Here’s to Mr Black! Let’s fight to defend our Christmas hero!
At last, that whiff of Christmas — and fre-ee-dom!
It comes with the kids, young adults now, returning from their first year at varsity filled with new ideas about how small Shiverpool is and a lot of other sophisticated polemic.
It’s great you ossifying old goats, embrace it! Don’t be like the leopard tortoise I passed on that longest driveway on Earth, the single lane slab linking Steytlerville and Willowmore.
That little palm-sized okie was lying on its back, legs outstretched as if to say ‘what now’?
It was so shocking it took me a while to register and by then we were hundreds of metres away, gunning it at ... oh don’t worry ... but I never went back and to this day I regret it.
Maybe someone else did, or it has a way of righting itself, which would make more sense.
But just suddenly, there it is — a glimpse of the finish line, and even if you are working in the festive season, it’s always an exciting time filled with sun, rain on Christmas Day and drama!
Who doesn’t like a good skiet, skop en donder?
Not me, though I did watch The Good, Bad and the Ugly recently and that last 14minute long shoot-out scene, all about the gold and bad-ass attitude.
But Christmas only gets like this on the aptly-named Boxing Day, and then onto the drunken oblivion of New Year’s.
So this is the time to feel of good cheer — that moment of antici ..... pation!
Yoh, that Jewish grandfather of mine left me with a gene pool which is either light or dark, probably a bit too much on the dark side that sees me listening to Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde played in the final scene of Lars von Trier’s incredible endof-world epic, Melancholia (2011).
I wondered why that movie, which suggests those of us feeling depressed about the sixth extinction have every right to feel that way, and even makes us more able to accept, understand, though possibly not act in the face of looming destruction almost too enormous for our little noggins to grasp.
Google says it better than me — damn you too Google for being so absolutely useful and creepy, watching my movements even when my location is switched off, and listening to my conversation in the background to send me adverts of sexy outdoor clothing.
To wit, Melancholia is described as: “A strangely apt visual representation of depression. Von Trier creates a blackly comic delirium that is terrifying and completely exhilarating.”
And again: “Melancholia floats in an air of supernatural malaise and tension, a melancholy mirrored in everything and everyone.”
That scene of Kirstin Dunst lying starkers in the radiant blue light of the approaching rogue planet, and an almighty boom, certainly helps but I see her acting won her a Cannes best actress award while the movie is listed as one of the best in the 21st century.
No Leonard Cohen, I really don’t want to make it darker, but those damn genes ... During this morning’s contemplative reading my eye hooked a paragraph from psychiatrist Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning given to me by Gonubie psychologist Kirstin Liss: “The most ghastly moment of the 24 hours of [Nazi] camp life was the awakening when, at a still nocturnal hour, the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams.”
But I really want to move onto exhilaration: the festive season and a tradition of mine around this time of year.
It goes like this. I get a slightly anxious call from older dorter in Netherlands: someone has hacked fiancé’s Netflix account and is watching Christmas movies!
I think it was the other reporter-dorter who gave me the squiff eye and asked me: “Dad have you been watching movies on the wrong [said fiancé’s] profile. Busted!
The shame, oh the shame. But ya, I will watch Xmas movies until there are no more ... I love the magical realism of the rich girl either stepping down to fall in love with a prole, the antics of the nasty pampered antagonists, and then the benevolent patriarch, the rich dad, so wise but also maybe getting to fall in love on the side.
And despite living in an African land of flooded mielie fields and shacks washing away, I can escape into the fake, snowy slopes of the Western mountains (though they too are trapped by the worst heatwaves this side of the industrial age).
And there is always food, a bakery, a moerse cake or tables loaded with pastries amid giant shepherd’s crooks made from sugar. All such glacéed, glossed, gumph!
I know Jim Carey’s Grinch was incredible, but I disliked it, too frenetic and crazy for normal old me ... And it tips my mind into the Grinch’s of BCM who stall pensioner’s rates discounts, losing whole boxes of annual applications, forcing the frail oldies to wait and pay and causing regressive anxiety.
BCM seems to fight to withhold every penny, only repaying a month or two of the rebates when finally activated — and only if the bals put up a fight.
I was there when BCM cut the lights on Sunday night to a pensioner’s home even though the family had settled the inflated bill days before.
We cheered when numerous telephone calls with proof of payment in hand finally saw the lights come back on.
So today, Delores pays homage to one dude in BCM’s Byzantine, Kafkaesque pinball machine revenue department.
Let’s call him Mr Black. Oke, we know who you are. We know how hard you labour to get people like our pensioners the rights to which they are entitled, we know how you reach beyond the empty desks, the missing in actions, the echoing vlakte of disinterest and worse, to push the buttons, pull the levers and make those accounts work for the people.
If anyone sees Mr Black, form a ring of protection around him.
Pray for him, send him sandwiches, for he is the great unknown civil servant fighting for the democratic rights of our residents in a thicket of uncivil serpents. Mr Black, don’t go down without a fight! We are with you now, at Christmas and in the New Year when the hangover descends.
He will be at risk. Remember, people who do their jobs with care, pride and diligence are the greatest threat to the slobs who don’t, those leeches driven by the pathological urge to tear down those who show them up for what they are: skivers and jivers, duckers and divers, the bureaucratic, thuggish, self-entitled riff-raff of patronage borne of a stolen nonracial democracy.
Just don’t die of stress Mr Black. I don’t want to be laying a wreath for the unknown soldier who died in the war against thievery, sloth and oppression.