Hey, Did You See What Obama did?

President Obama swatted a fly during a televised interview a few days ago. And then he congratulated himself on his quick reflexes.
The fly, which as far as I could make out had done nothing wrong except settle on the presidential knee, lay there on the carpet twitching in its death throes for all the world to see.
Yet the media have been shamefully silent about the morality involved in this spontaneous act of violence and has given not a thought to the probable impact of the President’s action on impressionable minds.
Isn’t the world violent enough already? (Answers on a post card please).
Thank heavens then for Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Its members don’t wear leather, they don’t eat meat – they won’t even drink milk because that would be exploiting cows. And they certainly don’t go about swatting flies and mosquitoes. They all walk funny but that’s only because they have to avoid stepping on ants.
Peta is yet another forthright and courageous animal rights group in America and it has demanded an apology from the President.
As President for Life of Densa, the club for those who haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into Mensa (the society for those with high IQs) I want to congratulate Peta and offer it my full backing. Peta! I am right behind you marching shoulder to shoulder.
Densa firmly believes flies have rights just as cockroaches, slugs and politicians have rights.
Flies have feelings (otherwise why was this one twitching?) and flies are sensitive towards other creatures. Do you ever see a fly eating a LIVE animal? No. They wait until an animal is stone dead and, just to be sure, they even hang around until the carcase is rotten and suppurating and stinking.
And did Obama give a moment’s thought about whether this fly was perhaps a daddy fly with 4677 children (now tragically orphaned). Children now without a bread-winner (OK. Yes. I should have said, “now without a green meat-winner”) and 89 500 grandchildren and 1 456 000 great grandchildren crying themselves into their pillows at night?
And yet, as I say, the media has not seen fit to criticise the President. Is this because they are a bunch of liberal pinkos who believe Obama is the new Messiah?
After all, what did this fly do? He, or she (She? OMG. What if this fly was a mummy fly about to fly home to feed her 40677th baby?) … he or she merely sat on the presidential knee.
Maybe he (or she) wanted to impart a vital message from the insect world?
Even if it merely wanted to impart a tiny globule of fresh dog’s dropping – maybe from the White House lawn itself, left there by the President’s dog, Bo – did it deserve to die for THAT?
It was an abuse of power.
What if George Bush (remember him?) had settled on the President’s knee – would Obama have, with one blow sent him sprawling to the floor? On television?
By viciously striking an innocent creature 1/10 000 000th smaller than himself Obama showed a facet of his character that must have disappointed many. Yet the media have shown no sign of outrage.
The Stoep Talk Organisation wishes to distance itself from The Star which, like all the other newspapers, has not even raised an editorial eyebrow. Yet look at how indignant it was when B52 bombers swatted Iraq. And look how, only a month ago, it roundly criticised North Korea because it threatened to drop atom bombs on people’s heads.
Is it that size counts after all?

