Was it worth it? No.  Was it challenging? Yes.  Would I do it again? Ask me next year!

In the end AfricaSoccer supplied a crew of about 140 people to various broadcasters including ESPN, Sky, SBS Australia, BBC, and HBS/FIFA.  It was an enormous undertaking which, on first examination, seemed entirely possible.  And it was.  BUT…when you’re working with human beings, there are always a few unforseen speed bumps on the road to riches.  Various people needed to be replaced at the last minute for all sorts of interesting and often dramatic reasons.  These included:
- Being arrested, jailed and roughed up in Angola.
- Death in the family
- Illness (stroke)
- Car accident (broken bones)
- and my favourite:  “I got a better offer for more days and therefore more money, so sorry, can’t do the job for you any more.”
- Also had one guy who just didn’t show up one day.  His phone was switched off, and everybody was worried sick.  Next day he arrived for work as usual, and seemed perplexed by the fact that he was summarily dismissed on the spot!

Here at home, Mike and I built 2 television studios on the roof of a Green Point hotel that-shall-not-be-named.  Between the extortionist hotel management, and the CT city council building department, we had just 6 weeks to finish the construction in time.  The lights arrived from the USA 3 days before our first live broadcast.  On the day that our Australian clients arrived, we put on our “everything is perfect” face, and hoped to god that it would all be ok.  Aside from a bit of a boardroom-reshuffle, it was!  They turned out to be dream clients and did a lot to make it all the more bearable.

I suspect that things went a lot better for the thousands of soccer fans that enjoyed the 64 matches.  The tournament was a huge success, visitors didn’t get robbed or killed, and Bafana Bafana didn’t embarrass themselves (or us).  Success!  For me, success is measured in how much money we DIDN’T lose, how many of my friends and relatives are still speaking to me, whether I can repair my broken body and release stress trapped in it, and the fact that Mike and I get to go to Mauritius for a well-deserved holiday.  Au  revoir!

My smile twinkles with mischief
My smile reveals a hint of sadness

My smile is seductive
My smile makes you smile

My smile is sometimes fake
My smile is sometimes shy

My smile remembers the good times
My smile hopes for the future

My smile is a reflection of my joy
My smile is a mirror of those around me

My smile is a glimpse of my spirit
My smile is filled with infinite possibilities

The aroma wafts towards you from 100 paces.  It’s the unmistakable scent of baking, mingled with the rich headiness of cinnamon.  I close my eyes and move blindly in the direction of the divine deliciousness.  Then I see it…it’s a sign…no, really, it’s a sign that says “Cinnabon”.

I move closer, lured by the aroma-induced euphoria and existential knowledge that something heavenly awaits if I follow this path. 

Inside the sacred temple of temptation I catch my first glimpse of this divine decadence and I know…I must have it.  Flavours of vanilla, lemon, caramel and chocolate offer themselves to me like vivid red roses to bees.  And like a cult follower, I point weakly at the one that begs me to take it.

I take out my purse and gradually everything comes back into focus.  I realise that I am in a shopping centre – Canal Walk – and that this is a little store selling cinnamon rolls.  My religious experience evaporates as I part with R12 and eagerly clutch my freshly baked bun.  I open the wrapping as if it were a diamond necklace and inhale the beautiful cinnamon. 

The first bite is utterly beyond anything I had imagined.  (These things always look better than they taste, right?  WRONG!)  Every bite was a thing of unsullied beauty and, as I took my time and allowed my palette to revel in its treat,  all was right with the world.  The hot rolls are taken from the oven freshly baked, and then filled with a cream cheese frosting which melts into the swirls of the roll.  A hint of lemon brings out the vanilla and cinnamon flavours.  This is heaven!

www.cinnabon.co.za

I am drying my eyes.  I always cry when I watch this movie.  Every time.  And always in the same places.  It’s a very unsentimental film too, so what is it that always tugs at my heart?  The movie I’m referring to is “Shall We Dance” starring Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, made in 2004 and first released on the art circuit.  It also stars Jennifer Lopez, but don’t let that fact make you stop reading this.  At the heart of this film is pure, honest human emotions, failings and fears.  Richard Gere plays a (gorgeous) middle aged man who commutes home every night on the train in Chicago.  On his way home he notices a dance studio and spots Jennifer’s character, Paulina.  The hapless group of would-be ballroom dancers are wonderfully – sometimes tragically – entertaining.  But each somehow mirrors a facet of myself, and probably everybody else too.  Nobody is perfect in this film.  Gere doesn’t end up a champion dancer.  But the ending is more beautiful, more moving than you would ever expect.   And the dancing represents that repressed passion and fire that is within all of us.

