But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  One night, after the episode of Bonanza in which Little Joe fell into a fever and was captured by the Apaches, my father came in and sat on the edge of my bed and began talking. He spoke for a long time. His black silhouette blocked my view of the wallpaper.

  Then he stood and said: “You may not understand all this now, but one day when you’re grown up you’ll remember these words.” I remember that clearly. What I don’t remember is anything he said before that.

  Almost certainly it was some useful life lesson that would have spared me immense inconvenience and discomfort – how to avoid an over-friendly scoutmaster on a scout camp, perhaps, or the truth that only tennis players and newborn infants can wear white socks in public without social disgrace. Perhaps it was his recipe for making the perfect brandy-and-ginger ale, a drink for which he had an unreasonable enthusiasm.

  In certain long dark nights of the soul I have come to the conclusion that if I could only remember those words, all the secrets of adulthood would be revealed to me. I have sat staring at the Greater Oxford Dictionary, bitterly musing on the fact that all his words are in there – I just have to arrange them in the correct order.

  Some weeks after that particular episode of Bonanza, my father had a stroke, was hospitalised and died. His words, unless one day I suddenly grow up and remember them, are lost forever. Which is not to say that he didn’t leave me illuminating tips to light my way through this long valley.

  “Never mix your drinks, when you can get the barman to mix them for you,” was an enduring favourite, sometime after the fourth little tin of ginger ale had been emptied.

  On the subject of marriage, his advice was simple: “If you want a happy relationship,” he said, “never, never, never do the washing up.” At that time he was on his third marriage, so he must have known what he was talking about.

  I don’t know that his absence in my childhood affected me that much. It simply meant that my mother had to watch a lot more games of schoolboy rugby than she might otherwise have preferred, and that there was no one in the house big and strong enough to prevent me playing music as loud as I liked.

  My mother being a good, sweet person with a strength of will incapable of matching my sulks and tantrums, it also meant that I had my own way through adolescence and consequently had nothing against which to rebel. An absence of discipline meant I had to invent my own – a masterstroke of parenting by implication.

  People learn many useful things from their fathers. To this day I don’t know how to change the oil in my car or repair a leaking water pipe. I had to teach myself to drop-kick a rugby ball and how to bowl an in-swinger, which is why every so often I still unintentionally produce the mystery delivery that neither swings not goes in.

  Instead I contented myself with the stories and memories he shared of his own life as a bouncer and a romancer and a conman and a child of the Great Depression. You learn wisdom not from being told wise things, but from proximity to wisdom. And wisdom is simply another word for living well. I don’t know what my father told me that night, which means I can never decide it was mistaken.

  His more useful gift to me is the idea, however false, that there is a truth, and that if I live well enough I may one day find it. Perhaps one day I will even learn how to make the perfect brandy-and-ginger ale.

  Forget phobias, find a fix for Felicia

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 1 JULY 2001

  THERE ARE MANY things that frighten me. People driving white BMWs, for instance, and dinner parties where only couples are invited, and the Williams sisters, and anyone below the age of 25, and falling overboard in the middle of the night and bobbing in the wide and ink-black sea, yelling unheard as the yellow lights of the ship are slowly swallowed by the darkness. These are all scary things, and I haven’t even mentioned colonic irrigations and conceptual artists and sausages.

  But fearfulness, like happiness, is a shadowy trick of the mind.

  Leave it to work away at the corner of your vision and it will grow obligingly, following its own laws and dusky twists of logic. But look at it closely and it simply melts away, like a journalist when it is his turn to buy the round.

  Unless, that is, your fear is a phobia. A phobia is an irrational fear, felt with irrational force, so there is no remedy for treating it rationally.

  There is, I can reveal, a clinic in the suburbs of Pretoria that takes what I can only describe as an overly aggressive approach in dealing with Feliciaphobes. Who among us does not tut and even cluck at reports of grown men and stripling children being strapped to their seats, their eyelids clamped open and tapes of Felicia on e.tv being endlessly replayed before their transfixed eyes?

