Winter is a blast!
Do we huddle down and slowly disassemble or get out into the maelstrom and live large?
Which one is it: hibernate or oceanate?
Every time I stride out onto an East Cape beach, the sand and rock glistening and fully stretched by the full moon, the sun warm on my back, the night breeze still coming cool on my pip, I think: “This is how to live a full, healthy, life.
“This is how to keep the retread-required knees going — by strengthening surrounding muscle, this is how to release the black dog to run free and wild again.”
And then, when I crash on my bed, phone up, doomscrolling the latest outrage of the orange demagogue and friends, and fixate on global and national politics, the black dog of winter is on my bed, urging me to scroll up, just one more video of jester and alarmingly accurate soothsayer Jimmy Kimmel roasting the rising US regime and fall of democracy, or cats doing the cutest darn thing …
Yeah, by the time I roll off that bed, I am literally injured.
Muscles are sore, my back aches, my mind buzzes. Doomscrolling, it should come with a public health warning.
We keep on protesting against the damage digital tech does to children, but I wonder if we are not all just as hooked.
I see the end!
I have walked hard and strategically for one who abandoned his legs for years.
But the 5km finish lines are there and as I make my push to proudly hand in my non-existing barcode, thinking, well the knees held out sort-of, there is a rumble and whoosh.
Noooo! I am being passed by a woman pushing a pram with an infant having fun inside!
This is beyond humiliating. Or possibly a moment of wonderful celebration.
I see there is a father running alongside her — but why isn’t he pushing the pram?
There is one “hill” in the brand-new Orient parkrun — a faint rise in the bricked paths between the pools, about 30m from said finish line — and this mom actually uses it to speed up, pram, infant and all.
I see her man start to fall back. He tries a little spurt of speed, but this Madonna mama has dropped us all.
The okes trot in a little beaten but full of admiration.
I see a lot of this along an extraordinary course, which takes on a new dimension when you actually put takkies on the ground.
You literally feel the infrastructure and what is happening to it from your soles.
The start, near the gate at the pools, is excellent, if you can ignore the uncollected bags and gaping hole in the main building where a roller door has stood broken for how long.
And a city refuse truck parked for a few days now with a flat tyre and load on the back.
But it is all good, until you hit the Orient Pier. From here on, for 768m out and back, you have entered the futuristic utopia-dystopia world.
The view of the port, with Transnet’s 1,559 tonne Italeni hopper dredger digging out the entrance, a sailboat on the horizon, kelp and grey-headed gulls wheeling, the Quigney looking so familiar, comforting and resilient, and of course, our urban core, the wildly exquisite, under-pressure, Nahoon Point Nature Reserve.
It’s an out-of-body moment, but right now our eyes are grounded.
This pier, scuffed and scoured, is a concoction of colonial origins, liberation neglect and sloppy maintenance. But it too stands proud, resilient and integral to our socio-psychological centre, our cultural heritage, a survivor like the rest of us.
It may not be that loved by officialdom, but the public sure do dig it!
Anglers, runners, soul searchers and the odd official van taking a jolly out into the ocean to have a smoke.
Its bedrock engineering DNA remains in place 102 years after coming into existence as a rough breakwater in 1924, and then, in 1927, as a “super-imposed” 384m-long promenade pier with seating bays, and wood-and-brass entrance gates, turnstiles and lanterns.
In terms of colonial nostalgia, it was a place of stylish masters and madams strolling out in billowing dresses and suffocating corsets.
In 2026, we are a grittier society struggling with inequality, the hangover of these systems.
Those corsets and tie-down bonnet creations are replaced by peaks, Lycra and high-tech takkies which must pick a way between gnarly, pitted cement, sand, rusting railway tracks used to build the pier, and some smooth cement.
Promenading is replaced by an elderly woman seated on the rough cement of those larney “benches” with blood on her nose being taken care of by volunteer marshals. She is in shock after a hard fall but is holding the line.
Earlier, during our race briefing, the race director warns they are “running out of medics”.
It is a treacherous and stupendous course all at once. Here in the liminal zone, we all huff and puff, pound and pitter patter.
We are a mixed bunch, as we have always been. But here, in the wasteland of ocean-and-politics battered public infrastructure, we also endure.
And it’s such fabulous experience, that we return in the afternoon with Friesland milkshakes in hand, and stroll out, still in takkies, to the lighthouse at the end of a world now populated with anglers.
