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COLUMN LOGO to be inserted later
O F F T H E W A L L
(Launch of a new column)
As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted in September 1990. . . "The more things stay the same, the more they change," I said.
Which is why, I suppose, I was interrupted.
But little did anyone know that, immediately after uttering my inverted cliche, I was about to reveal to readers in the Reform Era several fundamental secrets of life. They were - and still are:
* How To Survive Change.
* How To Be Part of The Miracles Which Are About To Happen.
* How To Earn Money Without Actually Working.
* How To Laugh When You Ought To Be Sobbing.
* How To Be Successful and Loved Without Being Publicly Criticised or Unduly Taxed.
Unfortunately, as I was about to make these revelations, I wandered off to Eastern Europe to examine the practical effect of political change, socio-economic change, and changes in national psyche on the individual (that's me, and I suppose, you). In examining real-life change, I became confused.
The Czechs and the Slavs, the Hungarians and the Georgians, the Romanians and the Bulgarians, the Serbs and the Croatians are very confusing people. Especially the latter two, when you separate them from the Dalmatians and the Herzo-whatsits. So I may have lost a Secret-of-Life or two during these years of not writing a column. But never fear. You've survived Reform as well as Change - and I can still help you in some of the other departments listed above.
Of course, nothing's "for free", as the Americans say. So, if you want to survive, and be loved, and to laugh, and to make money and be a success, etcetera, you're going to have to read this column, and even participate in it.
It may be asking too much. Because first you have to listen to my opinions and read about my credentials for offering advice.
It is my opinion that newspaper columns are too opinionated.
It is my opinion that columnists, like red wine, take years to become potable - let alone reach maturity. I have been writing columns on and off (usually off) for nigh on 40 years. Long ago, not knowing a chiffon from a tulle, I wrote a bridal fashion column for the Diamond Fields Advertiser in Kimberley. It made brides brood, if not broody. Hastily moving on, I wrote for "The Wanderer" in the Pretoria News, "The Wayfarer" on the Natal Daily News, and other peripatetic columns in The Argus, the Sunday Chronicle, the Financial Mail, and in publications around the world wherever an opinionated opinion seemed called for.
For 20 years, I shared in, then appropriated, a Saturday Star column called "Undercurrent Affairs"; a column which has since been corrected and rehabilitated.
In Undercurrents alone, I wrote in excess of a million words - the equivalent of perhaps ten lengthy and boring books - which allows me to claim to be one of the most opinionated people in the business.
For all those years I successfully hid wisdom and withheld the secrets of life. Now, life must be explored, and its secrets shared. We are going to examine all kinds of questions, possibly with the help of Moses whom I shall introduce to you. Moses is a horticultural consultant and contractor. He used to be a gardener, and in the bad old days he was, ahem, a servant. He knows more about labour relations, productivity, staff communication and all that stuff, than any three Cabinet Ministers I have ever met. And he has more opinions than any three columnists I have ever met. He's sure to make his views heard in this column sometime. But no opinions, even my own wildest and most erratic semi-convictions, will hold sway in this off-the-wall column for long.
The only possible prediction about this new loose-cannon observation post is that it will reveal secrets (see list in the introduction), starting with the revelation, perhaps, of How to Make Money Without Actually Working.
You'll have to wait a fornight, or perhaps a few fortnights. for the answer. (Don't send cash....yet).
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