so i was at the beach yesterday which i really don’t do enough and was actually in the water (ditto) which was amazingly warm (or maybe amazingly warm for cape town beach water – i am not really a swimmer type person usually because i find the water too cold but here i had to be in to watch the kids and it was surprisingly not that bad) and i started to watch people

i love watching people – not in a hunt-them-down-later-and-leave-disturbing-messages-made-out-of-letters-cut-out-of-magazines-and-the-newspaper kind of way – but just seeing how people (who don’t know they’re being watched) behave or look or speak

and it was great. firstly there were these three young and little girls who were having an absolute blast in the waves near us and just seemed absolutely content and happy and vibing with each other and laughing a lot.

then there was a very young and little dude who was trying to catch a wave on his surfboard and just wasn’t able to stand and as he went past me i said to him “so close dude” and he responded “yeah and so far” and i gave him a bit of a Robin-Williams-in-Dead-Poets-Society-and-Good-Morning-Vietnam-type pep speech about how he could make it and how he shouldn’t give up and so on and he went off and the very next wave… he tried to stand up… and didn’t… but i think he didn’t stand up a LOT better than before I’d given him the talk…

watching him a little bit more and first picked up his mom in a full wet suite surfing near him and helping take him out over the waves to get to a good spot to try again, and then his dad also full wet suit, also surfing and i thort, “wow, that is so super uber cool” cos you know what they say, ‘the family who surfs together… um… something something together’ or something like that, but it was great to see this family, obviously loving each other and loving hanging out together doing stuff

then there were these two guys walking along the beach together, obviously friends. the one guy had no neck whatsoever, you know, one of those head-almost-directly-on-the-shoulders type guys, and as i noticed that i looked across at his friend and noticed that he had almost too much neck, and so it was quite an interesting combination of neck and no-neck walking down the beach together – how about sharing some with your friend, neck!

and then there was thug body boarder. now i know you can’t call someone ‘thug’ not in a bad way but i really don’t mean it in a bad way. if this guy was in a british football movie he would be in the credits as ‘football hooligan #4’ or something like that – just looked like a bit of a bruiser, big oke, well built, huge tattoo down his forearm and kinda thuggish… which is relevant, cos if i just said a big guy on a body board then it loses momentum. cos i watched him catch a wave and ride it for a long while and he had the biggest most contentable smile on his face, the kind of smile that only an 8 year old can have when he eyes ice-cream or the parents of a toddler when he finally poos in the pottie you know. It was incredible – this dude was absolutely enjoying himself to the extreme

and obviously a bunch of other people but those stood out. and of course the ten kids we had brought to the beach from kayamandi (the K) who were having an absolutable blast. brilliant just watching these kids come to life and just completely thrive in the water.

i love watching people. guessing who they are and what they’re about. watching interaction between people who really care about each other (and there are a lot of those on the beach – maybe those who don’t care enough stay away from the beach a lot more) and just seeing the absolute power of love in action.