SHARING SILENCE IV

It's easy to be nostalgic about lost beauty when what you envisaged as you crossed the boundary turned out to be your worst nightmare. It is sad that man is a virgin only once and ageing is such a high price to pay for maturity. Forget the power of the mind and let's focus on the tangibles. The tangible is my vision of a brown horse at Caversham which I heard going buckwild and later saw on the neighbouring farm, minus the cowboy of course. It is the smell of half-cooked fresh carrots filtering out of the open windows of my cottage as I approach from the side of the river that got me lusting after idombolo and sweet potatoes. That's what I can touch and write long poems in the tradition of nursery rhymes, your 'Baba Black Sheep have you any Wool?'

Reality tends to take a new meaning when you've always thought of silence as an alien intrusion. The returns often outweigh the investment. At this moment I'm thinking, can all these text and pictures make sense to Getaway magazine? Am I becoming a travel writer of serious note? Though I started this morning with a 30-minutes silence and one hundred press-ups I find myself doubting my mental fitness as I struggle to negotiate my sanity past seven o'clock. I'm a newsman and television news are to me what petrol is to automobiles, some voice in the back of my mind says, 'discipline', while I'm thinking 'this is making me a Branch Davidian, the next things I'll be telling my family 'don't call me ever, I'm now a Christian (pun intended)'. I'm thinking this is brainwashing at its best, something I last saw on some late night R16 rated film starring unknowns and set in Waco Texas. Stories about groups of writers, poets, print people, graphic artists and academics who gassed themselves to death over dinner because they felt nothing mattered. While relaxing I could see the headlines on newspapers, gory pictures provided by the Natal Witness, of a group that died, which puzzles the world and television footage of police helicopters and ambulances leaving the farm in a column through the seven kilometre stretch of bundu road. I can also foresee etv's Deborah Patta trying to put together the pieces on 3rd Degree, 'Why Did they Do It?', especially with the credentials most of the people I'm with here have.

That's a joke, but my worst fear is that of 250 anti-terror police officers raiding the farm at night, following months of investigations about it being a training camp for terrorists. "They come here for ideology classes, get their passports faked by a suspect named Gabi and travel to Syria and Somalia for military training", that will be police commissioner Jackie Selebi at a news conference flanked by a representative from the FBI and another from Scotland Yard. All bragging about how they've had the farm under surveillance since 1995. I can do jail time but not as a suspect deported to Guantanamo or some secret gulag in Kazakhstan.