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.

The Dreaded Nativity Play

Belinda Tamsen is a grade four schoolgirl whose spelling is as bad as mine was when I was her age and, in fact, possibly much older. Her spelling is based on real examples of the earnest writings of small children culled from South African primary school magazines.

But Belinda’s essays are all-revealing and Mrs Williams often regales the staffroom with Belinda’s revelations.

At a recent parents’ day Mrs Williams said to Belinda’s mother, “I promise not to believe what Belinda says about you if you promise not to believe a word she says about me.”

Recently Mrs Williams, desirous of completing some end-of-term work set her class the task of writing about the forthcoming nativity play. Rehearsals which, she knew, were not going terribly well.

She smiled a little smile when she saw Belinda snatch up her pen.

 

Ow native-ittee play

Bie Belinda Tamsen, Gr4

 

I am playing the part of Mary in the native-ittee play nex Friday nite and Brendan is Joesif. Babee Jesus is been playd by Tandi’s doll juss becose it is a brown doll.

I say mie doll looks mor like Jesus and I hav never ever seen a brown Jesus not ever.

But Tandi sae Jesus wasunt enny color so it dussint matter.

She sae that is wie we mus all love each otha so I pinch her arm sore and got de-ten-shin.

Tandi is mie best frend but now I like Peta better.

Rodnee is playing the part of a anjel but he look silly with his halo witch he wares rown his nek and Miss Tomlisson had to tell him that he mus ware his anjel wings on his BACK not on his CHEST. Rodnee is so SCHOOPIT.

I doanno wie Miss Tomlisson arst him to be a anjel she mite as well arst ow dog Smooch becose Smooch have mor brane in his bakside than Rodnee has in his hed.

Jon and Sipho are the donkee and hav a blankit over them and I hav to sit on them and thay suddenlee stand up and shute me hie into the ear.

We havta sing the hiym – Wile Sheppids wotch ther flocks bie nite orl seetted on the grown. But the boys orl sing Wile sheppids wash ther socks by nite orl seeted rown the tub which they think is very funny.

Mrs Tomlinson sum times goes inta a corna and holds her hed.

At the re-hers-sal wen Joesif nock on the dor of the inn and say is ther enny room the inn-keeper spose to say the inn is full up but he spoyl evverythink bie saying ther is stacks and stacks of room. The inn-keeper is playd bie Gareth who is also schoopit like orl boys and orlways gettin inter trubbel.

Brendan didernt no wot to say so he jus crie. He is a bit of a wimp if you arst me. Miss Tomlisson had to tell Gareth off.

She sae the native-ittee play is eg-streem-ly seerios and holee.

So nest time Brendan asrt the innkeeper is ther room in the inn Gareth sae noe it is full up to the brim an orl the beds are takin. But he then sae Joesiv muss come in enny way an hava tot of sumthink.

So Mrs Tomlinson make Gareth play Joesif and make Mark the inn keeper and Mark and Gareth have a big fight.

Wen Gareth ask the inn keeper if ther is room Mark says that for Mary there is room but Joesif can bugga off. 

Mrs Tomlinson keep on saying it will be orl-rite on the nite.

Father Christmas and the chimney problem

There are a lot of traditions at this time of the year and one of them is for Stoep Talk to trot out a column regarding that milestone in American journalism when a New York editor, Frank Church, received a letter from a little girl named Virginia.

Virginia told Church that her friends were mocking her because she believed in Santa Claus.

In American emetic style, Frank Church wrote:

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the scepticism of a sceptical age… Not believe in Santa Claus? You might as well not believe in fairies.

“No Santa Claus! Thank God he lives, and he lives forever.

“A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

One wonders how an editor might handle little Virginia’s letter in this day and age.

How, for instance, would I have handled it?

“Dear Virginia,

“Thank you for your letter of the 12th inst.

“Your little friends are dead right.

“Santa Claus! Ha! You might as well believe in fairies. Nay, you might as well believe in the Easter Bunny, politicians and airways time tables.

Make no mistake, Virginia, Santa Claus is a figment of the Chamber of Commerce’s mission statement.

“Have you ever stood back and watched Father Christmas at your local departmental store? Do you see how obscenely fat he is? Can you visualise him sliding down your chimney carrying a bicycle and a doll’s house – even supposing you have a chimney which, living in New York, you almost certainly don’t?

