Mastering the Art of Doing Nothing

Pavementism

It has been said that the Greeks have mastered the art of doing nothing purposefully. The wiser older Greeks spend most of their time on pavements and side-walk cafe's discussing their favourite topics, soccer, politics, food, women, philosophy or whatever else grabs their fancy. It’s an ancient tradition that has its origins in the Agora or open place of assembly of Athens. The younger more ambitious Greeks are busy scheming how to take short cuts and swindle their partners, their employers, the government or their relatives for short term gain. They pay no heed to the words of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew which warns us: “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul.” Similarly the ancient Greeks believed that great riches would be despised but glory never.

The Greeks are otherwise a nation of restless passengers and spectators with great expertise in social commentary. They sit uneasily on the laurels and achievements of their illustrious forefathers, the ancient Greeks. But even the ancient Greeks had slaves to do the chores and lots of time on their hands to develop new theories for the betterment of humanity. The modern Greeks are unlikely to improve the lot of mankind with new theories or by inventing a space shuttle or vacuum cleaner but at least by passing their time debating at their favourite pavement cafes they cause the least harm to society.

My friend and fellow pavement philosopher, Quinten Knox has recently coined a phrase called "Pavementism."* Pavementism is a spontaneous movement which encourages people to slow down and smell the coffee. Its adherents are called pavementistas. Pavementistas are a special breed of very sociable people who happily spend their time on the pavement with absolutely no idea about what they are going to do next. If you are someone who likes drawing up lengthy to-do lists or lives with diaries, deadlines and schedules, then chances are you’re not a pavementista. You’re a stone cold sober realista. Similarly if you’re a devoted fashionista or someone who has children at a private school, you are unlikely to be a pavementista. You are more than likely a reluctant payista.

Pavementistas believe that when they are on the pavement, they are in the midst of life. Enjoying coffee on a pavement somewhere, watching the passing daily parade of people and cars go by and lots of free, unallocated time, is the ultimate ambition of a true pavementista or the summum bonum, the greatest good. Baristas make the coffee and pavementistas drink the coffee. And coffee shops in shopping malls don’t count as worthy destinations for pavementista purists. The coffee shop must have a real pavement and face a public street, square or piazza and be family owned not part of some branded franchise. There are not many original side-walk cafes left and they deserve to be supported and preserved because of the worthy role they play in the social fabric of a neighbourhood.

Diogenes the Cynic was one of the earliest intentional pavementistas and pavement philosophers. He was a 4th century BC philosopher who lived with his faithful hound in a tub on the pavements and side-walk gutters of ancient Athens and Corinth. He walked the streets during daytime with his lantern and staff in search of an honest man and a real human being. But none was to be found. He found only rascals and scoundrels. Diogenes shunned the corrupt practices, earthly pleasures, the vanity, artificialities, pretension and luxuries of Athenian society while extolling the virtues of self-sufficiency, austerity and a simple lifestyle. Alexander the Great went to visit Diogenes and as he stood over the philosopher, who was lying relaxing at the side of the road, the young king asked him whether there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes looked up at Alexander and asked him to stop blocking his sunlight. Alexander was so impressed with this reply that he told his assembled courtiers and generals that if he was not Alexander, he would be Diogenes.

Deliberate and enlightened pavementism is the very antithesis of mindless busyness, haste and multi-tasking. It requires long periods of reflection, observation and contemplation. A pavementista has the rare ability to spend 3 to 4 stress free hours on a pavement everyday, drinking coffee alone or with friends without feeling guilty. Certain nations are better at producing pavementistas than others. The leading countries in the field at the moment are Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Italy, France and Portugal. In many of the rural villages of Greece and Turkey, the men hang out at the coffee shop, smoking and drinking small cups of dark strong coffee. It’s Greek coffee if you’re in Greece and Turkish coffee if you’re in Turkey, but it tastes and looks the same and is brewed the same way. The women are prepared to work the fields for the sake of peace in the home and to keep the men happy. They deem it a better compromise than sending them off to war or to some distant factory or mine. Japan has not produced any noteworthy pavementistas but it has produced many legendary train gropers and frotteurs. Unfortunately the Protestant work ethic and misguided Nazi inspired notions that work shall set you free has killed pavementism as a movement in many countries. Guilt, fear and ego are currently recognized as the three main obstacles to becoming a successful pavementista. Pavementistas find their inspiration on the pavement. They are usually sensitive creative types like poets, artists, day-dreamers, layabouts, writers and pavement philosophers. But they can also be plumbers, electricians, hashish smokers, voyeurs, pimps, drug-dealers, cigarette vendors, arms dealers, car salesmen, unemployed stock brokers and commodities traders.

I have bumped into many retired bankers, civil servants and former CEO’s, mostly in Greece. They still have a manic, harassed look on their faces like they’re being hunted or chasing some elusive prize. They don’t get it. They clutch small leather strap pouches and are always in a rush, continuously running around town, doing errands for their wives, buying stamps, dog food and paying utility bills. They cannot relax and find it very difficult to become pavementistas. They are fatally addicted to their own busyness and self-importance. They are busy merely for the sake of being busy.

Admittedly many who aspire to join the movement are trapped by their present circumstances. Many might ask how does one become a pavementista when you have a full-time job, mortgage, car payments, overdrafts, kids at school, and a disgruntled mother- in- law. Zorbas full catastrophe in other words. You’re a highly paid professional who works 18 hour days. You work to pay an ever growing list of bills and your clients make huge demands on your time and headspace. You get home shattered, with energy levels depleted and spend very little quality time with your family. Your spouse is stuck with you either out of economic necessity, dependence or habit. Your children are distant and aloof. How can you ever become a pavementista? It’s fine for a while if you really love what you do but otherwise it’s a tough situation for most people on the relentless daily treadmill with clients and corporates making ever increasing demands on exhausted, burnt-out people. Life becomes an endurance test. You’re a zombie on weekends, feeling like you’ve just done 15 rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson.

The words of American writer Henry Thoreau come to mind when he said: "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." If you’re chained to your desk and find yourself like I once did staring out the window of your corner office, desperate to escape and longing for freedom and a simpler life, you start by becoming a frequent escapista, the first rung on the ladder before graduating with eventual pavementista status. You run out for a quick cup of coffee. Once a week is not enough. You gradually build up your fitness, tolerance and exposure levels until you can spend more time out of the office without feeling remorse or guilt. You may however need to opt for a pared down lifestyle, give up the big house, crippling payments and the shiny BMW that’s killing you every month and trade down for a Toyota Yaris and a small apartment. Are you prepared to trade your illusory status and fleeting possessions for more freedom and less money?

Some critics condemn the lifestyle of committed pavementistas as being non-productive and irresponsible. These critics are usually corporate raiders who specialize in gambling with other peoples money and pension fund fraud. Pavementistas have also been accused of being "social Velcro" and "pavement sluts" who live on the fringes and margins of society eating the crumbs that fall off the corporate dining tables. This is simply false. It is true however that genuine pavementistas have simple tastes and needs usually satisfied with a quick shot of the finest Arabica but otherwise they are non-conformists with little time for the conventions, norms and demands of polite and organized society. As a rule however, pavementistas are peace loving, mild-mannered, non-competitive and very tolerant phlegmatic types. They only become militant when they are forced to attend formal functions, wait in queues or renew their driver’s license.

Some commentators refer to dedicated pavementistas as “pavement specials.” This description is usually reserved to describe dogs lacking some form of pedigree. This analogy is completely understandable but while pavementistas share many common traits with mans best friend, they are not dogs. Dogs will eat anything then lick their balls and relieve themselves in public. Dogs however have their virtues. They are companionable, honest and faithful. Like dogs pavementistas can happily sit outside for hours sunning themselves, content to live in the present without anxiety, without dwelling on the past or worrying about the unfathomable and unpredictable future.

Pavementistas believe that speed; busyness, cocktail parties, social climbing and corporate networking are extremely dangerous to your health. Research shows that health is linked to higher levels of education and status. PhD’s and respectable members of the community who contribute their time and energy to society are supposed to be healthier. Scientific studies also confirm however that people who meet and socialize every day with friends over coffee on the pavement tend to be happier and live longer. The pavement is egalitarian and democratic. It is the modern Agora. It is the great leveler among men, the forum and marketplace of ideas. In ancient Rome, the forum served as the central public meeting place where people gathered to air their views, to seek justice and to restore their faith and hope. The pavement revives this ancient custom.

Senior pavementistas of many years service and experience become the doyens and ambassadors of the Pavementista movement. They then become elevated to "boulevardier" status on account of their peripatetic lifestyle and the numerous pavement cafes that they have visited all over the world. This is the same as being a "Chevalier" or knight of the pavement. This gives them the right to hold court, to join in on any pavement discussion and offer their views and counsel without invitation. They also mediate in disputes between feuding pavementistas, but this is very rare.

When pavementistas look back on their life, they never regret the happy hours spent with friends and loved ones drinking coffee on the pavement. They are comforted by the immortal lines of T.S.Eliot:

“For I have known them all already, known them all -,
Have known the evenings, mornings and afternoons,
I have measured my life with coffee spoons.”


Costas Ayiotis
25 October 2008
Waterkloof, Pretoria.

Aspiring pavementistas should also read “For the Love of Coffee & Diogenes the Cynic” posted in the archive of this blog. *For a description and definition of Pavementism, also go to http://www.quintenknox.blogspot.com/

Coffee on the Pavement

The bankers, financial wizards and other "masters of the universe" have brought great suffering and losses to the world with their insatiable greed and monumental stupidity. In money terms the losses will run into trillions of dollars. In human terms, millions of working people globally will lose their jobs and pensioners will lose their retirement savings.

In these troubling and uncertain times, I seek solace, comfort and companionship at my local pavement cafe. I don't aspire to own a Ferrari or a yacht. I don't want to be a "master of the universe." I seek simplicity and peace of mind. Coffee on the pavement is my everyday luxury and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to it enjoy it. As my friend and fellow pavement philosopher, Quinten Knox puts it, the time spent on the pavement offers periods of reflection, contemplation, observation and opportunities for intellectual pursuit. This is also where we laugh, joke, relate, read, write, learn, inspire, comfort, support, teach, listen, tease, flirt, speculate, plot and shoot the breeze with friends.

Anais Nin said:

"My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living."

When I'm on the pavement, I am in the midst of living.

Costas Ayiotis

Quote of the Day

The Secret

“No it is not enough to despise the world. It is not enough to live ones life as though riches and power were nothing. They are not.

But to grasp the world, to grasp and feel it grow great in ones grasp is likewise not enough. The secret is to grasp it and let it go.”

Wang Wei, Chinese Sage
1300 years ago

Thomas Jefferson on the Banks

Quote of the Week: Thomas Jefferson 1802

'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.'

The Lure of the Siren’s Song

The sirens were fabulous winged creatures in Greek mythology, half woman, half bird, who lived on a flower filled island protected by very high cliffs and a dangerous rocky shoreline. Ancient accounts are not clear whether the sirens could fly but because they never left their island it is assumed that were incapable of flight. They were said to be the daughters of the storm god Achelous. They played the lyre and sang songs so irresistible and enchanting that ancient mariners who sailed past their island would lose their minds and were either lured to jump into the turbulent waters of the sea and try and swim towards them or they would steer their ships towards the sirens and in so doing smash their ships to pieces on the rocky shores of their island. Either way drowning or destruction was inevitable. Those few souls who safely made it ashore would eventually starve to death because the sirens were unable to provide food and sustenance for them.

Homer the epic Greek poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey writes about the ordeals Odysseus faces trying to return home to his wife and son living on the island of Ithaca. After fighting for ten years in the Trojan War, Odysseus sails home with his men. He has heard about the deadly charm and power of the siren’s songs and voices. Odysseus instructs his men to plug their ears with beeswax and to tie him firmly to the mast of the ship so that he can hear the sirens’ song and live to tell the tale. He instructs his men to leave him tied to the mast no matter how much he begs and curses them to release him.