What a stinky, lekka bunch! Covered in bait, with their wheelie carts and Assassin bags showing clever arrangements.
There is great excitement as an unattended rod goes into a bend.
An angler rushes up from the lower tier and leaps onto the parapet to start the fight. Others abandon their stations and rush alongside to leer and cheer.
When the catch appears, there is a collective groan — another “skate”!
They would not say this if they were walking into the EL Museum’s maritime gallery where a 5.3m manta ray caught in 1948 floats and flows majestically in the air.
I see a plastic cooldrink bottle stuffed with small fish and a little water — live bait or dead bait.
But this is how it goes in angling, and later we enjoy a fish and chips from our local shop. It’s how life is right now.
Messy, mangled and magnificent.
The pier anglers chirp and growl, and one young woman leaps out offering to take our picture, saying she once worked for some “fine dining” restaurant.
She takes pics against the lighthouse, now decorated with some rando spray-can warrior’s anarchic tag.
Yet, it’s easy to rise above all this grime and grit — just stand at the very end of the pier and look down and out.
The waters are dark and green, full of mystery and danger. It’s scary to think of how I have swum around this orb poking into the ocean with someone called Joy, to whom we swimmers famously do not say ‘no’!
But out there, it is all dark and light greens and blues, ships, birds in the big watery desert.
Your hobo-bohemian reporter prefers being out here than in the air-conned office.
Parked off at the Southern Cross Cruises cafe on the first floor overlooking the harbour on Thursday, I hear about how thousands of youths are discovering this oceanic treasure for the first time.
I ponder the derelict places in this port, the recent being the fencing out of the community from a strip of land next to the Orient Pier.
I pray harder than any atheist should, of the days when even just a handful of these children are ignited by that one boat trip to take a career in marine science. I pray they will fight hard to keep on defending this natural, urban glory.
I am slightly without hope, but then again, I look on the faces and body language of my 546 parkrunners and see so much determination.
It’s grit versus grit out here.
Surely, this phenomenal public spirit will win out against gangsterism — in corporations, the state or the private sphere.
Surely.
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I and 18-million others have had a look at The Offline Club reporting on Insta on a slow night of reading, crafting and personal reflection, “meeting people, [with] live piano and vinyl and not single phone in sight” taking place on Tuesdays at an historic church in Amsterdam.
Then, in another post, maths professor and public commentator Hannah Fry spoke of making her own “AI agent” and it went “completely rogue”, using her credit card to buy paper clips, emailed all sorts of journalists trying to sell novelty mugs, “and then it leaked all of my passwords to the internet”.
She goes on to tell the story of the director of AI safety at Meta, Summer Yue, having to run to the wall and pull the plug on her computer to stop her AI agent from deleting all her personal emails.
One thing that ought to wrench our eyeballs from screens is when the climate is hammering on our roofs, doors and windows.
As I write this, our WhatsApp, Facebook and email are buzzing with forecasts about the full might of the clashing giants about to clobber us — an Antarctic winter coming up from the south has collided with one or two of those weird hot air pulses from the equator, creating the second mutant monster within two weeks.
Sadly, these climate events are influenced by human behaviour. These low-pressure storms, often called mid-latitude cyclones, are amplified by air and ocean pollution, causing everything to heat up and go bonkers.
The forecast was bleak. Another cut-off low from Tuesday to Thursday but not like last week where the COL unloaded in a band across central SA; this one is on our heads.
The SA Weather Service’s euphemistic purple “80%” patch extended right over the province. It was talking about 100mm to 200mm of rain — and that’s just on Tuesday.
There would be gales and seven-metre swells, possibly a storm surge. And snow on the highlands.
This general and increasingly deadly Armageddon effect happens when one of your happily bobbing-along southern low-pressure storms gets arrested in its easterly path by a massive Mr Plod filled with hot air, in this case the Atlantic high, which is expected to move in and dominate in an increasingly familiar band right around the south of SA.
We can expect a lot of tears. The impacts of these deluges on our barely administered and maintained infrastructure, on the poor huddled in their hundreds of thousands in shacks with naked illegal wire sparking and flying about, with uncollected plastic packaging clogging storm drains … It is devastating, and there is always a body count.
‘I still feel free!’ the city’s veteran woman motorcyclist and hairdresser Alrose Vice said.
