolled up with the ‘Twilight Zone’ and even as youngsters we were allowed to stay up till 11pm and watch it as a family. The drama was never less than riveting, the plot enthralling and as the hand on the clock ticked towards another trip to the dream factory, we would comfort ourselves that the bad guys at the centre of the mayhem, murder and deceit were about to reap the whirlwind of justice usually in the shackles of the electric chair or tethered like a squealing pig to the noosed end of the hangman’s favourite rope.
But this was Armchair Theatre, and Armchair Theatre always had a sting in the tail.
It was the last of the television programmes for the night, and so as the credits started to roll, my Dad would sprung from his own designated armchair faster than Usain Bolt, to intercept and destroy the opening bars of the English National Anthem!
His hand would stretch in victorious fashion for the off-knob!
But then, like a puff-adder or Cape Cobra Armchair Theatre would strike!
Its fangs would deliver its venom, catching dad in mid stride, turning the whole evening on its head, as those who seemed innocent proved guilty, and those who we judged definitely guilty were absolved of all wrong doing. But in the impressionable mind of a nine year old who had been let stay up far too late, the uncertainties of right and wrong became merely a backdrop as his bulging eyes peered through his fingers, his tongue bitten red raw and his untouched tea went cold on the little wooden tray placed at his feet on the hearth of the slowly dimming coals giving up their heat as the day gave up its minutes.
Such was my formative memories of the early sixties, the new fangled state of the art British Relay television on the shelf and the family gathered round for their Wednesday night treat and introduction to conniving duplicity. Mind you the telly took fifteen minutes to warm up, during which time those with things to do fiddled around and the kids waited for the sullen inanimate grey/green screen to metamorphose into a world of living greys and whites.
It was Armchair Theatre time!
“It’s ready” we would shout, and in a trice the throng had been assembled with those other compulsory attendees, Bilsland toast, Co-Op tea, City Bakers’ snowballs and Marks and Spencer’s biscuits that were usually reserved for visitors.
Silence enveloped the room like a blanket of conspiracy.
This was Wednesday, this was stay up late night, this was ‘wide-eyed with shock’ night, this was Armchair Theatre night.
Armchairs and all things related to them have, ever since those nights held for me a degree of mystery, of wariness but most of all suspicion that not everything is as it seems. “Beware the mocking gaze of a conman pocketing your cash” was always my guiding light to life and armchairs in particular.
And so it was that as my time in South Africa approached its twilight hours, I booked in for a few nights at The Armchair on Lower Main Road, Observatory, Cape Town.
I had done what I had set out to do, scratching the surface of South Africa Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and back through Swaziland and Lesotho. The Green Elephant (and much will be written about that haven from the insanity of the world later) had been my home from home while in Cape Town , but now the almost spiritual lure of ‘The Armchair’ proved too much and I found myself, disoriented, dizzy and doubtful, standing on the pavement opposite its ‘come and get me’ windows and coquettish doorstep.
I forcibly blinked and the enticing allure and siren calls in my head softened and muted.
Perhaps the sepia toned vision was a result of the two bottles of red wine (Pinotage if you’re interested) and seven Windhoek lagers of the previous night. As my vapours dispersed the building assumed, as buildings should, an emotionless appearance, almost unassuming with little to suggest to the desperate itinerant that this might be the place to rest his camel for a few days and find a sense of serenity, peace and tranquillity all wrapped in the potential for party, laughter, food, foaming ale, inspiration and flirtation.
I stepped over the threshold and passed through the Stargate into another dimension. One that told a hundred tales, sang a hundred songs and like a great reunion of the travelling world, brought together backpacks large and small, new and old, tattooed with a thousand badges and faded with the sun, rain and probably a million tears as people found not so much what the world had in store for them, but more importantly what deep motivations and hidden strengths made them what they were.
People of every age, colour creed, and gender. Men with grizzled beards, women with moustaches, men with make-up and women who needed make-up. And not just backpackers. This was a jigsaw of life where the pieces were assembled as gingerly as the Jenga towers that crashed with regular abandon to the peals of laughter or cries of disappointment. Like life, the pieces were picked up and the game begun again.
This was no ordinary hostel, motel, lodging or guest house.
Take your place and play your part in the singularity of the ages as television, music, braii, good beer, good food, sink-in sofas, and casually cast cushions vie for territorial claim with bar stools, tables, coffee, tea newspapers, ready laughter, a thousand stories of derring-do. This is a place where the pieces have been assembled with one aim, to meet the needs of the footloose, feckless, fancy free and drifting ships passing in the night but leaving an echo of their presence lingering softly in the air.
As Shakespeare pointed out, ‘all the world’s a stage, and each of us must play our part.’ So who are the players, directors and producers who have taken the bricks, mortar, fixtures and fittings of a typical building in a street of far from typical life, and transformed it into the revitalising drama and reinvigorating mental massage?
Well first there’s Sam. I’m not sure how exactly to describe the philosopher, artist and general observer of all the flotsam and jetsam that washes up at the beach of life that is the bar. So I’ll use her own words.
“Take a picture of me that shows just how tall and elegant I am”.
This was a challenge since Sam had been rejected by the pygmies for being too small.
In an inspired moment we built a very small model of a safe, positioned Sam in the open doorway of the 4ft high mock-up and with the magic of Photoshop gave the impression of unrivalled elegance staring down from the lofty heights of Kilimanjaro.
Sam whose full name is Sam (an unusual phenomenon in Africa), revealed that her name meant ‘gift’, a small present to humanity! In fact Sam made every day a birthday.
She is also seriously into marketing. Nothing gets by this girl when a business opportunity peeks its head above the parapet. As she looked around her little safe, she noticed the convincingly modelled grey bags with the sign of the Rand printed upon them.
“there must be a big demand for moneybags like these” she thought aloud, and immediately drew up her business plan and marketing mission statement
“Come to cape Town, call Sam - for the best in safe sacks that Africa has to offer”
The phone has not stopped ringing, although every call has been terminated by Sam shouting down the receiver “It says ‘sacks’! The advert says ‘sacks’”!
With a smile that could absolve even the most sinful of souls, Sam is your introduction, spirit guide and first clue as to the drama hidden in the folds of the armchair. Folds indeed that most warm blooded males would be happy to search! (rumours that some are still lost are totally unfounded).
Then there is Christian. Christian is Africa Cool , Cape Town sheik, Observatory laid back and the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to The Fonz.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of Christian, but this photo was taken of the bar when he wasn’t there. The skeleton hanging from the shelf is NOT supposed to represent him.
Walk into the bar when Christian is directing proceedings and ‘abracadabra’, your drink is on the bar, positioned perfectly for your left-hand’s grasp, your change by its side before you’ve even decided whether you are going to offer a 20, 100, or coinage in payment.
Christian just knows.
He takes the pain out of decision making and lets the night and you drift into a careless relationship of possibilities, while he tops up your glass, turns down the sounds, cools the ambience and smiles as if he knows a million things that you don’t . He probably does.
Now that’s cool and that is Christian!
Connery, Pitt, Clooney, Daniel Craig and EVEN ME. Believe me, the rules of coolness and street cred will need to be re-defined when Christian strides across the world of celebrity, for he is the walking, talking ‘God-made man’ embodiment of coolness that would keep your milk fresh for ten years.
And so to Michelle!!!!(And believe me Michelle deserves the four exclamation marks - one for each night I stayed there - in my dreams anyway).
Michelle strikes two poses as you can see. The professional and the relaxed. In either case the photographer faces a challenge; just how do you improve on perfection?
Michelle sits at the Armchair‘s answer to the Pearly Gates - the reception that gives entry to the feast of frivolity lying in the sound-proofed chambers of the residents’ zone.
Michelle finds rooms where before there was only an empty air-space. No request is unfulfilled, no fantasy unsatisfied, and cold, windy and wet doorways will go unused for another night. An angel in disguise some may say….and who am I to argue!
She has a secret squad of builders on the go just in case a late night knock echoes through the dark corridors of the romantically lit reception. As the spirits of the exhausted and lonely backpackers emerge from the gloom of the night, Michelle brings her magical skills to the party and by the time she has made the guests welcome, relaxed and comfortable, the bricklayers, plasterers and design consultants have finished a room with a touch of magic, built just to the needs of the night-time stragglers.
Magic is not really the word. I am reliably informed that the whole history of Christianity would have been changed if Michelle’s ancestors had lived in Bethlehem. They would undoubtedly have acquired a room for Mary and Joseph. No stable, no manger, no cows, goats and no a barn full of straw. The Star of Bethlehem would have settled over the nearest Hilton or Trust House Fortie, and the three wise men would have arrived with room service.
I think that Michelle’s power over the future of the world hasn’t yet reached its peak. Perhaps one wet and windy midnight a hungry destitute and poverty-stricken group will arrive unheralded on the doorstep of the Armchair. Michelle will conjure up a room and what they will go on to achieve will no longer be the child of a night on the cold homeless pavement, but a world changing idea dreamt up all because of Michelle, as their heads rested on the cool pillow and comforting quilts of the Armchair.
You just never know when it is going to happen…….but I think Michelle does.
But every orchestra needs a conductor and lead violinist, every dance a choreographer and costumier and every play a playwright and director.
As the cast take their bow, we all stand in applause as the ranks of the twinkle-toed part to reveal the life-blood of the show - Faith and Mike, Mike and Faith.
Their ways are different, their tasks are different and each brings their own speciality to provide a combined sense of service, smiles and every little effort that makes The Armchair the diamond mine it is. Don’t just come and stay. Ask Mike or Faith for something. If they can’t satisfy you themselves I bet they’ll know someone who can.
And keep your eyes and ears peeled for the first hint of their supernatural talents.
Faith was standing one side of the window between bar and non-smoking lounge; Mike was mouthing a request for a till-roll. Two minutes later Faith came into the bar, clear polythene bag in hand, almost bursting at the seams with lemons and limes.
“Doesn’t look much like a till-roll to me” I remarked.
“Faith said I didn’t need one. Changed it this morning. She’ll be right” Mike responded.
“I didn’t hear her saying that” I offered.
“She was thinking it” Mike countered.
“Ah but what about the lemons and limes?”
“I was thinking about them and she picked up on my thoughts”.
I pondered this little example of thought reading and dismissed it as a parlour game. Little did I know!
For there is more. Seated at the bar - “Matt’s end of the bar” as it has been renamed, is where Faith demonstrated her mastery over the occult and the secret rites of mind-reading.
It was an ominously foreboding evening , the clouds heavy and dark snuffing out even the twinkling of the brightest stars and the futile moonbeams. The breeze turned chilly as it whistled through the open door and as the travelling merry-makers made merry as merry-makers tend to do, Faith showed me a picture on her phone.
It was of brightly burning multi-coloured candles, bedecking the bar and tables, familiar faces peering out of the shadows, holding familiar drinks, smiling familiar smiles.
“It was the night the power was cut off without any warning” Faith said in conspiratorial tones.
AND WITH THAT THE ELECTRICITY WAS CUT OFF AGAIN!
Out came the candles and the bar was transformed again into a big birthday cake.
Yes, one word from Faith and Mother Nature bends her knee in obedience.
But not only does Faith control the elements, she can also see deep inside your innermost secret chamber and read your long hidden truths.
I had just completed the first draft of this blog entry, unseen by eyes other than my own, when Faith said.
“When I was young(er), we always gathered as a family to listen to the drama and mystery plays on the radio”.
The cold grip of fate on my shoulder tightened as surely it was no coincidence that here I was writing about drama, mystery and Armchair Theatre, and Faith tugged on a silver thread of magic between my writing and her childhood. Did she know in her soul what was being written? Was this another clue to the missing link between mind, body and life’s unexplored depths? Was Faith placed on this earth by the gods to open up a backpackers’ hotel as a cover for her more important mission - leading the poor lost tribes of mankind out of the darkness of superstition and into the light of a new self-awakening.
Have no doubt, you will be hearing a lot more of Faith. Raising the dead, turning water into wine, feeding the five thousand. No problem for Faith. Let’s be honest, anyone who can keep the beer flowing when the power is cut to her wish, and who can see into the depths of your subconscious is surely destined for demigod status!
And of course last, not least, and maybe even a first among equals is Mike.
Mike is the glue, the hammer and nails, the flitting presence that keeps the cushions on the armchair puffed-up and comfortable. Mike lights fires of mystery and keeps the embers burning till even the most Doubting of Thomases is convinced that time can stand still, logic can be suspended and every room in the building is another planet in the South Africa’s answer to the profound questions of creation.
Mike doesn’t actually appear to do anything, but you must not be fooled by his apparent devotion to sitting down, breathing shallowly and surviving on a diet of biltong and beer. This is just another mystery to be solved during your stay. Every room you enter, every stair you climb, every door, every cupboard, every ornament sports the indelible fingerprint of Mike at his creative best.
If all you remember from your visit is Mike asking for more beer and biltong, you will have missed the real secret of the ‘man with the plan’.
