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I am having that out-of-body mind experience again.
Yeah I did willingly follow the senior Fort Hare University academic into the sea and found myself out 300m off the Kennaway Hotel in large, slow, heaving swell sighting for him.
Sighting is when you lift your head while swimming to line up on a point or triangulation of points, or find someone.
It totally throws your stroke and you go off your body line.
Basically, you start going a bit bonkers like a frolicking elephant seal.
Rhythm is shot, if you swim like me.
Saturday morning was a weather “window” — the b-easterly would hold off until 10am and we’d have a grooming light offshore until then.
This did come to pass, but no mention of the giant blackness, the billowing giant rolling in off the Agulhas current covering the entire sky with a massive pirate’s eyepatch.
Sighting towards Bat’s Cave was a two-tone for the Quigney half was full of golden sun.
So there in this burnished bronze chop — yes, even the offshore wind creates an ominous micro-swell when you are far out enough — I spot his yellow blimp, the buoy that weaves 100m this way and that.
We three following feel like it’s us versus the wild, wild ocean.
This was no goefing in a sea lake surrounded by deck chairs, frozen fruit drinks and Thai masseurs ... Did I wish it was?
No ways. This was exactly what I came for.
Earlier on our WhatsApp group, the Easy Peasies, I had turned MC off from joining this swim with the words “bring your adv game”.
She knew immediately what that meant, but had to explain to a friend that it was not for them, because it meant “adventure”.
Damn, and it was!
The Dean of Weave gave one of his endearing laughter base mannerisms, saying he was really having a drunken sailor swim!
Anyway, Jax, Janine and I were happy to turn and head back to port. Literally.
And so it went for 90 minutes and by then I was muttering in bubbles: “I want my fat back!”
The medical nuclear scientist has a BMI of minus whatever, and how she does it, I do not know.
She is a scientific miracle!
Jax, who is training for the Robben Island crossing, is fired up with determination.
That left me to call it. By 3km my hands had yellowed and my arms, thighs and even my neck had thickened and lost sensation.
Was this hyperthermia? Shadows and light.
Earth had been kind to us and as the wind prepared to swing northeast it dropped away, leaving a silken blue surface, and the sun was out!
But I was done.
Janine felt she had had elegant sufficiency, while the dean chirped he always liked to stop “at halfway” — and he and Jax proceeded to swim back towards the aquarium while the other half of the bait ball went home to shore.
So how do people’s minds work?
How do some have such different physical and mental limits, I pondered in my sheltered corner of Transnet’s latest, very expensive, very irrational and very denied fenced-in parking lot on Orient Pier.
The dean is case in point. I think he is still out there ...
When blood and feeling in my hands came back and I rode off to lunch, I heard this story from a highly respected early childhood reading expert.
Once upon a time not many years ago, the education minister of an African country called and asked her come along and assess the state of their children’s books and libraries.
In the capital, she was put up in a simple and acceptable abode and taken to her meeting with the minister.
She entered a room where a secretary working for three ministers greeted her cheerfully, saying the minister was waiting for her. It was 6am.
In they went and the minister politely offered tea.
Yes, she said, and he reached for the lowest drawer of his well-worn desk, and took out his very own tea caddie brought from home. As was government policy.
Lot’s of engaged chatting and later he asked them to head out to see the libraries.
They all got into his official transport, a well-worn Golf, with one constable for security, and drove to work.
The libraries were neat and well-stocked with the latest children’s books.
And then on to villages based on a trilogy of service — a police office, a health clinic and a library — filled with excellent children’s books in the right mix of language.
Teachers she said had, in terms of government policy, to read to the children regularly, if not once a day.
Then the minister got twitchy.
He was to be on radio later that day answering any and every question from the public.
It was a duty ministers took very seriously and they made every effort to have meaningful answers and not make mistakes.
And that is why Botswana has such amazingly well-read and spoken citizens, a government education system built on smartest practices and civil servants who are there to serve the people, not their next plateful.
In the midst of this lunch, my new best friend left, saying she had arranged a massage with two guys around the corner.
This was Saturday in East London and she said they were the only sports masseurs still open.
She later described a vigorous session where they used a machine that was a combination of a road drill and industrial vacuum cleaner.
He and his partner were so gentle and even though they were men, if she appeared to wince or twitch the masseur would be instantly attentive, so she let her trust issues go.
Did she have a secret word, I asked ...
Ja-nee you know you are being lined up for the seniors’ village (in my case subsidised rooming) when you meet someone and you look at them, and they look at you. And nothing?
Yet the mind works in mysterious ways — I remembered (first!) that I had actually interviewed her on Nahoon Beach, and then she remembered too.
Gosh.
Moving on.
A message to the community.
It so often happens that someone has an event that they want to tell everyone about, and they then approach a single reporter.
I don’t mind, I am there for you, but once we have reported your fundraiser about the poor, disabled, the cats, the dogs, then what?
The greatest WhatsAppers in the city, the seniors, will tell you a trick — send your message far and wide, to the world even, by just writing six paragraphs.
Say why it’s important, what it is, where it will be, what time, how much moolah?
Do it in an open email, not an attachment, dummy.
Those attachments were designed by Bill Gates’s people to promote his software, not to make your life easier.
Sending an attachment, and even worse, a damn PDF, just makes it that much harder to access your wonderful effort.
Then having struck that message down in a foolproof copy-and-paste blank email page, attach a picture that makes your project look so interesting.
No listen up, write a sentence which tells us who is in the picture, first name and surname, what they are doing, where they are and what we need to understand from that photie.
Use a JPEG, no bigger than a megabyte, and now attach.
And for the love of Friesland, do not send a word document with your picture embedded therein. So not carb smart.
If you want to be sassy, attach your 30-second video, but that is tech beyond me.
You wokies know all about how to do that with one hand.
This is called a press release and it is beautiful because you send it out like a meteorite exploding across the sky — everyone gets to see it and if they want to use it, they can!
If this is too tech-bro for you, imagine your message floating off in a million bottles.
OK. Now stop being so desperate. Gmail and your cellphone camera are your friends.
But if you really, really want to get that press release out, do send it to the Daily Dispatch for first bite!
There is also a difference between a digital poster and a press release.
A digital poster is great for a WhatsApp punch and is easily shareable, but a press release tells a bigger, more insightful story.
And without stories, who or what are we?
Nothing, just a hand roll waiting to be lunched on by the first mosquito of spring, or a 110kg sardine floating in the rollicking ocean a few hundred metres off Kennaway.
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