The ship sails past the island and Odysseus hears the lyrical song of the sirens. The words are even more enticing than the melody. The sirens promise to grant him infinite knowledge, great wisdom and a quickening of the spirit if he goes to them. He goes mad with longing and desire. His heart aches and the great warrior is ready to sacrifice everything he holds dear. He is ready to accept their false promise of eternal truth and then die if he must. His comrade Achilles faced a similar choice. Live to a ripe old age and be forgotten or die a young hero’s death and be remembered and immortalized for thousands of years.

Odysseus curses his men, he screams at them. He threatens them. He orders them to untie him immediately! The sailors see his agitation and anguish but with ears blocked they do not hear his pleas. The ship quickly passes the treacherous shores and sails to calmer, safer and less turbulent waters. Eventually Odysseus is untied by his men. He emerges from this heartbreaking and harrowing experience enriched; sadder but infinitely wiser.

Homer’s Odysseus is a timeless and very human character, unquestionably brave yet deeply flawed. He is at times a conflicted wanderer of dubious morals rather than a boring moral saint, who wants to experience the temptations of the world yet somehow still manage to eventually emerge virtuous from his many ordeals. As some have suggested we find Odysseus attractive because of his vitality and adaptability. He exercises his freedom of choice and seeks out possibilities for action. He desires engagement with the world and all it holds or promises. This touches our humanity and draws us to him.

The genius of Homer is that he creates such wonderful and complex characters. The poet also makes the sirens more alluring by making them appeal to the spirit and not the flesh. For the sirens like the sphinx were mantic creatures, knowing both the past and the future. Homer writes: “Once he hears to his hearts content, sails on, a wiser man.”

In more recent times Franz Kafka wrote The Silence of the Sirens in 1917. He says the following about our modern affliction:

“Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. It is still conceivable that someone (like our hero Odysseus) might have escaped from their singing, but from their silence, certainly never.”

To the artist silence and indifference are infinitely crueler than the engagement that criticism brings.

So the sirens have passed down the ages as symbols of temptation. But they have also been redeemed in modern times as more positive symbols signifying warning and caution, the twin-tailed mermaid-like siren of Greek mythology even appearing on the Starbucks Coffee company logo.

On a final note, the Greeks never content to grant such awful powers to any creature let alone these winged nymphs and forever aware of hubris and nemesis, created some worthy rivals and antagonists to claim our favour and ultimately our allegiance. Hera the jealous and vindictive Queen of the Gods and wife of the promiscuous Zeus, God of Kings and King of Gods, decides she’s had enough of the femme fatale sirens. Hera spent much of her considerable energy and power pursuing, punishing and persecuting any potential rivals and especially the many mistresses and bastard offspring of her husband.

Hera also had a flair for reinvention. She would immerse herself in a magical spring near Argos to restore and renew her virginity. It appears she visited the spring often. Hera goes on a charm offensive and persuades the reluctant and reclusive sirens to enter a singing contest against their more fancied and less deadly sisters, the muses. The delightful muses immediately take up Hera’s challenge to eclipse the sirens. Blessed by the gods with great flamboyance and enormous talent, they sing and dance like never before with wild abandon and carefree exuberance. They win the contest, silence the sirens and capture our hearts forever!

Costas Ayiotis
Pretoria

In Praise of Skinny Women

The popular saying states that you can never be too thin or too rich. Well, I’ve never much liked or agreed with the too thin part.

When it comes to the sexual prowess of women however, I have been labouring all these years under a grave misconception. I mistakenly believed that thin women were somehow inferior in the sack to their fleshier sisters. I’ve always felt pity for those unsmiling, emaciated and anorexic looking waifs on the modelling ramps of the world pouncing around like ungainly giraffes. Real women in my world are big and beautiful. I have always preferred that healthy profile of alluring curves and crevasses. Women with full voluptuous figures and robust appetites just like my beloved wife.

Being a fellow of ample proportions myself, I subscribed to the old Afrikaans adage: “soort soek soort,” which basically means “birds of feather flock together.” Put differently, most men with a 40 inch waist and above seemingly go for women with more Rubenesque proportions. In other words pear-shaped women built for comfort, with ample pendulant bosoms, plump rosy cheeks, soft-full lips and well padded bottoms. Though generally it seems most men regardless of their size prefer their women to be soft, feminine and more well-rounded as opposed to the hard, flat-chested androgynous athleticism of an Olympic female sprinter or hurdler.

As the old Greek saying claims: “the fat chicken has the juice!” But then a wizened old Greek presumably exasperated with his well-fed, lard-arsed wife, upon hearing this expression retorted: “Are we going to fuck or make soup?”

These men however could be missing out by overlooking skinny women and lusting after bigger busty babes. I have it on good authority that skinny women are to put it delicately, more well –endowed where it really counts. My source is very reliable and has impeccable credentials. He is a scholar, an officer and a gentleman. An army General, who appreciates the finer things in life, like women, wine, food, cigars and corporal punishment. He reminded me of the Afrikaans expression which says: “Aan die dunste takkie, hang die rypste vy.” Translated it means: “the ripest figs hang on the thinnest branches.” Another version of this expression goes: “agter die dunste riete skuil die grootste padda’s” Which means that the biggest frogs lurk among the thinnest reeds.

Now the Afrikaners are usually sensible, no-nonsense, solid farming folk who are far more dangerous and adventurous than their dour Dutch cousins and they presumably know a thing or two about their women, guns, animal husbandry in general and the virtues of fruit and its relation to intimate parts of the female anatomy. I fail to see however how by any stretch of the imagination, this home-spun logic can equate a frog to a vagina!

In any event I decided that I needed some empirical proof. I could not rely purely on hearsay and farming folklore as reliable evidence. Being a married male in his forties, which is the equivalent of an indentured serf, I feared losing my quarterly sexual privileges. One romp in each season; spring, summer, autumn and winter and naturally on my birthday which unfortunately falls in summer so it conveniently does not count anymore making the once obligatory birthday bonk sadly obsolete.

Unable to inspect the vaginas of real skinny women and stay married, I did what most married men do as a hobby nowadays to compensate for their looming or impending dotage. I went virtual. I turned to that infinite source of wisdom and learning, that modern oracle of knowledge, possessing answers to many of the mysteries of the world. I clicked on Google for guidance to point me in the right direction. Going purely on memory, I figured that professional ballerina’s have lean gazelle like bodies, so that would qualify them as skinny females. Unable to contain myself, I feverishly typed in “naked ballerina’s” bursting as I was with anticipation.

I am delighted to say that a whole new unexplored world opened up before me. I discovered that a group of highly talented, enterprising and uninhibited Japanese ballerina’s have discarded their tutus and decided to stage naked ballet performances. For example, they perform the Dance of the Seven Veils wearing nothing but their veils and their ballet pumps. What a wonderful and novel way to combine high-brow culture and artistic expression with good old-fashioned smut. This will certainly get more males like myself with a slight artistic bent to venture forth and go to the ballet to enjoy Swan Lake and other such classics. It may even persuade an entire generation of ardent Japanese train gropers to give up frottage, panty pulling and group wanking sessions in favour of more enlightened voyeuristic pursuits.

I poured over numerous dirty pictures and video clips of naked ballerinas practising their movements and stretching their willowy limbs on the cross-bar with carefree and brazen insouciance. The Nutcracker Suite took on a whole new meaning. This stretched more than just my imagination. It also confirmed what the General has been telling me for a long time. Skinny women and especially ballerinas may be slight of build but they make up for this seeming physical deficiency by having very generous triangles of desire. In some cases their libidinous nether regions are so abundant and prominent; they positively pout and protrude proudly with beckoning ripeness. After watching the precision of their movements, their effortless grace and lightness, I was mesmerised. In my near delirious state I imagined one such sprightly and butt naked nymph pirouetting over my prostate body. Imagine how they could spin effortlessly around your……….! One such “porno prima ballerina” a 21 year old veteran with fifteen years experience admitted with youthful exuberance: “I’d really like people to take a really close look when I do my jumps and pirouettes.” How welcoming! How utterly engaging!

I instantly berated myself for being such a cultural philistine. For too long I had dismissed these lithesome creatures of the stage as unworthy of serious sexual advances. Mea culpa! I was wrong! How can one even begin to compare the big, broad, blonde brashness of uber-bimbo Pamela Anderson to the delicate suppleness of a classically trained dancer? Suddenly I had a new found interest in Pas de Deuxs and Grande Jete, (which for the uninitiated is the polite term for spreading of the legs) and other such previously unfathomable intricacies.

So if you feel uncomfortable in sleazy strip bars where fleshy, curvaceous women do strange things with beer bottles and you like your nudity more refined, then naked ballet is definitely for you. It is understandable that freshly weaned teenagers and men in their twenties are still fixated with large breasts and Jennifer Lopez derrieres. With advancing age however ones tastes evolve and hopefully become more sophisticated. I no longer automatically seek out those impressive looking Amazons with the big hair, thick thighs and heaving chests. I now gaze upon slightly built women with a new-found appreciation and a knowing glint in my eye.

And remember: if you want to be happy for the rest of your life; make a skinny woman your wife! Preferably a ballerina.

Costa Ayiotis
Pretoria

One Woman’s Flesh is Another Mans Chocolate

All is well on the southern tip of Africa. It must have something to do with the early onset of spring in Cape Town. Something is definitely up and I can feel faint stirrings in my loins as we slowly emerge from our self-imposed exile and involuntary hibernation. It’s time again to gird ones loins and go out and do battle at the sidewalk cafes of Cape Town. Yes, our ancient forefathers did exactly that. They tied leather straps around their balls and went out to look for trouble.

In winter we swathe ourselves in the protective bandage of dullness, but as summer approaches, its time to consider the virtues of being reckless again. If you want to feel truly alive nothing beats the lascivious nasty side of human existence. With the rising temperature and lengthening days, it was this nasty side that reared its ugly but fascinating head in Hout Bay recently in the form of that all too common human frailty, jealousy, but in this instance of the murderous kind. As the whales frolicked in the bay, a crime of passion was committed here in Hicksville, in our very midst, under our sunglasses so to speak, to shake us out of our winter slumber and herald the arrival of the new season.

The facts are plain: On a gloriously sunny day in a home high above the harbour an afternoon tryst ended in a bloody murder. The perpetrator of the heinous deed returned home unexpectedly and caught the two secret lovers in bed in what the police report described as a very compromising position (read having oral sex). The enraged jilted lover attacked the long-standing live-in lover, plunging a common bread knife into the victim’s neck. During the ensuing scuffle, the third party fled the scene of the crime, slipping out of the front door and speeding away to safety. Safety in this instance being the illicit lover’s home base in Camps Bay, that fertile breeding ground of deviant behaviour. As the saying goes, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Yes, dear reader you guessed correctly, the protagonists in this deadly lovers triangle were all "womyn".

While the unfaithful lover lay on the floor expiring, the muted beige lounge carpet changed colour becoming a whimsical irregular pattern of gently spreading crimson. An aura of tormented stillness and studied concentration consumed the jilted partner as the reality of her deed began to sink in. She gathered all the strength left in her whitened knuckles and rage depleted fingers to dial her attorney's number and summons his assistance. The attorney escorted his client to the local police station where she duly handed herself over to the bemused policeman on duty.

Police later found the victims body on the lounge floor and next to it the blunt and bloodied kitchen knife. On the glass coffee table next to the body they found a copy of a book called "The Powerless Penis", written by a Dutch psychoanalyst called Kees Miereneuker, “The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories”, several magazines called "WOMYN" dedicated to the joys of lesbianism, a publication called Crazy for Chocolate and an Australian Women's Weekly magazine containing Finger Food recipes.

In between pondering about Freud's vexing interpretation of sexual ambivalence being primal, I continued my relentless pursuit for the perfect cup of coffee. My diligence was soon rewarded. I discovered a new coffee shop concept called Vida e Caffe. Located next to the eTV studios and the Cape Town Film and Television School, the place is so hip, you could never imagine it to have its origins in humble Portugal, the land of Fado and the flaming chourico. A junk shop in its former incarnation, the converted space is long and narrow, its walls clad in an interesting combination of cream coloured marble and brown mosaic. An extremely wide, framed black and white photograph of some Latin looking soccer team is the only decoration that adorns the otherwise empty walls.

