fush and chips

Twatter®

2011-12-25T19:13:00.004+02:00

I look like a bruised potato that lost a knife fight. A potato doing a regrettably high-fidelity impersonation of Mickey Rourke, circa Wrestler. With the benefit of hindsight, my recent car crash has had some regrettable outcomes. Maybe it’s Maybelline®, maybe it’s Blunt-force Trauma…

Deplorable facial injuries have wrecking-balled my facial charms from Seven Beer’s Cute? to Head in a Jar of Formaldehyde. If this wasn’t enough, repeated post-collision CAT scans of my cranial cavity have revealed nothing but a plasticine abacus, capable of only the most mundane of household chores, and focus on concepts no longer than 140 characters.

So, I’ve joined Twitter, the LOLSpeak soapbox of choice for Generation G (Goldfish attention-span).

Some entries:

“OMG! Twitter is the shizz. Seriously, dudes. Awesome! LOL! KTHX!”
(An early attempt, possibly out of my depth with today's youth)

“Natal, South Africa Christmas = Pray, Eat, Pray, Eat, Sleep. Elisabeth Gilbert is a lying, filthy hippie destined to burn in a Lutheran hell.”

“Sometimes I wish my son had a “snooze button!” Or an “off switch.” Or “didn’t look a lot like my Kenyan neighbor, Mbui.”

“Do they ever "shut off" super fat people at restaurants like they do with drunks at bars?”

“I think that chocolate Sterie-Stumpie may have restored my will to live.”

“I think it would be sweet if everyone who calls themselves a "social media guru" were turned into food.”

“To my neighbor using a chainsaw at 8 am on a Sunday: Try holding the other end.”

“If I had a time machine I would go back in time 30 years and unsmell my cousin Daryl's finger.”

“#Wimbledon Don't get me wrong, I love woman who grunt, but after three whole sets of Tennis, RIP my boner.”

Does "interfering with yourself" make you go blind? http://victorianmythbusters.blogspot.com/2010/04/does-onanism-cause-blindness.html

Follow me if you like, at http://twitter.com/fushandchips.

57 Stitches

2011-12-04T21:13:00.010+02:00

3am. Today.
I bowed my head under the state hospital restroom tap, the cold water shutting out everything, even the last seven hours. My head gorged out thick red like a clenched paint tube. Crescents of dried dark moons in my fingernails as torrent after torrent of blood rushed down over my ears, down my nose into the roiling crimson puddle. After the water began to run a pale pink, I switched off the tap, wiped my closed eyes, and exhaled, and peered across, under the zinc halogen light. Blinking in the mirror, I recoiled at me. Atop my broad, pale unblemished shoulders, above my neck, was a swollen, mottled, botched autopsy head, my eyes staring out of it at me. Sick-red grooves dug fork-deep across my nose and cheek. Hopscotch trails of stitches, death-threat handwriting clenched across my face like meandering spiky crabgrass. A face that would make a child scream. I shut my eyes. The crying jump-started the pain again.

2pm. Yesterday.
I took the corner. My phone slid lazily across the dashboard, skating in from left like a slow slab hockey puck. I looked down as it toppled down lazily down past the steering wheel, bounced off my knee and landed silently between my feet. I never looked up.

A blood-crunching, flesh and glass bang, loud enough for Death in the silence beyond. My head went through the windscreen quick as a spoon through cling-wrap. Blink. I pull my hands away from my face. They’re wet and dripping, like I spooned them into buckets of paint. FireEngineStopSignStigmata. Red.

I’m alive.

Bare-knuckle Blancmange

2011-09-30T18:10:00.000+02:00

I may have whined about having the muscle tone of a blancmange in my last blog, but starting kickboxing two weeks before I turn 40 was about as clever as a Palestinian taking a rock to an Israeli tank fight.

My personal trainer Solly (a whirling black dynamo who’s built like a brick privy) is on the South African kickboxing team. He nonchalantly head butts speeding locomotives, and his spiral jump kick could knock out a street lamp. Sweet baby Jesus, he kills me in training sessions surely devised by the Marquis de Sade. One hour of doing stuff like bouncing on the ball of 1 foot, trying to kick above your head with the other, then follow that with an uppercut, and a roundhouse punch. I somehow make it through the hour, but I have to pull myself back to my car using my lips, the only remaining unexhausted part of my body.

I wake up with my body hurting in places I forgot I'd ever had. My arms feel like a Spaniard's, stretched on the rack, Inquisition style. I have to use a Zimmer frame to shuffle down the passage to the bathroom. Gonna have to get a lot fitter.

So I've started running. Nothing too drastic, just about as far as you could throw a mango. Being tall and thin, I lollop along like a spastic flamingo in hobnail boots.

Update: Solly has gone to Japan for the world champs, and I have Zimmer-framed into the garage, where I intend to curl up with a bag of dog biscuits.

Life Skills I Lack

2011-09-13T14:31:00.005+02:00

I turn 40 this month. Expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth on said day. In this time of taking stock, I realise there are several life skills, things I’ve yet to learn:

Play an Instrument
Despite singing solo at school choir (and taking a beating for it from age eight), the only thing I know how to play remains iTunes. As a youth, I was coerced into playing the recorder- an instrument as mind-numbingly tedious as a Russian bread queue put to music. After I broke the second reviled wind instrument against my knee, mom cancelled lessons, and I remain to this day a musical quadriplegic.

Perhaps I should join a choir. Not a dreary grey Christian church one that sounds like cold porridge, or a tambourine-slapping, Charismatic, Kum Ba Yah gaggle of God-botherers. I’m looking for more of a White-boy-Negro-Gospel-Choir sound.

Get a Body
Right now, I'd rather get an artificial leg with an ashtray built into it than even look at a gym. My body’s like a sagging, late model station wagon that drives my brain to work. I am on a diet, and so far have lost the Weber barbecue lid I've been hiding under my T-shirt. So now I'm skinny as the lead-singer of The Verve, but with the muscle tone of a blancmange- which leads me to the next skill I'd like to learn…

Kill Somebody with My Bare Hands
Despite having anger issues, I can’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. Below my Ego, Superego, lurking in the Unconscious, is a roiling, nameless rage. I've discussed this with my therapist, and she feels the occasional murder would serve as a cathartic Id release, and help move our sessions forward. Well, she actually didn't say that in so many words, but who among us can honestly say that they haven't wanted- at some stage or another- to grab a ballpoint pen and stab somebody through the heart with it- possibly during a waffling, interminable board meeting? I know I have.

Things I Don't Miss about the '90s

2011-09-08T17:51:00.007+02:00

The day Billy Ray Cyrus realised "Achy" rhymed with "Breaky"
My lowest point of the decade. I’m sure we all remember where we were the day that cracker scum's cuntry ditty entered the global consciousness, like a turd in the swimming pool. Despite toilet-splatteringly shit songs like The Macarena, Aqua's Barbie Girl, Ice Ice Baby, and Who Let the Dogs Out?, this remains the musical nadir of the decade. Coming to a hay bale ho-down near you.

Mom jeans
Jesus, how high was that waistline? Were ‘90s jeans designed by Obelix? These could make the most toothsome nubile as sexy as Angela Lansbury. Still, we made do with what we had, and once they were off it really didn't matter that much.

Would you like chips with that, motherfucker?
Waitering was the soul destroying, logical conclusion to getting a BA degree. "Hi, I'm fush. I'll be your waiter for this evening. How may I prostrate my over-educated self for your edification?"

The only high point of the job was swiping non-tipper's credit cards with a magnet after the bill was charged. This wiped the magnetic strip blank and made the card as useless as… uh, a BA degree.

The word “Fully”
The one-word vocabulary of the heroically stoned. A kind of blurred, but emphatic "yes". I used to partake too, but before I step out of the greenhouse and put down that rock, let me get this off my chest. Ask a stoner anything:

"Are you high?"
"Fully"
"What is your name?"
"Fully"
"How many fingers am I holding up?"
"Fully"
"You know, Hitler was misunderstood. His ravaging of Europe, and eventual suicide was a cry for help.”
"Fully”

Miss M*, S*, and C*
[censored]

May 21^st, 1990, 7pm to (time unknown)
I was at a Res ball- I was later told. You can read about it here.

Toilet cistern tops and paranoia
Don't get me wrong, not all drugs are good. Some of them are GREAT. Sadly, the lengths one had to go ingest them to could be cringingly ignoble. Pulp wrote the tawdry, squalid lyrics they did for a reason.

I recall one night in a low rent, achy-breaky clientele type nightclub. A and J went into a toilet stall to partake. As they exited, a Yuffie** at the urinal, in acid-washed jeans, leered at them and made a blowjob gesture. A, a 6 foot three, hard cunt from Glasgow, sniffed, walked up to him and said- an inch away from his face; "Listen you prole cunt, I just snorted your week's wages."

Heed’s acid-green underpants
The night the slavishly lusted after Tank Girl and I finally got together one night, the amorous mood was derailed for a moment by her seeing my green day-glo underpants, that I’d unadvisedly fished out of the communal digs laundry pile that evening. I managed to stifle her giggling and things continued along giddy nicely. Weeks later I made her a “Kryptonite Underpants” mix, and gave it to her wrapped in the same (now laundered) lurid green underpants of that first night. She cried laughing.

*Names and several wild, depraved sex scenes have regrettably been omitted to protect current marriages and relevant children.

** Yuffie: Young Urban Failure. The financially-challenged, mullet shorn, anti-Yuppie.

Squint the Puppy

2011-08-24T06:38:00.003+02:00

The problem with pugs, is- despite being the size of a burrito- in the tiny Tom Thumb firecracker of their minds, their body-image is Rottweiler big. Added to this, Squint, my new pug puppy, has skewed eyes that swivel like a chameleon's. One eye's looking to bite you, while the other's roving around for what's on TV. I just may have a five-inch, snub-nosed super predator on my hands. Or not.

Squint the Puppy*

There’s a puppy I bought, from Laurens van der Post,

With four legs, a tongue, and eyes that are crossed.

A dog like that you’d think quite a dunce,

What with each eye not quite together at once.

But with her stare wonky woo, and her glance in a scrunch,

She can see with each eye both breakfast and lunch.

*A poem, with apologies to Spike Milligan.

I Can Bench Press Brontë

2011-08-19T14:09:00.013+02:00

Hoohah! After eight years of trying, I finally won at Ex Libris- a taxing game of bluff for bookish types with expendable English degrees.

This literary Geek Core game is quite simple. Someone reads a brief synopsis of a novel: anything from Emily Brontë to Roald Dahl- then asks the players to write the first or last sentence of the book, in a believable style. All the sentences are then read out, and then you have to guess which sounds like the right one. Whoever's fake sentence is chosen wins a point.

Sadly, as the red wine kicks in, by the third round all my sentences usually devolve into Victorian bodice-rippers, with words like; "tumescent", "member", or "heaving bosom"- no matter what the novel.

This time I eschewed the red wine, and won by one point, in an epic, pugilistic, LitGeek nail-biter, not unlike the climax of Rocky IV. Or perhaps not.

Sadly, my virile literary prowess failed to arouse any of my female opponents into a zealous bodice-ripping session behind the rhododendron bush.

Heroes

2011-08-17T17:26:00.011+02:00

The Berlin Wall went up overnight, this week 50 years ago, in 1961. I’ve always held a fascination with the Wall era, and this anniversary reminded me of one of my favourite Bowie songs.

David Bowie recorded the song Heroes, in 1977 West Berlin, where his studio had a view of the wall, 300 yards away.

The song tells a story of two lovers who meet and kiss at the Berlin Wall, defying the guards at the gun turret, making their love into something "heroic." When the second chorus arrives, the emotional level escalates tenfold, with Bowie starting to scream out his lyrics. For me, it’s one of the most emotive, anthemic love songs ever recorded.

Bowie stated on several occasions that the song was based on the time he "saw two lovers standing by the Berlin Wall. An East German watch tower stood high above them, manned by armed guards. Why did they choose the gun turret? I assumed their motive was guilt, thus the act of heroism in facing it. Maybe they felt guilty about their affair and were drawn to the spot for that reason, to cause the affair to be an act of heroism. It seemed an act of personal survival by self-rule.”

“We could be heroes/ Just for one day.”

I think that’s swooningly romantic.

Black Box Recorder

2011-08-15T13:49:00.009+02:00

On a shelf on my wall-length bookcase, among all my books, I have a box. It's matt black, two shoeboxes big, and stuffed with the detritus of my life. Polaroids, love letters, sketches, and even the 7-inch vinyl single of David Bowie's Absolute Beginners (all the way back from a stormy adolescence back in 1987).

