Two Bits – 6 February 2015

Did you ever think a fur seal would make a good journalist? It’s the only explanation I can think of, because National Geographic magazine has rated Clifton, Cape Town, the second best beach in all the world.
I’ll give them that Clifton is very pretty – white sands, huge boulders, clear blue sea, beautiful people, etc – but the traffic on the really hot day when you want to go to the beach is impossible.
And the more clear and more blue the water, the colder it gets. Seriously, 11 degrees is a geometry angle, not something you want to immerse your tender bits in. It’s about the temperature that only residents of the ice caps would enjoy, hence my wondering if National Geographic had hired a fur seal to do the write-up.
Dozens of beaches come to mind well before Clifton. The beaches of the Eastern Cape and Zululand are great for getting out there and enjoying the wide open spaces. Anywhere along the Wild Coast gets a five-star rating from me for fishing, swimming, walking and getting away from it all. Zanzibar, Copacabana and San Salvador in Brazil, around Inhambane in Mozambique – there are so many!
But home is best. What more could you want from a beach than what Salt Rock main beach and Thompson’s Bay have to offer? Warm water, good waves, great lifeguards, crunchy sand, hot sun, beautiful people . . . everything you could possibly want from a beach. I’m going to leave Ballito’s Willard Beach out of it until they clean up those toilets.
And if you’re wondering which National Geographic rated the best in the world, well they chose Barcelona. Yes, it is a nice beach, but I think the magazine’s editors should get out more.
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Well, well, well. Charismatic preacherman Angus Buchan came and laid down the Word on the North Coast and what do you know, three days later it started to rain!
Either the combined prayers of locals were heard in the right place, or Buchan has an outstanding weather forecasting app. Whichever, the wonderful rains must be welcomed by all.
We can also all be delighted that Umgeni Water and government has decided to build a pipeline from the Tongaat River to Hazelmere dam. The river just empties into the sea, anyway. Surprising, in a way, that this solution hadn’t occurred to them earlier, but let them get on with it. Finished by March, if plans go right.
I also rather liked the suggestion made by readers that the sand-mining operators, at present causing havoc on the rivers, be invited to go to Hazelmere and take their fill of the silt lying exposed there. They get their sand, we get a deeper dam and the rivers don’t get damaged – a win all round.
Considering that the North Coast is going to grow much, much more in the future, it would be a good idea for Umgeni Water to dust off the plans to dam the Glendale valley and even the Tugela valley, which were drawn up years ago but shelved for unknown reasons.
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A history professor and a psychology professor are at a nudist colony.
The history professor asks, “Have you read Marx?”
The psych professor says, “Yes, I think it’s the wicker chairs.”