This makes me feel very small. And our planet very big. And absurdly beautiful.
Sorry. I just can’t get you around the world quicker than that. I know you’ll understand.
* A time-lapsed doff of the old hat to clearly tireless photographer Kien Lam and the wonderful Colossal art & photography website for this majestic round-the-world trip.
This blogpost is dedicated to all of those people who tut-tut darkly about starlings nesting in their rooves. I wager that they will never look at starlings in quite the same way again.
Just one more thing. Can art truly imitate life?
I think not. That little bit of avian showing-off, dear Hatpeople, is known as starlings doing a spot of murmuration. Murmuration? I’d love to murmurate with all of you. If only.
Nature’s got talent, hey?
* A big, murmurating, hat-tip to Jennifer Kestis Ferguson for the heads-up on wildlife cameraman Dylan Winter\’s majestic footage.
So, here we are on another Moanday (sic), sitting in a post-weekend stupor in offices all over the globe. Same grumpy old boss. Same boring old meetings. Same rubbish coffee. Same old grubby work colleague sitting nearby with sticky tape holding together his glasses, picking his nose and droning on about his weekend spent trying to coax some love out of a Russian instant wives website.
I think that this might help you…
Wow. Nice. That certainly reminded me of the really important things in life.
So I’m going back to bed.
* Thanks to Eric Alan for the heads-up on this very sweet little vid. Oh, in case you’re wondering, the vid is called The Meaning of Life, produced by “Santé et beauté pour tous!!”, whatever that is, and that stunning soundtrack was “Cuore Di Sabbia” (Sand Heart) by Pasquale Catalano. Mooi, ne?
We like it when the little guy comes out on top, don’t we? The underdog. Winning against all the odds. Like when my Jack Russell chased that Great Dane the length of Camps Bay beach. Actually, bad example. Because The Scrapster sees herself as very much The Overdog.
OK. Like when Samson pinged Goliath. That’s better. Or when Wimbledon beat Liverpool in the 1989 FA Cup final. What am I talking about? I’m a Liverpool supporter. Or sufferer. So forget that.
Got it. Like this…
How was that?! Yowzers! You’re a penguin. You’re being chased around by about four ravenous killer whales keen to have you for a starter before the main course. You’re getting a little fatigued and your frantic little flippers are slowing down a tad. You spot a boat with a bunch of boring Norwegians on it…
You’re going to take your chances, aren’t you? You’re jumping straight on that boat and hope like hell that those fjordspeople aren’t going to bore you witless with their talk about, well, fjords, fjords and more fjords. Beats being scrunched up in a whale’s digestive system, doesn’t it? OK. Only just.
Still, a victory for the little guy there. Reminds me of the time old Nel, one of diminutive twins, got called out at big break by Buster Chadwick, the school’s 1st XV lock, and felled him with one almighty blow to the side of the head. It probably helped that his twin brother jumped on Chadwick’s back at just the right time and stuck his fingers in his eyes.
That little penguin didn’t have any twin brother doing him any favours out there in the big, bad ocean, did he? So, a very happy result. Glad you enjoyed that, Hatpeople. Always support the underdog is the moral of the story, isn’t it?
* And you can do that right now by clicking on that big banner thing up there on the top right of this page and nominating me in the South African Blog Awards. “Best New Blog” category, if you please. Only two days left before nominations close. Remember to enter your e-mail address, wait for the e-mail asking you to confirm your nomination for Fred “Little Guy” Hatman (http://www.fredhatman.co.za) and then sit back and sigh to yourself “job well done”. Because it will be. You might just have helped me get one over all those big, blubbery killer bloggers chasing me around the murky waters of the blogosphere and trying to gobble me up. Go on. Save a little penguin blogger today! 
I love older women. No, not like that.
Like this…
You go, gogo! We love you. We love your vibe. We love your handbag. And we love that airbag. And we don’t love – how do da Americans say? – that “douchebag” who hooted at you. That was simply too beautiful for words!
Tough Tuesday?
Never mind. Make a cuppa (or something stronger, I won’t judge you), get comfy in the old recliner, take a deep breath and ease yourself into this spirits-lifting video…
I hope that you feel better now. You do, don’t you? Yes. That was quite beautiful. Glad I was able to becalm your soul.
Mind you, I could blow smoke rings at the age of 12. And dolphins are far more intelligent than me. So why are we so amazed that they can blow bubbles like that?
