"But I Digress ..." (21 page)

Flu is a tense of fly

CAPE TIMES, 18 APRIL 2003

F
OR 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

G
OD 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.”

There have been other attempts: the gold chain that turned her neck green; the T-shirt that announced “World's Best Mom”; the fluffy Garfield with suction pads on his paws to attach to the back window of the car. If you were to pile up all the gifts I gave when I was a child, it would look like the props wardrobe for Jerry Springer's American show. Adult efforts haven't been much better: the complete collection of potted cactuses of the world; the tickets on a so-called pleasure cruise that turned out to feature Margaret and Ferdinand from
Big Brother
as special celebrity hosts. Through it all she has reacted with great excitement and gratitude – except, obviously, the cruise that turned out to have Margaret and Ferdinand as special celebrity hosts. After that she said: “Really, dear, all I want is a telephone call. Please.”

If you are a mom, bless you. Sons are not always good at thank-yous. But thank you. Happy Mother's Day.

Somewhere over the rainbow

CAPE TIMES, 30 MAY 2003

I
HAVE BEEN PLANNING
a holiday. Even the most diligent and workaholic columnist needs from time to time to breathe that sweet, sweet air that is not clogged by the miasma of deadlines, and to stretch and yawn and shut his eyes far from the crash and rattle of outraged readers' letters hitting his doorstep. Why outraged readers can't just write their letters on regular paper like everyone else, I'll never know.

So I have of late been perusing travel brochures. Ah, but the world is pretty in travel brochures. Everywhere at the far end of a long-distance flight, it seems, is nothing but one long, empty palm-lined beach, or an endless succession of noble and ancient ruins, proud and deserted, lit by the gentle golden light of sunset. I would like to live in a travel brochure, or at least travel in one. Nowhere in travel brochures are there queues of unhappy people waiting for a delayed flight; nowhere in travel brochures are there vast Americans with shirts like shower curtains and backsides like an Engen garage, shouldering past you to rub their bellies against the Mona Lisa. In travel brochures the only people you ever see are happy locals, ready to offer you a tasty drink in half a hollow pineapple, or cool strangers in evening dresses with a glint in their eye to suggest passionate assignations behind the curtains at the Vienna Opera House.

Sometimes I think the best part of travelling is the part before you leave, when you can imagine a perfectly framed world of edited highlights. Of course, the canny traveller knows that this is just a dream. “Travel” and “travail” (meaning “painful or laborious effort”) were in Middle English precisely the same word, with the same meaning. I'm not sure that things have changed all that much.

Still, it is a beautiful dream. Whose heart is so flinty they didn't sigh to recently read of one Koichiro Takata, a 22-year-old ophthalmology student from Japan, who was so disappointed by his holiday in Kashmir that he tried to commit suicide? The fact that Mr Takata chose Kashmir for his dream holiday – presumably edging out such rival fun spots as Kabul and Mosul and Khartoum – should probably tell us something about his judgement, but I felt a strong pang of sympathetic recognition when he announced from his Kashmiri hospital bed: “This place does not look like my travel brochures. This is not the Kashmir I read about. I feel hurt.”

It seems that, upon landing in Kashmir, Mr Takata became anxious about the armed soldiers patrolling the streets, feeling they detracted from the natural beauty of the place. Apparently there were no camouflaged gunmen in any of his travel brochures. Unable to stand the disappointment a second longer, Mr Takata produced a pair of scissors and started stabbing himself in the chest. I myself have at times been tempted to produce a pair of scissors and stab my travel agent, not to mention the person sitting next to me on the flight, but I have always stopped short of turning the clippers on myself. I suppose my sense of personal honour is just not as powerful as Mr Takata's. The Kashmiri Tourism Authority declined to comment, which is probably sensible.

Mr Takata has since made a full recovery, and says he will not be dissuaded from future travelling. Bless you, Mr Takata, for continuing to be a dreamer. The world needs dreamers, but if you ever make it to Cape Town, I sincerely hope there isn't a cloud covering the mountain on the day you arrive.