It is a brilliantly simple concept. A self-service counter runs along its entire length, with three tables inside, counters and barstools lining the floor to ceiling windows which face onto busy Kloof street, aluminium and plastic chairs and tables scattered on the crowded sidewalk outside. They play Frank Sinatra, jazz, big band, swing and the blues. But more importantly they serve coffee in all its glorious permutations. Freshly squeezed orange juice is also on offer from a wonderful transparent contraption that looks like an automated tennis-ball serving machine. Monster muffins which are called "bolinhos" in Portuguese and "pasteis de nata" or custard pastries, are if you exclude the customers, the only edibles.

I sat on a barstool at the window multi-tasking. While casually glancing at the new UK men's magazine called "Jack", which was opened on the counter before me on the page featuring the buttock dance, I munched on a sesame-coated sweet red pepper and feta bolinho, sipped a tall black iced Americano to wash it all down and happily contemplated the light-hearted frothiness of life. "Jack" is a great read. I highly recommend it to all genders. It is chock a block full of crass commercial goodness, that all too tasty cocktail of sterile hedonism that we so often condemn yet secretly covet. It features an orgy of war, animals, humour, fashion, girls, guns, mountains, killer whales and motel sex.

I was eyeing the clientele - a heady mixture of bored Camps Bay housewives, vegetarians but with a carnivorous look in their eyes and gays, both attracted by the Adonis serving types in their tight T-shirts and full aprons, waif like models with flat bottoms, denim clad students, studio execs, advertising moguls, lawyers, ageing lotharios and ordinary lechers like me.

My first view of her was from behind. I was unobserved and therefore safe to appraise her wares undisturbed. In a world obsessed with speed and thinness, she was a welcome exception. She had the full type of voluptuous body that Levantine men find immensely satisfying. Her movements were slow and deliberate. As she sashayed across the room, she swayed her hips with the practiced ease of a professional belly-dancer. If she had lived in another age, place and time, she would have flourished in this noble calling and been greatly admired for her skill. She wore a dove grey dress that not only adhered to but also perfectly followed the contours of her generous body. Her cleft round protuberances were on the whole mostly constricted by her underwear. But gently spreading on either side of the V-shaped lines, that rampant bulging pear of unconfined flesh made contact with the soft cotton of her dress. A thin gold chain dangled around her waist at a rakish angle to further entice the unmistakable Arab intent in my hungry eyes.

Only after more bolinho and coffee could I bear to look again at that tantalising outline of desire. Here before me was full-blooded womanhood in motion. Here before me was proof that a fully clothed woman is infinitely more alluring than a naked one. I mused if she were mine; I'd resolve to have good manners even in the bedroom. Greek style, Arab style, Turkish style, call it what you will would definitely be out of the question. I would be clean; I would never slap her on the bottom. I'd keep my socks on, I'd say please and thank you. In short I would be a perfect gentleman and like every good gentleman knows, I would use my elbows as the other critical points in the libidinous triangle.

That's the strange thing about bounteous bottoms and women who wear stockings. The top is always nearest to the bottom. It struck me that so many women are best viewed from behind. As the great author Philip Roth discovered with Irish girls, they have too many repressed feelings and are not used to being openly admired. If you want to eyeball women in a blatant direct way, it seems you have to go all the way to Brazil. No, here at home there's too much pussy-footing. Furtive, stolen glances are all that today's emasculated male can offer and all that today’s liberated woman can handle. Notice how when you ogle them directly, how they reflexively raise the ramparts and fold their arms to hide their breasts.

Then as fate would have it, I spotted a young uninhibited lass with short copper- coloured hair that proved me hopelessly wrong. She had poured herself into a red T-shirt all pointed and pert that exposed her belly and pierced navel. She wore a long faded denim hipster skirt, slung incredibly low even by my increasingly lax standards. This was not a skirt. This was a weapon worn like a gunslingers belt and with the same brazen insouciance. Adorned across her mid-riff, snaking and spiralling its way around was clearly tattooed a message of "Love". Written in a distinctive cursive longhand style and addressed to the world at large, it followed the outline of where her panties should have been, plunging downwards, with words unknown, a hidden message perhaps, to end we don't know where, but we can only hope at the lips of her shaven mound of Venus or at the very least at the tip of her Brazilian, again that mysterious triangle of desire.

While Europe flooded, I was in a trance. My midday reverie was then abruptly shattered by two well-coifed attractive young women sitting next to me sipping tall Latte's and dressed like no-nonsense professional types, dark slacks, white blouses, tailored jackets. The conversation I overheard invaded my thoughts and left me mildly perplexed. They were discussing the merits of the Indian squat position as a remedy for constipation. There are many women out there it seems that are afflicted with blockaded guts. This was a sad fact that I did not need to be reminded of, certainly not on a sunny afternoon surrounded by so much beauty. You see in my perfect world, women only have highly desirable and purely decorative bums but no functioning anuses.The two women had tried every remedy known to man to no avail: liquorice, papaya, prunes, bran, beetroot, olive oil, five rams suppositories from China, hydro-colonic irrigation, Brooklax, Agiolax, marimba jam, Senokot, seeds and such. No joy. One of the women had gone to India to find herself by losing herself in the second most populous nation on this earth. A journey of "spiritual re-awakening" she called it. She returned home several months later with a cure for her constipation and a new found respect for nice new shiny things like chrome toasters and BMW's.

At this stage an unwelcome internal debate was raging inside my head. Did I have anything significant to add to their conversation? Was continuing and all-knowing silence my best recourse? I wanted to tell them that the Indian-style squat had been perfected if not invented by the great Ghandijee as a non-violent way to defy the British. They would not have believed me. I wanted to tell them that as a young boy my father had taught me how to execute this potentially dangerous manoeuvre, while perched precariously on the slippery rim of a porcelain toilet bowl. They would not have cared to listen. On our country trips he taught me to gingerly lift the toilet seat with the tip of my shoe. Then you had to remove your jockeys and trousers, while keeping your shoes on, a task a whole lot easier to accomplish in the bell-bottom era and then squat on the rim. Keeping your shoes on was always advisable. I once tried the elevated squat wearing only my socks and a short-sleeved shirt. With superhuman effort I tried desperately to stay balanced on the treacherous rim, as all hell exploded beneath me. My foot slipped and I narrowly missed crushing my testicles into a pulp. I wanted to challenge them to attempt this position in their Manolo Blahnik stilettos but I remained silent. Constipation was not my problem, and at home I had in any event rendered the plastic seat redundant, preferring the cold comfort of sitting directly on the porcelain rim, this having the added advantage of providing more dangling room for my male paraphernalia.

Murder most foul, buttocks, bolinhos, tattooed bimbettes, lavatory etiquette, breasts and Brazilians. All in the space of a week. What next? After all this a fitting finale that could have featured the title:"Crazy Things to do with Chocolate." I read the disquieting news from Durban that an enterprising young artist called Nicola Deane shaved her body from head to toe, donned a schoolgirls uniform, sans the knickers, sat down on a chair in front of a live audience, opened her legs and under the harsh glare of the stage lights above made chocolate moulds of her vagina. This was an unusual performance of Home Economics at its best at the NSA Gallery. The performance was followed by polite applause, the audience visibly relieved that no-one was offered any chocolates to eat on the night. The chocolates are however on sale at the gallery at R250 for a gold box? of eight. A fellow conceptual artist, named Peet Pienaar not to be outdone grabbed his penis, pointed it at the the audience and waved it around in a slow circular motion.

You may ask: art, pornography or simply acts of liberating life? I don't know. What I do know is what I want for Christmas; Peace and goodwill among men and a gold box of chocolates, preferably dark.

Best regards
Costa
Cape Town, 28 November 2002.

Priests or Prostitutes

The Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church has started a recruitment drive for new priests. To make the selection process easier they have drafted a new set of rules for the admission of candidates to the clergy. The admission requirements are straightforward. Candidate priests must be male. They may be single or married. If they’re single they can rise all the way up the church hierarchy and one day become bishops, archbishops and even patriarch (the Greek equivalent to the pope but with more facial hair and fewer followers). If they’re married they will remain priests or fathers for the rest of their careers and be sent to run a community or parish church in a suburb, neighbourhood, village or island.

The priests that land up in a village or on some island may have fewer material benefits but they also have fewer responsibilities and are left largely to their own devices. There is less politically inspired interference in the work they do from their superiors in the church hierarchy. Many of them take up fishing, while others collect honey and tend to their herb gardens and vegetable patches. They eat exceedingly well, have free access to the best wine, olives, feta and olive oil money can buy and are generally accepted and well liked by the villagers or island folk. Throw in the odd chicken in the pot or leg of lamb courtesy of the kind village folk and what more could a man ask for? Spanakopita perhaps? Well, the company of a merry widow with a flair for baking will take care of that one. They spend their free time at the village kafeneion idling the sweet hours away sipping free coffee and as the spiritual leader of their community listening to gossip and occasionally counselling their flock in this informal but convenient setting. Sounds like the ideal stress-free job to me.

In some way the married priests get to miss out on a lot of the action. For a start if you’re young and single you may start your career in some distant monastery perched precariously on a cliff with incredible views of the sea and the surrounding countryside. The Greek Church is arguably the biggest landowner in all of Greece and they know a good location when they see it. They own everything from vast tracts of pine-covered mountainsides to marble-clad shopping centres outside Athens.

You could say that it’s in these very monasteries that the men are separated from the boys. The way they do this strangely enough is by getting the boys to spend a lot of their free time in the evenings with the men. Anyone who has spent a night in a monastic cell (visiting non-clerical guests are occasionally allowed to stay over in some monasteries) will tell you about the cries of ecclesiastical ecstasy that echo within the stony ramparts as the young charges are “tutored” and “mentored” into the ways of their newly chosen vocation. If you’re fond of animals, you get to spend a lot of time with the chickens, goats and sheep. Vows may be vows but priests after all are only human.

Either way, as a priest the fringe benefits are good. You get free accommodation. You get to wear a dark navy blue cassock or black robes that are durable, crease resistant and virtually stain proof. You also wear cylindrically shaped head-gear that looks like a black chef’s hat. The story goes that in ancient times wealthy Greek and Roman households valued their prized chefs and their recipes so much that they disguised them as priests to protect them as they escaped from the invading Barbarian hordes, hence the classic cylindrical shape of the chef’s hat.

You have to grow a beard, so you save on razorblades and aftershave. You eat and drink well, considerably well, hence the need for dark stain proof garments. I have yet to meet a skinny Greek priest. And if I did happen to meet one, I wouldn’t trust him, just as I would not have much confidence in a skinny chef. The first inviolable rule in any business in these impressionable times is that you must look the part and organised religion is no exception. It’s a thriving business, just ask any image consultant. You must look as if you have arrived at the top not like you’re still trying to get there. In the case of Greek priests looking well-fed is a distinct advantage. Thin priests simply lack the requisite presence and gravitas required for the job.

In terms of the new rules you may not apply to join the priesthood if you’re a coroner or heaven forbid a gynaecologist. I can’t quite understand why morticians and coroners are excluded. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that their job requires them to violate or desecrate dead bodies. Even if it’s done in the best interests of science or forensic medicine, I guess this puts you in the same league as a police detective. The church is very old fashioned and understandably squeamish about these things. Gynaecologists spend their lives working with the reproductive organs of females. In the eyes of the church, anything to do with women is taboo. It was Eve after all who seduced Adam in the Garden of Eden, bringing untold suffering and misery to all of mankind in perpetuity. The reasoning goes that women are devious and manipulative temptresses not to be trusted. The same applies to anyone who works too closely or in this case intimately with them.

Other medical specialists however are welcome to join. So if you’re a proctologist who has dedicated his life to rectal medicine, for the uninitiated that branch of medicine concerned with disorders of the colon, rectum and anus, then no problem, you can apply to join. This branch of medicine may in fact be very useful especially in the all-male monasteries.