* Dear Hatpeople, if you look up to your right on this page, you’ll see a great big fat badge saying something about the 2010 South African Blog Awards. I’ve only been around for a year so it may be a tad cheeky of me but I’ve entered your “diagnosed SA-positive” blog into three categories: Best New Blog, Best Personal Blog and The Kulula Best Travel Blog (well, I think I’ve been parping the vuvuzela big-time for people to travel to our Beloved Country!). I wouldn’t be at all offended if those of you who quite dig reading my stuff clicked on that there badge and nominated http://www.fredhatman.co.za in any one of those three categories. In fact, were I to amaze all of us by winning something, the Birkenhead is on me down the Stanford Arms! Cheers!
I was having a day off, listening to Seth\’s stunning 2oceansvibe radiostream and trying really hard not to touch myself at the same time, when this little gem rolled into the collective unconscious of Hatman Mansions on a Saturday morning… oh, this carries a “You Might Fall Off Your Chair And Crush The Cat You’ll Be Laughing So Hard” warning…
Beautiful! I think all SABC TV news reporters should be ordered to get stoned before getting their hands on a mike. I might actually understand what they’re saying.
* Red hat tip to Anne Bussio of Joe’s Restaurant in Stanford for sending this beautiful baby my way.
Size does matter. But don’t ask a mosquito or a Jack Russell, ask a sardine.
I don’t think their lifestyle is anything near ideal. But I suppose some life-forms, such as worms, prawns and Paris Hilton, are just feeble fodder for something far larger and hungrier.
So you’re a sardine. There you are, hanging with lots of friends and making your way timidly up the east coast of South Africa, checking out the pretty coral reefs and the colourful undersides of surfboards when… wham, your best mate disappears into a gannet.
Damn. But you put it down to bad luck and swim a little faster. Kapow! Your twin sister gets taken by a tuna. Next thing, there’s a sound not dissimilar to a giant Deluxe Supa-Strength Hoover sucking in bathwater and you look around and find your entire family, including a distant cousin and a few hangers-on, have been baitballed up into a nice, juicy orb and swallowed, along with the tuna still digesting your twin sister, by a chuffing Great White.
Where’s the fun in this, you ask yourself, and hook up with a new shoal who look like they know what they’re doing and head with them for shallower waters. No sooner are you there and some big chick in a sari and smelling faintly of curry powder and assorted exotic spices is scooping you into a bucket. A cheap one from Checkers, nogal.
Not nice. If you drew one of life’s short straws and you’re not much bigger and a lot hungrier, like a Great White or even a Great Big Black… like Julius Malema. He’s always on the right side of a feeding frenzy, isn’t he?
But before I am tempted to digress any further, please pull up the closest deckchair, apply some Factor 30 and enjoy The Greatest Shoal On Earth (as provided each and every July by South Africa’s eastern seaboard)…
How cool was that? I think that even a sardine, if it would just choose to step back for a few minutes and try to be dispassionate about everything, would see the coolness in that spectacular vid. Especially as I threw the inimitable voice of David Attenborough into the mix as well. What a legend.
I’m here. In my beautiful country cocoon of Stanford. It’s a glorious sunny Cape winter’s day and I could tell you that many birds are lunging out their unique songs in the garden but that wouldn’t make it very much different from many South African gardens.
What is perhaps different is, that from where I sit, I can see – over the roofs of white Victorian cottages – the craggy tops of mountains, glowing in shades of green and muted mauve. The Kleinrivierberge. It is said that wild leopard still roam in these mountains. Although Geoffrey Phipps, a local youngster who himself roams the mountain range in his mission to remove gin traps and assorted evils, says he has only ever seen their spoor and never actually clapped eyes on the elusive beasts.
So why am I telling you this? Because I feel seriously blessed to live here in Stanford, a very special place which attracts special people. And because, since South Africa’s almost excruciatingly magnificent World Cup ended 10 days ago, I have felt both elated and mentally exhausted. I have had to take a break. An unscheduled remission from the giddy-making carousel of SA-positivity which swept me up and spun me around for four weeks. As it did many of you.
As I have drifted slowly back to earth, I have understood how absorbed, nay swallowed whole, I was by my country’s party of a lifetime. I did eat, drink, breathe and live World Cup 2010. OK. I confess. I had a one-month stand with it. A seemingly unstoppable orgy. And, then, cruelly, as the last pyrotechnical rocket popped above Soccer City, I was dumped.