So enter the armchair with your eyes wide-open and your personal antenna primed for the unexpected, the irrational. Take no rule book, no recipe and leave your expectations on the doorstep. Experience the riddle of time as days turn into nights and weeks and the accepted laws of nature are bent to the will of the Mike, the master playwright.
And then when you leave, say your goodbyes and turn the corner leaving the haunting disturbance of The Armchair behind you.
But stop a moment and look back around the bend to see if it is still there, inviting you back, holding the potential for surprise and shock and guarding the secret of a changing world? Or has it dissolved like a ghost into ages past, or even worse was it just a product of an overactive imagination and too much Windhoek beer?
Relief will flood over you as you can still see the red painted building still standing tall and magnetic as through its open windows a laugh or exclamation escapes into the outside world. The memory of that first day’s disorientation, dizziness and doubt will make a surprising but welcome return as you whisper in amazement to yourself….“It was real after all”!
But unlike Armchair Theatre, The Armchair keeps it surprises only for those who enter its fabled corridors and so as you trudge to the railway, Baz bus, or coach station, Sam, Michelle, Christian, Faith and Mike get preparations for the next performance under way. Rooms are buffed up, curtains freshened, new music fills the air, a slight adjustment here, a movement of a cushion there. Everything needs to be just right for the next needy nomad who rings the bell.
The Armchair is expecting you; they know who you are, they know when you will arrive; and they know what you need.
How do they do it?
That’s the mystery and only they know the secret.
Your task is just to settle into your very own Armchair upholstered with all the wisdom of the ancients, let your worries disappear while your minds are cleansed and souls refreshed.
Make yourself comfortable as the drama is about to begin again!
As for me, well herds of wild unicorns will not prevent me from returning……..but next time I’ll bring Garlic and Holy Water, for on my final day Michelle informed me that The Armchair had originally been called ‘The Armchair Theatre’.
The world is not as it seems! Woooooooooooooooooo!
Hail hail
Matt
Armchair Theatre for those of the generation of two television channels, was never quite what it seemed. It was ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ rolled up with the ‘Twilight Zone’ and even as youngsters we were allowed to stay up till 11pm and watch it as a family. The drama was never less than riveting, the plot enthralling and as the hand on the clock ticked towards another trip to the dream factory, we would comfort ourselves that the bad guys at the centre of the mayhem, murder and deceit were about to reap the whirlwind of justice usually in the shackles of the electric chair or tethered like a squealing pig to the noosed end of the hangman’s favourite rope.
But this was Armchair Theatre, and Armchair Theatre always had a sting in the tail.
It was the last of the television programmes for the night, and so as the credits started to roll, my Dad would sprung from his own designated armchair faster than Usain Bolt, to intercept and destroy the opening bars of the English National Anthem!
His hand would stretch in victorious fashion for the off-knob!
But then, like a puff-adder or Cape Cobra Armchair Theatre would strike!
Its fangs would deliver its venom, catching dad in mid stride, turning the whole evening on its head, as those who seemed innocent proved guilty, and those who we judged definitely guilty were absolved of all wrong doing. But in the impressionable mind of a nine year old who had been let stay up far too late, the uncertainties of right and wrong became merely a backdrop as his bulging eyes peered through his fingers, his tongue bitten red raw and his untouched tea went cold on the little wooden tray placed at his feet on the hearth of the slowly dimming coals giving up their heat as the day gave up its minutes.
Such was my formative memories of the early sixties, the new fangled state of the art British Relay television on the shelf and the family gathered round for their Wednesday night treat and introduction to conniving duplicity. Mind you the telly took fifteen minutes to warm up, during which time those with things to do fiddled around and the kids waited for the sullen inanimate grey/green screen to metamorphose into a world of living greys and whites.
It was Armchair Theatre time!
“It’s ready” we would shout, and in a trice the throng had been assembled with those other compulsory attendees, Bilsland toast, Co-Op tea, City Bakers’ snowballs and Marks and Spencer’s biscuits that were usually reserved for visitors.
Silence enveloped the room like a blanket of conspiracy.
This was Wednesday, this was stay up late night, this was ‘wide-eyed with shock’ night, this was Armchair Theatre night.
Armchairs and all things related to them have, ever since those nights held for me a degree of mystery, of wariness but most of all suspicion that not everything is as it seems. “Beware the mocking gaze of a conman pocketing your cash” was always my guiding light to life and armchairs in particular.
And so it was that as my time in South Africa approached its twilight hours, I booked in for a few nights at The Armchair on Lower Main Road, Observatory, Cape Town.
I had done what I had set out to do, scratching the surface of South Africa Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and back through Swaziland and Lesotho. The Green Elephant (and much will be written about that haven from the insanity of the world later) had been my home from home while in Cape Town , but now the almost spiritual lure of ‘The Armchair’ proved too much and I found myself, disoriented, dizzy and doubtful, standing on the pavement opposite its ‘come and get me’ windows and coquettish doorstep.
I forcibly blinked and the enticing allure and siren calls in my head softened and muted.Perhaps the sepia toned vision was a result of the two bottles of red wine (Pinotage if you’re interested) and seven Windhoek lagers of the previous night. As my vapours dispersed the building assumed, as buildings should, an emotionless appearance, almost unassuming with little to suggest to the desperate itinerant that this might be the place to rest his camel for a few days and find a sense of serenity, peace and tranquillity all wrapped in the potential for party, laughter, food, foaming ale, inspiration and flirtation.
I stepped over the threshold and passed through the Stargate into another dimension. One that told a hundred tales, sang a hundred songs and like a great reunion of the travelling world, brought together backpacks large and small, new and old, tattooed with a thousand badges and faded with the sun, rain and probably a million tears as people found not so much what the world had in store for them, but more importantly what deep motivations and hidden strengths made them what they were.
People of every age, colour creed, and gender. Men with grizzled beards, women with moustaches, men with make-up and women who needed make-up. And not just backpackers. This was a jigsaw of life where the pieces were assembled as gingerly as the Jenga towers that crashed with regular abandon to the peals of laughter or cries of disappointment. Like life, the pieces were picked up and the game begun again.
This was no ordinary hostel, motel, lodging or guest house.
Take your place and play your part in the singularity of the ages as television, music, braii, good beer, good food, sink-in sofas, and casually cast cushions vie for territorial claim with bar stools, tables, coffee, tea newspapers, ready laughter, a thousand stories of derring-do. This is a place where the pieces have been assembled with one aim, to meet the needs of the footloose, feckless, fancy free and drifting ships passing in the night but leaving an echo of their presence lingering softly in the air.
As Shakespeare pointed out, ‘all the world’s a stage, and each of us must play our part.’ So who are the players, directors and producers who have taken the bricks, mortar, fixtures and fittings of a typical building in a street of far from typical life, and transformed it into the revitalising drama and reinvigorating mental massage?
Well first there’s Sam. I’m not sure how exactly to describe the philosopher, artist and general observer of all the flotsam and jetsam that washes up at the beach of life that is the bar. So I’ll use her own words.
“Take a picture of me that shows just how tall and elegant I am”.
This was a challenge since Sam had been rejected by the pygmies for being too small.
In an inspired moment we built a very small model of a safe, positioned Sam in the open doorway of the 4ft high mock-up and with the magic of Photoshop gave the impression of unrivalled elegance staring down from the lofty heights of Kilimanjaro.
Sam whose full name is Sam (an unusual phenomenon in Africa), revealed that her name meant ‘gift’, a small present to humanity! In fact Sam made every day a birthday.She is also seriously into marketing. Nothing gets by this girl when a business opportunity peeks its head above the parapet. As she looked around her little safe, she noticed the convincingly modelled grey bags with the sign of the Rand printed upon them.
“there must be a big demand for moneybags like these” she thought aloud, and immediately drew up her business plan and marketing mission statement
“Come to cape Town, call Sam - for the best in safe sacks that Africa has to offer”
The phone has not stopped ringing, although every call has been terminated by Sam shouting down the receiver “It says ‘sacks’! The advert says ‘sacks’”!
With a smile that could absolve even the most sinful of souls, Sam is your introduction, spirit guide and first clue as to the drama hidden in the folds of the armchair. Folds indeed that most warm blooded males would be happy to search! (rumours that some are still lost are totally unfounded).
Then there is Christian. Christian is Africa Cool , Cape Town sheik, Observatory laid back and the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to The Fonz.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of Christian, but this photo was taken of the bar when he wasn’t there. The skeleton hanging from the shelf is NOT supposed to represent him.
Walk into the bar when Christian is directing proceedings and ‘abracadabra’, your drink is on the bar, positioned perfectly for your left-hand’s grasp, your change by its side before you’ve even decided whether you are going to offer a 20, 100, or coinage in payment.Christian just knows.
He takes the pain out of decision making and lets the night and you drift into a careless relationship of possibilities, while he tops up your glass, turns down the sounds, cools the ambience and smiles as if he knows a million things that you don’t . He probably does.
Now that’s cool and that is Christian!
Connery, Pitt, Clooney, Daniel Craig and EVEN ME. Believe me, the rules of coolness and street cred will need to be re-defined when Christian strides across the world of celebrity, for he is the walking, talking ‘God-made man’ embodiment of coolness that would keep your milk fresh for ten years.
And so to Michelle!!!!(And believe me Michelle deserves the four exclamation marks - one for each night I stayed there - in my dreams anyway).
Michelle strikes two poses as you can see. The professional and the relaxed. In either case the photographer faces a challenge; just how do you improve on perfection?
Michelle sits at the Armchair‘s answer to the Pearly Gates - the reception that gives entry to the feast of frivolity lying in the sound-proofed chambers of the residents’ zone.
Michelle finds rooms where before there was only an empty air-space. No request is unfulfilled, no fantasy unsatisfied, and cold, windy and wet doorways will go unused for another night. An angel in disguise some may say….and who am I to argue!
She has a secret squad of builders on the go just in case a late night knock echoes through the dark corridors of the romantically lit reception. As the spirits of the exhausted and lonely backpackers emerge from the gloom of the night, Michelle brings her magical skills to the party and by the time she has made the guests welcome, relaxed and comfortable, the bricklayers, plasterers and design consultants have finished a room with a touch of magic, built just to the needs of the night-time stragglers.
Magic is not really the word. I am reliably informed that the whole history of Christianity would have been changed if Michelle’s ancestors had lived in Bethlehem. They would undoubtedly have acquired a room for Mary and Joseph. No stable, no manger, no cows, goats and no a barn full of straw. The Star of Bethlehem would have settled over the nearest Hilton or Trust House Fortie, and the three wise men would have arrived with room service.
I think that Michelle’s power over the future of the world hasn’t yet reached its peak. Perhaps one wet and windy midnight a hungry destitute and poverty-stricken group will arrive unheralded on the doorstep of the Armchair. Michelle will conjure up a room and what they will go on to achieve will no longer be the child of a night on the cold homeless pavement, but a world changing idea dreamt up all because of Michelle, as their heads rested on the cool pillow and comforting quilts of the Armchair.
You just never know when it is going to happen…….but I think Michelle does.
But every orchestra needs a conductor and lead violinist, every dance a choreographer and costumier and every play a playwright and director.
As the cast take their bow, we all stand in applause as the ranks of the twinkle-toed part to reveal the life-blood of the show - Faith and Mike, Mike and Faith.
Their ways are different, their tasks are different and each brings their own speciality to provide a combined sense of service, smiles and every little effort that makes The Armchair the diamond mine it is. Don’t just come and stay. Ask Mike or Faith for something. If they can’t satisfy you themselves I bet they’ll know someone who can.
And keep your eyes and ears peeled for the first hint of their supernatural talents.Faith was standing one side of the window between bar and non-smoking lounge; Mike was mouthing a request for a till-roll. Two minutes later Faith came into the bar, clear polythene bag in hand, almost bursting at the seams with lemons and limes.
“Doesn’t look much like a till-roll to me” I remarked.
“Faith said I didn’t need one. Changed it this morning. She’ll be right” Mike responded.
“I didn’t hear her saying that” I offered.
“She was thinking it” Mike countered.
“Ah but what about the lemons and limes?”
“I was thinking about them and she picked up on my thoughts”.
I pondered this little example of thought reading and dismissed it as a parlour game. Little did I know!
For there is more. Seated at the bar - “Matt’s end of the bar” as it has been renamed, is where Faith demonstrated her mastery over the occult and the secret rites of mind-reading.
It was an ominously foreboding evening , the clouds heavy and dark snuffing out even the twinkling of the brightest stars and the futile moonbeams. The breeze turned chilly as it whistled through the open door and as the travelling merry-makers made merry as merry-makers tend to do, Faith showed me a picture on her phone.
It was of brightly burning multi-coloured candles, bedecking the bar and tables, familiar faces peering out of the shadows, holding familiar drinks, smiling familiar smiles.
