I went to the Eagle Awards last night. It’s an advertising award dedicated to print only and apparently quite a big deal to win. Well, a big deal to people who work in advertising. To everyone else, it’s meaningless. Which is ironic since the point advertising is to seduce all those other people into buying whatever it is the advert is selling. And even more ironic is the fact that the award is judged by people who work in advertising and have been trained to see through the gimmicky techniques advertisers use to create the seduction in the first place. So, this must beg the question. Is it an award that celebrates advertising, or an award that celebrates advertisers? It is surely the latter.
And then to add to the dilemma, not only is this the case for 99% of advertising awards but 99% of the work that’s submitted into these awards never actually runs. And if it does, it runs once as a thumbnail in some completely random miniature publication, like the art director’s wife’s garage-studio yoga newsletter. Which means no one outside of the advertising fraternity is ever exposed to it. Essentially, the very people who it’s intended to seduce don’t even know it exists. And I assure you that any honest, self-respecting creative (as much of a contradiction as that may sound) will admit to this. So, this then begs a further question. What the fuck is the point?
What the fuck is the point of advertisers awarding themselves for work they’ve done that’s intended to sell products to the man on the street if he never even sees it? The more I think about it the more ridiculous it becomes. It’s like an Oscar being awarded to a director for a movie he created that no one other than those in the film industry ever saw. Or a Pulitzer being awarded to a writer for a book no one ever read.
The advertising community pats itself on the back time and time again with award after award after award for job after job after job that, theoretically, don’t actually exist. How fucked up is that? What difference are they making? It’s actually pathetic. And when you go to these award ceremonies, you see these ad geniuses milling around in their skinny black jeans acting as though their work is so mind-blowingly amazing that should a homeless child dying of kwashiorkor see and understand their ad, it would be as though the child had just received a life-saving injection of protein without even using a needle. Because after all, advertising saves lives.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
I once met a life coach.
I was sitting at the Seattle Coffee Company on Kloof Street in Cape Town (the one opposite A Store) about 4 years ago, quietly minding my own business while writing a piece for an online youth culture magazine. The 4-piece string quartet across the street added a pleasant kind of rhythm and melody to the usual street sounds of cars, scooters and incomprehensible natter from many others enjoying that Sunday morning. It was the kind of rythm you catch yourself slowly nodding your head to, then looking around to see if anyone was watching, or at least nodding with you.
I think I was writing something about being a creative, or understanding what it's like to be a creative. Oddly enough, since then my definition of 'a creative' has changed. At the time I was referring mostly to people who worked in the creative department of ad agencies. I was sympathising with all the frustrations and fears associated with such a job, trying to sound as though I had years of experience to create a true and understandable connection with whichever 'creative' might read the piece. But as I said, my definition has changed and to be honest I don't really give a fuck anymore.
So anyway, while sitting there, nodding on (not to be confused with nodding off, considering the live music from across the road and the fact that I was drinking an espresso) some random dude came up to my table, placed a piece of paper down next to my cappuccino, smiled and walked away. A little confused I picked it up and read it. I can’t remember exactly what he’d written but it was some shit about how people don’t just sit on their own and write anymore, and that he really admired what I was doing. He may have even used the term, ‘lost art’. He then went on to say that he was a life coach and that if I ever felt like meeting up for some coffee to chat about writing and life he’d love to get together. Just then, like a giant ball of pink candyfloss smacking me in the face, it hit me that he was gay and using this life coach thing as an angle to make a pass at me. Unfortunately for him I am not gay and unfortunately for me he wasn’t a gorgeous woman.
Anyway, this got me thinking about life coaches. What the fuck is a life coach? Or more importantly, how can anyone assign such a title to themselves? Coaching implies you’ve reached a point in a particular field where you’re able to teach others how to learn and excel in that same field. Just as many ex-professional sportsmen become coaches of the sport that was their profession. And it so happens that just like these regular coaches, life coaches charge for their services too. But the thing about life is that you never reach a point when you know everything there is to know about it to then be able to teach others how to live theirs. Because you’re dead.
