If you have started reading this column with any hope of being reduced to helpless laughter by yet more of the trenchant and witty invective by means of which I have for many years patiently scoured my puny name on to the lists of South African also-rans, then you’re going to be mildly disappointed.
Before going on, let me point out what you might already have noticed about the above brutal self-analysis. At no stage did I use the word “satire” or any of its variations, because I no longer consider myself to be a satirist in the scrupulous South African sense. In order to qualify as such, I’d have to do what all male South African satirists now do, which is, most times, to dress up as a woman.
This is not to suggest that in my long and culturally prolific years in live entertainment I never dressed up as a bird. At the age of 12, at a primary school in the Natal Midlands called Treverton, I and several coevals were made to dress up as girls so as to take part in a Fancy Dress Race dreamed up for inclusion in the School Day festivities by one of several sexual deviants on the Treverton teaching staff.
I was a Southern Belle in vast flimsy skirts and colourful bloomers. The Fancy Dress Race was a huge success. So much so that a future editor of the Cape Times called Tony Heard, who was dressed up as Little Bo Peep — a role he’s never quite abandoned, I may note — pursued me into the Standard Five lavatories where he tried to tear off my bloomers and ravish me until I hastily revealed who I really was.
I remember that both of us, still sexually aroused by each other’s costumes and make-up, then looked speculatively at the elderly Dorper ram Tony had dragged in with him. And so to the subject of this week’s non-satirical column which is to celebrate the best single piece of news in a long time. A new South African venture, called the Hamilton Airship Company, has announced its plans for the future.
With R378-million backing, it will build and commission vast commercial airships to be used both for sightseeing trips and actual travel. The company will pump them up with non-flammable helium — who needs another Hindenburg? — pack in the cheerful rich people and float them on their way. Sometimes as far as London, a three-and-a- half-day trip at 150m above ground level, fabulous game-viewing and all at a stately 90km an hour. Maximum capacity 150 standard luxury class, with luxury configurations for just 49 super elite.
In a publicity accomplishment of saucy imagination, the Hamilton Airship Company has offered to donate one of its airships to what Gore Vidal called “that muffin-faced regality”, Lizzie Two. This to replace her personal yacht, Britannia. What a brilliant idea. Load Her Maj and all the other unlooked-for issue of her loins on to a Hamilton airship and set it adrift for ever. She’ll never get a better chance for waving.
But there are even more exciting possibilities for a Hamilton blimp. As of writing, the South African Correctional Services bods are scratching for new ways to accommodate this season’s bumper crop of convicted criminals — overflow of the El Dullah Effect. They should just hire a few Hamilton airships. In “correctional” configuration one of these airships could probably carry 300 felons. Send up a few bushels of food and water each day and that’s that.
Correctional airships wouldn’t have to go anywhere. Each one moored by a single hawser. To dissuade convicts from swarming down these hawsers, their lower ends would be anchored in the middle of specially constructed viper and crocodile pits. If the hawser breaks, prevailing upper-air westerlies will make sure the airships drift off in the general direction of Australia.
In return for this column I confidently look forward to my invitation to a Hamilton airship kick-off cruise.