32 Whilst on the topic of taxis, on your daily drive to work you are inevitably kept entertained by the remaining ground-based taxis doing everything possible to defy the laws of the road, the laws of physics, the laws of nature and any other laws ever thought of. If you have the nerve to remove your hand from its death grip on the wheel and activate the radio, the news reports update you on the latest offerings by our illustrious politicians. Our President tells us that Russia will definitely nuke us if we arrest Putin so best we wine and dine him at the imminent BRICS bring-and-braai in ZAR. Our electricity minister assures us that power generation and distribution via the grid is most definitely on the mend and that the stage six to eight loadshedding being implemented currently is merely a precaution. You miss a lot of the news broadcast given the need to focus on avoiding the convoy of coalbearing side-tippers most likely owned by povertystricken politicians desperately trying to eke out a living. Carnage averted, you zone in again in time for the sports news only to hear, once again, of the solid pounding that the All Blacks administered to the Bokke. You reach out to change over to a music channel just as a blue light convoy screams past on a mission to beat up pedestrians and deliver a very important politician to an even more important breakfast before the bacon gets cold. Entering the suburbs, muscle memory automatically directs you around the familiar potholes in the semi-tarred roads and you greet the street beggars on every corner by name given that you have established a good rapport with them over the last ten years. You arrive at work and shoot the breeze with your colleagues around the coffee machine. Here you pick up on all of the latest anecdotes regarding recent burglaries, neighbourhoodwatch skirmishes, rising costs of food and other essentials (think beverages) and the devastating decision to end the Sevende Laan series on TV. An escape to the office is needed where you hope to find peace and solitude amidst all of this mayhem. It’s not to be. Your e-mail stream is full of chain-ofcustody concerns along the timber supply chain, timber theft and land claims and perhaps an arson or two. Community unrest is placing pressure on a plantation and the battery has mysteriously disappeared out of the fire tender. A few incidents of farm invasions provide light relief. Given your (my) advancing years you phone the HR office just to check on your (my) official designation lest you (I) am experiencing earlyonset dementia and have forgotten that you (I) am employed as a special security envoy. Yip, the records show that you (I) remain a professional forester. You (I) have not slipped inadvertently through a time portal into a parallel and treacherous universe and major brain decay can be ruled out (at least for now). The rabbit hole you are in appears therefore to be the reality of the day. It’s a long hole with no light visible from the direction in which you envisage the end to be. On your way home from a fun-filled day at work, you reminisce on those far distant days when you could actually catch a bus to work (I kid you not), you could catch an overnight passenger train to the coast, and you never saw a container on the road. Road signs used to be in place and smooth roads were marked with white lines. Security companies had something to do with financial investments and never anything to do about security. Family members used, generally, to stay in the same country and a matriculant could read. Alarms were something to set before going to bed and designed to wake you up in the morning and never about infrared beams and panic buttons. Back home behind extended precast walls and a fence alarm, one can sit back relax and watch some TV. We have so many choices of uplifting programmes to indulge in. The local or global news all reporting on various acts of violence, or you have murder movies, or crime movies or very woke movies. Alternatively, there are reality shows of people trying to outwit or outlie one another in many creative ways. If you don’t fancy TV, then you can always turn to your electronic device and indulge in the latest social-media offerings. And so, the rabbit hole deepens. We begin to live the screen shot of a broken and decrepit South Africa. We believe that nothing works. The Bokke will definitely never win again, and that guy being reported by the neighbourhood watch is definitely going to attack me when I take the dogs for a walk. The lights are going to keep going off and at some stage they are never going to come back on again. Unless however, you get to glance at another screen and realise from that observation, that your particular rabbit hole does not necessarily comprise reality. I would urgently encourage you actively to seek out alternative screens. There are many out there
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