Either these coaches should change their job title to something more appropriate, like ‘people who want to charge you for help but don’t want to study an appropriate field’. Or they should focus getting better at living their own lives and stop hitting on every guy they see sitting at a coffee shop trying to work.
I think I was writing something about being a creative, or understanding what it's like to be a creative. Oddly enough, since then my definition of 'a creative' has changed. At the time I was referring mostly to people who worked in the creative department of ad agencies. I was sympathising with all the frustrations and fears associated with such a job, trying to sound as though I had years of experience to create a true and understandable connection with whichever 'creative' might read the piece. But as I said, my definition has changed and to be honest I don't really give a fuck anymore.
So anyway, while sitting there, nodding on (not to be confused with nodding off, considering the live music from across the road and the fact that I was drinking an espresso) some random dude came up to my table, placed a piece of paper down next to my cappuccino, smiled and walked away. A little confused I picked it up and read it. I can’t remember exactly what he’d written but it was some shit about how people don’t just sit on their own and write anymore, and that he really admired what I was doing. He may have even used the term, ‘lost art’. He then went on to say that he was a life coach and that if I ever felt like meeting up for some coffee to chat about writing and life he’d love to get together. Just then, like a giant ball of pink candyfloss smacking me in the face, it hit me that he was gay and using this life coach thing as an angle to make a pass at me. Unfortunately for him I am not gay and unfortunately for me he wasn’t a gorgeous woman.
Anyway, this got me thinking about life coaches. What the fuck is a life coach? Or more importantly, how can anyone assign such a title to themselves? Coaching implies you’ve reached a point in a particular field where you’re able to teach others how to learn and excel in that same field. Just as many ex-professional sportsmen become coaches of the sport that was their profession. And it so happens that just like these regular coaches, life coaches charge for their services too. But the thing about life is that you never reach a point when you know everything there is to know about it to then be able to teach others how to live theirs. Because you’re dead.
Either these coaches should change their job title to something more appropriate, like ‘people who want to charge you for help but don’t want to study an appropriate field’. Or they should focus getting better at living their own lives and stop hitting on every guy they see sitting at a coffee shop trying to work.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Here's a question:
Why on earth are prisoners allowed to vote?
I was watching the news the night of the elections and they showed a clip of male and female prisoners, dressed in their eyesore orange and deep blue "uniforms" (respectively), queuing up inside their particular jail (I think it was Sun City) to vote for the next president of South Africa.
Until seeing this footage I hadn't given much thought to the vastly diverse range of voters we have here or where in the country they'd be casting their votes. But when seeing rows and rows of convicted criminals line up in their jail quad to voice whatever opinion or political need they may have, stuck me as utterly absurd.
Why on earth are prisoners allowed to vote?
Surely when these criminals committed whatever felony it was that landed them behind bars (and for however long), certain societal rights that used to belong to them are stripped, or at least wavered?
They chose to place themselves outside of the society when the disobeyed the rules by which it is governed, but they still somehow have a say in who (therefore how) the next to make those rules will be.
This is really fucked up if you ask me. Think of these hardened rapists and murderers, the very people responsible for our reputation as a violent and dangerous nation, actually having a say in the future of our country!
It's fucking ridiculous.
I was watching the news the night of the elections and they showed a clip of male and female prisoners, dressed in their eyesore orange and deep blue "uniforms" (respectively), queuing up inside their particular jail (I think it was Sun City) to vote for the next president of South Africa.
Until seeing this footage I hadn't given much thought to the vastly diverse range of voters we have here or where in the country they'd be casting their votes. But when seeing rows and rows of convicted criminals line up in their jail quad to voice whatever opinion or political need they may have, stuck me as utterly absurd.
Why on earth are prisoners allowed to vote?
