Poll position...

Voting day gave CHRIS BENNETT a little time to reflect during the short wait to make his mark.


VOTING day was a pleasant outing. A bit of a glitch when I got turned away at the first polling station, which was near my house, and was told I had to vote where I was registered, which was not too much further. My first choice of polling station had started to run out of papers at about 10am; the one at the Munster Sports Club had a short cue and a carnival atmosphere.

There was a good mood and all sorts of neighbours emerged from the woodwork.

The election was a great excuse for many people to take a bit of a break. For the price of a couple of days leave you got almost a week’s holiday. This would explain the crowds on our local beach. I counted nearly twenty people on the two kilometres of beach I walk. And three dogs.

The buzz word in this election seems to have been accountability, which gets trotted out, dusted off and paraded around for a few weeks prior to Election Day, when it is hidden at the back of some cupboard somewhere for the next four and a half years.

I looked it up in the dictionary, in fact in both of them. I also looked at Roget, another good way to clarify thoughts.

‘Dueness’ and ‘duty’ are the two words that leap from the page, closely followed by ‘responsibility’, ‘obligation’ and ‘the least one can do’.

Don’t you love that last one? Our council, comprised largely of fine men and women, may care to bear a few of these definitions in mind as we enter the next five years of life in the sunshine democracy. Having to explain to visitors who come down here twice a year why we still have a crumbling waterfront and a collapsed pier in Margate gets a bit tricky by
the third year.

The problem seems to me to be two pronged; on the one tine is the problem of knowing what to do or who to ask, and on the other is the problem of believing that we are their servants, not the other way round. Now I know some of you may be thinking that to see the masses as the boss is not the African way, the fact surely remains that we put our crosses against the party of our choice. It is that party which then becomes accountable. We, the people, are to be answered to.

Talking of visitors I am sure I saw a lot more Zimbabwean cars down here this time around. It is nice to know that once again the South Coast can help to bring sunshine and the seaside in to the lives of those up north. Well, some of them, anyway.

A friend who is a property developer was hoping to toddle over to meet up with old pals; she couldn’t make it because of work, which is a promising sign. The beauty of the South Coast and its lifestyle has not lost its allure it would seem.

Light at the end of the tunnel…

CHRIS BENNETT has been reflecting on visitors and their visits.

THE power of the sea is displayed, in the great crevice in the rocks near the foot of the North Sand Bluff lighthouse, in its full majesty. Here you will not see the vast, towering plumes of spray to be found at Splash Rock, but the surge and might of the sea, thick and muscular with colossal energy.

This is a force seriously to be reckoned with; a force that clearly illustrates what the boffins are getting at when they talk of harnessing the power of the waves.

Go into the bushes on the footpath on the right at the end of the road in which the lighthouse stands. From the little green tunnel you will emerge upon a scene of startling beauty; a scene, for me, unlike any other.

A massive platform of what appears to this untrained eye to be sedimentary rock, scored, wrinkled and scoured by swathes of geological time, ends abruptly (caution is advised) at the precipice of a deep, although not particularly vast, chasm. Sit for a while and watch the seething, roiling tide display its writhing sinews of vigour and potency as the cumbrous tons of water surge into the narrow funnel of the chasm.

For some reason, never to be fathomed, it set me to thinking of my days at school and the endless battle with numbers (and the joy when the English class started). I remembered, watching and listening to this astonishing display and its cacophonic accompaniment, the day when, literally, the penny dropped.

I had no clue how money worked. I still haven’t, come to that. But the realisation of the mystery of how one pound could be divided by three (six-and-eightpence) was suddenly clear.

I suppose this archaic memory was stirred by the timelessness of the sight and sound and symmetry of the sea. Those rocks are worth a visit.

As a result of having had a bit of a gavotte the previous night, the lighthouse breakfast beckoned. There are times when only bacon and eggs will do. This was one of those times.

The little restaurant has changed since I was last there. Or maybe I have. The lounge area, with its fascinating photographs of lighthouse and sea-related activities, and its provision of the Citizen and the Mercury, was civilisation in excelsis.

The food is unpretentious, good and in sensible servings. The price is as good as the rest of the experience. We sat with our Cape Town friend, who ventures up here twice a year to rid his system of the rigours and trials of having to live in what many regard as the most beautiful city in the world. He finds the silence and the accessible solitude of the coastline here an irresistible draw.

Which is more than can be said for most of our visitors, or so it seems to me. We walked to the mouth of the Mpenjati on Easter Sunday; he asked where all the people were. The two kilometres of beach, uninterrupted sand as fine as suede and wide with the low tide, had two other occupants.

I answered him, “At the shopping malls, of course”.

I am, of course, no cynic.