Why I was so heavy as a kid

An old friend, Adrian Steed, emailed to say, “Congratulations to all who were born between the 1930s and early 1970s.
“We survived despite there being no childproof lids on medicine bottles; riding our bikes without helmets; spending babyhood in cots painted with lead-based paints…”
Stop right there.
Don’t joke about our lead-contaminated world. We might have survived in that we are still breathing in and out but what did all those heavy metals do to us mentally?
Of all brain-damaging pollutants lead is the worst.
It might well explain why today we do mad things like shrieking in lunatic ecstasy at pop stars cross-eyed with drugs and who earn more than state presidents; like buying and selling soccer players for more money than it cost to build ships; like blowing those stupid horns non-stop for 90 minutes at soccer matches.
We who lived in the lead-polluted world of last century must be full of it and as sure at nuts (if you’ll forgive the expression) our head filler is severely damaged.
Even the aluminium pots of yesterday are now believed to have contaminated food to the extent that it caused the sudden prevalence of that disease that destroys one’s memory. Eizenhammers? Alpiners? I’ve forgotten.
And mercury. In my boyhood we would play for hours with beads of mercury, breaking them up and watching them coalesce again. Today mercury is known to scramble the brain just as surely as opening up the skull and inserting an electric eggbeater.
Look how toxic smoke poured out of factory chimneys like toothpaste. In my childhood in the English Midlands the air was filled with sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, phenols, chlorofluorocarbons and heavy metals like cadmium and German bombs. All brain damaging.
And there was lead. Ah yes, lead. Lead from vehicle exhausts; lead from water pipes and, as you say, lead from our cots which health authorities infer we must have eaten though I don’t recall doing so.
Water passing along lead pipes becomes contaminated – hence the expression “heavy water”.
As kids we played with lead soldiers and then ate sandwiches with lead-blackened fingers so it went into our stomachs from where – although I’ve never understood how – it leaked upwards into our brains. Maybe little bits dropped down each time we bent to tie our shoe laces. Maybe those who went around barefoot are today less brain damaged than we are.
We even looked for scrap lead to melt on the kitchen stove and pour into sand moulds so that our homes became filled with lead fumes. Whole families ended up sitting cross-eyed in corners, giggling and nudging each other until the authorities arrived to take them away.
I recall melting down some broken lead soldiers over the kitchen stove, pouring the molten metal into a mould and fashioning a model boat hull and trying to sail it in the bath. Any parent seeing their child engrossed in trying to float a lead boat should immediately start asking it questions like, “How many fingers am I holding up, son?” and, “Can you tell me your name?”
As a kid I might have been small, but I was heavy. Not surprisingly I was a poor swimmer.
When I and my lead-befuddled friends leapt shrieking with joy in to our local municipal swimming bath our lead-filled heads acted like breeze blocks anchoring us to the bottom. Lifesavers were constantly on the look out for feet sticking up above the surface so they could pull us out.
Today’s cheap plastic playthings may be, after all, the best bet.
Certainly plastic armbands are better than lead ones. So are plastic beach balls.

How to Kill your Husband (nicely)

The lunchtime topic was “How to kill your husband”.
Ronnie Whitaker, a Durban wife, mother and author has discovered a nice way to do it.
She claims to have “a successful marriage” and I gathered the secret lay in what Ronnie and her husband call each other. They call each other long distance. Ronnie’s husband lives 10 000 km away in England.
The lunch was at the New Chapter Literary Luncheon Club at Sandton’s Hilton Hotel. The club arranges for authors to talk about their latest books and sell some at the door. The club has launched some of mine but the preponderantly female members have never fallen upon myh books with the salivating enthusiasm that they displayed for Ronnie’s “How to kill your husband” (published, appropriately, by Spearhead).
Ronnie says, “Women place for too much emphasis on being married – and not nearly enough on being widows.”
She advises women to make sure they get what is rightfully theirs – the old man’s life insurance.
She says she likes men, but that some are nicer dead.
Oh yes, I laughed and laughed. All we males laughed. Sort of high-pitched stuff.
And we dropped our food more than usual.
Ronnie was a little nervous of public speaking but as she warmed to the subject she began to appear more and more like Charles Adams disguised as a fruit sundae.
“I’m terrified of public speaking,” she said. “A recent study showed that 90 percent of people say public speaking is their greatest fear. Death came second.
“So there you go, people would rather die than stand up and speak. It figures, therefore, that the men affected (by the advice in her book) are lucky. All they have to do is die while I must stand up here and speak.”
Ronnie’s book is just like Ronnie herself. There’s a cynicism that is very very funny. There are recipes for “killer food”; recipes that are practically guaranteed to give the old man a heart attack, in good time. It’s not cold-blooded murder, you understand. There’s no blood involved. It’s good fun all round.
She said, “When my husband had a heart attack we weren’t prepared for it – he didn’t have enough insurance.” After virtually saving his life she got him to step up insurance payments.
“I agree, heart attacks are no laughing matter,” she says. “Well, at least, not until the estate is wound up,”
She says a woman spends 30 years of her life looking for her man’s lost socks and taking all his nonsense only to see him stricken by the “lolita syndrome” and go off with his 22 year old secretary. “And he doesn’t even wear socks any more. It’s slops and Bermuda shorts. He looks ridiculous. But she gets the money.”
She sounded almost serious when she said a wise wife ignores her husband’s affairs – “and certainly don’t divorce him because then the Viagra popping nymph chaser will give all his money to the bimbo”.
Affairs are stressful and stress is good for heart attacks. And nearly all men who die having sex do so while with the other woman.
So, she says, encourage stress and invest in lethal puddings. She offers some serious super-cholesterol killer recipes such as:
“Healthy Mangoes Ha Ha – liquidise a large mango with 125-150 mg mascarpone cheese. Layer between liqueur-soaked sliced mango and top with whipped cream!”
The funeral can be a tonic…
A drunken abusive husband died and the hired minister exaggerated the man’s almost non-existent good points so ridiculously that the widow began to giggle and eventually she and all her friends folded up in helpless laughter.
But I must go. My wife is cooking a huge eisbein – with chips followed by bread-and-butter pudding – again.

