FourSeeing The Past

I just drove 170 kilometres from Hobson House to East London in an attempt to let a little bit of steam off the pressure cooker that has become my life. The 170 kilometres were no joke – I was held up by 'two stop-and-goes' for fifteen minutes each, almost knocked over three baby goats on three separate occasions and I am quite sure that I got a speeding fine. Upon arrival at the East London seaside my hair goes astray and I begin to resemble those fluffy baby goats I almost decapitated. Off to the Highlander it was; a local East London hotel bar that smells of stale smoke but serves the best cocktails. The Highlander is like the Moulin Rouge of East London, everybody goes there to wind down after a hectic week. The open deck looks onto a stunning view of the lagoon, something you would find at the back of a postcard and inhabits all types of strange people on a Friday evening. People are aged, on average, about 27 to 34 but despite their ages they seem to behave like children in a sandpit. It is like fate has brought all of these people together to pursue one common primitive goal – sex with the opposite sex.

I am sitting next to three men who are probably in their late thirties. They are drinking copious amounts of Castle Lager draughts and seem to be scrutinizing anything female that walks in. "Those are all legs hey!", one of them say a little too loudly for it to be subtle. "Do you think she's married?....oh F@*%k she is definitely married. What do you think of that one over there? Nice tits yaaaa", says a German type man on my left. Turns out, the other guy is an ex-Rhodian who was in Smuts nine years ago. Not much has changed…

I am wondering if the game is similar to the one we play when we are teenagers. Girls gossiping over coffee after school and running after a sexy victim to get a whiff of his cologne. After my twenty minute observation I realised that it is quite similar indeed. The only difference is that the coffee after school is substituted by 'Sex on the Beach' cocktails, very low blouses and the smell of cologne is replaced by the stench of cigarettes. "Do you want something more to drink?" the German type man asks me, catching me off guard. "No thank you – I'm ok", I respond amusingly. I wonder if he knows that I'm young enough to be his daughter.

I look at the girl sitting in the other side of the deck. She is promiscuously sipping on a pink cocktail through a double straw and she is duelling that puppy! She has put the mini cocktail umbrella in her hair, hoping to attract some male attention, I presume. I would compare it to the female version of the "peacocking" technique that the ugly looking guy with the bald hair wrote about in his book "The Game". A guy would basically wear something outrageous at a fancy bar – like a cowboy hat in order to attract the female's eye – how animal, how primitive, and how strange? It is a technique that guys think girls don't know about. She throws her blonde hair back and giggles at something that seems to be hilarious, but probably isn't. Across the table from her are another two blondes who think that smoking is as attractive as the white bellbottoms they wear. Then there is the odd hobo looking man who looks like his past got the better of him while he sips on whiskey and eventually starts slurring. The younger men wear hiking boots with little spikes on the edge and thinks that it's hot.

As I sip on my cocktail I remain convinced that the way we were in high school has not changed much at all. It always boils down to 'the game'…