“Can you imagine him getting into any suburban home today without setting off alarms and Rottweilers and getting lead poisoning from 9mm slugs?

“Come on Virginia, get real.

“I am yours ever so sincerely,

“James F Clarke

Editor of the Column that Tells It Like It Is.

As I typed in that final full stop (please find) I heard the thump of gumboots getting louder and louder. They stopped outside Stoep Talk Organisation’s luxurious suite of offices.

Then a fat, white-bearded man, dressed in ridiculous red clothes launched himself at my computer’s “ZAP” button.

“Stop!” he cried. “You are crazy! You have gone insane! Look at me! Say who I am! Go on, say it!”

I said: “Who I am.”

“No, no! Tell me who, or even whom, you think I am!”

“Father Christmas,” I said, taken greatly aback. (Nay, Virginia, I was gobsmacked.)

“And how did I get here notwithstanding the absence of a chimney?”

“You screeched up on that sledge pulled by those overgrown sprinklebokkens and kicked down my door causing the picture of my aunt, Pamela Anderson, to fall off the wall.”

“Yes, well, it was an emergency. But note that your lack of a chimney was no handicap to me. I gain entry through MAGIC.”

Then he said: “Look here, do you want something really nice for Christmas?”

“Yes please. I could do with a one of those cellphones that takes movies, prints faxes, boils kettles and has a built-in Swiss Army knife. Then I’d like mag wheels for my dustbin and I’d like some socks and…”

“And what must you be to get all these things?”

“I must be a good boy.”

“Then just remember that!”

And, so help me Virginia, he hit my “ZAP” button and rode off leaving a trail of stardust which the cleaning lady is going to be spitting mad about.

Needed: a men’s liberation movement

As Monday is National Women’s Day and I have to clean my bicycle I hope you’ll forgive me if I tell you, once again, of the time I wandered upstairs into my cranium to pay a visit to the Pondering Division of my Memory Bank.

It was on National Women’s Day in 1997 and this was a surprise visit.

“Busy are we?” I said.

Naturally the staff began jumping around.

I smiled. Even though I am the captain up there, I am always friendly. I asked the Head of Pondering (HOP) if it were possible that men would ever, seriously, start a men’s liberation movement?

After all, we ARE liberated; we ARE our own masters; we ARE . . .

I was interrupted by a voice that made everybody jump. It came in from outside entering the operations area through both ears and reverberating off the walls.

It was the wife from the kitchen.

I said: “What is it, dear heart?”

She wanted to know what I was doing. I shouted back: “I was just talking to myself.” (She would never have understood the truth.)

She wanted to know when I would fix the iron. I said: “Yes, light-of-my-life, I’ll drop everything and fix it right away. I mean, I am only trying to earn an honest living but we don’t need money in this house because we get everything free just by shuffling our pack of plastic cards at the supermarket, at, the butcher, at the blasted dress shop . . . “

I admit that most of this was said, sort of softo voce.

I leaned against the doorpost of the Pondering Department. Many staff members were scratching their heads. They tend to do this a lot in this section.

The Head of Memory (HOM) popped his head in. Useful fellow to have around. I told HOP and HOM that men have men’s clubs and the difference between a man’s club and woman’s is that most of the time a man’s club is silent. We have little need to speak. But when women meet they can’t stop.

The voice came crashing through again.

I replied: “Yes, chickabiddy, just getting the jolly old insulation tape. Can’t fix the iron without insulation tape, can we? You could get your little self e-lec-tro-cuted! ZAPPPPP!”

I told the Head of Memory: “Expunge that thought!” I heard the sound of flushing.

“Women chatter so,” I went on. “They chatter about each other. They chatter about anything.

“Men merely exchange views.”

Later, in the Memory Department’s operations room I caught somebody shovelling neurons into a bin. “Hey!” I cried, “what are you dumping?” I recognised my history notes from school. “You can’t throw these away!” I scolded. “And what’s this? My bachelor memories of Felicity Throgmorton and that time we had in a field outside Stratford! Dear old Throgs!”

I said to HOM, “How can you throw precious stuff like this away?”

