Nor do I object solely to the commercial aspect. Valentine’s Day may be a rip-off, but it is no more of a rip-off than, say, going to a World Cup match and buying a beer. Just because they extort ten rand for the flimsy plastic beaker in which you receive your beer does not cause me to say, “There should be no World Cup.” No, indeed. Nothing short of losing to New Zealand this weekend would make me say that.
In fact, on Valentine’s Day a store-bought token of your dutiful affection is probably the best of a bunch of very bad deals. I recently heard of some loser whose idea of an imaginative Valentine gift is to fill a glass jar with slips of paper that he calls “Affection Cheques”. Yes, he does. The idea is that whenever his beloved feels down, she can take a lucky dip from the jar and cash in her Affection Cheque: “Pay the bearer one hug”, for instance, or “I’ll do the dishes tonight”. If I have to explain why I run outside and take deep breaths of fresh air whenever I imagine their relationship, you are probably in that relationship.
So no, I am not celebrating Valentine’s Day. But there is something that I am celebrating today. I may even celebrate it with a few drinks. Today is Friday: now that’s a day worth making a fuss over.
Another day, another dolour
CAPE TIMES, 4 APRIL 2003
OO-ER, I DON’T like this time of year. This time of year makes me distinctly uneasy. “April,” said TS Eliot, “is the cruelest month,” and now I know I why. (He also said, incidentally, that September is the funniest month and that February is the month most likely to buy you a drink if you’re feeling down, but you never hear about that, do you? No, as usual, if it’s not bad news, the media doesn’t want to know about it.)
I noticed, as a result of my usual close scrutiny of the posters on lampposts, whence a world of information flows, that today is national Cleavage Day. Now if ever there has been a redundant day, more so even than national Workers’ Day, it is surely Cleavage Day. I don’t mean to sound all sensitive and feminist here, but I can say without fear of exaggeration that in my household every day is Cleavage Day. When it comes to consistent recognition and appreciation, I don’t think the assembled cleavages around my neck of the woods have anything to complain about.
Still, Cleavage Day brings the same kind of dilemmas as Vagina Day did. What do you mean, you missed Vagina Day? Vagina Day and Cleavage Day are always at this time of year, and whenever they roll round I am stumped for the appropriate way to celebrate them. I am not big on commemorating every day that comes along – for instance, I allowed International Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Day to come and go last year with scarcely a second thought – but I don’t want to ignore V-day entirely because, well, the ladies down at the office can be very sensitive about these things. It’s one thing boycotting Valentine’s Day and Youth Day – as far as I am concerned Youth Day is entirely wasted on the young – but no matter how much they protest that Vagina Day is just a day like any other, deep down the ladies at work expect a little special attention.
But what? I don’t even know what the correct Vagina Day greeting might be. “I wish you a happy Vagina Day” sounds inappropriate, “Merry Vagina Day” just comes across as sarcastic, and wild horses could not drag the words “Have a relaxed Vagina Day” from my lips. Last year I contented myself with sending thoughtful and decorative cards to the ladies in the office, but that just resulted in a written warning from management, and the reputation as someone you don’t want to be alone with in the lift. It alarms me, I can tell you. It makes me want to hide indoors until sunset. Fortunately National Productivity Day isn’t until sometime in October.
I don’t know what to do about all these commemorative days, I really don’t. There are just too many of them – we’ve scarcely finished with International Day of Respiratory Tract Disease when it’s time for National Stutterers’ Day. I am not making up any of these days, incidentally. A few years ago there were actually advice hotlines established for Stutterers’ Day. I called one, being a man of social conscience, and also always keen on some good advice, but no matter how often I called, the lines were always engaged.
I am putting my foot down. No more days. International No-Smoking Day can expect short shrift from me, and I am going to try my best to get through International Erectile Disfunction Day without dwelling on it as much as I did last year. There is one day I do still mark, though. On Sunday it is my birthday. Happy birthday to me.
