"But I Digress ..." (20 page)

Another puzzling New Year

CAPE TIMES, 3 JANUARY 2003

W
HAT WERE YOU
doing on New Year's Eve? Were you? Really? Gosh. Wasn't it painful? No such high-jinks and shenanigans for me, I can tell you. I started the New Year as I intend to finish it: painstakingly piecing together the sundered bodies of ballerinas.

I don't know if this sounds peculiar to you, but I spent my New Year's Eve in a painful ecstasy of absorption, poring over the jumbled smudges of a 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle, not that it matters, was a reproduction of Edgar Degas' “Dance Class”, or, if you are the sort of person who likes their jigsaw puzzle unwashed, eating a baguette and wearing a beret, “
Classe de Dans
”. Oh, don't sneer – it was either that or the 2000-piece photograph of seven dalmations in a basket. It was the first jigsaw puzzle I have tackled in nigh 18 years, and it was just the thing for a thoughtful New Year's Eve.

You learn interesting things about yourself when you sit down to a diningroom table spread with cardboard pieces. I chose to do a jigsaw puzzle on New Year's Eve as a kind of gesture to myself. I wanted to greet the New Year, if not sober, exactly, then at least with some measure of self-possession. A jigsaw puzzle seemed perfect – I would spend the last evening of the year piecing together the bigger picture, putting things in their place, rediscovering the lessons of proportion and perspective, and at the end of it I would have made, with my own hands, an object both pleasing to contemplate and greater than the sum of its parts. “As with this jigsaw puzzle,” I said to myself sternly on the Tuesday afternoon, settling down with a French painting and an even more French bottle of champagne, “so let it be with your life.”

By midnight, as I reluctantly broke from my labours to stand outside and watch the flares from the ships and hear the distant roar of the hippies on the beach celebrating the New Year three minutes too early, the puzzle was still French but the champagne was long finished. So was that shaker of gin I keep tucked under the sofa for emergencies. My eyes were swimming with tiny specks of colour and the after-image of long-ago brush strokes. I was cursing Degas' enthusiasm for the colour green. What kind of a man paints the entire top-left corner green? And all the same colour green, at that. It must have made the painting go by more quickly, but what about the people doing the jigsaw puzzles, eh? What about them?

As I looked at the sky over Cape Town, I found myself thinking those deep and echoing thoughts that men and women have always thought, searching the heavens on New Year's Eve: “Cor, I'm glad I'm not doing a jigsaw puzzle of the Milky Way! That would take forever!”

Eventually I finished, with the sun risen and my eyes bleary and my back in spasm, and I stumbled to bed with a jigsaw hangover as bad as any I could have acquired from less salubrious pursuits. And I remembered, as I drifted off in an impressionistic swirl of green, that a jigsaw puzzle is not a very good metaphor for a life. In life you haven't the picture on the box to guide you, and in life there are very often pieces missing. But there is this similarity: in life as in jigsaw puzzles, it's easier and a lot more fun with someone helping you. And then I thought something else, but I can't remember what.

Valentine's Day

CAPE TIMES, 14 FEBRUARY 2003

O
F ALL THE
days of the year, Valentine's Day is far and away the least romantic. Mind you, it is possible that I only say that now because I have not yet reached the age when I have to choose the date on which to have my annual prostate examination. Come to think of it, when I
do
reach the age when I have to book my annual prostate examination, I am going to book it for Valentine's Day, so that the two least romantic days of the year can happen at the same time.

It is not easy to define what romance is, but I know just what it isn't. It isn't a duty forced on you by newspapers and shopping malls and a partner who will otherwise sulk and sigh and question your love. Romance, I think, has something to do with intimacy, and there is nothing intimate about sharing a date with every other couple so bereft of imagination and enterprise that they need to be told which day of the year they should be nice to each other. I dislike the publicness of Valentine's Day. To take your partner to dinner and sit in a restaurant with all those other couples proudly showing off that they are not spending this Valentine's Day without a partner, that is one step away from joining a cult and taking part in a mass wedding. Seriously – sending a Valentine card is like being a Moonie.

Even worse are the aesthetics of Valentine's Day. Red hearts and ribbons and cherubs and fuzzy stuffed Grizzlies holding little flags that say “I love you beary much” … that is how hell will be decorated. And if hell has a soundtrack audible above the screams of the tormented, it will be Celine Dion and Chris de Burgh and the rhythmic ka-ching of cash registers. No, to hell with Valentine's Day. You know who had the right idea about Valentine's Day? Al Capone. I am not necessarily suggesting that massacring your enemies with a tommy-gun is the way to celebrate Valentine's Day, but on a day of rampant sentiment, those sentiments are not furthest from my heart.

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

O
O-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 establish 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.