Informal justice, SA style!

This appears to be some kind of kangaroo justice in the back room of the security office at a South African supermarket.

One would guess that instead of going through the trouble of having this group of alleged shoplifters arrested and prosecuted, the security guards have decided to mete out their own kind of punishment and then let the crooks go.

The gang are forced to bitchslap each other repeatedly through the face – the dreaded poesklap in local parlance. "Daai is nie 'n klap nie," the one guard is heard to insist when one guy doesn't slap his mate hard enough. "Ek will hoor". I want to hear it!

The thieves stoically go about the business of klapping each other silly, giving as good as they get and generally giving a good account of themselves. If they'd been as good at stealing as they are at bitchslapping each other, they might have got away with it.




And while we're on the subject of klaps, check out this gif. Not sure what's actually going on, but dude is getting a serious slap issued.

Getting back in the game...

Much has been written about drinking and its debilitating effects on the human body, mind and spirit. All largely true. 

 

 Taken with the wisdom of such insights, I once stopped drinking completely for five years. Half a decade! Five years of not one drop of booze.The benefits were many: fresh, energized mornings of joy and happiness, promotions at work, more disposable income, the admiration of vivacious women… For the sober man, the very fabric of time expands with loveliness and possibility. 

The thing is, though, it gets a bit boring. You can only be the one straight person at a house party for so many times before you stop going. And watching a ska band like Fuzigish without a beer in your hand feels like a crime against nature.

Also, World Cup 2010 was coming up. SA’s biggest party ever! I wasn’t going to be the only straight person at that thing. Bugger that.

             

So some time in late ’09, I resolved to start drinking again.

             

It may sound simple, but relaunching your drinking career after five years off the sauce is easier said than done. Believe me.

           

For one thing, your alcoholic tolerance has vanished entirely, so you have the drinking capacity of an eleven-year-old choirgirl. For another, booze tastes absolutely terrible!

             

When your tongue’s no longer accustomed to it, even a light beer will taste like carbonated Rand Show mop water.

            

 It was a lot like being back in Standard Eight and trying to get into drinking for the first time. Except I was a grown-up.

             

In those days in early 2010, I would be at a table in a bar, we’d order a round, everyone would finish theirs and I’d have, like, 90 per cent of mine left. “Yoh! You only nursing that one, hey,” would be the jibe.

             

So the next round I’d try keep up, forcing this stuff down my gullet every minute, dry heaving all the while. I’d skelmly pour a bit of my drink out into the potplant when no one was looking.

             

Sometimes I’d take my beer to the toilet with me and pour some in the urinal, hoping no one would catch me.

             

I found myself drinking stuff like Spin, because it was sweet and went down easier. Manly drinks like whisky… that stuff was like paint thinners with fishing hooks in it.

           

But I persevered. The World Cup was too important for Project Relapse to be abandoned.

            

In the months leading up to the tournament, I would take myself off to the Brass Helmet, my local, and force-feed myself three Windhoek Lights in one sitting. With two Sparkles in between each one to get rid of the taste.

            

Pretty soon we’d all started buying our merch – vuvuzelas, Bafana jackets and those scarfs like a long SA flag. By that time I could have three proper beers and a shooter without kotching.

            

I was still far from competitive match fitness, you understand, but I was no longer an embarrassment.

            

My tolerance being what it was, though, my hangovers were on another level. One morning, after a night where I made new breakthroughs in my training, I woke up convinced we were having an earthquake.

             

But the body is a marvellous thing and much like Spain striker Fernando Torres, I was able to complete my comeback in time for World Cup 2010. There I was at the Innisfree Fan Park: feeling it, nicely pissed and freezing my arse off.

Even today, in a lot of ways I’m the Fernando Torres of dopping. After my enforced lay-off, I will never be the same player I was in my prime. But given the right man-management, decent service and the right attitude, on my night I’m still capable of greatness.

SA Rugby Random Cliche Generator

You're a professional rugby player. You spend your life running full pace into massive okes the size of hippos that go to gym lank. Fans across the entire country and the planet put their hopes, dreams and Superbru picks on your shoulders every weekend. As if that's not enough, here comes a journalist to ask you questions.

Luckily you have the SA Rugby Random Cliche Generator to fall back on. Hit refresh for your next statement. In  between, just say, "It's all part of the game."