I know that I am a fool. A fool for love. For the love of my flawed, frustratingly fraught with corruption country, at turns horrible and heartwarming, at once wearying and wondrous. This is no easygoing relationship, hooking up just for the good times.
This is like being madly in love with a woman once condemned to death row. Relishing the gift of every moment spent together, luxuriating in the heady scent of her dusty, musty backwaters, delighting in the amusing nuances of her body language, always agog at her ability to poke herself in the eye with a big stick and then break out in a dervish-whirling, devilishly beautiful dance on the world’s table.
We showed them, didn’t we? We showed them how to be truly human and still pull off a successful World Cup. Hugely successful. Triumphant beyond even my wildest dreams. Pay no mind to those number crunchers who now sit like vultures with calculators over the handsome corpse of our World Cup and point to percentages, mumble about margins, groan over graphs and spit out told-you-so’s over new stadiums which may lie unused for a period of time.
To them I say: it’s not about the numbers, you boring farts… it’s about hearts and minds. It’s about inspiring children. It’s about South Africa growing up in the eyes of the world. It’s about perceptions. It’s about seeding a belief that we can overcome our many challenges if we believe enough in ourselves and our 16-year-old democracy. It’s about beautiful things not immediately tangible, by-products not easily assessable by one-eyed accountants obsessed with their abacuses. It’s about a vibe. So kindly shut up.
Instead, if you are of the “SA-positive” persuasion, it is not hard to continue to find the good. The microbiocide, researched by South Africans, that promises to help our women to stem the dreadful tide of HIV/Aids that has threatened to overwhelm our people.
So, as I recover from our ballsy celebration of all that is bloody marvellous in the state of the South African psyche, I look out of my front door and see no despair, only timeless and immovable mountains that offer me strength and hope.
And, now for reasons that should be apparent to you, I offer you some visual inspiration that came my way on my darkest day…
Oh, wait. I should first tell you that, after I pumped every ounce of my passion for South Africa and football into the World Cup, I was flat. Flatter than a pancake baked by the honorary secretary of the Flat Earth Society and then placed on the treadmill trampled on by the people in that awful The Biggest Losers programme. Pap. Introspective. Oh, OK, I was depressed. It wasn’t a World Cup hangover. It was cold turkey. And I felt burnt out. Then somebody sent this to me…
That’s Nick Vujicic. He loves living life. And he’s happy. And his attitude to life is massively inspiring. To everybody to whom the universe has thrown any sort of challenge. It’s how you get up. And it’s how you finish. Now, my little period of papness post-World Cup is as nothing to what Nick has had to overcome. But it’s always worth being reminded of how fortunate we are.
And I so wish I had seen Nick’s video back in 1996 when I did crash and close down. When I spent a month alone in my flat in London, mostly in bed, not working, not eating, not living. I was burnt out. But I did eventually get up, with two arms and two legs, and started again. It’s how you finish.
The link to this video was sent to me, unknowingly, by a man with whom I shared an adventure earlier this year. He rode a unicycle from Durban to Cape Town to raise awareness of the landmines that do remove arms and legs (and lives) and I drove the support vehicle. We lived in a parallel universe for two months… and, for both of us, there was a huge, gaping void at the end of it. But we finished.
I hope that he doesn’t mind me telling you this but Geoff Brink, the unicyclist, also fell down a few years ago. He went into rehab to flush out the accumulated poisons of drugs and alcohol from his body that threatened to ruin his life. It’s one hell of a story, that only he can do justice to.
But Geoff got up. He not only got up but he climbed on to a unicycle only two months after learning to ride it and pedalled it for 2,000km over a period of two months.. I watched him do that. Every minute. Every kilometre. And I will never know how he did it. It’s about how you finish.
So, we South Africans can stumble over each other to grumble and moan about how much it cost our country to stage the 2010 World Cup, how many houses could have built instead of shiny shrines to soccer. How many people could have been uplifted. All very well.
Some may say, now that our throw-everything-at-it party is over, that our country remains down on one knee. I would point out that, down on one knee we may be, but our hands are held up high in triumph. Because, in one short month, we won over the world. And, as Nick Vujicic keeps telling us, it’s how you finish that counts.
This chirpy little World Cup ad for the London Guardian and Observer newspapers put an extra spring in my Diski Dance this morning…
Aren’t you glad I shared that with you?