Barefoot in Hope’s warm sand

Do you remember the 21st night of September?

Love was changing the minds of pretenders While chasing the clouds away Our hearts were ringing In the key that our souls were singing As we danced in the night Remember, how the stars stole the night away

Long, long ago and in a galaxy very, very far away, I was a disco dancer. I had hair (and I grew it over my ears because no Army sergeant was going to tell me I couldn’t). I had tight trousers. I had an amazing Technicolor shirt that would have made Joseph envious. I had rhythm … for a white boy anyway.

And Earth, Wind and Fire’s September was my anthem. The year it hit the charts, I fell in love in September. I remember purple jacarandas, soft rain at midnight and laughter.

It didn’t end well. She went. I didn’t say: Stay. I didn’t go with her.

A year later, in September, someone fell in love with me. That didn’t end well either. By the time I had healed and realised I loved her too, she had had enough. And she went, too.

The last (and final) time I fell in love was at the end of August (close enough). And 33 years later, it doesn’t seem a day too much.

It is true that you can fall in love at any time and anywhere, but in southern Africa, in spring, in September, you cannot but help feeling, if not in love, then at least surrounded by a soft, optimistic glow. Well, I can’t…

Right now, I should be depressed. This company is in the process of restructuring and retrenching as it tries to shape itself to cope with the challenges of the changing media environment … so this might well be one of the last columns you read from me on these pages.

And, on campuses around the country, there is burning, there is violence, there is anger.

Our four-words-at-a-gulp President looks distinctly Third World when speaking at the United Nations on the same day as an urbane, articulate and thoughtful Barack Obama speaks about the real challenges facing humankind.

And our Springboks … okay, let’s not go there.

This is a time for the glasshalf-empty pessimists: a crippling drought, pollution, GMOs on our plates, unemployment, a tanking rand, e-tolls. Yet, yet … The other night, I stood in my driveway, looking at a blood-red full moon clawing its way up the side of the Northcliff hill … and marvelled. As it rose, the red dimmed and became orange as the light filtered through the soft new green leaves of our trees. Silence was the only appropriate response.

In September, Joburg’s beauty can sneak up and smack you upside the head as effectively as any smashand-grabber.

The birdsong is louder, the grass more eager (even with water restrictions, it is fighting its way up), the jasmine sharper.

For me, it is as if the winter of our discontent is coming to an end. The time when we throw off the clothes of anger and disappointment and of despair and go barefooted into the warm sands of Hope.

And, who knows what the future holds?

Carpe diem, people. Seize the day. Because it may not come along again.

You don’t want to get to the end of the road and say: I didn’t dance enough.

Or: I didn’t pay enough attention to September …