Eish!

Somerset West is on fire.

Literally, that is. This is not a town ablaze with cosmopolitan delights; burning with brazen, youthful zeal;  or even conflagrant with exotic and filthy Eastern temptations. Mind you, the Ladies of the Elsies Riviera are known to impart certain kinds of tantalising treats that should leave something burning for a few weeks at least.

Somerset West is probably only smoldering in the wake of a decades long Barbarian invasion as German’s, armed only with blunt undeclared Deutschmark, flung themselves in a surprise onslaught at unsuspecting estate agents. Our supermarkets threw out uneaten baguettes onto the streets and piled the shelves high with pfeffernüsse and sweet wines. Our travel agents neglected their forefathers, plaited their hair round their ears and enrolled in foreign language courses. This is what passes for excitement in these parts. This and watching elderly couples inspect coins at checkout counters. It is the way of our people.

And now the hiiiills are alight without the sound of muuuusic.

There is, of course, no direct link here. Germany did not start the fire. This is merely a discourse on instant gratification.

I am instantly gratified to gripe about why my local Spar no longer stocks chicken breasts in place of Kassler chops. What is a Kassler anyway? Certainly some form of biblical, cloven-hoofed, beast of burden I’m sure. They certainly don’t grow around here or I would have noticed one. What an entire nation would have against chicken is beyond me still.

“Good things come to those who wait”. No doubt. If you wait long enough bad things will come too. As will Christmas, a bed sore, your income tax return, my subscription to Readers Digest and a man speaking foreign asking to take another look at your kitchen.

It’s mere statistics. In an infinite universe, a thousand monkeys stand a better chance of asphyxiating than finding a thousand typewriters. This is easily proved.

However, in an instance, when confronted by a woman scorned, a man will find religion, a plausible excuse and his voice sounding like a Muppet. Three things that many bored Buddhists silently lament. So too an instantly gratified German will find a tax haven, build a three storey house on stilts in front of your seaside hovel, buy a lifetime supply of Khaki-waistcoats and get a spiky haircut in a matter of weeks.

Besides, as an arduous student of Ephebian Philosophy, rhetorical rhetoric and logical enthusiasm, I can conclude with some authority that instant gratification appears to be both:

1. gratifying and
2. instant

Sounds good to me.