Sport

Losers in sport

BUSINESS DAY, 1 OCTOBER 1999

T
HIS MAY SEEM UNLIKELY
, but something Craig Jamieson said recently made me pause to think. Interviewed on television, the former Natal rugby captain reminisced about the province's famous first-ever Currie Cup final victory in 1990.

“It was a tight game,” he recalled fondly, “but then Theo van Rensburg missed a tackle and gave us the title.” I winced in sympathy with Theo, who was no doubt at that moment frozen in horror, braai tongs in hand,
wors
half-turned, his mates all pretending to find something fascinating to read in the newspaper.

But then an image floated into my head: it is the final minute of a home test against France, South Africa one point behind. Theo steps up to take a kick almost directly in front of the poles. Like a great soggy baguette, the ball wobbles wide. Dizzy from a memory I had successfully repressed for the better part of a decade, I felt my sympathy for Theo van Rensburg evaporate. “Serves the loser bastard right,” I snarled.

One of the fundamental truths of sport is that, regardless of talent or training, some sportsmen are winners, some are losers, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Indeed, the athletes we take most enthusiastically to our hearts are those who parlay unexceptional gifts into the stuff of greatness. The World Cup squad of 1995 is an obvious case: a modest team with all the flair of a pair of stovepipe jeans, but when it came down to it, Stransky's drop went through, and Mehrtens' went wide.

Consider Gerrie Coetzee, one of the most gifted heavyweights of the post-Larry Holmes era, who contrived to lose first to a drug addict and then to Frank Bruno, himself a confirmed loser and an Englishman to boot. Baby Jake Matlala, by contrast – a man knee-high to Martin Locke, with a punch like a slap from Glenn Hicks – is a multiple world champion. Baby Jake is a winner, Gerrie was a loser.

The most obvious breed of loser is the Choker. Wayne Ferreira and Elana Meyer are champions in this breed, and they say their prayers to St Zola Budd of the Order of Perpetual Fourth Place. They are classic chokers – extravagantly talented, but blessed with the mental toughness of a punnet of Denny's button mushrooms. To them BMT is a sandwich with bacon, mayonnaise and tomato. Their careers are as predictable as a Hugh Bladen commentary: when the heat is on, when they are in a position to make that single step to greatness, they wilt like Steve Hofmeyr being handed a condom.

South African chokers – from Kevin Curren to Okkert Brits – is a favourite topic with my friend Phillip, especially after the fourth beer. His explanation – simple, yet sound – is that so many South Africans choke on the big stage because they had maids making their beds when they were kids. They are soft, pampered, cut off from the consequences of their actions: if they spill Nesquik on the sheets, by the next time they get into bed everything will be smooth and clean and snuggly. There is always an excuse, someone to blame, a reason for not doing the dirty work themselves. You would think that someone with Wayne's complexion or Elana's voice would know something about overcoming hardships, but no – they would rather dream up a hamstring injury and hobble off into that hazy, humourless middle distance reserved for sulkers and chokers. They should be struck firmly and frequently with a blunt object – preferably Hugh Bladen – and taken to a training camp for the South African paralympic team to be taught a few hard truths about grit, guts and gratitude.

There is of course another breed – the Unlucky Loser, whose AGMs are chaired by that Job in cricket flannels, Andrew Hudson. If you are an Unlucky Loser, you can have so much talent and temperament that it is running down your leg onto the pitch, but things still will not go your way. A cover drive will rebound off a passing seagull onto your stumps; an earthquake will trip you up while starting off for a sharp single. Unlucky Losers are nice guys, for the most part, but you would not want to be on an aeroplane with them.

By contrast, consider Mark Boucher, who is that most glorious sporting treasure – a lucky player. He will drop the straight balls that miss the bat, and snag the impossible catches; his eyes-shut slog six will win the match. We need that sort of luck at least as much as ability. If our team is ever again to reach the World Cup final, it will be due to training and tactics and even talent. If we are ever again to win, however, it will only be because, when it truly matters, we are not Losers.