It's a collection of paper, silver, and celluloid artefacts- wayfinding things that show me where and what I've been for the past three decades. My time capsule- the bits and pieces from the last 30 summers, that make up the shape of my heart.

Letters
I have a bonfire of old love letters. They're faded currency now, out dated as bounced cheques, but once I clutched them to my chest like answered prayers, my heart ringing like a hundred church bells. The countless handwritten ink words have carved a palimpsest on my heart.

Letters were analog to email’s digital. Something real, something you could hold in your hand, knowing the writer had held it too, days or weeks ago, somewhere far away.

They seem quaint as vinyl records and polaroids now, but letters were the everyday currency I used to stay in touch. They to’d and fro’d like paper carrier pigeons from far off places, with exotic stamps and strange post codes.

Handwriting is unique as the whorls of a finger print. Reading someone’s for the first time is a milestone in any new relationship.

Some of the envelopes hold glossy, tactile photographs, that I raise to my face and stare at, or hand-labelled mix tapes whose songs I remember, but have nowhere to play them on.

Let’s face it, no one ever sighed and clasped an email to their chest. Email’s like reading a fucking TV screen. Letters are a document, not a morse code of ones and zeros.

Silver
There's a silver ring G gave me one glorious day on the beach, way back- that day she said there were dolphins in my eyes. She’s gone - and I don’t wear it - but I like to take it out, look at it, and roll it in my fingers sometimes, to remind me someone else - and I - can love that much.

Photographs
These are the most immediate. They hit like a technicolour bolt from the blue. Faces and places out of time, long since gone, and now far far away. Some of them make me smile, others make me feel like a hollow man scooped out by nostalgia, empty and homesick.

'Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.'

- Kurt Vonnegut

‘Nuff said. Do you have a box, and what's in it?

Children are a Gift from Odd

2011-08-06T14:23:00.008+02:00

I've met some amazing kids in the last three weeks. Not Nintendo junkies, princesses, or spoilt brats. These ones are down-to-earth as fresh green grass. They pull you out of yourself, into a world of inaccurate magic. Some of them I've known a while, and it's been gratifying to see them grow up, like a clacking Rolodex of Polaroids as they mature into the grounded young adults I hope they're going to be.

The Face of a Child Can Say a Lot, Especially the Mouth Part

Kids don't have mortgages, or hire purchase payments. They have much more interesting things to talk about, some of it funny nonsense, a lot of it so left-field it leaves you scratching your head for an answer. They keep you on your toes. With each utterance, such possibilities stretch before them- whereas so many adult tomorrows seem inevitable and leaden as the snooze button, a business suit, and the rush-hour.

Laughter and Other Injuries

Making a child laugh is the most awesome music in the world. I get off on it, even if it involves a painful disagreement with the basic Newtonian laws of physics, my advancing age, and a skateboard. I speak from experience, and have the bruises, and cherished, hand-clapping laughter to remember it by. I'm good with kids, I take pride in it, and they fill me with delight. This talent may spring from me being the mental age of 10, and thinking Spike Milligan the world’s finest poet, but who cares?

A Bad Stacked Deck

I'd love to get some of my own, but being bipolar is like playing Russian roulette with your progeny’s DNA. It is not a nice inheritance. So, I plan to remain the doting uncle Oswald, with sweets in my pockets, and shiny coins to induce them into death-defying wagers, which I always seem to lose.

That would make me happy.

To a 15-year-old

2011-07-08T21:48:00.021+02:00

I wrote my Matric at 18. I fell in love that year too, for the first time- I was a late bloomer. Not that "blooming" or "late" were a nice thing. Throughout school, and all those tinsel and streamer Bryan Adams school hall parties I reconciled myself to the fact that: be it looks, DNA, or acne- I was unkissable. My mother would hear the sound of soft sobbing, and the more strident moans of The Smiths from my record player, and sense something was amiss. Worried that The Smiths would lead to a harder audio drugs like Pink Floyd, my mother counselled me as best she could. "Girls, at this age, are just stupid." She'd say. "Just you wait. When they recover their senses, they'll see what a nice, articulate, sensitive boy like you has to offer." These pep talks sounded as cool as a crocheted twinset, and I nodded dumbly in assent.

Mom was RIGHT though. The girls did grow up. The fairer sex became more pliant, to more freely spoken matters of the heart. At 18 I learnt to unclasp my first bra strap. Undressing a girl for the first time felt like caressing the universe in a snow globe. The curve of a female stomach, close enough to reach for my trembling touch, was an atlas of wonder unknown.

I'm rambling on, but what I wish I could do, is hand you the pearl, like Sal Paradise did in "On the Road". I want to hold you under my wing, and protect you from all of the mistakes I made.

One day, you'll be cool. Know that, 'cause it's true. This shit now is just a dress rehearsal, a shallow, cramped way of how life will be when it explodes in your heart like a thousand blooming flowers, when things are as they should be, as you wanted it. Beyond school, there's a place where you can redefine yourself out of the muck you're wading through now. A newer, truer you. Believe me.

So pass the fucking exams. Don't fight against the system. They're bigger than you are, and will crush you as soon as you step out of line. So walk the line, and get through this. A breathless freedom, and the real you awaits. Godspeed.

Electric Fence

2011-07-02T16:46:00.002+02:00

My body is covered with a million little stings, like I just took a swim through poison ivy.

Came home last night, to find our electric gate shorted out, and impossible to open. Eventually had to climb over a 12 foot wall, through our electric fence. OUCH those bastards hurt- like the particularly zesty "I shall beat the devil from you, boy!" canings I had at boarding school, but all over your body, in cracking thwacks that hurt so much, I screamed like a schoolgirl at a Justin Bieber concert.

Have checked body this morning, and am rather miffed that I don't have noughts and crosses of bruises all over, just a bunch of red welts that look like I'm coming out in some unsightly rash.

Soundbites

2011-04-16T10:00:00.001+02:00

For the last months, I’ve spent my dwindling, incontinent, creative reservoir on writing song commentaries for a facebook group, inspired by my life long obsession with the mix tape.

On U2The last 10 years of U2's music is like when you're sleeping with somebody who doesn't know what to do in bed but who thinks they're really hot stuff - and they're rubbing one part of your body over and over, thinking they've found your 'Magic Spot' when all they're doing, in fact, is annoying you.

Keane - Somewhere Only We KnowSoaring piano. The excitement of heading out on an adventure, a road trip to a secret place. For me, the song of putting up a tent with G, in a rainstorm. Laughing and wet kisses in the rain.

The National - Conversation 16The National’s lean, wounded sound feels palpable as regret, like saying goodbye to your 20s as they drift away like a burning Norse funeral boat.

Arcade Fire - Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)A joyful elegy to the death of suburbia. Goosebump backing music, and a soaring, shiny voice that could fly to the roof of a cathedral. This makes the bluest Monday bearable. You can see it live here.

R.E.M. - NightswimmingSublime. The sound of getting nostalgic for the moment, even as it’s happening. A tune for our late night skinny dips in the Rhodes pool.

Faith No More - Midlife CrisisA nasty, fiery, savage vortex of sound that could twist the most pious Christian into a grinning arsonist.

Lloyd Cole - She's A Girl and I'm A Man“She’s gotta be/ The stupidest girl I’ve ever seen”. Festival ’92. This playing on my car stereo. Cute but annoying M from Durban Varsity and I in a savage argument. I locked the brakes, and screamed “You… are SUCH a BITCH!” She breathed in sharply, then leant across and we snogged.

Repeated attempts at said pick up line have since met with several sickenly violent rebuttals.

The Violent Femmes - American MusicThe first beats of this would have all the unwashed, tangled hair art students in holey, stretched sleeve jerseys leaping onto the dance floor, waving their paint-stained fingers like shadow-boxing lemurs on Benzedrine.

It’s an on-going project. You can join the facebook group here if you like.

Rhys Ifan’s Tapeworm

2010-12-22T11:28:00.000+02:00

Thinning straw stack hair that looked like rats had been fucking in it, yellowed mielie* pip teeth in a Marge Simpson overbite, and a chinless wonder profile. A sort of tapeworm Rhys Ifans. This was oddly enough, not a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde in a dark corner of the British Museum, but a client I did some freelance work for a while back.

As freelance usually goes, the tapeworm briefs you and says “I need this tomorrow!” So you acquiesce and work like a spinning Catherine wheel through the night to deliver on time. Client is happy, and so you invoice them. And wait. And wait. Weeks drag by.

Tapeworm behaved exactly as above, but then bitchily claimed by the mere act of briefing me, he’d done the work, so was in no rush to pay me. Hmmmph. So I sicced S on him. S is an old varsity friend, with the added bonus of now being a shit hot lawyer in a massive firm bigger than Stark Industries.

She sent him a letter. The legal mumbo jumbo was beyond my 2 kilowatt BA degree brain, but S patiently explained that it meant that if he didn’t pay up in 24 hours, she would hand him his balls on a kebab.

The bowel parasite paid up faster than someone with his nuts in a snackwich toaster, and I have bought S a damn fine bottle of wine.

Don’t fuck with the fush.

*Mielie- Corn (South African slang)

The Chatsworth Pocket Rocket™

2010-12-09T00:34:00.000+02:00

My wheels. Yesterday.

I pranged my car. Again. A margarine-tub styled SUV breeder-carrier and my Ford Fiesta had a frank exchange of views, and despite my swerving vehicular bons mots, two tons of Land Rover Discovery won the argument. So, while my babe anti-magnet mobile gets repaired, my insurance pays for a rental car.

The Fast and the Mildly Annoyed

At first, I was lumped with a new Volkswagen Polo 1.4. Reliable, bland, and slow as an asthmatic ant carrying some heavy shopping. Kinda like that nice, jolly-hockeysticks god-fearing gingham-frocked girl your parents want you to marry, but who’s exciting as argyle socks. So I returned to Avis and demanded something with a bit more oomph.

My Chatsworth Pocket Rocket

Oomph is a garish Renault Clio 1.6 S (see above). Chatsworth, for the uninitiated, is an Indian suburb of Durban teeming with callow boy racers driving souped up, ghastly blinged-out little city cars. They drag-race on Friday nights, rending the humid summer air with the roaring, under-powered whine of chromed exhausts and the screech of mag wheels.

In short, my new ride is classy as a slutty, wit kak* Benoni** girl, who’s dirty, been with sailors, and will do anything for a litre bottle of Coke. Sexual junk food.

No matter. Crank up this song, rev to 7000rpm, and damn the speed bumps. Expect my speedy obituary.

* Wit kak (Afrikaans- ‘white-shit’): white trash.

** Benoni: Southern low-income suburb of Johannesburg, peopled with mullet-shorn wit kak.

Hospital

2010-05-06T10:53:00.000+02:00

Wow, I do hate hospitals. Long macabre passages, that wee-like disinfectant smell, and the occasional scream. Much like a Natal Midlands boarding school, except with canings replaced by machines that go ‘ping’.

General anaesthetic is really trippy though. I love it. 10, 9, 8, ..7…..6 Boom! Gone. Hours truly gone from your life, a blank you never get back, without the recriminations that follow an alcohol-induced memory loss and its messy aftermath. Just lights out, and wham! back for jello and morphine.

Dying under anaesthetic’s a pretty cool way to go, I hear. Not in the James Dean sense of cool, more the Woody Allen “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” way.

Ooops, time to go. See you on the flipside.

Tubing

2010-04-20T17:30:00.000+02:00

Way back before Nintendo, all I had at 13 was a car tyre inner tube and a river. There was a pile of well-thumbed Hustler magazines from the early ‘70s, but that’s another story.

The Umgeni wound its way through our town, tracing farm paddocks, and on past manicured lawns of riverside houses. We'd start off near the Midmar dam wall, then scoot in one by one, then float for miles down the river, toward the Howick falls. Lying on our stomachs on our tubes, faces just inches from the surface of the water, we'd plunge head-first through rapids with bruising rocks, over gushing weirs six feet tall. There were calm flowing bits in between, where we'd link up tubes, compare bruises and cuts, soak up the sun, and talk about girls, monty python, and whatever young teenagers chortle about.

I dreamed about those river days last night, and woke up on the right side of bed.

Thadeus Pyle and Jebediah Kneebone's Victorian Myth Busters

2010-04-16T17:44:00.000+02:00

Hosted by men of Science, Thadeus Pyle and Jebediah Kneebone, Victorian Myth Busters blends the age of the enlightenment, sound biblical principals and the glamour of the photo picture into a rollicking slice of edu-tainment. With a steady supply of wretched whores, drunkards, debtors and urchins to use their cutting-edge scientific contraptions on, Thadeus and Jebedia get to work debunking or confirming the popular myths of the Victorian age.

