Winter is a blast!
Do we huddle down and slowly disassemble or get out into the maelstrom and live large?
Which one is it: hibernate or oceanate?
Every time I stride out onto an East Cape beach, the sand and rock glistening and fully stretched by the full moon, the sun warm on my back, the night breeze still coming cool on my pip, I think: “This is how to live a full, healthy, life.
“This is how to keep the retread-required knees going — by strengthening surrounding muscle, this is how to release the black dog to run free and wild again.”
And then, when I crash on my bed, phone up, doomscrolling the latest outrage of Trump and friends, and fixate on global and national politics, the black dog of winter is on my bed, urging me to scroll up, just one more video of jester and alarmingly accurate soothsayer Jimmy Kimmel roasting the rising US regime and fall of democracy, or cats doing the cutest darn thing …
Yeah, by the time I roll off that bed, I am literally injured.
Muscles are sore, my back aches, my mind buzzes. Doomscrolling, it should come with a public health warning.
We keep on protesting against the damage digital tech does to children, but I wonder if we are not all just as hooked.
I and 18-million others have had a look at The Offline Club reporting on Insta on a slow night of reading, crafting and personal reflection, “meeting people, [with] live piano and vinyl and not single phone in sight” taking place on Tuesdays at an historic church in Amsterdam.
Then, in another post, maths professor and public commentator Hannah Fry spoke of making her own “AI agent” and it going “completely rogue”, using her credit card to buy paper clips, emailing all sorts of journalists trying to sell novelty mugs, “and then it leaked all of my passwords to the internet”.
She goes on to tell the story of the director of AI safety at Meta, Summer Yue, having to run to the wall and pull the plug on her computer to stop her AI agent from deleting all her personal emails.
One thing that ought to wrench our eyeballs from screens is when the climate is hammering on our roofs, doors and windows.
As I write this, our WhatsApp, Facebook and email are buzzing with forecasts about the full might of the clashing giants about to clobber us — an Antarctic winter storm coming up from the south has collided with one or two of those weird hot air pulses from the equator, creating the second mutant monster within two weeks.
Sadly, these climate events are influenced by human behaviour. These low-pressure storms, often called mid-latitude cyclones, are amplified by air and ocean pollution, causing everything to heat up and go bonkers.
The forecast was bleak. Another cut-off low from Tuesday to Thursday but not like last week where the COL unloaded in a band across central SA; this one is on our heads.
The SA Weather Service’s euphemistic purple “80%” patch extended right over the province. It was talking about 100mm to 200mm of rain — and that’s just on Tuesday.
There would be gales and seven-metre swells, possibly a storm surge. And snow on the highlands.
This general and increasingly deadly Armageddon effect happens when one of your happily bobbing-along southern low-pressure storms gets arrested in its easterly path by a massive Mr Plod filled with hot air, in this case the Atlantic high, which is expected to move in and dominate in an increasingly familiar band right around the south of SA.
We can expect a lot of tears. The impacts of these deluges on our barely administered and maintained infrastructure, on the poor huddled in their hundreds of thousands in shacks with naked illegal wire sparking and flying about, with uncollected plastic packaging clogging storm drains … It is devastating, and there is always a body count.
Now, since being cheerful is what keeps us going, there is this fascinating social curiosity with our oceans and rivers.
I was your loyal observer of the storm swell which rose along with the full moon last week.
All along the coast the surf pushed up against dunes, scooped up rocks from the ocean bed and tossed them on the sands, and, in our case, pushed over the sandy berm at Cefani and flowed into the increasingly salinated and suffering estuary.
A long dry period had caused evaporation and the way estuaries work as nurseries for so many marine species, rain is needed to push these sandbars aside and let fish and all creatures small and large in and out.
It was the arrival of so many people at the scene that was remarkable. There was a sense that this was something unusual. And it was.
On a day so blue and clear, if you stood and faced the sandy horizon with the ocean in the background and waited, it suddenly appeared — a 50cm wall of water with a big lip of white foam would spread out over a 200m stretch and flow in a half-lemon shape down to the estuary.
People got so excited one fella stood right in the middle of it — with his happy dog! Our video shows him being OK, but the mutt gets slowly enveloped until you can see it is being washed away.
But this is a gentle flood, and the doggie is slowly released. It finds its footing and bounds over to us to have a good old shake.
What are these two okes doing at the front edge of the estuary? One guy is fishing using a silver lure; the other is throwing a net.
Lloyd Cairns, grandson of Cefani resort founder Lindsay, explains that sometimes gamefish, like leeries, need to get out of the river and into the ocean to grow and will behave like salmon and swim out against the incoming rush.
And the net? Well, a deep and secretive fishing society knows when and how to use it to catch prawns. It is a rare moment and requires a lot of skill, apparently.
We ask if the giant slab of rock which had been facing skywards on a single point has been lifted by these giant tides and he says while it started with previous storms it has now lifted even more.
This dichotomy of digital-amplified sloth which binds us to our chairs and beds, and the wild winter dystopia — is in our social DNA.
The only time we really have to dedicate ourselves to these screens is for work, education and when the Boks play.
So here is my winter resolution: get out onto those beaches for long walks, in the beautiful post-frontal weather and even in the full blast because that stuff is mind-blowing.
I must now mount Hetty, the 1200 GSA adventure bike, and make my way into the howling wasteland to celebrate sissie’s 70th birthday.
Hang onto your hats and helmets.
Winter is a blast.