THE city is packed with tourists and the newspapers tell us we can expect even more holiday-makers arriving in the days to come.
Visitor numbers at the V&A Waterfront, the premier tourist trap, are expected to shortly hit the 100 000 a day mark. This is likely to double on New Year's Eve as the hordes lurch about in search of a good time. In other words, it's going to be very jingle bells all the way down there with the cash registers.
The V&A has done some research on their visitors. Apparently a little more than half of them, or 55 per cent, are locals, while 26 per cent are foreigners. The remaining 19 per cent are from Gauteng.
It's unclear why the Gautengers have been singled out like this. Were they not local enough?
Fun fact. But did you know their presence here has saved the Western Cape economy? You didn't? Don't worry. Just pop off to the Waterfront and you're bound to meet some Joburgers who'll tell you all about it soon enough. Then they'll complain how rip-off expensive everything is.
Here in the village we have our own visitors and we too have done our research. About a third are upcountry relatives - although it sometimes feels like two thirds.
They take a dim view of our refusal to join them on excursions to the Waterfront. Apparently the blood oaths we swore to stay away at this time of great lunacy do not hold water with them.
So they loll about moaning that the village's beach is too windy and it smells of dead seals and rotting kelp. Then come the solemn promises to try Durban next year. Or Plett. But we all know that nobody has relatives in those places.
It is, however, a time of peace and goodwill. And we do count our blessings - chief of which is the Mahogany Ridge. It is to its darkened interior that we flee to escape the holiday spirit and, naturally, there debate the big issues of the day.
Such as: what is more demented - that North Korean despot Kim Jong-un is now the United States' chief film censor or that Ellen Tshabalala would have us believe that it was the Communists who were behind her resignation as SABC chairwoman?
It has been a good week for Kim. In a new low in corporate cowardice, Sony Pictures cancelled indefinitely the release in all formats of The Interview, the apparently lame comedy about the North Korean leader's assassination described by Pyongyang as "the most blatant act of terrorism and war and will absolutely not be tolerated."
This follows the hack attack on the entertainment giant allegedly by Unit 121, a covert North Korean military cyber group. Not only was a vast amount of data stolen, but they were warned of 9/11-type reprisals should they release The Interview,
Prior to Sony Pictures' capitulation, Kim's regime was seen as a useless joke. As the author Euny Hong put it in the New York Times last week: "To call North Korea a banana republic - the term historically used to denote little dictatorships with only one export - would be an insult to bananas. For North Korea produces nothing the world needs, and the regime knows it . . . [This] global uselessness is the regime's own fault."
But now Kim has taken on Hollywood and, as they say in Pyongyang, kicked most absolutely the backsides of the debased imperialists. He has, in short, won.
Ellen Tshabalala, meanwhile, has not won. But don't tell her that. She won't believe it. In her world it is entirely plausible that burglars steal proof of academic qualifications that don't exist and universities deliberately tamper with their records just to make life difficult for gravy trainers and fellow travellers at the trough.
Her decision to resign does however relieve President Jacob Zuma of the responsibility of having to fire his "close friend". He has, naturally, thanked her for her "contribution to the public broadcaster". And why not? For five months she has been the SABC's most entertaining soap opera.
She was delusional to the very last. Even as the curtain fell, she was still railing away, daft and utterly unhinged. If anyone or any party, she said, had any incentive to have her removed, it was the SA Communist Party, who were quite vocal about it.
"It could be the SACP, but definitely not the ANC," she said. "I am an ANC member and none or any of my leaders have ever called me to say you are going astray or anything."
Oh dearie me, but we're going to miss her.
This article first in the Weekend Argus.
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