“It was the night the power was cut off without any warning” Faith said in conspiratorial tones.
AND WITH THAT THE ELECTRICITY WAS CUT OFF AGAIN!
Out came the candles and the bar was transformed again into a big birthday cake.
Yes, one word from Faith and Mother Nature bends her knee in obedience.
But not only does Faith control the elements, she can also see deep inside your innermost secret chamber and read your long hidden truths.
I had just completed the first draft of this blog entry, unseen by eyes other than my own, when Faith said.
“When I was young(er), we always gathered as a family to listen to the drama and mystery plays on the radio”.
The cold grip of fate on my shoulder tightened as surely it was no coincidence that here I was writing about drama, mystery and Armchair Theatre, and Faith tugged on a silver thread of magic between my writing and her childhood. Did she know in her soul what was being written? Was this another clue to the missing link between mind, body and life’s unexplored depths? Was Faith placed on this earth by the gods to open up a backpackers’ hotel as a cover for her more important mission - leading the poor lost tribes of mankind out of the darkness of superstition and into the light of a new self-awakening.
Have no doubt, you will be hearing a lot more of Faith. Raising the dead, turning water into wine, feeding the five thousand. No problem for Faith. Let’s be honest, anyone who can keep the beer flowing when the power is cut to her wish, and who can see into the depths of your subconscious is surely destined for demigod status!
And of course last, not least, and maybe even a first among equals is Mike.
Mike is the glue, the hammer and nails, the flitting presence that keeps the cushions on the armchair puffed-up and comfortable. Mike lights fires of mystery and keeps the embers burning till even the most Doubting of Thomases is convinced that time can stand still, logic can be suspended and every room in the building is another planet in the South Africa’s answer to the profound questions of creation.
Mike doesn’t actually appear to do anything, but you must not be fooled by his apparent devotion to sitting down, breathing shallowly and surviving on a diet of biltong and beer. This is just another mystery to be solved during your stay. Every room you enter, every stair you climb, every door, every cupboard, every ornament sports the indelible fingerprint of Mike at his creative best.
If all you remember from your visit is Mike asking for more beer and biltong, you will have missed the real secret of the ‘man with the plan’.
So enter the armchair with your eyes wide-open and your personal antenna primed for the unexpected, the irrational. Take no rule book, no recipe and leave your expectations on the doorstep. Experience the riddle of time as days turn into nights and weeks and the accepted laws of nature are bent to the will of the Mike, the master playwright.
And then when you leave, say your goodbyes and turn the corner leaving the haunting disturbance of The Armchair behind you.
But stop a moment and look back around the bend to see if it is still there, inviting you back, holding the potential for surprise and shock and guarding the secret of a changing world? Or has it dissolved like a ghost into ages past, or even worse was it just a product of an overactive imagination and too much Windhoek beer?
Relief will flood over you as you can still see the red painted building still standing tall and magnetic as through its open windows a laugh or exclamation escapes into the outside world. The memory of that first day’s disorientation, dizziness and doubt will make a surprising but welcome return as you whisper in amazement to yourself….“It was real after all”!
But unlike Armchair Theatre, The Armchair keeps it surprises only for those who enter its fabled corridors and so as you trudge to the railway, Baz bus, or coach station, Sam, Michelle, Christian, Faith and Mike get preparations for the next performance under way. Rooms are buffed up, curtains freshened, new music fills the air, a slight adjustment here, a movement of a cushion there. Everything needs to be just right for the next needy nomad who rings the bell.
The Armchair is expecting you; they know who you are, they know when you will arrive; and they know what you need.
How do they do it?
That’s the mystery and only they know the secret.
Your task is just to settle into your very own Armchair upholstered with all the wisdom of the ancients, let your worries disappear while your minds are cleansed and souls refreshed.
Make yourself comfortable as the drama is about to begin again!
As for me, well herds of wild unicorns will not prevent me from returning……..but next time I’ll bring Garlic and Holy Water, for on my final day Michelle informed me that The Armchair had originally been called ‘The Armchair Theatre’.
The world is not as it seems! Woooooooooooooooooo!
Hail hail
Matt
Thursday, 29 October 2009
A Town called Catatonia
Mountain dark! That is the blackest of imaginable darks! Nights when the stars are hidden by angry cloud and the roads, verges, precipices and disasters are indistinguishable at more than two or three yards.
Driving in those conditions at anything above a slow amble is not particularly recommended, but traversing in this darkest of dark nights well above the cloud line and in the eye of waterfall of this particular storm, the journey was fraught with unfenced edges of a canionesque crater. This was exacerbated by the fact that the road had recently been used by the South African army for target practice. Pot-holes were everywhere, and as the rain filled them to the same muddy reflection as the rest of the road, it was evens that one would get me and there I would be, broken axle, stranded a couple of thousand feet up in the uninhabited void between civilisation and the Indian Ocean.
Except, on this night on possibly the most inhospitable weather in the most inhospitable land, it was anything but unpopulated; From the mist, cloud and rain, people came from all angles, across fields, from above, below, all points of the compass they would emerge from a the background gloom and just as quickly disappear again.
Some were running, some bending against the wind, some with essential stuff balanced on their heads, strangely unaffected by the gale, some (just to make the issue even more precarious) had kitted themselves out for the weather in black bin bags.
Black people, covered in black bin bags and running out of a deep dark wet night, visibility - negligible, out of a unfathomable void of black cloud. It had the feel of a computer game; your going for the record score and the game throws everything it’s got as you plough your way through hazard and disaster. It’s you against the deviously nasty programmer. But you really, really want that record score.
Hit a pot-hole, go off the edge, avoid the pot-hole and here are five people on the way to work, home from work, or just out for a stroll suddenly appearing like gunmen in a high noon shoot out; wait a minute that’s a cow, goat, ass, horse; slam on the brakes, check heart and trousers.
I was heading for a seaside village called Port St Johns, a few hundred kilometres south of Durban, and the furthest point I could get before the road ran out forcing me inland towards the hyperactive city of Mthatha. I had passed through it on the bus a few weeks previous and it gave the appearance of a nuclear reactor.
As for Port St Johns, I had no reason for going there other than trying to stick to the coast and get an alternative view of Southern Africa away from the inland. The portents hadn’t been brilliant with two of the preceding towns not only bearing the names Margate and Ramsgate, but also being uncannily ‘English’ seaside towns. I just didn’t fancy that at all.
With every swerve, skid, panic and shuddering stop I was fancying this whole idea less and less. Mind you there was no turning back.
In a helter skelter, and I sped down the other side, my desire to get off the peak more motivating than the fear of potholes or human carnage.
I got my record score, but believe me nothing less than great fortune, a strong suspension, and very agile folk of the night who could beat the blink of an eye in avoiding a collision, all played major roles. I contributed little.
My heart fell even further; immediately after the town sign was a big KFC.
I found a place to hole up and occasionally peaked out of van curtains trying to discern anything of interest while I struggled for sleep.
6.00 am was my first real wake call as the town tumbled from its slumber and jumped to attention for another day of English Pub, pub grub, jellied eels, silly kiss me quick hats, what the butler saw and ‘just hit the frog on the head Justin Darling, ……..on the head dear,……… ON THE FLIPPIN HEAD YA DAFT WEE BOOGER!
(Justin breaks into tears, wets himself and the mother embarrassedly searches around trying to find her last elocution lesson! Mother buys him an ice-cream, he drops it, more tears and ‘you’re your fathers son, that’s a fact. He can sort you out. Right home! Boy smiles, he‘s won - he hates arcades.)
.
.
.
.
.
.
Oops! Sorry about that, just a scene more or less regularly played out every Sunday in Worthing, Brighton and Portslade when I lived in those towns. I am not a fan of English seaside resorts!
I jumped out of the camper prepared to move on almost immediately.
The sun came out.
And the music started.
The town rubbed its eyes, and faced another day with the left-overs of a smiling dream still on their lips and in their eyes.
A hive of activity with people rushing everywhere, opening their stores, setting up there stalls. One after one the pairs of giant loudspeakers bust into life and as I walked through town, reggae merged with soul, with Jazz, rap and Tamla giving every area of town a different feel, flavour and sound.
And with the sun, the laughter started, the smiles beamed, hand after hand was shaken and the voices of the street called from one end of the street to the other.
Port St Johns became the only place to be for the next few days at least.
This was my kind of town.
I was going nowhere.
And then it hits you. All this hustle and bustle, to-ing and fro-ing is a mask. As I strolled seemingly directionless, so did most of the inhabitants. Fifteen minutes in and you’ve already encountered the same faces at least three times.
They become familiar with you and you with them.
“Yo man, howzitgoin man.’
“yeh man, hanging easy and sweet man’ (that’s me by the way, I used that rather clever response to ….sort off…..blend.)
And then you get the boxers stance with their two thumbs stuck in the air in approval, one long stride forward, bend at the knees and do a choo-choo train action, 1-2-3. All done by at least three in harmony. With the obligatory “Cool man”!
I practiced it that night and can now do it pretty much as second nature.
But the real breakthrough came when they asked my name.
“hey man, who are you. What’s your name man.?”
“Matt’s the name, chilling’s ma game, man”.(Blending in really brilliantly now).
“Cool Matt. Won’t give you our full names, man cos they’re a bit long but we use their meanings anyway. This here’s Virile, Hero, Perfection, and yours truly Prestige” he stretched out the P-r-e-s-t-i-g-e finishing with an upward flourish.
‘Matt’ seemed a bit bland compared to their names.
“Of course man, Matt’s my formal name. In Scotland we tend to do like you and use the meaning of our names rather than the given handle……..man”
“What’s your name mean, man” then asked Virile
“ ‘Gift of God‘, man” (as so many names do mean when the people who allocate these things - what a job that is, you could have real fun with that - when they‘ve had a bad night and their hangover simple will not focus on the fundamental skill needed to define a name).
They seemed impressed.
“Yo ‘gift of God’, good talkin man. See you around man.”
I assumed the position, did my choo-choo train and said simply “Cool man”.
Everyone is doing this directionless wander, stopping a few times to update each other on the world shattering events on a parallel street not five minutes ago. But the general air is one of total relaxation, the epitome of Africa Time.
This town is so laid back in attitude that the rush to go nowhere is virulently infectious as I took my part in the dash for mental proneness.
Once you suss that ,you’ve got it. There is no point other than doing what you’re doing.
Every stall’s a different colour, offering fruit, clothes, electricals, second hand anything, hair cuts (internationally recognised), traditional remedies, dentistry, shoes, meats. This is an African Market town and seaside resort ; it is mainly black but with a smattering of white backpackers and refugees and asylum seekers from the lost world of western society! This is civilised in a chaotic (to the initiate) sort of way. Deals are done, goods sold and acquired, plans made and tales told.
This is Puccini’s La Boheme or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody …..with a black beat and an African tempo accompanied by the massed dancers of the town, moving in rhythm while conducting their business.
As the music and voices resound, the clatter screech and grind of four-wheel drive pick-ups and illegal taxis belting up and down the street roar out, oblivious to the pot-holes until the occupants in the open rear are thrown in the air as the offside wheel finds a two foot hole in the road. People jumping clear of mud, water and anything else that the wheels of the vans throw up. And everyone laughs; and so it goes on.
Up comes my man ‘Prestige’ for the third time in half an hour.
“Hey, The Gift Man (shortened already - another sign of status). Ganja man? Dagga man?”
I repeat my tactics of the previous two encounters and pretend that I don’t know what he is talking about, shrug my shoulders, choo choo train and move on.
“Hey, Gift man, I’ve got it man.“
His eyes lit up and he shouts out at the top of his voice “You already stoned man. Way to go man! Hey bros, the Gift man is high as his good old lord and protector”
I didn’t bother arguing.
And the day passed the pace slowed and thinned out.
Catatonic suspended animation loomed as the night began to fall, the stalls were disassembled or secured, shutters closed, the lights of the houses shacks and tents on the on the hill side villages shining like earth-ridden stars, and laughter, singing and the ripples of parties filtered down the gradient to the listening empty streets below.
Empty, apart from me anyway, absorbing the reality of civilisation and knowing that this ‘Emerald Jewel of the Transkei’ will eventually go the same way as any place with rolling waves, blue skies, gilt-edged sunshine and a welcoming populace.
The developers the planners, the builders, the architects, the exploiters and they will destroy it. Margate, Ramsgate will have the third ugly witch as we welcome visitors to the new Scarborough.
Now that is worth fighting against
See youse all man!
(Gift of God does Choo-choo train, ‘cool man‘)
Matt
p.s. I know it's not as perfect as it appears. Perhaps at those evening parties they conjure up all sorts of occult forces and wish ill on their fellow man. In fact I even encountered the seamier side in a confrontation with a security guard in their Spar supermarket. I had wandered in and had a look for a cash point, it wasn’t up and running and so I strolled back out again.
“Hey man, can’t you read”?
He pointed above my head at the sign saying ‘ No exit/entrance only’.
