But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  At that moment the camera pulled back to a wider angle. There, perched like strange beaked birds behind a line drawn in the sand perhaps 15 metres from the family, were all the photographers of the world, four deep, jostling and leaning over each other, snapping and snapping and snapping. I looked at William again. “Poor bugger,” I thought.

  The show had its share of drama. “William is the Royal Family’s last hope!” said the voice-over, sounding like Obi-Wan Kenobi discussing Luke Skywalker. “But first he must come to terms with his destiny!”

  Epic stuff, but still I can’t get that interested in him. He is just about as dull as I suppose a future king of England has to be. There is another character I find far more intriguing.

  He is there in all the file footage of William, but instead of occupying centre screen, blond and radiant like a sun, he is a dark, brooding smudge at the edges, his mood unreadable, like a cloud gathering but not yet large enough to threaten. Harry has the makings of a Shakespearean character: dark, inward, bearing an almost embarrassing resemblance to James Hewitt, orbiting ever on the fringes of the Windsor solar system.

  While William wears chinos and simpers for the camera, I imagine Harry stalking the gardens thinking furious thoughts, brooding on his uncertain blood, absent-mindedly strangling baby birds and crushing small mammals beneath his heel. One day, like Mordred, he will leave the kingdom and raise a mighty army in exile, always dreaming of the day he will return … or perhaps it’s just me.

  2

  Lifestyle

  Of mice and morons

  STYLE, SEPTEMBER 2000

  HAVE YOU NOTICED how stupid the world is becoming? Well, not the world, exactly – the world, while not necessarily one’s first choice as an after-dinner speaker, has come up with some nifty ideas in its time. Plate tectonics was a pretty shrewd manoeuvre, and the condensation cycle generally earns nods of approval in all the right circles. No, I mean the people who inhabit the world.

  Stupidity is everywhere. It is the air we breathe. There are, of course, many shades of the stupid. I don’t mean the recognisable stupidity of drooling, slack-jawed incomprehension, although, as anyone who has ever watched SABC1 will tell you, there is plenty of that shuffling around. Far more depressing is the stupidity that disguises itself as thought, that talks so glibly and eloquently – indeed, that never stops talking. How powerful is this species of stupidity? It is so powerful it has invented a genre of literature that actually makes people more stupid for having read it.

  I was rictally grinning my way through a dinner party recently, when conversation turned, like a deflating boerewors on a suburban braai, to the subject of self-help. For some reason those beyond help are always talking about self-help. They can’t help themselves. A young lady of doubtful provenance dipped into her handbag and hauled out a glossy paperback. “Read this!” she commanded. “It will change your life. It contains the lost wisdom of the ancient Mayans.” The book was called The Avocado Prophecies or Footprints of the Toucans or some such horsefeathers and flapdoodle. I fixed her with an eye both cold and unaccommodating. I have no patience with the cultural anthropology of loserdom.

  Any curling potpourri of antiquated mysticism is celebrated nowadays, provided it can be attributed to the Incas or the Etruscans or some other culture that has disappeared with scarcely a trace. Besides celebrating communal cocaine use and the social merits of human sacrifice, what can the Mayans teach us now? How to be invaded by a rag-tag bunch of Spanish ruffians? If those ancient cultures were so damned clever, where are they now? Eh? Pyramids and maps of the stars are all very well, but they might have found the wheel a touch more useful in the long run.

  Anthropological mysticism is but one rickety arm of the genre of quick-fire self-help. To sell an idea today, you simply have to tell people it will change their lives, and tell them it won’t be hard. It’s not stupid for people to believe in something better, but it is a very modern stupidity to believe it will come easy. The fashion for mainstream mysticism is not a swing away from religion as such, but away from systems of belief that require rigour and application.

  Hence the popularity of faraway cultures – they don’t have to make sense. In fact it’s better that they don’t. Modern folk are so hostile to thought, we’ll put our faith in anything, provided it’s not rational. With alternative medicine it’s the alternative that attracts, not the medicine. No doubt sundry roots and tubers and suchlike have useful healing properties, but the way people go on you’d think that dangling crystals and painting your bedroom puce is guaranteed to work, for no other reason than that it hasn’t been subjected to clinical testing.