8 Ways to Die

2010-03-03T11:37:00.000+02:00

1. Moped Collision

A long-time favourite. A train-spotter’s death at a blistering 20km per hour.

2. Rooftop Stilt Disco

Deadly boogiedown. Music by Earth, Wind & Fire, and The Pointer Sisters.

3. Pylon Piss Fight

Electricity pylon tightrope, with opponents crazed and bladder brimful with Tennants’ Special.

4. Mobster Cuckoldry

An ill-advised dashboard tryst with a hoop-earringed, stretch-denimed, pink-lipsticked mafia poppie* in the South of Jo’burg, that ends in boot of same car at the bottom of Wemmer Pan.

5. Elvis Heart Attack

Fat, bloated on the toilet after a Krakatoa Richter-scale bowel movement.

6. Anchorchute

Sky-diving variant with parachute replaced by a six-ton anchor.

7. Predetermined Russian Roulette

Gun fun with six live rounds and no empty chambers.

8. Commuter Train Roof-surfing

Decapitation by overhead wires a possibility. Death after disgruntled commuters regularly burn down the trains that get them to work a certainty.

*Tart, Slapper. Sexual junk food.

Piece of Shit Car

2010-02-20T10:43:00.000+02:00

As I write, my car is on an operating table, after blowing its head gasket. Last rites have been administered. For the non car fundis* among you, a blown head gasket is like a thunderous blue-in-the-face-dead-before-you-hit-the-ground-heart-attack that blows out surrounding windows and sets off nearby car alarms. A tiny homunculus suicide bomber hiding in the engine, wearing an "Allah Will See You Now" t-shirt.

It's going cost R18 000 (US$2 800)- money I could have more wisely spent on:

Aeroplane sky-writing “Fuck you, you dried up old skank” over a particular ex-girlfriend’s house
A knee-job on my ex-employer by a reasonably reliable thug
More pliant Morrocan boys than you could shake a stick at

Alas and alack, these pecunious pleasures are not to be.

*fundi (Zulu) : a person skilled in repairing or maintaining machinery; mechanic.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

2010-01-11T07:55:00.000+02:00

This, for many of us, is where Jo’burg ends- OR Tambo airport: a blunt nexus of steel and escalators. Yesterday I met some departing friends in the food hall for a few between flight hours. The food hall is a gleaming, shrieking neon kaleidoscope of tat that leaves your eyes feeling like a chameleon crawling over a TV test pattern.

Travellers, by and large, are not beautiful people. They’re an exasperated, over aged, sexless, lumpen jetsetariat that make you wonder if they’ve ever had sex, and with WHO? Or what?. If so, who was the blind drunk chump who did the deed, and do they still wake up screaming decades later?

After much searching, I found a chunk of my growing diaspora of friends, who’ve chosen lives of winter snow, safer places for kids, nanny states with far less crime.

Just finding a quiet place to chat and catch up in an airport is nigh impossible. We tried the kid-friendly Spur restaurant, but the hordes of shrieking, balloon-popping, sugar-crazed toddlers in it seemed bent on enacting a riot in a maximum security prison.

Shell-shocked with the above lesson in contraception still ringing in our ears, we moved over to Fournos Bakery. Like all airport coffee bars, it’s soulless, sterile, and lit brighter than a dentist’s chair. I do recommend the coffee milkshake though. It’s loaded with enough caffeine and sugar to turn you into a crazed Cape Flats gang member kite-high on tik.

See someone off, rather being the one flying, is like dancing to no music. Sad and sugar-buzzed, I drove back into Jo’burg. With all its flaws, it’s my home. Joburg’s more than skin deep- it’s in my veins. Here’s to 2010, and another year in our mad, bad, ‘n good city.

Kreepy Krauly™

2009-11-13T06:15:00.000+02:00

It’s now 18 days, 20 hours, and 3 minutes since I was retrenched. Being retrenched is not – as I was promised- sitting in front of the TV, tucking into chicken buckets. It’s interviews, searching for freelance, job agencies, severance pay wrangles, and lawyers. That, and hours of idle waiting, where a boredom not felt since being stuck in Gatwick airport for 8 hours with no money sets in.

With cable TV a distant memory, I spend ages staring engrossed at the chugging swimming pool vacuum cleaner. We’re becoming close friends, I think. We swim and gambol in the water, rather like the guy in the Big Blue riding the dolphins- only not.

I have thoughts of freeing the pool cleaner. Think Free Willy; but substitute Orca and cherubic Disney kid with a Kreepy Krauly and a 38 year-old with man tits. I'll set it free in the Juksei river, where it can chug, salmon-like to the ocean, picking up tasty bits of grit along the way.

God speed, my plastic pal.

The fush&chips Retrenchment Diet™

2009-11-05T10:44:00.000+02:00

You. Today. Employed.

Does it take more than an A3 scanner to photocopy your arse? Unsettled by your burgeoning man tits? Can you remember the last time you had sex with the lights on? Want to lose 3kgs in one sitting, and up to 6kgs a week?

My plan™ is simple, tested by yours truly, and involves no exercise or special diet. Just get retrenched!

Step 1. Getting retrenched: roughly like re-living being dumped by all your exes, at once, times 100, in a soulless boardroom. Instant weight loss 3kg - the whole experience is gruelling as running a marathon with The Rosetta Stone on your back.

Warning: Try to avoid going for your boss’s eyes at this moment. It may boost your morale, but appearing on CNN in handcuffs is not such a good extracurricular activity to include in your CV when you’re released 30 years later for involuntary manslaughter.

Step 2. Dinner: Umpteen red wines (170 calories). A bagillion cigarettes (0 calories) - weight loss 0.5 kg.

Step 3. Breakfast: Coffee (80 calories), Despair and cigarettes (0 calories), sighing a lot (0 calories) - weight loss 1 kg.

Step 4. A tentative reply to your CV: and the promise of an interview: (150 calories, equivalent to jumping on the couch for 1 minute, or furtively interfering with yourself) - weight loss 1.5kg

Step 5. Job interview and inevitable rebuttal: (130 calories; equivalent to 8 minutes of bad sex, when you just lay there like sack of potatoes) - weight loss 2 kg.

Step 6. Curl up foetal in your garage with a bag of dog biscuits: (300 calories)

Synchronised Swimming Pool Totty

2009-10-13T23:32:00.000+02:00

My ex possessed an arse so massive her beach swims were declared a danger to shipping. Hippos fled for their lives throughout her Kariba excursion. My swimming pool is nearly twice that size, big as an upside down inside out Ayer’s Rock.

Wooing buxom lovelies has ended in abject failure. My herb garden yielded a sparse pot noodle garnish before being massacred by Stankie (a Bond villain cunningly disguised as a Pug). So, I’m looking for new distractions besides the Moroccan boy.

I’m assembling a water ballet ensemble, or synchronised swimming team. Nine Maillot clad mermaids in floral bathing caps to winsomely scull through the water for my amusement as I recline, sipping mint juleps silently proffered by Mustafa.

Coriander Chain Gang

2009-09-02T13:15:00.000+02:00

Me. Yesterday.

“Early in da mornin’,

Massa got me workin’”

Earl Grey Man Friday

After a tad too much Chardonnay and lashings of scrummy home-made pesto Sunday last, I decided to build my own herb garden, in a well-appointed rockery nook at my new abode. I lazily dreamed of a verdant idyll of burgeoning crocuses, iris flowers, and coriander. Somewhere I could drink my morning Earl Grey, read the London Times, and summon the Moroccan boy occasionally from the kitchen to proffer sweetmeats and other attentions I deem necessary.

Sexual Frustration and a Pickaxe

As my recent attempts to woo the fairer sex have been fruitless, I have rather a lot of pent up energy, which if not martialled, could lead to regrettable onanistic misadventures. Never one afraid of hard work*, I set to digging up the rockery with a pickaxe, hacking through Jo’burg granite harder than high school algebra. After 3 hours of this I felt like I’d been building the Zimbabwe Ruins by hand.

Foothands

My hands! My Hands! My soft, petal-like piano player’s hands! Hands that have done nothing more arduous than clicking a mouse, and once, feverishly unclasping a 33C bra strap back in 2004- now look like feet. Calloused, cracked, Eulactol Heel Balm™ campaign poster boy feet.

The Sweet Sweat of Others

I have offered a keen chap from the local nursery a bright, shiny, shilling to finish the bulk of the digging. I am now sitting on the couch, drinking a smooth, salubrious red, and watching his labours with enormous satisfaction.

*Preferably done by someone else in the distance, in a country with green in its flag, and legions of willing, cheap, labour.

Photocopy Your Tits and Win!

2009-07-15T15:55:00.000+02:00

This could be you.

Calling all bored secretaries, listless housewives, mousey librarians, and cider-crazed varsity girls. Leery of speed-dating, wary of online hook-ups? Allow me to steer your attention to a more subtle, nuanced manner of boy-meets-girl.

What to Do

Photocopy your man toys and fax them to 555-447-5965. Taking care not to obscure any pertinent details, write your name and number, preferably in candy apple red lipstick. Or just scan the twins at 300dpi and mail the pics to fushandchips@gmail.com. Extra points will be given to colour pics.

The Grand Prize

The owner of the most jugalicious set of devil’s dumplings gets to prepare a home-cooked meal for yours truly, fushandchips. Sit back and enjoy urbane conversation, ham-fisted attempts at flirtation, and the rather unsettling presence of the mute Moroccan boy in the background.

The Small Print

No chancers or gatecrashers: said breasty dumplings will be verified against a print of the winning entry.

You will be unfortunately automatically disqualified if:

Photocopying your arse requires an A3 scanner
You use aubergine as ingredient in anything
You are my ex girlfriend, P

David Niven Shag Pad

2009-07-12T23:28:00.000+02:00

I am moving house. The leaking, lop-sidedly listing scow of a digs I’ve been living in for the last eight years has been sold, so the hounds and I are heading to greener pastures. I’m packing my meager possessions: bed, kettle, and a pile of brutally frank ’70s Hustler magazines that informed my formative years and have been treasured ever since I stole them from Andrew’s dad’s attic in 1988.

White Goods

Household necessities like a fridge, stove, and pliant Moroccan boy cost money. And to add insult to injury, I am reliably informed that Moroccan boys don’t come on hire purchase.

Shag Pad

My new flat has a sunken lounge, spiral staircase and a drinks cabinet the size of Westminster Abbey. I plan to spend my days lounging about suave as David Niven, in a cravat, smoking jacket, and reading Somerset Maugham. Nights shall be spent in the more louche smoking lounges of my new leafy high street, trying to snare buxom young fillies with my jovial, urbane bon mots, lashings of pomade, and tweed three pieces. If experience is any teacher, these nights will end alone, with a wank and a cry.

Jesús the Tequila Worm

2009-06-03T21:16:00.000+02:00

The entity you previously knew as fushandchips is long since gone, replaced by Jesús Montoya, Tequila Worm Extraordinaire. After one or ten too many Cuervos last night, he’s seized the reins of my brain and is now in control of my limbs. Look deep into my bloodshot eyes and behind them you’ll see an impish worm behind the wheel, in racing goggles and a jaunty scarf.

Shanks Bashing

My last blurry memory is of trying to chat up someone or something in a little black dress, followed by a short savage burst of Tourette’s, then suavely kicking in the toilets at the Craighall YMCA. Thereafter is no data.

Pink Milk Fruitless

Bygones. Focus. Back to the present. This hangover’s got my number. All the usual cures- bacon and eggs, Sterie Stumpie pink milk, date rape strength painkillers- have proved useless as trying to flog a steamroller with a feather boa.

Pray for me.

Children of the Corn

2009-05-29T10:22:00.000+02:00

My friend Ange recently moved to a stone cottage in the Cotswolds. Dreams of a life of gumboots, lashings of ginger beer, and cycling down lanes with a blissful expression her face have given way to happenings more sinister.

From: Angela M

Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009

To: fushandchips

I swear to God there's a freaky blonde toddler child in the garden staring at me, children of the corn-style.

If it picks up a banjo I might have to kill it with a spade.

All the Best Women are Married

2009-05-03T11:14:00.000+02:00

Though it’s been a while since I was so taken with someone I’d want to buy them a fridge, every so often the idea of marriage makes me think "Fuck it. Why not?"to a world that smells of damp towels, a realm of broodiness, home improvements, and a husband that worries about his lawn.

