Life, Covid and Wimp-Outs
Tuesday 28 April 2020 Given lemons? Make lemonade! Cape Town photographer Neil Bradfield links the wipeouts featured in his photo essay to lockdown and the surf we so earnestly seek.
{gallery}SLIDESHOW/2020/april/wipeouts{/gallery}
So you’re flying furiously, picking up speed and weaving along the face of this Dunes beaut.. All good. No worries. But then “Kaboom!” all of a sudden you are klapped sideways and katapulted krytogenically (is that a word?) into the stratosphere.
You could even be paddling desperately into the take-off zone of a massive Sunset ogre, when simultaneously the bottom falls out of your world and the world falls out of your bottom. In the trade we call this a wipe-out: “chowed, chundered, crunched, carrots, stukkend, verby, finito, Jim Reeves!”
Your fantasy rapidly turns into a nightmare and your Endless Summer suddenly hits Full Stop rock!
So what’s this got to do with Covid? Well, for a start, it has an end and a beginning. In the middle is a journey - a dim state of limbo as we grind through a tumoultous murky world that has no up nor down.
The fact that vampire bats from China started it by nesting in Donald Trump’s kuif and injecting DNA from Betelgeuse into his dandruff is irrelevant. The solution to all these things is easy: Take your beating, wait for a lull, paddle out again and catch the wave of your life! Mahalo.
@neilbradfield