  Oh, the humanity. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

  At night in the dormitories, out-of-work SABC newsreaders are employed to sit on elevated chairs and read and reread a paperback copy of Felicia’s autobiography to the sleeping unfortunate. The autobiography is called Dare to Dream. The sleeping unfortunate dare not.

  Fears and especially phobias were Felicia’s subjects on her show this week. Her first guest was a genial hypnotherapist called Terry Winchester.

  “We have a phobia because we fear the unknown,” announced Terry genially, or perhaps hypnotherapeutically.

  Not me, mate. I know exactly what it is I fear about watching Felicia’s show. I fear waking up one day in a bed in a dormitory in a clinic in the suburbs of Pretoria, with my head bandaged and a portion of my brain missing because the doctors had decided it was time for drastic measures.

  Felicia had a variety of frightened people in the studio with her. Mainly, they were frightened by snakes and spiders. That suited Felicia just dandy, because she happened to have a variety of snakes and spiders ready to hand.

  A doctor popped up to caution that treating phobias by trying to force the phobics to confront or touch the object of their fear is bad medicine and counterproductive.

  It was an extraordinary thing to watch: Felicia appeared to be listening. She scrunched up her face and cocked her head on one side, as she does when she wants to appear to be listening.

  She even nodded thoughtfully, as people do when listening. Then when the good doctor had finished, she scooped up the snakes and spiders and resumed chasing people around the studio, trying to force them to touch the objects of their fear. Felicia had not been listening.

  We met Kylene, who is afraid of spiders. “I don’t want to see a spider,” said Kylene. “Shall I bring in a spider?” said Felicia. “No,” said Kylene. “Let’s bring in a spider!” yelled Felicia.

  Along came one of Felicia’s assistants, with a spider. “I want to see how close we can bring it to you,” crooned Felicia in a tone of voice you wouldn’t expect to hear outside of a dank dungeon in a medieval monastery.

  We met a fellow in the audience who confessed, rather boldly, to a fear of buttons. “Oh,” lamented Felicia, “I wish I had a big bucket of buttons with me, so I could see how scared you are of them.”

  Was the man afraid of swallowing a button, or being swallowed by a button? Did he snort contemptuously and with bitterness whenever someone used the expression “cute as a button” within earshot? How did he feel about people named Button? That saucy Jenni Buttton? Lauren Hutton? Hal Sutton? Pizza Hutton? Roast leg of mutton? We never found out.

  I had other things on my mind. It is always fun to watch recent fads in American sitcoms come limping onto our TV screens, rag-tag and single-file and dragging their paltry ratings behind them in the muddied snow, like Napoleon’s army entering Russia after an especially stern autumn.

  Some of My Best Friends (M-Net, Fridays, open time) is the most recent attempt to tap into the American insight that friendships between homosexual men and heterosexual men are a rich mine of heartwarming, slide-slapping, life enriching humour.

  I watched the first episode with interest. A gay man and a straight man share an apartment in New York. The gay man has a problem, because he doesn’t have a female friend with whom to empa
thise and shop. The straight man has a problem, because he has a girlfriend who expects him to talk. But ho! There is a solution. They gay man and the straight man share the girlfriend! Everybody’s happy!

  I telephoned my friend Daniel, who happens to live in New York. “Daniel,” I said, “you’re gay.” “That’s true,” he replied. “So how come,” I demanded, “we so seldom enjoy heartwarming, side-slapping, life-enriching humour?”

  “What?” said Daniel. “What I’m getting at,” I persisted, “is why haven’t we ever shared a girlfriend?”

  There was a long, transatlantic silence.

  Daniel is an old and dear friend. He knows me well. “Darrel,” he said at length, “are you struggling to finish a column again?”

  The highs and lows of weather

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 26 AUGUST 2001

  I SHALL NEVER LOOK at weather the same way again. As of now, my pleasure in isobars has flown and the delights of frontal lows have evaporated like morning mist in the rising sun. I am unmoved by partly cloudy conditions. Synoptic charts delight not me; no, nor isobars neither. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this most excellent canopy, the air, appears to me nothing but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours, but the thought is not far from my mind. It was not ever thus.

