Music in concrete…

CHRIS BENNETT peers at the pier.

WALKING along the promenade at Margate in pleasant sunshine, with majestic, rolling high seas surging through the bay one day last week gave a great sense of invigoration and freedom.

My companion was a friend visiting from Cape Town, or to be more accurate, Sea Point, where he enjoys walking along that lovely promenade. We were discussing my rather lamentable efforts at replacing my old late and lamented dog with a new; efforts, for the time being, doomed to failure.

Walks like this are particularly sweet when the conversation turns away from the personal and entangled mysteries of private life to its more poetic side.

On this walk there is a lot of architecture at which to look and, more important in my book, at which to react. I think it was Kenneth Clarke who described it this way: “Architecture is music frozen in time”.*

Some of the buildings along the promenade are very, very boring, but some, especially the more recent blocks have a distinct appeal to the eye, thus making the walk all the more rewarding.

But perhaps the real jewel in the crown will turn out to be the fishing pier, at the moment a work in progress.

You will recall that the pier, and a lot of the waterfront road, was almost destroyed in the huge storm of a few years ago.

Well, the work of restoration is moving forward, and may be finished in time for the Christmas season.

The muscular pillars on which the old structure had been built survived the storms of that terrible year. Now the architect in charge has added to their grandeur, not only in building so solid and sound an upper structure, but in grasping the huge energy which our seemingly changing weather unleashes on this beautiful pier.

The final result will be quite awesome, and a great blessing to the fisherman of the lower South Coast.

Another topic discussed, at a later date and over a delicious lunch at Mario and Marisa beautiful restaurant, was the debate I mentioned recently, the one about the press and its function, a debate that has stirred emotions in every corner of this country.

We are fortunate to have a wide variety of newspapers in KwaZulu-Natal, supplemented these days by the ease of access to some up-country papers on the Internet, although most of those in the Independent stable charge to read their publications on the ʼnet, which I think is a pity.

The group of us at the table included the retired head of a radio station (Leslie McKenzie was the last Head of Springbok Radio) and a current newspaper editor.

The lively discussion quickly became a unanimous opinion: that the loss of any measure of press freedom, and this newly proposed bill is simply censorship masquerading as “the public interest”, is a catastrophe for any democracy.

André Brink wrote recently, apropos the bill, “…the prime function of the word is to interrogate silence”.

Talk soon turned to the beautiful sight of the lagoon in the Mpenjati valley beneath us and the parched appearance of the grass on the hills. All eyes turned to the blue sea and the sky above it.

It must rain soon.

* The German philosopher, Friederich von Schelling (1759-1805), wrote, “Architecture in general is frozen music”.