Shedding more light on Darkest Europe

Maybe we are getting older. The Tour de Farce team I mean. We who took part in this month’s Tour de Farce VIII expedition in France are all over 40 y’know. Yes, all right, over 50. OK, over 60…
But once again, we did it: 1000 km across France. Well, OK, let’s say 800. Mind you, it might have been only 700. Certainly we cycled more than 600. Oh yes. Definitely more than 600. Even 620.
We always go in the Northern Hemisphere’s spring.
As many readers know, the annual Tour de Farce is when, ever so intrepidly, six of us set out from Africa to explore, on bicycles, Darkest Europe and bring back tales of the natives there.
There were only four of us this year – two having been temporarily stricken by problems that typically afflict the over 40s such as ones spine crumbling like a cheese straw or ones hip joints running out of axle grease.
They’ll be back next year.
Our difficulties began right at the start, at the railway station at Paris’s Charles de Gaul Airport. Peter Sullivan (who normally takes charge at stations and airports) asked for tickets to Haute Peronne 100km north in the Somme valley.
Explorers such as Marco Polo, David Livingstone and Bartholomew Dias would understand what I mean by “difficulties”.
“No station at Peronne,” said the ticket man.
“But it says here we must take a train to Haute Peronne,” said Peter.
“No train. Go to Amiens and catch a taxi.”
At this stage, as expedition leader, I took command. Bearing in mind that one has to speak loudly when speaking English in France, I waved our instructions, explaining that there were people waiting for us at Haute Peronne station. I added, “Très important people”.
He shrugged in that dismissive way that Frenchmen learn at shrugging collièrge.
Then he said, “Ah, Péron! Bourgogny!”.
“Non. Non! Picardy.”
“Ah, Picaaardeee! Oila!”
Next thing we were getting off the train at Picardy’s tiny station where we were greeted by two young ladies from the Somme Tourist Board who were providing the bikes for the first leg of our heroic ride. They whisked us by car 9 km east of Peronne through villages whose names we could not pronounce.
We stayed in Buire-Courcelles on Joel Bleriot’s ancient endive farm, Moulin de Binard. This beautiful farm is set amid deep meadows sparkling with daisies and buttercups. Below is a shady stream that emerges from dense woodland whose branches accommodate a full choir of birds.
Just as the Pilgrim Fathers opened up America for those who came later so it was our bounden duty to open up this area of France to future cyclists – families, groups of friends and so on.
People ask us: Is it safe? Is it expensive? Is the terrain challenging? Is it interesting? Do you need to move your own luggage each day?
The short answers are: yes, no, yes, yes, no.
We spent three days cycling in the Somme Valley though not as far as its huge estuary famous for its waterfowl. That would b a great ride – via Amiens and Abbeville.
Occasionally we found ourselves on busy highways yet with careful map reading (something that eludes us) it is possible to pick ones way clean across France using only quiet, almost traffic-free country roads. But with four of us reading individual maps and all four possessed of 100 decibel voices we were inclined to shoot off at different angles shouting contradictory pieces of unheeded advice.
The next two weeks took us down the Somme with its lakes and streams, along the Normandy coast and then across to Burgundy for the final week – all to unveil, for the people of Africa, yet another corner of Darkest Europe.