The 'No entrance/exit only' was beside it, no turnstiles, no barriers, no difference except the signs. Two identical gaps in the wall, leading onto the identical bitof ground.
I was going to argue but decided ‘Yo man, cool man’ and took two extra paces to my left and exited under the exit sign.
He was happy, his authority reinforced and I wondered why in a town where mass slaughter by random acts of psychotic driving was but a moment away, it was so important to go through that particular door.
I found out later..... I should have remembered!
Monday, 12 October 2009
In Pursuit of the Fallen Angel.
October 2009
There was nothing below me; well nothing of substance, nothing that I could hold, step or rest upon, nothing that would give me peace of mind. Unfortunately there wasn’t even the whirlpool of disorienting space with its far away depth urging me with its sneering insincerity to let go and fall, to flail my arms pointlessly, to plummet through my own terror until either my heart’s beat failed to keep pace with my brain’s needs or to come a poor second in the battle of the fragility of blood, skin and bone versus the permanently unyielding might of granite, sandstone and the daggers of storm hewn trunks and branches.
All I could see, in the word of the indigenous Sotho, was ‘Rilithithithi’, ‘less than nothing‘, ‘darker than darkness’, a suddenly impenetrable mass of rain filled, cold strangling cloud. All I could feel was the icy impact of searing rain, all I could touch was the numbing poultice of wet mud and rocks, and all I could hope for was that the next step, the next ledge, the next painful wrench of another yard would yield somewhere, anywhere to give me a moment’s respite from deluge, wind and my hopelessly inbred dread of height.
It was October 7th 2009, and I was clinging to the vertical surface of a creviced mountainside approximately 2800 feet nearer to God’s realm than man in the normal course of events really should be. I was more than clinging, I was attempting to become a chameleon of the rock not just in appearance but in substance, hugging physically and mentally to the surface, the texture and the contours; but I knew that I couldn’t stay where I was; I couldn’t bear even the thought of trying to go back down never mind attempting the descent; so outrageous as it may seem (and believe me even I argued against the suggestion), I had only one option - I had to go onwards and upwards; I had to complete the next 200 feet or so to scale the height of this mountain, a partner to the more famous Table Mountain overlooking Cape Town, and once again face up to the curse laid on me by some prince of darkness.
On the climb this far I had heard the voice of fear and doubt whispering in my ear, ‘look down, look down, see how high it is, you feel dizzy, you might fall, you will fall, give up!’. By now the fear had approached barely controlled panic, and the voice was a gale spiralling and buffeting round the crags of both his choosing and even worse, his name.
This was “Devil’s Peak” in name and in just about every other sense you can imagine.
Adrenalin takes over and endomorphism kick in. I squiggled my feet secure in the rock holds and my right hand firmly in the grip of the sandstone and granite. My left arm stretched, my body trembling but this time through effort and with the cold, soaking and bone aching fatigue of someone who has just taken on about three hundred per-cent more than he should have and now faced the final insult. But that final insult at least wouldn’t be succumbing to the siren voice of fear; it would simply be the failure of having to accept that nature with even the merest of inconsequential whims was stronger than the ego and puny strength of any man’s arrogance.
I knew she was going to win (she always does in the end); but my stubbornness hadn’t been totally drained and so I knew that she was going to HAVE to win; There would be no resigned capitulation before I had exhausted whatever reserves of energy still existed. I just had to balance them across the priorities of keeping the autonomous life support systems working, breathing and moving on inch by painful inch.
I turned my face away from the tearing elements, took a deep breath and with my left hand in its new hold, I heaved my body upwards. My grip was solid…..for a moment….and then I felt a sudden sinking and wetness as the niche turned from sandstone to mud. The wind blew a final victorious blast, laughed in my face and screamed in my ear. “I WIN”!
The dyke above my head burst and the wetness turned to a sudden rush of a dam’s release showering me with rocks, mud, and enough water to solve the drought in the Kalahari. I tried to press myself against the side of the rocks but my hands, feet and possibly my will all gave way at the same time and I flew backwards spluttering and swallowing the cataract, plunging into the mountain’s halo of mist and mystery towards……..somewhere!
*******************************************************************
Many decades earlier.
The wind howled like a banshee with piles, rain intermingling with bursts of hail strafing the windows, doing its violent utmost to breach the steel and glass lattice that protected the single bedroom of the five year old fast asleep in the safety of his pillow and dreams. Basically it was a typical fresh wee sma’ hours of a Coatbridge January; sadly all too typical and ever more disturbing for the other four occupants of the room standing around the boy and where he lay.
His father, mother and elder sisters watched, while as if in a fit of uncontrolled muscle spasms the boy tossed , turned, shadow boxed and kicked out at unseen demons, screaming and shouting in a foretaste of a future number one occult best seller.
They were resigned by now if not accustomed to the interrupted nights and disconnected days which followed. They had only once tried to waken him from whatever world he was in, but the almost catatonic reaction from the youngster had outlawed that as an option.
After an hour or so the outrage being enacted on the single bed eased and the screaming softened to an occasional moderated plea and a whimper eventually steadying to an uneven breath and moan.
Only his dad remained, sitting now in the little bed-side chair, having urged the girls to return to their room and ‘mammy’ to go and ease the weight of the advanced bump soon to produce another daughter and sister for the family.
The boy didn’t know the agonies that everyone else was going through but he did know that something was far wrong. The atmosphere the day after one of those nights was never the best, not bad, just not the normal liveliness of a child’s interaction with his family. Everyone else seemed so tired and the whole world seemed on edge.
Sometimes nothing would happen for months, sometimes only days but it would never disappear completely and another five years later, a brother on the way this time and the ‘terrors’ as he later found out they were called continued, irregularly perhaps but unabated in impact and ferocity.
They were never really discussed; how can you legislate for a nightmare? After all this was the West of Scotland, the land where men didn’t have feelings, emotions or tears, and in the unlikely event that they even admitted it to themselves, the possibility was immediately condemned and mocked as a passing phase.
The boy wouldn’t have told them anyway. After all it wasn’t just the dreams; dreams that consisted of falling from great heights, bellowing strangled screams, sharpened tree stumps getting ever closer, shifting position to prevent his pointless manoeuvres to evade their pointed intent, then just as the inevitable fate pierced his eyes the whole mad movie would start over again, this time a thousand moving stalagmites beckoning him ever closer.
The following day would be even worse as the fallout hit his life. ‘Good mornings’ sounded like accusations, simple questions like interrogations, every breath like a gasp for life, every sound, every movement and every touch like a threat, an attack or an assault.
He learned quickly to control it. He knew the dreams were the trigger; but then the secondary cause started. Heights would bring it on, not just standing somewhere high, but seeing it in reality or even in a film or on television. The world would become a bad place to be. Year after year it continued, and so as anyone who suffered from the affliction of acrophobia, NOT vertigo, but terrifying acrophobia, he took what he considered the only sensible action.
He took up parachute jumping, scaled the outside of multi-story flats, attempted (fruitless due to gendarme intervention) a mission to ascend the outside of the Eiffel Tower, walked over the struts and cantilevers of bridges spanning many of the world’s great rivers, gorges and valleys and in one particular episode at a place called Port Samson on the West Coast of Australia he found himself no more than two feet from the edge of a hundred and fifty foot sheer drop onto the rocks and swirling foam of the ocean below.
How he had got through the barbed grass and lethal flint shards was one thing; how he was going to get down, quite another.
As he got to his feet the wind changed direction and with a few more knots to its power, the journey down would have been solved for him. But there were compensations.
The view and vista of sea roar, wind song, and silence of mankind for just a few moments made it the only place on earth where he wanted to be and with a will and foolhardiness that he didn't know even he had, he stood on that two-foot wide ledge, stared first out to the distant blue horizon and then at the breakers below, stretched out his arms inviting the up draught to do its worse, closed his eyes and felt what it was like to be truly free!
The height did not phase him!
The height did not phase me!
Now though I hope that the above adds a wee bit of foliage to the wasteland of simply admitting to ‘acrophobia’, it also begs the question that if I no longer had the phobia, the challenge to be overcome, the fiend in my mind’s ear, why was I mucking around with extremophile plants and creatures with the added advantage of wings, at altitudes where re-entry rather than descent would have been more appropriate to return to ground zero?
Well, I suppose that there always remains the ex-smoker’s nagging doubt that a relapse is possible but on that day the real reason has to be put down to Bill Mitchell.
Everyone needs a Bill Mitchell.
We met in the car park of the Rhodes monument as I stared up at the peak disappearing into the wispy low clouds of an intermittently sunny day.
He introduced himself in the friendly manner that I had become accustomed to.
“That looks like a Celtic shirt. Thank god you’re not one of them.”
He then introduced himself as Bill Mitchell, Cape Town born and bred, but of solid Orkney stock who recently found himself at the top of Ben Nevis, admittedly by cable-car, and then he told me straight.
“The wind we normally get here is a warm south easterly and that is where our magic climate comes from. Tomorrow and for the next few days it is turning to a northerly blast that not only brings colder and wetter weather, but also the low dark cloud that foretells disaster for the idiotic who still try and climb the Devil’s Peak.”
The mountain loomed over the initially gentle rise that took those ‘idiots’ of Bill’s warning up towards the cloud enshrouded summit of the raucous ‘come on and get me’ ascent that overlooked the city.
The car park attendant, his name ‘Moses’ as I was later to discover wandered over, the rain just starting to pepper the air, ground and conversation.
“You wanta climb up there? Ok man, but not today. Try tomorrow and follow the winding trail. Take you a while maybe two hours but when you get there man, what a view of Kaap Tu,”
That’s Cape Town in the vernacular.
Bill Mitchell, pulled me aside and simply said, “if you can’t see the top, don’t even bother starting out.”
As the following day dawned I stood in the car park again and looked up dolefully at the shroud that swaddled the hidden peaks of the mountains. The sky was broken and at the level I was at there was a fair amount of sunshine, deceptively encouraging me to ignore the warnings and go for it. It wasn’t the height this time, but the cloud and the warnings that loomed as large as the peak itself.
I had been warned of all sorts of dangers in Johannesburg, Durban and now Cape Town, and had ignored them as the usual ravings of locals who were too familiar with and focussed on their problems not to see just how infrequently incidents actually occurred.
Unfortunately it was my judgement that had gone awry and skin of the teeth brushes with a couple of cocked rifles had stemmed my forays into the night life of the City centres. So this time I decided to heed the advice and turned back towards the car park exit.
Who should suddenly emerge from his little soldier hut than Moses.
“Hey Mr, you came back to do the climb today?”
I voiced my concern; well Bill’s concern.
“Stick to the trail man, and you’ll be fine.”
At first I remembered Bill’s advice and refused to buckle, but then I remembered it again. It was just too sensible and it wasn’t the peak that became the challenge, it was the warning not to go for it!
Mind you Moses’ smiling confidence definitely helped. (Never trust a smiling assassin!)
So once again I started towards the ascending rough terrain.
Moses called after me, sounding faintly like a final goodnight from Dave Allen …….“May your God go with you”!
He might as well have cackled and rubbed his hands with devious glee! Nuances and intuition never were my strong point..
********************************************************************
Moses’ had been quite clear, “take the rough path over two walkways and then take a left at the third walkway and follow it all the way round and round and round to the summit”.
I reached the third walkway and since I had already ignored Bill’s guidance I decided that I may as well ignore Moses’ advice and head through the low shrub and rain soaked mud coated basalt towards the hand over fist, foot over sense climb up the perpendicular face of the Devil’s peak.
I mean who in their right mind wants to simply walk up a winding trail to a vantage point, no matter how beautiful. The scenic route may very well have been aesthetically delightful, but the weather was coming in faster than a hun chasing a moonbeam and the hike would take about 2 hours, whereas the summit lay a tantalising five-hundred feet from where I stood. Surely no more than an hour and a half of exhilarating exertion.
It had been a good if challenging foray so far, the wind changing direction, rain then dry, sun then cloud, cold followed by a life affirming gust of warm air.
My moods had alternated with the elements. Confidence, pleasure, pain, enthusiasm, doubt and ultimate certainty.
But now I was in the final straight. Each three steps forwards were followed by a slip backwards, each three yards of clear gentle gradient led to two yards of lacerating vertical shrubbery.
Memories of Ben Lomond came back! But then, foolhardy and without any sense of what I was taking on, I had strayed from the signposted rising trail to the mountaineers’ ascent where ropes, clothing and years of experience were the basis of not only success but survival. I had been wearing a Celtic training jacket, Celtic trainers, Celtic track suit bottoms and carrying a mobile phone….. with a flat battery.
I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
This time the battery was fully charged….. Sadly there was no signal!
But old Devil’s Peak wasn’t as high as a Munro was it? Well it was and is. At almost exactly 1000m it passes the 3000 ft qualifying height by nearly 3oo ft.