Surely when these criminals committed whatever felony it was that landed them behind bars (and for however long), certain societal rights that used to belong to them are stripped, or at least wavered?
They chose to place themselves outside of the society when the disobeyed the rules by which it is governed, but they still somehow have a say in who (therefore how) the next to make those rules will be.
This is really fucked up if you ask me. Think of these hardened rapists and murderers, the very people responsible for our reputation as a violent and dangerous nation, actually having a say in the future of our country!
It's fucking ridiculous.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Our felon president.
What does the rest of the world think?
Our new president is guilty of rape and corruption. Although suspiciously not having been convicted of either of these, anyone with the slightest concern for our little "haven" at the end of Africa knows them to be true and that it really is about who you know, not what you know. Come to think of it, he's also guilty of stupidity (since he doesn't know much), which he assigned to himself the minute he blurted out that a bit of running water and a good lather was all he needed to ensure he wouldn't get AIDS. And if all of this is the truth, what does it say about our legal system?
Jesus, when you lay the facts out it's quite scary how corrupt and fucked things really are down here. What kind of self-respecting country anywhere in the world, no matter what their political history, would even consider allowing a man suspected of these atrocities to call the shots? Never mind the fact that he actually thinks taking a shower will cure him of one of the world's deadliest diseases. (And I've heard him sing - he doesn't have the voice of an angel.)
Well, that country would be us. South Africa. Where anything goes. Where people are allowed to drive drunk (so long as you have a bit of moola in your wallet to pay off the cops). Where someone will kill you for as little as loose change. Where an electrified fence is fashionable. Where having sex with virgins cures AIDS. And where the citizens of one of the most culturally integrated societies in the world are still calling each other racists.
My god!
I mentioned self-respecting up there as a crucial element to this vent. There are countries (most of which are in Africa and one of which happens to be our neighbour) that instate similar fools. But they don't qualify as self-respecting. And neither will we soon enough.
This all begs one big question:
What the fuck?
What the fuck is a country like Switzerland going to think when Jacob Zuma, whose level of education equates to that of a child in Std. 5, stands up to accept responsibility for 43 million people? I kind of remember standard five. We learnt really important stuff. Like long division, which way cursive is meant to slope and what colours are used in the national flag.
And what the fuck is going to happen when Zuma's followers take his song, "Pass me my machine gun" a little too literally. I mean, if he's as educated as a thirteen year old, then surely there'll be at least a handful of his followers that are even less educated. And I doubt a curriculum anything less than Std. 5 would have included Analogy 101 to help them understand that "Pass me my machine gun" doesn't actually mean, pass me my machine gun. Or does it?
And what the fuck will happen to the confidence in an organisation willing to donate funds to the saving of our rich and beautiful wildlife, when they find out the ruler of these lands is a man who will far sooner use the money for his next private jet than to curb the extinction of one of our cats?
This is a joke and the rest of the world are laughing at us.
Our new president is guilty of rape and corruption. Although suspiciously not having been convicted of either of these, anyone with the slightest concern for our little "haven" at the end of Africa knows them to be true and that it really is about who you know, not what you know. Come to think of it, he's also guilty of stupidity (since he doesn't know much), which he assigned to himself the minute he blurted out that a bit of running water and a good lather was all he needed to ensure he wouldn't get AIDS. And if all of this is the truth, what does it say about our legal system?
Jesus, when you lay the facts out it's quite scary how corrupt and fucked things really are down here. What kind of self-respecting country anywhere in the world, no matter what their political history, would even consider allowing a man suspected of these atrocities to call the shots? Never mind the fact that he actually thinks taking a shower will cure him of one of the world's deadliest diseases. (And I've heard him sing - he doesn't have the voice of an angel.)
Well, that country would be us. South Africa. Where anything goes. Where people are allowed to drive drunk (so long as you have a bit of moola in your wallet to pay off the cops). Where someone will kill you for as little as loose change. Where an electrified fence is fashionable. Where having sex with virgins cures AIDS. And where the citizens of one of the most culturally integrated societies in the world are still calling each other racists.