  I was never really a fan of weather, precisely. I liked it well enough, but only when it was good weather. When it was bad weather I was less enthusiastic. I wasn’t one of those fanatics who liked the weather for its own sake, who keep barometers mounted on their walls and nod and tut knowledgeably when the mercury drops a notch.

  Far less was I one of those suburban meteorologists who have installed an inverted plastic cone in their gardens and at the end of each month record the rainfall figures in a special logbook they keep in the top drawer of the sideboard, beside the telephone directory. (I once met a man in Durban who could tell you the rainfall in millimetres of any month of any year, stretching back to February of 1964. I am led to believe that he would offer to do so as a party trick. I remember his wife having an extremely haunted look and a tendency to bury her head in her hands.)

  So I was never one of the true weather nuts. My principal interest in the weather was what it could do for me. But the weather did offer me this special pleasure: it brought Graeme Hart into my life.

  Graeme Hart was not, on the face of it, the kind of public figure you would expect to make an enormous impact on anyone’s inner sense of being. Faintly beige in colour, mournful of mien and bearing altogether too close a resemblance to a better-fed version of Mr Burns in The Simpsons, Graeme Hart was no one’s pin-up. His principal recommendation was that he was unflappable, personally inscrutable and knew how to impart the weather with the proper gravitas.

  Not for him the cheery smile, the playful waggle of the eyebrows, the humorously patterned necktie. Graeme always delivered the weather as though just off screen balaclava-clad terrorists were holding an Uzi to the heads of his loved ones and snarling in Eastern European accents: “Right, read the weather, Mr Hart, and I suggest you make it good – or else.” I sometimes think Graeme Hart became a weatherman just to give me the opportunity to use the word “lugubrious” in public without fear of ridicule.

  But Graeme gave me peace and continuity. He has been around forever, cool, unmoved by the ructions and fluctuations of the world outside the weather. Did Graeme blink when Kuwait was invaded or when the space shuttle exploded? Does Graeme have an opinion about Robert Mugabe or the plight of the East Timorese? No, sir. Graeme Hart was a pool of unchanging calm, an unwinking pole star in a swirling, spinning, ever-expanding universe of quarks and black holes and supernovas.

  Graeme Hart was history, damn it. He is a veteran of the Mafeking wars of the late 1970s. Who else but Graeme and I will remember the astonishingly passionate battles that raged in the letters pages of the nation’s newspapers, regarding the correct spelling of Mafeking on the weather map? Should it be Mafekeng? Mafeking? Mafikeng? If Graeme Hart knew, he wasn’t telling. He was not trafficking in Mafeking. We need Graeme Hart. We need him, I tell you.

  Who else in the entire world knows how to find Gordonia on a map? Including the Gordonians?

  And now he is gone, and what will we do without him? We will have to content ourselves with Simon Gear, that’s what. I don’t mean to be unkind to Simon “Reverse” Gear, but he is stepping into an awfully large pair of Hush Puppies, and I don’t feel he is going about it the right way. Besides bearing a superficial resemblance to how you would imagine the young Graeme Hart to have looked (if Graeme Hart was ever young), Simon Gear has not learnt much from the master.

  Besides the uncanny knack of positioning himself directly between the camera and whichever region he is currently describing on the map, the Gearster lacks Graeme’s steady constancy of delivery. His weather reports have three distinct phases.

  The first is characterised by a kind of breezy optimism. He greets you with a jaunty air and a roguish twinkle in his eye. If he had a cap, it would be at a rakish angle. This time, he seems to be thinking, everything will go much better. This time, I’m the man. Then he runs into difficulties. In the second phase he resembles a car trying to drive off with the handbrake up. He starts the sentence, and you can tell the sentence wants to go, but it just can’t seem to get moving. “And, uh, uh, there’s … uh … there’s a cold front over … over … um …”

  The third phase comes when he has realised that he has spent 40 per cent of his time transmitting 10 per cent of his script. Then he breaks out into a horse-racing commentator’s urgent patter. Where will the high-pressure system end? “It’s Port St Johns on the outside, Tzaneen on the rail but closing fast is Pretoria Kimberley East London Beaufort West and that’s all from me, goodnight.”