Bouncing Sexual Cheques

I haven’t seen poontang in so long, I’d throw stones at it. That said, if I had a ZA Rondt for every married woman I’ve blithely chatted up, I’d be a thousandaire. Married women have no neediness in their mien. They’re the biggest flirts, because the stakes are low to non-existent. Married women constantly write cheques they know their butts won’t have to cash. The saddest words in the English language are “Oh you must meet my husband. You’d really hit it off”.

Shock and Awe

After hours of the sort of engrossing conversation where neither of you would notice that your lift had left- and the place had long since closed- seeing a wedding ring is like re-living The Challenger disaster. I go through the gamut of facial expressions that everyone did on the fateful day of January 28, 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in the skies above Florida. I go through the same sequence of emotions: confusion about what’s going on; shock when I realise the reality; horror when I think of its implications; and finally, deep and lasting sadness.

Exile in Breederville

Married women don’t roam in packs like single girls. They’re unlikely to be found in the bathroom, snorting a line of cocaine off the cistern. No, this seems a world of SUVs, pastel Hilton Weiner summer collections, and missionary position sex for the rest of your life.

Or maybe not.

I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You

2009-04-03T08:05:00.006+02:00

The Big One. The one I asked to marry me, when we were just way too young, and again, when it was way too late. No one since has budged the richter scale. I dreamed of her again last night. She’s an ocean away, married, with a kid, but once she was mine forever. I wake on these mornings heavy and sad, with a hollowness like thirst. I’ve never stopped waiting for her.

These feelings are beyond my control.

Why Did I Dream of You Last Night?

Why did I dream of you last night?

Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light

Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;

Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog

beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten

Return to my mind with stranger pain:

- Like letters that arrive addressed to someone

Who left the house so many years ago.

- Philip Larkin (1959)

Arsecons

2009-02-27T18:17:00.004+02:00

After dissing emoticons in the last post , I fear I’ve made some people coy about using them in future. While I think a world without with emoticons is a fabulous idea, I realize I may have dissuaded folks from ending their netspeak grunts with these trite semaphores of shite.

So, without any further ado, I present…. Arsecons! Impress your friends and astound your neighbours! Start using them today.

(_!_) a regular arse

(__!__) a fat arse

(!) a tight arse

(_._) a flat arse

(_*_) a sore arse

(_x_) kiss my arse

(_?_) Dumb arse

LOL Fucktards

2009-02-25T19:48:00.004+02:00

lol
I hate netspeak. “LOL” (Laughing Out Loud) particularly is the turd in my martini. By the amount “lol” is used, in conversations that were just harmlessly inane, the writers come across as a snorting chortling fucktard who’s pissed their straitjacket with incontinent mirth. I’d rather read death threats scrawled in shit on a wall.

Emoticons
People who use emoticons remind me of the sort of chunky blonde jolly hockey sticks deb who dots her “i”s with fat little circles, or smiley faces. Emoticons are the inane rubber stamps of language- no, make that the ham-fisted potato prints of the lumpen inarticulate. Why not try actual words? You’ve got a whole keyboard. Use it.

I Have Man Tits

2009-02-18T15:53:00.004+02:00

I could never be a woman. If I was, I’d never leave the house. I’d just stand in front of the mirror and play with my breasts all day.

Storm in an A Cup

Having moobs is sadly not quite the same. In the mirror fantasy, I’m a nubile, 18 year-old Alyson Hannigan (above), not a metabolically-challenged 37 year-old in need of an A Cup. With no more exercise than walking the dogs, my body's like a late-model mom’s station wagon that ferries my brain around.

Cherchez La Femme

Before I went out with the P, the Alcoholic Anorexic Sexual Voldemort- She Who Shall Not Be Named- I weighed 80kg and had a body. A damn nice one too; as an ex of mine reluctantly remarked. When I met P, I was brimming with sunshine and confidence. She left me sectioned under the 1983 Mental Health Act.

P treated me like shit, so I responded defiantly by moping on the couch, eating buckets of fried chicken, chain-smoking, and drinking heroic amounts of whatever alcohol was at hand. I got fatter and fatter, until I couldn’t remember the last time we had sex with the light on.

She’s long gone, but I remain on the sofa.

Disembowelophobia

2009-02-17T13:12:00.007+02:00

“The average male ostrich stands about 9 feet tall, weighs approximately 160 kg, and can run at up to 73 km/h. They have a sharp talon on each of their feet that is capable of slicing a person open with one kick.”

- Wikipedia

Revenge of the Überchicken

A hike last autumn took us into a field of (very) tetchy ostriches. It’s rather sobering, being menaced by a homicidal giant chicken, with nothing between it and you but a gaggle of hiking buddies squeaking in terror. Operation human shield then redeployed behind me, cowering behind a chest-high pecan nut tree, leaving me eye-to-eye with the beast. The group started jabbering advice, like “Er, it looks really pissed!”; “Run Tim! Run!”; and “Grab the fucker's neck!”

Kentucky Fried Guilt

So, it was just me and a bird with a walnut-sized brain, with likely only two settings: one: peck at grit; two: kick and eviscerate. The ostrich’s raptor-like talons and its keen interest to see the colour of my insides was most upsetting. I rued the last KFC chicken bucket I’d eaten. Maintaining eye contact with the brute, I picked up a gnarled stick about the size of a school ruler, and a lengthy Mexican stand-off followed, with much ruler waving and shrill "Shoo! Naughty bird!" noises from me. Luckily eventually setting one kicked in, the bird 'hmphed'at me, then trotted away in disgust to peck at some grit.

Thoughts of alpha male chest-beating, teeth baring, and triumphant chimp-style faeces hurling crossed my mind, but going toe-to-toe with an oversized chicken doesn’t really cut the Charles Bronson mustard.

Rain Like Nails

2009-02-11T20:59:00.010+02:00

The view from my desk.

Bullets on Tin

Rain for three weeks now. I’m sitting in a corrugated iron roofed house in Africa with the rain smashing down on the roof like clattering handfuls of nails. These rainstorms are not the “pardon me” ones you get in England. Here the big drops plough the soil, the thunder makes your heart jump, and the blinding lightning bursts tall thick trees easy as a child snapping a toothpick.

Boat Races

The street gutters are rushing and roiling like a miniature Zambezi in flood. Mad with cabin fever, I folded some paper boats to race down my street, but the downpour scuppered all three. One did make it almost 20 yards, before being side-washed into the maw of a greedy storm drain.

Freckles

At five or six years old, I was very self-conscious about the smattering of freckles across my nose and cheeks. During a particularly nasty Transkei storm, my older sister took me aside and confided that if I went to the top of the hill behind the farm house, and held my face up to the rain long enough, my freckles would wash off. Mom found me on the hill hours later, soaked as a wet cur, face still scrunched up to the rain. The freckles didn’t budge, I got a cold, and my sister was grounded for a month of Sundays.

Poo

2009-02-04T07:59:00.003+02:00

Aaah. Nothing that first cup of coffee, then blearily treading in fresh dog poo barefoot, and feeling it squidge through your toes. Stankie and I have to have a frank man-to-dog exchange of views.

Toddlerphobia

2009-01-30T19:51:00.010+02:00

Tessa has just taken a break from a busy Savannah cider-guzzling holiday schedule to phone me from Howick. Reclining on a lawn chair, cider in hand, she has harangued me about breeding. I have been informed that her black-ringleted little cherub can melt the stoniest of hearts, and make a broody breeder of a bullet-proof bachelor at 100 paces. I have one or two doubts.

Boiled or Fried?

I do like children, but I could never eat a whole one. Other than basted or floured, I find them of dubious worth. Kids ruin your figure, and leave your boobs looking like kippers. In my experience, they knock over beers, fistedly scrawl “FaR t” on the couch with your girlfriend’s Dior lipstick, and make you feel bad when you blurt out ‘fuck’.

If I had a ZA Rondt for every woman who’s said to me, “But you’d make such a good dad. You’re so good with children” I’d have enough money to build 10 planned parenthood clinics. Thing is, the little critters do seem to find me a cool fun guy, but I can never stand them for longer than the next nappy change. Sorry, but I’m just too selfish.

My Own Private Pregnaho

In the autumn of my thirties, the biological clocks are clanging louder than a 12-pound hammer on the inside of a slowly flooding diving bell. It seems the whole world is pregnant, or has a little IQ-sapper on each hip. It’s like Shaun of the Dead but with ponderous phalanxes of pregnant or fussy pram-toting women instead of marching zombie hordes. A previously thriving conversational ecosystem of everything between heaven and earth topics has been wiped out by “being pregnant” or “the face of a child…” GM crop platitudes that make me feel like an atheist at a church barbeque. Can’t we deport all the pregnant woman to a US State that no one cares about, like say, Idaho? We could rename it “Pregnaho”. Oprah can be President for Life.

Milestones

2009-01-28T17:23:00.011+02:00

It’s been raining all day. So as usual, I’ve spent the time staring out the window at the rain like a pensive teenager, listening to wistful Crowded House songs, and imagining I’m a character in one of the gloomier Bronte novels. The time hasn’t been totally wasted though. I’ve been doing some nostalgic sums in the skewed whiskey-marinaded abacus of what’s left of my mind.

I was born in a monastery, 37 years back. I blame this monastic start with my early ham-fisted hopelessness with girls. Compared to the shy, fidgeting, bedwetting teen me, Adrian Mole was James Bond.

It's 20 years since my first kiss, after a gymkhana at Lions River. It was ruddy awful, I was nervous and clumsy as a cow playing scrabble.

I lost my virginity 18 years, 2 months and 11 days ago, in Room 37 of Cullen Bowles Res, Rhodes University. It was bloody glorious, I was stoned, and satisfactorily adroit; so was I told. T, if you’re reading this, you were the first. I never told you that. Thanks for having me.

15 years ago I tried my first hallucinogenics, at the instigation of Tank Girl. TG, if you’re reading this, I couldn’t see, but heard odd noises from the kitchen. Was Preston really tormenting a leprechaun in the microwave? I would have intervened, but was too busy outside watching aliens build the pyramids.

I learned to drive at 14. At 18, I totalled three cars in one day. It’s a long story.

13 years ago, I went over 230 km/h on a motorcycle, on the N4 highway to Mozambique. It felt sexy, scary, and Godlike.

I have more, but Crowded House is playing Better Be Home Soon, and the rain’s started up again. Jane Eyre calls.

Nick Drake

2009-01-21T20:02:00.009+02:00

Just back from a funeral abroad. My best friend’s mother died. Now I’m home. It’s raining hard outside. I’m listening to Nick Drake, and wondering about death and loss. Drake's music is exquisite, forlorn, and yet transcendent as watching a bird in flight. A talented but troubled young man, he was shy and withdrawn, and sold only a handful of albums in his short career. Frustrated and despairing, he overdosed on antidepressants in 1974, aged 26.

I’m listening to this last song off his final album. I think of Gary and his mother. Wherever she is, I hope she’s flying.

“And now we rise

And we are everywhere

And now we rise from the ground

And see she flies

And she is everywhere

See she flies all around"

- Nick Drake, From the Morning (1972)

Reasons to be Cheerful

2009-01-07T13:31:00.004+02:00

1. Herring-bone cirrus clouds scudding across blue skies.

2. Turning cartwheels on the beach.

3. A swim in a natural body of water.

4. Lazy Sunday mornings.

5. This Sigur Rós song. It's playing most mornings I yank open the curtains.

6. That first cup of coffee.

7. Boiled eggs and soldiers for breakfast.

8. Freshly-squeezed orange juice.

9. The Beatles’ song, Here Comes the Sun.

10. Throwing sticks for the dogs.

11. Skipping flat stones across the river.

12. Slow technicolour implosion sunsets.

13. A long hot bath and a good book.

14. The way the world looks infinitely more manageable after a cup of tea.

15. Crème Soda (a green cooldrink you can only get in South Africa. It tastes of summer pool parties when you were six)

16. A sense of humour. It’s your umbrella when the world is raining shit.

In Praise of Slow Blogging

2009-01-05T08:32:00.007+02:00

I don't enjoy rushed dear-diary blogs of tedious daily minutiae, so for me this little manifesto is right on the money- or a handy excuse for being lazy in putting those posts out.

"Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy. It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly, and that many thoughts are best served after being fully baked and worded in an even temperament."

- Todd Sieling, Slow Blog (2008)

Jets Aren’t Natural

2008-12-29T06:03:00.004+02:00

(Kuala Lumpur: Yesterday)

My brother, sister, and I manage to get together in one place about every two years. It’s Christmas in Kuala Lumpur this time.