Actors representing as they do a calling that is “most soul-corrupting and harmful” are most unwelcome to apply to join the priesthood. You cannot trust men that routinely apply make up on their faces, wear stockings and who live in a make-believe fantasy world. Owners of wine and liquor shops are also unwelcome which, is a trifle confusing because Greek priests consume vast quantities of wine and that’s not just the sacramental wine they need to properly perform their hocus pocus rites and ceremonies.

Lawyers and politicians are unwelcome. No argument here. They lie for a living. No mention is made of accountants, although by the same logic they should also be excluded. But then again they are needed to administer the vast wealth of the church including property holdings and other investments.

Members of the armed forces are excluded presumably because they are trained to kill for a living. Then again the Greek armed forces have not fired a shot in anger against external foes since the Korean War. They did however turn their tanks and guns against the demonstrating students of the Athens Polytechnic in the late sixties during the military junta of Colonel Papadopoulos and his henchmen. The Church it seems still holds this against them. During the Greek War of Independence against the Turks, priests were often at the forefront of the struggle for freedom, shooting Turks, blowing up their fortresses and slitting Turkish throats with wild, gleeful and gay abandon. This does not count as service in the armed forces and in any event all these priests are now conveniently dead.

The Holy Synod says that the church will open its arms to farmers, fishermen, beekeepers, candle-makers, carpenters and cobblers, all of them honest, decent and hardworking occupations. A clear indication that post the Olympic games euphoria, times are tough in Greece and the job market is limited, is the willingness of the church to also welcome candidates from many modern professions including seismology, meteorology, biology and astronomy. Seismology makes sense. Greece is particularly prone to earthquakes and the good fathers would want to have advance warning given that their hotline to the Almighty is overworked, frequently congested and not always reliable.

This list of acceptable professions should include athletes, pole-vaulters and hurdlers. Priests blessed with strong legs, athleticism and physical prowess could do very well for themselves. Why you may ask. Simply because renegade priests from outlying areas in search of wealthier clients have been known to scramble over the walls at the main cemeteries in Athens and ply their trade by conducting “unauthorised” memorial services at grave-sides in return for money donations from relatives of the deceased. The marauding priests then get chased away by the understandably irate priests of the area who need to protect their turf or else face being deprived of business and loss of custom. So back over the wall they scramble in an unseemly rush for safety, as insults are hurled and the odd stone is cast at the offenders.

Yes. Anyone who has spent time with Greek priests will tell you that you need deep pockets. In ancient times when a priest walked past you, you would grab your testicles and cup your private parts in your hands. No not for your protection from errant priests. But because it was a customary pagan ritual to ensure that your loins remained fruitful as priests were seen as symbols and guarantors of fertility. This practice was discontinued over time given the demands for more modesty in modern times and evolved into the infinitely more meaningful practice of thrusting your hands into your pockets and parting with your money.

The priests who enter the priesthood single can climb the ecclesiastical ladder if they are ambitious and play their cards right and can reach the upper ranks or echelons of the church hierarchy. As bishops and archbishops they get to wear cream and purple coloured garments and vestments to distinguish them from lowly parish priests, lavishly adorned with gold threaded embroidery. The maces, chalices and crowns become jewel encrusted and the crosses, larger more elaborate and studded with rubies. The rewards can be considerable for the chosen few. Luxurious villas on the coast of Greece and Cyprus and Swiss bank accounts are common practice.

At my father’s funeral in the picturesque coastal suburb of Vouliagmeni, three priests officiated on the day. The senior ranking priest approached my uncle before the service and told him that he had three gold crosses of differing sizes in his collection all strung from thick rope like gold chains. The reason he told him this is because he wanted to know which cross we wanted him to wear. He patiently explained to my perplexed uncle that if he wore the largest and more ornate of the three crosses it would cost us more.


The Italian film director, Frederico Fellini, got it right when in one of his films he depicted Catholic bishops, archbishops and cardinals in all their glory participating in an ecclesiastical fashion show. He paraded them on the ramp in their finery, complete with maces, tall hats, crimson, cream and gold vestments. Fellini was possibly ahead of his time because only this week in Poland, SacroExpo was held. This is Europe’s largest religious trade fair with 235 vendors from 11 countries exhibiting and peddling their wares. The fair is officially called the Sixth International Exhibition of Church Construction, Church Fittings, Furnishings and Religious Art. It draws 3000 Catholic priests annually. Items on sale include church organs, massive church bells, icons, statues, crucifixes, rosaries, stylish vestments, stained glass windows, shiny golden chalices, whips, the encyclopaedia of exorcism, Cape sandstone cladding and other assorted kitsch and religious paraphernalia. Food on sale includes our version of boerie-rolls in the form of Polish Kielbasa sausages and Italian salsicce. So if you’re a successful archbishop looking for a plush red velvet armchair that befits your status complete with carved wooden angels hovering protectively above your head, this is where you find it. Salvation doesn’t come cheap.

The Greek Orthodox Church cannot match their Catholic counterparts in this regard. Though in central Athens near Mitropoleos there’s an entire street of shops that cater for the religious trade, selling approved items, everything from icons that glow in the dark, to church sanctioned worry beads. They are however not allowed to sell evil eyes. Even though many Greeks wear them, side by side with their gold crucifixes, they’re considered harmful pagan artefacts by the church, their protective qualities being seriously questioned probably because it could cost them business.

The Catholic Church must be commended for its entrepreneurial spirit and uncanny ability to combine good-old fashioned commercialism with spirituality and aesthetic considerations. Here the Catholic Church is merely continuing another age old tradition. Remember Pope Julius II who in the sixteenth century incurred the wrath of Luther by selling indulgences (a pass or clearance certificate to enter heaven) to the faithful flock so that he could fund the building and renovation of his pet project, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

If you decide to enter the priesthood and appear before a selection committee, remember to look the part by growing a beard. You should also prepare yourself for the role by putting on some weight. At least six months before you face the committee you should eat all the dolmathes and baklava you can lay your hands on. Then proceed to devour several whole chickens, platters of lamb chops, several kilos of keftethes and trays of roasted potatoes every week. Loaves of thick crusty white bread dunked into half litre bowls of olive oil will also help give you the desired girth and a healthy ruddy complexion and elasticity to your cheeks.
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Remember to go bearing gifts. This will show that you are of sound mind and serious intent. It is also better to give than to receive. Bearing gifts is seen as a biblical imperative and there is biblical precedent for this. Five litre tins of olive oil, buckets of feta cheese, an entire lamb and barrels of wine will do nicely. Gold Kruger Rands are even better. Just make sure you have enough to go around. This is not seen as an attempt to bribe the members of the committee. On the contrary, to appear before them empty handed is considered disrespectful of the church and its traditions.

This act of generosity will also prepare you to receive gracefully when your turn comes when you are finally ordained as a priest. The members of your parish will be expected to provide you with all the home comforts. The ladies of the congregation will be falling over themselves to take turns to feed you every week, especially if you’re single and good looking. Shopping at supermarkets will be a thing of the past. Wealthier communities have even been known to provide their priests with cars and collections of art and antique furniture. You’ll be invited to lots of funerals, weddings and baptisms, so your stomach will always be full of food and your pockets full of cash. Best of all saving souls is a cash business. Run it like a shop. Open on time, keep a healthy cash flow, be discreet with the widows, remember to give the archbishop his cut and you’ll do just fine.

CA
Pretoria
15 June 2005

Made to Measure: My Puzzled Penis

“If my sound advice you heed,
If you follow where I lead,
You’ll be healthy, you’ll be strong and you’ll be sleek.
You’ll have muscles that are thick and a pretty little prick,
You’ll be proud of your appearance and physique.”

Aristophanes
The Clouds

There’s always something new to worry about especially if like me, you read too many magazines and the advice contained in them. As if I don’t already have enough to worry about. Like Aristophanes in his comic play, my thoughts turn to the one thing that preoccupies most men most of the time: penis power. When I was twenty years old I used to think that the fountainhead of all human inspiration lay in the penis. Now I’m convinced that it is! Before all men had to worry about was limited to issues of length versus girth. Now I read in a women’s health magazine that when you’re twenty your erect penis stands at a proud one hundred and ten degrees. When you’re seventy it sags to a dismal sixty-five degrees. Panic stations! How many degrees does it drop every year? Do I weep uncontrollably or take the plunge and face the cold and maybe not so hard facts?

Men as all women know like to measure things. Elasticity and flexibility combined with a healthy dose of creativity is a good thing not so? The tape measure never lies. Really? A tape measure in the wrong hands is like relying on accuracy from statisticians, politicians and accountants. But the tape measure is not my immediate problem. I need to measure angles of approach like a navy pilot easing up on the throttle and trying to land his jet on a carriers heaving deck. When things get too much for me, I turn to superior wisdom for help and advice and ask my dear wife to lend a helping hand. She’s always more task orientated and practical when it comes to these things. She is also better at maths and trigonometry.

“Chrissie, do we have anything in the house that measures angles? You know one of those plastic semi-circular calibrated things that you used to get in your school maths kit.”
“You mean a protractor.”
“Yes, that’s it, a protractor is what I need.”
“What do you need it for? Comes the impatient reply.
“Well, I need to measure the angle of something here on my desk that’s been bothering me. It’s an experiment I’m conducting, you know, research, that sort of thing.”

My perplexed penis stands defiant. How do I work this damn plastic contraption? Am I holding it the right way, protractor in my left hand and dick in my right hand? Is it upside down? Do you measure the angle standing up or lying flat on your back on a hard surface? Do you lay it out on your desk and proceed from there? I just don’t know. I’m a complete novice when it comes to measuring angles especially when working with something that has a mind of its own.

How do I tell her that I want to measure the angle of my erection as an indication of sagging libido, as an early warning of impending middle age?
But then why worry. Everyday I read, hear and see men in their sixties and seventies having fun with women half their age. The Dolce Vita has given way to the Dolce Viagra. Take the example of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, both men in their sixties. Their respective spouses threw them out. So the two friends moved into an apartment together and started throwing wild parties.

The South African Garden & Home Magazine lies on the coffee table beckoning me. Could a solution come from this unlikely source? I page through the magazine, skipping the pages with plants on them, looking at pictures of renovated homes and architectural plans. Then there it is. On page 163, the eye-catching heading in capitals: “SIZE DOES COUNT.” What on earth do these women get up to in the garden? I start reading with apprehension only to discover to my dismay that it’s about trees – really big trees. But the accompanying diagram is very interesting. It shows the angle between the top of a tree and the horizontal distance to the tree trunk.
Low and behold. An inverted protractor is used as a means to measure and compare the size of big trees.

Should I write to the Dendrological Society of South Africa and ask for their assistance in this vexing matter? I read on and discover that this may not be a good idea. Our tree experts it seems find it hard to agree which tree is the largest. Should it be based on height, trunk girth, or the spread of crown? Where objects are large enough, the protractor measuring seems to work. But in much smaller objects certain adaptations are necessary. No need to get them all flustered about my small specimen. They have enough work on their hands, saving our magnificent trees.

It does however get me thinking. What if I place the straight-line surface of the inverted protractor on the underside of my penis? resting or sighting it as it were, underneath the shaft or “trunk” of my erection. Then I’d fix a piece of weighted string to the base of the protractor and read the angle from the top of its helmet look-alike head to the hanging string. It could work, but it’s far too complicated, I decide.

Do I get my spouse to help with the experiment all in the interest of science and fragile male virility? We could turn it into a fun-filled exercise like gardening in the nude. Christine’s always complaining that we don’t do enough fun things together. Then Eureka! The solution comes to me.

“Chrissie I’m going to strip naked down to my socks. Don’t be alarmed. I know it’s only nine thirty in the morning and the maid is downstairs ironing. We’ll close the curtains. Maybe I’ll keep my T-shirt on.” (Well fast-forward this bit. Use your imagination. Just make sure your research assistant has warm hands!)

