One day soon, I hope an anthropologist will look into life at the southern tip of this continent and explain the reasons for the undercurrent of violence that has come to permeate almost everything we do.
That study may show that contrary to walking a long road to freedom, we have stepped into lager where life is edged, to quote Hunter S Thompson, by fear and loathing.
This struck me (an appropriate pun I think) recently when I stopped, last week, on my way home late one afternoon to give two young hitchhikers a lift.
I don’t normally stop to give people lifts after reading so many horror stories of hitchhikers becoming hijackers. This fear was heightened some time ago when I stopped to give a young man standing at the foot of Ou Kaapse Weg a lift. He was going to Ocean View he said. Then he told me, on the most desolate stretch of road through Silvermine, that he was on his way home on parole after serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence for murder.
I was very happy when he asked me to stop at the Long Beach Mall to let him out.
Anyway, that was then and this is now, so last week when I saw a young couple running along the side of the road near UCT, I assumed they were late for an appointment, threw caution to the wind and stopped to help them on their a way. Not long after they had settled into my car the ear-ringed man in the passenger seat told me that they had just escaped from a notorious drug rehab centre in the north.
My hand dropped to the side of my seat, where I keep a wooden axe handle, just in case he decided to jab a knife in my ribs and relieve me of my car. Being hijacked once a lifetime is enough. But once I had listened to their story – over the thumping of my heart driving with one hand while the other held on to the axe handle – it appeared innocent enough. They were out for the weekend, fully intended to return and they turned out to be, well, peaceful. Although I was relieved when we arrived at their destination and I was able to travel on, unharmed.
After surviving two threatening thugs in my back garden, I venture out these days gingerly, eyes like a chameleon, scanning for tikked-out creepy crawlies slithering over the walls – especially after my neighbours woke at 3am a few weeks ago to find two men in their lounge. Now they have a home ring-fenced with barbed wire.
Yes, I am happy that the muggers, who attacked hikers at Silvermine where I go for relaxing walks, were arrested but I can’t really walk there again without constantly looking over my shoulder. And last weekend during a gap in the rain I walked nervously with Sara on a dirt road above Sandy Bay, until I saw other hikers walking on the road then felt safer.
What we don’t see here are lots of police everywhere. In the southern suburbs we see hundreds of them at Newlands when there is a game of rugby or cricket but otherwise none at all.
In Brazil or at least in Sao Paulo, Manaus and Rio, where I was recently they also used to have a lot of creepy crawlies preying left right and centre on frightened citizens. Now they don’t because there are police everywhere. Police on the beach, police on street corners, police standing outside the shops, police on buses police in cars. All of them steely eyed, stern and foreboding hands resting on the pistols holstered at their hips.
You’d be quite stupid, I imagine, to mug anyone in those cities without expecting to be caught and thrown in jail. Visible policing seems to work. I never got mugged once. Not that I missed be it. But I did notice my guard begin to drop, my sense of fear dissipates and I closed the eyes in the back of my head for a while. So I am not sure why we don’t do that here. Maybe we should play more sport on our street corners or games of rugby and cricket in our back yards. Then there’d be cops everywhere and we’d be safe.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
A classic and so much more fitting of Neil Diamond’s talent
Home Before Dark
Neil Diamond
Those people who have preferred to remain in the closet rather than tell the world that they actually like Neil Diamond can come out now, thanks to the amazing collection of songs by the man who gave us Hot August Night, and some of the most enduring anthems of the ‘60s.
Like he did for the late great Johnny Cash, with the American Recordings, Rick Rubin has taken Diamond by the scruff of his neck and wrung from him a CD full of songs which are good enough to put Diamond back at the top of the charts.
“No-one ever put me in a studio and asked me to sing the songs I want to,” Johnny Cash said of Rubin. This allowed Cash to deliver the best music he had ever recorded. Well, the same must be said of Diamond who in his liner notes describes the year of agony he went through to produce this album.
Track 12, Home before Dark is what the sticker on the CD promotes as the winning, chart-topping track, but I had difficulty getting past track one, If I Don’t See You Again.
This is such a great song, a wonderful love song in fact sung about a short relationship in the mould of the best Diamond has ever done from Sweet Caroline to I Am I Said, Holy Holy and any other Diamond hit you care to name. Diamond has a lot to thank Rick Rubin for.
This CD is a classic and so much more fitting of a song-writing man of Neil Diamond’s talent than that failure of a comeback attempt – ’12 Songs’ – released a year or so ago. Welcome back Mr Diamond. EJH
Neil Diamond
Those people who have preferred to remain in the closet rather than tell the world that they actually like Neil Diamond can come out now, thanks to the amazing collection of songs by the man who gave us Hot August Night, and some of the most enduring anthems of the ‘60s.
Like he did for the late great Johnny Cash, with the American Recordings, Rick Rubin has taken Diamond by the scruff of his neck and wrung from him a CD full of songs which are good enough to put Diamond back at the top of the charts.
“No-one ever put me in a studio and asked me to sing the songs I want to,” Johnny Cash said of Rubin. This allowed Cash to deliver the best music he had ever recorded. Well, the same must be said of Diamond who in his liner notes describes the year of agony he went through to produce this album.
Track 12, Home before Dark is what the sticker on the CD promotes as the winning, chart-topping track, but I had difficulty getting past track one, If I Don’t See You Again.
This is such a great song, a wonderful love song in fact sung about a short relationship in the mould of the best Diamond has ever done from Sweet Caroline to I Am I Said, Holy Holy and any other Diamond hit you care to name. Diamond has a lot to thank Rick Rubin for.