Today I fly back to South Africa. Helene leaves for London tomorrow, and Brett stays home in KL. We’ve made our singular choices and live our own lives, but today this wrenching away feels awful. Escape wasn’t meant to be so simple in this world where we can race sunsets. The distance loses the knife, but the scar can always be traced.

This time tomorrow I’ll be home. Six time zones away from today.

For all the joyful hellos and crying goodbyes airports play stage to, they’re such brutal places. Airports should be built like cathedrals, swooping heartspaces of rejoicing or solace- not the steel halogen-lit lonely places they are.

(Johannesburg: 4am today)

Feeling jet-lagged, tearful and wrung inside out. I’m home. Home in this crazy place.

As dit donker is, as almal slaap

is ek voor jou deur en ek wag

Sing die ou ou lied van Afrika

sing dit sag, sing dit lank vir my

maak oop jou hart, maak oop jou deur

laat my binnekom, laat my bly.

- Marianne de Jongh

(When it's dark, and everyone sleeps

I am at your door, and I wait.

Sing the old song of Africa,

sing it softly, sing it long for me

open your heart, open your door

let me come in, let me stay.)

Pace and Clarity

2008-12-11T07:28:00.007+02:00

Tourist: “Jesus H tap-dancing Christ, that lion’s close!”

Guide: “Don’t worry, they only attack if you’re wearing Brut aftershave.”

Him: “Is this rope strong enough to hold us?”

Me: “Of course. It’s been tested to 800 kilojoules to foot pound.”

Her: “Isn’t 120km/h a bit fast for a muddy dirt road?”

Me: ”Of course not! These lateral cambers can handle 200km/h.”

Trust Me

All these specious answers have one thing in common; pace and clarity. Say anything, no matter how preposterous, with brisk pace, assured clarity, a pinch of convincing detail, and people will believe you, every time a coconut. It’s served me well, from the boardroom to the bedroom.

Of Course I'm Sure!
If not for pace and clarity, safari guides, motor mechanics, and all echelons of management would be out of a job. The safari guide can’t be sure that you won’t get eaten, but a snappy answer stops your terrified bleating, and gets you out of his hair.

Try it today. Your money back if anyone doesn’t buy it hook, line and sinker.

The Midlands

2008-12-10T08:36:00.003+02:00

Today I head off on writing assignment to where I grew up. Howick, in the Kwazulu Natal Midlands; the last outpost of the British Empire. Where I get my thrift store English accent from, the place where rivers are good to swim in, and the dams and streams are full of obliging trout just waiting to be caught.

Kate Bush was a perennial soundtrack to those teenage days. Songs redolent of gumboots, walks in misty forests, and horse rides in warm summer rain. I first saw this music video at 13, and it’s remained one of my all time favourites. I like the story, and the countryside’s a dead ringer for the rolling hills of the Midlands. Oh, and when I’m old I want to look cool like Donald Sutherland.

Kuala Lumpur

2008-11-19T13:11:00.004+02:00

From the Plane

At dawn the city looks like an open cast mine, rising from the sea of jungle. Halogen-lit roads flow outwards, glistening rivers of coursing, molten neon.

Dinner at the Diesel Garage

Jet lag and late supper at Suzie’s, a roadside restaurant with a cracked concrete floor, and wonky plastic tables, lit by humming beams of halogen light. The place looks dirty and unhygienic as a diesel garage forecourt, but the food is spicy and delicious.

Awake and Dreaming

In the morning, the landscape’s a saturated Polaroid of roiling green jungle, punctuated by apartment blocks perches on soaring hills, like feta chunks in green salad. The slabs of tower blocks are daubed with greying streaks of mildew. There’s an unreality to this juxtaposition, like a surreal trompe l'ouille set design from a dream.

Crows in the Traffic

The rush-hour of sluggish cars is veined with swarms of mopeds, that course through the gaps like adrenaline, bursting from the green traffic lights like buzzing flocks of startled crows. Book ended building facades look on, damp mildew stains smudged down from their windows, like streaked mascara.

Exploding Mirror Balls

Shopping malls in downtown KL are not subtle. People shoulder past like shoals of fish, through kaleidoscope halls of warm glows and squinting, shrieking neon: like a mirror ball exploding in a lava lamp shop. Ten minutes of this and your aching eyes feel like a chameleon trying to play twister under a strobe light.

I'm All Man, Dammit!

2008-11-12T14:31:00.011+02:00

A friend chided me over drinks last night that my previous Beasties and Noo-noos post was the work of a big girl's blouse, a total jessie. This stung, and I wept with impotent rage into my Guinness. Despite a paralysing fear of pachyderms, the rest of me is all man, dammit. I’ve decided to settle this with a scorecard, ledgering up man and mouse qualities, on a scale of 10 down to -10. 10 equals testosterone-crazed, hatchet-wielding Last of the Mohicans manliness, and -10 is equivalent to a lace-cuffed, Little Lord Fauntleroy weeping over a spilt blancmange. .
Man	Mouse
I wrassle Parktown prawns with my bare hands (3 points) I can handle a motorbike on mud or tar, and have been over 230km/hour (8 points) I fired my first shotgun at six (4 points) At nine, I killed a plump, succulent cane rat with a home-made bow and arrow. (4 points) Then I cooked it over a fire and ate it (10 points) I read Hemingway (2 points) I completely caught fire once, and acted nonchalant (6 points) I have an incredibly high pain threshold. When my appendix burst, I thought it was just a bad curry. (9 points) I won an eye-to-eye staring competition with a chav ostrich (4 points) I pull fat tics off dogs with my bare hands (2 points) My record at skipping stones over water is nine bounces (4 points) I use angle grinders with no goggles (4 stupidity points)	I always cry at the end of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (-4 points) At eight, I was menaced by a crow (-5 points) I’m terrified of mimes (-8 points) Lifts (elevators) unsettle me deeply (-4 points) I do not enjoy open water (-7 points) I hate flying (-6 points) I will never skydive (-7 points) I once read a Marian Keyes book (-10 points) I am morally opposed to aubergine in all forms (-2 points) I can’t fix stuff for shit (-4 points) I go foetal during arguments with girlfriends (-7 points) I panic at small children on a sugar rush, stampeding en masse (-8 points) I quiver at lions, elephants, crocodiles etc- anything that preys on humans, seen from a range of less than 1km. (-6 points)
Total manly points: 59	Total mouse points: -74
Sigh, so I'm a jessie by over 15 points. I'm off to read sensitive poetry in a puffy lace shirt.

I Hate Hen Parties

2008-11-11T15:50:00.003+02:00

Paris Must Die

Nothing makes my dinner rise faster than the sight of a Northern Suburbs Hen Party, usually somewhere like The Fashion Café, or TeazHers; both places Paris (The Antichrist) Hilton has visited in Jo’burg.

Alcopop Lobotomy

Hen Parties are crimes of humanity that the English foisted on us, embarrassments the rest of the world judges us harshly by. A few alcopops down, and high heels up, previously singularly intelligent women dumb down into chirruping flocks that couldn’t beat a parakeet at scrabble.

Tomboys Rule!

My dream woman mostly prefers the company of men, has scarred tomboy knees, drinks beer out the bottle, and can fix a motorbike with a ratchet spanner and a hammer. Engine grease smears like Hiawatha war-paint on freckled cheeks can be sooo winsome.

Beasties and Noo-noos

2008-11-05T23:20:00.003+02:00

I’m planning a writing assignment in Chobe National Park, in Botswana. I should be excited, but instead I’m terrified. Chobe is one of Africa’s great wildernesses, teeming with animals, many of which prey on humans.

Ostrich Hairy Eyeball

I’m terrified of wild beasties. The Big Five may look cute while leafing through National Geographic - but up close and personal they’re SCARY. My aversion hasn’t been helped by being snapped at by crocodiles, charged by elephants, chased (on foot) by rhino, lunged at by hippos, and been given the hairy eyeball by ostriches. If anything larger than a cane rat approaches the car I bolt like Seabiscuit.

Rhino Can-opener

Unlike many blithe tourists, I’ve seen what a rhino can do to a two-ton Landrover. I’ve also watched someone get stung by a waddling scorpion as fat as my ex’s arse.

Whiskey and Ketamine

I’m hoping the Chobe staff can supply an Abrams tank for game viewing, or a telescope so I can witness nature from the safety the bar terrace. Failing that, I plan to blot out the terror with massive amounts of Jameson whiskey and horse tranquilizers.

Miranda, Tam, any suggestions?

Bipolar

2008-11-01T09:29:00.010+02:00

Every morning I take two white and three yellow pills. At night it’s three yellow ones, three round white pills, a big round white, an orange, and a red if I can’t sleep. It takes two swallows to get them all down. It’s a regimen I resent, but I’ve been on pills so long I honestly couldn’t tell you what I’m like without them.

They help.

Peter Sellers Syndrome

In social situations, I sometimes feel like I’m sobbing inside, floundering in the depression in my brain, while my mouth just witters away in some amusing fashion. Many comedians and artists are or were bipolar. People like: Stephen Fry (above); Jim Carey; John Cleese; Ben Stiller; Tim Burton; Virginia Woolf; and Sylvia Plath. Woolf and Plath met grim ends. 1 in 6 bipolars kill themselves.

Magic Button

If given the option of pushing an imaginary button that would cure me, I’m not sure I’d push it. My condition’s relatively mild. I have most of the benefits of hypomania, a slightly less psychotic form of energy, vitality and exuberance and hopefully, creativity. The depressions are awful, but on good days the soaring highs seem worth it.

Flu

2008-10-30T19:43:00.002+02:00

Do not adjust this blog. Normal service will resume shortly.

The 21 000 Rand Lesbian

2008-10-23T10:41:00.005+02:00

A while back I paid 21 000 Rand (about $3 000) to have a beer with a lesbian. During that weekend, I was in a near plane crash, climbed Table Mountain, lost all my cash for contraband I didn’t want, slept on the floor of an empty house, and worst of all was marooned in a sea of advertising people with egos bigger than Mussolini.

I’m not going to put the rest in a linear narrative, but here are some fragments:

Heaven in a Tank Top

I met her on a long weekend in a remote village in the Western Cape. Short spiky hair, flinty blue eyes and a naughty smile. She looked like Ladytron sounds: hard digital-sinewed metallic beats, skyscraper vertigo, and blurring motorcycle speed. Long legs and sinewy, strong arms carved out of wood. We agreed to meet up in Cape Town some time.

A R9 000 Excuse to Meet Up

I called her weeks later, and blurted that I was coming to Cape Town. “What for?” she asked. “The…uh… (I racked my brain for a reason)… Design Indaba! That’s it! The Design Indaba!” I shrieked like a game show contestant. I was making a silly amount of money at the time, so the R9k for flights, car, hotel and seminar didn’t seem too bad.

Emergency Landing

One minute out of Joburg, a very bad buzzing noise started, so loud it made my fillings ache. A sound of screeching of stripping gears and a metallic burning smell enveloped the cabin. The plane floundered in the air like a drowning swimmer. We swung round and landed with a jaw-jarring thump. I cracked three teeth which later paid for half my dentist’s daughter’s varsity tuition. The plane barrelled down the runway, flanked by red flashing fire engines. We stopped, got out, and I fell to my knees on terra firma and kissed the tarmac like the Pope.

Another flight, another plane, I landed in Cape Town. Called Lesbian, left message.

Shitlist

Lots of shit happened, including: snafu hotel booking that left me sleeping on floor of empty “for sale” house; lending Guy R1 000 for a deal which derailed and almost got him arrested; sneaking out of shit seminar sardined with Prada-clad advertising wankers, to climb the mountain; called the Lesbian, left a message; dined at most expensive restaurant in Southern Hemisphere, it would seem; called the Lesbian, still no reply.

Namibia, Apparently

Last day in town. Call Lesbian. Finally get through! She’s in… Namibia, but promises to meet up next time I'm in Cape Town.

Fuck that.

My Other Blog

2008-10-09T22:34:00.003+02:00

In trying to keep my other http://rhodes9094.blogspot.com blog updated daily, fush&chips is being neglected somewhat. '90'94 is a varsity memoir, but it's pretty universal. Do have a look. Pretty please.

Money

2008-10-03T14:36:00.001+02:00

I eat a lot of spaghetti right now. Clients procrastinate, projects lie unfinished, and their bean-counters sit on my hard-earned like covetous Gollums. I’ve nothing to do but wait, wait, and discover the montonous joys of baked veg.

In weeks like this I resent my freelance status, and envy the 9 to 5 hamster-wheelers with their regular paycheques. Sadly I’m just not cut out for cubicles, team-building, and timesheets. I tried it for years, and near the end was increasingly worried I might snap and end up on CNN.

