Peter Delmar: Margate is a very nice town on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal.
It has nice beaches and nice hotels and even a regional airport which, I believe, is nice enough. Lots of nice people live there. They live nice and quietly in Margate. So quietly that in the 102 years that Margate has been Margate nothing has ever happened there. (Except for just now and in 1922, but I'll come to that in a moment.)
When Margate had its centenary two years ago, civic-minded people put up a nice website to celebrate the fact. They put up a page, as you would expect, called "History". It begins thus: "Margate South Africa has a very interesting history that can be dated back to 1908." At which point the history section comes (to borrow from 1066 and All That) to a full.
It seems nobody could think of anything historic happening in the town. Which is not a bad thing when you're marketing yourself as a family holiday destination; the last thing you want is an unsolved serial-killer mystery, an outbreak of bubonic plague or something really bad like, say, Julius Malema buying a holiday home there .
Margate's reputation has been a bit tarnished in the last few years by the annual influx of thousands of teenagers who go there when school's out to get as drunk as humanly possible and to copulate themselves into a coma. But, every year, after the filthy young hordes have finished spending their daddies' dosh, Margate mops up the vomit, sweeps away the used French letters, pours itself a stiff drink and sits down to count the cash. Apart from that, there really has not been much to report.
I digress, but I did promise to tell you about 1922. The Margate centenary website has one particularly edifying page, devoted to the mysterious "Trunko" that washed up on the beach in that year. Nobody quite knows what Trunko (aka the Margate Monster) was because nobody scientific went to investigate and nobody knows why it was fighting, just off the shore, with two whales. To cut a short story even shorter, the whales killed Trunko, which then ended up on the beach. It has been described as a 14m polar bear-like creature with a trunk. There have even been suggestions that Trunko was a species of aquatic elephant, but it decomposed before Charl Pauw could get there, so we will never know.
If only one significant thing happened to Margate in its first hundred years, at least the second century has started with a bang.
So to speak.
There is a bit of a rumpus going on in the small-business community of the Hibiscus Coast, because the local sex shop is seeking official permission to open two small cinemas next door and - get this - two dinky little bedrooms.
I'm assuming that the mere fact of your reading this in The Times means you don't live in Pietermaritzburg and don't read the Witness newspaper which, on the weekend, brought this startling bit of intelligence to a wider audience, but I thought you really ought to know.
The Margate porn shop in question is part of the nationwide Adult World chain, and has been in business for only a year or so. There was some empty space next door so the shop manager reckoned he would go into the cinema business and offer patrons, after sitting through three hours of Gone With The Wind or whatever, the opportunity to have a little lie down.
Business owners in the vicinity are not impressed. They have got it into their dirty little heads that, after a bit of shopping and a movie, people are going to go next door to have sex. Said one business owner to the Witness: "I remember when Margate was a prime holiday location on the South Coast; businesses like this have made it what it is today." Harumph.
Now I'd got it into my addled head that Adult World was a franchise-based business but it isn't, according to Francois Joubert, the boss, who tells me it belongs to a "South African citizen" and employs 400 people nationwide.
Frankly, I don't know what to make of the Margate saga. But it just goes to prove that, eish, you can't take your eyes off those entrepreneurs for a second; they'll always be scheming of new ways to make a buck. Like I said, I thought you should know.