Gere’s character hides his nocturnal cha-cha classes from his wife, played by Susan Sarandon, who then hires a private detective to find out if he’s having an affair.  After finding out what he’s been up to, she doesn’t understand why he would keep it a secret from her.  In a memorable scene the PI asks her why people should get married?  She replies:  “We need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet… I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things… all of it, all of the time, every day. You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness…”

So why do I love this film so much?  Is it that scene where Richard Gere emerges on the escalator dressed in a tuxedo, holding a red rose?  Or is it the way that his voice falters and trembles when he says to his wife:  “The one thing I am proudest of in my whole life, is that you’re happy with me. If I couldn’t tell you that I was unhappy sometimes, it’s because I didn’t want to risk hurting the one person I treasure most.”   Or maybe it’s when he tells his wife that he was ashamed of wanting more, when he had so much.  The dance scenes make my muscles twitch and I long to be them, gliding so gracefully across the polished wooden dance floor. 

It’s about going beyond the mundane repetitive things we do in life and trying something new and exciting that makes you feel alive.  And it’s about Love, Friendship, and being true to yourself.

This article is being written out of frustration!  It concerns the phenomenon called  Blog Spam or BS.    So far, my interesting postings have had comments that, on the surface, look like they come from interested people complimenting me  on my excellent and informative writing.  On closer examination, their originating URL’s range from Russian prostitutes, marketing trackback websites, Estate Planners, music download sites, Viagra sales and various sex sites. 

Now, I know my blog isn’t exactly cutting edge journalism, but  just once, I’d like to get a genuine comment from an actual human being who has actually READ the words and had a GENUINE THOUGHT that they wanted to contribute to this fabulous interactive online forum.  As you may have gathered, I’m getting a bit upset about this and need to come up with a method of preventing these internet infiltrators from using my precious blog for their lame-ass marketing.

I have actually had to sit through seminars and speeches that sound like this.  Have you?

“A re-engineering of your current world view will reaffirm your online presence enabling a more effervescent solution.

Upscaling voluminous networking exchange solutions will result in your achieving an excellent systemic electronic data interchange synchronization, thereby exploiting technical environments for mission critical broad-based capacity-constrained systems.

This will fundamentally cause a morphing into a well designed and actionable information infrastructure whose semantic content is downright null.

To more fully clarify the current concept, a few aggregate issues will require addressing to facilitate a distributed communication venue.

In integrating non-aligned structures into existing legacy systems, an even more effervescent (bubbly) gateway blueprint in a backward compatible package of tangible and immeasurable strategic value will result in right-sizing the conceptual frameworks, but only when thinking outside the box.

This being said, the ownership issues inherent in dominant thematic implementations cannot be understated…”

Did you know that there is such a thing as a Veterinary Dentist?  Yes, these hapless souls have made a rather lucrative career out of tending to the oral hygiene of your pet hound.  So, not only do we enslave what was once a fully functional wild pack animal and reduce it to beggar-status, but we then subject the poor beast to tooth brushing due to our pathetic human distaste of its perceived bad breath.

This is all quite true, and I have the scars to prove it.  This proof coincides with the lowest point in my television career, namely, a diabolical and, as it turned out, extremely popular TV programme called Ja-Nee Troeteldiere.  Presented by Dr Quixie, this Kyk-Net show proceeded to break all previous ratings records in the “Interactive Television” genre.  The debut programme on “Brushing Your Dog’s Teeth With Poultry Flavoured Toothpaste”, was a huge extravaganza complete with extreme close-ups of foaming fangs and happy dog-smiles.  The viewers were ecstatic and proceeded to voice their joy by immediately phoning in with such groundbreaking questions like: “Dokter, my hond hou nie van hoender-geur tandepasta nie.  Help asseblief!”  (Doctor, my dog doesn’t like chicken-flavoured toothpase.  Please help!)  Ja-Nee Troeteldiere had become the unofficial yardstick by which all bad television was henceforth to be measured.  

I went home that night with a heavy brow.  Is this what I have been reduced to?  Mixing mindless pet programmes in the middle of the night?  After months of shock therapy, aversion therapy, and aromatherapy, I agreed to do another one.  This time the topic was Psychotic Pets, or in Afrikaans “Jy En Jou Mal Troeteldier” !  It took the entire crew to stop me from slashing my wrists with a tweaker, and the rest of the production team had to stop me from pushing the telephone operator out of the way and telling the callers that they really needed to get out of the house more.  They had pushed me too far!  I could still put up with the show on “Wild Animals Not Designed To Be Kept As Pets”, where my entire studio was filled with marauding monster lizards, lemurs, pythons and chatty African parrots.  But, the sympathetic ramblings of Dr Quixie in response to the caller who’s Chihuahua was humping the neighbour’s hamster…well, that’s all too much for this humble operator!

