Many of us have been thinking of racial tolerance — and intolerance — in our Fair Land since AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche’s death in Ventersdorp over the Easter weekend. It occurred to me as I watched my five-year-old daughter play on the beach at the weekend that the sea shore is probably the one place where all South Africans get along just fine irrespective class, colour and religious creed.

We do that because the Beach Has Rules that we all learn as children and retain through the rest of the life. If we don’t learn them, none of the kids will play with you so most of us catch on pretty quick. Let’s consider some of these rules — they really are lessons for a more tolerant South Africa.

My daughter Gemma heads off to find buddies at Gonubie beach in East London.

1. Don’t steal someone else’s bucket and spade.

2. Share your toys in puddles and especially your boogie board and frisbee as it will be much more fun than playing by yourself.

3. If your toy is so precious that you don’t really want to share, don’t take it to the beach. It will get messed up or you’ll loose it.

4. Don’t bash down another kid’s sand castle when they are working on it or mess up their drawings in the sand. Its more fun to ask if you can help or, after they’ve gone home, to build on them to make a super duper HUGE sand castle.

5. Chasing each other is fun but throwing wet sand at someone is too rough and it will end in tears.

6. Respect other kids’ spaces. Don’t plonk youself down and start building your sand castle on top of theirs. Rather ask them if you can play with them, bucket in hand, or ask if they want to help catch fish with your net. Watch out for little babies when you’re running around and throwing a frisbee or kicking a ball about.

7. When it’s time to go, drag your towel along the sand away from everyone and then shake the sand out.

8. Take your empty cooldrink bottles and ice-cream packets with you and throw them away in a dust bin.

9. And sometimes your mother does in fact know best, dammit! Keep still when she’s putting sunblock on you and wear your hat because sunburn is no party.

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BY MIKE LOEWE

The sun was out and the attitude was right. She needed the beach and Saturday was blue.

Grahamstown can be interminable on weekends. Dunno why because I love this place. It has a wonderful way of handling time – all those seasons and moods and switches. Just sometimes, you get to Sunday night and think: “Is that it?”

But this Saturday just said: “Beach!”

Simple sun worshipping. Unselfconscious. Real. Pic: Mike Loewe

You get people who are launching their rubber ducks into the dawn ready for a day of splendour. And you get those who launch their cars onto the freeway at noon, having visited the community market, dropped a child, spoken to moms, resolved little niggling, banal issues that just won’t let you go to the beach…

But the attitude was good, so armed with FooDude’s R20-a-slice baklava, plus shortbread and beetroot relish, and one teen, we happily puttered towards Kenton. I was resolved and at peace. No surfing today. Just swimming.

Tant Hettie’s farm stall on the vlakte above Salem is famous for two cyclists bonking (remember, it means getting tired, vulnerable and unable to continue) and only one of them calling home for a pick-up! (But they both took it, and we move on…)

Now it was my time to explore the store. Rushed into her darkened garage with its ancient shelves and single fridge. What would she look like? My late aunty Esme!

Her ginger beer is awesome, and with arms jammed with jars, we left this single-looking senior in her little house under giant gums and stopped only to look at rhinos a few kays outside Kenton.

A bit of faffing around (Mermaid beach is not the same as Aviator Girl’s cove) and we arrive.

The tide is in, such a wide shallow expanse of water. Easterly churn has turned it cold, but the sand is warm (not burny) and we make our way to the corner.

Daughter is delighted, but screeches as we wobble our way into the olive-coloured deep channel and we do that heart-pumping rush across (just in case a raggy decides to cruise the bay) and we are out in the ocean, on the flats. Exposed.

She goes in to the waist (familiar?) and stretches out on the sand, hat over head, in her styling, sporty black one-piece into that combo of intense light without the roasting.

Another family joins us. The beach is otherwise empty. And did I say vast?

We let the sun onto our pale skin. Not too long, because the next door Yorky runs up and snaffles into She’s hat-covered face!

Just an hour or so hanging out on this shoreline where earth and sea create endless energy and we’re peckish. (Later we’ll eat at Ocean Basket in Port Alfred on the banks of the Kowie. A treat.)

As we mosey along towards car, there is this remarkable sight.

A woman in full beachy outfit, slacks, blouse, hat, shoes. She should be upright, but has chosen to lie flat on the sand, stretched in full repose with that vista of hills and water in the background.

Simple sun worshipping. Unselfconscious. Real.

Great attitude.

* Mike Loewe is the editor of   Makana Moon, a quirky community paper in Grahamstown. Click here to check it out on the web.

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By FRED HATMAN

Shell collecting. The most innocent and becalming of pastimes. Fresh sea air. Crashing waves caressing one’s ears. Kids building sandcastles. Seagulls wheeling and whingeing. Dogs with sticks in their mouths shaking saltwater over bodies browning under sun’s grill.

