Tale guide

We walk amongst them

 “Where did we go wrong?” you may well ask.

Back in the day a group of our good friends and ourselves were sitting outside on our patio enjoying a calm, balmy night on the subtropical East coast of South Africa.

We had enjoyed a splendid dinner with copious amounts of good wine and had withdrawn to the patio overlooking the blackness of the sea broken by the white spumes of breaking waves below, in order to savour some fine Cape port.

It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to matters of the day and in particular, news items from the northern hemisphere where modern society and generation Z etc. combined to provide the world with revolutionary notions and ideas, much of which, we felt, was being forced upon the silent majority who, generally seemed to find these antics somewhat amusing.

Admittedly, our insights were increasingly uninhibited by the generous flow of the fruit of the vine, but the conversation was nevertheless comprehensible while our opinions grounded in six decades of experience on the streets of life.

That we were bowled over by the almost daily craziness of the modern world was as much an understatement then as it is today. So much of it just made no sense and yet allegedly, intelligent humans were making the calls and passionately living by their convictions.

And, we affirmed that this was not just an African thing, or even a prank made up to raise a laugh (which you can’t do for fear of offending a somebody!). There are ‘serious’ decisions being taken in the twenty first century that in our lifetime would have been the creation of a cheeky script writer for delivery on the morning of the 1st of April to the amusement of most of the nation.

I say ‘serious’ because even as I share these thoughts, deep down inside I still believe someone out there is taking the piss on a gigantic scale!

Our philosophical discussion was interspersed with examples. Someone said that the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University had reportedly closed a website inviting the anonymous reporting of ‘micro-aggressions’ after some of the dons had complained that the university was fostering a police state culture.

While the Dons at Cecil John Rhodes’ Oriel college at Oxford University threatened to go out on strike because the college had decided not to dispense with his statue despite woke pressure to do so.

The latter tale caused raucous laughter in disbelief and the noise disturbed an owl that stood high in our Ndoni tree, pensively observing the nocturnal goings on.

When the question of various sports organisations giving approval for men who have transitioned to female or part female, to participate on equal terms with women arose, there was a spontaneous outburst of amused incredulity.

As the evening progressed in high spirits and camaraderie, I noticed an almost perfectly circular ball of green light emerge from the right-hand side of our vision. The ball hung in the sky about 20 or so meters above the surface of the sea and was travelling a slow steady pace, northwards.

“Look!” I cried out, mesmerized, and pointed to the floating sphere.

“Good God,” said someone and another asked, “is it a UFO?”

I had certainly never seen anything like it in my life and also started to believe we were witnessing one of them extraterrestrial sightings. The manifestation was in itself startling as people from outer space was a concept that fell very firmly into the category of crazy imagination for most of us realists.

The glowing sphere continued its perfectly horizontal path across our vision before disappearing up the coast, way off to the left.

We were speechless. We had no idea what we had just witnessed. I hauled out the computer and we looked up references to UFOs. We found an office for UFO sightings existed in Australia and there was a number to call. We called.

The fellow on duty was surprisingly understanding. He accepted our version of events on face value and asked us to record the sighting on their website. He said they received many such reports of similar sightings from across the world and thanked us for reporting in.

To say that we were a tad taken aback, is an understatement. I mean to say, up until that moment, none of us honestly believed in aliens! But we conscientiously completed the UFO report, date, time, location, temperature, weather conditions and detailed description and once finished, clicked ‘submit’.

We returned to the patio and poured ourselves another port.

About five or so kilometers up the coast, another longtime friend and colleague lived in a sprawling home with a 180-degree sea view of the same coastline. It suddenly occurred to me that he may possibly see the UFO if I tipped him off that it was on its way.

I called him up and he answered immediately. He too was sitting outside on his patio, taking in the coolness of the night breeze. I told him what had happened and how amazed we had been at witnessing such a unique sighting.

The line was silent, as he pondered on my story. Then he asked two questions. “Whose there with you?” and I relayed the names, most of whom he knew; and “how much wine have you chaps consumed?”

You may imagine our amused part embarrassment and part disappointment when he announced loudly for everyone to hear, “It was a f@#*ing Chinese lantern you bunch of morons!”