Hats Off to the Conservancy

Dedicated members of the Pearly Beach Conservancy have rehabilitated two of the sea-facing benches, of which there are more than a dozen positioned along the shore. The before and after photos show how wind erosion undermined the concrete bases and how they have been stabilised.

These benches are a valuable amenity for local residents and visitors, providing somewhere to sit and enjoy the view, the sun and the sea air, and thereby improve their physical and mental well-being.

 Excerpt from "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin: 

"The sea, vast and mysterious, stretched out before her like a blank canvas, inviting her to fill it with her thoughts and dreams. She sat on the bench, feeling the cool breeze on her face, and contemplated the vastness of the universe and her place within it. The waves whispered secrets to her, and she listened with an open heart, finding solace in the rhythm of the tides."

Excerpt from "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman: 

"He sat on the bench, gazing at the sea, and as he looked, he felt a deep connection with all living things. The waves carried stories from distant lands, and the seagulls sang songs of freedom. He contemplated the vastness of the ocean and the eternal ebb and flow of life, finding comfort in the knowledge that he was but a small part of a grand and interconnected universe."

Here are five reasons why one should consider joining and supporting a local Conservation Society:

1. Local conservation societies work to protect and preserve the natural habitats and ecosystems in their area. By joining such a society, you contribute directly to the conservation of local flora and fauna, ensuring that native species and biodiversity thrive for future generations.

2. Conservation societies often promote sustainable practices for managing natural resources. Through education and advocacy, they encourage responsible use of resources like water, land, and forests, helping to maintain ecological balance and prevent overexploitation.

3. These societies play a crucial role in educating the community about environmental issues, ecological processes, and the importance of conservation. By joining, you not only increase your own knowledge but also help spread awareness among others, creating a more informed and environmentally conscious society.

4. Local conservation societies are active advocates for environmental protection and sustainable policies. By supporting them, you strengthen their voice and influence, which can lead to more environmentally friendly laws and regulations at the local and regional levels.

5. Joining a conservation society offers a sense of belonging to a like-minded community with a shared passion for protecting nature. Being part of a collective effort to safeguard the environment provides a profound sense of purpose and the opportunity to make a tangible impact on the world around you.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

Takeabody

“I’ve just had an SMS.”

“From?”

“Takeabody. Listen to this: ‘Good day. Collection of your husband’s body has been scheduled for no later than 5pm on Thursday 25 June. Please ensure that the corpse is in a hygienic state and lying in a supine position with straightened limbs.’”

“Thursday? But that’s tomorrow. It must be a mistake; I’ve been feeling fine of late. Or maybe it’s a scam. They send a fake Takeabody message, and when you respond, they offer to move the date if you pay a large amount into their account.”

“There’s a reference number. It looks authentic.”

“Well, if it is genuine, Their AI forecaster must foresee a heart attack, or a stroke, or something. At least, if it’s true, I won’t suffer a lingering death.

“We will just have to wait and see. What else can we do?”

“We can’t just sit around waiting. Let’s go out for a meal, and when we get back I’ll take some Viagra. How about it?”

“All right. You always said you wanted to go with a bang and not a whimper.”

From Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

They Stole My Weed

While I was recently undergoing chemotherapy and radiation my son, who lives in Joburg, sent me a parcel containing edible cannabis in the form of gummies and lollipops. Well-intentioned, he believed this would help to alleviate the unpleasant side-effects of the treatment.

My taste buds had gone haywire and I had lost my appetite for almost all food and drink, so I thought there was nothing to lose by giving cannabis a try. (I had not smoked the stuff for more than two years and there wasn’t a joint in the house, otherwise I might have gone that route already.) On a Sunday, about half way through the treatment, I decided to ingest half a gummy about an hour before lunch, in the hope that it would help me face the meal. The effect of this jelly baby was pleasant but mild. I made it through the meal and, because I missed being a little pissed after the usual several glasses of vino, which now tasted like sulphuric acid, I thought I would try half a tot of brandy in water. Not only was it like drinking camel urine, but I almost immediately felt dizzy and disorientated, and I had to stagger into the bedroom, assisted by my wife, who was alarmed at the sight of my rolling eyeballs and white lips drained of blood.

I soon recovered, but it wasn’t an experience worth repeating. When I reported this to my son, he apologised for not warning me to avoid mixing marijuana with alcohol. What I had been struck down with was a classic ‘cross-fade’.

This incident got me thinking about another unfortunate experience with the herb. More than two years ago I had been cultivating a few marijuana plants intended for recreational use when thieves entered my property and removed them without my permission. I remember writing something in response to this and, after a search, found it drafted as ‘They Stole My Weed.’ Dusted off, it can finally see the light of day.

They Stole My Weed

I came back from a walk and got busy with the evening routine. When the dog began to bark I could tell that this was something serious and not trivial like a passer-by walking down the road. I ran outside, the dog continued to bark furiously and I looked about for trespassers. Too late. Suspecting the worst, I hurried to the greenhouse and, sure enough, my beautiful dagga plants were gone. There had been three of them, all over a metre tall and heavy with buds. Now all that remained were stumps, half cut through and then snapped. A slit in the shade cloth sneered at me, contemptuous of my pride in having nurtured and raised such fine specimens.

