Braced for the fair, boots and all

Fred Khumalo: No matter how world-weary or emotionally detached you may be from reality, a time will come in your life that will make you feel, once again, like a child: excitable, easy to please, open-minded. Even if only for a fleeting moment.

The child in me was roused from the long slumber of cynicism the other day when my good friend and colleague BBK brought me a gift - a spanking new pair of soccer boots. These were not just ordinary soccer boots in commonplace black leather with white trim and white studs. These boots were from outer space, or from beyond the Pearly Gates. These boots Gabriel and his comrades yonder wear when they take to the field.

They remind me of a work Picasso would have produced during his cubism period - bizarre cut fragments of leather painted in stroboscopic colours: red, lime, navy, black, yellow. If I were to be given occasion to wear my new boots at night, I would solve Eskom's problems: the streets would be ablaze.

Anyway, no sooner had BBK presented me with the boots - right at the office - than I took off my own shoes and put on my new acquisitions. Ah, I was walking on air. I suddenly had the urge to go and drink coffee. When I realised that nobody at the coffee area remarked on the heavenly babes on my feet, I decided to leave the jealous losers alone. I went and joined colleagues who were having a smoke on the balcony - I don't smoke, mind you, but I don't mind being a passive smoker if there's a message I want to deliver ...

Sadly, my friends who wield cancer sticks were too engrossed in prattle about newspaper circulation to even notice my boots. Recalling one of my younger brother's tricks when he wanted to draw attention to a new pair of shoes or socks, I put one of my feet on a chair and started whistling joyfully as I untied and re-tied my shoelace. At last, from the corner of my eye, I noticed a colleague prodding his neighbour and nodding his head in my direction.

First there were titters, then giggles, and these finally crescendoed into outright guffaws.

When the makhulu baas spotted the boots, I thought he would recommend me for a salary increase seeing that I was setting high standards of sartorial elegance at the office. Bah! Like the rest of the unfashionable flibbertigibbets I work with, he simply said the colour of my boots confirmed what he had long suspected about me: that I was from the northern parts of this country. Or even beyond the Limpopo. Ah, what can one say about people who think Christian Dior is a new MP from the African Christian Democratic Party?

And oh why did BBK buy me the boots in the first place? I was one of the lucky scribes who had been invited to represent this beautiful country at the London Book Fair early this week. Because South Africa is hosting the World Cup, the organisers of the fair had been thoughtful enough to set up a friendly match between local authors and their British counterparts as one of the side attractions to the book fair.

As if being laughed at for my new boots were not enough, fate was to play a cruel joke on my ambitions to play soccer in London. On the day I was supposed to fly - April 16 - we were told that all flights into and out of London had been cancelled because of a volcano that had exploded somewhere in Iceland. Like a child who doesn't want to wake up from a dream in which Santa Claus is feeding him loads of candy, I refused to believe that some lousy ash could bring Europe to a sudden halt, and thus spoil my fun.

The poet Masoja phoned me late on Friday, sounding very dejected at having been turned away from the airport. He would have been on an earlier flight than mine.

By the following day, Saturday, because I was looking for would-be fellow denialists, I started phoning friends who were on the list of those supposed to travel to the UK. They were all depressed, but gradually beginning to make peace with the fact that the cursed ash was not a figment of someone's imagination. There was a suggestion that we should go en masse to the airport and demand to be flown somewhere in Europe where the ash hadn't presented its accursed self!

Why, one of the organisers in London itself sent us an e-mail to say it had been decided to charter a plane which would fly from Cape Town. My colleague, Phakama Mbonambi, and I were excited at this possibility - but the children in us did not allow themselves to ask the simple question: where would this lovely charter plane land, seeing that the entire miserable island of Britain had closed its miserable airspace?

Siphiwo Mahala of the Department of Arts and Culture defied all of us when he decided that he would fly from Johannesburg to Frankfurt, via Dubai. And from Frankfurt? I wanted to know. He said: "Ag, I'll see." On Sunday he sent me an SMS to say he was still stuck in Dubai.

Later that day, it was decided to have a small commiserations party for the grounded lot. By arrangement, a number of us gathered at novelist Niq Mhlongo's place. Succour came in the form of a number of bottles containing carefully distilled water from the Scottish highlands.

Experience has taught me that the famed beverages from those parts tend to flow most agreeably if accompanied by meat, and meandering talk. Incidentally, a lot of this talk - passionate, profound and insightful - was about the book fair that we never attended.

Experience has also taught me that a great many things can be said about something that one knows absolutely nothing about.

Someone averred that the fair was going to be a damp squib (because these gallant, grounded scribes drinking Scottish water couldn't make it, don't you see!).

Come to think of it, it was possibly good that we were not there, continued the sage whose intellect had been fortified by the waters from the Scottish highlands.

He said the gods had intervened to save us from you-will-never-know-what.

And when the comrade writer spat out the words "the bloody book fair", and invoked the wisdom of the gods, somebody suggested that we could drink to that.

And we did.