  The more non-rational a self-help book pretends to be, the more certain it is to succeed. We prefer anecdote and analogy to case studies and evidence. Invent a snappy metaphor and the crowds will flock. Consider the latest best-seller in the field: Who Moved my Cheese? by one Dr Spencer Johnson. It bills itself, and I’m not making this up, as the parable of four characters who live in a maze. Their lives are dedicated to the pursuit of, ahem, cheese. Apparently they like cheese. Two characters are mice named “Sniff” and “Scurry”. Two are miniature people named “Hem” and “Haw”. There’s more, but I can’t bring myself to utter it. Yet is this any more preposterous than a book titled 60 Ways to Make Your Life Amazing? I doubt it.

  And for all this hogwash and hoo-hah, are people noticeably wiser, kinder or more interesting dinner-party guests? They are not. I say to hell with this obsession with the real you. If you want the world to be a better place, don’t try to be more true to yourself – try to be more polite. Say please and thank you, teach your children not to interrupt adults while they’re talking, wear a jacket to dinner. Sod self-discovery, bring back manners. Imagine a day when every self-help book is replaced by a manual of common etiquette. Now there’s a world I could live in.

  Operation Copulation

  MARKETING MIX, SEPTEMBER 2000

  THERE ARE MANY ways to spice up a flagging marriage but I wouldn’t have thought that visiting Brackenfell was one of them. Brackenfell, in case you’ve never had the pleasure of driving past it at high speed while murmuring a spell to ward off evil spirits, is a dismal suburb in the north of Cape Town. Until recently, the best thing you could say about Brackenfell is that it’s neither Salt River nor Woodstock. Actually, that is still the best thing you can say about it. That is no longer, however, the most interesting thing you can say about Brackenfell, because recently Brackenfell was announced as being the lucky beneficiary of Cape Town’s newest and boldest marketing initiative.

  When it comes to marketing, you have to take your hat off to Cape Town, and not merely to shoo it away. Cape Town is more ready and willing to sell itself than any large town you’ve ever met. Cape Town is the Hansie Cronjé of seaside settlements.

  It doesn’t miss a trick: the last time I arrived at Cape Town airport I was handed a book of coupons, redeemable against the price of my next visit.

  Above all, Cape Town’s strategy is broad. In recent times, it has sold itself internationally as the only place to be if you are (a) a homosexual sex tourist, (b) interested in sleeping with under-aged girls, (c) an admirer of Earl Spencer, (d) a money launderer or (e) a real-estate speculator. Or, indeed, any combination of the above. But the Brackenfell venture is a stroke of uncommon genius.

  Brackenfell is the proposed site of a new multi-million-rand lodge, to be built in anticipation of a surge in swingers’ tours. It will offer adult entertainment, on-call sex therapists and communal spa-baths. What is a swingers’ tour, you ask, trembling? According to a recent report, one Robin Pike is advertising Cape Town as the ideal destination for international wife-swapping safaris. Allegedly, up to 100 British and German couples each month are queuing to come south and make whoopee with someone else’s spouse. Projected revenue is more than R60 million a year, which explains why the scheme has been given the thumbs-up from Satour and the Ministry of Tourism.

  I must confess the idea s
tartles me. The notion that our husbands and wives are a marketable natural resource will take some getting used to. The realisation that the Big 5 now includes Mrs Katz from down the hall, frankly, leaves me dizzy. The obvious obstacle to the scheme is that old South African bugaboo – racial intolerance. Having canvassed the fellows down at the Chalk ’n Cue, I can sadly report that many a lad who would do his patriotic duty in the cause of tourism with Mr and Mrs Hamburg or the Von Stuttgarts would draw the line at his own better half in the clutches of an Englishman.

  Still, there appear to be enough takers for the proposition to be viable: Johannesburg apparently has 6000 registered swingers, Cape Town a stately 2000 and Durban, ever keen to get in on the action, boasts a game 1000. Personally, I suspect that Johannesburg has a good deal more than 6000 but most of them don’t realise they’re swinging. They just think they work for an advertising agency.

