SummaryOpen the quick read
- A Saturday morning in Gonubie prompts reflections on loss, remembrance, and the healing power of embracing the outdoors.
- Offshore westerly winds bring clarity and vitality to coastal swimmers, runners, and ocean lovers across East London.
- Local running culture and simple physical movement offer a powerful antidote to modern socio-economic stress.
- Observations drift from pop culture and environmental concerns to the delicate ecological balance of the Gonubie River.
- The day concludes with a focus on presence, gratitude, and setting off towards Preekstoel beach for a coastal trek.
I have woken with the sun this morning.
I have family asleep, rising and falling with the surf breaking on Gonubie Point beyond their windows.
It's Saturday, 6.30am. Some friends are putting on takkies for the parkrun on Orient beach and pier, some are putting on dark glasses and heading down to Border Undersea Club, a most worthy collection point for oceanators.
These friends are having a counselling session.
It can feel that we are stumbling through the wreckage, going back to the physical spot where our friend died from her great white shark wounds. But, we all do this. I can tell you every spot where a motorcyclist started their departure away from this earthly existence.
But not today! I am closing the garden gate in this psychological graveyard. I am imagining it marking, like a stone cairn in the wild hills — Blouberg, Krakadow, Mary — the path to this
way and that.
Today, I chose the path to fun and adventure.
There is a westerly wind touching the back of my soul. Right before me the rumpled chaos of a beastly easterly is being smoothed and combed.
I discovered from Ed Gillfillan's wife, who was speaking with a broken but love-filled heart at his life celebration but a few weeks ago, that he taught her that our west wind has a distinct character.
Like the Zephyr, Mistral, Alizes, Diablos, Popoyo, Freemantle, Cape Doctor at Noordhoek beach, and our Berg, we should name it!
These winds blow from land to ocean, known as offshores, and they make oceanators instantly happy because playtime and adventure is at hand!
Even those who do not know it are having their mood lifted by these stratospheric spirits.
Ed is no longer with us, but his weeks-old son, sleeping, peeking, squirming on his mom's brave shoulder at this celebration of our friend Janine Lochrenberg’s life, has that lusty urge to get out there and live.
This sense of adventure is on the screen before us here in Stirling High’s music centre and auditorium.
As Janine's musician friends lean into their bows to the warm appreciation of Janine's viola set in the centre of their circle, we are all enthralled, amused and rendered ridiculously envious of her adventures.
Riding the rooftop of her rig, leaning into the surf with rawbone shoulders, her posture says, 'Get out there!'
It’s as if we are being told: Wipe those tears and your nose, untangle yourself from that anxious social web, and seek out full immersion in this liberating simplicity of the west wind sweeping the mist clear on Gonubie Bay.
Soon these precious women in my life and I will be sploshing in those waves foaming and rolling onto those sacred sands.
It's thrilling!
There is a seemingly endless flow of folk trotting and strolling past me here on Gonubie Point, plonked on my wonky picnic table bench.
I am in the shade of our hysterically posed red milkwood tree, topiaried into this comical shape by the sword in the wind.
One day a clever barber will see the golden value in this local "found object" and pioneer a new hairstyle. No more imported, imperial bovver and punk 'dos.
I will be getting into the chair and requesting not a wolf cut, burst fade, or mid-skin taper for me.
I will just say: "The Gqunube Sword in the Wind today please m'lord."
Isn’t that what our hairdressers and barbers are to us? They touch our heads, tug our locks, shape our very self-image this way and that while pouring the tea — sharing the latest
scandalous gossip or tut-tutting over the latest political verneukery.
If I became a hairdresser simply to spread the message of the looming Arctic burst about to send Europe into a freezing winter caused by a sudden stratospheric warming above the Arctic, or the Kelvin wave caused by overheated oceans sloshing back over the Pacific in this massive El Niño which is sending mansions caving into the ocean at Malibu, just imagine!
We’d have a proper environmental movement so desperately needed to save our sewage-throttled Nahoon and Quinera rivers.