10 Reasons Why Cape Town can Fuck Off!

The following is the original "10 Reasons Cape Town can Fuck Off" piece. I wrote it under my pseudonym Haai van der Schyff in 1998 for Skyf!! magazine, a Port Elizabeth scene 'zine I published for a while.
The piece was meant to satirise the whole trend of leaving your home town for the big(ger) city because, well, it's a bigger city, so it must be better.
It was later carried in SA Citylife magazine, then ended up on the global email circuit, where it has been steadily orbiting the planet ever since. It also spawned television interviews, radio appearances and other magazine articles. It was generally taken out of context - and stripped of irony - as a full-on attack on the city of Cape Town.



For better or worse, it remains my most well-known contribution to English literature.

10 Reasons why Cape Town can Fuck Off!

By Haai van der Skyf

1. It Exists.
   If it wasn’t for Cape Town, PE would look a whole lot better. Tourists would love us if they hadn’t first had a dose of first-world sophistication before embarking on the garden route.
   And anyway, if it’s first-world sophistication they’re looking for, why don’t they just stay in Europe or Japan or wherever it is tourists come from?
   Cape Town better wake up. This is Africa, not blimming Salzburg or something. Cape Town fuck off.
2. Capetonians are too hip.
   They’re a bunch of namby-pamby poncey glamour queens who think they live in a magazine.
   Prancing around in all their hip designer wear and looking all cool and unflustered like they’re in a fashion spread when they could be wearing perfectly good five-year-old jeans and T-shirts. What do they think this is? Marie bloody Claire or something? Magazines are for wankers. Cape Town fuckoff!
3. They’ve got a mountain.
   What is it with their precious mountain? If that was in PE we would have built condos all over its ass, and a freeway across the top of it. For good measure we would put a Playland on Devil’s Peak and a fuel depot on Lion’s Head. And ore dumps on Chapman’s Peak. Exploit the bastard.
   Instead the bunch of sanctimonious pricks treat it like it’s some kind of national treasure, some gift from the almighty.
   Every time some poor fool tries to built a little timeshare block on the mountain there’s a hundred fuckin’ protesters chaining themselves to the trees screaming “save the mountain, hey”.
   It’s not as if they built the damn mountain themselves or anything.
   So horse bollocks to them. Cape Town fuck off!
4. Their roads are too damn narrow.
   Ninety-five per cent of the roads in Cape Town are too narrow for two cars to pass each other.
   How do you figure a town of four million can have a road system built to sustain a seaside village of sixteen-odd and then try to host the Olympic Games.
   A case of the little boy whose eyes were bigger than his stomach, or what?
   Maybe try host a traffic-jam-free December holiday and move on from there. Baby steps, guys. Baby steps.
5. Their sea is not usable.
   Eleven degrees? That’s a geometry angle, not a fuckin’ ocean temperature.
   What’s the point of beaches if the sea’s too cold to go swimming in?
   More proof that the only reason people go on holiday to Cape Town is to get into traffic jams on the way to the beach and then to pose around with their cellphones on the sand, not to go for a ghoef. Cape Town fuck off!
6. They’ve got a Waterfront.
   The best thing Jo’burg ever did was build the Randburg waterfront. A crap hodgepodge of pubs, stores and restaurants to be sure, but one which well and truly called the V&A’s bluff, proving that Cape Town’s waterfront is nothing more than a shopping mall with some water near it.
   It’s just another consumer temple geared to getting you to buy garments with price tags at the child buggery level of obscenity and to be served Labels by waiters more condescending than the whole of America and the ex-smoking community put together. Cape Town fuck off!
7. Everyone’s off their tits from drugs.
   IT’s common knowledge that the only people in Cape Town who aren’t alcoholics, smackies, E-freaks, charlie-junkies, goofballs, acid-heads or nexus-fiends are Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Tunisian high commissioner.
   For this reason, everyone you speak to in Cape Town is mad, either because they’re high, or because they spent the whole of the 90s eating pills and now they’ve had to stop because they weigh 12kg and they can’t even remember what high school they went to any more.
   Compare that to PE, that haven of temperance, propriety and good clean fun, and you begin to see all to clearly why Cape Town can fuck right off.
8. All the best international bands and DJs go and play in Cape Town and none of them come to PE
   So if you wanna check U2 or Skunk Anansie or Tsuyoshi Suzuki you’ve gotta mission to Cape Town and deal with the skinny roads and the toxic psychotics and poncey fashion-mag E-freaks and a mountain that makes it rain all the time.
   Pricks. Fuck them.
9. It’s turning into another Hollywood.
   Every person you speak to from Cape Town is working on a movie set.
   Either they’re doing the catering or making props or being unit manager or merting zol to the film crew or being an extra in a French cellphone ad.
   And getting paid 20 gorillas a month tax-free in Francs.
   Why don’t they just get it over with? Build a Spago at the Waterfront and a Betty Ford clinic in Rondebosch, and put up a 20-metre sign on the slopes of the mountain that says “Zollywood”.
   And while they’re at it they can just fuck off.
10. It’s the new Riviera
    Skaapies is so dirt-cheap for Euros and Americans that they’ve all bought property there.
    But it’s so incredibly dirt cheap that you don’t even have to be an A-league jet-setter to afford a farm-size house in Bishop’s Court.
    Consequently, all the prices skyrocket because of all the rich bastards around, and you can’t even do any star-spotting because the rich bastards are only Belgian record executives or the earl of Derbyshire — crew that you’ve never heard of.
    Waste of time, really, Cape Town. Glad I don’t live there.