He grumbled that I stored so much useless information that it was no wonder they couldn’t always come up with answers when I needed them.

“Please,” he said, “get away from those bins. Just leave us to do our job? You can’t possibly remember everything at your age.”

The Voice once more came bursting through, this time sending a memory file crashing to the floor. The dust made everybody sneeze. HOM said: “You see what I mean?”

His words were drowned by The Voice.

“Quick,” I said to HOM, “I am supposed to be fixing the iron. Where the devil did I leave the insulation tape last time I used it?”

“Search me,” he sniffed.

What happened to the real James Bond

Britain’s M15 says secret agents are “beyond it” by 50. - report.

 

Bond appeared in the doorway, “The name’s Bond. James Bond.”

Grant of M15 said, “Who?”

“You know,” said Bond, “007! Licensed to kill and all that.”

“And all what?”

“Well, it depends on the season… but I’m also licensed to drive a vehicle that can do 320km/h, with machine guns in the hubcaps and an 88mm cannon disguised as an exhaust pipe and a grenade launcher in the boot and…”

“What on earth do you drive – a Soweto taxi?”

“An Aston Martin, actually.”

“Isn’t that a football team?”

“You’re thinking of Aston Villa,” said Bond.

Grant, “Anyway, old man, the name’s Grant, Sebastian Grant, 9800956. If you’ve been sent by Sir Andrew, I suggest we  move!”

Grant vaulted through the window to avoid being seen by those who (or even whom) he knew would be watching the front entrance. He landed lightly, three floors down. Bond followed, but landed astride some railings. He winced visibly and Grant, retrieving Bond’s tripod walker, noticed the old man’s eyes smarted, just a little.

“You OK?”

“Fine! Got this damned brittle-bone problem. Don’t worry – I can set my old bones myself once we’re in the car.”

Both 007 and 9800956 were gunning the M15’s Jag XJ 220 (with stereo radio and tape deck) along the M25 when 007 asked, “Tell me, old boy, whatever happened to Botvinik?”

“Old Botty – the Russian spymaster? He retired. We gave him a part-time job at M15, tidying up our files. He was more familiar with them than we were. We’ve given up chasing Russians, of course. Nowadays we buy their secrets through a mail-order catalogue. It’s the Arabs now.”

 ”Grant, I must confess I don’t know why Sir Andrew sent me to you. My game was chasing Russians. Of course, once we realised most of the M15 and CIA chiefs had been Russian agents all along the situation became uncertain and we spent a lot of time chasing each other – often round our own desks.

Bond began to reminisce … “Once I turned 50 they gave me an Austin Mini – imagine! One day I was chasing Botvinik in his Fiat 1100…” Bond laughed at the memory and was instantly racked by a paroxysm of coughing.

“Anyway, we drove straight into a canal! I said to myself, ‘Bond, this is the end of the road! You’re past it!’”

Bond wiped some dribble off his club tie, the thin end of which hung lower than the fat end.

“But surely, Grant old boy, Arabs must be easier to spot? Look, there’s one!”

“By jove,  Bond! It’s Ali Salim Salim Ali, licensed to deal in Scuds. Hold tight!”

The rocket-assisted XJ 220 soared over the top of the Arab’s SL 960 (four-door with disc brakes), touching down just in front of it. Ali Salim immediately pulled off the road, grabbed his secret plans, umbrella and sandwich tin and sprinted into the fields with Grant in hot pursuit and Bond in cooler pursuit.

As Grant disappeared into the distance, Bond, out of puff, lay in the grass and closed his eyes.

He sensed a shadow fall over him and found himself gazing up into the liquid brown eyes of  Princess Fabiola Aman Ik Aman the famous Arab spy.

“Hello, James,” she breathed.

“Hello, my dear,” said Bond.

“Can I loosen your tie?” she sighed.

But Bond was already snoring.

No Sound Bites

According to a British travel agent visiting South Africa, today’s British tourists are no longer intrepid. They are not a patch on their explorer ancestors who came to Africa – Englishmen such as Sir Richard Burton; Welshmen such as Sir Henry Morton Stanley and Scotsmen such as Dr David Livingstone.

Not only are visitors afraid of mosquitoes said the travel agent, “The new type of traveller flies into a panic if he is bitten by almost anything at all”.