My god!
I mentioned self-respecting up there as a crucial element to this vent. There are countries (most of which are in Africa and one of which happens to be our neighbour) that instate similar fools. But they don't qualify as self-respecting. And neither will we soon enough.
This all begs one big question:
What the fuck?
What the fuck is a country like Switzerland going to think when Jacob Zuma, whose level of education equates to that of a child in Std. 5, stands up to accept responsibility for 43 million people? I kind of remember standard five. We learnt really important stuff. Like long division, which way cursive is meant to slope and what colours are used in the national flag.
And what the fuck is going to happen when Zuma's followers take his song, "Pass me my machine gun" a little too literally. I mean, if he's as educated as a thirteen year old, then surely there'll be at least a handful of his followers that are even less educated. And I doubt a curriculum anything less than Std. 5 would have included Analogy 101 to help them understand that "Pass me my machine gun" doesn't actually mean, pass me my machine gun. Or does it?
And what the fuck will happen to the confidence in an organisation willing to donate funds to the saving of our rich and beautiful wildlife, when they find out the ruler of these lands is a man who will far sooner use the money for his next private jet than to curb the extinction of one of our cats?
This is a joke and the rest of the world are laughing at us.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
I wrote the title page for a website called Abletown.
This is how it went...
This is for the creatives.
For those who strive to make something from nothing - from blank screens and CMYK, to covers of magazines; from blank film and digital prints, to landscapes hanging in national galleries; from uncomfortable silence to beautiful melody; from blank paper to scribbles, then poetry. This is for those who rely on the ordinary to inspire the extraordinary. This is for their work and for what they believe – as well as for everything else in between.
This realises why a tired eye glares at a printer that’s run out of ink. It realises the frustration for a voice that goes hoarse in the middle of a verse. It realises the patience for that perfect shot and the disappointment thereafter for the price of a print. It realises that writers get writer's.........and just can’t find the words. It realises the worry that the work might not be best, and that it cannot be judged on the basis of a test. It realises when “realises” is being overused.
This understands the frustration and feeling of doubt, but also understands that there’s passion throughout. It’s passion that controls our thin thread of sanity and sets us apart. Without creativity the world would be flat. It would be black and white and Times New Roman; accounts, stats and the horizon much closer. It needs the graffiti and open-mike nights; it needs the tattoos and outer box in sight. It needs your pen and your pad, your mouse and your thumb. It needs your lens and your trigger, your guitar and your drum. It needs the world to see what you do. So put up your dukes, it’s your turn to prove.
This is for the creatives.
For those who strive to make something from nothing - from blank screens and CMYK, to covers of magazines; from blank film and digital prints, to landscapes hanging in national galleries; from uncomfortable silence to beautiful melody; from blank paper to scribbles, then poetry. This is for those who rely on the ordinary to inspire the extraordinary. This is for their work and for what they believe – as well as for everything else in between.
This realises why a tired eye glares at a printer that’s run out of ink. It realises the frustration for a voice that goes hoarse in the middle of a verse. It realises the patience for that perfect shot and the disappointment thereafter for the price of a print. It realises that writers get writer's.........and just can’t find the words. It realises the worry that the work might not be best, and that it cannot be judged on the basis of a test. It realises when “realises” is being overused.
This understands the frustration and feeling of doubt, but also understands that there’s passion throughout. It’s passion that controls our thin thread of sanity and sets us apart. Without creativity the world would be flat. It would be black and white and Times New Roman; accounts, stats and the horizon much closer. It needs the graffiti and open-mike nights; it needs the tattoos and outer box in sight. It needs your pen and your pad, your mouse and your thumb. It needs your lens and your trigger, your guitar and your drum. It needs the world to see what you do. So put up your dukes, it’s your turn to prove.
I once wrote a story called, "Should I stay or should I go?"
This is how it went...
I don’t know.