  There are obvious questions: How does one go about registering as a swinger? Must you pay a subscription fee? Is there a board of swinging directors? What constitutes a quorum at a swingers’ AGM? And who provides the refreshments afterwards? Above all, what are the benefits of being a registered swinger? Discounts on bulk purchases of paper towels and red-tinted light-bulbs upon presentation of a valid membership card? Special family rates at participating love shacks and motels? Frequent-flyer miles? There is so much to think about.

  Even more boggling to the mind is the question of what scheme Cape Town will dream up to top this one. Brazil has already cornered the market in organ transplant tourism, and Indonesia has surely had the last word in hostage chic. In the marketing stakes, cities are like sharks. When they stop moving, they die. Just ask Tripoli, or Vladivostok – all the open marriages in the world won’t save them now.

  The foolish will always be with us

  STYLE, NOVEMBER 2000

  EVERYBODY, IT SOMETIMES seems, is trying to give up something. Some people are trying to give up the second helping of ice cream, some are trying to give up Internet porn, some people – alas, not enough – are trying to give up saying the phrase “Don’t go there”. I can only encourage more good citizens to join the fight against “Don’t even go there!” Wear ribbons pinned to your shirts, get yourself a hotline – we need to stamp out the scourge. It is not hip. It doesn’t make you sound like Queen Latifah or Jennifer Lopez. It makes you sound like Mrs Huxtable on The Cosby Show.

  And don’t get me started on the habit – so enthusiastically championed by Shaleen Surtie-Richards, that sounding leviathan of the linguistic deep –of exclaiming “Hel-lo !” It’s hard to explain precisely what “Hel-lo !” means, although you would recognise it if you heard it. It is generally uttered in a sort of sarcastic Californian accent, and it is intended to indicate your vast fund of common sense and finger-snapping street-smarts: “People tell me I’m a good conversationalist. Hel-lo ! I knew that!” It is the modern version of the word “Duh!”, and it is so annoying it can make a grown man weep.

  The worst thing about such lapses of good sense is that they are not confined solely to imbeciles. The people who say these things aren’t only the kind of folk who wear stretch-pants beyond the age of 24, or who collect the soundtracks of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, or who name their children Jarrod or Savannah, or who have their own talk shows on television. Some of them are in every way decent, likeable, unexceptionable individuals who suddenly, for no clear reason, lapse into the worst failure of taste.

  It is a common phenomenon. Consider the perfectly sensible man, earning a good living, surrounded by a loving family, who one morning wakes up and decides to grow a moustache. Consider Mike Haysman’s hairstyle. Consider the otherwise professional businesswoman, responsible and well-regarded by her peers, who takes it into her head that a cellphone that rings with the title track of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is both quirky and entertaining.

  There is no word in English that adequately describes these unpredictable social atrocities, so I have had to borrow one from the Italians. The word I have selected is culacino. Strictly speaking, it refers to the mark that is left by a wet glass placed on a table, but I like the sound of it anyway. A culacino can crop up anywhere. It can be a thing: a Best of Queen CD lurking in a music collection, a Jack Kerouac paperback, a ponytail, a pendant with your name written in hieroglyphics, a patchwork leather jacket. A culacino can be an action: ordering a Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola, or telling a tale at the dinner table that involves your sexual habits during the 18 months when you were single. Worst of all, though, a culacino is an indelible Freudian slip, a moment of madness offering an insight past the civilised mask, into the terrible beigeness of the human heart.

  The reason I raise all this is that a good friend of mine is considering ordering personalised licence plates. It is a source of tremendous anxiety. Can I still be the friend of a man with personalised licence plates? If so, do I run the risk of one day waking and thinking to myself, “I know, I’ll get myself a licence plate with Untitled written on it. That’ll be cool!?”

  Let’s get this straight: personalised licence plates are the worst kind of culacino. They are bumper stickers that cost R3000. They are fluffy Garfield toys stuck to the rear window with plastic suction cups. The kind of man who would have a personalised licence plate is the kind of man who would carry a plastic Porsche keyring. I say “man” but I am being unfair – you can bet your last glue-on fingernail that Felicia has a set of personalised plates.

