Blaming ‘Apart Heed’ and flattening a koppie
Mountain of evidence and TV channel sinking to an all-time low
ODDS-and-sods today, a peaceable downhill feel, easier than telling a tale. I could try to tell you that each odd or sod is crucial to your life, but what’s truer is that an occasional time-out column is crucial to mine.
**** My daughter contracts to a handyman partnership, Trust and Honest. Of course I thought they made that up as a sales tool, but no, these are the names they were born with. They live up to them, too.
I think of them as gardener Geoff takes on a temporary assistant, named “Lie”. Or so he seemed to say. It’s properly Lai, which he tells me is Sesotho. (And he hasn’t lived up to its sound.)
**** About defending the Guptas, a sin that keeps coming back at me in ever-rising tones as the scale of state looting keeps pushing ever higher: okay, I plead half-guilty.
My case, made from the Stoep several months ago, was not that these guys were sea-green, but that we were hearing only rumour.
On and on we were told of the bad smell hanging around them, but the only count on the charge sheet was landing a plane on an air force runway. Were we picking on them for daring to look different and sound different and come from a different quarter, the upstarts? I asked for evidence before consigning them unto outer darkness, as was the fashion. Now we have the evidence. Fine. Insofar as I’d implied it might not have existed, I back off.
I add a deep thanks to the select vital band of real journalists who do real digging, real penetrating.
Mind-crushing to confront the vanishing of trust and honesty from life at the top. Let alone the depths being sunk in the fightback.
That TV channel has become awe- some in the shamelessness of its news twisting (which is no reason to take it off air, mind!).
A long, and I think new, YouTube advert descends to record levels. In an extraordinary voice like R2D2, it repeatedly denounces a thing called “Part Heed”, spelt Apartheid on the screen, and another thing called Whites.
This thing, whites, is definitely the source of all wrongs in the world, and the advert is definitely placed by someone who has scratched to find a plus side on their ledger and has yelled Eureka, when a smart PR firm said: “Well, at least you’re not white, let’s capitalise headlong on that, with our newly wealthy friends in the government of anti-racist racism.”
**** You know how your head puts some jokes onto permanent rerun? Ten years ago, my Gauteng-loyalist friend Stuart T wisecracked about my second city, the one that people talk of as 1 400km south, but is actually as far west as south. “Nothing’s wrong with that place that an ambitious Joburg property developer can’t fix. Just flatten the koppie and make a bit of space.”
Every visit since, coming in from the airport with that magnificent massif of mighty mountain growing, growing, growing in the windscreen, I have laughed aloud at the image of an eternity of crawling ant-like excavators with chutzpah, shifting it teaspoon by teaspoon into Table Bay.
**** Best news of the year: OR Tambo International Airport has gone silent. All these years of incomprehensible, inaudible, distorted, brain-jangling, ear-polluting clutter are gone, zoop, like a lifelong toothache that stops. Congratulations Acsa. (And it’s sneakily nice to for once be ahead of that south-western city!)