I have a brainwave or is it a temporary surge of passion? I say to her: “Before we get started lets have a quick fifteen second Frenchie for old times sake, just to get the juices flowing. Like we used to do in the back seat of my Peugeot. No? OK let’s get started.” I always have the last word in our relationship. Christine says no and I say OK. The experiment goes something like this:

“Chrissie, I’m going to stand between the lampshade and the wall. I’d like you to get down on your knees and…… just press the protractor against the wall and keep your head out of the way. What? No, that won’t be necessary. Can’t you see he’s already….? You can keep your clothes on for now. Just please do as I say and stop arguing with me! Do me this favour and I’ll weed the flower- bed for you. Just measure the angle of the shadow that you see cast on the wall by Brutus and we can go and have a nice cup of tea. Mmm! That’s a rather good profile on the wall. Can you see the fireman’s helmet? There it is in perfect outline. I must say I think those Egyptian doctors knew what they were doing. Can you see how I was circumcised by the ancient but reliable Pharaonic oblique method? Thank god it was successful! I knew a poor fellow once whose bris went horribly wrong. The Rabbi botched his circumcision and left him with a cock that looks like a cauliflower!”

The angle looks reassuringly correct to me. Perception is reality and the mirror doesn’t lie. All else is an illusion thrown at us by the gleeful gods to torment us with their twisted sense of malevolent humour. We all know they are Janus faced. No need to be exact. Given a choice I’d rather settle for being interesting than accurate. I’m clearly no scientist and certainly no mathematician. As in politics, measuring penis angles is the art of the possible. Maybe there’s no reason to panic just yet.

My mind runs riot as my thoughts turn from the ridiculous to the truly bizarre. Maybe I should start a rigorous regime of Chinese penis pulling power exercises. Before you get excited and start preparing to pull on your penis, consider the following. “Penis hanging art”, apparently is a widely practised Chinese martial arts style. It’s called “Chiu Chiu Shen Gong”- nine, nine magic art. I don’t know what nine has to do with it but it sure sounds good. I discover that twenty Chinese men once tried to set a world record for pulling a Boeing 747 with their penises. To practice their sport they hang iron blocks hanging up to 300kg from their penises or testicles believing that it enhances virility and strength. And to think that all I have ever attempted was to hang a fairly large bath towel on my erect member as a way of impressing Christine with my prowess and it wasn’t even a wet towel. The experiment ended abruptly when Christine gave me a withering “grow-up stop being so obsessed with your thing” kind of look, which left the towel crumpled at my feet and Percy deflated and forlorn winking at the carpet.

For all the joys of pursuing a life filled with coffee and mental stimulation, the best advice I can give myself for everyday peace of mind is to stop measuring things and to keep my weekends free. For me the most effective mental medicine yet invented is watching Saturday afternoon rugby and chewing on a thick piece of biltong. Nothing beats that deadly combination of gladiatorial blood sport and salted meat to sate the most basic primordial instinct in us. And for the men out there, before you think of pulling out your penis, remember that measuring things is best left to kitchen cupboard installers and contractors who lay carpets and tiles for a living.

But I have to grudgingly concede that D.H. Lawrence has the final word on the penis. In his final novel “Tommy Dukes”, written as he battles against tuberculosis, he states the following:

“I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence and the courage to say shit in front of a lady. It would be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do? – To any really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis…He did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God! When one can only talk!”

D.H Lawrence would have been pleased to know that in South Africa, homeland civil servants once invented a novel way to use their penises. They rolled their penises on inkpads and used them in lieu of fingerprints to submit fraudulent pension claims. As the old Latin phrase goes: “Out of Africa Always Something New.”

Costas Ayiotis

The Secret

Join me on a journey of self-discovery. Walk beside me as we seek to learn many great lessons along the way. Join me in this quest to discover new insights about life and to write about them. We may not reach our destination. We may find that what we seek to find is not new and that it has all been said before, but we can at least enjoy the journey.

Some discoveries will sadden us while others will no doubt guide, inspire, inform and enlighten. At the end of the journey the ideal must be to gain greater understanding and greater wisdom. But there is no point in acquiring great knowledge merely for its own sake. There is also no point in having greater wisdom if our purpose is not to share it with others. Our intention must be to seek both knowledge and wisdom. And whatever we acquire along the way if it is to have any value must be used to guide and to ultimately benefit others, to inspire them to use the great gift of imagination. No one has all the answers nor should we trust people who profess that they offer us and humanity, quick, easy solutions with their ready answers. In this sense we need to ensure that people come before ideas.

Everyday this passion to cover new ground and to write about it becomes an obsession, sometimes a compulsion that torments and consumes me. It becomes a form of temporary madness and possession. But then in a drugged, numb, unfeeling state, devoid of pain, nothing of great consequence is achieved. There is no growth, no discovery, no exploration, no difficulty and no new ground. Even the finest swords in the course of their duty have to be broken, blunted and bent. The great composers, artists, writers, poets and actors all had to suffer for their calling. But it is infinitely better to deal with the pain of growth than face a life of regret. The ones that endured were able to rise above the pain and suffering, to draw lessons from its intensity and create something new and memorable.

The thing that feeds me also has the awful potential to devour me. In Marguerite Poland’s latest book, “Recessional from Grace” the following Zulu saying is quoted”If you were in my flesh, I could tear you out, but you are in my blood which cannot be divided.” Certain people and certain things are in my blood. Among them, words and writing. What kills me the most is that in our disposable and materialistic world nothing seems to last and even the written word is so ephemeral. That is why I have a problem with newspaper articles. So much effort goes into writing something yet today’s thought provoking article is tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapping paper.

Email too does not have the lasting power of letters. There was an initial hope that email would revive the lost art of letter writing. But sadly emails are now mostly cautious, curtailed and abbreviated communications. Emails are seen as weightless and lacking intellectual substance yet many great ideas are often exchanged using email. Then there is the deadly and very convenient “delete” button to ensure that our words do not survive and no lasting impression is created. Where would the dedicated biographers be without the correspondence of their great subjects to help them build a picture of their characters. How much poorer would our world be without the letters that Byron wrote to his friends, his mother and his wife; the letters between Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin; between Napoleon and Josephine; between Freud and Jung.

My biggest fear is that this troubled but intoxicating courtship, for it should never become a marriage, has been but a fleeting moment. That it has all been a brief lucid interval and a temporary awakening. I fear the possibility of this metaphorical death the most, the breath of death when inspiration fails me and hard as I try, I cannot resurrect my muse. Maybe like the great Gnostic Plotinus, it’s true to say that by dying for what we are not, we come to life as what we are. I do not fear the real physical death that comes to all mortal beings. When it comes my way that may even be a form of release. What torments me the most is the moment that is lost, never to return again.

I am comforted by the knowledge that these anxieties, fears and concerns are not something new. They have preoccupied thinkers from time immemorial and far greater minds than mine have grappled with these issues before me. Modern man has the advantage of being able to tap into a greater and much wider knowledge base than ever before. The ancients and the thinkers and philosophers of the Renaissance and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have had less knowledge about the world but they had greater wisdom and understanding.

Take the example of the US government. It knows more about its people than any government before it has ever known. The American people similarly know more about the present government than any electorate before them has ever known. But jointly they have failed to understand one another and on a broader global scale they have failed to understand the complexities of the world they live in. They have failed to understand that might is not always right. “Evil self-perpetuation” is not right, the relentless pursuit of profit is not always right. Not when it plays with and devastates human lives. This failure of understanding has become a much more sinister failure of the human imagination with the potential that we regress into a world driven only by fear and narrow self-preservation. A world that Hobbes called “nasty, brutish and short.”

Before we examine some of the issues that occupied and vexed the minds of great thinkers and writers through the ages, we need to make a critical distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes the two seem similar and at other times they are polar opposites. The secret is to get the two to merge.

We need to acquire both knowledge and wisdom if we are to lead a fuller more meaningful life. Without these two vital ingredients our life is based only on survival. Knowledge seeks to break down and dismantle while wisdom seeks to assemble things together to form a complete whole. Knowledge requires analysis and differentiation while wisdom synthesises and integrates. Wisdom lies in the verse: “the mind has a thousand eyes”. Wisdom is about unity, wholeness and experience. While knowledge relies on verification by the senses and is more wide ranging yet also more specific.

The modern Western emphasis has been on knowledge as seen in the great scientific and technological advances and discoveries. In this pursuit of technological excellence wisdom has been sorely neglected. The Eastern thinkers on the other hand focussed more on wisdom. The Ancient Greeks realised that symbiosis between the two was essential. That knowledge and wisdom had to co-exist in a well-balanced union to allow us to master the art of harmonious living, and to lead a life free of excess as proposed by Aristotle.

Acquiring wisdom for its own sake is not enough. Also knowledge based on facts alone is not enough. This is the domain of lawyers, policemen and scientists. Our need for emotional and intellectual nourishment requires that we feast our senses and our minds on music, art, literature, poetry, theatre, film, sculpture and dance.

Einstein admitted that the dry facts alone were not enough. They had to be combined with a belief in mysticism to become the new religion of the twentieth century. He believed that man had to make several intuitive leaps forward into the unknown, and then to work backwards towards the comfort of the hard facts. These leaps that Einstein was referring to were leaps into the realm of the imagination, which he considered more important than knowledge and facts. Consider this statement he made: “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

The thinkers and philosophers from previous centuries enjoyed distinct several enviable advantages. They faced fewer distractions and they had more time to think, to develop ideas and to write. None of today’s constant stream of scrambled and disjointed media generated messages. We live in a big confusing amusement park with an endless assault on our ever-shrinking concentration spans. The mindless and mind numbing barrage of soap operas and talk shows that insult our intelligence. The incessant need “to amuse ourselves to death,” often without the need for human interaction. Our predecessors did not have to contend with the cacophony of the flashing, mesmerising images of the electronic age to hypnotise them and to fry their brains. As David Hancock put it, in today’s world time is the devil and speed is the new God. In their time speed was the devil and time was God. They also lived in violent and uncertain times but they had more time for reflection and contemplation.

No better place to start our quest than with Aristotle, the founder of Western Philosophy. He was a realist who sought to generalise the ideal life. In his works on ethics he conceived of a virtuous character, which seeks to avoid excess in fulfilling life’s purpose, this was his Golden Mean.

Then we have Plato who founded much of metaphysics, aesthetics, moral and political philosophy. His moral theory featured reason as a means of controlling the passions through wisdom to bring harmony to the various components of the soul. He believed that man contained within him innate ideas, hence the belief in the inspiring role of intuition.

Descartes the French philosopher and father of modern philosophy, who in order to reconstruct a true view of reality doubted everything except his own existence. Hence the origin of: “Cogito ergo sum - I think therefore I am.” Descartes, the melancholy genius, believed that man intuitively possessed knowledge and that this intuition was more dependable than empirical facts.

Voltaire like Plato believed that man in his quest for a more meaningful life could perfect himself through the pursuit of reason and science. Voltaire used his formidable wit and mighty quill to fight against injustice, the excesses of authority, intolerance and fanaticism while he actively promoted intellectual freedom at a time when one could lose ones head for less.

The Anglo Saxon tradition of Hume, Hobbes and Locke and the empirical school of thinking on the other hand shunned the role of intuition and believed in verification only by the powers of observation, our own experiences and experimentation.

Yet many more great thinkers through the ages have believed that man’s “stored information”, is not limited to his own memories, past experiences and learnt facts. There is “one mind” common to all individuals, Emerson said. Ideas are not only innate in the Platonic sense but also out there often from sources we least expect, and they come to us from sources outside ourselves.

From Chaucer to Shakespeare, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Byron, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Freud, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Durrell, Kazantzakis and Graham Greene, these great minds to name but a few, explored every facet of human weakness: lust, hypocrisy, greed, stupidity, jealousy, cunning and priestly corruption. The existential struggles of memorable characters, from political and historical dramas to light hearted romances and frivolous comedies. They explored vast expanses of the human condition from the rationality of the Age of Reason, to the realism of the eighteenth century sociological novel. Some like Balzac surveyed every aspect of middle-class life. Others like Dickens focussed their social criticism on the injustices of the industrialized world and its devastating effects on the poor and especially on children.

