Living wild and free – briefly
FREEDOM: that feeling when you go somewhere and, on purpose, leave your cellphone at home.
You know you’re untethered. For that short time, you have complete certainty that your mental space will not be occupied by anybody – not your kids, your boss (not you, boss), the bank manager, the fibre people, the phone contract people, telemarketers. Nobody.
You will not get a call or message bearing bad news, at least not then. You can blank out and gather a bit of peace before you face the real world again.
Now do two weeks. rejuvenating bliss.
Make it a fortnight of pretending you’re not home, and you remember how to just breathe again.
It does take some planning. As a courtesy, inform everyone who needs to know that you’re going off the grid. That first bad news incoming call shouldn’t be someone terribly angry with you because they have reported you missing.
It’s even possible over the festive season. Send out early wishes with the message that you’re out of reach, preferably the day before the big switchoff, so you can reply where needed and then mute your devices and put them away.
There’s a hideous word, banned by the couch, to describe a stay-at-home holiday, but for a total break, you can’t go anywhere. Going away brings its own stresses, including possibly spending money you may not have, or dodging trauma on our roads.
Make sure your cupboards and the fridge are stocked, your prescriptions are filled, the dogs have their food, biscuits and medicine and, when that’s all done, set your mind on making do with what you have.
The rest demands self discipline. Do not let your fingers near anything even resembling news. Not for nothin’. The world will do what the world will do without you looking on and clutching your pearls.
Online games are okay, but no social media. One exception: if you follow a # group, you can check in for screen grabs.
If you’re of a mind, binge-watching is good. Claim your spot on the couch and lose the rest of you.
I spent two weeks on game drives, with alternating fur family coming for cuddles and naps. Once, I swept up their furballs. The three humans had a quiet Christmas Day outside and the whole family had at least a couple of treats. The dishes were done, but otherwise I “went on safari”.
The hyena clan played out a thoroughly traumatising, noisy, bite-filled matriarchal revolution which all, including two denning cubs, survived; we briefly saw a leopardess with her two tiny newborns before the area was closed off; many wonderful baby elephants windmilled their little trunks at us, trumpeting bravely before running to mom; enormous baby impala crèches rested in the shade with a babysitter or two while the ladies did lunch; spectacular electrical storms broke out and sent the crews with their 2m broadcast aerials running for cover. To the sounds of billions of insects flying past them, I changed the mozzie refill thingies.
All that was missing was the wild smell, but a few times our own thunderstorms freed the delicious fragrance of rain on hot African soil.
Thankfully, there is a full stock of the aptly-named Storm tablets and the scared pooches are learning thunder means peanut butter sandwiches.
Life is simply good.
It’s soul
APPARENTLY Christmas came early this year.
He came with hands eager to ignite. The ridges on his palm lines are tapestries of tales about smoke.
His left hand, crafted in flint. And the right is steel.
He should have known the severity of the friction from rubbing his hands palm to palm. Igniting his aura.
Apparently Zandile Christmas
Mafe, the traveller accused of setting Parliament on fire, had explosives.
Perhaps it was just his flammable aura. The same energy that warms your chest on cold nights.
Cold nights when fire doors are kept open, merely hinged onto cheap latches in Parliament.
Cold nights when we are reminded that a mountain of ash can be created with one stick from a box of cheap matches in Parliament.
Cold nights when the entry to South Africa’s legislature is easy pickings for any Tom, Dick and Zandile.
What a temptation to naked flames these nights are.
Somebody should have told the fire that this was a trap.
That nobody was monitoring CCTV cameras at 2am, when Christmas supposedly came wandering in the wee hours of the morning on the day the raging blaze ignited at the Old Assembly and National Assembly.
But then again, perhaps the fire also knew that this was not the first time security had been breached in Cape Town’s parliamentary precinct.
Flaming is a spark’s basic instinct.
All that fires know and do is burn, this is their nature.
They are a result of either mother or human nature. Mother is violent, she can crack a tree with a lighting bolt and burn a veld to dust.
Human nature and his man-made fires – arson, accident, negligence or scapegoating.
Explosives were allegedly brought into Parliament and laptops, crockery and documents had been stolen when the fire was set in Parliament.
Let us not look too close at these “documents”, the closer you look, the less you see.
I am eager to know what temptation lured Christmas to the Parliament.
Even if security was not on duty, how dead would the building have felt when he arrived?
If he was not coerced, freedom was his temptation. A fire awaited him. And the question was, “what are you capable of”?
It was Ben Okri, the Nigerian poet and novelist who said the fundamental freedom is the freedom to be exactly what we’re capable of being.
Be it an arsonist or thief, a negligent or corrupt legislature, or perhaps the fall guy.
There are snakes in parliamentary villages.
A snake and mole programme has been implemented at one of the three parliamentary villages in Cape Town.
These same villages, where Members of Parliament live, cost South African taxpayers R74 million a year to maintain. I digress.
Whether Christmas ignited the flame or not, the fire is a result of the failure of the executive and legislature, who are damned whether he did it or not.
I am eager to know if the story of Christmas is myth or truth.