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April is the time of dangerous fools. It’s also the best time of the year for weather.
Yea, as I write this, yet another feared cut-off low storm is looming and by Friday Windy.com is showing stormy showers from lunchtime.
And yet, in the midst of all these crazy storms where lightning crackles in clouds over the ocean, lighting up the night sky like all points in the brain when you hit your thumb with a hammer, amid all this climate weirdness, there is a qualitative autumnal shift.
We all know it.
My oceanator galz in the Orient parking lot, know it. too. We have finished a swim, and instead of the peals of laughter over coffee, they quietened for a moment, and are talking sotto voce, then I know they are plotting a social event!
For this is what we do as the seasonal shift drifts into our unconsciousness.
I blunder in, for what is good for the goose must be good for the gander.
Yes, indeed, there is talk of camping, and four-by-four adventuring and I am delighted to hear that it will be in the Eastern Cape highlands. I invite myself along and they say sure, if your bike can do 22 Southern Drakensberg passes.
I have done a few and, honestly, I can feel the seat of my saddle clench.
They are not going now, but I know that it is this swing in the air which is kindling the adventure-time talk.
It is happening in a moment of sublime counterpoint — when there is so much social trouble, conflict, and bad news ad evil, this holy Earth and its sacred atmosphere become positively planetary.
Summer has waned but winter is not quite here. Instead there are these incredibly broody, moody skies, bursts of yellow flame at sunset turning grey puffy cloud into thunderous nimbus.
And the air is not frigid, it’s neither warm, nor cold, it’s delightfully neutral.
And I can never understand it, but humanity seems to mirror this giant gyroscopic turning.
In all my 41 years of journalism, April has always marked the start of strikes, raids, in my case jail, OK, detention without trial, states of emergency, and of late, and today the collapse of 234 years of democracy in world superpower the US with dire consequences for us.
It’s unthinkable, but there is glee on the part of some very weird zealots there.
Who cheers when your education department is being pulled down or park rangers are being randomly fired, when old age and children’s benefits are being stripped, citizenship rights are being ignored, judges who rule against this tyranny are derided and court orders are ignored?
That’s Amerika for you, back home in Buffalo City as sewers spew into the rivers and oceans, townships are rendered vicious by deadly illegal power lines, and people live in hovels, we have some BCM official flaunting his R50,000 takkies at a Scopa meeting.
BCM put out a statement to try to calm the waters, but I am blaming seasonal changes for the switch in public mood.
Clearly officials did not heed Shakespeare’s soothsayer who in Act 1, Scene two of Julius Caesar warns the Roman military ruler “Beware the ides of March”. Soon after that it was tickets for the complacent dictator.
One supposes that golden takkie official had no doubt he could get away with flaunting his fashion swag, but that emperor was wearing no clothes — he was surrounded by younger generation leaders who know their Gucci from their Gu Chi, their KFC from KFG and, in my own case, (as pointed out by my daughter) my “Apple Airpods” were definitely not made, as they claim, in “California”.
So we know our brands, but there should be a label called Pawpaw for the municipal okie who wore a tee, jeans and takkies calculated by his generation to be worth R115,000.
But does he not carry on regardless and next day appears draped in an Emperor’s airy suite of jeanpent, takkies and a tee valued at R125,000. I believe I spotted him wearing a new label and it read: “Guava”.
Anyway it’s not so much March that we should worry about, it’s April, starting with April Fool’s day, and in recognition of the new month I watch the Jimmy Kimmel show.
Every day, he makes America not so great as he rakes the Trump gaggle with ferocious claws of satire.
The problem, or is it solution, with Kimmel’s leering, guffawing comedic take is that most of it sounds true.
The jester of modern colonialism, slavery and extraction (terms that are becoming common place) is in fact a soothsayer.
You’d think Trump and gang have rendered us numb with their daily litany of crazy politics and outlandish lies, but what really shook me most was a simple poster in a pushback public meeting. It read simply: “Down with the rich”.
I would normally find this bluntness somewhat funny, except that the current context is all about billionaires tearing down barriers to gouging more billions in the form of obscene tax cuts.
Wasn’t Robin Hood supposed to steal from the rich and give to the poor?
So madness and conflict are in the air but I ask only that we look up to the sky and acknowledge that glorious changes in our seasons are here.
The Easter long weekend is almost here, followed by another long weekend as we celebrate freedom day on April 27 with a public holiday on Monday 28th.
Whether you are a pawpaw working for a guava or the other way round, I suspect these holidays are cosmically arranged and aligned to allow us all to pop the top on all this autumn animosity, and get the hell out of dodge and live on your own time.
But you and your loved one should not worry about exotic holidays to Bangkok or Tasmania, though the Tasman National Park is great this time of the year, “offering cool, dry days and crisp nights, ideal for outdoor activities like hiking and wildlife spotting, with the added beauty of autumn foliage” if you can afford it.
Tarkastad, however, is the way to go. it is cheaper than Tasmania by the tens of thousands, and that dorpie with its lakka The Story coffee shop and country store is the starting point of one our best-kept autumn secrets.
It is the end point of the drive up the R344, the Spring Valley road from Adelaide, which is not only epic as you literally climb and cross over the Winterberg, which will reveal dense copses of poplars with their green leaves turning a brilliant yellow and orange, literally before your eyes.
Enough of all this inequality. What do we really know about each other?
How often, when we open ourselves up to try to walk in someone else’s Stokies, Birkenstocks, Mr Price slip slops, or Louis Vuitton LV Maxis Sneakers, do we discover something absolutely new, that our prejudice, expectations or beliefs were far from the truth?
That’s the joy of life, and of course, the time we own that is ours, all ours, to watch those gorgeous poplar trees turn yellow and be OK with the fact that they are an invader species, because they also make great log cabins and stunning blonde furniture.
- Andrew Trench, 54, is a wonderful journalist who was raised in the Daily Dispatch and East Cape News Agency, who rose to become the Daily Dispatch editor, and editor of three other SA publications before entering the realm of business strategy and media houses migrating to digital. In January, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 oesophageal cancer. He said being told the news felt as if for a moment, that his “soul had left his body”. Andrew related with curiosity and dedication to all those he worked with but said cancer was a real leveller. He was super fit. An open water swimmer, he was doing 12km races and the Robben Island crossing. He needs a hugely expensive drug, Keytruda, if he has a chance of survival but cannot afford it at R90,000 a dose every three weeks for two years or more. Journalists, even those at the top, do not earn enough to afford this and his medical aid has said he was not in the top tier plan so they would not be covering the cost. Friends have started a back-a-buddy campaign https:/backabuddy.co.za/campaign/andrews-fighting-chance This is, in fact, a real chance to save an amazing journalist in these times of propaganda and corruption. Deloris will not forget you! Save a journalist today, for your own good mental health.
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