Editorial - Andrew Mather The usual editorial guff and a little more

Telling Stories

Savs

Garrotte can currently be found in a holiday cottage with excellent views on the coastline of the Eastern Cape. When you consider the range of accommodation options made available by the state it’s not the worst possible place to face a mandatory quarantine. He only recently found a way off the islands and has to be kept apart from the rest of society for a while.

I received a late-night message from him sent from an airport where he was laid over somewhere along his circuitous route home. A text message doesn’t convey much emotion but his anxiety was tangible. He explained, rather unnecessarily, that their prime guiding season is a bust and that his fledgling but promising career may have gone with it. The possible negative health implications resulting from hops through several international travel nodes are nothing to be laughed off either, but he had a duty-free beer in his hand and was in reasonable spirits.

The Sensei is meanwhile unwittingly validating the outcomes of several academic studies into the link between a lack of stimulation and senseless vandalism in city kids - he’s throwing paper airplanes from the balcony of his multistorey apartment. An evening of critiquing my fly tying efforts may have, I fear, driven him to the edge of some dark place. When Nietzsche spoke of gazing into the abyss there was no mention of paper airplanes, but these are unusual times. My suggestion that he uses candles and paper bags to make hot air balloons to drift into the night sky was met with condemnation. The line that he draws between, for example, the number of fibres in a trailing shuck and the permissible degree of criminal m i s d e m e a n o u r s t h a t m a y r e a s o n a b l y perpetrated out of boredom are very fine.