A Time Machine in a Jar

By far the best birthday present I got this year was a jar of Smurfs.

Yes, Smurfs. Those blue shirtless guys with the funny hats.

On the morning of my birthday after being presented with loads of cards all filled with money, after downloading the $50 Amazon gift voucher from my mum all the way in South Africa (spent on Goo Goo Dolls, The Fray and Madonna (for the wife) CDs), I opened the badly wrapped present complete with (rather random) piece of string.

At first I thought it was a jar of sweets or chocolates, which would have kept me in a movie’s worth of munchies and kept my dentist flush with future filling bills, until I realised that they were the exact same plastic Smurf figures Greg and I used to get at the petrol station. My niece had had them lying around and on the night before thought she’d wrap them up for me just because.

My eyes lit up and my jaw dropped open. Everyone in the room – even the kids – initially thought I was taking the piss.

I wasn’t.

When I was but a wee lad my mum, dad, brother and I used to spend almost every school holiday on my grandparents farm in Beaufort West – one of those small towns described as ‘one horse’ but also only have one policeman, one prostitute and about thirty liquor stores. It is surrounded by many large farms, so in fact it has many horses.

Anyway, the drive from Cape Town to Beaufort West would take around six or seven hours (this was before the Huguenot Tunnel shortened the journey considerably) and on the requisite stops for petrol, padkos and a piss we would receive a Smurf figurine.

I’m not entirely sure if my parents bought them or they came free with every tank filled (it was before I understood the concept of money… as in something other people always seem to have and I always seem to need), but we always got some.

That was around 1985, and now back in 2012 it was as though someone tied my brain to a football and I’d been booted back in time by Beckham.

Of course, the kids were chuffed by my reaction, even though they didn’t entirely understand it. It seemed kind of poetic to be surprised with a burst on nostalgia on my birthday.

I am the Smoking Jesus

You might as well tattoo a swastika on your forehead, because you’d no doubt garner the same contempt from little old ladies and mums-pushing-prams. You’re standing in the rain, while everybody else – all non-smokers – look out at you thinking, “Freeze, you bastard.”

But you put up with it because you’re a slave to nicotine. An addict. And the ten minute wait for the bus would seem like an age if you didn’t have your cancerous friend to suck down.

It is a universal law, though, that as soon as you light a ciggy the bus will round the corner. If you’re scabby enough you might nip it and put it back in the box – to hell with the stench – but most of us just grumble and stomp it underfoot.

Smokers, in England, are treated like lepers were a few hundred years ago. I’m sure if all the health freaks had their way we’d be chained and shipped off to a remote island where we could pollute the air away from their tender nostrils; killing only those like us with our secondary poison.

They now put pictures on the packs of all the horrible things it does to you - like a child sniffing it in; an open mouth with missing teeth and rotting tongue; and my personal favourite, a dead guy on a morgue table.

The thing is, if they did that when I was in school it wouldn’t have discouraged me. Rather, I would have collected the things like stickers for a Thundercats sticker book.

An ad I noticed put it into perspective for me. A yellow background with black silhouettes of a young lad handing a pack of cancer sticks to a younger lad (or a midget), and the writing: CHEAPER CIGARETTES MEAN IT’S EASIER FOR YOUR KIDS TO SMOKE!

Made sense, I thought. A lot more sense than the South African version telling you that cheap, illegal smokes fund terrorism(?). Yes, but the heavy ‘sin’ tax on legal ciggies funds Jacob Zuma’s third plane.

Like any addict gives a shit, anyway.

But it made sense to me, and I thought that it’s right to make smokers feel like evil outcasts if it means my future children will look at the habit with disgust.

It wasn’t like that in my day. Hell, James Bond was a smoker! But a decade or so ago they got Hollywood to only let Bad Guys tug on a fag. And no teenager wants to be a bad guy… well, unless you want to score with the girls your mother warned you about… and who didn’t?

It makes sense that Bad Guys would have bad habits, but so often the Bad Guy is more appealing than the Good Guy with his neat haircut and gentlemanly demeanour. The genius in making smokers smelly, yellow-teethed and rain-drenched is that it makes them us look like sad losers with no friends, obviously standing in the rain so that no one can see we’ve been crying over our pathetic lives.

I will happily stand out in the rain dancing with pneumonia if it means I will spare my children from future addiction. Stick a fag in my mouth and nail me to a crucifix if it helps.

Hopefully my sacrifice will save them.

The American Version

Growing up I was often forced to break the law.

My parents were criminals not because they robbed banks or blew up shopping malls, but because our house was practically a warehouse of books and films banned by the Apartheid government.

Of course, it didn’t take much for the forever-frowning, downturned-mouth racists at the board of censors to ban something. Most of it was laughable; like the banning of the novel ‘Black Beauty’ for obvious, albeit ridiculous, reasons.

It was hard to get good telly. You see, the British were holding ‘Free Mandela’ rallies and imposing sanctions, and my parents couldn’t bear the thought that their kids would have to make do with American television.

So mum and dad would sneak in bootleg copies of ‘The Benny Hill Show’ and ‘Fawlty Towers’ – the kind of thought-provoking art they knew mattered.