Fifty-five years ago, Vice “borrowed” her brother’s motorcycle.
She was 16, living with her family in Euwin Court in Webb Street, Southernwood.
It was 1971. All the boys had bikes, mostly 50ccs if you were a teen.
She wanted to ride, but girls did not ride, she says.
Quietly spoken, measured, thoughtful, this woman, now 71, has touched the heads of many local women, turning their locks into fabulous creations, imparting pride and spreading confidence.
That first ride was with her cousin Bernard who was sweet on a girl, but needed his cuzzy to come along to kuier in Cambridge. To be his wingman.
Teen romance was a frightening, but thrilling experience and even in the feral ’70s in Slummies, it was an ordeal.
But the ride. Just pure adrenalin.
Before climbing on, she was given “the basics”, and, as it was for the analogue generation, “I went for it!”
Even though it was dark — the rendezvous was at 8pm — “I was not scared. I wanted to do this. I was the laat lammetjie by six years.
“I had brothers. When I was eight they had bicycles. What they did, I wanted to do.”
But her own bike would only come a few years later, when, at 18, she met Deryck Vice, who was a few years older at 21.
He had a proper motorcycle and he was a track racing fan.
Rides to the Grand Prix circuit, then a prized sporting arena with a recent Formula 1 history, was beyond exciting.
She was met with a scene — bikes roaring past, the speed, “all the people in leathers, it was awesome”.
And then a visit to the pits where it was action stations, revving, “cars, bikes, people buzzing around, working on engines ...”
Attraction was in the air, but the couple’s chariot was a humble 100cc Yamaha.
“I fancied him and he was glad I enjoyed bikes. We had something in common.”
Free time was spent going to the beach for the day, “with our record player” — a boxy machine with two speakers making the top half, which, when the contraption was unclipped, would pull apart and stand aside the bottom half which would spin the plaate — records.
She was studying hairdressing, he was becoming an electrical fitter at the Cambridge diesel depot.
He bought a 650cc Triumph Thunderbird. The dating intensified. Deryck chips in: “She asked me ‘Why don’t we just get married?”
They did, she was 20, he was 23 and the open road beckoned.
Fun lay at the end of every long, fabulous road — biker rallies.
They have done 45 Buffalo Rallies — every single one that was ever held.
It was time for her to fulfil a life’s dream and get her own bike.
Deryck rebuilt a BMW 650 for her and her first ride to a bike meet at the Beach Burger at Eastern Beach, a favourite local biker hangout, was difficult.
The bike was unsettling — the BMW boxer engine has two horizontal pistons and these “pots” have an unnerving — or exhilarating — sideways vibration or wobble.
She arrived at the burger jaunt to see only two women on bikes, and she was one of them.
A bike dealer and rider, known as “Rockey”, told her: “I have got just the bike for you.”
On Monday morning, at the start of business, Alrose was first through the door.
She rode a 750cc Suzuki road bike off the shop floor.
“It was brilliant!”
She had written her learner’s test and went for her yard test or “drivers”.
“The traffic cop said: ‘Where is your bike? Did you ride here? Go up that road, go round the island, and come back here’.”
She did it. “When I got back, he handed me my licence.”
The riding they did. “Every year, for our holiday, we would be on the bikes.”
They saw every province, every corner, did many rallies.
They were a married couple, but she rode her own bike.
As biking grew around them, so did the inevitable desire to form a club.
“They were the in thing.”
They were involved in founding Road Runners MCC and Ulysses East London and a hot rod club.
As the years passed, so did the bikes underneath her.
In 40 years, she has owned about 10 bikes, mostly in the 700cc range.
Bikes, she says, are made for men, not women.
They are too tall but there are men who fix that. They drop seat heights, shave saddles, lower swing arms and suspensions.
“I have chosen comfort — my feet must be able to touch the ground when I stop.”
You would not think so judging by the size of her latest bike, a 700cc Honda Deauville, which has large fairings and a touring feel.
But the difference was made when “Deryck cut the seat down so my feet can touch the ground”.
In 50 years of riding, she has seen women take to bikes in greater numbers, and estimates about 20 ride in her city alone.
Like men, they die on their bikes too. But, touch wood, she has never had a high-speed crash.
Bikes falling over while stationary — tipping incidents — aplenty but not a broken bone, scar nor piece of surgical metal.
