“Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead,”
Gene Fowler.
Writer’s block is a strange beast. It sneaks up on you quietly, usually when you try your best to be productive. You sit down, full of noble intention. You open your laptop, crack your knuckles like you mean business, and… nothing. Just a vacant stare, maybe a twitch in the left eye, and a deep sigh that echoes through your soul.
Now try doing that in a place like St Francis Bay.
Salt In The Air
Sunshine, waves, the scent of salt in the air – paradise. Absolutely terrible for productivity. You’d think the ocean would inspire creativity. And it does, sometimes. But mostly, it whispers, “Come outside. The tide is perfect.” And suddenly, your plot arc is abandoned for a quick paddle out, and the idea of deadlines feels like someone else’s problem. So maybe writing about writer’s block is a way to a cure?
Even when you manage to start something—one brilliant, shimmering sentence—it often trails off into thoughts about beach walks, sandbanks, or what you’ll braai for dinner. Ideas start with fire and end in smoke. You find yourself googling “famous authors who wrote nothing for years but were lovely people and still turned out okay.”
Then there are the friends. Lovely people. Friendly. Chatty. Love a chat. Love to chit-chat. A lot. Happy to go on about anything for ages. Just want to yak. They always seem to arrive the moment you’re about to produce a line worthy of a Pulitzer. “Come grab a coffee,” they say, like caffeine and small talk are the missing keys to your creative soul. “I need to chat to you about something really important,” they add as if the muse can wait. “You look a bit pale,” they whisper, twisting the knife, probably imagining themselves helpful. Lovely people.
Metaphor about life
And so your productive writing day ends with sunburn, three decent waves, twenty-four blurry phone photos, a few beers at the beach, and maybe half a clichéd metaphor about life being like the sea—deep, mysterious, and constantly pulling you sideways.
Not your best work.
Because sometimes, stories don’t come from word counts and well-planned outlines. Sometimes, they come from the wind that never stops blowing, misheard conversations, or the way the light hits the water just before sunset.
Eventually, the block loosens. One word leads to another. Something clicks. And then, just when you’re finally in the zone – someone knocks on the door with a cold beer and a question about tomorrow’s swell forecast.
A recent trip to Cape Town, the place of my birth, caused a severe re-evaluation of this false dystopia and a general vibe that Cape Town can piss right off
The Weather Has A Bipolar Illness
How do you pack clothing for Cape Town? Fck knows. It was 37 degrees on the day of our arrival, and the Kombi was actually melting. A snowy wind blew from the southeast the next day, and we were in our thickest winter jackets. I wore my winter jacket, boardshorts, a beanie, and a cap over the beanie as protection from the skin-melting sun pouring through the wind. Not a good look.
The Wind is Trying to Kill You
The Cape Doctor tried its hardest to blow my youngest child off a cliff and tried to blow the Kombi door off its hinges and the same cliff. The wind is your daily dose of abject misery. It blows around corners, and Cape Town can piss right off.
The Traffic Will Kill You, With Sadness
Don’t worry about peak-hour congestion; normal-hour congestion will try and kill you. Two hours to sit in the Kombi, listen to KFM drivel and think about how you totally messed up your life with bad choices after bad choices. No one deserves that.
The Water Crisis is Eternal
Day Zero is still there! They are still perpetuating the lie. No one told the inhabitants of this city that there is enough water now, and they are still not flushing their turds immediately, and showering in the garden under plastic bottles of recycled pool backwash. Or maybe it’s just the people I hang with. Either way, Cape Town Can piss right off.
The Cost of Living (and dops) is Barbaric.
“Four tequilas as our pre-drinks celebration, please, my good man.”
“Here you go, that will be R640. Enjoy.”
“Ok, right. That’s the budget gone, no dinner tonight, no jol, let’s go home.”
“But, Dad. You still get to have the dops.”
Why Live At The Beach If You Can’t Use It?
Every dip into the Atlantic Ocean is a full-blown Wim Hoff session, and the hyperventilating is involuntary. Swimming in cold water doesn’t make you high on life; it makes you cold, so stop talking, kak.
Capetonians
While driving back from the beach along a high coastal route, I saw a shirtless, sweat-drenched man with a hairless chest, a giant beard and long hair wrapped in what looked like a Vietnam war bandana running furiously up the hill. He was in the middle of the road (quiet, not much traffic, but still). When he saw us, he started roaring like The Hulk, possibly to give himself some extra energy to get up the last bit of the steep hill. He ran past us screaming, and, utterly nonplussed, I sipped on my beer to calm down while driving as a direct result.
My kids acknowledged that they also saw it, so it wasn’t an LSD flashback, but no one could explain it.