So here I sit, in (hopefully temporary) penury, several puddles away from the mainstream, shopping my portfolio to clients like a shy, grimy-faced child tentatively proffering a half-licked lollipop.

Think I’ll take the dogs for a walk. At least that’s free.

Tessa's Room

2008-09-19T09:27:00.017+02:00

Back in ’88 when I was 16, my friend Tessa’s bedroom was a salon for as yet unformed personalities hunting in packs for an identity. The room was a well of conversation, a magpie’s nest of photos, drawings, curiosities, quotes, and lyrics; the bits and pieces that make up impressionable young souls.

Cassettes and Vinyl
We sat around, listened to cassettes and vinyl like Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground; read books like JD Salinger, Graham Greene, and countless others, whose lyrics and quotes we’d earnestly write out on the walls in thick black koki pen. We were wide-eyed, and smugly sure we were the first people in the world to discover these songs and books, and they were always - urgently - about us. We searched in them for clues about the maelstrom of fears and passions we were going through. Given how impressionable we were, this was not always a good thing. We got lost in them, as we blindly tried to outrun the turmoil of teen hormones.

Teen Angst
“I wear black on the outside, ‘cos black is how I feel on the outside”
- The Smiths

We were older than now. The world weighed heavy on our callow, narrow shoulders, a precocious weltschmerz we wore with deadly seriousness. I felt not so much blank slate, as bunch of raw nerves. The gamut of emotions and thoughts felt so much and so deep. Feelings red-lined the emotional Richter scale at the slightest bump.

Girls
The glimpse of a bra strap under a white school shirt would send me into anaphylactic shock, and I’d take the electric chair over the terror of calling a girl for a date. I’d never been kissed, never unhooked a bra, but I had bands like the Smiths and Morrissey to tell me that was okay, and people like Lloyd Cole who said I’d regret it anyway.

School
“They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It's a laugh, a fake. Don't disturb the universe.”
- The Chocolate War

High School was a stillborn rebellion, a daily rote of tedium. The cost of being an individual seemed astronomical. Books like The Chocolate War, Catcher in the Rye, and Adrian Mole just cemented my outsiderness.

The Summer of ’89
“We’ve spent so time shaping and detailing this time together, and next year we all leave and it breaks.We pick up what pieces we can, and start all over again, in new places, with new people.”
- Tessa

The summer ended on a high note. The girl who at 6 years old I’d had a helpless crush on and followed daily as she cycled home from school, came back after years away, even more winsome. We fell, plunged, in love for a brief, giddy summer. I got kissed, and finally saw someone naked (though my whoop of joy at the crucial moment queered the mood for a second or two).

Where Are We Now
It’s a long time since I thought 30 was old. Music still takes me back there in a heartbeat. The heartstrings sounds of Pink Floyd, vivid as tears on your cheeks. The hollow, wounded percussion of Depeche Mode. Even the flash in the pan, short shelf-life sounds of Prefab Sprout, or ‘Til Tuesday take me back. In retrospect it may seem a lot of melodrama, but it was so so real at the time. Some of the ideas seem dated and cringeworthy as lame ‘80s fashions, but most of them have the ring of truth.

The people from those days are far flung wide today. We drift in and out of touch. We’re older, better, and happy most of the time.

I treasure those times in Tessa’s room, the friends around me and the things we revealed to each other. I’m the sum of all I’ve read, heard, and seen, and most importantly, the people I’ve met.

“I've nothing much to offer
There's nothing much to take
I'm an absolute beginner
With eyes completely open
But nervous all the same”

- Absolute Beginners, David Bowie (1988)

Inanimate Things That Annoy Me

2008-09-16T11:15:00.010+02:00

Aubergine
The Saddam Hussein of vegetables. The taste, the texture, and the smugly self-satisfied look of an aubergine drive me to distraction. We were vegan growing up, and aubergine is the sine qua non of every vegan meal. I couldn’t stand it then, and I loathe it now. To this day I can smell a sliver of the stuff in an acre of lasagne. I’d rather find a finger in my pasta.

The Washing Machine
When our washing machine has finished, it lets you and (your postcode) know with a heart-stopping mechanical keening sound, like a flat-lining heart rate monitor, or a bawling baby appliance that needs a nappy change. This continues at 2 minute intervals, till you stop what you’re doing, mission to the scullery, and pull the plug. Since the instructions are in German, my best efforts with a phrase book have failed to find the words “Bitte machen Sie es aufhält!“ anywhere on its knobs and dials.

South African Bandwidth
Costly, temperamental, and slow as lichen. Not so much information superhighway, more a string and two tin cans. I spend a lot of time gazing at blank white loading screens. It'd be quicker to fax the internet, page by page.

Black Dogs

2008-09-13T17:19:00.012+02:00

“Black Dogs have been used as a symbol for depression since Celtic times. Winston Churchill famously used the metaphor to articulate his own struggle with melancholia.”

I have my own black dog. It’s been here since I can remember, like a doleful, invisible play friend. It waits patiently, in my dark places, in nearby shadows.

It’s there in insomnia, real as toothache, when I lie awake and every heartbeat thuds like a funeral bell. In these moments, I catalogue my shortcomings, and count my blessings on my thumbs.

My black dog's been following me this week. It found me today, when I woke up with heavy and sad on this grey morning.

Anthropomorphosis

2008-09-05T16:13:00.009+02:00

In my mind, Stankie the pug is Kim Jong Il, the Great Successor To The Revolutionary Cause, and a frustrated Bond villain. Her hero is Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and she practices the Goldfinger quote ‘No Mr Bond, I expect you to die!’ (and a maniacal cackle) in the mirror. A small nuclear device may or may not be being built in my garden shed.

In my mind, Frankie my labrador is an Aussie surfer from the Gold Coast. He wears faded Hawaiian shirts with palm tree prints. Not originally the brightest pilot light in the kitchen, Frankie smokes so much dope he barely maintains his day job at the video store.

In my mind, Molly, my-ex bulldog (RIP) was a rum old slapper who ran a chip shop in South London. She drank babycham, chain-smoked Rothmans and shocked customers stiff with off-colour jokes that would appal an Australian. On weekends she wrote Mills & Boon bodice-rippers on Nick’s Underwood typewriter.

I know, I know. I should get out more.

Electric Dog Disneyland

2008-09-01T18:06:00.003+02:00

This crazy wind’s got to the dogs too. We’ve just returned from the park and my nerves feel jangly as a ball of wire coat hangers. A trip to my local park with the dogs is not unlike taking a kid on a sugar rush on an outing: it’s a drag for you the adult, but for the dogs it’s like Disneyland at age 5 - on acid. The park is bordered by overhead power lines, and Frankie and Stankie may be induction-charging from them. As they enter the park, the slow, single-marble runs of their brains wind up to a pachinko machine ballstorm, endorphins red-line, and they race off like furry bottle rockets.

They gleefully chase ducks for miles, sniff strangers’ arses with the frowning concentration of chess champions, and cavort around in the park’s abundant overstuffed rubbish bins chomping down things that’d make a maggot gag. All the while, I lumber after them, wheezing like an old couch. If dogs are this chaotic, God only knows what children will be like. I’d likely just leave them hung by their dungaree straps on coat hooks for hours. That, or heroic amounts of Ritalin.

Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground

2008-08-31T23:14:00.004+02:00

I have fucking had it. The August winds have been blowing barn-flattening strong for weeks now. Tumbling dead leaves fill the air like swarming locusts, landing and burying everything. The pool’s leaf soup, and the filter’s gagging on the all-roughage diet. The hammock’s become a giant potpourri of dead leaves and twigs, and the patio’s vanished under crunchy brown snowdrifts. Trying to sweep it away is a Sisyphean futility. This wind’s sentient, malevolent. When I try to fly my kite (when life gives you lemons, make lemonade and so on and so forth), I either get scorching string burns as the kite gets snapped out of my fingers, or watch it stall and plummet as the winds seemingly holds its breath out of spite. It's become a bitter personal enemy. Take this extract from The English Patient:

“There is a whirlwind in Southern Morocco, the Aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. Herodotus tells of a wind - the Simoon - so evil that a nation declared war on it and marched out to fight it in full battle dress, their swords raised.”

Fuck it, if they can, I can. The kitchen arsenal has yielded an egg beater and a rolling pin, though I fear they may not be quite up to the task of thrashing an entire low pressure system. Any suggestions?

Plagiarism and Seduction

2008-08-29T22:42:00.013+02:00

Watching a rust-coloured sunset from a deck on a stretch of beautiful and wild beach*. Paragon du jour sits next to next me, pink gin in hand. I clutch a fist-sized whiskey, trying not to babble, gazing at her ice-white blond hair, blue eyes, and the freckles on her button nose.

I’d already made several mock charges at her. The previous night’s attempt of flinging off my glasses and saying ‘kiss me, you fool!’ had left me blinded and blundering into the rhododendron bush. At least she laughed.

So now sitting on the deck, my brain was ransacking the unkempt bedsit of my mind for something cool to say, to do - anything. Something along the lines of ‘we could die tomorrow, so just in case, why not snog an average guy like me?’. Or failing that, just tearful pleading.

Then, tearing my eyes away from her and seeing the sunset, a flash of inspiration hit me, like a bitch slap from Cupid. I segued the conversation into mortality and the vivid bits in-between. I began a sensitive, heartfelt monologue heavily paraphrasing from this extract from Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky , passing it all off as my own.

'Because we don't know when we will die,
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.
Yet everything happens only a certain number of times,
and a very small number really.
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon
of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of
your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it.
Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.'

There was a sigh. She swung out of her deckchair, climbed onto my lap and snogged me!

We spent a great, funny, affectionate year together after that, til she went back to London, and I swore off tear-stained airport goodbyes for life.

*Storm’s River Mouth, Tsitsikamma, for those of you who know it.

What’s In Your Pockets?

2008-08-26T21:11:00.007+02:00

Tonight I emptied out mine and found:

1. Silver cigarette case. I’ve started rolling my own cigarettes and need somewhere to lump them. Like all the things I like, it feels good in the hand. It snaps open like a clam shell, easy as a gesture.
2. Packet of liquorice rizla papers. See above.
3. Asthmatic Bic cigarette lighter, dull as a broken lego brick.
4. Old silver ring someone gave it to me one glorious day on the beach way back, that day she said there were dolphins in my eyes. She’s gone - and I don’t wear it - but I like to keep it near me sometimes, to remind me someone else - and I - can love that much. It’s my talisman against settling for less.
5. Piece of shit clam-shell cell phone that’s about as clever as a nine volt scalectix set. Texting on it is slower than semaphore.
6. 250Mb flash drive. Last night’s work and some other random crap on it. Sadly no Defcon 1 missile launch codes.
7. Passport-sized notebook, for catching exciting stray ideas and mundane grocery lists. Right now it’s scribbled with cock-eyed storyboards for a spoof James Bond trailer Nick and I are making.
8. Jane’s writing manifesto, printed to bookmark size. She wrote it a few months ago, to kick my arse into writing stuff down.
9. Lamy fountain pen with a broad nib (the only sort that makes my spidery writing legible, even to me) and Parker sapphire ink. They don’t make this ink anymore, but if you wrote someone just a grocery list in this deep india blue, they’d jump trains, switch buses and walk blocks to see you.
10. Wallet with drivers licence, a waning debit card, maxed-out credit card, and about R125.40 bucks in change, after all the tequilas I bought tonight.

I think you can tell lots about a person by turning out their pockets. What’s in yours?

All Nighter

2008-08-26T00:19:00.011+02:00

3am. I’m still up working, while the rest of the post code has been under the covers 12 cups of coffee and a phone book of computer code ago. My eyes are itchy and the on-screen alphabet segues into dancing kenji subtitles. The keyboard is dandruffed with cigarette ash, and the ashtray is silting up with butts, higher than my laundry pile. I shan’t bore you by explaining what I’m working on: suffice to say it’s tedious as grouting and tiling the Berlin wall, and so mindless a trained monkey zygote could do it.

Stankie the pug is fast asleep under the desk, snoring like a wheezing plastic squeeze toy. I wish we could trade places, but I'm hesitant to entrust the skewed marble run of her dog brain with cranking out an airline website with a 10am deadline.

I thought I left all-nighters behind at varsity. Strong cheap coffee and brutal Stuyvie Red cigarettes that would poleaxe an iron lung. A set work Bronte speed read faster than a money counter clacking through a brick of Zim banknotes, then writing the essay out straight into neat. I always cursed the first birdsong that meant dawn wasn’t far behind, and the nine o’clock sharp deadline, when Gollum the English Dept secretary snapped closed the submissions slot sharp and final as a mousetrap.