From my perspective, there’s regret in that sentence. As if a decision to stay or not influences an outcome - that if one choses the one over the other (which is inevitable) the other would or could have been the better one.
If you’re now confused, it’s ok. Confusion makes peoples faces look funny. Like skin coloured crinkle paper. I bet your face looks hilarious right now.
Regret is a strange thing though. If you ask me, it’s a feeling made up in your mind. In reality, it shouldn’t exist. Think about it…I can’t regret not doing something because I didn’t do it. So, I therefore have no frame of reference for whether it would or wouldn’t have been a better choice, had I chosen it over what I did do. So, whether we decide to stay or decide to go doesn’t really matter. It’s what happens in between that’s more interesting and more likely to make your face crinkle with confusion.
I had to make a decision to stay or go a few months back. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I had gone but I decided to stay and got beaten up, sworn at and robbed by a 13-year-old girl.
I was somewhere in between the sidelines of an amateur rugby field in London, watching amateur rugby players trying their best to look as professional as they could, and hunched over in a pink leather chair in my living room when I experienced my first teenage assault. In socio-economic terms, I experienced first-hand proof of how Western society has, in many cases, failed dismally in its attempt to raise and nurture a generation of eager and ambitious adolescents.
It was on this Sunday morning, around 3am, that my definition of ‘chav’ finally made perfect sense. Now I believe, under normal circumstances, the ability to describe something is made a lot easier and clearer when writing it down, with enough time to think about it. But unless you’ve seen or had an experience with a chav yourself, you’ll never really know – and these circumstances were certainly not normal either. However, for the sake of this story, think of the word as describing uneducated, lower class scum with bad attitudes and worse teeth. These vermin, who shouldn’t be entitled any interaction with well-bred, well-cultured human beings on any sort of level, are so devoid of any half decent behaviour that I have decided, without any exception, that their collective noun should never be written with a capital letter.
From 12pm in London, trains and tubes stop running, busses are few and far between and cabs take precedence. At the time, I was new there and made the mistake of waiting for a bus instead of using my last ten quid to pay for a taxi home. Quid, for those of you who have never had the opportunity of experiencing London (or Mud Island, as the rest of the world affectionately refers to it), is a colloquial term used for pound, as in British currency.
This mistake and it’s magnitude unbeknownst to me at the time would later reaffirm my belief in questioning whether the mindless dregs of society are, in fact, needed in this often fucked up world we live in. It would also tighten my own understanding of the importance and value of money, and more specifically, ten pounds (quid).
Despite the hour of the morning and the sharp iciness in the air, strangers were walking past me in both directions - just like most places it seems, humans everywhere. No matter what time of the day, there always seem to be people meandering toward their own personal destinations; some in the search of something meaningful along the way or at least aiming in a certain direction and others who really couldn’t give a shit. At the time, it wasn’t surprising or something I took note of, as I was one of them and with my own reasons for being there. However, when two drunken 13-year-old girls came bouncing up to the bus stop I quickly became very aware of just how dark and cold that morning actually was. Classically speaking there is no way two 13-year-old-girls should have been out on their own so early on a Sunday morning. If anything they should have been fast asleep under pink barbie duvets and dreaming about rose petals and Sunday school. But not these girls – they were not only far too energetic for 3am, but they were also chavs. So, only three assumptions made sense to me; either their mothers were not much more than half a dozen years older than them, or they were on crack, or both.
The one girl was chanting lyrics to a song I assume she’d composed about the other (who was now skipping circles around the bus stop). From what it sounded like, the song was about her just having had sex with some guy. The name of the guy (who I can only assume was also a chav), or the colour of his eyes, or his hair, or any other trait that I thought a teenage girl might dwell on had no influence on the lyrics. She had chosen rather to create a graphic sing-along-song, telling those close enough to hear, the exact details of how and where what part of his anatomy had been in which part of hers. [I instinctively choose to neglect the fact that this guy had most likely just committed a statutory sex crime, since these are chavs we’re talking about. Chavs with only a little more culture, moral belief and education than a Cambodian street dog making Cambodian street dog babies on the steps of the Angkor Watt].