The wildlife, flying, crawling, scampering or just salivating camouflaged themselves and with each chirp, whistle, growl or threatening silence they sniggered at my prospects.
The previously beautiful multi-coloured songsters became brooding mocking vultures.
“ Here’s another one. Look at him. He’s finished. Food for a year. Ha ha hah!!!”
I tried to ignore them all but as the rain swept in again from above I looked back down to the fast disappearing car-park! The doubts over my conquest of acrophobia came back with a ripping vengeance. The wind started shouting at me, the rustle of the bushes came at me from all directions whip-lashing my neck as I searched for the unseen and probably non-existent threat that lurked in my mind.
But what was as real as the rain was the mud on my hands, the numbness in my fingers, the pain in my knees and ankles, the tiredness in my spirit and the sudden prospect of the darkness of the cold cloud descending as I ascended and the inevitable conjunction of sightless eyes with impenetrable greyness.
I looked back down past my aches and pains to the incomprehensible sight of Cape Town spotlighted in a sun break in the far away clouds and then it was gone, the route back was gone, and all that was left was silence, cold, the return of fear and the deep memory of how I had never given in to it before.
A chimney through the rock appeared in front of me and as I clambered knees and back wedged in its narrowness to its exit, a wind cleared the clouds for a second and the sharp deliverance of trunks, branches and stalagmites called to me from the valley below. The cloud cover came back and I looked heavenwards.
I could make out some hand and foot grabs; I looked back down and could make out nothing. Up I went onto a place that I had never known before, a place that I couldn’t stay and one that I couldn’t go back down from.
This was fear and one that didn’t scream at me. Just one that whispered. It whispered my past, it whispered its patience and it whispered my future.
You know the rest.
“Rilithithithi, who gives a …..and then the deluge broke from the last hand grab and ‘I flew backwards spluttering and swallowing the cataract, plunging into the mountain’s halo of mist and mystery towards……..somewhere!’
I probably fell no more than thirty feet wedging in the chimney in V formation, jammed by my back pack of camera and Celtic towel, my knees level with my face.
I knew it was only another thirty feet to the bottom of the chimney and with a heave of my calves I freed my upper body and made the next stop with bloodied hands, face and pride where the final straight had started. I checked that my camera was ok.
I knew I was going no further up, and as I looked around at first dispiritedly, I cheered up when realised that the fear had gone again, blown up with the clouds as the sun shone through another gap on the downward trail. I looked up but the mist above clung still to the summit and the rain from its midst fell unrelenting, turning the mountainside into one huge cascade of water and rubble.
I followed it (or it washed me) downwards, tumbling, sliding and as the water cleansed away blood and mud, the birds and creatures of the undergrowth reappeared and made themselves heard, this time cheerfully welcoming my return and applauding my survival.
They still thought I was an erse!
The car park approached like an oasis and there was Moses. He was still grinning.
“Your God was looking after you” he said “you didn’t stick to the trail did you man?” it wasn’t really a question.
A little shadow appeared on my shoulder and whispered in my ear “you failed, I won!”
“Feck off, you never beat me, your just a fallen angel, a we feart fallen angel condemned to your own hell of misery. I found you and I beat you”.
Moses seemed to know what I was talking about.
I made my way back into town and thought 'Bill Mitchell was right after all. I’ll check the weather before my next attempt at scaling Devil’s Peak - the idiot’s guide indeed'.
Hail hail
Matt
There was nothing below me; well nothing of substance, nothing that I could hold, step or rest upon, nothing that would give me peace of mind. Unfortunately there wasn’t even the whirlpool of disorienting space with its far away depth urging me with its sneering insincerity to let go and fall, to flail my arms pointlessly, to plummet through my own terror until either my heart’s beat failed to keep pace with my brain’s needs or to come a poor second in the battle of the fragility of blood, skin and bone versus the permanently unyielding might of granite, sandstone and the daggers of storm hewn trunks and branches.
All I could see, in the word of the indigenous Sotho, was ‘Rilithithithi’, ‘less than nothing‘, ‘darker than darkness’, a suddenly impenetrable mass of rain filled, cold strangling cloud. All I could feel was the icy impact of searing rain, all I could touch was the numbing poultice of wet mud and rocks, and all I could hope for was that the next step, the next ledge, the next painful wrench of another yard would yield somewhere, anywhere to give me a moment’s respite from deluge, wind and my hopelessly inbred dread of height.
It was October 7th 2009, and I was clinging to the vertical surface of a creviced mountainside approximately 2800 feet nearer to God’s realm than man in the normal course of events really should be. I was more than clinging, I was attempting to become a chameleon of the rock not just in appearance but in substance, hugging physically and mentally to the surface, the texture and the contours; but I knew that I couldn’t stay where I was; I couldn’t bear even the thought of trying to go back down never mind attempting the descent; so outrageous as it may seem (and believe me even I argued against the suggestion), I had only one option - I had to go onwards and upwards; I had to complete the next 200 feet or so to scale the height of this mountain, a partner to the more famous Table Mountain overlooking Cape Town, and once again face up to the curse laid on me by some prince of darkness.
On the climb this far I had heard the voice of fear and doubt whispering in my ear, ‘look down, look down, see how high it is, you feel dizzy, you might fall, you will fall, give up!’. By now the fear had approached barely controlled panic, and the voice was a gale spiralling and buffeting round the crags of both his choosing and even worse, his name.
This was “Devil’s Peak” in name and in just about every other sense you can imagine.
Adrenalin takes over and endomorphism kick in. I squiggled my feet secure in the rock holds and my right hand firmly in the grip of the sandstone and granite. My left arm stretched, my body trembling but this time through effort and with the cold, soaking and bone aching fatigue of someone who has just taken on about three hundred per-cent more than he should have and now faced the final insult. But that final insult at least wouldn’t be succumbing to the siren voice of fear; it would simply be the failure of having to accept that nature with even the merest of inconsequential whims was stronger than the ego and puny strength of any man’s arrogance.
I knew she was going to win (she always does in the end); but my stubbornness hadn’t been totally drained and so I knew that she was going to HAVE to win; There would be no resigned capitulation before I had exhausted whatever reserves of energy still existed. I just had to balance them across the priorities of keeping the autonomous life support systems working, breathing and moving on inch by painful inch.
I turned my face away from the tearing elements, took a deep breath and with my left hand in its new hold, I heaved my body upwards. My grip was solid…..for a moment….and then I felt a sudden sinking and wetness as the niche turned from sandstone to mud. The wind blew a final victorious blast, laughed in my face and screamed in my ear. “I WIN”!
The dyke above my head burst and the wetness turned to a sudden rush of a dam’s release showering me with rocks, mud, and enough water to solve the drought in the Kalahari. I tried to press myself against the side of the rocks but my hands, feet and possibly my will all gave way at the same time and I flew backwards spluttering and swallowing the cataract, plunging into the mountain’s halo of mist and mystery towards……..somewhere!
*******************************************************************
Many decades earlier.
The wind howled like a banshee with piles, rain intermingling with bursts of hail strafing the windows, doing its violent utmost to breach the steel and glass lattice that protected the single bedroom of the five year old fast asleep in the safety of his pillow and dreams. Basically it was a typical fresh wee sma’ hours of a Coatbridge January; sadly all too typical and ever more disturbing for the other four occupants of the room standing around the boy and where he lay.
His father, mother and elder sisters watched, while as if in a fit of uncontrolled muscle spasms the boy tossed , turned, shadow boxed and kicked out at unseen demons, screaming and shouting in a foretaste of a future number one occult best seller.
They were resigned by now if not accustomed to the interrupted nights and disconnected days which followed. They had only once tried to waken him from whatever world he was in, but the almost catatonic reaction from the youngster had outlawed that as an option.
After an hour or so the outrage being enacted on the single bed eased and the screaming softened to an occasional moderated plea and a whimper eventually steadying to an uneven breath and moan.
Only his dad remained, sitting now in the little bed-side chair, having urged the girls to return to their room and ‘mammy’ to go and ease the weight of the advanced bump soon to produce another daughter and sister for the family.
The boy didn’t know the agonies that everyone else was going through but he did know that something was far wrong. The atmosphere the day after one of those nights was never the best, not bad, just not the normal liveliness of a child’s interaction with his family. Everyone else seemed so tired and the whole world seemed on edge.
Sometimes nothing would happen for months, sometimes only days but it would never disappear completely and another five years later, a brother on the way this time and the ‘terrors’ as he later found out they were called continued, irregularly perhaps but unabated in impact and ferocity.
They were never really discussed; how can you legislate for a nightmare? After all this was the West of Scotland, the land where men didn’t have feelings, emotions or tears, and in the unlikely event that they even admitted it to themselves, the possibility was immediately condemned and mocked as a passing phase.
The boy wouldn’t have told them anyway. After all it wasn’t just the dreams; dreams that consisted of falling from great heights, bellowing strangled screams, sharpened tree stumps getting ever closer, shifting position to prevent his pointless manoeuvres to evade their pointed intent, then just as the inevitable fate pierced his eyes the whole mad movie would start over again, this time a thousand moving stalagmites beckoning him ever closer.
The following day would be even worse as the fallout hit his life. ‘Good mornings’ sounded like accusations, simple questions like interrogations, every breath like a gasp for life, every sound, every movement and every touch like a threat, an attack or an assault.
He learned quickly to control it. He knew the dreams were the trigger; but then the secondary cause started. Heights would bring it on, not just standing somewhere high, but seeing it in reality or even in a film or on television. The world would become a bad place to be. Year after year it continued, and so as anyone who suffered from the affliction of acrophobia, NOT vertigo, but terrifying acrophobia, he took what he considered the only sensible action.
He took up parachute jumping, scaled the outside of multi-story flats, attempted (fruitless due to gendarme intervention) a mission to ascend the outside of the Eiffel Tower, walked over the struts and cantilevers of bridges spanning many of the world’s great rivers, gorges and valleys and in one particular episode at a place called Port Samson on the West Coast of Australia he found himself no more than two feet from the edge of a hundred and fifty foot sheer drop onto the rocks and swirling foam of the ocean below.
How he had got through the barbed grass and lethal flint shards was one thing; how he was going to get down, quite another.
As he got to his feet the wind changed direction and with a few more knots to its power, the journey down would have been solved for him. But there were compensations.
The view and vista of sea roar, wind song, and silence of mankind for just a few moments made it the only place on earth where he wanted to be and with a will and foolhardiness that he didn't know even he had, he stood on that two-foot wide ledge, stared first out to the distant blue horizon and then at the breakers below, stretched out his arms inviting the up draught to do its worse, closed his eyes and felt what it was like to be truly free!
The height did not phase him!
The height did not phase me!
Now though I hope that the above adds a wee bit of foliage to the wasteland of simply admitting to ‘acrophobia’, it also begs the question that if I no longer had the phobia, the challenge to be overcome, the fiend in my mind’s ear, why was I mucking around with extremophile plants and creatures with the added advantage of wings, at altitudes where re-entry rather than descent would have been more appropriate to return to ground zero?
Well, I suppose that there always remains the ex-smoker’s nagging doubt that a relapse is possible but on that day the real reason has to be put down to Bill Mitchell.
Everyone needs a Bill Mitchell.
We met in the car park of the Rhodes monument as I stared up at the peak disappearing into the wispy low clouds of an intermittently sunny day.
He introduced himself in the friendly manner that I had become accustomed to.
“That looks like a Celtic shirt. Thank god you’re not one of them.”
He then introduced himself as Bill Mitchell, Cape Town born and bred, but of solid Orkney stock who recently found himself at the top of Ben Nevis, admittedly by cable-car, and then he told me straight.
“The wind we normally get here is a warm south easterly and that is where our magic climate comes from. Tomorrow and for the next few days it is turning to a northerly blast that not only brings colder and wetter weather, but also the low dark cloud that foretells disaster for the idiotic who still try and climb the Devil’s Peak.”
The mountain loomed over the initially gentle rise that took those ‘idiots’ of Bill’s warning up towards the cloud enshrouded summit of the raucous ‘come on and get me’ ascent that overlooked the city.
The car park attendant, his name ‘Moses’ as I was later to discover wandered over, the rain just starting to pepper the air, ground and conversation.
“You wanta climb up there? Ok man, but not today. Try tomorrow and follow the winding trail. Take you a while maybe two hours but when you get there man, what a view of Kaap Tu,”
That’s Cape Town in the vernacular.
Bill Mitchell, pulled me aside and simply said, “if you can’t see the top, don’t even bother starting out.”
As the following day dawned I stood in the car park again and looked up dolefully at the shroud that swaddled the hidden peaks of the mountains. The sky was broken and at the level I was at there was a fair amount of sunshine, deceptively encouraging me to ignore the warnings and go for it. It wasn’t the height this time, but the cloud and the warnings that loomed as large as the peak itself.
I had been warned of all sorts of dangers in Johannesburg, Durban and now Cape Town, and had ignored them as the usual ravings of locals who were too familiar with and focussed on their problems not to see just how infrequently incidents actually occurred.