They gave us vividly drawn characters and sprawling sentences and made our lives richer for it. They examined the psychology of man, our repressed unconscious instincts, our dreams, our fears, our emotional and sexual problems, the nature of morality and Christianity. The underlying political intrigues, the pursuit of power and riches. They looked at the moral dilemmas of complex, conflicted and flawed characters, their faith, their failings, their triumphs and their redemption. They created protagonists equally capable of good and evil deeds. They explored the problems of contemporary culture and society.

They probed our existential concerns regarding the most basic institutions of life, such as marriage, fidelity, friendship, family and the meaning of life. They wrote about the human heart in conflict with itself and about the universal themes of love, obligation to family, honour, pity, pride, prejudice, compassion, sacrifice and the meaning of human suffering. They consoled us with their humanity and their grace.

We revisit the classics so that we know that whatever crisis we face in life, we are not alone. We read them to make our load bearable. Whether it is Tolstoy’s landscape of the grand passions or Trollope’s “chronicle of those little daily lacerations upon the spirit”, they remind us that we are all made of the same bruised flesh. They remind us that none of us are spared from tragedy and despair. Nobody is immune to life’s disappointments, frustrations and idiotic expectations. We read them so that we can accept that there is a great hurt that everyone has to endure. We read them to know that not everything is driven by narrow self-interest and the bottom line. We read them to gain some depth, perspective, solace and some time-tested wisdom. We read them to continue our dialogue with the wisdom of the ages. And if as Diogenes said, “The foundation of every state is the education of its youth”, then we owe it to our children to introduce them to the works of the classical thinkers and writers and to encourage them not only to read them, but to understand them.

And what is the secret to life? Consider the haunting words of “The Secret” written by Wang Wei, the Chinese sage, 1300 years ago:

“No it is not enough to despise the world. It is not enough to live ones life as though riches and power were nothing. They are not.
But to grasp the world, to grasp and feel it grow great in ones grasp is likewise not enough. The secret is to grasp it and let it go.”

Let it go! Easier said than done. Why? Because of our vanity, the vanity of power, wealth, beauty, even the vanity of authorship. Nikos Kazantzakis the Cretan author of Zorba the Greek and the Last Temptation of Christ explored in his novels topics such as disillusionment with contemporary society, the fight against temptation and weakness and the relationship between man and God. Every writer has to also deal with and write about death as well. If at all possible to deal with tragedy with a sense of humour otherwise I couldn’t bear it. Kazantzakis chose the following words as his final epitaph:
“I fear nothing. I expect nothing. I am free.”

The final words of Leon Tolstoy, the Great Russian novelist were:
“I care a great deal.”

The secret as Dickens and Kazantzakis knew is not to have great expectations but rather to look forward to the small everyday miracles like fresh air and clean running water. The secret lies in what Ghandi said: “We must live simply so that others may simply live.” The secret is in the wisdom of Socrates: ”He is richest who is content with the least! For being content is the wealth of nature.” The secret is to embrace both knowledge and wisdom even if the process is painful.

The secret too, as my mother has known all along, is to endure. To endure in the Russian sense of the word. Even a larger than life figure like Prince Potemkin in moments of introspection, was sometimes disgusted by the sheer overwhelming excess inherent in his extremely successful life. He believed that the greatness of the Russian character lay in its capacity to endure and in its capacity for boundless suffering and self-abasement. For other beings success lies in being able to put bread on the table every day.

In a world where we are fed a diet of conformity and mediocrity and conditioned not to ask questions. In a world that discourages us from asking ourselves, and others, uncomfortable and troubling questions, the secret is to question everything. To revive the ancient Greek spirit of free and fearless inquiry, because where there is doubt there is freedom. And even if what we do is deemed insignificant by others, to do it all the same, and to the best of our abilities, because every job counts to the hilt. The secret lies in being tolerant and open-minded. The secret too is to keep the things we cherish in our hearts and in our minds and in this way to find what the Quakers call “peace at the centre.”

The secret is to accept the paradox of life, the complex and the simple. To understand that it took the genius of Einstein to explain the complexity of the universe in a simple way and in the end to concede that reality is after all nothing but a very persistent illusion. What is real then? The American Indians believed that our dreams are real and life is only a dream. Fellini said that everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that. No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private personal fantasies the truth.

Either way, whatever we believe to be real or the truth, the real tragedy is that we do not use the full potential of our minds. Our minds have the power to conceive, to hypothesise and to imagine anything and everything, from distant galaxies to parallel universes, to the interconnectivity between space; time and individual beings.

For Tolstoy, the changes in our life had to come, not only from our mental resolution to try a new form of life, but also from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience. Whether we prefer the words of Tolstoy or Kazantzakis is immaterial. The secret, as they both knew, is that the significant changes in our lives come from an altered state of mind. So that like Shakespeare’s Henry V we can say to the world: “Presume not that I am the thing I was.” The deepest secret is that life is not only a voyage of discovery, but also a process of creation. We must not only discover ourselves, but also create ourselves anew.

Seek therefore not to find out who you are, seek rather to determine who you want to be. Ghandi said we must become the change that we seek. This is how we reinvent ourselves, through another noble act of creation. Therein lies our hope and our salvation. Because ultimately the only nobility there is, resides in one place only and that is in our minds.

The secret dear friends, is whatever you want it to be.

Costa Ayiotis
Hout Bay
13 June 2003

Diogenes the Cynic

Two thousand years ago in ancient Greece.
In the land of Jason and the Golden Fleece.
Lived a man who despised wealth, pleasure and position,
Possessions, reputation, and ambition.
Diogenes the Cynic he was called,
By dishonesty and lies he was appalled.

He walked the streets of Athens with his lantern, staff and faithful hound,
But to his dismay an honest man was nowhere to be found.
The famous and powerful came to see him from afar,
Though he lived on the roadside in a clay storage jar.
One day a young king called Alexander of Macedon,
Was elected to replace his father as hegemon.

Alexander the Great became his name,
Through all Greece and Persia spread his fame.
My father will leave me nothing to do,
Was his baseless lament and anguished rue.
He came to Corinth, that great City State,
To be like a god was his preordained fate,
(To consult an oracle about his fate)

Alexander went out to visit the wise man,
To find him butt-naked enjoying a tan.
He greeted Diogenes in a manner most formal,
The philosopher was silent as if it were normal.
The king politely enquired if there was something he wanted,
He had merely to say and it would be granted.
Ask me for anything, he said, and it will be done,
Stand aside young king, you’re blocking my sun.

The kings courtiers and general’s joked and muttered,
Astonished at the words he’d uttered.
Alexander his rowdy followers cut short,
With a shrewd reply and grave retort:
If I were not me,
That man in the gutter I would be.
We are both made of flesh and blood and of manly loin,
We are merely the flip sides of the same coin.
And whereas I seek to travel far,
This man is happy to live in a jar.

Costas Ayiotis

For the Love of Coffee

For the Love of Coffee

Berries from a bush some goats did eat,
A somewhat surprising but bitter treat.
The goats became lively and happy and frisky,
And soon behaved in a manner most risky.

A goatherd noticed and followed suit,
And soon to this habit he took root.
He ate the berries and to his bewilderment found,
With incredible energy he did abound.

Like some miracle cure it led to his spirited dancing,
And caused him much nocturnal prancing.
It banished his gloom and overall sadness,
And encouraged in him a general gladness.

Monks soon heard about this amazing discovery,
Which gave man and beast such an unusual recovery.
From the land of Ethiopia where humble goatherds dwelt,
Its presence soon all over the world was felt.

Taken by camel to Arabia’s burning sands,
Taken on foot and Dhow to verdant distant lands.
From coffee’s great find in its African birthplace,
To palaces and salons its hot liquid to grace.

Once called Arabia’s drink so fine,
Enjoyed by Muslims as a substitute for wine.
The Wine of Araby by a Sultan named,
Its usage for everything became much acclaimed.

It landed up in Turkey to eventually be roasted,
With this elixir to everyone’s health they toasted.
On an open fire the beans they cooked,
At each other with anticipation they looked.

To a fine powder the beans were ground,
By adding boiling water they soon found.
They had created a potent new beverage,
Which when consumed gave you great vision and leverage.

They boiled the berries and made a strong brew,
They even put them into a hearty stew.
Tired limbs and bodies to transform,
And enable them all night to perform.
In Arabia a marriage contract clearly stated,
A wife coffee could drink till she was sated.
If a husband did not allow his wife as much coffee as she wanted,
For his failure to comply a divorce was granted.

A wise mullah was hired to discuss poetry, history and law, this was his job,
By the Persian Shah he was appointed to drink coffee and entertain the mob.
Called by imams and priests the source of all evil,
Called by the Emperor Napoleon black as the devil.

It helped his huge army in their march,
Their lips to wet and not to parch.
Men made speeches and told satirical stories,
Recounted the past and ancient glories.

Entrepreneur’s quick to spot a trend,
Introduced many a tasty and powerful blend.
In time a variety of styles they did rend,
It’s grateful drinkers into rhapsody send.

Served in cafés where friends could meet,
Offered in cups with sugar for a treat.
Premises impressively were furnished,
With chandeliers and the warm glow of wood they were burnished.

Men spent great lengths of time in coffee houses,
To escape from the chores of home and nagging spouses.
To each other they gave great secrets to keep,
But once back at home, alas! they could not sleep!

Frequented by teacher, trader and idle gossipmonger,
Carpenter, butcher and humble fishmonger.
People of like mind,
Came to companionship find.

A meeting place for lost and lonely souls,
A welcome place to discuss life’s goals.
Some came to sit all alone,
Others for their sins and thoughts to atone.

Artists and writers working in isolation,
Sought coffee for comfort and consolation.
It added a certain briskness to their walk,
And a liveliness to their talk.


Coffee had a great impact on society, culture and the economy,
On the arts, literature, politics and gastronomy.
It stimulated conversation and increased communication,
It rejuvenated tired minds and provided inspiration.

People by its powerful aroma were lured,
Many a hangover by its black liquid cured.
Athletes convinced it could make them run quick,
Doctors claimed it could cure the sick

The most vital berry the world has ever seen,
Fortunes were made with this precious brown bean.
Poets, philosophers and kings its virtues did praise,
Some lawyers speculated the dead it could raise?

Well made, strong and hot,
To quench the lips of a thirsty lot.
Textile merchants, horse dealers and pickpockets,
Students young with sunken eye sockets.

Our olfactory senses to delight,
Our minds to free in fanciful flight.
On my grandmother’s saucer with goodness it flowed,
On her lap, the warmth of her face with love glowed.

Man has now invented a contraption, a machine,
To extract the essence of the worldly bean.
Serve it with a simple, lightish froth,
Or topped with cream for a bountiful broth.

Grind it, pour it and let it percolate,
Sprinkle with cinnamon or sensuous chocolate.
Mocha, Cuban or Arabian,
Brazilian, Kenyan, or Colombian.

In coffee we see a wonderful revival,
To ensure its longevity and ultimate survival.
Because we all to this idea are wed,
To see to its success and ubiquitous spread.

And now it serves a delightful clientele,
Good men and women who know its spell so well.
Coffee houses therefore will continue to proliferate,
Places to pause, to sip and to pontificate.



And if perchance you should grow weary of this tale,
Your memory fades and begins to fail,
Brew a fresh cup, not one that is stale.
And when your concentration begins to flag,
Lift the cup to your lips and have a heavenly drag.



Costa Ayiotis
June 2003

The Sexual Habits of the Greeks through the Ages

This little vignette on the sexual habits of the Greeks is dedicated to all my amoral friends out there who are only happy when they are fornicating.

It’s official! The Greeks are the fornicating champions of the world. This is according to a global survey conducted by Durex, one of the worlds leading and most respected condom manufacturers. The 2005 Durex Global Sex Survey is the largest sexual health research project of its kind in the world. More than 317 000 people from 41 countries took part in the world’s largest ever survey of sexual attitudes and behaviour. The research shows that Greeks are the most sexually active people on the planet having sex 138 times a year, well above the global average of 103 times.