  Appalling as the very notion is, worse is the kind of guff that people select for their plates. 007 – there’s an original thought. 140MPH – ooh, you devil. The new generation of personal plates specialise in words, allowing middle-aged men to call themselves STUD or PYTHON on national roads. Even more dire is when they take the opportunity to make private jokes with their pals. I saw one sad specimen with a plate proudly announcing: LUNCH. Was he a pizza deliveryman specialising in midday service? Was he a dyslexic member of the Ku Klux Klan? Had BREAKFAST already been taken? Who cares. Yep, buddy, that was worth every cent of R3000. It saved you having to find a T-shirt saying TOSSER.

  In the sharks’ den

  OUT THERE, FEBRUARY 2001

  A SMALL GIRL PRESSED her face against the window and screamed. I knew she was screaming, although I could hear no sound. She looked like Edvard Munch’s little sister, though tinged with a deeper shade of blue.

  I looked at another window and there was another small girl, also screaming. I felt obscurely pleased. I haven’t made girls emote like that since the time I shoved a shuttlecock down my trousers and sang “It’s not unusual” in a Welsh accent at the Sunday School talent contest. (I was, lest the Carte Blanche team come knocking at my door, 10 years old myself.)

  Now, as then, the girls were screaming in terror. It puzzled me. As far as I could remember, I had left my shuttlecock at home. I turned. A 12-foot shark was moving towards me, eyes small and dark like cigarette burns in a wooden table, mouth jagged and ajar like a kitchen drawer overstuffed with cutlery. I backed away, air-tank rattling against the glass of the window, the air of my exhalation escaping in a great cloud of cowardly bubbles.

  I wished I could reach through the glass for one of those small girls and hold her out in front of me. Or better, I wished Clint Lishman were there. You don’t know Clint Lishman. He was the little boy who beat me into second place in the Sunday School talent contest with his musical teaspoons routine.

  I’m not sure precisely what prompted me to scuba-dive in the predator tank of the Two Oceans Aquarium. Perhaps it was the prospect of having to spend a whole weekend in Cape Town. Perhaps it was the fact that I had to write another column this month. For a modest fee, the aquarium takes divers on an escorted 30-minute tour of the tank. The escort is a charming young lady carrying a thin wooden stick.

  Sitting on the platform above the tank, preparing to enter, I had eyed the thin wooden stick with some suspicion. “That’s it, eh?” I’d murmured. “That’s it,” she’d confirmed. “A thin
wooden stick, hmm?” I’d ventured. “As you say,” she’d agreed, “it is a stick that is thin and wooden.”

  It is a meaningful moment in a coward’s life to slip off a platform into an enclosed space containing predators with teeth. All the more so when protected only by a slip of a lass with a thin wooden stick and a nasty sense of humour. My breath came quickly as we sank through the dappled blue; I patted the pockets of my wetsuit for a cigarette.

  Water has its own spatial demands. It’s not enough to look over your shoulder for approaching sharks; you must also check beneath and above you. It is a large tank, but well stocked. There is a large rock structure, and around it circle yellowtail and turtles, dories and dogfish and a vast stingray, easily two metres across. But my attention was taken with the five ragged toothed sharks of imposing size and mien. They are vast and impossibly silent. There is something terrible yet familiar about them, like the shadows of your own mind, or the stirrings of a bad dream before you’ve quite fallen asleep.

  Familiarity brings comfort. They avoid humans, as wild animals do. Occasionally one or more becomes curious, but I find a firm prod with a thin wooden stick does the trick. When the big boy backed me up against the glass, I pushed him away with my hand, politely but firmly, as though I were a dieter and he a second helping of sticky pudding.

  All the same, I felt heroic and terribly manly, like Sean Connery in Thunderball, or Nick Nolte in The Deep. I turned to the small girls to give them a rugged thumbs-up, but the attention spans of children these days are shameful. They had already wandered off to look at the sea urchins.

  Men are from bars

  STYLE, MAY 2001