Unfortunately it was my judgement that had gone awry and skin of the teeth brushes with a couple of cocked rifles had stemmed my forays into the night life of the City centres. So this time I decided to heed the advice and turned back towards the car park exit.
Who should suddenly emerge from his little soldier hut than Moses.
“Hey Mr, you came back to do the climb today?”
I voiced my concern; well Bill’s concern.
“Stick to the trail man, and you’ll be fine.”
At first I remembered Bill’s advice and refused to buckle, but then I remembered it again. It was just too sensible and it wasn’t the peak that became the challenge, it was the warning not to go for it!
Mind you Moses’ smiling confidence definitely helped. (Never trust a smiling assassin!)
So once again I started towards the ascending rough terrain.
Moses called after me, sounding faintly like a final goodnight from Dave Allen …….“May your God go with you”!
He might as well have cackled and rubbed his hands with devious glee! Nuances and intuition never were my strong point..
********************************************************************
Moses’ had been quite clear, “take the rough path over two walkways and then take a left at the third walkway and follow it all the way round and round and round to the summit”.
I reached the third walkway and since I had already ignored Bill’s guidance I decided that I may as well ignore Moses’ advice and head through the low shrub and rain soaked mud coated basalt towards the hand over fist, foot over sense climb up the perpendicular face of the Devil’s peak.
I mean who in their right mind wants to simply walk up a winding trail to a vantage point, no matter how beautiful. The scenic route may very well have been aesthetically delightful, but the weather was coming in faster than a hun chasing a moonbeam and the hike would take about 2 hours, whereas the summit lay a tantalising five-hundred feet from where I stood. Surely no more than an hour and a half of exhilarating exertion.
It had been a good if challenging foray so far, the wind changing direction, rain then dry, sun then cloud, cold followed by a life affirming gust of warm air.
My moods had alternated with the elements. Confidence, pleasure, pain, enthusiasm, doubt and ultimate certainty.
But now I was in the final straight. Each three steps forwards were followed by a slip backwards, each three yards of clear gentle gradient led to two yards of lacerating vertical shrubbery.
Memories of Ben Lomond came back! But then, foolhardy and without any sense of what I was taking on, I had strayed from the signposted rising trail to the mountaineers’ ascent where ropes, clothing and years of experience were the basis of not only success but survival. I had been wearing a Celtic training jacket, Celtic trainers, Celtic track suit bottoms and carrying a mobile phone….. with a flat battery.
I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
This time the battery was fully charged….. Sadly there was no signal!
But old Devil’s Peak wasn’t as high as a Munro was it? Well it was and is. At almost exactly 1000m it passes the 3000 ft qualifying height by nearly 3oo ft.
The wildlife, flying, crawling, scampering or just salivating camouflaged themselves and with each chirp, whistle, growl or threatening silence they sniggered at my prospects.
The previously beautiful multi-coloured songsters became brooding mocking vultures.
“ Here’s another one. Look at him. He’s finished. Food for a year. Ha ha hah!!!”
I tried to ignore them all but as the rain swept in again from above I looked back down to the fast disappearing car-park! The doubts over my conquest of acrophobia came back with a ripping vengeance. The wind started shouting at me, the rustle of the bushes came at me from all directions whip-lashing my neck as I searched for the unseen and probably non-existent threat that lurked in my mind.
But what was as real as the rain was the mud on my hands, the numbness in my fingers, the pain in my knees and ankles, the tiredness in my spirit and the sudden prospect of the darkness of the cold cloud descending as I ascended and the inevitable conjunction of sightless eyes with impenetrable greyness.
I looked back down past my aches and pains to the incomprehensible sight of Cape Town spotlighted in a sun break in the far away clouds and then it was gone, the route back was gone, and all that was left was silence, cold, the return of fear and the deep memory of how I had never given in to it before.
A chimney through the rock appeared in front of me and as I clambered knees and back wedged in its narrowness to its exit, a wind cleared the clouds for a second and the sharp deliverance of trunks, branches and stalagmites called to me from the valley below. The cloud cover came back and I looked heavenwards.
I could make out some hand and foot grabs; I looked back down and could make out nothing. Up I went onto a place that I had never known before, a place that I couldn’t stay and one that I couldn’t go back down from.
This was fear and one that didn’t scream at me. Just one that whispered. It whispered my past, it whispered its patience and it whispered my future.
You know the rest.
“Rilithithithi, who gives a …..and then the deluge broke from the last hand grab and ‘I flew backwards spluttering and swallowing the cataract, plunging into the mountain’s halo of mist and mystery towards……..somewhere!’
I probably fell no more than thirty feet wedging in the chimney in V formation, jammed by my back pack of camera and Celtic towel, my knees level with my face.
I knew it was only another thirty feet to the bottom of the chimney and with a heave of my calves I freed my upper body and made the next stop with bloodied hands, face and pride where the final straight had started. I checked that my camera was ok.
I knew I was going no further up, and as I looked around at first dispiritedly, I cheered up when realised that the fear had gone again, blown up with the clouds as the sun shone through another gap on the downward trail. I looked up but the mist above clung still to the summit and the rain from its midst fell unrelenting, turning the mountainside into one huge cascade of water and rubble.
I followed it (or it washed me) downwards, tumbling, sliding and as the water cleansed away blood and mud, the birds and creatures of the undergrowth reappeared and made themselves heard, this time cheerfully welcoming my return and applauding my survival.
They still thought I was an erse!
The car park approached like an oasis and there was Moses. He was still grinning.
“Your God was looking after you” he said “you didn’t stick to the trail did you man?” it wasn’t really a question.
A little shadow appeared on my shoulder and whispered in my ear “you failed, I won!”
“Feck off, you never beat me, your just a fallen angel, a we feart fallen angel condemned to your own hell of misery. I found you and I beat you”.
Moses seemed to know what I was talking about.
I made my way back into town and thought 'Bill Mitchell was right after all. I’ll check the weather before my next attempt at scaling Devil’s Peak - the idiot’s guide indeed'.
Hail hail
Matt
Monday, 28 September 2009
The Sky at Night, Mugabe, the Chief, Spam and conquering my own prejudices.
22.00 hours and in the depth of the night the headlights from the Intercape coach picked out the luminous cats’ eyes and exit signs from Johannesburg bus station as it started its four hundred mile journey to Durban. Roughly twenty five quid it cost me, comparable to the Glasgow to London ordeal but a whole heap more pleasant. The seats provided plenty of leg room, the reclining was substantial and comfortable, and once the sponsored TV adverts switched off at about 23.00 the gentle drone and vibration of the engine lullabied me to a much needed sleep.
Nature’s call roused me at about 01.50 and I headed to the toilet in the lower deck. The brightness in the wee-est room on the coach ill-prepared me for my return journey as in the contrasting blackness of the upper deck I stumbled, and in an instant was confronted by a hundred stars and fifty crescent moons suddenly lighting up the gloom like the sky at night; except these stars and moons were the abruptly opened eyes and smiling teeth of everyone else on the coach as my stubbed toe and painful exclamation awoke them from their own slumber.
I was the only white person on the coach!
A pale imitation of their grin crossed my lips and I awkwardly returned to my seat, any residual tiredness now dissipated with the embarrassed rush of blood to my cheeks. Then as with every other sleepless night I remember, the great bane of my life returned; I started to ponder the whys of the world and the hows of life.
The girl in the window seat beside me stirred in time to her regularly vibrating mobile phone that for some reason she always replaced in her cleavage! Five minutes would pass and then the gentle burr would sound again and after a few seconds and a little giggle she would reach down into the depths of that mysterious ravine and retrieve her little pal! She caught me looking; me with a fixed smirk and her with a knowing wink!
I smiled back in that subconscious way that we do when slightly embarrassed, and returned to my contemplation.
Jo’burg had created a whirlpool of questions, doubts, and reappraisal of long-held ignorant beliefs. Irrespective of revealed history it was apparent that wherever South Africa and its neighbours had come from it had never in any sense of the phrase been simply ‘black and white‘. good and bad, just and unjust. It was much more complicated than that.
Bill McIntosh (now re-christened McCluskey by his pals due to a slight typo by myself on the previous blog entry) had told me about his conversation with Margaret Mugabe and her response. The question was loaded but the answer was unequivocal and honest.
Bill : “Margaret, your a Zimbabwean. Given what you know now (a killer condition in any question), how would you vote, Ian Smith or Robert Mugabe?”
Margaret : “Smith! Smith! Mugabe is a bad man”
In the self-styled ‘civilised nations’ how often do we witness exactly the same phenomenon.
The desire and creation of change stems not always just from what is being promised but the intolerable nature of the existing conditions. Unfortunately it doesn’t take us too long to discover that like evolution change is a quite different phenomenon to progress, and we sometimes head down a cul-de-sac of hopelessness before having to fight a bloody retreat back past the hordes of ’me-to-ers’ who are blindly following the initial gadarene dash for greed. To all intents and purposes it has happened all over the ‘first world’, most demonstrably at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. How many millions of people see that what has merely happened is that one autocratic set of despots have been replaced by another, and this time with none of the disciplines that had become second nature to their every day lives.
So progress was needed but all they got was change, and not a change for the better. Now what are they faced with? Obviously it is unlikely that they really want to return to the way things were, but they don’t want to exist in a sad mirror image of that system either. I think they await another sober sensible gradualist Gorbachev rather than a drunkenly ranting Yeltsin. Many undoubtedly pray that they had made a different choice.
Zimbabwe is the same. I doubt really that they would want to return to Ian Smith and his white supremacist hegemony, but just maybe they would like to go back to the starting gun and choose a different answer to the multiple choice question. One modelled perhaps on a Nyerere, one modelled on a Mandela, a Tutu but not a Mugabe. Sadly I think that many people confused the apartheid of Smith with a characteristic of being ‘white’, and similarly assumed that changing that colour-base to ‘black’ would solve the perceived wrongs. It didn’t, it hasn’t and it never will until they change the values and become blind to colour.
Imagine what Margaret Mugabe is really saying about the horrors of the Mugabe regime.
Lets reverse the struggle, the deaths, the bloodshed, the sacrifices and the terror, all apparently worth it at the time, and all now consigned to the black-hole of worthlessness by a man who has taken the base concept of hatred and used it to divide and conquer his own people. Black versus white. Forget it. This is about power and the ‘white’ factor is only a tool to be used to fire up his Shona tribe, to give an ingredient of injustice to his fascist campaign, and to conjure up terror within the electorate. Margaret would rather choose to live in a state that views her as second class citizen, deprives her of basic human rights, and condemns her from birth to a life of uneducated poverty scavenging on the middens of the rich to eke out survival. In fact she did under Smith and those still in Zimbabwe stilll do under Mugabe. What a condemnation of the farce whose chief comedian is Robert Mugabe. Black humour indeed!
Mugabe is just a magnification of western style democracy’s devotion to lies and spin, spiced by the added ingredient of open brutality in the desperate desire for power. If the white vote was needed Mugabe would court that and sadly the western governments would see that as a virtue.
Instead of being a breadbasket for its own continent and possibly the world, Africa with the greatest resources in the world is steadily becoming a basket case, and don’t let us be in any way stereo typical here, this is allowed, encouraged and driven by the interests of big western conglomerates who shiver at the very thought of a united will and effective administration throughout this most colourful Eden.
Perhaps Mugabe’s inevitable demise will see a branch onto the real path of progress, but I doubt it. The infection is spreading and the treatment hasn’t even been identified.
However when that day does dawn, probably far into the uncharted future, Africa will be restored and recognised as not only the birthplace of humanity but also the founding empire of the future. It will succeed where barbed wire walls of the Grecian, Egyptian, Roman, Ottoman, British, Austro-Hungarian and Chinese imitations failed. Now there’s a prediction.
I’m not naïve enough to think that I’ve even scratched the itch never mind the surface; when I get to Harare I’m sure that a completely new panorama will be presented to me. But the above is a scenario that is regularly voiced by many here who fear that Zimbabwe is a rock tossed into a pool and whose waves will spread outwards to Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi, and South Africa in the years to come. The ripples are already being felt and the waters are rising.
Mind you I’m feeling quite chuffed at the moment.
I arrived a few days ago at the ultimate in back-packers accommodation. The Happy Hippo on Mahatma Ghandi Road (until recently known as Point Road). It has everything a man of the road could possibly desire and most importantly it has a unique welcome offered by Norma and Sunshine, the two wee Zulu girls on reception.
Compliments are a real bargaining chip in this land, and the silver tongue has worked wonders again. Not only am I granted almost open hours on the internet (I pay for one and get three free), but I have been allocated the best suite in the house. None of rooms are numbered but are named after heroes, tribes, battles or landmarks. Mine is simply called ‘Inkosi’ which everyone knows simply means ‘Chief’’! And well deserved it is especially with its echoes back to the Glaswegian Patois…”Aw right Chief?”
