Childish Things. Marita van der Vyver

      John Lennon is singing ‘Imagine’ on the radio in my narrow London house with a front door that opens on to a pavement, and a back garden smaller than a British pound note. Just imagine there’s no heaven.

      I hear that seventies music is becoming popular again. And the fashions keep popping up on the streets. Is nothing exempt from the irrational power of nostalgia?

      An election is being held in Angola today which could change everything. Perhaps there will be an end to the war that has torn the country apart for so many decades. On the other hand, perhaps nothing will change. Things might even get worse. However unthinkable that might seem.

      It’s easy if you try, John Lennon sings. I introduced my son to him today. Why, I don’t know, but it was the one figure in Madame Tussaud’s famous Wax Museum that caught his almost three-year-old attention. Maybe he became aware of his mother’s nostalgia (back to bloody nostalgia again) as we stood in front of the four young men with their dark mop-heads, narrow ties, and identical jackets tidily buttoned. Or a nostalgia emerging from the depths of the collective subconscious of an entire generation?

      ‘And here we have John Lennon,’ I said, and never got to the other three Beatles because my son stretched out his arms to grab John Lennon’s legs. ‘But you’re not allowed to touch him.’

      He was determined to touch him. I tried to pull him away but he began screaming. I looked around, saw no security guard and allowed him to touch, quickly, and with a dirty hand, John Lennon’s leg.

      It wasn’t good enough. He screamed so loudly that we had to end the excursion right there, before we could even get a proper look at Madonna or Michael Jackson. Which perhaps was also fitting, I consoled myself on the Underground on the way home. My taste in pop music never really developed beyond December 1980. On that day, when John Lennon was shot by one of his crazy admirers, I knew that the seventies had really ended. The day the music died.

      The biggest danger in Angola, I read in the newspaper, is that Unita or the MPLA will refuse to accept the result of the election. Then the civil war and the bloodshed will continue. Until there are no civilians left to kill? Until there is no blood left to flow? The most likely candidate for such a tactic is Unita, which has kept guerrilla operations going year after year with massive logistic and military support from Pretoria.

      Pierre was right, after all. He had the irritating habit of always being right. Now I wonder whether he would have been able to forecast how long South Africans would still have to wait for a free election.

      Imagine it, my dear child. Just imagine it!

      M.