Work calls. Wherever you are, sleep tight. Sweet dreams.

UPDATE
8am. 3 hours sleep. My bones feel like plasticine. I’m bumping into things. Things are blurry and my eyes feel like eggs boiled in lemon juice. I can’t email the 80Mb of work across town, as bloody SA bandwidth is slow as lichen. So now, in my knackered state, I have to zip the files onto a flash drive, bike* the fucking thing four postcodes from here and transfer them onto the computer of what I suspect will be a contentedly well rested client. Then it’s straight home for deadline number two, due at 12 o’clock. Bloody hell.

*My car got nicked recently. I have not the words for my venom.

Housework

2008-08-13T16:04:00.020+02:00

I’ve returned from three weeks’ holiday in Malaysia, to find the garbage scow that is my house listing badly and taking in water. The swimming pool has gone rotten and looks like a tar pit, I haven’t seen my bedroom floor in days, and Frankie and Stankie (the labrador and pug) have colonised the ziggurat of dirty laundry in the scalectrix room and are turning feral. The digsmates have fled for parts unknown, leaving no forwarding addresses.

Agri, my Zimbabwean butler/houseboy has been home on holiday for three weeks now. He normally does the gardening, housecleaning and laundry. I live in a large, drafty, lopsided four bedroom house that without his constant attention would slowly collapse in on itself like a flan in a cupboard. Now before you self-cleaning First World types roll your eyes; my generation grew up in ‘70s South Africa in similarly preposterously large houses that would be totally unviable without servants to keep them afloat. As a result, we are lazy, spoilt, apartheid brats that are hopeless at surviving in the wild.

I’ve tried to blame my procrastination on jetlag, but as I’ve been home for a week now, this excuse is becoming untenable.

A Sawed-Off, Pump-Action Babe-Magnet

2008-07-05T21:40:00.007+02:00

I haven’t seen anyone naked since last Michaelmas. I don’t remember much, except a tearful rush of gratitude at being there at the time. Since then, apart from a well-thumbed June 2006 copy of Juggs magazine; naked women have been rather thin on the ground.

The gambit of sidling up to said paragon at the bar, suavely tossing a set of scuffed late-model Ford Fiesta keys on the bar counter and say “You could be driving home in this tonight, babycakes” has proved fruitless.

So I’ve got me a sawed-off pump-action babe-magnet; Stankie, my pug puppy. This dog can make girls shriek at 100 paces, and derail the skewed hamster wheel of a woman’s mind at 50 yards. Stankie doesn’t turn heads, she stops trains. Any public appearance brings forth a scrum of women hysterical as a riot at an Enrique Iglesias book signing.

I’ve yet to capitalize Stankie-Mania into any tangible totty. Perhaps I should dispense with the ineffectual chit chat and give chloroform a bash.

Angel, Won't You Call Me?

2008-07-03T08:13:00.014+02:00

I walk to my favourite coffee shop most mornings. The coffee’s good and the WIFI is free. There’s a girl that sits on the couch to my left. She stops my breath. Tousled blonde Amelia Earhart haircut, red apple winter-flushed cheeks and ink-stained piano fingers. Her clothes are incoherent Oxfam winter layers that seem fished random from the laundry pile, like a librarian that secretly plays bass cello in her bedsit.

She hardly knows I exist. The only words she's said to me are "is that your dog?". I just stood there, dumbly mumbling-talking like someone playing scrabble in oven gloves. She resumed, engrossed at her Mac, biting her bottom lip with the expression of someone engrossed in a crossword.

I haven’t started making mix tapes to her in my head yet, but she’s on my mind. If she leant forward, looked in my eyes and said, ‘Let’s leave town, tonight.’ I’d drop everything. I’d follow her to Margate.

A Hangover as Massive as My Ex-Girlfriend’s Arse

2008-06-12T07:50:00.004+02:00

Awake with a thump. Heart beating like a fucked clock, and nerves shrieking like a xylophone being scraped with a fork. Try to focus but thoughts misfire, plonk and plink like knives and forks being flushed down the toilet. Stumble to bathroom, slop water down mouth, and lurchingly glimpse self in mirror. Not good. Head has apparently been dried out and shrunken while sleeping.

Denial
No no no. Someone or something is hammering my mind on an anvil with a bowling ball. Mouth filthy and dry as the floor of a parrot cage.

Anger
What. The. Fuck! Why do I do this to myself? Why do these muscles hurt? Did I make out with anyone? Whose email addresses are these in my pocket? Why is there a traffic cone in my bed?

Bargaining
Please make this stop. I’ll rewind rental video tapes. I’ll wash my car. I’ll recycle.

Depression
Loser syndrome. A black mood arrives like a Leonard Cohen box set. I hate this house, this job, this relationship, this life. I HATE everything. Except Myprodol. Aaah…

Acceptance
The painkillers are kicking in. All is better now. Screw the bargaining, I’m not going to drink until I… do.

Winter

2008-06-06T09:40:00.006+02:00

Winter has arrived with a bite like a lock-jawed bulldog. The lawn is skid-mark brown, and scratchy as a bag of crisps underfoot. Our leaf-strewn swimming pool is dirty as a tar pit.

Inside it’s five degrees colder than out. Our house has stone floors that work like under floor heating in reverse. Your breath steams inside the house so bad you can blow smoke rings. Toilet seats are so cold you wail like Chewbacca as your bare buttocks hit the rim.

Nothing to do but swathe myself in thermals and headscarves, til I look like a Bedouin Michelin man. Whoever said winter clothes were sexy? Trying to rip that many layers off someone would be like trying to ravish an onion.

I did read somewhere that the best way to cure hypothermia is to climb into a plastic bag with a naked women. Sadly in my post code naked women are rather thin on the ground, and due to a lack of rohypnol and planning I lack a giggling blonde teen with puppy fat and a lascivious lack of morals that’d make a Cairo pimp gasp. Sigh. My bedroom remains cold as a Methodist church.

Shopping Malls

2008-06-02T16:17:00.003+02:00

Despite what the airbrushed people in glossy magazines would have you believe, the majority of the human race is startlingly unattractive. Go to any shopping mall and you’ll see the the lumpen uglitariat en masse. Slack-jawed mouth-breathing men, and women with wide hips pressed into jeans tight as sausage casings. Both sexes in shapeless sweat shirts and sensible shoes, unsexy as a Russian bread queue. It's like they gave up on anyone seeing them naked years ago. Malls are idiot machines, looping hamster tube trails of the great unwashed, all mooching somewhere and going nowhere.

It’s not just the mutants. Malls are an assault to the senses. Bewildering acres of crap you don’t need are lit by humming fluorescence and blaring neon that make your eyes feel like a chameleon trying to play twister under a strobe light. Your ears are fricasseed by the tink whoosh of lifts, blotchy thin soup of background conversation, and gnawing tinny muzak that sounds like its being played through your fillings.

Isn’t it strange that we have hardly any mental picture of what malls look like on the outside? They’re aseptic, inward spaces with all the homeliness of an airport toilet. You get the feeling they get hosed down at night.

I’m old enough to remember the high street, where separate shops sold your bread, meat and veg. You would pop into a supermarket for odds and sods, but generally as you accumulated your groceries, each time you you’d step out on the pavement, into the breeze and under the sky. Sadly. shopping malls and the chant of ‘Give me convenience or give me death!’ have killed the high street and quick-limed its grave.

Work (9 to 5 vs Freelance)

2008-05-30T12:55:00.002+02:00

The Salaryman battery hen lives a 9 to 5 existence cooped in a vast machine of identical chickens, all fed at rote intervals. Freelance Brer Rabbit has a more bucolic existence, though fraught with intervals of financial terror stalking through the carrot patch like an irate Brer Fox.

9-5
The salarymen dress in the blue button-down shirt and pleated slacks uniform of their ilk, trudging through the rush hour like moulded marching lego men on the M1 conveyor belt.

Your space is a cubicle, or Veal Fattening Pen, similar to those favoured by battery hen farmers, with all the coziness of an airport toilet. Attempts at homely touches such as a picture of the kids, and a “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps” sticker all add to the crushing pathos. Furtive attempts at concentration are frazzled by the cacophony of chirruping telephones, grinding printers, and Mabel from admin discussing her eczema in distressing detail.

Management attempts to prop up lagging morale with 3-star hotel corporate bonding events about as cool as watching your Dad dance drunk. You endure cheap champagne and fake bonhomie with co-workers you’d run a mile from if you saw them in a normal social context. Your boss press-gangs you into organized activities the like of which you haven’t been forced into since school.

Freelance
Freelance man wears slovenly clothes you normally wouldn’t even watch TV in. The rush hour becomes like a distant war in the third-world; it sounds awful, but it doesn’t really affect you.

Have laptop will travel. Your space is preferably on a deck chair by the pool. That’s the fantasy anyway. Try this at home and you’ll get bugger all work done as you stare blissfully into space, hypnotized by the rhythmic chugging of the Kreepy Krawly.

Rather than corporate bonding, take as many holidays as you want, when you want- if you can afford them. Money in the freelance world is like fishing. You’re in a pleasant setting, but catch no fish and it’s end-of-the-month salticrax for dinner.

Battery farm or free range- it’s your choice I suppose- but I’m glad I’m typing this beside my pool, rather than in a veal fattening pen.

Attack of the Breeders

2008-05-18T17:16:00.006+02:00

Babies are everywhere now.I never really noticed breeders and their offspring before, but now, in my 36th winter they’re taking over the world. There must have been a time before them, somewhere back before iPods. Babies and iPods are now ubiquitous, a 'must have', it seems. I feel like I’m the only one still listening to vinyl. It often feels like being the last single person alive in a zombie movie where the breeder undead are marching in pairs and pushing strollers. It’s a war, and the breeders are winning.

There’s an innate smugness about breeders, scooting around in cub scout-laden Volvo Estates as if to say, ‘No virgins driving this car, and there’s the proof!

Babies destroy conversation. The sight of one makes previously intelligent, stimulating people stare dumbly at them like stoners at a lava lamp.

I’m sorry, but your babies aren’t special. I KNOW you think they are, but they’re not. If they were so special there’d be a lot less of them, for one, and they’d be useful, like performing simple tasks such as: working as chimney sweeps; taking out the rubbish; or being shot out of a circus cannon.

Breeder braais are fun as alcohol-free beer, dull as an educational toy store. Conversation devolves into a shared monoculture, with arid topics like: Trinny’s/Sebastian’s bowel movements, the cognitive leaps being made by their ‘super baby’ (which is just like a normal baby, except it’s yours), and the mortgage. I’d rather spend the day at an insurance seminar.

Beyond the braai, the world of dating isn’t much better. Being single can be a lean and scary existence, living hand to mouth, never knowing where your next shag is coming from. The good women all seem to be married and dismayingly faithful. I can spot a wedding ring at 500 yards these days. At 30-something the remaining table scraps seem to be on the ‘being set up’, 'internet dating’ and ‘speed dating’ plates.

1. Being set up. Never a clearer chance to see your friends’ perception of your level of attractiveness, embodied in the person who’s being prodded towards you. A sobering experience.

2. Internet dating. Instead of happening organically in the real world like it used to; on the internet boy-meets-girl has become romantic as walking blindfolded round a shopping mall wearing a sandwich board with your vital statistics on it. 99.9% of the ones who approach you type in grunts and have photos apparently taken off the Crime and Investigation ‘Wanted’ channel.

3. Speed dating. A manic musical chairs as multiple strangers fling shards of conversation at you. I’d rather be strapped to a spinning circus wheel and have a blindfolded knife-thrower hurl machetes at me. If you listen close you can hear the hum of neediness, whirring in the background like a broken air-conditioner.

If I sound bitter, I am. Breeders are blanding down the world, dating has become a leper-fest, and babies-these squirming bundles of appetites- have taken over the world. Sartre was right; "Hell is other people’s children".

Hluhluwe

2008-04-24T07:59:00.002+02:00

After a long dry day in Hluhluwe Game Reserve, we drove around the corner, and saw an elephant, grazing close by in a flat field on our right, calm as a dairy cow. I switched off the car and we walked outside into the sunset, the breeze cool and nice on hot skin. Nothing around but the indifferent elephant, big and slow as whale. No sound, just the munching of the elephant, and the tick of the cooling car engine. Whispering in the twilight, so not to break the hush, it felt like we were the last two people in the world.

