Half of Tom Eaton is Missing!

I speak in my capacity as Tom Eaton’s Number One Fan, and on behalf of all lesser fans, when I say that the Mail & Guardian is a heartless creature. It gave us last Friday’s edition without Viva Gazania and didn’t warn us first. No sky-writing bi-plane, no complimentary gold Lindt bunny by way of apology, no little sample packet of valium stapled on, just a very missing column. Does it have any idea what this does to people? It’s like when you’ve ordered a pizza and they’ve left out the base and the tomato and the capers, and all you get is a mozzarella pancake stuck to the bottom of the box. Or when you’ve gone to get Master and Commander on DVD and get home to find disc 3 of Lost 2 in there instead. Well not exactly like that, because there’s still his cricket column, which is vitally important, but we really need to be forewarned if we’re only getting half of our weekly Tom Eaton.

To cheer myself up a bit I thought I’d transcribe the previous week’s Viva Gazania in here, and was three-quarters of the way through doing that when I discovered that I could just link to it instead, like in the old days. How odd. I remember moaning about it being unfair that one had to subscribe to the M&G in order to access it online. Well, it turns out that I was either hallucinating or being incredibly thick, because it isn’t true now. I don’t know if it ever was. Maybe they’re just messing with my head. Whatever the case, this is a good time to point out that you should not believe everything you read, especially if I wrote it.

- Here it is: “Boetie Gaan Boardmans Toe”, about Ragnarök; and cucumber slices at the Heilbron Spa. http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=301453&area=/columnist__tom_eaton/

Until recently I had neighbours who are actually living this legend, fervently. They’re gone now, to an encampment somewhere, to sit out their uhuru, time is short they say, and I can’t say I’ll miss them at all because they were… challenging, in many ways. It’s difficult to believe that these people are for real, but I can say from personal experience that they absolutely are. They are as real as the Heilbron Spar, which is deeply depressing. I was googling for news of David Bullard after I heard on the radio that he’d been shot, and among the first of the online ‘articles’ to appear was one from a blog called “Why South Africa Sucks”. It’s manned by someone who calls himself the Uhuru Guru. I’m not sure that Mr Bullard would appreciate being a poster boy for this cause, so I hope he hasn’t noticed.