I’ve been in a few situations, as I would think we all have, when I’ve had to adopt my most convincing uninterested, pretending to pay no attention demeanor. And most times I’ve managed to divert any sort of attention that could have come my way, thankful for not having to find out how I may have dealt with it. But not this time.
This time, I became the poor bastard that would have to deal with abuse from Satan’s offspring.
The one skipping turned her attention to skipping circles around me instead, in time and to the beat of her accomplice’s song. The vulnerability I was feeling while being intimidated by two young females made it that much harder for me to filter my options on how to handle my new fans and I’m sure (just like those Cambodian street dogs) they could smell the fear too. In my defence though, I didn’t have many options since these were girls and unfortunately still entitled to the correct gentlemanly treatment I’d grown up to believe to be very black and white – up until that point in my life at least.
Half way around her fifth rotation she whipped the hat I was wearing off my head, stuffed it down her tracksuit pants and ran across the road. My first reaction, given the lyrics of that goddamn song, had been the wish for a black cab en route to its own destination to be speeding past at the exact time she set foot into the street. However, upon returning from the chav side I would much later think of it rather as good subject matter for a retold experience and the best reason I’ll ever have for washing my hat.
The hat is my favourite and one that I bought in a small backward town called Glenwood Springs in Colorado, so I wasn’t about to laugh it off and run away with my tail between my legs. I started off shouting at her to give it back, then telling her, then asking nicely and just before I began begging she asked for money in exchange. I only had 10 quid on me, which seemed unreasonable to give away so easily - being an unemployed rookie in London. However, the hat has a lot of sentimental value so I compromised and decided that I’d hold the note out and do the whole OK-count-to-three-then-swap thing. In an effort to regain some dignity and come out better than her, my plan was to grab the hat, pocket the money and turn around and walk away. But the fact that that’s the most clichéd strategy in primary school politics meant she was thinking the exact same thing and combined with her junkie ferret-like instincts she snatched the tenner, put my hat back in her pants and ran away again. Fuck!
Now with my bottom lip very close to being trodden on I was £10 down, hatless and hastily turning from intimidated and vulnerable to angry and extremely caddish - all the while having those fucking lyrics waft around me like the stench of an ineffective toilet spray.
Since she had stolen my best means of ammunition against any chav, money, all I had to rely on was my vocabulary and choice of words therein. I can’t remember exactly what I said but she eventually held up her end of the deal and removed my hat from her pants and put it back on my head (yup, pretty siff).
Although I had managed to retrieve my precious headgear, the thought of its own journey (and respective destinations) as well as the fact that I’d paid over R150 to reroute it home, did nothing to simmer my rapidly boiling blood. The little reptiles continued their skipping and signing, clearly aware of my frustration because little Miss inbred kept asking me what was wrong and why I was angry. Surprisingly, she managed to dig deep enough through her layers of bad upbringing and offer to give me my money back. But the heat of my blood and disappointment with humanity had fueled my obstinacy and poisoned my tongue, to the point that all I managed to muster was, “No! Keep the fucking money and use it to get your teeth fixed you little brat.”
I think the world stopped spinning for a millisecond in reaction to the look that she spat at me and in reaction to the world, her leg and foot set off on their own journey – their destination, my crotch.
Finally the bus arrived while I was crouched over in a man’s most vulnerable pose with my hands on my balls feeling all kinds of pain coursing through my stomach. Even though I had no physical ache in my mind, something in there definitely hurt too.
Who knows what else might have happened that night if I had used the £10 to get home in a cab, bringing my destination closer quicker and in less agony? But the fact that I decided to stay and wait for the bus left me £10 down anyway and with first hand insight (and foot for that matter) into the direction the world is headed and perhaps a sneak preview of it’s own possible destination.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
From my perspective, there’s regret in that sentence. As if a decision to stay or not influences an outcome - that if one choses the one over the other (which is inevitable) the other would or could have been the better one.
