I am clubbing this. Not waiting for anyone. Head down, pounding for the parking lot.
In Gonubie River it’s about 14°C and in the air above 12°C.
I am wearing spandex. I may as well be naked running through the howling wasteland.
Instead, Mandy has a crew of us doing the 3km down run from Tidewaters on a Saturday morning at 7.30am.
Hark thee, it is an incredible day! You do not get a day as good as this! The air is pristine, the clearest, coldest, cleanest air on the planet — all the way from Antarctica, it better be clean!
The sun is like frigid treacle, it layers the sand and surf with golden caramel. The chainsaw in the wind is scything off the back of the thick green-bronze swells sending a shower of Trump White House sparkles, gold glitter like those cherubs at the entrance to the Karoo Theatre and hotel I love so much.
But actually, this is a sufferance. A spiritual seance, a duty of life, to friends and futures. To good health.
It’s the wup in the wors of winter, but it’s also Saturday! A day of absolute freedom ahead of today, Sunday, day of drudgery and keyboard bangering. These words, through metaphorically bleeding fingernails.
But writing, especially drift writing, is a joy and privilege. After seven years of being afloat on the Deloris Koan shipping container, all of us lost in an ocean of dreams and dreariness, it is always voorwaarts ever, backwards neva!
Klapping that Gonubie river surface, at times chippy-choppy, especially on the corner, at times like silk.
Other times, I think I can see that shark Mands and I are convinced was laying on the ground in the sand as we both swam over it a week or so back.
Talk about synchronicity, or more like synchronised swimming: our heads shot up out of the water as one. Did you see that?
A sandy shape, very distinct. A piece of shipwreck wood? An old gun barrel, a shark!
Mandy, being a scientist, while I am a wuss, doubled back and it was gone.
Then she started giving me the intel on where the large raggy lived and the most feared Zambezi or bull sharks had their pups. Places we swim through fairly regularly! Nee, not now!
Nature, I believe, left to its own logic, and encouraged to stay away with shark pods and hippy-dippy rare earth magnets, will leave us unscathed.
In fact, we often have beautiful encounters. The galz all hear the dolphins, but I just hear the sound of my blood pounding in my ears as I try keep up.
Galz! Gosh ... We can be far out there, 200m, 300m off shore, so far that you may as well be on your own if you get clipped, and they will stop and blah-de-blah.
“What are they saying,” I ask Barbs or MC? Oh, nothing to bother yourself about boy. Men. We’re just not on the frequency. Our job out here is to just keep up Dory!
I have never seen someone so happy to have a birthday as Joybells!
We sang to her four times in the water as more swimmers came out and splashed and dunked her every time.
Her smile just got bigger! And then we did it all again in the parking lot where, for once, I was proudly able to contribute a plate of Maggie Grand’s stupendous vegan carrot cake slices!
I was up in the confectionery stakes, in the top box, but not at a Coldplay concert about to be bust by the kiss cam!
Back in Africa, my writer’s den here on Gonubie Point is so cold that I was roused to make a soup.
OK, so it was called Writer’s Block Butternut and Sweet Potato Soup.
Not my recipe but the bike prof who says he gets terrible writer’s constipation and that making a warm, hearty vegan broth seems to be the perfect distraction.
Trump likes to distract in one way — “look away from my paedophilia friend Jeffrey Epstein and me” — but we Saffer okies, we distract ourselves by making amazing soup.
I whacked down the recipe. Some handy tricks about letting the veg sweat and cool. I took a bowl to the flu-trodden landy and she loved it!
I did not tell her there was no carrot in it — the foundation of a great veggie soup is celery, onion, garlic and carrot.
Of course, being undiagnosed ADHD by children who have no licence to practise psychiatry, I am always keen to keep on adding. But no. Do not reach for the Asian flavours, the soy and lemon.