The Americans, who didn’t have a problem with Apartheid because they thought all blacks were Communists, flooded our market and our tv screens with ‘Airwolf’, ‘The A-Team’ and ‘Murder She Wrote’.

I don’t think anyone will seriously argue the superiority of British television. I believe this is mainly because in Hollywood original thought is for amateurs.

And of all the Yank shows stolen from the Brits I can’t think of one Brit show stolen from the Yanks.

The British also manage to restrain themselves; with the average show lasting maybe three or four seasons no matter how popular it is. Americans, on the other hand, will milk the cow until its udder turns to dust. It’s all fair play if it’s a show you love, but more often than not the Yanks run it drier than a cheap table wine and by the time the show is cancelled it’s become so lame your entire memory of it is ruined.

And it’s all such flag-waving masturbation. If you believe films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ you’d think that it was only the Yanks who fought World War 2. I mean, did anyone even know that Australia was involved in the Vietnam War?

The irony is that in South Africa, even though the American government supported the National Party’s retarded policies, we still love them so much that half the country puts on a fake Wesley Snipes accent.

I think Ernest Hemingway said that “a good writer borrows, but a great writer steals.” So, of course, I could just be full of shit.

Good News is No News

I see myself suspended from a washing line. The rope enters one ear and exits the other; with a look of painful sadness I flap violently in the wind.

Or maybe there is a toothless hillbilly in my head; grinning idiotically as he plays on a tight, thin strip of catgut attached to a banjo constructed out of a rusty oil can and his late uncle’s wooden leg.

Now, I’m not complaining about the weather – which would be all too British – but merely commenting on the frozen state of my ears as I trudge up the hill on my way home. It is enough to make me at least consider buying and invariably wearing earmuffs; but I’m not sure I lack the sense of self-consciousness to take such a plunge.

It’s odd, but I find myself appreciating the horrible weather. Or, to be more specific, I appreciate the appreciation it gives me of those days when the sky is blue and the sun is shining; even if said sun isn’t making things that much warmer, but the mere presence of its happy glow now makes me as retardedly giggly as a drunk Tellytubby.

Possibly I’ve come to some Zen understanding of the nature of existence… but probably not. More likely is that I’ve become an exile from the world of print media.

What makes your neighbour’s botched birthday cake more newsworthy than, say, the slaughter of a thousand Buddhist monks in Burma is the closeness of it all. The closer it is to your doorstep, the more you care.

Even though I occasionally browse South African news, I find myself not puffing out my cheeks in wild indignation, furiously punching out an angry rant in the comment box, but shrugging my shoulders and thinking: not my problem.

And even though I occasionally pick up a copy of the Herald, I can’t find the energy to exhaust myself over the pseudo-shocking headlines. It all seems like good news to me.

For instance the story today about the gormless (and pudgy) thug stuck in jail for five for threatening someone with a broken bottle. Five years! That’s about the average term murdering rapists face is SA; and that’ll probably be suspended.

In South Africa criminals are scary and intimidating, but here in Plymouth they just seem incredibly stupid and ridiculous.

Like the asinine monkeyboy caught spray painting “Dorks” in fancy tags all over the city who barely escaped tchookie. There we see his simple mug, his puerile smile, and we just know he’s looking at the photographer while his small brain is thinking: “Yes… Yes! Fame at last!”

So while some stop reading the papers due to impending depression, I’ve stopped because it simply isn’t interesting enough.

However, on page eight of the Herald I see earmuffs on special at Chaplin’s, but now I’ve kind of befriended the little hillbilly so it would seem rude.

The New Facebook

After yawning at yet another FB status update along the lines of: “Riding my bicycle this afternoon. Yay!” I couldn’t help logging off and spending a wheelbarrow-full of money.

Not on drink to ease the pain of not having my own bicycle. And not on an actual bicycle to ride myself and maybe exclaim my very own “Yay!” on my very own Facebook wall. In fact, forget the bicycle. It’s metaphorical and wildly random at best.

The money was spent on books, movies and music. And I was content to wait a few days to receive these items; unusual in this ‘instant gratification’ world we now live in.

You see, I’ve started to realise that Amazon might just be the new Facebook.

Even though ‘The Book’ might be “free and it always will be” as advertised after abject international online horror at the mere rumour that they were going to start charging, I don’t mind the spending or even the waiting.

As it were, the waiting is the part I love the most. A few days later, when you’ve forgotten all about your purchase of an old Batman comic you liked as a kid or Britney’s Greatest Hits, you hear a plop through the letterbox and instead of the usual bills and Avon catalogue there lies an exciting gift.

And if you’re like me in any way you’d have forgotten completely about it by now; it’s like Christmas all over again! Even though it may be the Madonna cd you bought for the wife or ‘Zulu Dawn’ for your mum-in-law, it’s still addressed to you so you get to rip the box open.

As long as you put some money every month into an inaccessible account, and draw some cash to spend on bus fare and fags, you can spend to your heart’s content.

And it’s not just entertainment one can purchase. They sell pots and pans and shoes and trousers. They even sell sporting equipment; so very soon I may just be exclaiming a “Yay!”

But I promise I’ll try really hard not to mention it on Facebook.