My mind floated back to the Old Type. Were they ever fazed by bites? Ha!

THE SCENE:

It is dawn and the mist thins slightly to reveal a small camp near the Ruwenzoris. Montague Cadwallader Ponsonby walks into his companion’s tent.

“What ho, Carruthers old boy! I say, not still in bed?”

“Ah, I’ll be up in a jiffy my dear fellow. Just feeling a little seedy.  Had a restless night.”

“Not well, old man?” says Ponsonby with genuine concern.

“Actually, dear boy, I was bitten during the night.”

Ponsonby then notices Carruthers’ leg is just a bloody stump, torn off above the knee.

“I say, that IS a nasty bite!”

“Lion,” says Carruthers. “Came into my tent during the night and tried to carry me off! Dashed thing! I’m surprised you didn’t hear the commotion – though I did try not to wake everybody. “

“I say! And we still have about 200 miles to go, what?”

“My dear Ponsonby, it’s a bite. That’s all. No need to make a big thing out of it. I’ll be tickety-boo after a cup of tea.”

“But the Ruwenzoris, old boy! We have to cross the Ruwenzoris. It’s going to be frightfully difficult with only one leg. And what if we run into the waHitto?

“My dear Ponsonby, you worry so. Now, be a good man and help me to my feet. Or, rather, my foot! Ha ha ha. That was rather funny, what?”

Ponsonby helps Carruthers to his foot.

After a few miles Ponsonby says, “I think we’re being followed. Bless me, it’s the waHittos.”

But the two men manage to shake them off, at least for the time being. They press on. Occasionally they have to beat off creatures unknown to science at the time.

Inevitably Carruthers’ bloody stump begins to attract hyenas. On of them bites off his arm.

“I say, Ponsonby, I’m dashed if I haven’t been bitten again!”

“Oh, What absolutely beastly luck, my dear fellow! Here, try some more Peaceful Sleep.”

They come to the Semliki River and swim across. Ponsonby is bitten by a crocodile. He stifles a curse for he is a deeply religious man.

As they gain the far bank Ponsonby, now badly holed by crocodile teeth, makes light of his injuries. He then says, “Don’t look now Carruthers, but I think the waHittos have surrounded us.  Try as he might, not to look, Caruthers nevertheless finds himself eye-to-eye with a fierce waHitto warrior leading a war party.

Ponsonby addresses them:

“My dear chaps, we come in peace for all mankind. And womenkind also of course. We just want your land in the name of the Great White Queen, that’s all.

“Of course, if you want something for it I’m sure we can come to some amicable arrangement. Here, have a bag of salt old chap. No? Some beads perhaps? They’re jolly pretty, what?”

The tallest warrior says in sign language: “Chief Ntgathla, Chief of Chiefs, Man Among Men, sends cordial greetings to the bwanas and says he would be awfully glad if I brought you fellows back for dinner tonight.”

“How dashed decent of him!” cries Carruthers.

“Carruthers, for goodness sake!” whispers Ponsonby, urgently, “When the Chief says he wants us for dinner I don’t think he is necessarily going to entertain us – I think he will be more inclined to casserole us. We have no choice but to hop it.”

“I say, how very droll,” says Carruthers. “That’s all I can do is to ‘hop it’, what? Ha ha ha.”

He becomes serious: “Look, my dear Ponsonby, why don’t YOU make a dash for it on your own? After all you’ve got twice as many legs as I have and they probably look upon me as being perfectly ‘armless. Ha ha ha, there I go again! Gettit? Armless!

“I’ll distract them with my renditions from the Pirates of Penzance until you are safely away.”

Ponsonby solemnly salutes Carruthers’ noble self-sacrifice and escapes.

The waHittos, fascinated at first by Carruthers rendition of, “I am the very model of a modern major-general“, become restless and close in with their spears.

Carruthers switches to “God save the Queen” (as best he can while maintaining a stiff upper lip) – the spears fly.

(Dies).

Nothing (comprehensible) excites a geologist

I’ve received an interesting email based on an informal note by a mineralogist at Mintek in Randburg nroth of Johannesburg  commenting on how the media rarely present geologists to the general population.