Franschhoek always scares me a bit.  It usually means I’m going to eat well…but be much poorer afterwards.  This time was different.  Yes, it WAS expensive, but someone else suffered the post-bill indigestion!

It was Mother’s Day and Stoan invited his mother and me to lunch at CAFE ALLEE BLEUE  just outside Franschhoek.  The drive through the winelands always reminds me what a gorgeous part of the country I am privileged to live in.  And that I should explore the countryside a lot more. 

This intimate restaurant is located on the Allee Bleue estate.  It lies in a picturesque location in the Franschhoek Valley and offers a beautiful view of the Drakenstein mountains. With its white, thatched buildings surrounded by dense lavender bushes and sky-high blue gum trees, the extensive estate stands proudly in the middle of large fields of herbs and expansive meadows.  Many of the restaurant’s ingredients are sourced from the estate.  Adjacent to the Cafe is a wine tasting venue both in the cellar or outdoors. 

Because it was Mother’s Day they were offering a set menu.  For starters we had a very unusual salad comprising prawns, rocket, watercress, finely chopped tomatoes and a tiny dot of basil pesto.  It was a fascinating combination of flavours that worked perfectly.  It was also small enough to allow for 2 more courses.  My main course was a duck confit, falling off the bone, with red cabbage and a gentle sauce the details of which escape me now.  My companions had a herb crusted sirloin with baby vegetables in season and a red wine sauce.  All perfectly cooked and presented.  Then came the only part that I remember in detail…the dessert.  It seemed very simple…chocolate mouse with orange segments.  But this was no ordinary mousse.  It arrived like a Rolls Royce, presented as 3 round balls, the colour of deep, dark chocolate.  The orange segments offset the richness of the chocolate with a fresh citrus zing!   It was also not light and fluffy like the conventional stuff.  This was dense and creamy with a hint of cognac and rum that elevated the dish to that of Mousse Royalty!  I jokingly mentioned to the waitor that I’d love to have the recipe.  Before I could say “allee bleue” the chef emerged from the kitchen with a hand written recipe for the precious mousse. 

Clutching my newfound secret knowledge, I emerged into the afternoon sunlight after a thoroughly enjoyable meal.  This is a fantastic lunch venue and comes highly recommended.

Click here to view the regular Allee Bleue Menu

Call 021 874 1021 for bookings

Ok, so it’s all over and the ANC have won the 2009 election, albeit with slightly less than a two-thirds majority (65.90% in fact).  Pretty soon our new president will be inaugurated at a lavish party, and the who’s-who of the world’s political leaders are invited.  On May 9th Jacob Zuma will be sworn in as our third democratically elected president.   All this from behind a very large piece of bullet-proof glass, which is not surprising…I can think of a few people who might want to take a pot shot at him.   Four thousand invited guests and 40 000 ordinary citizens will gather at the Union Buildings in Pretoria to witness the R75 million event.  I wonder, how many houses could be built with R75 million of OUR money?

Government spokesperson Themba Maseko said Cabinet had decided the inauguration may not cost more than R75 million.  “It will be a grand affair, but in the light of the international financial crisis, it was decided to limit the budget.”   The budget for former president Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration in April 2004 was R63 million.  

Good thing EVERYBODY is tightening their belts!

I LOVE voting!  It’s one day every five years where my opinion actually counts. 

Tomorrow will be the third time I cast my ballot in an all-inclusive election in South Africa.  Although I’m a sceptic by nature, voting is the one thing I’m not cynical about.  It’s important to participate in a democracy that came at such a high price.  As I make my X on the ballot papers I shall remember all those who sacrificed their lives so that we could ALL vote.  I will acknowledge the 27 years that Nelson Mandela spent in jail standing up for what he believed to be true and just.  I will remember Edward Gumede.  You don’t know him, but his death was not in vain.  I will regret the loss of a potentially great leader, Steve Biko.  But most importantly, I will remember all the milestones that marked our journey as a country.  It began with repression and resistance and eventually led to our current path from democratic infancy to adolescence. 

I cry every time I open the ballot paper in the stillness of the voting booth.  I’m alone with my thoughts, memories and hopes for a better future.  My dreams are not for me, but for the millions of trusting souls who foolishly vote with their loyal yearts, rather than a critical mind.  I hope that one day they will have running water INSIDE the house and not a shared tap 100 metres from a leaking shack.  That their electricity doesn’t come via a mangled bunch of dangerously frayed live cables loosely strung between rickety poles.  That we can somehow become a little softer, less angry, less violent and more tolerant.  All my love and compassion and naive idealistic dreams are encapsulated in those 2 short straight lines.