  Never mind. There is a long road ahead. Weathermen are not made, or replaced, overnight. Perhaps one day I will be dandling my grandchildren on my knee and saying: “That’s Simon Gear, the weather guy. I remember the first time he wore that suit.”

  Oh brother, Big Brother

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 2 SEPTEMBER 2001

  SO GEORGE ORWELL had it backwards all along: the biggest fear for the future is not that Big Brother will be watching us; it is that we will all be watching Big Brother.

  Big Brother (DStv, 24 hours) came seeping onto our screens this week and it would have taken more moral conviction and strength of will than a mountaintop full of Tibetan monks to have kept it out. Among the many things that I am not – blond, for instance, and good-natured, and a patient driver, and to be trusted not to read through your e-mails if I am bored and you are out of the room – a Tibetan monk is pretty well near the top of the list.

  Along with the rest of South Africa’s chumps and suckers, I was so far bowed under by the sheer weight of media hype and hullabaloo that last Sunday night saw me hunched before my television screen waiting for … for … come to think of it, I didn’t really know what I was waiting for; and now I know even less.

  Good thing for me Gerry Rantseli was there.

  “There are still some people who are wondering what the fuss is all about,” burbled Gerry in the pre-launch show, looking something like a glove puppet who has escaped from its hand and is joyously planning to flee across the countryside. “Well, now, believe it or not, I’m going to explain it to you.”

  Oh, I believed her, all right. Why wouldn’t I? It’s her job.

  I had more difficulty believing her co-host, someone calling himself Mark Pilgrim. When first I glimpsed him, he was towelling himself off after a dip in the jacuzzi, presumably as a cunning measure to demonstrate the range and picture quality of the hidden cameras.

  “I’m trying so hard not to let you see my Charlie,” said Pilgrim proudly. I could only encourage him in his endeavours.

  “We can see you, Mark,” whooped Gerry. “We can see you. You can hide but you … we can still see you.”

  It was sorry viewing.

  The show had such a long and laborious build-up, y
ou would think Gerry and Pilgrim might have spent some of that time thinking about what they were going to say on the big night. Apparently not. Gerry, given the brief to be excited, hit upon the dramatic stratagem of telling us she was excited. She hopped from one foot to the other in front of a skimpy crowd of M-Net employees holding helium balloons. You wouldn’t call it a throng, exactly. It was more of a thong than a throng. “It’s so happening out here. I’m so excited I don’t know what to do with myself,” she gurgled.

  Behind her the crowd started chanting: “Run, little glove puppet, run.” No, they didn’t, but I would have if I’d been there.

  It was all a little embarrassing. It was like being at a bad party where everyone is standing around looking at each other but one person is drunk and running around shouting: “What a great party!”

  As bad as Gerry and Pilgrim were, however, I would rather spend a year locked in the boot of a car with them than three months in a house with that shower of twisters who somehow managed to bob to the top of the contestants’ barrel. Looking at them, you could only blanch and tremble and hang a piece of garlic around your neck to imagine the black-hearted villains who didn’t make it through the selection process.

  There is not a one among the 12 that I would allow into my home – not even if they were delivering furniture – and yet for the past week those blighters have been, well, blighting my living room with their infernal babble and chatter. I switch them off, of course – I have not yet fallen entirely under the evil eye – but I find myself at peculiar moments thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what those halfwits in Randburg are up to now.” And then I switch on and sit a spell and see if anything interesting is happening.

  And sure enough I receive my rightful punishment. I have watched them mow the grass and make fires and smoke cigarettes, none of which is a gripping spectator sport. I can watch myself doing those things, damn it. In fact, if I scootch down in my chair right now and catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the computer screen … nope, it’s no more exciting when I do it. And yet can I stop switching over to the 24-hour channel? I cannot.