No nudes is good news
SPECTRASTYLE, 1 APRIL 2003
I AM ALARMED – YES, alarmed – by recent developments in the world of nudism. You may not be aware that there is such a thing as the world of nudism, but there is, and it is having developments. Primarily, judging by what I can glean from international news reports, nudism is on the increase. Nudism is surging. Nudism is, you might say, waxing, and that leaves me a little edgy.
You will remember that nudism had a peak of popularity back in the sixties and seventies and even straggling on into the eighties. Hippies and exhibitionists and weirdos and Scandinavians were first responsible for popularising nudist beaches and nudist colonies and nude triathlons and similar peculiar exercises in nudeness. They claimed it was good for your health, as though anyone ever felt better for visiting a nudist beach and spending the next two weeks digging grains of sand from secret parts of the body. Fortunately in time people saw the perils of nudism – it leads, among other things, to Beau Brummel – and the fad waned.
That encouraged me, I can tell you. It made me think that perhaps humanity still has some residual shred of taste and good sense. In the over-whelming majority of cases, the human body is just not intended to be undressed in public. The invention of clothing is one of civilisation’s finest moments – it is what separates us from the beasts of the field, and also from the Swedes. I may be a naked bachelor in the shaded safety of my own home, but I would not dream of unleashing my wobbly expanses upon the unsuspecting public. That would not only be unsightly, it would be downright uncivilised. It is one thing not being ashamed of having a belly like a VW Beetle, but it is quite another to inflict those visions upon others. Just as your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins, Ngconde Balfour’s right to wear skintight golf shirts should end where our line of sight begins.
It was Oprah Winfrey who first alerted me to the resurgence in clotheslessness as a lifestyle choice. It was recently reported that Oprah is to celebrate her 50th birthday by having naked photographs taken. Naked photographs, I suppose I should add, of herself. When I heard that, I had to sit down and drink a glass of water until the world stopped spinning. Fortunately, Oprah is not intending to publish the pictures – they are apparently for the sole viewing pleasure of her lucky boyfriend Steadman – but still I am not sure I feel comfortable living in a world in which there exist nudie photographs of Oprah Winfrey.
Scarcely had I recovered from that shock when I read the news that an American travel agency is organising the world’s first nudist flight. Castaways Travel has apparently chartered a Boeing 727 to Mexico for what has been described, with hardly a snicker, as a nudist package holiday. Everyone files on board as usual, but once the flight is in the air, passengers are encouraged to unbuckle and disrobe and enjoy the delights of pressurised nudity. Evidently staff will remain clothed – airline regulations wisely stipulate no nudity in the cockpit – and there will be no hot drinks or food served, to avoid scalding should there be spillage during turbulence. Still, I cannot begin to express what a worrying development this is. I become anxious on international flights as it is, without this new additional worry that I may have accidentally booked onto the wrong flight, and when the seatbelt lights are extinguished that balding sales rep in the seat beside me is going to sigh happily and start unzipping his trousers.
Nor is it just loony overseas types who are leading the comeback of the pale and wobbly bits on the public stage. Last year, as part of a strategy for wooing more Scandinavian tourists, members of the Port Elizabeth town council unveiled a proposal to establ
ish an official nudist beach in the city. See? The insanity is spreading! No disrespect to readers from the Eastern Cape, but Port Elizabeth is simply not so aesthetically blessed that it can afford this risk. Take a walk downtown and look at your fellow pedestrians and ask yourself: “How many of these people would I like to see without their clothes on?” Do not be fooled, my friends – nudist beaches are not like paparazzi photographs from Cannes. Nudist beaches have real people, and real people should wear clothes.
Good people of South Africa, it is not too late. We can stop this madness before it takes root. Civilisation is in our hands. The next time you are invited to strip in public, say no. Just say no. If we set a good example, soon everyone will be doing it.