Japlish and Chinglese – irresistible

It is, of course, rude to laugh at the efforts of foreigners trying to write English – especially people from the Far East. How can somebody, like me for instance who knows only two Japanese expressions (”saki” and “Tokyo Sexwale”), have the cheek to laugh?
Well, like chocolate digestives and kicking car tyres, I can’t help myself – and suppressing the temptation to laugh at Far Eastern instruction leaflets can lead to stress fractures in the lower abdomen.
Some time ago C L Voges of Lakeview, Florida, sent me the following instructions for a Japanese keyboard:
The audio speaker is so construction that a sound of volume will come out of it when a key is depressed due to the finger. This is due to an electricity of alternate flowing in the coil in it.
And how was this? – it came with a calculator.
The batterys must position so that the poles are to correspond to the like poles mark on the device. This will failure or damage device if not done so correctly.
Les Caroto sent me a letter he had received from a Taiwanese corporation:
Dear Sirs, we hereby to recommend a most practical invention, Ribbon Inker, to you. Instead of renewing a ribbon from time to time, Ribbon Inker makes it can be re-used over and over. Spenting just a little money you’ll have unexpected effect.
This machine can make the ribbon use again and again and don’t need to renewing so soon and re-used the ribbon over and over to protect the earth to increase rubbish.
All of us think that this new item will be come most necessary and most popular in the latest.
More information will be supplied at your comments. Please contact with us earlier, we assure you of our best service and quickly reply.
From an unnamed source I received these instructions which accompanied a Taiwanese-made sponge purporting to be German-made:
SPONGE SQUEEZE – please put sponge in water about 3-5 minutes to soft before use. Attention to always keep wet.
Wash the dirt, draw the handle a few times and dirt water will quick off the sponge.
NOTE: The Germany sponge features – don’t need sunburn and always keep wet after use for available. If a long time didn’t use it will dry out, please put in water again, for useful and long life.
And on a peanut packet:
GOOD EDIBLES – It is a famous local product refined with the peanuts in a special grade as raw material which are in even granule and thick in nut but thin in skin by a traditional direction in an advanced scientific method. It is a kind of good edibles which is suitable for young or old people with the special taste causing your favourite.
The Chinese use insensitive computer programmes to translate Chinese into English with sometimes hilarious results.
It prompted sports journalist, Jane Bramley, to tell me about a yoga mat she recently bought and how the instructions “nearly caused me to twist myself into a knot because I laughed so hard reading them”.
Jane then quotes:
The yogo mat is made of OVC foam materials which make it exceptionally durable, not adhinit dust, no poisonous, no sapor, block burn, defend avulsion, you can seat on the floor to practice the yoga, you can feel more comfort, act to the moment because of the yoga mat.
The rubber foam materials can greatly strengthen the resist the pull, make the action slowly, protect your body to get hurt.
Product characteristics: Flexible, comfort, touch the ground well. Excellent endure climate, protect the color. Withstand avulsion well, bear the low temperature. Good flexible, not easy to distortion
Soft chest expander. The soft chest expander is an exercise tool used to strengthen health. Its ergonomic design allows for ease of use while reducing the risk of possible injury. It’s well suitable for the length, the strength, the handgrip with the rubber foam, the pulling well, flexible comfort, antiskid good, the safe coefficient is high, it’s convenience for you stretching at home, it not only eliminate the proud flesh on the arm and the shoulder, but can also promote health develop of strengthen chest, it should exercise plump, goodliness of chest lines.
Avulsion? Like the tearing off of a limb.
Hmm. I need to exercise the plump. Maybe I should get a yoga mat and eliminate the proud flesh.
Imraan Geedat of Springs sent me the instructions for a “Magic Cube”, an elongated version of the Rubik Cube:
Exotic snake is an itellicence test to gain creativity cubic configueation and space master spilts, by spinnting the 24 bricks contionusly.
We can create thousand kings of different gitapes. This smain brochure coneats the picture created by exotic snake, please master these picture first, if you have done this then make your own pictures.
I received anonymously the instructions for a Hamanaka Pencil. It is for drawing on fabric. “For all clothes – Just only draw. You can dye”.
In case you made a mess of things it suggested: “You can clean up the colours on your hand and/or foot easily with soup.”