Faster than the speed of David Kotze!

Dawid Kotze was the fastest sprinter at Laerskool Lorraine. Yooss, he was rapid!
In the inter-house athletics gala, he would beat me in the 100 metres by about 40 metres.
That’s why he jolled wing and I jolled hooker.
When Kotze gave it flat box, he made this “sss-sss-sss” sound, like a steam engine venting steam.
My mate Glen, on the other hand, was a loose forward. He was a fetcher, quick to the breakdown and good at foraging for ball. We used to ride bikes together.
The one year, Glen had a growth spurt. He came back for standard five and his voice had broken, he’d started shaving and he looked a bit like Gerrie Coetzee.
The oke was massive. And as inter-house athletics time rolled around, we knew. This was the year we could take Kotze.
Sure enough, that year Glen beat Dawid Kotze in the 100 metres. When I spoke to him afterwards he said, “When I was behind Kotze I could see clearly. Then when I passed him everything went black!”
Glen was one of the heroes of Lorraine. Another was John Nel, the best dodger. Dodging was big at Lorraine – it made you excel at the lunchtime open-gates games. John was the all-Lorraine open-gates champ and therefore the u13A rugby captain as well.
Michael Bense was the king of cycling. He came fourth in the 1982 Oosterlig Sirkel on his salmon-pink Le Turbo. He won a popcorn machine and got to stand up in assembly.
Gary Gibson was the only oke at our school to master swing bowling. Shaun Paton scored 30 or more in every innings he played in the B section of the under-13 cricket league. He was the best until Gert Nel’s dad bought him a thigh pad and he scored 90 against Diaz.
The cleverest in school was Sharon Hill, coincidentally also the cutest. Strongest was Jonathan Bartlett. Richest, Michael Thomson. Best BMX, Michael White. Best at kleilat fights, Michael Nel.
These were the heroes of my childhood. All of us shepherded towards maturity by the likes of Mrs Ridden, Mr Frauenstein, Mr Lotter and Mr Van Rooyen.
Where are they now?
I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to know.
Growing up changes our perspective and shifts our priorities fundamentally. What was worthy of massive respect and admiration yesterday can become utterly meaningless today. And our heroes, the kids we held in such awe, they can be reduced to the level of the mundane and ridiculous.
I don’t particularly want to see a race between Glen Wasserman and Dawid Kotze these days. They might be faster than they were in 1983, but their showdown wouldn’t have the drama, the gravitas of that epic under-13 final, with White and Blue house tied on points.
I’m sure Sharon Hill is still as lovely as ever, even if her name is different. But I prefer to remember her as she was when she sat in front of me in Mr Frauenstein’s class.
When I think of Gary Gibson, I see a shiny, red, medium-paced away-swinger being edged to first slip.
The name Michael White conjures up images of a blonde kid on a metallic-red Scorpion wheely-ing two whole lampposts in Alsace Road.
And that’s where he belongs.
The golden days of childhood were golden especially because of the boundless infinite possibility that stretched out in front of us.
I see more than enough podgy, slightly cynical thirtysomethings in my daily life. I don’t need to see any more who can make me think, “Sheez, look how he ended up. Used to be the hippest guy in standard five.”
I’ve got a couple of mates I’ve known since childhood and they’ve done very well for themselves, thank you. But the rest of them, I’d prefer to imagine the rest of their lives to myself.
To me, Sharon Hill went on to become Miss Universe, and chief actuary for Investec. Gary Gibson played cricket for the Titans. Shaun Paton emigrated to Australia, where he’s now batting coach for New South Wales. Michael White now designs BMX bicycles out of San Diego, California.
And somewhere, in a parallel dimension, Glen Wasserman and Dawid Kotze are still tearing down the grass track at the back of Lorraine Primary School. Kotze’s got the, “Sss-sss-sss” going on, and Glen’s surging past him, arms pumping and his vision going all black. The fastest oke in the whole of Lorraine.