Neighbouring countries Croatia (134) and Serbia and Montenegro (128) came a close second and third, while Bulgaria came in fourth at (127). The workaholic Japanese, are the least amorous lovers in the world and not surprisingly also the least satisfied with their sex lives. They came in last having sex only 45 times a year. Predictably men all over the world are least satisfied with how often they have sex, 41% want it more frequently compared to just 29 % of women. The pesky Turks have more sexual partners than any other country (14.5). South Africa comes in at a respectable fifth place when it comes to number of partners. Sex using artificial mechanical devices such as dildo’s and vibrators is most popular in Australia, the USA, Canada and New Zealand. These are countries where women are the dominant species, women call the shots; and the men have been suitably emasculated and do as they are told otherwise they sit in their cars crying into their beers. It’s also possible that these countries have higher lesbian populations. Vibrators are less popular in Italy, Greece, Turkey and Vietnam. The Greeks together with the Chileans top the charts when it comes to anal sex (55%) followed by the Italians in second place at (50%), the Croatians and Finns in joint third place (49%), the Norwegians in fourth place (48%) and the USA in fifth place (47%). *(See attachment at www.durex.com/gss).

When the results were announced in Greece, large jubilant crowds spilled out onto the streets and gathered in Syntagma Square, Omonia and other public spaces all over Athens in a spontaneous outpouring of public joy, to celebrate and to express their pride and satisfaction at this remarkable achievement. Not since Greece was crowned European Soccer Champions last year has there been such a buoyant revival of the national spirit. The crowds danced and hugged each other to the strains of Bouzouki music and chanted in unison: “Poutsos! Poutsos! Zito o Poutsos! (Penis! penis! long live the penis!). The crowd had unknowingly revived the ancient Greek practice of penis worship. In ancient times the celebration of the erect penis was a positive symbol. Women and girls routinely wore penis amulets as lucky charms and erections were carved on doors of houses to bring good fortune. Giant sculpted penises on stone pillars stood sentinel at country crossroads to protect travellers from evil spirits and the evil eye. Dionysus the Greek god of wine, parties and orgies smiled from his lofty perch atop Mount Olympus as he absentmindedly stroked his penis while planning his own celebration with his wayward coterie of inebriated muses and bored goddesses.

The mood in Greece until recently has been quite sombre and Greece desperately needed the good news to revive low morale and flagging national fortunes. A Greek Orthodox priest was recently arrested on the island of Lesbos for trying to pimp a young Polish woman to an undercover policeman for 100 Euros. The very powerful Greek Orthodox Church has been rocked by this and a series of high-profile sex and corruption scandals that have seriously tarnished its image. The graft ring is alleged to have included judges, lawyers and Greek Orthodox clerics. The country unfortunately has always been plagued by a plethora of very public corruption scandals involving bankers, industrialists and politicians. Jacob Zuma and Shabir Shaik would feel entirely at home in Greece although the Greeks are old hands at the bribery game and would make our boys look like amateur cub scouts, selling lemonade at a church fair. Post the Olympic Games euphoria, the country’s economy has faced a crippling multi-billion Euro debt burden, a spiralling budget deficit and a severe economic downturn. The prospect of higher taxes and other austerity measures to be introduced by the conservative government of Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis led to a series of crippling strikes by doctors, teachers, air traffic controllers and other civil servants demanding higher pay, bringing the country to a virtual standstill this week.

Politicians from all the major parties, keen for some media exposure and eager to capitalise on the mass feelings of goodwill, were quick to join the festivities and from balconies and hastily erected podiums praised the Greek nation for its unflagging energy and passion. There was even fevered talk of several smaller parties joining in a coalition to form a new political party to be called “The Poutsos Party.” Mr Evangelos Malakismenos the leader of the NMP or New Mounothuella Party stepped up to one of the podiums and announced to the crowd that sex could be a powerful force for good and a catalyst for positive change. “The battles of Greece could be fought in the bedroom and not in the streets with unnecessary strikes. Solidarity was needed in these difficult times. Greeks for once could set aside their party political and ideological differences and petty internecine squabbles and agree to act for the good of the country. It was time to place the interests of the nation above the interests of the political parties. It was time to seek consensus and adopt a multi-partisan approach to address the many challenges and pressing problems that the country faced. The last time the country was so united was when they fought the Italians and the Germans during the Second World War. Bravo! Long live Greece! Let’s keep it up! Keep it up! He cried to shouts of approval and cheering from the crowd.

Greece after all has always adopted a very pragmatic approach when it comes to mixing sex with politics and almost expects and certainly admires sexual prowess and machismo from its leading politicians. Politicians in Greece, Italy and France have always known that sex has a powerful allure and that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. The European public and press have always been more open and understanding when it comes to human desires, weaknesses and frailties. They seem to adopt a far more tolerant, mature and adult stance in these matters.

In Italy porn star Ilona Staller, affectionately known as “La Cicciolina” – “Cuddles” in Italian, famously bared her breasts while on the campaign trail and was duly elected to the Italian parliament. After winning her seat in Parliament, “Cicciolina” continued acting in porn films for another two years and on two separate occasions offered to sleep with Saddam Hussein to prevent a war in the Gulf and to achieve peace in the Middle East. The allied coalition should have taken her up on her offer and saved the world a whole lot of trouble. I’m sure Saddam would have obliged her if given half a chance. In October 2002 she declared: “My breasts have never done anyone any harm, while Bin Laden’s war has caused thousands of victims.” In France President Francois Mitterand was famous for his many liaisons and even had a daughter with one of his mistresses. Socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou was a legendary womaniser and had a long standing affair with Dimitra Liani, otherwise known as “Mimi”, a buxom bottle blonde air-hostess working for Olympic Airways. The numerous affairs of Mitterand in France and Papandreou in Greece rather than leading to their demise only served to strengthen their appeal and increase their popularity at the polls.

In the United Kingdom there is very little tolerance for sexual indiscretions on the part of their political figures and many an unfortunate politician and cabinet minister has had to resign in disgrace after being caught in flagrante delicto wearing nothing but a black lacy brassiere, suspender belt and fishnet stockings. In British political circles there may be a predilection for cross-dressing and buggery while in the USA an entire generation of young women will be remembered for their cock-sucking. The US has inherited and perfected the British secret weapon; hypocrisy and it now reigns supreme. The USA has become notorious for applying double standards in everything ranging from foreign policy, environmental affairs, religion, global trade practices, family values and sexual mores. A strong puritanical streak runs through Middle America and the moral conservatism of the Bible belt states borders on the hysterical yet the USA is the largest producer and consumer of pornographic films and magazines.

President Kennedy had numerous affairs including his celebrated affair with the ill-fated Marilyn Monroe yet the all knowing press of the day chose to ignore these indiscretions while others have been blown out of proportion. President Bill Clinton was impeached during his second term of office because he was forced to lie about his improper liaison with Monica Lewinsky, the highly impressionable young White House intern. At the time with all the righteous moral indignation and sophistry only he could muster, he uttered the famous words: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!” He did however manage to insert a large Cuban cigar into the young lady’s vagina and in return the grateful young intern performed fellatio on the Presidential penis. Philip Roth the great American novelist maintains that Clinton should have had anal sex with Lewinsky to ensure her silence. Being a good middle class Jewish American Princess she would have kept her mouth shut. Any self–respecting Greek, Italian or French politician would have given him the same advice. The difference is that this kind of risqué behaviour would barely raise an eyebrow on the Continent.

Professor Haris Poutsomegalokefalos, Head of Sexual Studies and Human Behaviour at Athens University, was not surprised at the results of the global survey. Looking like a tanned version of Woody Allen with a large Roman nose, and large black-rimmed oval spectacles with thick bottle lenses that distorted his small beady eyes, he was dressed in a utilitarian white lab coat, his only concession to sartorial flair being a silk crimson red bow-tie. Members of his academic support staff were convinced that under this uninspiring exterior he wore racy underwear just like Mao-Tse Tung’s widow. In the latter’s instance her undoing was a weakness for lacy imported French lingerie which she wore beneath her austere Mao suit. The professor was a volatile little man, a bundle of highly combustible and excitable nerves that got the better of him when he was challenged by fellow academics. Dealing now with the scoundrels from the press he looked surprisingly calm, relaxed and decidedly smug. Believing that reporters as mere scribes were of inferior intellect, he displayed an unpleasant combination of being conceited, all-knowing and provincial. At the press conference in Athens, the highly regarded academic patiently explained to the assembled journalists in his best high-pitched voice that there were many reasons for the Greeks coming up tops in the global sex survey. For a start there was he said, a clear connection between hot weather and sex. According to his research the Eskimo’s had very little sex in winter. The cold weather adversely affected their libido. Hot weather made people feel alive and liberated and further inspired uninhibited behaviour and attitudes in human beings. The Greeks he said have agile, open and enquiring minds. This natural inquisitiveness makes them question everything especially authority and rules. This flexibility, chameleon-like adaptability and relaxed morality in modern Greek society allows them to be uninhibited about their sexuality.

There was he said also a connection and a basic affinity between travel, tourism and sex. The more you travel the more you want to have sex. Travel even in Byron’s day when the Grand European tour was de rigeur for young English aristocrats, went hand in hand with the search for sexual exploration and adventure in the sexually permissive, warmer and more forgiving climes of the southern Mediterranean. Millions of female tourists from Northern Europe, the Nordic and Scandinavian countries visit Greece each summer with the express purpose of getting a tan , eating tzatziki, getting drunk and having sex with a local in that order. Whole neighbourhoods and entire suburbs of single and married Greek men are mobilised during the summer months to satisfy the needs of these tourists. This happy band of brigands, marauders and gigolo’s immerse themselves with single-minded determination into the national pastime and practice of what is commonly referred to in the vernacular as “kamaki” – which means to harpoon or spear a fish. It is often with the implicit consent of their wives, mistresses and girlfriends, who suddenly infused with Olympian detachment, turn a blind eye for the duration of the silly season because it is a matter of national pride that their men are so sought after for their sexual prowess. Casual sex with a “xeni” – a cold-blooded foreigner doesn’t really count as long as you don’t fall in love with your blonde Agnetha and run away to Upsala with her. The legendary Greek hospitality is in part based on sharing food and sex with total strangers. It’s even better of course if the total strangers pay for the food and sex. The ancient Greeks even invented a word for it “filoxenia.” – meaning lavish displays of warmth, affection, generosity and friendship towards strangers. The pursuit of “kamaki” also conveniently frees the sexually liberated Greek women to secretly pursue their own liaisons. The younger Greek females then take on considerably older and wealthier married or divorced lovers well into their sixties and seventies. This practice is called “Faca d’Oro”, meaning fucking in exchange for gifts, preferably gold jewellery and solid gold diamond encrusted Rolex wrist-watches, but furs, cash, government bonds, German convertibles and apartments are also acceptable currency.

One summer in Greece I was mesmerised by the terrifying sight of a Greek gigolo at work. I first spotted him on a bus in Corfu. He was fairly tall by Greek standards and in excellent shape for a man in his mid-forties. He sported a deep tan and an athletic build from years of chasing goats in his village. He wore extremely tight white towelling shorts that were cut high up on his muscular thighs like John McEnroe’s tennis shorts. Never trust a man who wears white socks and his shorts too tight.The side-on bulge in his shorts outlined clearly the tool of his trade even though he was only in a state of semi-arousal. He wore a red shirt with tight short sleeves that was completely open at the front and that prominently displayed a thick gold chain resting on his dark chest. He wore several gold rings on his fingers, a gold chain on his right wrist and a cheap Japanese gold watch strapped onto his left wrist. He wore white canvas espadrilles on his feet. He had jet black hair slicked back with brilliantine, a trimmed village moustache and several gold fillings in his mouth. I dubbed him the man with the golden cock. His victim was setting next to him on the back seat of the bus. She was a blonde German Frau with short hair and sagging breasts in her mid-fifties who was clearly having the time of her life. She was a robust woman with a hefty farm-house sensibility about her. She was clearly not some shy retiring shrinking violet. She had come to Griechenland with one purpose in mind, to be dealt with in firm and assured manner, to be manhandled, grabbed, squeezed and prodded with much heaving and groaning and grunting. And our ageing Lothario was going to do just that, oblige and accommodate her every carnal whim and desire; everything except for accepting the presence of a rampant rabbit vibrator skulking somewhere in the draw beneath the bedside table. That would be the ultimate insult for a man in his profession. He hugged her, his roving hands caressing every gentle fold and bulge on her body and kissed her with much simulated and exaggerated relish on the mouth and on her neck in what amounted to the most visibly vulgar and insincere public display of affection that I have ever witnessed. He was being true to the instructions contained in the Greek Gigolo’s Seduction Manual. He stuck his tongue into her ear and snorted, slurped and licked and twisted it in and about while she squirmed with delight in her seat and leaned her considerable frame deeper into his. He smiled at her like a crazed hyena and spoke to her in stilted German phrases that he picked up in some phrase book. “Mein liebling, mein schatz” was all he kept saying to her. The “vielen dank” and “aufwiedersehen” would come later, much later after the matter of his remuneration had been suitably settled in his favour.