Flu is a tense of fly
CAPE TIMES, 18 APRIL 2003
FOR EVERY CLOUD there is a silver lining, as the poet once wrote, before rejecting it as a cliché. For many the cloud is the new SARS flu virus. Indeed, for many there is nothing good to say about SARS, but not for me. No sir, I use a smile as my umbrella. For all its obvious drawbacks – the sneezing, the shortness of breath, the involuntary dying – SARS has given me a ray of hope.
I have been impressed with the alacrity shown by our authorities in taking measures to nip SARS in the bud. Of course, they have a lot of alacrity to spare, considering how little they used up on AIDS, but still. Naturally, one man’s alacrity is another man’s opportunity. For many years now I have been wrestling with one of the thorniest problems of contemporary life: how to avoid economy class.
The economy-class section of an aeroplane has become to me as the headmaster’s office was when I was a small boy, or as the dark space under the bed was when I was an even smaller boy – I fear it with all my mortal being. I sweat and itch and swoon when I think of having to go there. Fortunately, not for the same reasons – I don’t actually think some enormous child-devouring crocodile of darkness will swallow me, nor do I really anticipate that I will be sexually interfered with by my headmaster in economy class – but there are horrors back there that make me quite shrill with terror.
Babies; fat people with arms the size of legs trying to share your armrest; babies; junior businessmen who smell of Axe deodorant and read self-help books; babies – these are the sorts of wretches and villains with whom no civilised individual should have to share personal space, yet in economy class they are thrust upon you as plagues of boils and locusts were thrust upon the ancient citizens of Egypt. Short of actually shelling out the hard cash to join the sports administrators on the other side of the blue curtain, however, there has been nothing one could do about it. Until SARS.
I have hit upon a cunning wheeze to lift myself out of purgatory, the next time I travel any sort of distance in economy class. I will tell you but you can’t use it yourself, or they will soon rumble us, those airline swines. It was with a certain interest that I read the reports of passengers boarding flights, buckling up, then beginning to snuffle and croak and ostentatiously blow their nose on the hems of stewardesses’ skirts. “Are you all right, sir?” ask the stewardesses, backing away.
“Well,” say the passengers, “yes, although I seem to have suddenly come down with the symptoms of flu, not to mention unusual respiratory complications. Do I feel hot to you?”
“Have you been to Asia recently, sir?” the flight crew ask, wrapping their faces in the blue curtain.
“Well,” say the wily passengers, “no, although I did eat at the Mai Lai Oriental Barbeque joint a few days ago.”
Without further ado they are swept away from the assembled fiends and atrocities of economy class and are quarantined in blissful seclusion at the rear of the aircraft in a curtained cubicle. For the rest of the flight they do not have to see, hear or breathe the body odour of another human being. To be sure, you have a certain amount of inconvenient medical examination to endure when you arrive, but that, my friends, is a small price to pay. Book me a seat. I am ready to go travelling.
Home of the free ride
CAPE TIMES, 25 APRIL 2003
GOD BLESS AMERICA. Every time I open the newspaper I see something else that makes me realise afresh how true it is that America is the land of opportunity. “Bring me your poor huddled masses,” says the Statue of Liberty, “and I will teach them how to make money by suing people.”
I have already in these pages saluted the legal nous and financial acumen of one Gregory Rhymes, a roly-poly Yankee teenager who brought suit against McDonald’s for allegedly selling him several thousand greasy hamburgers over the years without once – not once! – telling him that if your diet consists almost exclusively of greasy hamburgers, you may very well not keep your slim, boyish figure. Big Greg is rivalled in my esteem only by the legendary Stella Rimsky, who set the aspirational benchmark for klutzes and dunderheads everywhere by earning a large sum of money after protesting to the court that McDonald’s takeaway coffee is unpleasantly hot when poured over your lap instead of the more usual method of transporting it in a polystyrene cup.