Polly’s gone crackers

A Chinese man walked into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. The barman asked, “Where’d you get that?”
The parrot says: “In Asia there are MILLIONS of them!”
I am not sure why parrots feature so much in jokes but they do. Here are a few samples some of which you’ll know but a good story, like good music, bears repetition…
A woman bought a female parrot without realising it had spent its formative years in a brothel. All it would say was “Hi guys! You wanna good time?”
This often proved to be very embarrassing and the woman asked her local priest what she should do.
He told her he had two male parrots who spent their days saying the rosary and praying quite fervently and he suggested she put her parrotess in with his two males.
When the female parrot entered the cage there was silence at first. Then the new arrival said, “Hi guys! You wanna good time?”
One of the male parrots said to his companion, “Hey Cecil, you can stick those beads away. I think our prayers have been answered.”
Then there was this one which I frequently receive:
A young man named John received a parrot as a gift. It had a bad attitude and its language was profane and vulgar.
John tried in vain to clean it up.
He yelled at the parrot. The parrot yelled back. In desperation he shoved the bird into the refrigerator. The parrot squawked and screamed. Then, suddenly, silence.
John quickly opened the door and the parrot stepped out onto John’s outstretched arm and said: “I have offended you with my rude language and I apologise unconditionally. I will never swear again.”
John was stunned and was about to ask the parrot what had made such a dramatic change when the bird continued, “May I ask what the chicken in there did?”
Then this corny one:
A woman brought a very limp parrot into the surgery and the vet pronounced it dead.
She wailed, “You haven’t even tested it.”
The vet brought in his Labrador. It sniffed the dead parrot and then looked at the vet with sad eyes.
Then the vet brought in a cat that looked the parrot up and down and left the room.
The vet said, “It’s definitely dead.” He handed her a bill for R400. She was outraged.
He shrugged. “If you’d taken my word for it, it would have been R60 – but what with the Lab test and the cat scan…”
My favourite:
A magician was working on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. The audience would be different each week, so the magician could safely repeat the same tricks.
Just one problem: the captain’s parrot saw the shows every week and began to understand what the magician was doing. He took to calling out in the middle of the show: “Look, it’s not the same hat!” and “He’s hiding the flowers under the table!”
The furious magician could do nothing because it was the captain’s parrot.
One day there was a terrible storm and the ship was wrecked. The magician found himself on a piece of wood in mid ocean, the parrot by his side. They stared at each other with hate, but uttered not a word. This went on for several days.
Finally, the parrot said: “OK, I give up. What did you do with the ship?”
And this one which I used some time back:
After carefully “casing” a house for several hours and watching the residents depart for a night out, a burglar entered and in the dark felt his way around from room to room.
On entering what he considered to be the living room he heard a quiet voice say, “Jesus is watching you!”
He froze. Then he continued to cautiously feel his way further around the wall and the same voice, somewhat louder now, repeated the message: “Jesus is watching you!”
Again he stopped. Silence.
He continued around the room for a while and a loud voice from immediately in front of him said, “JESUS IS WATCHING YOU!”
He took out his torch and shone it on a beautiful parrot sitting in its cage directly in front of him.
He laughed with relief and asked, “Is your name Jesus?”
“No,” said the parrot, “My name is Percy.”
After a stunned silence the burglar asked, “Who on earth would name a parrot Percy?”
“Well,” said the parrot, “that would be the same person that named the Rottweiler that’s walking behind you, Jesus.”

What’s all this **** then?

Not long ago there was a fairly well-founded  rumour that  Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had banned the use of the word “cock” when meaning a male bird.  What had happened was this: an article had been published in one of its journals in which it censored the phrase “cock blackbird” replacing it with ****blackbird.

It was, apparently, the fault of a software programme which automatically eliminated any word deemed to be offensive.  The matter was quickly rectified. But, for a moment, it seemed that no longer could refined British birders describe the familiar dawn cry of a ****erel crowing  ****-a-doodle-do!

Oops, I should have written, ****-a-******-do.

A reader of my column in The Star, Ruth Logie, wrote, “I was horrified about not being able to use words like ‘cock robin’ and perhaps even ‘titmouse’.

“Imagine if asteriskization takes hold.

“Enid Blyton has already been bowdlerized by having ‘Dick’ and ‘Fanny’ eliminated as children’s names. Imagine what would happen to Enid Blyton’s stories if the automated censor really got going?”