This CD is a classic and so much more fitting of a song-writing man of Neil Diamond’s talent than that failure of a comeback attempt – ’12 Songs’ – released a year or so ago. Welcome back Mr Diamond. EJH
I didn’t wrestle an anaconda, but I turned the tables on a piranha
Manaus, Brazil: As it turned out, I ate a piranha and did not get eaten by one of those nasty little fish with the sharp teeth, as I feared when I planned to swim in the Amazon.
Here piranhas are as common as guppies. They suffer, it appears, mostly from a bad press thanks to visit to the region by a former US President and an early James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, in which one of the baddies was shredded after being thrown into a pool of hungry piranha.
According to Wikipedia, to guarantee a good show for Roosevelt during his visit to Brazil, local fishermen blocked off a portion of the Amazon with nets and dumped hordes of starving piranhas into the pool that had thus been created.
Then they sliced up a cow and tossed it into the river, setting off a wild feeding frenzy and a leaving a skeleton in their wake. Roosevelt declared the fish evil, and the journalists traveling with him spread the word.
Pira-nia, as Amazonians pronounce the name, do not generally eat people except when they are really, really hungry. Otherwise they swim around much like other fish, underwater not bothering anyone.
What was more worrying to me were huge iguanas. They kept dropping off the trees and plopping into the water around and about the canoe from which I was fishing. I am not into reptiles at the best of times so this was rather disconcerting; piranha below and iguanas above.
I did not swim in the river where I caught the piranha, as they were obviously hungry and taking what bait they could. So once I had dropped my line into the water and caught my fish I was paddled in my canoe to a nearby riverbank in a completely different section of the river for a swim.
The day before our party of nine had been taken deep into an estuary, our canoe had been run aground and we had been marched off the front end into the Amazon rainforest.
I was not too happy seeing the canoe disappear back downstream while our forlorn group, dripping wet in the tropical rain, stood on the bank, as our guide later described - like wet chickens.
Then suddenly we were alone in the rainforest, nine gringos, one Peruvian and one Amazonian with a nasty looking panga in his hand. I stood there recalling scenes from a film I saw about a crazy Brazilian slicing and dicing tourists to stock his trade in body parts.
But our guide was quite friendly. He taught me how to make poisoned arrows and shoot them from a blowpipe and how to tempt tarantula spiders out of their holes in the ground while I wondered why I would want to that.
I am not particularly fond of anything with lots of hairy legs that creeps and crawls, particularly when I am in the Amazon rainforest on the lookout for Anacondas three days away by boat from help at the Amazonian capital of Manaus.
Not that being in Manaus would have helped. It’s just the kind of Grahame Greene place from which people disappear. It feels like the end of the earth, from where, if you took one more step, you might plunge off the edge of the world; the kind of place you get to when you are on the run from the Federales and there is nowhere left to hide.
Mind you, it was there where I saw my first piranha — at the fishmarket where they were piled in sharp edged little pyramids. Little did I know that a week later I would be eating one, grilled! And what a bony little fish they are; mostly skeleton in fact which was all that was left of the piranha on my plate after it provided a meal for me.
Here piranhas are as common as guppies. They suffer, it appears, mostly from a bad press thanks to visit to the region by a former US President and an early James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, in which one of the baddies was shredded after being thrown into a pool of hungry piranha.
According to Wikipedia, to guarantee a good show for Roosevelt during his visit to Brazil, local fishermen blocked off a portion of the Amazon with nets and dumped hordes of starving piranhas into the pool that had thus been created.
Then they sliced up a cow and tossed it into the river, setting off a wild feeding frenzy and a leaving a skeleton in their wake. Roosevelt declared the fish evil, and the journalists traveling with him spread the word.
Pira-nia, as Amazonians pronounce the name, do not generally eat people except when they are really, really hungry. Otherwise they swim around much like other fish, underwater not bothering anyone.
What was more worrying to me were huge iguanas. They kept dropping off the trees and plopping into the water around and about the canoe from which I was fishing. I am not into reptiles at the best of times so this was rather disconcerting; piranha below and iguanas above.
I did not swim in the river where I caught the piranha, as they were obviously hungry and taking what bait they could. So once I had dropped my line into the water and caught my fish I was paddled in my canoe to a nearby riverbank in a completely different section of the river for a swim.
The day before our party of nine had been taken deep into an estuary, our canoe had been run aground and we had been marched off the front end into the Amazon rainforest.
I was not too happy seeing the canoe disappear back downstream while our forlorn group, dripping wet in the tropical rain, stood on the bank, as our guide later described - like wet chickens.
Then suddenly we were alone in the rainforest, nine gringos, one Peruvian and one Amazonian with a nasty looking panga in his hand. I stood there recalling scenes from a film I saw about a crazy Brazilian slicing and dicing tourists to stock his trade in body parts.
But our guide was quite friendly. He taught me how to make poisoned arrows and shoot them from a blowpipe and how to tempt tarantula spiders out of their holes in the ground while I wondered why I would want to that.
I am not particularly fond of anything with lots of hairy legs that creeps and crawls, particularly when I am in the Amazon rainforest on the lookout for Anacondas three days away by boat from help at the Amazonian capital of Manaus.
Not that being in Manaus would have helped. It’s just the kind of Grahame Greene place from which people disappear. It feels like the end of the earth, from where, if you took one more step, you might plunge off the edge of the world; the kind of place you get to when you are on the run from the Federales and there is nowhere left to hide.
Mind you, it was there where I saw my first piranha — at the fishmarket where they were piled in sharp edged little pyramids. Little did I know that a week later I would be eating one, grilled! And what a bony little fish they are; mostly skeleton in fact which was all that was left of the piranha on my plate after it provided a meal for me.
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