One day, walking past an Adult Interest Retail Concern

Had an interesting lunch, complete with floorshow today. Not strippers. I was with a colleague and two business acquaintances for a lunch meeting. We sat outside on Greenmarket Square- a busy tourist market area with lots of outside restaurants in the centre of Cape Town. In the middle of lunch, there was a YEEEEEEEE noise, which in Cape Town means people are yelling to warn of a crime taking place. A teenaged street-kid sprinted past our table pursued by at least six security guards. Hundreds of luncheoning tourists got to watch the kid trip, and slide on his face. He stood up and looked ready to take the security guards on- in Cape Town, most of the security guards are former businessmen or professionals from other African countries who came here as refugees- they can’t get work, so they work as security guards for minimum, and I mean minimum wage (say $150-200 per month).

So the security guards are fast, but not violent, and it looked dangerous, until a cop appeared. She was vast, and clearly hadn’t broken into a run since cadet school. She walked up to the raging kid, berated him like an angry mother, scolding him and waving her finger. (In the old days, the cops would just beat the living crap out of a guy like that- but there were tourists, with cell-phone cameras, so one has to be cautious). The kid calmed completely, and she gently led him away to his pointless night in the cells.

I turned to my semi-tourist colleagues, and said ‘He does that every day at 13.30, just for the tourists’. He probably does- It is what tourists expect to see- the rampant crime. Maybe he is a professional actor. Who knows? It was all very unobtrusive and amusing*. Stupid crime. *Being flippant- The kid will, statistically, end up on heavy drugs, go to prison, get raped in prison, and die of AIDS-related illnesses. Statistically.

Later, walking to the station, I passed Adult World, the, er, shop where adults go to buy adult stuff. (My repressed nature has kept me from going in, so I have to go by the imagination a little). Normally, there is a mannequin wearing a feather duster in the window, but today, for the first time, there was a bouncer. Not some odd toy, but a doorman, a huge depressed looking guy- admittedly, he can’t have dreamed of THAT job, growing up, and it made me wonder, what could they possibly have going on in there that needs the services of the sad giant? I thought they just sold rubbishy German magazines, and scary DVDs? I am now even more convinced that I will never cross that threshold. Rereading that paragraph: It is a sex shop, ok? See? Too repressed to say the words sex shop. SEX SHOP SEX SHOP SEX SHOP. There. Out of my system.

It’s difficult to find silliness out of these things, and I don’t, really, but I am glad I don’t live in a dull place.

Apropos of nothing: I saw a grandfather hitting his four-year-old grandson this weekend with a belt. Really hard. I was too surprised to intervene. Surely this is way out of line? The kid was beaten for shouting while playing in his own garden. I know these people- they are not strangers.
I’m sick of violence. Sick that our society seems to approve of it. I wanted to make the old man feel really small using words, but instead, I pretended as though I hadn’t seen.

I wasn’t heroic today. Clark Kent went to the phonebooth, and all he did was dial his mobile server to check for messages. **Found the picture after I'd written this- you can steal almost anything from Google Images- does that endorsement exculpate me?