Paternoster teems with life and desperation

RECENTLY, I along with my First lady spent three luxurious days in Paternoster. We were the guests of Father Theo Hendricks and his lovely wife, Anneliese.

Of course, one cannot enter the West Coast at this time of year and not be aware that Jazz on the Rocks was taking place at Tietiesbaai this weekend. Just saying “Tietiesbaai” the word in decent company is like asking my mum, “Mother, would you like some Jig-se-moer?” without any concern about appearing to be disrespectful. The name seems to dare folk into an existential space ranging from unbridled hedonism to that of a desire to revisit the alcohol matric-fest they never had. The sedate clerk, the receptionist, the manicurist all become just sheer roekeloos. Ennie pensioners,

oe my yete! And so, people who can’t swim, who always paddled demurely at the water’s edge of Mnandi Beach end up believing they can walk on water, evens further than Jesus.

From the day we arrived we ate, courtesy of Yvette van Hooi – the Chapelwarden of St Augustine’s Chapelry – crayfish for breakfast, morning tea, lunch and stuff like that. As Thabo Mbeki would say.

People are friendly and can’t stop offering “kreef virrie bhuya?” And it’s

“slaamat” left right and kabbeljou. Of course, no day can be absolutely perfect nor so the people we meet. As I strolled through Paternoster two chaps caught my eye. For a while I had stood listening to a parliament of birds whietiering in the trees clustered between the busy road and the sea. The dim darkness was electric with the perennial twitching chirp of the birds. The breeze off the sea offered a coolness to the feathered, gossiping occupants of the branches reaching high above the nearby dunes.

The locals stepped forward and greeted me. They cut to the quick of the biznis end of our exchange of pleasantries. I was told how much I would enjoy their catch of the day, somnolent in a green plastic packet clutched in their hard, sun-darkened hands. I declined their offer.

The long day hung heavy on their shoulders. The small, well-stocked bottle store on Saint Augustine Street was closing soon. Their thirst curtailed their innate civility and they veered onto the wrong side of the thuma mina road. What were they going to do with these bag of crayfish tails?

Hermy Adam’s and the braskap stepped forward from the memory quarters along Veertag Street, Elsies River. I was Liverpool on a Weskus, late afternoon Friday. Never alone. Our conversation wasn’t especially rough. Nothing dire. Just me a bit tired of my balieskap and how it distanced me from the bromance of my youth.

“Meneere,” I said, my voice soft and smiling with a bit of a ken-djulle-vi-my

grit. Like Denzel in Training Day,“Ek wassie altyd ’n Priester nie”. Of late I have hurled this phrase at the teenage hustlers, gangsta refugees from the flatlands and their cohorts who randomly invade the cathedral precinct. It’s my verbal okapi, the Tiger windbreaker I wrap around my ego when the drug consumers slowly assemble their opiate of choice and its necessary paraphernalia, the ticket for their temporary flight from the nightmare of their lives. And now it was the turn of the small biznis entrepreneurs of my Weskus holiday to hear the faint war song of a middle-aged revolutionary. They turned and walked away with their promise of culinary pleasure. At a four-pace distance away from me,

one of them turned and said, “Soerie die Vader wassie altyd ’n Priester nie? “My reply, a Charles Bronson stone-faced silence. As the distance between us increased my nemesis added,