I could have put in a bit of ginger, but, of course, once I had raided the chaos called my kitchen cupboard, I had bay leaf, turmeric, a red chilli, nutritional flakes, masala, I sort of did mess with simplicity.
I even made a video of the climactic moment when you woerra-woerra blitz it. The sounds I made when played back on the video were unrepeatable, but it was fun.
And, like every good pirate in the kitchen, I gave the landy her bowl with not a word about not having any carrot, or even if it came out of the oven belching with the fumes of Balthazar.
The cookie always tells the eaters, it’s the best flaming feast they will ever, ever have!
Gaslighting — “Oh I forgot this and put in too much of that” — is unforgivably poor behaviour, the very worst act of Debbie downery.
And the landy loved my soup! She is a good Afrikaner woman — I took it as high praise!
Later in the day, the bike prof in the hills of Makhanda posted a pic of his loaf set against the mountains, a lockdown tradition where he would encourage all the Sad Sacks in their warrens to make one too.
And being a dedicated vegan, he gave me the ingredients because we all know that many of the loaves we buy from the shop are packed with nanoplastics. Just sayin’.
He has stone-ground wholewheat and rye flours from a “source of origin”, local honey and olive oil, steel-cut large flake oats (not that instant gruel), sunflower, chia, pumpkin, flax, poppy and cracked hemp seeds, warm-water pre-activated yeast and a caraway seed for even more flavour.
It’s all mixed, kneaded, adding a little water if needed. “Oi stop that!” he yells at his cat about to exterminate a white-eye. “So many birds — they sense spring is coming!”
Let it rise in a warm place covered with a dish towel for 60 minutes.
Knock it back to release some air. Plonk it in a tin lined with olive oil and bake at 180°C for 40 minutes. Nca!
I see the river mouth coming up. My mate in his neoprene full suit is 200m ahead but I am ahead of the rest of the party.
The swim in dark shade and darker water started with such a clamp I thought my core had frozen over, but as you keep moving and pushing up your heart rate, you burn like fire.
Finally at the end, you are just killing it. As your core plunges lower, you can feel the warm towel and bottle of water, the sun, the clothes — anything to start that long journey back to normal temperature.
But I see there is no-one here and no key, so I lurk around trying to snatch as many rays of this winter sun as possible hiding behind the bush, and finally we get in and it’s time to get clothes on.
The co-ords are just not there and arms and legs get stuck, contorted in jackets and pants and the sweet lifeguard is trying to tell me about his last swim and I can’t listen because, well basically, I am dying.
Finally, clad like a normal human, the thaw starts. Three or four hours later, I get out of bed feeling better than James Brown.
Your system has been swung around by the tail, pounded and grounded, and now you are pulsating with good health.
Can you see why chaining oneself to the keyboard can feel like such a prison sentence?
Life, like the outflowing Gonubie River, sweeps us along in this lovely, bipolar Eastern Cape.
And, kids, as you get older, people around you start dropping away. I look at the only surf picture I have, me at 16 and my Durban china Chris Hadlow paddling in the shot hooting because it’s so rare that anyone got barrelled in that phantom Diary bowl. He died last week.
But we live on in hope. So swim Dory, keep on living on the edge! Get out and travel, even if you are only mind-surfing on your way to Thailand.
Spring is showing in the new leaf, I think, as I snap out of my snooze in the late arvo sun here on Gonubie Point like Aqualung.
It feels great! Bring it on! Your summer bod is calling.
Dom Nom’s fortified bread
Ingredients
- 375ml water
- 2tbsp honey
- 1tsp salt
- 3tbs virgin olive oil
- 3tbsp steel cut jumbo oats
- three cups stoneground whole-wheat flour (single origin)
- two cups brown stoneground brown flour (single origin)
- one cup rye
- Heaped tbsp of seed mix (chia, pumpkin, sunflower, flax, hemp seed hearts)
- One packet instant yeast activated with warm water and pinch of sugar for 10 minutes until frothy.
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