Sunday morning is hell in the Groot Marico; the residents are not just recovering from the after-effects of the night before in the Dorsbult Bar, but coping with the Sunday rags.
“This lady is going to be so disappointed,” keens Dr Mohamed Cassim in The Sunday Independent. “We have 10 beautiful eggs and the sperm are fine, but they just won’t penetrate for some reason.”
Who could, with the mad eyes of South Africa’s “cloning doctor” leering down the microscope while one sets about one’s reproductive duties?
The confusion is what makes it particularly difficult to bear. The Saturday Star and the Saturday Argus announced authoritatively on Saturday: “The expertise and equipment to replicate genetic material and create human clones are available at a Johannesburg fertility clinic.”
To underline it, our very own Dr Frankenstein is shown peering myopically at some under-performing spermatozoa.
“My son could do it,” boasts Cassim of cloning. “With the technology that we have in our laboratory, the procedure is as easy as fiddling with some controls.” In case anyone else’s son wants to have a go, the newspapers even provide a blow-by-blow account of how to set about the “fiddling”.
But by Sunday the whole picture is changed with the news, hot-foot from London (or some hidden glen in Scotland where these ghastly experiments originate) that Dolly – the sheep that began all the excitement – is not the product of the world’s second virgin birth.
She cannot even claim to be the product of some illicit act of passion – the reality which usually lies behind tales of impregnation from on high. She is, announces The Sunday Independent, seemingly the sad fruit of a mix-up of bottles in the lab!
Who are we to believe? Tony “Tomato Sauce” O’Reilly – proprietor of all three newspapers – was at Rhodes University this week, collecting his honorary doctorate for journalism.
But close examination of his acceptance speech by teams of investigative reporters failed to illicit any answer to the riddle. Elsewhere in the rags – in the “social diary” of the Sunday Times to be precise – Gwen Gill is to be found wittering: “There is good news for FW de Klerk’s supporters.
“Those who were concerned that the former president is lovelorn, lost and languishing can stop worrying”.
The only thing that Lemmer is worried about where the former state president is concerned, is how to shut him up.
Was it really necessary for him to make such a fuss in the Sunday press about his decision to turf out his wife of 39 years? And on Valentine’s weekend, of all occasions?
The next thing, no doubt, will be daily bulletins as to the hit rate of his errant spermatozoa where the no-doubt perfectly formed eggs of Elita Georgiadis are concerned.
If De Klerk insists on putting out these announcements on the progress of his private life, perhaps he could address the next one to the question being bandied about among the handful of out-of-work spies still masquerading as the “National Party”: what effect did his preoccupation with the lovely Georgiadis have on his conduct (or lack of it) at the constitutional negotiations ? Any prejudice against cloning can only have been reinforced by Gill’s account of Gauteng’s glitterati “hopping” on planes to Cape Town for what she describes as the “do of the decade”.
It was a gathering of the so-called beautiful people for an event called “Versace for Africa”, billed as “the last collection designed by the couturier before he was shot”.
“One plane was just a big private party organised by Dory and Les Weil [he of JH Isaacs, she Dr D of Radio 702] who took a few score of their dearest friends off to party,” gushes Gill.
The organiser of this blot on the social calendar, one Suzanne Weil, is quoted as saying: “Unique international events of this kind can help redress the social fabric of our country.”
Bugger Dolly. Smart bombs are the only answer.
The question haunting cricket lovers this week is whether the Pakistani players, Mohammad Akram and Saqlain Mushtaq, were mugged or whether they mugged themselves. The latter theory would reinforce fears that the gentlemanly traditions of the game are being forgotten in pursuit of victory at any cost.
First we had ball-tampering. Then we had “sledging” – attempts by close-in fielders to upset the batsman with whispered accounts as to what his wife/girlfriend is getting up to while he is pouncing around in fancy dress on the field of play.
This was followed by Pat Symcox rubbing the ball in his hairy arm-pits, a ploy guaranteed to play havoc with the most determined player’s concentration.
Is the mugging story now an attempt to evoke pity in the stony heart of Alan Donald, discouraging him from his attempts to brain the opposition for fear of adding to the country’s reputation for violence?
Recent events persuade Lemmer this is not the explanation, however.
It will be recalled that both our president and deputy president have been assuring us that levels of crime are rapidly falling in South Africa. Readers may also have seen the story about the Antipodean back-packers who falsely claimed that they had been attacked and robbed in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.
The conclusion from all this is obvious: tourists, used to boasting to the folks back home of their narrow escapes in the land of rape and bloodshed, are becoming frustrated by the lack of “action”.
We have, of course, been through these ups and downs before: foreigners used to come out here to risk their lives as big-game hunters. When supplies of man-eating lions etcetera dried up, entrepreneurs stepped in to fill the vacuum with “canned” lion hunts.
What we need now is for some patriotic crooks to offer themselves up in similar fashion. Maybe Messrs Akram and Mushtaq would like Central Energy Fund chief Don Mkhwanazi as a trophy ?