Ruth then surmises: “Hooray, hooray!” said D*** excitedly, running into the room where his sister F**** was playing on the carpet with her p***** cat while Mother knitted a scarf out of two ***** of wool. “Auntie Le***ia and Uncle ****hrey have invited us to go on a day t*** to the beach with them!” “How lovely!” cried F****, ***ping her knee on the table in her haste to jump up. “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere in county of Es***,” grinned D***. F**** ****ped her hands.

“We can collect ****les and mussels on the rocks,” she exclaimed. “We might even spot ***** the Whale!”

How to be organised or otherwise

You’d think I’d be organised by this stage in my life. After all, I’ve been in one occupation for half a century.

In fact the casual observer might assume that I am indeed organised. I have, arrayed in front of me, a fax machine; a busy body telephone that chats to people and takes messages; a cellphone whose number I can never remember and that can take pictures (I ask you); a personal computer with email; an ADSL device with flashing lights that keeps me constantly in touch with the world through an ever-open line; Skype through which I can talk to people across the world for nothing (it doesn’t yet work and I don’t give a damn)- and people can write to me via a Post Office box number or a street address.

Eight ways of communicating – 10 if you choose to shout through my letter box or throw a brick through my window with a message tied to it.

But the truth is I am more technologically overwhelmed than organised.

The nearest I am to being organised is the possession of a supposedly out-dated “personal organiser”. This is n diary bound with artificial leather  and which has a burglar-proof press-stud fastener. I bought in the 1980s. Admittedly, even then, nothing was allowed to be that simple. This one had extra sections divided by stiff plastic leaves and you could buy accessorises for it just like you could for a Barbie Doll.

It had a “yearly planner” which could be folded out displaying all your important dates for the year. I spoilt mine by writing “My birthday” on the wrong day. So I threw that section away. There was a section labelled “things to do” and another labelled “Notes”. It had a plastic ruler and a section for filing transparencies and another for keeping visiting cards.

I threw all these sections away and just kept the day-at-a-glance bit.

I realised that owning a personal organiser, unless one showed discipline, could become just like owning a Barbie. Not that I have ever owned a Barbie Doll but I do know that when a small girl owns a Barbie she simply has to have all the extras such as handbags, the latest shoes and so on.

One could, by filling in all the sections of a Personal Organiser, squeeze one’s entire future life in between the covers – all one’s PIN codes, telephone numbers, addresses and appointments for the rest of the year.

All nice and compact.                                                                                                                    

But what if one leaves it on the bus?

Do the shops that specialise in Personal Organisers sell cyanide capsules to keep in a tiny locket round your neck so that if you lose your POI you can bite on the capsule and drop dead because you might as well.

The Personal Organiser has been replaced by these new cellphones that fold out and have a qwerty keyboard like a miniature typewriter and through which you can download your emails and send faxes. You can also take movies.

It is the cellphone equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife. It can store hundreds of telephone numbers. It can store your detailed diary and has a built-in alarm to remind you of each appointment.

I know a fellow who can get television on his cellphone.

These cellphones even have a GPS (geographical positioning system) into which you type the address you are looking for and a voice tells you when to turn left and when to turn right.

It tells you your precise geographical position to within a metre.

It eventually rules your life.

Lose it and you’re dead.

Be my Valentine – anybody!

I don’t get Valentine cards. But, being an optimist, around this time of the year I hang around my post office box – even as late as April. You never know, what with the post being like it is.

The last time I received a Valentine card was in 1976 when I wrote in my diary:

February 14. Dear diary, Got up. Went excitedly down to mailbox, prized open rusted lid to find I had been inundated by a St Valentine’s Day card!

Tried to remain calm by going into yoga position and doing deep breathing but found myself frenziedly tearing away envelope sending little bits of paper flying everywhere.

“WHO? WHO?” (Caught myself shouting this out loud.)

Occurred to me that really, despite my age, I still have potential as lover boy. Still have lots of own hair, quite a few teeth, and do macho things like use Mum for Men and crush empty beer cans although, these days, it takes both hands and sometimes I also have to jump up and down on them.

I am not saying I am a Sex Symbol of Our Time but considering afflictions of youth, I have reason to be satisfied. Main problem in youth was that, whenever confronted by a girl, the nose would bleed, sometimes copiously.

