The manner in which this newspaper wrote the news before it happened last week (‘The day rape was raped”, or, as it turned out, ‘The day after rape might have been seduced”) had nothing on the frenzy of pre-emptive journalism in the press box at Newlands on Sunday night.
Of course it was fairly safe, with the West Indies on 48/8, to suggest in one’s lead that the tourists had narrowly lost, but all the same the box was suffused with a bouquet of desperation and horrible cologne.
And so it went almost entirely unnoticed when a stuffed suit delivered an envelope from Standard Bank to every soothsaying scribe, each containing a letter perpetrated by somebody called Victor Nosi.
‘The excitement that we hope to bring with the ODI [one-day international] sponsored by Standard Bank is something that is very important to us,” read the first paragraph, and I realised I was being addressed by someone with the cavalier wit and esprit of a Soviet battery-chicken farmer.
Having thus elegantly set up his argument and numbed his readers senses with a sharp blow to their intellect, he surged onward: ‘We need to put a lot of energy in making sure that the public get a bang for their buck.”
Just one bang? Surely a mega-corporation like Standard Bank, trampling unchecked across the green pasture that is the South African consumer’s inability to complain, can afford to cough up for more than a solitary bang?
But even banks have budgets, so one was all we were going to get. Unashamed at this percussive tight-fistedness, Nosi continued: ‘It is in this spirit that the United Cricket Board of South Africa and ourselves are looking at ways of rekindling this part of the game.”
Nosi’s devil-may-care attitude to grammar and sentence construction was starting to take its toll. Which spirit, exactly, was he talking about? The spirit of the energy-sapping quest for the singular bang? And which part of the game was firecracker Nosi intending to ignite?
Then, apropos of nothing, with haiku-like asceticism, three bullet points appeared.
Bullet points have long been the crutch of illiterate executives who never quite got the hang of full-stops, but Nosi’s pithy zingers hung tremulously on the frontier between prose and esoteric performance art.
‘That cricket should be fun for families,” read the first line, and for a heady moment it seemed possible that I was reading a terribly bad poem penned by Nosi in the bath, something like: ‘That cricket should be fun for families / Is a truth most fertile for homilies.”
‘That ODIs are punchy, memorable and”, read the second. Most would suggest that the hanging ‘and” was signifying the imminent arrival of a third bullet point, but I propose that this was Nosi’s realisation of the ultimate failure of language: this prophet of marketing had communed with the god of platitudes, and had been shown The Great Catchphrase.
Through tears of joy he had fought to write down what he had seen, unable to express the orgy of greed that had flashed before his eyes. In the end the hanging ‘and” was his monument, a testament to his failure to reach his mountaintop, his Volvo convertible. But he did leave us with an intriguing philosophical problem.
Past generations have pondered over how many angels could pass through the eye of a needle; but thanks to Nosi, we have this one to mull over: can an event that lasts seven hours, and is usually entirely predictable for the last of those seven hours, be punchy?
‘We have committed ourselves that these forthcoming ODIs will be memorable,” wrote Nosi.
If only he had committed himself earlier. Or been committed. With a final flourish of his quill he bade us to ‘Keep up the good word,” and signed off, leaving one to ponder over which word he meant.
“Pus” is a marvellous word, as are ‘lugubrious” and ‘moribund”, but it seemed unlikely that he wanted these slung around the press box.
Perhaps, one wondered, he was hoping for a word that signified good, like ‘God” or ‘kittens” or ‘Isabel Jones”. We’ll never know.
But what we do know (because he wrote it under his name) is that Nosi,a man with a tangential relationship with words in general and undoubtedly estranged from syntax, is the group communication director for Standard Bank.
Incidentally, if KPMG needs a new chief accountant, please look me up: I got 47% for standard grade maths.