After the initial shock on discovering how I had been robbed and my private domain violated I was consumed by feelings of anger and hatred. How dare they come onto my property uninvited and steal the plants that I had spent months growing to maturity? If only Ruby had been alerted to their vile presence a few minutes earlier. She would have cornered them; I would have pressed the panic button on the remote and then attacked them with a pick handle and bludgeoned them to a pulp. Well, maybe not. They would probably have stabbed both me and the dog to death.

When I stopped seething a day or so later it occurred to me that this was not a novel experience, and when I tried to recall all that has been stolen from me over the past seventy years I was amazed at how much there was. The first item on this list was a battery razor. It was pinched from the toiletry bag I left on my bunk in the dormitory of a Youth Hostel in Venice back in 1972. In the ensuing decades I have been robbed of three bicycles, a car radio, a Toyota bakkie, a Ford Escort, three wheels off a Tazz, a ladder, half of a sound system, several metal roof sheets, a 9kg gas bottle, an angle grinder, drums of paint, garden chairs, a wheelbarrow and two 7.5kg dumbbells. And I mustn’t forget Alfonso, the Boxer puppy who was kidnapped and later released unharmed.

Considering the number of items stolen I am tempted to make some generalizations. Larceny amongst all societies is so widespread and pervasive it can be classed as a basic human trait. From an evolutionary psychologist’s perspective the ability to steal from other humans must have given individuals and groups an advantage over those less adept at thieving and pillaging. Over hundreds of thousands of years we have become genetically programmed to seize any opportunity to steal from the vulnerable, the unsuspecting and the distracted.

The petty manifestation of this is associated with the poor and the working class, but white collar crime takes place on a far grander scale and is perpetrated by people who are motivated not by necessity but by greed.  And even more devastating in their plunder than the powerful individual and the Corporation has been the criminal actions of tribes and then whole nations. Throughout the five thousand years of recorded history people have been banding together to attack other groups in order to steal their goods and their women. In the Colonial era it was about subjugating the indigenous in order to loot their riches and exploit their resources, and at the same time capture and enslave millions of individuals for the purpose of forced labour. And now, long after the abolition of slavery, the present economic system continues to deprive millions of their right to share in the wealth generated by technological advances.

The theft of my Cannabis plants has left me even more certain in my conviction that human beings are incapable of controlling their destructive impulses and that the extinction of such a verminous species would be in the interest of all other forms of life on the planet.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

Not Afraid

“This is it? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“She said we mustn’t be put off by first impressions. The accommodation is around the corner to the right. It’s a pity we arrived in the dark.”

“My fault?”

“I’m not saying it’s anybody’s fault. I’m sure it will be perfectly fine.”

In the light of the headlamps, she watched him approach the dilapidated building and disappear into the dark. 

There were patches of bare plaster where the paint had fallen off. Left of centre was a big barn door flanked by an ordinary door. Another door was set in the gable above with a small-pane window to the right of it. No sign of the wooden stairs that must have once provided access. Some rusty pipe scaffolding was stacked against the left-hand corner.

As she got out of the car the blackness that had swallowed him was lit up. Passing two garage doors she came to the far end of the building.

“The key was in the lock, like she said it would be.”

A table and plastic chairs, a couch and an easy chair. On the other side of the breakfast counter was the kitchen with usual mod cons, presumably. Against the wall to the left steep wooden stairs climbed upward.

“Where’s the loo?”

He led the way through the kitchen to the bedroom. Quite spacious with a queen size bed.

Sitting on the toilet listening to the hiss and rattle of her piss and enjoying the feeling of relief, she heard him ascending. His footsteps were dulled but audible on the wooden floor overhead.

“Terrible stairs,” he said. “Not for drunks or the elderly.” He had emptied the car while she freshened up. “There’s another ensuite bedroom up there with two single beds.”

She stood at the open door and looked out into the darkness.

“No lights. It feels like an open field and I can hear frogs in the distance.”

When they opened the door in the morning they were both surprised by the unexpectedness of the scene before them.

“I could never have imagined this in the dark.”

They were looking at a paddock with half a dozen ponies slowly moving in an aimless fashion towards them, all the while nibbling at the stalks of grass that had been missed the previous day.

“Mindless,” she said. “I can’t say I envy their existence.”

“It doesn’t look like they suffer from stress.”

After breakfast he asked her if she wanted to do some exploring. Pearly Beach was about three or four k’s down the road.

“I thought I could hear the sea in the night. We’ve only just got here. I want to chill for a bit. You go and check it out.”

She put the dishes in the sink and was about to settle down with her book when she noticed that one of the ponies was standing at the fence and seemed to be staring at her. 

It stood its ground when she approached, and even let her stroke its head and muzzle. The brown eyes were calm but expressionless. Thick muscular lips that did the work of hands. They parted to reveal top and bottom incisors.

“What big teeth you have,” she said aloud. Probably got a big dick, too. Nothing on show at the moment. She wondered what those leathery lips felt like.