Me and Dad save the day in the '81 floods

At the moment rain is bollocking down over Jo'burg, from where I write this column. A glance out the window show Randburg wreathed in grey, with a black lump of a cloud depositing lashings of rain on that wretched suburb.
But no suburb has been spared. I don't think I've seen the blue of the sky for about a week. It's living proof that God has a sense of humour that the moment someone said, "drought" it began raining like it would never stop.

And motorists were treated to the ironic sight of newspaper posters warning, "Water restrictions loom" while actually dissolving on the lampposts from the amount of rain that had lashed own upon them.

And every time I see that starting to happen, every time it rains for more than three days at a time, I find myself guiltily wishing my guilty wish upon the land: "I hope it floods!"

It's terrible. I can't believe I actually wish such a terrible thing upon the poor people of the country, but I do. I know where my urge to curse the nation in such a manner comes from too. It is traceable to the 1981 floods in Port Elizabeth.

Anyone who was around at that time will recall that they were the biggest floods to hit the city since the 1968 ones, which are acknowledged as the worst. If I'd been alive in 1968, perhaps I'd have witnessed some extreme drama and destruction and been put off floods for life. Sadly I did not.

The reason for my psychological imbalance, my unhealthy love of floods can be linked to the fact that for me, the 1981 floods were the biggest jol ever.

It turns out that the Latin words for flood are eluvies or inundatia, so let's call it eluviophilia, or inundatiophilia, whichever sounds best to you. Either way, I contracted it back in 1981, when my sister and I awoke to the sight of rivers of brown, muddy water surging down our street in Lorraine like it was a river.

We were unable to get to school - hell, we were barely able to get out of the house - and I started to like it already. Then the pool overflowed. Ours was your standard suburban yard, surrounded by precast vibracrete walls on all sides. So naturally, when it buckets down, your yard fills up like it was a bucket.

It was quite entertaining looking at the yard through our window and seeing it as a small brown lake, with the bright-yellow kiddie slide parking forlornly in the middle of it, suddenly completely meaningless.

It rained and rained, and the muddy water level rose and rose. It seeped beneath the steel lounge doors and flooded the lounge. It was a sunken lounge, so luckily we were able to drag most of the furniture up the two stairs to higher ground. We had to abandon the sideboard to its fate and the lounge carpet would rot steamily over the next fortnight.

Then the floodwaters began licking at the top of the stair which led to the rest of the house. The surface tension was bulging over the sill of it as a couple of Family Radio & TV mags floated around, when my dad decided to take action.

He went in the garage and emerged carrying an axe. "Come, my boy. I need your                help," he said, donning his jacket. Bursting with excitement, I ran to get my school raincoat and my yellow plastic Wellingtons.

Like intrepid guardians of the household, we waded across the backyard. The water was just about waist-high to me, so my dad held my hand as he led me across the muddy lake which our yard had become. "Don't fall in the pool," he warned, but it was easy to see where the pool was thanks to the swamped kiddie slide, which served as a handy marker.

Our house was immediately adjacent and down the hill from the local park, so all the sheetflow from the park had seeped into our yard, as well as all the rainwater bucketing down upon us directly. Dad obviously felt we were getting more than our fair share of the water and set out to relieve it.

We waded to the vibracrete wall across from the house and I held Dad's belt to keep him steady as he hacked away at the lowest slat of the wall with the axe.

When the slat gave way there was a whooshing sound and the yard began to drain into our neighbour's property. The water level began to drop, and the house was saved!

I fancy dad gave me a sly wink as we waded back to the house.
To this day, floods evoke the very spirit of being swashbuckling. As I look out the window, it's still drizzling a little, I'm still hoping it floods.