Love, noxious atmosphere and newsworthy gags (oh, and yet another brief mention of the car)

Move right along to the next blog if you don’t want to read yet another V-Day post. Or hover for a few minutes if you’re the kind of twisted fuck who does.

Unfortunately, I can’t satisfy the bulk of you bearing angry cynicism towards the occasion, for I am one of the lucky – perhaps even gauche – few who are deeply in love with (and at the same time feel deeply loved by) someone out there.

But let me not wax holier-than-thou lyrical shlock to any of you, for there was certainly a time when I felt the same way – and who knows, a time may come again when V-Day sends diabolical shivers down my spine for weeks preceding the event.

Suffice to say that I’ll be taking Anthony on his first road trip, heading due east for 160km (the Gilb has commanded me to drive at under 150km/h because the car doesn’t yet have 2,000km on the clock) until we hit not so much greener pastures, as we do sulphur-infused-carbon-monoxide-riddled-methane-choked ones. I’ll be bringing a special bottle of vino along to pair with the Gilb’s home-cooked meal (we don’t do dinners out on V-Day, that’s my rule), as well as my most clichéd pair of ‘romance’ knickers (you know the kind: red, lacy, hearts all over them).

Anyhow, the point of this post is not V-Day (hmmm – just realised it rhymes with ‘bidet’ – that could come in handy for angry cynical poetry of the rhyming-couplet kind) at all, but an observation I made a few days ago, stuck in the midday heat on the M1 South (back in my unconditioned Max-driving days) during that crazy traffic jam caused by the truck that fell off the Grayston Drive bridge onto the highway below – remember that?

Well, it struck me that it’s really difficult to get into the newspapers for doing something good or amazing, and much easier to get coverage for infamy. All you’d have to do is something bad like buy/borrow/steal a gun and go on a shooting spree (even then, in sunny SA you’d be vying for Page 1 with a number of rivals pulling that stunt on any given day), or something really stupid like… drive a truck off a bridge onto the highway beneath it in peak home-bound traffic in the sweltering hours of a Friday afternoon.

Seriously, that’s it. That’s all I wanted to tell you today. Now go out and make babies, all of you! (ok, and, if I wanted to get into the papers really badly, I’d do naked cartwheels in the yellow lane of the N1 South in morning Pretoria commuter traffic – there’s no way I’d even think of hurting my gorgeous new Ant for a cheap 15 minutes in the limelight).