The Sea, The Sea

I must away, like all good Gautengers must, at times like these. We get empty street syndrome in December, you know. Oh, the horror. Linksfield to Linbro Park in under 45 minutes at rush hour is just not a challenge. So, we go south where the traffic goes. If the headache is not intense enough, we have been known to drink seawater in great gulps, while fighting off undertows as the cunning rocks exfoliate our sunburn, for an extra bit of frisson. What’s a sandwich without the sand, for heaven’s sake? Just a wich, and badly spelled too.

Speaking of sand, Pastor Ray McCauley obviously didn’t pay enough attention at Sunday school. If he had, he’d have known that a wise man builds his house upon the rock, and he wouldn’t be having this trouble that he’s having with his beach house in St Francis, which is falling into the sea.

But St Francis Bay these days is creepy anyhow. At first you obligingly murmur, “How sweet. A thatched, white cottage.” After the hundredth thatched white cottage, you begin to think it might not end, and it doesn’t. After the three hundredth you’re well on the way to despair.
Out of season it looks like one of those abandoned compounds on a planet in a fascinatingly bad scifi movie. Peace and quiet is one thing, but those endless thatched white cottages clawing at each other across the canals with their spindly jetty-fingers, the rubble, the cranes creaking, not a soul in sight apart from the occasional shadowy darting of a Grand Cherokee with tinted windows and who’s to say there’s a human inside? Maybe the inhabitants got hunted by the Seventy-two-tentacled Lagoon Creature, and she’s snacking on some of them while keeping the rest in gooey stasis in underground chambers, to feed to her hungry children when they return from working holidays abroad.

Maybe I’m crazy, and possibly damned, but St Francis is at least as creepy as Pastor Ray himself.

Oops, almost forgot - The Silvery Tay Poetry competition is coming along nicely. We have about ten viable entries so far. By January I expect we might have a good fifteen bad poems for our celebrity judge to ponder over. No-one has volunteered yet. You’d think Patricia Lewis would jump at an opportunity like this, but she hasn’t.

I’m very glad I’ve decided not to have any more birthdays. The more birthdays I don’t have, the more chance I have of continuing to be able to forget which year I was born in, and in time I could even forget that I was born in the same year as both Vanilla Ice and Celine Dion. Obviously an iffy year, that.

Quick, for ten points: Who was Robert Van Winkle?

So long, farewell, aufwiederzein (Dio? Help? Spelling?) adieu…
I’m going to stick my neck out here and wish everyone a Merry Christmas, for old time’s sake. See you in the New Year.

The Lone Deranger

Shoppers at Johannesburg bookstores are being menaced by a woman claiming to be Tom Eaton’s Number One Fan. Her identity is unknown as yet but one victim said, “I think it’s Lin Sampson, because of the shocking lack of fashion sense and the potted fern trailing out of her bag.” According to the victim, “…[It] was traumatic. I had fought several people for the last copy of ‘Cook With Jamie’, and the shop was littered with bodies, but when I got to the counter I found myself paying for ‘Texas’ instead. What can I say? This woman is very persuasive and I think she knows where I live.”

Well, let them think it’s Lin Sampson if they want, I say. We know better don’t we?