So howzit going, fellow inmate?
Caught in the gloom and lowering, the endless spats of pitter patter, the rain gauge going 30mm, empty, 25mm, empty, 40mm empty, just over and again?
Yes, we are all climate prisoners. Funny that, considering the world’s most important climate change conference, the UN’s Conference of the Parties, or COP, is run by the petrostates in the full gaze of catastrophe, and suddenly the weather has gone bananas.
Talk about Groundhog Day, probably the best time loop movie — Collider even lists the top 15 of these time tic flicks. My best was About Time — the dating scene for the intimacy shy is a total must!
Every day, since the Friday before Christmas, little weather pictures showing SA with a big blue tear falling across the eastern half, often stretching far west and south, has been unchanged.
Rain tanks were full long ago, the potholes were emptied even further back, and only the terminally jolly failed to feel the pull of a soft, grey blanket over the soul at 2pm and did not take a long, slow afternoon slumber.
But the siesta is over, baby. Work is calling. Even your slothful scribe attacked the climate-holiday stupor, whipped open the laptop and wrote ...
And wrote ...?
This: “For Julia SD180124 Deloris says F***, f*** arrrgh!”
Well, OK, it was my first go and you have to give me some credit for showing up on the page.
The editor responded, saying fine they had something from some famous hack who went to Egypt to drink wine who actually filed a piece ...
But they never went to Cefani, or swam with the great whites, or braaied chicken sosaties on steroids during the first flush of going vegan, I countered. Vegetarian. OK, pescatarian. This after it was pointed out that the less-than palm-sized piece of smoked Norwegian salmon in the fridge cost as much as I earn writing this column.
Cefani, for the last while under the management of Mark and Ash Cairns, was incredible. The rain had gouged open the mouth and the cyclone-affected swell was pushing the sea back in, making the high tide a spectacle.
The sea would punch into the mouth, collapsing chunks of sand dune built up by the relentless north-easterly wind.
Vast sheets of water would wash over the entire berm, and then further up the estuary a mud flat the size of 20 rugby fields would transform from knee-deep, beauty salon-quality mud, to a shimmering lake.
And then, between that cross-hatched sky of high pressure cell-fed tropical rain rumbling in from the north east and with the cumulus and stratus cloud streaking — and also rumbling — in from the north west, there were precious patches of blue sky and sun.
On the weekend, we caught a quiet moment when the sea was not chocolate brown and cantankerous. It was silvery and aqua-teal, so we went out for a swim off Cintsa beach.
I was promised a 700m swim, but misheard and it turned into a delightful 1.4km traverse. Amid stories of great whites loving Cintsa Bay and one bodyboarder already missing, there was shadow aplenty in the mind.
But I was escorted by my galz, Joy Belles, Gailo, and the rest and wow, what a sublime moment. Made better by the fact that I was wearing my Australian hippy magnet which supposedly puts off the sharks, while the ducks had serious shark pods — a fat battery strapped to the ankle and a long electric tail.
The second week of January happens to be the best in the year. Most people have left and only the real lifestylists remain. It is quiet, the birdsong is loud, but the biggest noise polluter, Homo sapiens-on-holiday, has gone.
We spent the last day with camp chairs on the beach, moving them from the mouth, to the beach to the top of the dune, marvelling at the change of perspective, the blue, shimmering waters amid bright greenery. It felt Wild Coast but also East Coast.
The quietude is astounding, the sense of time eternal fills the space, and all of it made ever more sacred by the imagined sound of metal teeth grinding in the days ahead when the economy chugs, splutters and roars into action.
I would say roars into life, but too often our economy feels like it is dead, snuffed it, like the parrot in Monty Python. But we all do our duty, and like the adults we don’t want to be, we shuffle off back to the production line, wary of Homo homini lupus who lurketh.
Being a peace lover in a time of war is the hardest, but I am hoping you all have your antidotes in place, like 30 minutes of exercise a day, less junk food, more agency, more Zen (the calm, thoughtful stuff), less panic and anxiety, delicious decision making.
Delicious because I have taken the time out to see a nutritionist, and this poor suffering human has drawn up a meal plan which has at the end of the rainbow a BHAG — a big hairy audacious goal!
Tomorrow is the day I start. All proteins are accounted for and the meal plan with its calorie intake is in place.
Trust me when I say all eyes, in my thimble of a world, are on me.
The goal is not to look and feel beaudi-ful and prance across the sands and surf at Nahoon Beach. Nah. I just want new knees and the boep has to go before the surgeon says yes.
But hey, I will take that. Imagine me with new knees and body like Greg Carlson at 20.
BHAG in indeed.
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