haha or lol?

If I explained the growth of a gigantic carbuncle on my toe as a process of ‘evolution’ you’d probably head off to the bar for another drink or make some such other excuse to leave my company, right? But then why do people insist on telling me that language is evolving?

More likely, as with the ugly thing sprouting on the edge of my foot, it is becoming hideously deformed.

With every Facebook ‘lol’ I type and ‘innit’ I catch on the tip of my tongue I feel like I’m becoming more slobbering beast than Darwinian king-of-the-food-ladder. And with every badly punctuated ‘Firemans Arms’ pub or cringe-inducing ‘wellness’ I read I imagine our species spiralling back to amoeba status.

I have a special hatred for the word ‘wellness’. When I hear it or see it written in some puffy magazine it never fails to conjure images of rich housewives daintily nibbling scones on the patio and sipping Earl Grey in frilly teacups – “So, Maeve, how’s your health? But more importantly, how’s your wellness?”

It is a pity our language is being destroyed. To hear a Christian say, “God is awesome!”, I’m never sure he means the yippeewowsingasong ‘awesome’ or the real meaning: the inducing of equal parts fear and excitement. One of the most powerful words in the English language is now a guy on the pavement with his trousers around his arse and a baseball cap at a jaunty angle.

Depressing.

And if I read the UK papers correctly, the word ‘immigrant’ now does not mean someone from another country living over here. In the hearts and minds of Brits, ‘immigrant’ means Muslim.

Whenever I see an article bemoaning immigrants I can’t help taking offence. I’m an immigrant and I don’t leech benefits. I’m an immigrant and I’m contributing to the economy and paying taxes. No, no, people tell me, they don’t mean people like you; people with jobs who can speak English; they mean those other people.

What am I then? A pseudo-immigrant? A European returning to the motherland? Sometimes I feel like I’m back in South Africa, only it’s not the Juju Malema’s telling me to bugger off back to where my ancestors possibly came from but the Brits saying I’m not really a Saffer but one of them… shit rugby team and all!

I’m not complaining. I appreciate that I’ve been welcomed with open arms by the country we beat in a World Cup final. In fact, the thought of going back to South Africa fills me with dread; not because I don’t love my country, but because I like it here so much.

I sympathise with the English who see a cleric on a street corner shouting about how evil the British are; especially when said cleric is living in a cosy council house eating food bought with tax money. I also think that if he reckons it’s so shit over here why doesn’t he fuck off back to where he came from.

But don’t shoebox him as an ‘immigrant’. Call him what he is: a stupid prick.

I say this not as a foreigner telling anyone how to run their country, but as a staunch defender of a great language trying to rescue it from obscurity. I love English, and will stand in front of the ‘innit’ wrecking ball as it swings in for destruction.

If only someone would point that wrecking ball at my big toe, maybe I’d get more conversation down the pub.

The Devil's Day Off

Some mornings it’s hard being a Secret Service samurai, arm-wrestling the legions of Darkness without denting your balls of steel. Leaving the safety of my bed yesterday, it didn’t take me long to realise that the balls in Hell’s Lotto had rolled the numbers of my shitstorm quickpick.

First, when I got to the library to print out the tickets for our flight, a sign told me their pcs were all down. This being Plympton (not exactly the tourist capital of Rainland) the closest internet café was fifty miles away, across a raging river of lava and guarded by an oversexed-yet-horny werewolf.

No worries, I thought, as I took it in my long stride and calculated a back-up plan.

Making a fast stop at home to remove my work clothes from the washing machine and pop them in the dryer I discovered that said washing machine had broken down, locking my clothes inside. As I peered through the tiny, round window my soaking clothes looked ashamed to be in cahoots with Beelzebub and his rotten tactics.

But I looked into the bleary, red eyes of Satan’s minions and spat.

Then, because the bus driver wouldn’t except a tenner (not enough change) and I had to buy something from the Tesco to get a smaller denomination, Satan thought he could beat me by making the queue really long and making the machine swallow my cash when I used one of those do-it-yourself check-outs.

People think the Devil is only to blame for the biggies – War, Pestilence, Famine, Death – but even the Dark Lord has a day off. He does some gardening, collects stamps, maybe is responsible for a new boyband, and then burns your toast or makes a shoelace snap.

I figure, if that red bastard is gonna fuck with me, I’m gonna fuck with him. So every time he makes me step in a dog turd, or moves my cereal bowl so the milk goes all over the table, instead of blabbing a load of expletives I try to laugh about it; try and make him think I love this shit.

In retrospect, even the worst day of your life is just an amusing story to tell down the pub.

So fuck you, Satan. I got my plane tickets, I got my money out the Tesco machine, and today is my day off and you’re back at work inventing AIDS or causing drought or filming another season of Jersey Shore.

You suck. I win.

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.