Don’t choose an airline on the fact that its named after your favourite fruit. I did and with gravity’s hand still clutching blindly at the air behind us, our plane began vibrating like Mrs Godzilla’s sex toy caught in a power surge and I was left checking my pockets for a long lost and presumed dead god.
Christmas season again, Woohoo...Every December I fly north to my home town to visit the family, see old friends and wallow in the warm Indian Ocean. I have mixed feelings about this place. On one hand it's heavenly, my family moved out here in the mid 19th century from Bristol and we have been here ever since, and on the other... well, let me get to that in a moment.
This is a piece of the big old Jacaranda tree that fell on my house on the farm. I figured I turn it into a Paipo (for those of you who worry about health and safety, please note I am wearing a sun hat)
Our farm is walking distance from some of the most spectacular beaches I
know. There is constant swell up here, warm clean water and barrels. Lots and
lots of barrels. Growing up here I got tubed at least once a week. The
problem is that, any place overly blessed geographically, will attract people. Lots of them. So it was only natural that with the
overpowering stench of easy money hanging in the languid air, developers would fly in like hordes of
locusts to gang rape Gaia. Paving over the forests with cheap and nasty rabbit
warrens for the zombie bunnies that then flooded in. Shopping malls sprang up
like concrete snares. Open prisons for the rich and paranoid they call
gated estates embalming the hills with the kind of architecture that screams for
the reinstatement of the death penalty. Soulful country roads morphed into viewless claustrophobia
inducing gridlocks of bloated, flatulent SUV’s. All the old fashioned churches were replaced by charmless charismatics. God... my
soul is puking. What’s
there to do other than swim out past the breakers and watch the world die...
My mate Gav has just bought a sawmill, he gave me this piece of Camphor wood. Now its a handplane.
And so
every morning before the subtropical sun had time to work itself up into its
full furious self and every evening as it caught its breath before bedtime, I
went down and swam out past the waves. Swim fins on my feet, sometimes with a
hand slide and sometimes without. This
place is where devout body surfers go after their ashes carpet the ocean. After
the frangipani flowers sink and your friends and family caught waves in. This is
where you slide away into eternity. The
water in summer couldn't be more comforting if it was a Geisha on ecstasy. The
waves have a natural strength that sets you planing high up on your gammon
fattened belly and the barrels, oh man... those sweet ever lovin little creatures. They hold you in their arms and whisper the rudest things in your ear... I
swear, another couple of weeks of these siren songs and I's be handing in my
notice to captain Odysseus, grow gills and swim off to join a seal colony.