St Francis Today will be a bit quiet next week, as the massive juggernaut that is the management team will be resting on a small, currently cyclone-ravaged island in the Indian Ocean for 8 days.
Digitally Nomadic
Depending on internet connectivity, the adoption and assimilation of a digitally nomadic lifestyle and the strength of the Long Islands, there is very little way to predict the future, as well as the regularity of the newsletter, and of it actually making its way out of the software program and into your inboxes.
This silence/absence will last for a short while, and we will soon be back at the helm, spewing forth a combination of vital information, breaking news, local communication, and absolute drivel, as we are prone to do.
Dad Jokes
Then we will be back, and life will continue as normal, with the odd complaint, a few spelling mistakes, some feeble attempts at wry humour, and a few dad jokes here and there to please and engage with you, the reader.
If you have any advice, ideas, stories, complaints, or any other feedback, this is probably a good time to send it through. We will be in quite a decent mood and will be able to accept advice for what it is and not fly off the handle and mutter obscenities to no one in particular through gritted teeth.
Easter Eggs
It’s the countdown to the Easter Holidays already. Can you believe it? It’s another holiday season, and there is so much chocolate on the go. The weather is still good until easter, so good advice is to spend as much time as you can outdoors up until those Easter Holidays so that you get enough vitamin D to last you through the long dark teatime of the soul that is another St Francis winter.
For many people in the St Francis Bay area, a good day is not crossing the Kromme. We moved here to enjoy the area, why go anywhere? Visiting the Big City can be all sorts of troublesome for these kinds of people.
I am even worse – a good day is not going past the Anchor Garden in Cape St Francis. An excellent day is not going past the waves at Seals. So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to a trip to Cape Town, albeit to see two of my old school favourite bads, Offspring and Green Day.
Airport Run
The first thing you notice is the traffic in Cape Town. The run from the airport to the waterfront is especially unplayable for anyone frustrated at The Links Circle in the morning. It is heavily congested and always seems to be moments away from some form of gridlock. The drivers, raging against the dying of the light of said gridlock, are doing it with such aggression. There’s not so much hooting or swearing; there is just very aggressive lane-changing. Bigger trucks and taxis have precedence over pretty much everything, although probably not Blue Lights, but I didn’t see any of that phenomenon.
The other thing that springs to mind is how incredibly skilled and adjusted the Uber drivers have become. What seems like a suicidal lane change or overtake is humdrum for them. They turn up the music, start whistling to the beat, and repeatedly evade death (their own and ours) without batting an eyelid.
23 Tequilas, 21 Guns
Day-to-day expenses are also quite frightening, as well as the nonchalance to these expenses. We were having a few pre-drinks at a waterfront establishment, and we ordered a round of 8 tequilas and some sushi snacks from a delightful foreign waitress called Sunshine or Smeggie or something. I forgot soon enough after the bill came for 23 tequilas. We still had the eight tequila glasses on our table, so there were no excuses. Our waitress smiled, said, ‘No problem,’ and changed the invoice with a pen to read 20 tequilas. When she received more chagrin from us, she smiled again, said, ‘No problem, ‘ and changed to bill to read nine tequilas. We left it at that, close enough, but it might have been a ruse for our waitress to get an extra tequila out of the exchange. At R118 per tequila shot, it wasn’t hilarious.
Pre-drinks
After storming out of that establishment, we headed for one more round of pre-drinks (don’t judge us) at another wonderful establishment on the water’s edge. A quick round of 4 tequilas (the drinkers in our group were dropping like flies, already from 8 to 4) were nice and cold, run-of-the-mill tequilas. But at R160 per shot and R640 for 4, I was thankful it wasn’t my round.
The concert was all-time, and the Offspring and Green Day performances were one of the top five music concert shows of my life. I’ve seen some legends over the years, especially during my decade in the UK, when massive bands played weekly, but this was something else. The experience was good, safety was top-notch, the bar queues and bathroom waits were negligible, and I was thoroughly stoked with the evening.
On our final night, we went on a costly boat trip to watch the sun go down. The bar service turned out to be a bottle of warm, sweet champagne to be shared amongst a few of us. It was awful, but we managed to soldier on. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at one of the more famous takeaways on the waterfront and ordered some schwarmas.
Boiled Meat
Massive kebabs turned slowly as they cooked, smelling exquisite. When we ordered our food, however, we watched the staff cut a few slithers from the kebab, put it on a griddle and then open up what looked like a packet of pre-boiled meat to put with the slithers. When we got our food, which was also substantially priced for a takeaway, the meat was as tough as a Tiger Takkie. We picked at it and played with it, looking in vain for some tender pieces.