There is also Xhosa, Rondavel, Nguni, Ndebele, Kraal, Sangama, Umjondola, and many more but that should be enough to keep you and google going for the moment.
Oh, there is a communal room called Washywashy; No it’s not Zulu, it’s just the laundrette!
Breakfast starts at 6am and I’m sure that the early start led to the journey’s first ‘Monty Python’ moment.
I had decided to have a ‘breakfast Treppanazzi’; basically two slices of dinner-plate sized unleavened bread sandwiching fried tomato, mushrooms, bacon, Italian sausage, and scrambled egg.
I love tomatoes but prefer them raw.
“No tomatoes please” I asked.
A couple of minutes later the waitress returned “Sorry sir, we have no tomatoes. But we have caramelised fried onions instead ”.
“Ok, No caramelised fried onions then”!
“Very good sir”.
The Happy Hippo bar on one evening (that’s about all I could stand) is an ever changing variety of nationalities Dutch, German, English, West Brit (Bhoy did he hate my Letterkenny Wolfe Tone’s shirt), Afrikaner, French and American whose conversation focusses almost entirely on where they come from, (the delights of winter in Lowestoft anyone), how much they are spending, what they do as a job, and how many of the local shorts they think they can drink before falling over. Converstaion obviously inspired by some as yet unacknowledged Gods!
Across the road is my preferred house of relaxation, The Vic. It’s a Zulu run bar, used mainly by Zulus but with an open handed greeting that sees a fair sprinkling of the fairer skinned folk enjoying the great company and repartee.
Tulthste, (I called him my Spirit Guide) latched on to my ‘Australian’ accent, ordered some food and drink and insisted that I eat my share. I almost said ‘no thank you’, but the words hadn’t even formed when I could see the disappointment in his eyes. I don’t know what it was, but it was green, spicy, meaty and tasty, tasty, very very tasty.
We’ve sat most evenings late on since in a group of six or so, and all they want to discuss is what I think of South Africa, Africa, why I am there, what memories I will take away, what I think will happen to their country and a hundred other subjects.
Tulthste is a university student of history and modern studies, an inspiration and a real beacon of hope for the future.
He and all his friends are desperate for Africa to achieve its true potential and he left me last evening with a little story about his lecturer.
She said to him “When I was young I wanted to change the world, and failed. Then I wanted to change my country and failed. Then I tried to change the government and failed. Finally I tried to change myself and succeeded. Do that first!”
I think that is advice worth heeding!
I’ll get the chance later to test my new found motivation when I dip my toe back in the eclectic mix of the Happy Hippo bar, where the conversation has probably turned to the relative price of their nattily sloganed Primark products of exploitation.
I promise I will rid myself of this prejudice, after all they can’t help being arseholes!
Hail hail
Matt
p.s. Hope to visit Bloemfontein Celtic in the next few weeks. That should be something else!
Nature’s call roused me at about 01.50 and I headed to the toilet in the lower deck. The brightness in the wee-est room on the coach ill-prepared me for my return journey as in the contrasting blackness of the upper deck I stumbled, and in an instant was confronted by a hundred stars and fifty crescent moons suddenly lighting up the gloom like the sky at night; except these stars and moons were the abruptly opened eyes and smiling teeth of everyone else on the coach as my stubbed toe and painful exclamation awoke them from their own slumber.
I was the only white person on the coach!
A pale imitation of their grin crossed my lips and I awkwardly returned to my seat, any residual tiredness now dissipated with the embarrassed rush of blood to my cheeks. Then as with every other sleepless night I remember, the great bane of my life returned; I started to ponder the whys of the world and the hows of life.
The girl in the window seat beside me stirred in time to her regularly vibrating mobile phone that for some reason she always replaced in her cleavage! Five minutes would pass and then the gentle burr would sound again and after a few seconds and a little giggle she would reach down into the depths of that mysterious ravine and retrieve her little pal! She caught me looking; me with a fixed smirk and her with a knowing wink!
I smiled back in that subconscious way that we do when slightly embarrassed, and returned to my contemplation.
Jo’burg had created a whirlpool of questions, doubts, and reappraisal of long-held ignorant beliefs. Irrespective of revealed history it was apparent that wherever South Africa and its neighbours had come from it had never in any sense of the phrase been simply ‘black and white‘. good and bad, just and unjust. It was much more complicated than that.
Bill McIntosh (now re-christened McCluskey by his pals due to a slight typo by myself on the previous blog entry) had told me about his conversation with Margaret Mugabe and her response. The question was loaded but the answer was unequivocal and honest.
Bill : “Margaret, your a Zimbabwean. Given what you know now (a killer condition in any question), how would you vote, Ian Smith or Robert Mugabe?”
Margaret : “Smith! Smith! Mugabe is a bad man”
In the self-styled ‘civilised nations’ how often do we witness exactly the same phenomenon.
The desire and creation of change stems not always just from what is being promised but the intolerable nature of the existing conditions. Unfortunately it doesn’t take us too long to discover that like evolution change is a quite different phenomenon to progress, and we sometimes head down a cul-de-sac of hopelessness before having to fight a bloody retreat back past the hordes of ’me-to-ers’ who are blindly following the initial gadarene dash for greed. To all intents and purposes it has happened all over the ‘first world’, most demonstrably at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. How many millions of people see that what has merely happened is that one autocratic set of despots have been replaced by another, and this time with none of the disciplines that had become second nature to their every day lives.
So progress was needed but all they got was change, and not a change for the better. Now what are they faced with? Obviously it is unlikely that they really want to return to the way things were, but they don’t want to exist in a sad mirror image of that system either. I think they await another sober sensible gradualist Gorbachev rather than a drunkenly ranting Yeltsin. Many undoubtedly pray that they had made a different choice.
Zimbabwe is the same. I doubt really that they would want to return to Ian Smith and his white supremacist hegemony, but just maybe they would like to go back to the starting gun and choose a different answer to the multiple choice question. One modelled perhaps on a Nyerere, one modelled on a Mandela, a Tutu but not a Mugabe. Sadly I think that many people confused the apartheid of Smith with a characteristic of being ‘white’, and similarly assumed that changing that colour-base to ‘black’ would solve the perceived wrongs. It didn’t, it hasn’t and it never will until they change the values and become blind to colour.
Imagine what Margaret Mugabe is really saying about the horrors of the Mugabe regime.
Lets reverse the struggle, the deaths, the bloodshed, the sacrifices and the terror, all apparently worth it at the time, and all now consigned to the black-hole of worthlessness by a man who has taken the base concept of hatred and used it to divide and conquer his own people. Black versus white. Forget it. This is about power and the ‘white’ factor is only a tool to be used to fire up his Shona tribe, to give an ingredient of injustice to his fascist campaign, and to conjure up terror within the electorate. Margaret would rather choose to live in a state that views her as second class citizen, deprives her of basic human rights, and condemns her from birth to a life of uneducated poverty scavenging on the middens of the rich to eke out survival. In fact she did under Smith and those still in Zimbabwe stilll do under Mugabe. What a condemnation of the farce whose chief comedian is Robert Mugabe. Black humour indeed!
Mugabe is just a magnification of western style democracy’s devotion to lies and spin, spiced by the added ingredient of open brutality in the desperate desire for power. If the white vote was needed Mugabe would court that and sadly the western governments would see that as a virtue.
Instead of being a breadbasket for its own continent and possibly the world, Africa with the greatest resources in the world is steadily becoming a basket case, and don’t let us be in any way stereo typical here, this is allowed, encouraged and driven by the interests of big western conglomerates who shiver at the very thought of a united will and effective administration throughout this most colourful Eden.
Perhaps Mugabe’s inevitable demise will see a branch onto the real path of progress, but I doubt it. The infection is spreading and the treatment hasn’t even been identified.
However when that day does dawn, probably far into the uncharted future, Africa will be restored and recognised as not only the birthplace of humanity but also the founding empire of the future. It will succeed where barbed wire walls of the Grecian, Egyptian, Roman, Ottoman, British, Austro-Hungarian and Chinese imitations failed. Now there’s a prediction.
I’m not naïve enough to think that I’ve even scratched the itch never mind the surface; when I get to Harare I’m sure that a completely new panorama will be presented to me. But the above is a scenario that is regularly voiced by many here who fear that Zimbabwe is a rock tossed into a pool and whose waves will spread outwards to Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi, and South Africa in the years to come. The ripples are already being felt and the waters are rising.
Mind you I’m feeling quite chuffed at the moment.
I arrived a few days ago at the ultimate in back-packers accommodation. The Happy Hippo on Mahatma Ghandi Road (until recently known as Point Road). It has everything a man of the road could possibly desire and most importantly it has a unique welcome offered by Norma and Sunshine, the two wee Zulu girls on reception.
Compliments are a real bargaining chip in this land, and the silver tongue has worked wonders again. Not only am I granted almost open hours on the internet (I pay for one and get three free), but I have been allocated the best suite in the house. None of rooms are numbered but are named after heroes, tribes, battles or landmarks. Mine is simply called ‘Inkosi’ which everyone knows simply means ‘Chief’’! And well deserved it is especially with its echoes back to the Glaswegian Patois…”Aw right Chief?”
There is also Xhosa, Rondavel, Nguni, Ndebele, Kraal, Sangama, Umjondola, and many more but that should be enough to keep you and google going for the moment.
Oh, there is a communal room called Washywashy; No it’s not Zulu, it’s just the laundrette!
Breakfast starts at 6am and I’m sure that the early start led to the journey’s first ‘Monty Python’ moment.
I had decided to have a ‘breakfast Treppanazzi’; basically two slices of dinner-plate sized unleavened bread sandwiching fried tomato, mushrooms, bacon, Italian sausage, and scrambled egg.
I love tomatoes but prefer them raw.
“No tomatoes please” I asked.
A couple of minutes later the waitress returned “Sorry sir, we have no tomatoes. But we have caramelised fried onions instead ”.
“Ok, No caramelised fried onions then”!
“Very good sir”.
The Happy Hippo bar on one evening (that’s about all I could stand) is an ever changing variety of nationalities Dutch, German, English, West Brit (Bhoy did he hate my Letterkenny Wolfe Tone’s shirt), Afrikaner, French and American whose conversation focusses almost entirely on where they come from, (the delights of winter in Lowestoft anyone), how much they are spending, what they do as a job, and how many of the local shorts they think they can drink before falling over. Converstaion obviously inspired by some as yet unacknowledged Gods!
Across the road is my preferred house of relaxation, The Vic. It’s a Zulu run bar, used mainly by Zulus but with an open handed greeting that sees a fair sprinkling of the fairer skinned folk enjoying the great company and repartee.
Tulthste, (I called him my Spirit Guide) latched on to my ‘Australian’ accent, ordered some food and drink and insisted that I eat my share. I almost said ‘no thank you’, but the words hadn’t even formed when I could see the disappointment in his eyes. I don’t know what it was, but it was green, spicy, meaty and tasty, tasty, very very tasty.
We’ve sat most evenings late on since in a group of six or so, and all they want to discuss is what I think of South Africa, Africa, why I am there, what memories I will take away, what I think will happen to their country and a hundred other subjects.
Tulthste is a university student of history and modern studies, an inspiration and a real beacon of hope for the future.
He and all his friends are desperate for Africa to achieve its true potential and he left me last evening with a little story about his lecturer.
She said to him “When I was young I wanted to change the world, and failed. Then I wanted to change my country and failed. Then I tried to change the government and failed. Finally I tried to change myself and succeeded. Do that first!”
I think that is advice worth heeding!
I’ll get the chance later to test my new found motivation when I dip my toe back in the eclectic mix of the Happy Hippo bar, where the conversation has probably turned to the relative price of their nattily sloganed Primark products of exploitation.
I promise I will rid myself of this prejudice, after all they can’t help being arseholes!
Hail hail
Matt
p.s. Hope to visit Bloemfontein Celtic in the next few weeks. That should be something else!
Friday, 25 September 2009
Bok to the future - Part 1
6000 ft up in the air, with neither wings nor parachute and you would think that my mind might be on something a bit more important than the fact that my nose was constantly blocked up.
Mind you in keeping with my own philosophy, it was a socialist blocking in that it didn’t exclusively favour any one nostril; after each blow it seemed to moved to share its work-to-rule within the recesses of the other nostril, transforming itself from a simple stoppage to a sudden full blown general strike of Synexally Natural Odour Treatment (SNOT).
Three bloody days and it just wouldn’t stop, but I suppose that is what comes from suddenly transferring from a life of sea-level temperance to this lofty existence 6000ft above sea level, up the Highveldt in Johannesburg’s Northcliff district.