“Women have realised that bikes mean independence, freedom and adrenalin!”
And they encourage each other.
What was her top speed? A modest but make-no-mistake 170km/h.
Yes, some men have been “chauvinistic” and felt threatened, but only a few.
Women riders “put them in their place”.
For the most part, “men have been so encouraging”.
“Deryck [still] loves it that I ride with him.”
“I am 71 now and I still love it. To smell that air, the amazing aroma of the bush.
“I still feel free.”
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Now, since being cheerful is what keeps us going, there is this fascinating social curiosity with our oceans and rivers.
I was your loyal observer of the storm swell which rose along with the full moon last week.
All along the coast the surf pushed up against dunes, scooped up rocks from the ocean bed and tossed them on the sands, and, in our case, pushed over the sandy berm at Cefani and flowed into the increasingly salinated and suffering estuary.
A long dry period had caused evaporation and the way estuaries work as nurseries for so many marine species, rain is needed to push these sandbars aside and let fish and all creatures small and large in and out.
It was the arrival of so many people at the scene that was remarkable. There was a sense that this was something unusual. And it was.
On a day so blue and clear, if you stood and faced the sandy horizon with the ocean in the background and waited, it suddenly appeared — a 50cm wall of water with a big lip of white foam would spread out over a 200m stretch and flow in a half-lemon shape down to the estuary.
People got so excited one fella stood right in the middle of it — with his happy dog! Our video shows him being OK, but the mutt gets slowly enveloped until you can see it is being washed away.
But this is a gentle flood, and the doggie is slowly released. It finds its footing and bounds over to us to have a good old shake.
What are these two okes doing at the front edge of the estuary? One guy is fishing using a spoon; the other is throwing a net.
Dancing. So many people shrivel up like a walnut and say: “I don’t dance.”
But you do. Just not in public.
At some point in your life, you tapped a heel, did a jazz jiggle, bopped your head slightly, clicked your fingers, hummed a tune, did some silent, raspberry lip-synching of an anthemic chorus line looping in your brain.
The shrinking away from public space is a metaphor of the times; few people, but for the very brave or mendacious, appear to want to take a public stand or make a statement.
Hell, I remember topless dancing on late-night SABC TV once in 1995, but let’s not go there today.
Let’s clear up that stupid platitude that dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.
That is the dark ages calling, a time when ideas and expression were discouraged, but every culture seems to have some form of disapproval of intimacy, and it’s mostly always about power and control — and freedom being crushed.
In my day, we loved the saying, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.”
I am more than delighted at how dance is utterly embedded in SA culture, it is part of culture, and no matter how poor or downtrodden we may be, when people sing and dance, they do so beautifully.
In the ’80s I recall being choked up at the soaring intensity of the singing at funerals across our province.
And, of course, the distillation of public response into the fierce — and fearsome — anti-apartheid war dance, the toyi toyi.
There is an endless array of dance forms, from celebratory events, to tightly-organised dance-card ballroom affairs, to twerking and high art — Jeannette Ginslov danced naked in the early ’90s.
Her work is far from sleazy, it is painful, disturbing, yet also liberating, evoking a ritual of self-discovery and liberation through the body and the way we move in it.
Sensual? Erotic? Well that is in the eye of the beholder, but I’d prefer to make that decision of interpretation myself, rather than some Praetorian censor from any ilk or corner.
As a banned Eastern Cape journalist in 1986, I watched censors ban a cabaret, Famous Dead Man: He Will F.. You Up by Matthew Krouse and friends, which pilloried the violence of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd.
They were offended by the searing, raw critique of their assassinated leader.
I was offended by the row of three or four grey-suited men, one of whom had a balding pate that caught a crack of light coming into the Black Sun venue from Hillbrow’s Abel Road.
Getting back to Calvinism and reverberating cross-generational fear, I took an 83-year-old friend to a night of song at our local senior’s complex on Friday night.
Wittily billed as “Karen’s Kitchen”, and it was to be an “evening of entertainment with the well-known Kerry Hiles”.
My date and I hacked our way between the houses, to get to the hall and, bingo! It was totally full.
Hiles is more than a singer, she is a multifaceted social builder.
You will hear her voice in radio adverts, possibly lifts “Mind the closing door”; see her rocking out on base with her kief crew, doing a popular musical at the Guild Theatre and just being an all-round mensch.