It was wild and totally rejuvenating to be at a live concert, to hang out in intensely crowded but ultimately good-vibes-only restaurants and bars, and to see Green Day for the first time. But home is lekker. I was happy to get back across the Kromme and past the Anchor Garden to see the lighthouse, get back to the point, see the waves of Seal Point, and breathe in the local air again.
I’m not going to lie, but I know certain things about you the reader, that my software allows me to see. Fully controlled by the compliance of the Popia Act, I can see who opens my newsletters, which pages you read, how long you stay on the page, and when you unsubscribe. That would mean you’re not reading this right now, and that’s fine. Unsubscribing can mean several things, none too sinister, and we don’t have time to dwell.
Wildly Sporadic
About 1,500 readers open the newsletter every single time we publish it, of which the publishing schedule is wildly sporadic, to say the least. This equates to about 20,000 page views monthly when we publish three weekly newsletters.
South Africa is the top reader country, followed by the USA and the UK. Germany is sixth, and Sweden is ninth.
The most significant referrals come from Facebook (St Francis Today), followed by Yahoo Search UK. ChatGPT is in third, followed by Instagram (St Francis Today).
The most popular stories are local stories. Consistently rated highly are the Client Care financial newsletters, What’s On At Supersper, Calibre Crime stats reports, Kouga Municipality announcements that affect St Francis Bay, and the Notes from the Editor series, especially the restaurant revues. In the same breath, the St Francis Property Owners newsletters and updates are some of the most-read articles on St Francis Today.
Sharks and Zuma but no Trump
In general news, articles about sharks usually jump the stats, as does anything related to the municipality wanting to charge for domestic solar systems or having some control or licensing system on domestic solar set-ups. People still like to read about Zuma, although Trump’s articles are not overly popular. Underneath it all, however, the most popular page is the Puzzle page, with the jigsaw the most popular sub-hit.
The most popular day is Tuesday, but this is because we don’t post on Monday. However, content-rich days often beat Tuesdays for page views. 58% of people currently access the page via mobile, with 38% on laptops and the rest on tablets.
After a recent surge in popularity last week, we noticed that 76% of readers were new. This number is fluid, but in the previous 30 days, there has been a weird surge of popularity that might or might not be attributed to the global recalibration of Apple MPP policies (Mail Privacy Protection).
Sales Pitch
Interestingly, community-based newsletters are trending and striving globally as they cut away the noise of social media ad pushing, offer valid local content, and tend to gather readers’ loyalty.
What is good for St Francis Today is that studies consistently show that email marketing still way outperforms social media accounts, according to Forbes. It is estimated by Forbes that, in 2024, 81% of US companies were using or engaging with external newsletters as part of their marketing strategy.
It started with my son coughing, then a little tickle in my throat, and before I knew it I was on my back, in bed, beset by unbelievable fatigue and brain fog. This summer’s flu was not lekker at all, and if truth be told, it felt like some Covid-related strain as my taste buds went for a ball of chalk. The fogginess and weakness I couldn’t shake was reminiscent of the first and second times I caught C-19.
Elements Of Recovery
Not that it makes any difference to whatever. The general feeling about this bout of flu was that the most crucial elements of recovery were rest, healthy food and hydration, and mind-over-matter that this wouldn’t get the better of me. Two of my friends – one a local resident and one a visitor from the Cape – both ended up in hospital in GQ as a result of this bug, so it did have an edge to it.
I eventually found myself alone on the couch and in front of the TV with a remote. My family all love watching absolute shit on TV, so I willingly gave up all rights to the remote about a decade ago, only calling dibs when the World Surf League has an event live feed and doing all my screen watching through my iPhone and iPad.
So there I was, alone with a remote, with Netflix, Apple TV, YouTube Premium and a few other streaming channels we pay for, all available and bouncing around on the screen. I started a rudimentary search, hoping that working the remote was like climbing back on a bike and that it would come back to me. We had unsubscribed from the atrocity that is DSTV many years ago. It has plummetted kilometres further to the centre of the earth since then as the crappest channel available to man on this planet, so that wasn’t available.
Position Of Rest
Eventually, I came across a show called Severance on Apple. I was already on the couch, in the position of rest, so I didn‘t have to do much to get the show going.
The first two episodes were kind of slow, to be brutally honest, but then, without warning, I was suddenly hooked. I haven’t been so addicted to anything as much in my whole life pretty much, except for maybe the Ritalin phase in 86 until I got caught in 87, but that’s another story altogether. Severance is incredible viewing. The final episode was worthy enough of watching the entire series.
The best part about Severance is that it has been out for nearly three years, and I only found out about it this last weekend while I was sick. Why is that the best part? Well, the show is extremely popular, and thanks to the Screenwriters strike in Hollywood, the whole wide world has been waiting anxiously for Series Two to come out for three whole years now.
On the other hand, I only have to wait a week, because it is coming out this Friday.
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