Time was when Mom and Dad would take us down the South Coast for a Sunday of bodysurfing, Coke floats and burgers and Swingball on the beach. We would wade in the rockpools, wonder at crabs and gigglingly stick our stubby little fingers into ever-alert anemone. And pick up, seemingly, huge cowrie shells almost at will.

Many years later, now that I enjoy the “live-the-holiday” luxury of blogging on my Umdloti verandah instead of enduring endless newspaper strategy meetings in drab offices, I have begun to take walks on the beach – just 40 metres away from my front door.

Bliss. It is during my seaside solo sojourns that I feel the eye-crustiness of hours spent hovering over my laptop wash away, cleansed by breezes surfing off the Indian Ocean, my feet cooled by flirtatious tides, the scrunching sand exfoliating my toes.

Umdloti Beach in more chilled times. Pic: Hatman

That was until I rediscovered what I remembered to be the joys of finding the enticingly elusive cowrie shells. Those subtly coloured beetle-body shells of porcelain sheen, with the tiny teeth that once protected the gogga which lived inside. The shells that, centuries ago, were used as currency in much of the world. Eulogised in myth to boost fertility in women whose bodies are adorned with them. Oh, what elation to be had when, among myriad fragments of oystershells, mussels and limpids, I spot a cowrie furtively shooting off a watery wink at the wintery sun.

Shells on the seashore: spot the cowrie. Pic: Hatman

Aaah, got it... did you get it?" Pic: Hatman

But no more. I have stumbled upon a secretive, sophisticated network of local cowrie collectors. And they’re scary. They emerge silently and menacingly at the crack of dawn from their hi-des double-storey homes lining Umdloti South Beach Road, clutching roneo’d copies of tide-tables in one hand and Friendly Store plastic bags in the other.

Wearing crazy-paved, granny-knitted and grotesque jerseys to defeat the early-morning chill, they fan out on the sands with nary a glance at sky or surf. Heads down they plod away, scouring around every granule of sand for any cowrie which may be trying to hide behind a piece of seaweed or Coke bottle-top. Raised glances are reserved for me, an Umdloti newbie, and they wordlessly say: “Hey, out-of-towner, don’t tread on our turf. You’re welcome to surf or build sandcastles but we have sole mining rights for cowries on this beach so naff off.”

I pretend to stare out to sea, waving occasionally at a bloke in a microlight or at a container ship headed for the Far East, all the while poking a toe around in the sand for a shape resembling that of a cowrie shell. It’s not nice.

Then it got worse. I had juggled my blogging hours to avoid any clashes with the Umdloti Underground Cowrie Collectors Club (UUCCC) when the unexpected dangers of cowrie collecting were raised to a new level altogether by the arrival of the Vixen of Vienna.

I had pocketed two beauties one day when I heard a low growl. It seemed to come from a short, copper-haired woman with translucent skin and fierce eyes. I could tell that her eyes were fierce because they were locked on me. “For vot are you looking?” came the repeated growl. “Oh, just shells,” I chortled cheerily. “Vell,” she spat, while clearly trying to hypnotise me, “has you found any kowies?”

“Nah,” I said, wearing my most disappointed face in deepest etch, “it’s a quiet day on the cowrie front.” “Is dat right?” rasped Frau Vixen, spinning on her sandalled heel to inspect a crustaceous form that had caught her eye.

The Viennese Vixen closes in on my shadow: so scary I had to shoot this from the hip. Pic: Hatman

I decided to put distance between me and the malevolent madchen. When the tide, now resurgent, washed up a shape answering to that of a cowrie, I strode forward, hand extended… only to find my progress blocked by the Austrian antagonist. “Mine!” she screamed, sounding like Bakkies Botha diving into a loose maul.

I retreated to the safety of my verandah, relieved not to have been mugged for the two cowries which now resided in my underwear. That night, I dreamt of a fearsome female alien riding atop a gargantuan tank-like beast which scooped huge lumps of Umdloti beach into giant retractable arms and rifled through its haul for cowries before clunking them into its rumbling belly.

I think I shall take up scrapbooking.

* Fred Hatman is a veteran South African hack, who has plied his trade both in SA and the UK, now living in Umdloti in KZN. He also runs a cool blog, which is well worth a visit… or two… or three… Click here to go there.

Popularity: 15% [?]

With one swift movement, Jack smashed the net into the water. “I can’t believe it,” he yelled, hopping up and down in the rock pool. “I’ve got a fish. I’ve got a fish.” My six-year-old nephew had caught his first fish — and not a silly little bully but a 10-centimetre spotted guy that looked a lot like a puffer fish.

“Don’t touch it,” I yelled, leaping over rocks to get to him, “it could be poisonous.” After decanting it into a bucket, Jack called over his cousin to show it off and then, after peering at it and discussing it at length, they set it free to go back to its family. Jack will never forget this moment, I’m sure.

Jack and his dad on a recce.

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