With great fortitude I learned to overcome this to a certain extent. I never went on a date without a pocketful of teaspoons and keys for my girlfriend to drop down my back. Also held head right back when chatting up girls but this inhibited flow of smoochy-type conversation.

Worst problem was acting nonchalant at intimate candlelit dinners with plugs of toilet paper sticking from nose. Especially if plug fell out.

Sorry, diary, I digress.

Anyway, opened Valentine card and read through fog of perfume: “Guess who, cutie pie???” That’s all. That’s all it said.

Desperately tried to recognise handwriting but totally stumped. Who was she??? Pounded the forehead.

The envelope! That’s it! The postmark! Retrieved the little scraps of envelope from bushes and reconstructed them on pavement. Postmark simply read “Johannesburg”.

But address on envelope riveted attention. The card was for next door.

Felt sick. Neighbour has less hair than me and is an accountant who wears grey shoes. “Cutie pie”? Ha! Cute like Mike Tyson!

Keep asking myself “Why him?”

Tossed card into bin. No point in complicating his life, he’d only end up with a pacemaker.

Belinda and the Bloody Lights

This week, Mrs Williams at Malhurst Primary, desirous of completing her class register, set the children the task of writing a composition on what they did at Christmas. Belinda Tamsen’s pen began to scorch up the paper.

 

My Crissmus by Belinda Tamsen

 

We hadda verry nies crissmus and I had lotsa presents in-clooding a bike witch I lern 2 ride rownd and rownd the gardin and inter the dalliers witch I flattend. My cuzzin Mark came 2 see us with his sister Mary. Mary tell me Mark tride 2 get her 2 put all her pocket munny in with his munny so they could buy thear mother a sokka ball. Mary sed she didernt forl 4 that one.

We hadda crissmuss tree with lites that go on and off but at first they wud not go on at all and daddy sed it was becos one of the tiny lites was dud and 4 an owr he cud not fine out witch one it was and he kept say-ing bluddy hell and bugga the soddin lites. Sumtiems he ack-chew-elly swear.

My little brutha gotta plorstic tool kit and just wen daddy got the lites 2 werk he hit wun with his hammer and they all went owt. My daddy orst him niesly not 2 hit the lites again but he did and they orl went owt again.

My daddy showt doant do that agen EVER or I will brane you.

My little brutha got such a frite he wet hisself.

Crissmus dinner was fun. Granny and Granpa came and bort us all sox and ornty Berrill came and she also bort sox – again. I orsk you with teers in my ize wot sort of crissmus present is sox 4 hevins sake.

She giv my little brutha a trumpit which make a sownd like a So-wetto taxy. She dusint hav any chillren so she dusint unner-stand. My brutha neva stop blowin it Paaap! Paaap! Paaap!

Daddy say if you doan stop blowin that bluddy thing I will rap it rown yor nek. Ornty Berrill say wot a terribell think 2 say 2 a smorl boy and my daddy say wy did you by him a trumpit 4 peet’s sake and she say she by him wot she like and she pick my little brutha up and hug him and he wet hisself again and orlso wet ornty Berrills dress.

She REELY doan unner-stand chillren.

We all bort millyens of thowsens of presents and daddy say it is orl a ridicu-luss waist. Mummy say we only spent abowt R20 on each so its notta train smash. Daddy say that nex year we shud all stand inna sircle on crissmuss day and hand each otha a R20 note and be dun with it.

We had turkey and ham and crissmus pudding and crackers witch we pull and things jump owt like wissels and spinnin tops. My little brutha gotta tin frog that goes click clack click clack wen you press it until peepel go mad. He drop it on the floor and my daddy ack-sid-ently stud on it and smash it inter millyens of peeses.

Wen my brutha cride my ornt pick him up and skweez him tight and he bort up all over her dress – all his crissmus pudding an turkey and custid and orl sorts of in-ter-ess-ting things sum from breck-fus.

My cuzzin then play the pee-anno. Every body clap eg-sep me. Mummy sae wie doan I tern the pages of the music so I had 2 and I ack-sid-dently drop the lid of the pee-anno on his fingas and he yell and yell but at leest he hadda stop playing and we all clap again in-cloo-ding me this time.