If you discount the “sound bytes” on Discovery Channel’s volcano specials, they rarely get a mention, he says.

Well, no wonder…

A big American TV company last year tried to integrate geologists working in hazardous circumstances into a “Survivors” style show.

It hired a production crew and corralled a group of geologists prepared to vote each other off based on how they reacted while performing hazardous tasks such as crawling around active volcanoes, testing landslides, making hazardous flights into remote areas and so on.

The last remaining “hard-core geologist” would win a prize.

The team was plagued with problems from the beginning. They found six male and three female geologists and flew them to a very unstable volcano in the Philippines.

The nine scientists bonded nicely on camera, especially when given alcohol. But the camera crew noticed that even after drinking “gallons” the geologists continued talking in “an obscure jargonised language about ‘breccia,’ and ‘lahars,’ none of which made for good reality TV”.

The only rise in tension came when the seismologist and the structural geologist got into a yelling match over the best recipe for chilli.

When the geologists climbed the volcano to probe its secrets they went in different directions and camera crew was unable to find more than two working together.

The geologists felt that the volcano could erupt any moment. On hearing this the cameramen disappeared.

The result was almost no footage, and the TV editors were unable to make sense of what they had because they had no idea what the geologists were talking about.

Few of the scientists seemed to understand the concept of voting off another member. Finally, they were told to just get rid of someone on any sort of criteria so they decided to dump whoever had the worst aim with a rock hammer.

The second event, landing in a ski plane in Alaska’s frozen waste, failed because none of the geologists was nervous and thus there was no sense of drama – except among the camera crew. The crew refused to go on site. Instead it gave the scientists two cameras and asked them to film themselves.

When the editors went through the footage they found it was all about “glacial erratics”

Only 10 percent of the footage showed humans- mainly a petrologist standing passively to show scale.

In Hawaii’s volcanic zone most of the cameramen quit, defeated by the chilli diet and stressed by the danger. And only five geologists remained. The rest had become so fascinated by rock formations that they stayed behind.

Paying for an almost-constant supply of beer and the transportation of the geologists’ heavy piles of rock samples almost exhausted the budget..

The project has now been canned.

So geologists will remain an enigma.

In my experience palaeontologists (fossil hunters), despite the same pre-occupation with rocks, are far better material. They would make a splendid “Survival” series for they are very quarrelsome; they have a great sense of humour and they behave dramatically when, after days of lying in the dust scraping away at the ground, they leap around in ecstasy.

Glenn C Conroy, a professor of palaeo-anthropology (palaeo-anthropologists look mainly for pre-human bones) at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, told me about a cannibal restaurant that charged four times as much for cooked palaeo-anthropologists as it did for cooked missionaries.

Asked why, the chef said, “Have you ever tried to clean a palaeo- anthropologist?”

 

It’s much the same with geologists.

 

 

Gorilla in their midst

It was The Selectors on the phone. They wanted to know if I still had contact with Freek Saunders, owner of the Ventersklip Private Zoo. Readers might recall the name – he owns Smiler, the semi-tame, 400kg gorilla that he trained to play rugby.

When I say “semi-tame”, I mean the gorilla’s discipline during games was about on a par with the All Blacks.

Some readers might recall how Freek tried Smiler out in 1996 when the Ventersklip Witrenosters agreed, as an experiment, to slip him into their team for their annual needle match against the Lichtenburg Wild Bulls.

The Witrenosters knew, heavy though their pack was, that they’d need a bit more weight if they were to succeed against the Bulls.

And, anyway, the Bulls themselves had few scruples. They once fielded a thinly disguised Massey Ferguson tractor on their side. After the match in which Smiler featured, many said that, from a sportsmanship point of view, it was not one of rugby’s nobler moments.

The final score, 378 – 0, and two dead, is still talked about.

Smiler’s main advantage is that he is good at tackling – he does it with one hand while he uses the other to tear the ball away. Sometimes hre tears away far more than that.

Provided that Smiler wears rugby togs, few people notice anything odd when he runs onto the field.

The long and short of it is that I was able to help The Selectors and, Smiler is now training with the Springoks.

But some people are worried. While the French might not notice gorillas in their midst, the English probably would. The Australians too. For this reason The Selectors might hold Smiler back until the Boks meet the All Blacks again.

