The best South African column ever?
I don’t know what made me think of Hagen Engler recently, but through a near-random series of mouseclicks I ended up on his website/blog. Actually, that would have been what made me think of him – I was on his website. Hagen is Editor of FHM Magazine and one of the more underrated writers in South Africa.
I remember playing rugby with Hagen. It was the Under-15D team or something equally ignominious or, indeed, fitting. For some reason I remember him having longer shorts than anyone else. If, indeed, shorts can be longer without stopping being shorts and becoming longers. He may have played in the backline somewhere (scrumhalf?) while I sweated up front. We tended to lose, mostly, but that didn’t stop us trying. What stopped us trying was the fact that none of us gave a shit.
Anyway…as I was saying. I came across his website and this gem of a column – written in 1998 called “10 Reasons why Cape Town can fuck off”. At the time he wrote it (when he was a surfing mag editor and I was a radio presenter) I interviewed him about the piece. Given its title it was something of a struggle to get through a 10-minute conversation on live radio without any profanity, but we managed it somehow. I didn’t mention the rugby team or the longers, which probably helped.
Reading it today, 9 years later, as someone who has lived in Cape Town for six years and is about to move to Grahamstown (which is as close to PE as you can get without fear of being glassed on a Friday night for checking out someone’s stukkie skeef) it resonates more than ever.
I particularly like the line: “Eleven degrees? That’s a geometry angle, not a fuckin’ ocean temperature” and it’s probably the only recorded piece of English writing to contain the word “ghoef” (I didn’t even know that’s how you spell it).
If you don’t like the F-word, don’t read it. If you want to have a laugh, click here now.