If you’re now confused, it’s ok. Confusion makes peoples faces look funny. Like skin coloured crinkle paper. I bet your face looks hilarious right now.
Regret is a strange thing though. If you ask me, it’s a feeling made up in your mind. In reality, it shouldn’t exist. Think about it…I can’t regret not doing something because I didn’t do it. So, I therefore have no frame of reference for whether it would or wouldn’t have been a better choice, had I chosen it over what I did do. So, whether we decide to stay or decide to go doesn’t really matter. It’s what happens in between that’s more interesting and more likely to make your face crinkle with confusion.
I had to make a decision to stay or go a few months back. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I had gone but I decided to stay and got beaten up, sworn at and robbed by a 13-year-old girl.
I was somewhere in between the sidelines of an amateur rugby field in London, watching amateur rugby players trying their best to look as professional as they could, and hunched over in a pink leather chair in my living room when I experienced my first teenage assault. In socio-economic terms, I experienced first-hand proof of how Western society has, in many cases, failed dismally in its attempt to raise and nurture a generation of eager and ambitious adolescents.
It was on this Sunday morning, around 3am, that my definition of ‘chav’ finally made perfect sense. Now I believe, under normal circumstances, the ability to describe something is made a lot easier and clearer when writing it down, with enough time to think about it. But unless you’ve seen or had an experience with a chav yourself, you’ll never really know – and these circumstances were certainly not normal either. However, for the sake of this story, think of the word as describing uneducated, lower class scum with bad attitudes and worse teeth. These vermin, who shouldn’t be entitled any interaction with well-bred, well-cultured human beings on any sort of level, are so devoid of any half decent behaviour that I have decided, without any exception, that their collective noun should never be written with a capital letter.
From 12pm in London, trains and tubes stop running, busses are few and far between and cabs take precedence. At the time, I was new there and made the mistake of waiting for a bus instead of using my last ten quid to pay for a taxi home. Quid, for those of you who have never had the opportunity of experiencing London (or Mud Island, as the rest of the world affectionately refers to it), is a colloquial term used for pound, as in British currency.
This mistake and it’s magnitude unbeknownst to me at the time would later reaffirm my belief in questioning whether the mindless dregs of society are, in fact, needed in this often fucked up world we live in. It would also tighten my own understanding of the importance and value of money, and more specifically, ten pounds (quid).
Despite the hour of the morning and the sharp iciness in the air, strangers were walking past me in both directions - just like most places it seems, humans everywhere. No matter what time of the day, there always seem to be people meandering toward their own personal destinations; some in the search of something meaningful along the way or at least aiming in a certain direction and others who really couldn’t give a shit. At the time, it wasn’t surprising or something I took note of, as I was one of them and with my own reasons for being there. However, when two drunken 13-year-old girls came bouncing up to the bus stop I quickly became very aware of just how dark and cold that morning actually was. Classically speaking there is no way two 13-year-old-girls should have been out on their own so early on a Sunday morning. If anything they should have been fast asleep under pink barbie duvets and dreaming about rose petals and Sunday school. But not these girls – they were not only far too energetic for 3am, but they were also chavs. So, only three assumptions made sense to me; either their mothers were not much more than half a dozen years older than them, or they were on crack, or both.
The one girl was chanting lyrics to a song I assume she’d composed about the other (who was now skipping circles around the bus stop). From what it sounded like, the song was about her just having had sex with some guy. The name of the guy (who I can only assume was also a chav), or the colour of his eyes, or his hair, or any other trait that I thought a teenage girl might dwell on had no influence on the lyrics. She had chosen rather to create a graphic sing-along-song, telling those close enough to hear, the exact details of how and where what part of his anatomy had been in which part of hers. [I instinctively choose to neglect the fact that this guy had most likely just committed a statutory sex crime, since these are chavs we’re talking about. Chavs with only a little more culture, moral belief and education than a Cambodian street dog making Cambodian street dog babies on the steps of the Angkor Watt].