It is true that when, in the Witrenosters game, Smiler ran out onto the field, some of the opposing side looked at him sideways. This was not so much because of his hair or absence of neck, nor was it because of his practically audible smell – it was because of the way in which Smiler stopped to scratch himself and for how long and where.

Freek directs Smiler from the touchline with a series of whistles, and in the loose scrum he has got Smiler to push the other side back 60m with team mates clinging to him.

Once, when a ref dared to show him a red card, he ate it.

The Witrenosters v Bulls went into two hours of injury time and the final movement was when Freek whistled to Smiler to “get ball”. Unfortunately it was just at the moment when the ball had been intercepted by the Witrenoster’s own captain, so Smiler took his own captain’s head off, tucked it under his arm, dropped onto his knuckles and went for the try line.

Fans on both sides now had reason to cheer him on although the captain’s wife was concerned that this might be a career-limiting injury for her husband.

Smiler touched down with the head, but the ref ruled against it – at least until Smiler menacingly moved towards him, beating his chest. Then he allowed it.

One of the worries The Selectors have is that for the first time in history a country will be fielding

a team weighing well over a ton and this might raise suspicions.

Footnote: Happily, the captain, after a transplant operation involving a pumpkin, was able to pursue a career in Parliament.

Secrets of the Staff Room

One of the most dangerous things a schoolteacher can do is ask pupils to write what they think of their teacher.

 ”My teacher is fat and screams all day,” wrote one child.

“Miss Smith is nice but not very bright,” wrote another.

An insightful view came from Glen Shaw of Rosebank Primary when he was in Std 1. He produced a frank expose of a day in the life of a teacher:

“They get up and have a shower, get drest, have breakfast. Then they go to school, sine our work and have tea and go home. They watch TV and go to sleep.”

I would like to ask Glen Shaw and other fearless classroom critics what they think goes on in that secret room called the Staff Room.

Most people know, of course, that teachers go to the staff room to eat all the apples and sweets they have confiscated from pupils and then they eat cake and fortify themselves with generous glasses of sherry. And there they plot ways to get their own back on the parents of precocious kids.

Picture the scene: three teachers in the Staff Room put their heads together and, cackling and rubbing their hands, they dream up HOMEWORK PROJECTS.

They chant the first verse of the Teachers’ Anthem:

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Ms Hecate: Cackle, cackle. I have given my little monsters Ancient Egypt as a project. Do you know how difficult it is finding pictures of Ancient Egypt?

Last year it gave Felicity Worthington’s mother a nervous breakdown – she thought she was a labrador and began chasing cars up and down the road. Jenny Mclean’s mother was caught stealing pictures from a public library book!

Ms Graymalkin screams with laughter. Prancing forward she tells the others how she gave her class a project on soil conservation because it is so difficult finding good information.

She says she had just heard that little Johnny Stewart’s father, who runs a big computer business, is helping Johnny by enlisting the aid of one of the secretaries as well as an assistant manager with a BSc in agriculture – and they have so far worked 22 hours on the project. Her red eyes narrow as her thin, purple lips mouth the words:

“Sleep shall neither night nor day

Hang upon his pent-house lid…

She adds with a shriek: “And when Little Johnny hands in his project I shall give him… and his father… a D minus!”

Shrieks of hideous laughter fill the air as the three prance around a table containing a pile of unmarked geography books and sandwiches containing eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog.

Mrs Paddock, burying her long pointed teeth into a big red, confiscated apple, shrieks: “I have given mine a project on a shopping mall. Do you know what that means?

“It means their parents will have to take their kids to the mall here and some will feel obliged to invite their little classmates and they’ll all want sweets and icecream and hamburgers and some will stray and get lost.

“Last year Mrs Swinton took eight children to the square and roped them together so they wouldn’t get lost. Ha! Then she put them in a lift but only half fitted in… Haaaar haaar haaar!”

Ms Garmalkin leaps forward, her twiggy hands clawing the air in ecstasy:

“When shall we three meet again

In thunder, lightning or in rain?”

Mrs Paddock cries: “When the hurly-burly’s done.

When all projects have been done!”

A flash of lightning, the bell goes, all three, smoothing down their skirts, walk briskly back to their classrooms.