I soon erased them from my mind but two weeks later back in Athens I was sitting outside in the courtyard of my favourite taverna in Athens. “O Platanos” is named after the magnificent plane tree that provides some shade and occupies pride of place in the cobbled courtyard outside the taverna. The taverna has been in the capable hands of the same family for over a hundred years. It is situated in an old beautifully restored double storey neo-classical house in the Plaka in the gentle foot-hills and paved alley-ways beneath the Acropolis. The taverna is famous for its retsina (young resinated white wine) and its basic, unpretentious and honest home-style Greek cooking which essentially involves cooking everything from meat, to fish, to potatoes and aubergines in olive oil in large trays in the oven. Add thick round loaves of crusty country-style bread, slabs of feta, olives, red onions, cucumbers and tomatoes and you have a meal fit for a king. The retsina is kept in the basement cellar beneath the house in large pine barrels and is served ice-cold in half litre copper jugs. I glanced at a table next to mine and there he was; the same offensive character I had seen on the bus in Corfu with the same Frau, only now her cheeks looked considerably redder. The Greek sun, sea, food and sex-soaked lifestyle had improved her circulation and this was infinitely better than biting into bockwurst back in Bremen. I stared at the Greek gigolo with morbid fascination, unable to avert my gaze from someone so repulsive and who oozed so much sleaze, but it was for a moment too long. He glared at me with fierce flashing eyes, a look of pure malice twisted onto his face, as if to say: “fuck off and mind your own business vre malaka! Can’t you see I’m working here?” I no longer felt like eating.

Another factor that explains the high rate of sexual frequency or activity in Greece according to Professor Poutsomegalokefalos is the healthy Mediterranean diet. Olive oil, olives, fish, vegetables, kilograms of creamy feta, beans, legumes, fruit, gallons of red wine and an endless supply of cigarettes keep the arteries clear, the heart healthy and make the body a willing instrument for amorous pursuits. When the Greeks are not sleeping with each other or with complete strangers from foreign shores, the other national pastime is eating and talking about food. Not to be underestimated are the health benefits of eating Greek yoghurt. Home-made Greek yoghurt with its enzymes, nutrients and active probiotic cultures that stimulate the immune system, is known for its aphrodisiac qualities and is often referred to as “white energy.” Greek and Bulgarian peasants have sex well into their eighties because they include yoghurt in their daily diet. The logical inference that can therefore be drawn from this is that compared to other nations the Greeks have longer sex lives. A little known historical fact is that many years ago the Bulgarians stole the yoghurt recipe from the Greeks to improve their sexual performance and in retaliation for the Greeks sleeping with their women. Add to the classic Mediterranean diet, daily afternoon naps (followed by sex, a cigarette and a small Greek coffee to wake up), a close knit support network of family and friends and the result is happier people, lower stress levels and more sex. So it becomes a virtuous cycle of eating, socialising, smoking, napping and sex. Essential to the success of this regime is a low tolerance level for work. Work is in fact seriously detrimental to this happy and healthy lifestyle. Work is seen as a foreign Protestant inspired abomination. The great Indian writer V.S. Naipaul agreed with this sentiment when he wrote: “Employment is the ultimate humiliation.” The pursuit of idleness is essential.

A young journalist named Vassili writing for a left-wing daily questioned the accuracy of the survey’s findings. He said that research had shown that both young and old alike tend to overstate their sexual achievements. He added that the Greeks like the Italians were especially prone to exaggeration and known and for their dubious and inaccurate accounting methods. The European Union he continued had first hand experience with the accounting practices of Greeks, which were so creative that they bordered on fiction. The methodology used was seriously suspect. Everyone knew that the Greeks invented anal sex and were the world leaders in this field. The Greeks he concluded had simply counted anal sex and vaginal sex as two separate sexual encounters and this explained their inflated figures. These comments caused an immediate uproar and howls of protest from several journalists writing for right wing pro-government newspapers.

The professor held up his hands to silence the room and with a patronising reptilian smile glared at the young reporter. Addressing him directly he said: “Young man, you are a disgrace to your forefathers, to your country and to your profession! The allegations you make are spurious and defamatory to the nation as a whole. Greeks are honourable people with a proud history and they never lie about important matters like sex. The years you have spent in exile in the Soviet Union with your parents have clearly contaminated your thinking. There is no room in modern Greece for outdated communist inspired dialectics. Your thinking belongs in an ideological museum. Greece has given you a home and more importantly it has given you freedom. The freedom to express yourself without fear of persecution. Something which you would never have known in the former Soviet Union.”

Government spokesperson John Kopritis displaying a level of maturity unusual in a hardened party apparatchik sought to defuse the volatile atmosphere in the room. He thanked the professor for sharing his findings with the members of the press corp and added that the vigorous debate that the survey had generated was healthy and welcome and that lone dissenting voices were necessary in every democracy and should not be silenced. The official viewpoint of the Greek government however was that the findings of the global survey were essentially accurate. In due course the Greek government would be seeking the endorsement of the WHO-the World Health Organisation, the WSF – the World Sex Federation and would be drafting and sponsoring a special resolution to be adopted by a special sitting of the UN General Assembly. This would make the findings incontestable and beyond reproach. The Secretary General of the UN, Mr Kofi Annan, could not be drawn to comment on these latest Greek initiatives. The US Permanent Mission to the United Nations however in a show of solidarity with their Turkish allies contested the findings of the global survey and stated in a press release that they would be voting against the resolution.

At a White House press conference, President George Bush stated the following: “I have always stood for the sanctity and inviolability of family values. I have always believed that marriage is a sacred institution that lies at the bedrock of the American way of life as we know it. Them Grecians may be the founding fathers of democracy, but that was a long time ago and we thank them for it, but they need to come to Texas and see for themselves how we do things around these parts. In my book Texans are the finest people I have ever known and are the most virile people on earth, by which I mean that they have the most sex within the confines of a stable long-term heterosexual married relationship between a female wife and a male husband.”

In a separate interview Dr. Sotiris Kolobaras, a prominent proctologist in private practice and one of the worlds leading experts on intestinal gas, attached to the prestigious Swiss Medical Institute of Lausanne added his views to the growing chorus of voices. Dr. Kolobaras an amateur archaeologist and classicist in his spare time; conducted a detailed study of the sexual practices and attitudes of the ancient Greeks. Dr. Kolobaras said that the sexual proclivities, habits and large appetites of the modern Greeks could be traced back directly to their ancient forefathers. There was a clear connection and continuity of certain customs and traditions, he said, that had not been diminished or diluted with the passage of time. Even the Turkish occupation had not managed to extinguish the ardour of the Greeks. There was a popular misconception based in large part on Turkish propaganda that the Ottoman Turks had introduced anal sex to the Greeks when in fact all the historical evidence suggested to the contrary that it was the other way around.

To the ancient Greeks anal sex was a practical form of birth control and a way to keep the hymen and virtue of young Greek virgins intact. In ancient Greek society the concept of “arête” - virtue or “andreia” – beauty and strength in manhood was attached to the idealised naked male form. Anal sex between both single and married Greek warriors was seen as a perfectly normal way for comrades in arms to bond while away on military campaigns. The Greek army was also followed into battle by an impressive caravan or retinue of traders, merchants, charlatans, thieves, gamblers, priests and prostitutes. The Greeks then were happily bisexual. This was a very practical and sensible arrangement. You would go to a party and double your chances of going home with someone. The upper class Greek men at a typical symposium, or drinking party for like-minded friends would gather in the “men’s room” and recline on comfortable day beds large enough for two or three guests to spread out together. The wine flowed and the naked courtesans danced. The men sang merrily: “If a chick won’t do, to a prick we’ll be true.” Another variation was “grab him by the ear, and present his rear.”

Not much has been written about the sexual attitudes, preferences and practices of Greek women, but there is growing evidence to suggest that they were comfortable to enter into lesbian liaisons while their men were away waging war. The Greek men were away for extended periods of time, at first fighting each other and then fighting the Persians. What else were these women to do? The lyric love poetry of Sappho centred as it was around her male-free existence on the island of Lesbos, suggests that a thriving colony of lesbians existed on the island and they didn’t wear sensible shoes. Sappho was herself from an aristocratic family and besides writing beautiful poetry ran a finishing school for well-bred young women on the beautiful pine-covered slopes of the island. She tutored them in the arts and composed their wedding songs. The affection in her sensual and melodic love songs was directed almost exclusively at females. Love between women was not persecuted then as it was in later centuries. The homoerotic content of Sappho’s poetry was not condemned at the time. Rather than drawing censure and criticism her art was honoured by Plato who elevated her status from great lyric poet to one of the muses. Solon, the great Athenian ruler, law-maker and a poet himself, heard one of her songs and asked to be taught the song because he said: “I want to learn it and die.”

Attitudes to sex in ancient Greece were very tolerant and progressive and not shackled within the narrow straitjacket of moral conservatism. One has only to look at the art, poetry, pottery and sculpture of Ancient Greece to get an idea of just how open-minded the Greeks were. A sex scene depicted on an Attic cup from about 480 B.C. shows standing rear entry as the preferred position. Now whether it was for anal or vaginal sex we are not sure. On another Attic wine goblet from around 510 B.C. the late stages of a symposium or banquet are depicted, which has escalated into a full blown orgy with multiple partners, multiple penetrations and oral sex. Other pottery vases show satyrs having an orgy in a vineyard. Although in this instance their actions are homosexual, this does not mean that they were always consistently homosexual. Scholars like Thomas Cahill point out rather, that they were sexually omnivorous and always ready for copulation. There are sculptures showing a satyr tackling a “nymph” with a beautifully shaped bottom who on closer inspection is actually a hermaphrodite. Another sculpture from 200 B.C. shows a phallic dancer while yet another sculpture this time in bronze from the same period shows a masturbating hunchback and a dwarf sporting a massive phallus. The philosopher A.C Grayling makes the point in his book “The Reason of Things” that the modest sized penises on most classical statues were symbols of sexual self-restraint whereas the giant phalluses of the satyrs symbolize an uncontrollable and large sexual appetite. This art rather than being considered offensive or pornographic was viewed as erotica, the telling of the truth or simply put an exploration of what happens in ordinary life.

In ancient Greece sex and religion shared many rituals and lived side by side in peaceful co-existence. It was only when the Graeco Roman world collided with the Judaeo Christian world that the Greek gods started dying and religion gradually became the enemy of sex. As Nietzsche put it: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink, but he did not die of it, he degenerated into vice.” Or as Mark Twain said: “Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.” Until then the ancient Greeks, their gods and goddesses lived free of constraints and happily cavorted with each other and with lesser mortals when the mood grabbed them. The recent global survey suggests then that the all encompassing sexual expansiveness of the ancient Greeks 2500 years ago has been passed on down the centuries like a bright flaming torch and is being happily continued by their no-less illustrious descendants, the modern Greeks of today.


Costa Ayiotis
17 November 2005
Pretoria

P.S. If you don’t speak Greek ask a very open-minded Greek friend to translate the meanings of the some of the surnames used in the text for our fictional Greek politicians and eminent Greek academics.