There were no sugar lumps in the kitchen, so she spooned some jam into the palm of her hand and went back to the pony.

“Here you are; lick it. It’s better than sugar. Got more flavour. Just try it. No? Well, fuck you then.”

She wiped most of it off on the domed head of a fence pole and was about to go in to wash the rest off, when the bloody thing started licking and mouthing the post like it was giving it a blow job. Try again. This time she got the novel sensations she was after: the giant caterpillar lips and the rasping tongue doing acrobatics in the palm of her hand. So that’s what it feels like?

She had finished drying her hands when she saw the woman striding across the paddock.

Read the full story on Smashwords (free until end July).

The One-handed Maniac

She agreed to cohabit with me only once we were married. Accordingly, after the performance of some Christian rituals and the completion of the necessary legal formalities, I held her to her word, she gave up her job and we set up home in the cottage I had built in Pearly Beach. This was in 1984, and in those days, we did not worry about how we were going to keep the wolf from the door. I used to say, ‘God will provide,’ which was rich, coming from an atheist.

One way in which I got God to provide was by taking on some small building jobs, but in those days there wasn’t much work to be found in the area. I thought of trying my hand at firewood, andas described in a previous blog post (Trees must Fall), this venture took place on the farm Groothagelkraal at a time when the property was owned by the alternative couple, Ian and Avanol Bell. I abandoned the venture after three weeks, having been reduced to a physical wreck. I was exhausted and becoming emaciated, my arms and legs were badly scratched in a hundred places and I had developed tendonitis in my right forearm from the constant stress of wielding a chainsaw. It also soon became clear that there was very little money to be made after deducting expenses like wages for two helpers, chain oil, petrol and chain sharpening.

When I heard about a charcoal kiln for sale, I thought this might be an easier way to turn Rooikrans trees into a commercial product that could yield an income. Charcoal is produced by partially burning wood in a space starved of oxygen. The kiln was about 2meters long, 1.2 wide and 1.5 high. It was built with heavy steel plate, had a chimney at one end and a meter-by-meter hatch on top. The thing weighed a ton and transporting it proved to be a nightmarish operation. After positioning it close to a dense stand of rooikrans, I set to work cutting enough meter-long pieces to pack the kiln two thirds full. This took three days. Then I had to find a quantity of dry wood with which to build a fire on top of the stack. Once the flames had taken hold, the hatch had been closed and  sealed with soil, and smoke was rising from the metal chimney, I went home.

When I returned in the morning it was clear that the fire had gone out. At the third attempt the starter blaze spread to the main bulk of wood and The chimney smoked for a week. On opening the hatch, I was delighted to find that the lengths of wood were black, brittle and lightweight. Genuine charcoal! I began to pack my black gold into bags, thinking I was now in business. Then, halfway down, the branches became heavier and uncharred. This meant that more than a third of the load would have to be refired.

I persevered for another six weeks and ended up with about a hundred bags of charcoal of dubious quality. It was time to admit defeat and move on. Neither firewood nor charcoal were going to provide me with a living, and I added them to my list of failed enterprises.

The kiln was abandoned and left to rust and eventually disintegrate where it stood, and I put it from my thoughts. Then, about a year later, my wife came across a news item in the Cape Times.

“Remember that man who sold you the kiln?”

Of course I remembered him. He had been making charcoal on a small holding beyond Klein Paradijs on the way to B’bos.

“I told you he was a bit creepy. And it wasn’t just that stump. It was something about his eyes. And his mouth.”

The stump she was referring to was the one at the end of his right arm. I know it was his right arm because, on first meeting him, I tried to shake hands, and was confused and then embarrassed when he extended his left hand and I was obliged to reciprocate.

She read the newspaper report to me, and it was without doubt about the same man who had sold me the kiln. Now living in Cape Town, he had been arrested for amputating some of the fingers of three women. The victims themselves had refused to lay charges, but family members had gone to the police, claiming that the women were under the man’s spell and had been persuaded that losing a finger would be a transformative psychological experience. The case was postponed while the man was ordered to undergo psychiatric assessment at Valkenberg.

“Really weird,” I said. “It’s hard to imagine how they got sucked into that mental space. Dark, man, dark.”

“And to think that this psycho was here in our house when he came for his money! Sitting in the lounge, in the rocking chair drinking coffee!”

“It’s like with these religious cults. People get drawn into crazy stuff and lose touch with reality. Reminds me of Goya: The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

We never heard what happened to the case, but over time the episode established itself as a legendary memory worthy of revisiting from time to time.

Because the idea of getting a kick out of having a finger cut off was so bizarre, I thought it would be interesting to explore it as an example of psychotic behaviour by incorporating it in a piece of fiction. The opportunity to do this finally arrived about two years ago.

My son and his partner were staying in some accommodation on a small holding not far from where the one-handed maniac had lived. When I saw the building I immediately thought that this was the perfect setting for a creepy story. I asked him to photograph it at night, and the result was even more charged with gothic undertones than I had hoped for. This, I thought, would make the perfect cover illustration for the story that was still to be written.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.