I’ve been in a few situations, as I would think we all have, when I’ve had to adopt my most convincing uninterested, pretending to pay no attention demeanor. And most times I’ve managed to divert any sort of attention that could have come my way, thankful for not having to find out how I may have dealt with it. But not this time.
This time, I became the poor bastard that would have to deal with abuse from Satan’s offspring.
The one skipping turned her attention to skipping circles around me instead, in time and to the beat of her accomplice’s song. The vulnerability I was feeling while being intimidated by two young females made it that much harder for me to filter my options on how to handle my new fans and I’m sure (just like those Cambodian street dogs) they could smell the fear too. In my defence though, I didn’t have many options since these were girls and unfortunately still entitled to the correct gentlemanly treatment I’d grown up to believe to be very black and white – up until that point in my life at least.
Half way around her fifth rotation she whipped the hat I was wearing off my head, stuffed it down her tracksuit pants and ran across the road. My first reaction, given the lyrics of that goddamn song, had been the wish for a black cab en route to its own destination to be speeding past at the exact time she set foot into the street. However, upon returning from the chav side I would much later think of it rather as good subject matter for a retold experience and the best reason I’ll ever have for washing my hat.
The hat is my favourite and one that I bought in a small backward town called Glenwood Springs in Colorado, so I wasn’t about to laugh it off and run away with my tail between my legs. I started off shouting at her to give it back, then telling her, then asking nicely and just before I began begging she asked for money in exchange. I only had 10 quid on me, which seemed unreasonable to give away so easily - being an unemployed rookie in London. However, the hat has a lot of sentimental value so I compromised and decided that I’d hold the note out and do the whole OK-count-to-three-then-swap thing. In an effort to regain some dignity and come out better than her, my plan was to grab the hat, pocket the money and turn around and walk away. But the fact that that’s the most clichéd strategy in primary school politics meant she was thinking the exact same thing and combined with her junkie ferret-like instincts she snatched the tenner, put my hat back in her pants and ran away again. Fuck!
Now with my bottom lip very close to being trodden on I was £10 down, hatless and hastily turning from intimidated and vulnerable to angry and extremely caddish - all the while having those fucking lyrics waft around me like the stench of an ineffective toilet spray.
Since she had stolen my best means of ammunition against any chav, money, all I had to rely on was my vocabulary and choice of words therein. I can’t remember exactly what I said but she eventually held up her end of the deal and removed my hat from her pants and put it back on my head (yup, pretty siff).
Although I had managed to retrieve my precious headgear, the thought of its own journey (and respective destinations) as well as the fact that I’d paid over R150 to reroute it home, did nothing to simmer my rapidly boiling blood. The little reptiles continued their skipping and signing, clearly aware of my frustration because little Miss inbred kept asking me what was wrong and why I was angry. Surprisingly, she managed to dig deep enough through her layers of bad upbringing and offer to give me my money back. But the heat of my blood and disappointment with humanity had fueled my obstinacy and poisoned my tongue, to the point that all I managed to muster was, “No! Keep the fucking money and use it to get your teeth fixed you little brat.”
I think the world stopped spinning for a millisecond in reaction to the look that she spat at me and in reaction to the world, her leg and foot set off on their own journey – their destination, my crotch.
Finally the bus arrived while I was crouched over in a man’s most vulnerable pose with my hands on my balls feeling all kinds of pain coursing through my stomach. Even though I had no physical ache in my mind, something in there definitely hurt too.
Who knows what else might have happened that night if I had used the £10 to get home in a cab, bringing my destination closer quicker and in less agony? But the fact that I decided to stay and wait for the bus left me £10 down anyway and with first hand insight (and foot for that matter) into the direction the world is headed and perhaps a sneak preview of it’s own possible destination.
I don’t know.
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