But there is a new hero. Join me in applauding Ms Geremie Hoff, 56, of St Louis, Missouri, who this month won nearly R50 000 and a free blow-wave after she sued her hair salon for giving her a bad haircut. Ah, America! When Ms Hoff ’s parents and grandparents arrived on the overcrowded transport ship from the Old Country, bowed by poverty, oppressed by the lank hair and unflattering cuts that were the unhappy lot of the European peasantry, how little they could have dreamed that one day their daughter would grow up to turn personal grooming into a civil rights issue. They must be so proud.
According to testimony, Ms Hoff took herself off to the salon to have her hair straightened. Later that night, clumps of her hair came loose, and the resulting bald spots made her feel “depressed and reclusive”. She sued for emotional distress, depression, counselling costs and lost income. Lost income? How did a patchy head lose the huffy Ms Hoff her income? Was she a photographic model? Was she one of those circus trapeze artists who dangle themselves from the high-wire by her hair? Did she make a living impersonating Lady Godiva at upmarket cocktail parties? No, she was a part-time tour guide, but she resigned after her traumatic hair experience. People just don’t trust information from people with bad hair.
“Say, Stanley, what’s that building over there?”
“The tour guide said that’s the St Louis municipal suntan parlour and library, honey.”
“What does she know? She has a patch of loose hair.”
It is an extraordinary thing, the extent to which it has become a modern principle not only accepted but actively embraced by law that if something goes wrong, it must be someone’s fault, and that money will ease the pain. No one really becomes depressed and reclusive and quits their job because of a bad haircut. Look at Gwen Gill – she still pitches up for work every day. Bad haircuts are acts of god, like hurricanes and tidal waves and lightning strikes. Bad things happen in the world – they happen to everyone and sometimes they happen to us. That’s just the world, and only a fool takes the world personally.
No, whatever is troubling Ms Hoff, I suspect it is something that runs altogether deeper and will last a lot longer than her loosened hair, and I very much doubt whether the money – any amount of money – will make the slightest difference.
Confessions of a bad son
CAPE TIMES, 9 MAY 2003
I AM A BAD SON. No, I am. I am not proud of it, but I must face facts. Not once, in all my years of having a mother – which is most of them – have I given a good Mother’s Day present. I have tried, but I am just no good at it.
It all began with a double-album of Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits, Volume Two, and it hasn’t improved. I was maybe 10, and all day I roamed the shopping centre, jingling the money in my pocket, looking for a suitable present. I forget where the money came from – almost certainly my mother – but I remember standing staring at the rows of perfume bottles in the cosmetics section of the department store, wondering how anyone could tell them apart, too shy to ask
the big ladies with the very red lips at the counter. Finally one of the ladies spritzed me with perfume and they all laughed and I ran away and bought Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits, Volume Two.
My mother had never given any indication that she was a fan of Olivia Newton-John. We did not, for instance, have Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits, Volume One. I can’t honestly say that I had ever heard an Olivia Newton-John song, although I knew she had been in a movie called Grease, which a lot of older kids had seen and my father hated because it had John Travolta in it. “John Revolter,” he used to say, and chuckle. Still, I thought Olivia Newton-John looked pretty on the cover, it came with a poster, so if she didn’t like the songs, she would at least have something to pin on the wall.
My mother accepted her double gift of Olivia Newton-John with great excitement and gratitude, and I think she may even have played it once, because I remember my father saying, “What’s all that yowling?” and my mother saying, “Shhh, it’s my present.”
The next year I was determined to buy perfume, like good sons buy their mothers. I went to the perfume counter and studied the bottles. I still couldn’t tell them apart by smelling them, but I bought the one with the most exciting name. “That’s very popular,” said the lady with the bright red lips, wrapping my perfume.
So I gave it to my mother, and it was received with great excitement and gratitude, but afterwards my Aunt Rosemary took me aside and said: “Darrel, you’re 11 now. You are old enough to know some things. And one of those things is that you must never, never, never again buy a woman You’re the Fire perfume.”
But I Digress ... Page 18