[Image: Wikicommons]
Those of you expecting a Hemmingway-esque fishing story, involving a line of fishermen on a pier, casting rigs in harmonious rod swings, and using calloused fingers on wooden Scarborough reels will need to satisfy yourselves with the metaphoric sense in this tale.
Nor is this about Santa’s little helpers with big pointy ears. It has more to do with Satan’s little helpers, or Sandton’s or Constantia’s.
The Elfs being discussed here are the Entitled Little F***ers who roam the mean streets of St Francis in the week between Baby Jesus’s birthday and New Year’s Eve.
Many of the parents who holiday in St Francis nowadays are not of the old school. Families from the Eastern Cape, and even some from the large metropoles who have holidayed here for generations, enjoying the relatively laid-back scene of booze cruises on the canals, golf in the perennial tempest, fishing, and beaching on a privileged holiday break from the madness in cool white houses with black thatch rooves. In the old days, anyone in South Africa with true social ambition, who favoured a ‘holiday’ of drinks parties and days packed with cycling and golf with clients went to Plett, Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard or to a lesser extent, Hermanus.
Things have changed, and not only in the increasingly crazed and dystopian corridors of the West Wing. Although Darwin would have struggled to have framed these developments as evolution. Nowadays, many of the people renting the increasingly exorbitant houses in St Francis are here at their teenagers’ request. Although whether this is a request, or a demand remains to be seen.
A scene has developed here in the form of a series of arranged beach parties held over the holiday season ostensibly to provide entertainment for young adults of a drinking age. The traditional beaching pursuits followed by a few of dad’s stolen beers or a half-jack of Obies are no longer enough for a generation raised on immediate satisfaction.
The popularity of these profitable Ibiza-styled affairs has resulted in derivatives, namely, parties for teenagers who are not yet of a drinking age, and even a night where parents can join in the fun, in Sodom and Gomorrah, where you get to watch your children at play with their guards down in ghoulish fascination. And where different generations can celebrate the no-doubt, profitable year together. I am not sure if grandparents are also catered for and provided with noise-cancelling headphones and tepid glasses of whisky and water in a cordoned-off section scattered with bridge cards, but it is not beyond the realms of possibility in this spirit of celebration, and profit.
I am sure this is all arranged in the interests of fostering community and inter-generational spirit, like an enormous wedding at a farmer’s hall in the country. At least a country wedding with a cash bar and an eye-watering cover charge where some 18-year-olds arrive in Lamborghini’s. I just don’t think intergenerational parties make sense outside of family weddings and birthdays. Whoever has read Lolita, will understand the potential complexities this can create.
The problem is, of course, that no one wants to go to the underage party. Teenage discos have always been lame and lacking in rizz. Alcohol or intoxicating substances have been the keys to a good party since we lived in caves. They allow us to overcome our shyness, to show off the moves we have only practised in the mirror and to talk to anyone of the opposite sex without blushing. Think of dry school socials in brightly lit concrete halls and the fate of the wall flowers. Nowadays these affairs are probably pods of kids messaging each other on their smartphones.
This means that the ‘adult’ parties are now sometimes rumoured to be attended by teenagers under the drinking age who have managed to acquire the requisite fraudulent identity documentation which allows them to gain attendance or sneak in undetected or unofficially.
This is certainly not a new phenomenon. Experts in photocopying and amateur fraudsters made a good living out of fake IDs in the ’80s and ‘90s, and ingenious teens over the generations have been one step ahead of the technological developments of the identification business ever since. South Africa received its grey status for a reason. After all, ‘n Boer kan ‘n plan maak.
We all understand the issues with abolitionism. Although I am still trying to discover why evolved humans (myself included) need to dumb down our senses to truly relax. It certainly has something to do with a national drinking culture, the disturbing world we attempt to anesthetise ourselves from, and rampant and manipulative advertising. All this in an increasingly complex environment in which we are now competing with abstinent robots who can think for themselves and work without stopping at a frightening speed 24/7. I know an adult couple who had to check themselves into A&E at the Finsbury hospital as a pair of gibbering idiots the other day after eating a gummy at a party that said it contained 5mg of THC on the tin but in fact, packed a 60 mg punch.
Have you considered how your teenager will manage such a crisis, amid thumping oonce oonce, whirring strobes and circling sharks? Perhaps you are one of those parents who preferred the sink-or-swim approach of throwing your baby into the swimming pool and then waiting to see how and if it got to the side. Call me risk averse but I preferred to send mine to swimming lessons first.
Knowing all we do about the world of ‘going out’, is it a sensible idea for parents to buy teenagers a fake ID on the internet for R5000 to facilitate them attending a party that they are neither allowed nor equipped to attend? Or even knowingly permit them to go to a party when they are underage? It is one thing to lead a horse to water, but another altogether to give it a lift over the fence into the forbidden pasture. Aren’t we supposed to be setting our children up for success? Allowing them the space to develop the ingenuity to make their own plans for subterfuge is surely far better than parental facilitation.
Surely a few ‘discos’ chaperoned by sober(ish) parents in a quiet town with a managed guest list is preferable to provide them with the facilities to develop a game plan? Or is this an impractical utopian dream?
While I am at it, is it smart to allow teenagers to determine where families go on holiday? Psychologists have long eulogized the relative benefits of a strong and grumpy paterfamilias at the apex of the sociological triangle in a family dynamic. Mainly because children get anxious when they realise they are running the show given how little they know. Besides, why should I give up a couple of weeks of calm in a quiet village on the coast, reading about Horatio Nelson’s heroics because my teenagers have FOMO and would like to get both lit and laid, preferably simultaneously?
There is so much time available for queuing for drinks in bars in your 20s and 30s, along with the unenviable drama of trying to procreate. Shouldn’t we be encouraging our kids to be younger for longer? And did anyone ever benefit from trying to be in the cool crowd?
Having said all of this, in cricket, they say that you should never judge a pitch until both sides have batted. They also say that those who only cricket know, know nothing of cricket. In fact, judgment in general is not advised unless you are employed to wear a wig. Although those of us in the fourth estate, even the amateurs, have a calling to comment on our society, I am merely asking a few obvious questions.
Thank God my children are not at this stage yet. But isn’t it better to teach your kids the complicated art of casting the Scarborough reel – the timing of the fingers on the line and the looping swing of the rod, in a benign environment, before we expect them to land an Elf on the pier by themselves, with all those avaricious commercial fishermen crowded around them?