I had no idea what to expect. The audience was senior, high age, and then I had a look in the mirror — that was me too. Not long to go now.
What? No base? She arrived simply with a breadboard-sized computer and a tall tech gumpole, some kind of futuristic speaker.
All she had was her art and a lovely jazzy outfit to match those long curly locks.
Hiles is all about heart and connection.
She paid homage to her music teacher, the groovy, incredible educator Alan Webster, ringmaster at the jazz festival at the National Arts Festival for so many years and now headmaster at St Joseph’s Preparatory and College.
It was like the universe opened up. In this hall, where I usually vote, the songs she sang were turning on those magic dancing shoes.
The ballies had no hesitation. They were out there swingin’ it.
Compare that to the tight, terrifying parties I went to as a young teen where the thought of asking a girl to dance made my heart leap out my chest — thank you so much for spin the bottle you EL gals, for that is where I learnt to snog, teeth gnashing, the works.
Tonight was extraordinary. Jiving and turning, not wild or excessive, but with such swaying purpose.
These people had come to jol. And they knew how to. No hesitation.
Hiles was their cultural lighting rod. The dance floor was open.
Suddenly the lights flickered and it went dark.
“Loadshedding,” quipped Hiles. Yet her sound stayed on?
Then the lights were on again — this was the compere “doing the lights” for the show.
My date was not a dancer, but, whew, she was alive, chatting, and having a good time. A social dance all on its own.
Supper was 130 plates of small bites and bits, lovingly prepared by a chef and kitchen chieftainess. Ten bits per plate, 1,300 pieces plated.
The Coke was flowing, sugar rush deluxe, but why not? This was Friday night in KuGompo ...
And … the final song — after the Beatles, some Stones? Abba? — was the classic Revaux, Thibaut, Francois Comme d’habitude, made famous by Frank Sinatra in the English translation: I did it my way.
The entire sea of grey seemed to nod, not falling asleep even though we were digesting, but in a moment of recognition.
Not so much nostalgia — this is the generation that was young in the ’60s when Hendrix, Joplin and Led Zep were letting it all hang out.
It is a generation, according to my dagga oil merchant connection, that does a lot of alternative pain medication.
The best market, I was told, was among seniors.
This was a point when we were all asking ourselves, not how many summers, but how many dances we had left.
Will the next dance be in God’s ballroom?
It is so telling, so poignant, that when the clock starts running down, and we are starting to use up our ninth life, dancing is the ritual that keeps it all flowing, gives us meaning, makes us happy.
I found Jeannette Ginslov on the Internet and here is what she has to say about dance: “Freedom is about stepping into ourselves, and the full expression of ourselves, it’s about finding our boldness and brightness and our brilliance, about not shying away from who we are and what we are and becoming how we think other people see us and how we should be.”
So, in the selected lyrics of David Bowie: “Let’s dance. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues, let’s dance to the song they are playing on the radio, while colour lights up your face. Let’s sway through the crowd to an empty place. If you say run, I’ll run with you. And if you say hide, we’ll hide. Because my love for you would break my heart in two. If you should fall, into my arms and tremble like a flower. Let’s dance for fear your grace should fall, for fear tonight is all. Let’s dance under the moonlight, this serious moonlight.”
Lloyd Cairns, grandson of Cefani resort founder Lindsay, explains that sometimes gamefish, like leeries, need to get out of the river and into the ocean to grow and will behave like salmon and swim out against the incoming rush.
And the net? Well, a deep and secretive fishing society knows when and how to use it to catch prawns. It is a rare moment and requires a lot of skill, apparently.
We ask if the giant slab of rock which had been facing skywards on a single point has been lifted by these giant tides and he says while it started lifting with previous storms it has now lifted even more.
This dichotomy of digital-amplified sloth which binds us to our chairs and beds, and the wild winter dystopia — is in our social DNA.
The only time we really have to dedicate ourselves to these screens is for work, education and when the Boks play.
So here is my winter resolution: get out onto those beaches for long walks, in the beautiful post-frontal weather and even in the full blast because that stuff is mind-blowing.
I must now mount Hetty, the 1200 GSA adventure bike, and make my way into the howling wasteland to celebrate sissie’s 70th birthday.
Hang onto your hats and helmets.
Winter is a blast.
