There is No One at My Gate
I saw you through the glass and rain
Wearing a white dress, at my gate
You said we would talk it over,
But, again, you have made me wait.
…
Words & picture: Fred Hatman
How suddenly we fall away from the sun…
We fight and we fight, we fight to find our flight to the light,
But, so quickly and without warning, we submit to your might…
RIP Guid Man.
Words & picture: Fred Hatman
A baby elephant tests the surf…
This is what happened when a baby elephant saw the sea for the first time.
Just beautiful.
I do believe this video would cheer up Van Morrison.
The home of our horror (and shame)… revisited
Earlier this year, on February 2, Anene Booysen was taken from David’s Sports Bar and Grill in Bredasdorp to a nearby housing development. To a sandy passage between two small RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) houses, and alongside a deep culvert.
There, the 17-year-old girl, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister and a friend of some and known to many, was gang-raped and murdered. Inbetween those two events, she was disembowelled. Not just her body but Anene herself… because she died much later, after she was found by a security guard, her blood sinking into the sand.
A week later, with South Africa seemingly rising up in protest over the grotesque invasion and mutilation of Anene’s body and life, I went to join the demonstration outside the Bredasdorp Magistrate’s Court, where three young men appeared in connection with the crime. I also went to the spot where Anene’s dignity and life were taken from her…
… and found these flowers. And a wooden cross. And I found the horror. I found it on people’s faces. I felt it in the heat of a midsummer’s day. Between two unoccupied houses.
The horror had its own home between two tiny, empty houses built on sand. And I felt it snaking through my body.
Like Woodstock… only with a lot more wood
I’ve spent the past two days feeling the biggest love. Now I’ll try to share it.
The love feeling is so large that I don’t know where to start to spread it. Like mulch. So, obviously, I will start at the end.
Me and Lucille (by now you know that she is my Grand Old Lady of The Road) crested the rise just near Grootbos, but even closer to midnight.
The half-moon that had blessed the blissed at Greenpop’s Reforest Fest at Platbos now hung over Walker Bay before me. The supreme blackness and my headlight beam of just seconds before was replaced by a shimmering silver path on the sea. It was a sight that simply served to send my spirits soaring even higher, if that were possible.
It was. I stopped Lucille. I looked. My heart sang. It sang of one of the most beautiful days of my life. I expelled a frighteningly discordant and quite primal whoop, not a thing of beauty at all but one that yelled of a man set free of the chains of ordinariness. I was alone. And it was mine. I was heading home to my bed.
I left my heart somewhere among the good and happy and carefree people who had planted three thousand trees on the edge of Africa’s southernmost indigenous forest. And my sole remained in the rich and reddy-brown earth which would help those trees grow. I have never had a problem distancing myself from a crowd. But I was already missing the three hundred-odd and somewhat odd people who had gathered for “Friends Fest”, truly a union of friends who had never really been strangers but were now forever unified in the spirit of nursing the planet. And their own souls. And those of each and all of us.
We Have All Been Here…
In fact, we were all born here. But none of us remember it, do we?
So here is a reminder so wondrous that it is impossible for me to describe…
You’re welcome.
Music by Ohdae-soo.
Stainless Steel Dragonflies
Rain, rain drops. Like cut-out tears glued to my eyes. Stuck here.
Obscuring vision. Frozen. Unseeing. Unable to move.
The invitation of the road is glimpsed. Open. Then closed. Reopened.
It’s slippery out there. Wet. Beyond the high gate of my mind’s eye.
Wet. Cold. Wet road. Cold hearts. Stainless steel dragonflies.
Flitting. Fey.
The silver highway slips and slides, slaloms into uncertainty.
Behind me, my well-worn dirt track, dusty and brown.
Sandy. Rocky. But warm to the feet of my understanding.
I’m leaving now. The rain won’t stop.
Dripping. Drops down my cheeks.
Slipping. Sliding. Clearing.
Shoop… shoop.
The windscreen to my memory, wiping.
Wiping. Wiped clean.
But it is still so painful
.
Words and pictures: Fred Hatman
Lost in the loving embrace of Temenos
Lucille and I headed out of Stanford towards Montagu. I had heard that Montagu was “the best-preserved Victorian village in the Western Cape”, my home village of Stanford listed a mere third.
I had to see this for myself. Cue a “Hatman and Lucille Roadtrip”. But we never got there. Actually, we did. Eventually. For a whole, wholly unpleasant 90 minutes. I really tried. I tried to find accommodation. But there was something that just didn’t work for me. What really didn’t work was when I was subjected to a tannie (elderly Afrikaans woman) behind reception at one of the joints slagging off the “country house” next-door and saying it was awful and that I should book into her place.
No. This wouldn’t do. I had just spent two days in the zow-wow zen gardens of a tranquil retreat in McGregor and this vrou was dissing her neighbours and harshing my Temenos mellow. I gave Mrs Reception a smile radiating with the karma of forgiveness, with only one corner of my mouth slightly curled in utter contempt, and gunned old Lucille back to McGregor.
Stanford’s revolution will be WhatsApped
Out of The Hat column, Stanford River Talk, May 2013.
I can see it now.
Queen Victoria Street, Saturday morning… people milling about at the morning market, Brydon’s lemon tart in one hand, Elsa’s mozzarella in the other, and complaining in a genteel and socially decorous manner about what happened to Tracy’s trees and the fact that the Municipality sat fatly by and did diddly-very-squat about it.
Then a hush falls over the small gathering. A lemon tart makes a ka-plop as it falls, lemony side-down of course, on cold, hard concrete. A Yorkshire Terrier squeaks as the weight of a Stanford Info leaflet drifts gently past its ear.
Many faces all turn sharply in one direction and reflect absolute horror. Well, OK, not horror… more a face-mash of wonder and consternation, lightly garnished with escalating anxiety.
Stanford’s children, practically all of them and from every corner of the village, are coming down Queen Victoria Street. And not just strolling, as they usually do in that somewhat directionless we’re-not-quite-sure-where-we’re-going-but-we-are sure-we’re going-to-have-fun way that Stanford’s children appear to have perfected. No. Not at all. Not today.
The Rainbow Elation
I made this rainbow at home.
And, the more I think about it…
I think… I think I understand
that our Rainbow Nation…
will be created in our homes,
and in the revealing of
home-made rainbows
in our hearts…
and minds.
Rainbow Elation (Fred Hatman, 2013)