Reverie was ended by a frightened squeal from me as I looked behind, and saw a family of seven elephants 'get-in-the-fucking-car-NOW' close to us. J was having none of it- we actually went closer to them. The family eventually crossed the road in jumbled single file, like a gaggle of school kids trotting past a crossing guard. The mom elephant prodded the baby one along with her trunk, the teenage one sulked along at the back, several yards behind. The troupe vanished one by one into the bush, til we were staring at an empty road. They left us breathless and grinning, me clapping my hands with delight.

Black Hawk Down

2007-10-26T01:22:00.002+02:00

I had hippie parents. Christmas gifts included things like “Lets Grow Bean Sprouts at Home and Be Healthy™” home gardening kits (this is true). Not an action man or BB Gun in sight. The closest I got to a projectile-based toy was looiing a clod at Travis, my best friend. I wore corduroy dungarees til I was 10. The folks ran off to India every now and then, returning with even more dubious hippie presents, and kaftans smelling of patchouli.

In order to right the injustices of my childhood deprivations, Nick and I bought a remote control helicopter a few days back. Just a dinky one, about the size of a dishing up spoon.

Bored with buzzing Frankie (Labrador) and Stankie (Pug puppy), I went for the altitude record, the yardstick being the huge oak tree shaped like Grandpa Simpson’s head (a peyote-weighted observation, made some time ago by The Fat Guy with the Beard).

The ‘copter shot up, quicker than a child’s fumbled balloon vanishing to a dot in the sky above the fairground- and vanished behind the tree.

It’s been 4 days. I have posted flyers all over the neighbourhood. None of the local kids has claimed the R100 reward. Black Hawk is still down.

What to Do When Your Ex Hasn’t Got Fat

2007-10-25T17:00:00.002+02:00

I had lunch with an ex yesterday. It’s been 9 years. She hasn’t got fat. This is a big, big problem. In an ideal world, all my exs will be bigger than my postcode, with bad skin and thick ankles. In an ideal world, you can just walk up and say; ’ Wow. It’s been ages. What have you been doing all this time... APART FROM EATING?!’

Better that than to see them and have your heart somersault like a flipped pancake. This ex still has sea blue eyes that makes time hiccup, leaving you wondering just where you are and what exactly you were saying. Coherently formed sentences vanish on your tongue quicker than a snowflake on a frying pan. If this wasn’t enough, there’s the thought ‘we’ve seen each other naked!’ blipping in and out of the static, shrill and sudden as an alarm clock in a biscuit tin.

Some people's company has no shelf life. Conversation's easy like an old well-worn mix tape, where you both know what song’s coming next. In a heartbeat you’re finishing each other’s sentences, swapping obscure jokes and giggling at them like school kids passing notes under the desk in the in class. That sort of empathy gets scarcer as you get older, and seeing them makes you rue the ones that got away, or regret those you discarded.

I guess once a relationship starts, on some level it never ends. It just carries on. Maybe you got married, maybe you broke up earlier than you did, maybe you shagged her sister. Whatever. Somewhere someplace else, those feelings never stop, they keep just going on an on, like a million flickering TV shows bouncing off the satellites, beaming into space.

The New Pornographers - Challengers

indie crumpets: Continued

2007-10-09T09:35:00.003+02:00

2. Björk

“Aye lee-iv under dee wutah,
Weeth the leetle feeshiss
All sweemming like aurora boree-awlis
Prittee like starsss”

Accompanied by what often sounds like spoons, forks, and a drum machine being flushed down the toilet, accompanied by a teddy bear popping bubble wrap.

Who would have thought a facial mix of 14th century Mongolian warlord and hamster would produce such a trouser-bursting result?

3. Kim Deal

"First I'm going to piss like a racehorse, then I'm gonna dance like a black woman”
(after Pixies concert)

The vocals of 'Gigantic’ sound like black coffee and sandpaper coming out of a pitch black room. She fronted the Breeders, the best all girl band since, well, ever. Sadly the years have been less than kind, and she’s packed on more pounds and looks less and less like her voice sounds. Ms. Deal now looks like my 50-something grade 7 French teacher, Mrs. Nesbit, who resembled a labrador with a weight problem. Sigh.

The Ballad of Lonely Guy- dating for bottom feeders

2007-10-09T08:47:00.002+02:00

Lonely Guy
-noun
1. The bottom feeder of the dating world.
2. Hasn’t seen anyone naked since since mix tapes were bigger than mp3s.

Sounds like you? here are some tips to help you fathom the skewed hamster wheel of the female mind and snaffle some table scraps.

1. Drink. With enough alcohol almost anyone can fade in repugnance- even you. Never approach anyone even remotely sober. You’ll be seen for what you are, and the look of recoil and disgust may lower morale.

2. Listen. Once you’ve cornered your paramour, be sensitive. Let her talk. About anything. Maybe her parents didn’t give her enough love, maybe her boyfriend just dumped her... whatever. Just look into her eyes, nod your head occasionally and she’ll think you’re the nicest guy in the world.

3. Cry. Throw in some of your own emotional road kill, the more relevant to hers the better. Begin to cry, reluctantly, manfully. As she puts her arm around you, BAM! Move immediately to step 4.

4. Lunge. The fix bayonets, over the top approach to getting a snog. Not for the faint of heart. Lean in and go for the kiss. Research shows your odds are marginally better than sinking off the break in pool. If rebuffed, wait till she’s had two more drinks, and repeat steps 2 through 3. Warning: over repetition of these steps exponentially increase your chances of getting slapped.

5. Loathe self. Pretty self explanatory. This is a pretty pathetic way to go about boy-meets-girl.

If the above fails, go read Ovid's 'Art of Love'. Twice.

Satan in a Furry Pug-sized Jumpsuit

2007-10-03T06:56:00.002+02:00

My digsmate Nick is tired of being my pug puppy Stankie's bitch. (Someone) told him that if you bite a pug's ear, it calms down and shows you respect from then on. He tried this last night. Stankie yelped, looked at him for a fraction, then said; 'Game on, mutherfucker!' and beat seven shades of shit out of him.

Nick has returned to being Stankie's personal whipping boy. I can hear the screams now this morning as she leaps onto his bed, waking him with a bite on the face.

Nick has turned to The Good Book for comfort; namely this passage:
'2 Corinthians 12:7 - Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, and it shall pass through this world in cute pug form.'

Amen.

Gumboots and Raincoats

2007-09-27T08:15:00.000+02:00

Woke up to rain this morning. The first of the summer. Drops on dry leaves, a wet white noise. The morning smells of orange peel, and feels like the first day of school holidays. I kicked the wheat-coloured labrador off my bed, made some coffee and thought about going outside. The day shakes and rustles with possibilities, like a string-tied brown papered parcel. Today is shiny brand new.

indie crumpets: Francoise Hardy

2007-04-19T18:02:00.002+02:00

The idea of an indie crumpets hit parade verges on a saddo FHM magazine thing. Actually no, fuck that. FHM is Huis Genoot for vapid meat-fed castle drinking mouth breathers. So there.

French girls wittering along about nothing in particular always gets me hot and bothered. They sound winsome, exotic and distant as another language, like a kid’s confused, blurred notion of sex and romance, years before girl meets boy. Innocent, with blunted stirrings of perviness. Like being nine, snooping and finding your friend’s hot mother’s silk stockings in a drawer. But I digress.

Francoise Hardy could sing about cleaning her stove and I’d still get all flustered. Not that I understand French. After two years of schoolboy French, all I can say is “la garçon monge la glaçe” (the boy eats the ice cream), which proved useless in asking directions to the musée Rodin in Paris.

Perhaps it’s just me, but her song “Comment Te Dire Adieu” indelibly puts me in mind of a black and white music video with my bulldog as Grace Kelly. No really- head scarf and Jackie O sunglasses, slo-mo gliding by in a red convertible. Listen and you’ll see it, I promise. Maybe. Sort of. Or not.

Joburg, London, Houston.

2007-04-18T11:27:00.009+02:00

Joburg
Everyone here’s from somewhere else, somewhere smaller. A big city means more round slots for BA degree-shaped pegs. Career arcs are shorter though. Your gmail address will likely last longer than this crummy job. Longer than a Cape Town number plate in Joburg. Longer than your old London bank account. Longer than most relationships.

Aeroplanes take cherished faces away, to cooler places, more money and less crime. No one writes letters anymore - and email’s like reading a fucking TV screen - so you visit. Visiting unfortunately means climbing into a glorified bus with wings, and nine hours of terror. Hanging onto an armrest’s about as pointless as jumping up in a plummeting lift.

London
Heathrow still smells like burnt coffee creamer. Passport always seems to get stamped by the same smiling turbaned Sikh with an alarmingly not Durban Chatsworth accent. Thrilled reunion with luggage, which is now clumsy and heavy as a trussed corpse. Manhandle it onto a train and slump into a journey long enough to bore the air terror out of you. Delusions of a Famous Five England of hedgerows, lashings of ginger beer and cardies get amputated by the rolling vistas of grim council tower blocks that slide by like slabs of broken teeth.

24 hour travel honeymoon phase. Everything, no matter what, is new and wonderful: Tube adverts for products you don’t know; the thrill of making change with different coloured money; strange accents being used to say ordinary things. Gawping at chalk marks overhead as 747 vapour trails play noughts and crosses games over and over. Same songs as home but different music videos in your head. Lurching jet lag every now and then, like a lift stopping too fast. Get lost and snakes and ladder around London transport like a pinball.

Keys behind the door jangle, bolts thunk. Hugs and ‘how was your flight?’. Dump luggage corpse in lounge. Ear-popping centrally heated silence and all-fours-steep steps to the bathroom. Shuddering pipes and a drizzling, spiteful shower that wets you long enough to gets soap in your eyes. Sleep.

Restaurant/pub/club. Three pints and you stop converting into Rands. Catch up with friend after friend in a loud small space. Group gets slowly culled as friends leave for unfathomably long train rides to homes a moon trip away. The knot of late-stayers walk, walk, and walk to somewhere still open in Soho. Honeymoon phase gets lost in umpteen pints, walking under dizzying sodium lamp lights and cold that takes your voice away. Warm stuffy inside places with long bar queues and new strange beers. Miss your train and follow the stragglers like a lost stray to a take-out place. Clumsy fumble with the ex, who kisses the same, but now has a boyfriend with English teeth and an endearing accent. Wake up with your clothes on, in a strange lounge with grinningly brain-dead radio ads chirruping from somewhere. Light a cigarette on the toaster and let yourself out.

Houston
9 more hours of terror. Cling onto the hope that a working in-flight TV means the plane’s staying up. Little aeroplane icon on the TV map inches slow as lichen across screen-fulls of blue ocean. Nowhere to land. Hope the pilot knows that too. George H Bush airport of smells of syrup waffles and cut grass. It’s 3 post codes big. 8 in the morning and it’s already umpteen degrees whatever in Fahrenheit. Air feels syrupy and hard to breathe, even in the goose-bump-cold everywhere air-conditioning. Slack-jawed, newly (poorly) minted Americans stamp your passport so loud you jump. Another reunion with now even lumpier luggage. Brother arrives in his minivan, the vehicular sexual white flag of the married man.

Traffic. Texas radio is ZZ Top on a 24 hour loop. The music video is miles and miles of flashing by strip malls, concrete and American flags. Buildings seem moulded from the same one lego brick. One design fits all, be it: fast food, nail salons, bail bondsmen. All just massive slabs of brick bland as rice cakes and gum-wrapper-bright signs. Houston makes Bloemfontein look quaint as the Lake District.

The 24 hour travel honeymoon kicks again, but shorter and more brutish. Speak slowly to be understood. Green money all looks the same, and trying to make change makes annoyed queues silt up behind you. Rather just pile notes on the counter and point mutely at the product. Units jump from metric to quarts of milk, miles per gallon and gallon tequila bottles, which equate to reducing (give or take) eight adults to all fours. Weather report in Fahrenheit gibberish that doesn’t tell you how hot or cold it should be outside the ever-present air conditioning. Cars the size of London flats glide by, piloted by dwarfed little heads poking out of tinted windscreens.

Jetlagged sleep. Wake up to London time, in the middle of the night. In the dark the house is alive is alive with the light blips, ticks, and hums of countless electrical things. The house sleeps, watched over by machines of loving grace.

Camping in New Mexico. Long flat drive. Scores of nodding donkey oil pumps, like wind farms of metronomes. Swamps, alligators and Texas-sized mosquitoes. Brother and wife put up tents and make dinner while the kids watch Simpsons reruns on a toaster-sized portable TV. Beach picnic on the Gulf of New Mexico. New flowers in strange shapes and hues, crabgrass with sharp little thorns underneath. Naff waves with a slightly oily pallor. Oilrigs dot the sea line. Time to go home.