Let me not ruminate on the slowing down of Amoc — the Atlantic Overturning Meridonian Circulation — when Greenland’s unprecedented ice-melt slows to a point that London could become the new Alaska with -20 C winters.
Ah, but here’s the thing. In Africa we will be hit by drought, storms and sea level erosion, but nothing like the northern hemisphere.
We have more issues with inequality and corruption than total climate chaos.
Watch how those Euros start fleeing south when it becomes clear that the goose has been totally stuffed there, and sunny, vibrant Africa beckons as a safer haven.
Just saying.
Getting back on track: These runners fascinate me. Everywhere I go I see runners. We are becoming a city of exuberant, proud, wholesome runners.
This is phenomenal because, despite the use of expensive takkies, shirts, tops, and flapping headbands, the simple truth is that everyone who feels the urge can run and experience the incredible euphoria that blossoms when you run or walk , even just a few kilometres each week.
We are fast becoming a city that fights the horrific onslaught of socio-economic plundering on our minds with movement, walking, bumbling, and sprinting.
Even our sly alcohol industry knows that the way out of addiction and decline is to keep on walking!
Even Spotify agrees — as I write this, the warmongering algorithm chooses to play bluesman Leon Redbone who plunks and plucks sweetly and moans and groans:
"I had the blues, but I kept on walking, trying to walk my troubles away..."
Now for the other side of the booze business; I had to watch a documentary on the life of actor Vinnie Jones to discover the full meaning of a beer advert being floated on social media.
It is set as a scene from the Guy Ritchie-directed Brit series, The Gentlemen, where the drop-dead handsome, gangster toff, duke Edward Horniman, (Theo James) discovers that Norman, the prize bull, a “cathedral of muscle” he wants, faces another high-bidder, none other than UK soccer legend David Beckham (also this beer’s global marketing ambassador).
In this besuited, wine-red auction ring, when Beckam doubles the duke’s bid of £1.5m for Norman, Eddie turns to his gamekeeper, silent assassin played by Vinnie and burbles: “A
little refresher for our friend perhaps…”
Jones approaches Beckham, foaming beer in hand, takes his blade and slices off the head of white froth saying: “Courtesy of the duke!”. Beckham, his eyes bulging, withdraws his bid.
What I had to discover is that Jones, before he took to movies, was renowned as Britain’s most brutal soccer player.
An absolute legend for cutting down his opposition player at the knees, this bricklayer and his
“Crazy Gang” took the outsider club Wimbledon to FA cup glory in 1988 with great play, but also by intimidating their opponents with ferocious tackles.
He was also famously photographed in a match holding Newcastle star Paul Gascoigne by the testicles.
Jones still holds the record for the most red-cared player at 12.
He is a magnificent character in the series, but the documentary on his life, “Untold UK: Vinnie
Jones” is hilarious and … gripping?
Like politics, we watch stories of gangsterism with a morbid fascination. We watch the promises and lies unfold in real time alongside revelations of how the state and these cunning shape-shifter benevolent dictators and public sociopaths reel the voters in.
I was reminded of this as I sat on the banks of the Gonubie River on Saturday morning after a quiet but relentless swim upstream into the wilds.
A fish eagle called and swooped down on the other side of Tide Waters as an angler manipulated his little boat onto its trailer on the water’s edge.
He rumbles past me bursting with pride at his catch, a 67cm cob.
“Did you put it back? There is almost none left,” I respond, but he is caught up in hunters’ euphoria.
Only 0.9% of these brilliant river and ocean creatures. Probably a breeder, I mutter to myself because, really, who else will listen.
No listen, we are living in paradise this month. Foliage is bursting forth. Everywhere it’s green.
We keep getting told the brown withering is approaching.
But there is also merit in saying live each moment to the full.
For me, today, it means leaving this writer’s wonky chair and making my way to Preekstoel beach for that big long trek.
I won’t be thinking of politics, climate, or any other deep, dark undercurrent.
I will be locked in on getting through these waters to my loved ones on the harbour quay — and that Bok game!