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I sleep in the cosmos.
Not really, but sort-of — it’s a playlist I have made on the modern music slavery algorithm, Spotify.
What have I put onto play that is making my lilac-tinted grey morning so evocative of the social storms I sense around us?
No it's not Zep or Parow or the Dead Kennedies, it’s Fred Chopin’s Prelude in E minor Opus 28 number 4.
It’s the soundtrack to the final scene in The Pianist when families are reunited after the trauma of the Nazi holocaust.
Bass line (left hand) and chords (the other) played by Janusz Olejniczak make up a duet of aching simplicity, so perfect for climate prisoners.
For this is what we have become on yet-another dank dawn as we await the drumming to stop, the headbanging craziness of interminable mid-latitude cyclones buffeting us day in and out.
Technically, these cyclones deliver the cut-off lows.
Say it slowly — C-O-L — and let it sink in because this is what is happening daily, in your muddy rutted lawns and driveway, the rubble-strewn gaping-eye potholes, bizarre weaving of desperate tyre-protective drivers, the cold that is in our bones when we rise to groan at the day. Or not, and just lie in our warm nests.
Notice how amid the soaring world of technology, of AI platforms like Perplexity (which actually references the documents it has used to make its aggregated answers), we are actually descending into a decaying world.
Sci-fi is becoming reality before our eyes — along with all the wealth inequality, tyranny and control George Orwell so vividly set out in 1984.
He was out by a few years and should have titled it 2024.
When the tech bros, one of them our most cringeworthy ex-Saffer, the world’s richest nutter, Elon Musk, line up behind the president they have paid to give them unimaginable tax breaks — money wrested from the rest of the poor suckers in society, you just know.
Despite Kamala Harris’s final election slogan “We are not going back” we are indeed reeling backwards into a raw, feudal morass ruled by overlords and oligarchs.
I wish it were not so. For we have danced on the breath of heady optimism and promise in SA.
We know what could be, and I can’t tell you how my insides crumble when I hear people erecting castles in the sky as they wax lyrical about “how it should be”.
Call me bleak and foreboding, but journalists have a duty to set out before you, beloved reader, yes, just you, what is happening before our disbelieving eyes.
We hacks did it for apartheid, and we do it for post-apartheid, for today I am convinced both are rather terrible.
Nobody wants apartheid terror, but who wants today’s miseries?
While our government pollutes its policy with rogue oil and gas imaginaries, and the coal and manganese trucks run bumper-to-bumper, as our poor land is gutted with heavy-industrial machinery and our roads broken, definitely without our consent or benefit, there arises this canopy of BS.
We are indeed more believing of the bigger lie. It can feel like we are clutching at sands of hope.
Standing on Abbotsford causeway last night, staring mesmerised at the massive amounts of floodwater roaring as it exits in a furious foam, I can’t stop feeling this is the new climate disorder we are living with.
I see a family pull up and a grampa goes on bended knee to explain to a little grandy — and I just know he is recalling our great floods of 1973.
No longer these grand statement disasters, it can feel like we are being washed away by a thousand pinprick COLs.
But I know the big bombs are coming.
I am with you in this. And I am haunted by the knowledge that thousands of Buffalo City residents are hunkering down in cold metal shacks, rain pouring in, life’s chattels slowly becoming sodden and then there is the issue of sewage.
Thousands of Section 26 rights to adequate housing lying trampled among the newspaper and rags in the mud.
But on Friday my wonky window of opportunity opened just a smidgen — and I was outta there!
It began with a fabulous evening of wining and dining with real chefs, wonderful platters of unpretentious food, gorgeously decorated, spiced and roasted.
Wine flowed with port and ... OK but I made it home by 2am.
At 6am the sun rose and so did I!
Now to belt across to Kowie Beach in Port Alfred for there were amazing women by the score lining up to have fun.
The road flowed, the Keiskamma cuttings dreamy, peppered with knowledge that generations of bandits have lived dangerously here cutting trucks.
The bush looked lush and on the flats where the corrupt traffic cops of Peddie would try their own hand at banditry, I hit the high-end of the GSA 1200’s speedo.
Hetty sang back to me, so solid in the shrieking maelstrom. Letting my “freak flag fly” as David Crosby once wrote and sang.
Now the sun and blue sky are out!
A moment of joy and release as Hetty and I picked our way down the broken and crowded road to the Royal St Andrews SA Open Surfing Champs on the Kowie’s east bank.
It was great to see how focused and determined the forever young competitors looked, as they strode about in neoprene, their razor-edged sleds tucked underarm.
Out on the beach the Kowie Granny Groms could not have been more different.
They cheered and pounded their boogie boards to welcome new members, and then, as a surprised Kowie NSRI station 11 commander Chris Pike looked on, these 60 high age women stampeded into the ocean!
“These women do what they want!” I heard him say.
Exactly. They are, but for a moment, tossing off the chains, the obligations and duties and whatever holds them down, and having a healing expression session.
This time there are no foolhardy men rushing in for the save and then getting into trouble.
Just men on the beach taking photos, admiring their loved ones having fun.
By being there, on the periphery, they are holding just their right place in the set-up.
But I am a journalist and we enjoy the front row seats to history.
I go out and have a goef on the edges, with Jack Parow cursing and cavorting with his board, and later I get to hang on the beach with a crew of Nahoon GGs who have come on a surf trip to support their Kowie sisters.
It’s shining bright, but the air off the frigid ocean is cool — unlike present company as these wholesome matriarchs regale us with tales of being beach girls.
But they still look like beach galz, I think, but do not say for I am keenly aware of what is good for my own wellbeing.
On and on we go.
Up the hill to Bathurst where I meet the Bike Prof at the Pig & Whistle, home to lonesome travellers for almost 200 years.
The air is suddenly warm, and out on the stoep we hang, the prof smartly kitted in styling Leatt braces and the rest, which I galla (covet).
Early afternoon sun shines through the leaves, and Gin is laying down some gentle tracks.
The meal is vegan and good.
Owners Lucille and Gavin Came speak of a full 15 fairs, markets, festivals of food, art, wine, dogs, horses and farming implements lined up in Bathurst until Xmas.
It’s suddenly so wonderful to know that community tourism is alive and well and that you can even get a 200-hundred-year-old room for R690, but not sure I want to share the bed with my biker mates.
OK, there are single beds too, they say.
But the day is not over.
The swim Chinas are lining up a Gonubie goef for 3.30pm. That's 170km and kinda makeable ... And I am off!
Buffeted by the nor-Easter, Hetty just thunders on, leaning and leaping.
I love you Hetty! I say as I roll up to the Gonubie Marine Club — first on the scene!
And we stroll down to the mouth and jump in. It’s brown and blue, cold and green and wild.
And we swim for the mos, the joy.
Then we lay out the picnic blankets and snacks — I am empty-handed, but I am here!
More G&Ts, and other delicacies as the sun goes down on me and the galz, Gailo, Mands and MC.
Sigh, when it’s good out there, it's really fantastic.
And while friends are high in the air heading for expensive venues elsewhere, I would not like to be anywhere else but here, next to BCM’s functioning pump station looking upriver where the fish eagles wheel.
For this is home.
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