With it has come an unusual tiredness that manifests itself particularly at night when I find that as the witching hour takes hold of the moon and the stars, I drift off into a deep sleep only to be awakened 9 hours later by the insistent laugh of the hadida bird (for those who know him, imagine Billy Shannon through an amplifier, for those who don‘t think of your childish reaction to the laughing policeman) or the ‘hoo-ooo-oooop - hoo-ooo-ooop-hoop-hoop-hoop-hoop’ of the surprisingly-named hoop-hoop bird (C’mon the Hoops)! It’s odd how the mind works as in its idle moments it ridiculously suggests that the sleep may be a normal by-product of a (relatively) alcohol free existence and dreams uninterrupted by nocturnal calls to the bladder relief room.
Anyway enough of the physical alterations to a goat-like existence on the sides of the mountain and the liberation from a life tied to Guinness and Sharkeys bar stool.
It had been an interesting journey, more from my own surprise that having been wasted on the Saturday night and then intermittently staying up to watch Mayweather versus Marquez , I was still functioning as Sunday 06:40 ticked into existence. Sufficiently programmed I dragged bags and myself across the road to meet up with Brenda and family for the journey out to the Airport. I was quiet the whole way. My brain was neither sure that it belonged to me nor that I was its normal compatriot. Fortunately Brenda, her mum and Paul kept up a running commentary on life in general and I just left my brain gearbox in neutral, my neural engine just ticking over enough to ensure that life sustaining functions operated in the background. Mind you if it hadn’t been for the help I received to automatically create my boarding ticket, I think I would just have given up and got the bus back to town.
Never mind, I got to Heathrow having eaten breakfast without actually realising that I had done so and while waiting the hours and minutes till my departure for Jo’burg I watched the Celtic v Hearts game on the net, the picture freezing at 1-1 and 1 minute into injury time. I trudged through security, sat down to a pasta meal, checked the final score and lo and behold, a new man appeared at the handle end of the fork. I even phoned Pat! It was gratifying to hear that not only had Celtic grabbed a stoppage time Hearts-breaker, but also that I wasn’t the only one in the world with a grand-canyon sized hangover and memory blank!
And so to Jo’burg and that city’s first encounter with the new Bumblebee - purchased at the last minute from the handily situated airport Celtic shop (tax free I hasten to add - ah the benefits of international playbhoy-dom)!
It was one of those paradoxes in life that Ray (my designated chauffeur) was an East Belfast lad. Oh the banter !!
Bill McIntosh and his wife Gioia, my hosts for the first few days , made my introduction to this new and fascinating culture as smooth as is possible. I can imagine now the apprehension that faces an immigrant, refugee or asylum seeker embarking on a new life in Glasgow. I am the different colour here! I speak the different language. I don’t know where the shops are, what to ask for, what to pay with. I don’t know the safe areas, the dangerous streets, the humour, the intonations of friendliness or threat, and most of all I don’t know where the nearest bar is which sells a decent pint of Guinness - the sole reason I am alcohol free!
Bill’s an ex-pat from Castlemilk; a dealer in gold, diamonds, medical services amongst other activities; Ross, his son is at Uni studying physics - I’ve been a great help to him in his thesis on string theory; Laura his daughter sleeps most of the time, and Gioia or ‘Mrs Bill’ as I call her having picked up the local patois, makes lasagne - but not just any lasagne - not even M&S lasagne - this is lasagne with dreams built in.
They’ve got two dogs - Boorbools - that a pack of Dobermans would do well to avoid, and a maid called Mrs Mugabe that the Boorbools do well to avoid. She makes me breakfast and also fires disapproving looks and grunts in my direction on a fairly regular basis. I take this as a sign of affection.
Johannesburg itself, that is the place that everyone would recognise as Downtown Johannesburg, is a dump and is heading for an implosion as once beautiful buildings, monuments and palazzos are destroyed in an orgy of retribution by immigrant opportunists taking advantage of the efforts to recompense the once downtrodden indigenous black peoples. What must have seemed like a golden age of opportunity for those who had long struggled for recognition or at least acknowledgement, has been decimated by an influx of tenuous kith and kin from Nigeria and Zimbabwe in particular, and that opportunity undoubtedly created has been washed away in a tidal wave of corruption, drugs, murder and Uzis. 50 murders across the country every day!
Businesses by the hundred have deserted their totemic buildings; bohemian city dwellers on a par with Paris have escaped the broken windows and shattered hopes; and societal civilities have been swept into the drains and sewers with each flood of desperate take-everything-give-nothing land-grabbers. The Government is paralysed, confused and leaderless believing that somehow next year’s World Cup is a fairy godmother with a magic wand.
Meanwhile a new city has sprung up, one that is the Johannesburg of old. Sandton is its name and since apartheid’s demise and the decay of the original city (replaced it seems by an epidemic of original sin) it is here that businesses have moved, people have relocated and society has begun its own fight back. But this is no simple like for like replacement for the old regime. Here the hopes of the new egalitarian dawn still shine. Perhaps it is still a bit too glamorous, glitzy and capitalist for me but at least there is no barrier to progress irrespective of colour or creed; and right in the middle sits Nelson Mandela Square (a wee bit more evocative than our very own back in Glasgow), a statue to the great man rising to the heavens as tall as the tallest building but unfortunately bearing a striking resemblance to Lionel Ritchie.
There is a continuing struggle, a struggle sadly echoing the days of the ghettos, the days of the shanty towns, the days of apartheid. But this struggle is not one of colour, nor even one of money or haves and have-nots. This struggle is one of law and order versus anarchy. It is a real battle and the locals, those who believed in the country and stayed (the whites and Afrikaaners), those who triumphed through justice (the blacks), and those who have already embraced the new integrated future (the coloureds) fear for a new ghetto-like existence where vision becomes imprisoned behind strictly defined walls and outside the battles for the quick-rand, the quick adrenaline rush and the quick fix become even more myopic as the country flounders in a disastrous magnification of Zimbabwe.
That is the sad sad truth of a future that one as beautiful as this country is, with the most beautiful people in the world, flashing the most inspiring smiles and welcoming with the most warm of handshakes, just simply doesn’t deserve.
The World Cup may be as good as it gets!
I hope I’m wrong.
I’ll be more upbeat next time as the lack of Guinness and too much sleep probably begins to become the norm for my new lifestyle. I’ll also hopefully be in Durban by then.
Hail Hail
Matt
Mind you in keeping with my own philosophy, it was a socialist blocking in that it didn’t exclusively favour any one nostril; after each blow it seemed to moved to share its work-to-rule within the recesses of the other nostril, transforming itself from a simple stoppage to a sudden full blown general strike of Synexally Natural Odour Treatment (SNOT).
Three bloody days and it just wouldn’t stop, but I suppose that is what comes from suddenly transferring from a life of sea-level temperance to this lofty existence 6000ft above sea level, up the Highveldt in Johannesburg’s Northcliff district.
With it has come an unusual tiredness that manifests itself particularly at night when I find that as the witching hour takes hold of the moon and the stars, I drift off into a deep sleep only to be awakened 9 hours later by the insistent laugh of the hadida bird (for those who know him, imagine Billy Shannon through an amplifier, for those who don‘t think of your childish reaction to the laughing policeman) or the ‘hoo-ooo-oooop - hoo-ooo-ooop-hoop-hoop-hoop-hoop’ of the surprisingly-named hoop-hoop bird (C’mon the Hoops)! It’s odd how the mind works as in its idle moments it ridiculously suggests that the sleep may be a normal by-product of a (relatively) alcohol free existence and dreams uninterrupted by nocturnal calls to the bladder relief room.
Anyway enough of the physical alterations to a goat-like existence on the sides of the mountain and the liberation from a life tied to Guinness and Sharkeys bar stool.
It had been an interesting journey, more from my own surprise that having been wasted on the Saturday night and then intermittently staying up to watch Mayweather versus Marquez , I was still functioning as Sunday 06:40 ticked into existence. Sufficiently programmed I dragged bags and myself across the road to meet up with Brenda and family for the journey out to the Airport. I was quiet the whole way. My brain was neither sure that it belonged to me nor that I was its normal compatriot. Fortunately Brenda, her mum and Paul kept up a running commentary on life in general and I just left my brain gearbox in neutral, my neural engine just ticking over enough to ensure that life sustaining functions operated in the background. Mind you if it hadn’t been for the help I received to automatically create my boarding ticket, I think I would just have given up and got the bus back to town.
Never mind, I got to Heathrow having eaten breakfast without actually realising that I had done so and while waiting the hours and minutes till my departure for Jo’burg I watched the Celtic v Hearts game on the net, the picture freezing at 1-1 and 1 minute into injury time. I trudged through security, sat down to a pasta meal, checked the final score and lo and behold, a new man appeared at the handle end of the fork. I even phoned Pat! It was gratifying to hear that not only had Celtic grabbed a stoppage time Hearts-breaker, but also that I wasn’t the only one in the world with a grand-canyon sized hangover and memory blank!
And so to Jo’burg and that city’s first encounter with the new Bumblebee - purchased at the last minute from the handily situated airport Celtic shop (tax free I hasten to add - ah the benefits of international playbhoy-dom)!
It was one of those paradoxes in life that Ray (my designated chauffeur) was an East Belfast lad. Oh the banter !!
Bill McIntosh and his wife Gioia, my hosts for the first few days , made my introduction to this new and fascinating culture as smooth as is possible. I can imagine now the apprehension that faces an immigrant, refugee or asylum seeker embarking on a new life in Glasgow. I am the different colour here! I speak the different language. I don’t know where the shops are, what to ask for, what to pay with. I don’t know the safe areas, the dangerous streets, the humour, the intonations of friendliness or threat, and most of all I don’t know where the nearest bar is which sells a decent pint of Guinness - the sole reason I am alcohol free!
Bill’s an ex-pat from Castlemilk; a dealer in gold, diamonds, medical services amongst other activities; Ross, his son is at Uni studying physics - I’ve been a great help to him in his thesis on string theory; Laura his daughter sleeps most of the time, and Gioia or ‘Mrs Bill’ as I call her having picked up the local patois, makes lasagne - but not just any lasagne - not even M&S lasagne - this is lasagne with dreams built in.
They’ve got two dogs - Boorbools - that a pack of Dobermans would do well to avoid, and a maid called Mrs Mugabe that the Boorbools do well to avoid. She makes me breakfast and also fires disapproving looks and grunts in my direction on a fairly regular basis. I take this as a sign of affection.
Johannesburg itself, that is the place that everyone would recognise as Downtown Johannesburg, is a dump and is heading for an implosion as once beautiful buildings, monuments and palazzos are destroyed in an orgy of retribution by immigrant opportunists taking advantage of the efforts to recompense the once downtrodden indigenous black peoples. What must have seemed like a golden age of opportunity for those who had long struggled for recognition or at least acknowledgement, has been decimated by an influx of tenuous kith and kin from Nigeria and Zimbabwe in particular, and that opportunity undoubtedly created has been washed away in a tidal wave of corruption, drugs, murder and Uzis. 50 murders across the country every day!
Businesses by the hundred have deserted their totemic buildings; bohemian city dwellers on a par with Paris have escaped the broken windows and shattered hopes; and societal civilities have been swept into the drains and sewers with each flood of desperate take-everything-give-nothing land-grabbers. The Government is paralysed, confused and leaderless believing that somehow next year’s World Cup is a fairy godmother with a magic wand.
Meanwhile a new city has sprung up, one that is the Johannesburg of old. Sandton is its name and since apartheid’s demise and the decay of the original city (replaced it seems by an epidemic of original sin) it is here that businesses have moved, people have relocated and society has begun its own fight back. But this is no simple like for like replacement for the old regime. Here the hopes of the new egalitarian dawn still shine. Perhaps it is still a bit too glamorous, glitzy and capitalist for me but at least there is no barrier to progress irrespective of colour or creed; and right in the middle sits Nelson Mandela Square (a wee bit more evocative than our very own back in Glasgow), a statue to the great man rising to the heavens as tall as the tallest building but unfortunately bearing a striking resemblance to Lionel Ritchie.
There is a continuing struggle, a struggle sadly echoing the days of the ghettos, the days of the shanty towns, the days of apartheid. But this struggle is not one of colour, nor even one of money or haves and have-nots. This struggle is one of law and order versus anarchy. It is a real battle and the locals, those who believed in the country and stayed (the whites and Afrikaaners), those who triumphed through justice (the blacks), and those who have already embraced the new integrated future (the coloureds) fear for a new ghetto-like existence where vision becomes imprisoned behind strictly defined walls and outside the battles for the quick-rand, the quick adrenaline rush and the quick fix become even more myopic as the country flounders in a disastrous magnification of Zimbabwe.
That is the sad sad truth of a future that one as beautiful as this country is, with the most beautiful people in the world, flashing the most inspiring smiles and welcoming with the most warm of handshakes, just simply doesn’t deserve.
The World Cup may be as good as it gets!
I hope I’m wrong.
I’ll be more upbeat next time as the lack of Guinness and too much sleep probably begins to become the norm for my new lifestyle. I’ll also hopefully be in Durban by then.
Hail Hail
Matt
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