A story of hubris, addiction, celebration

IRAN wild at Scope for five glorious years, starting at 21 when I became their features writer, then features editor. A wildness that was overtly endorsed and encouraged and applauded. The whores were always kept a secret. Until now I suppose… As long as I did my work. And work I did, often half-drunk. And as long as I remembered the words of our editor: a mercurial, charismatic man and my inadvertent drinking coach.

“Scope isn’t a f***ing democracy!” he would bellow. “It’s a f***ing dictatorship. And I’m the dictator.”

For the first few months at Scope, based in the grimy industrial area of Mobeni, outside Durban, closed doors terrified me. Every time a staff member went into the editor’s office and the door was slammed shut, I was convinced they were discussing ways to get shot of this useless, substandard laaitie (youngster).

I would sit writing The Glamour File – a puff piece accompanying an overseas photo shoot of some halfnaked model.

My job meant also adding a little panel called Vital Statistics. This included guessing their breast size, making up some fairly cerebral quotes from the models, and bestowing upon them some huffy, moralistic quotes about how they were actually good girls. I also had to make up their favourite films, food and books. But judging by what at the time I thought of as their cockhungry Cockney expressions they didn’t look like they read much.

Then, Martin, the features editor – a heavy drinker but not an alcoholic, who years later would gas himself in his own garage – would walk into the editor’s office. From my desk in the open-plan office I’d see the door close and wait for a call of “Siddall, come here… We don’t really feel you fit in here.”

And then I started winning awards. A minor “best newcomer” motoring one at first, from the SA Guild of Motoring Journalists – an organisation I still belong to, and from which I’ve gained far more than they have from me. I’m surprised they never threw me out, really.

My swaggering hubris grew. I was untouchable. A Golden Boy. An arrogant one. (For a while I buried – rather, hid – the scared little boy with a pillow over his head to mask the screams and beatings in the next room.) And I was a misogynist too. Women were little more than receptacles for spare sperm. Take this extract from the Scope piece I wrote called Where the Girls Are: “Women – you can’t live with them and current legislation discourages you from hunting them down with assault rifles and hollowpoint ammunition…

“The predatory male can, however, hunt them down on the beaches, in the pubs, in the clubs, at house parties, in ladies’ toilets, aeroplane galleys, cinemas, and wherever else they gather. And that’s precisely where this article comes in… But please read on – at least some of the following loose distillation of tips and pointers has worked for us in the past. So there’s no reason why it shouldn’t help to make the planet a happier place for the hungry, hormonally enhanced hunter.”

I was spurred to even greater heights of tastelessness and wrote things that today I couldn’t attach my byline to. Not with any pride. But at the time I was running leashless. My nadir – or zenith, depending on your point of view – was a piece called Are You a Sexist Bastard?

At the end of the Scope era I was to sell reworked versions of that article to at least three other publications.

“The 1990s is the decade of the politically correct,” I wrote.

“Never in the history of humankind has it been less acceptable to be a male chauvinist pig.” Then I went on to ask a whole lot of multiple-choice questions, a few years later my favourite Martin Amis quote was to come from the opening of The Information: “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and say nothing. It’s Nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that… Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them.”

A close friend now dubs me Mr Weep Ship. But in the Scope era I was, in the words of our editor, “Young, dumb and full of c***.” He said this proudly, fondly, paternally. And I took it as an accolade.

I doubt that the 42-year-old James Siddall would much like the 21-yearold Grant Siddall – I switched to James, my official first name, only around the age of 30. I still get people asking if I’m related to the Grant Siddall who used to work for Scope.

My first press junket was to an upmarket camp in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. At Lanseria Airport in the morning I saw the recently released Nelson Mandela sitting with a woman at a table in the refreshment area. A single minder hovered behind them.

“Good morning, Mr Mandela,” I said.

“Good morning,” he replied gravely.

Only months previously, as the politically conscientised young man – to use that awkward phrase – at The Leader, I would at the very least have asked for his autograph. That day I was indifferent.

In Maun we changed to a singleengined six-seater plane and in the hot little cabin I vomited repeatedly. But at the Okavango camp I was able to drink beer heavily, and when I returned to the Scope offices I was stunned to discover that I could claim my drinks on expense account.

This is an extract from Dystopia, published by MFBooks Joburg, an imprint of Jacana Media,