Temple of the Kite People
2nd September 2018
Wonderfully quiet and uneventful here at Montalivit, beautiful weather too so am taking the opportunity to just relax for a time.
However, that doesn't make for a very interesting travelogue so I've had a rummage through my digital archives and found a piece I wrote just under two years ago whilst similarly loitering in the sun on the Atlantic side of the southernmost tip of Spain.
My two wolfdog companions of the day and I were enjoying fabulous weather in the beguilingly bohemian port of Tarifa, even though it was October and, indeed, the warm sunny weather held right through until early December that year when it then finally started to rain just a bit too regularly for my tastes and so we took the hydrofoil to Tangiers, Morocco as I really don't like getting wet on a regular basis!
Here then is the aforementioned 'piece' I have dug out of my digital dungeon, from that time, which I called 'The Temple of the Kite People':
The Temple of the Kite People, Tarifa, Spain October 2016
Prologue: Tarifa, due to it’s favourable climate, shoreline and prevailing winds is Mecca to a fraternity of kite surfers. For those unfamiliar with the sport I would like to explain that it entails perching atop a very flimsy and super lightweight surfboard whilst hanging onto a giant curved kite in order to harness the wind as a means of propulsion. It’s known as an ‘extreme sport’ but it seems to me it’s not so much a sport for many of it’s disciples but more of a way of life.
It's a very calm morning here at The Temple of the Kite People, their god of wind having, unusually, deserted them this morning. Well, it is Sunday so maybe she is having the day off. As I recall from my very conventional C of E upbringing gods are wont to do that.
There will be a lot of disappointed worshipers though as the beach access area is bumper to bumper with expectant campervans this morning. Unsurprisingly many of them Spanish, but a good representation from the northern EU countries. Whorehouse plush French, uber functional German, string and sealing wax Brits, plucky Nederlanders and a few super stylish Scanderweigens.
I have observed the high priests (like all good hardcore religions, high office seems to be exclusively a male preserve) have a one metre slender keel attached to their board and attached to the bottom of the keel is a hydrofoil, or simply 'foil' as it is referred to. The run of the mill clergy have aircraft aluminium grade foils and the bishops, arch deacons and the like, carbon fibre.
This gives the clergy the appearance of levitating a metre above the water's surface as they skim along at great speed, possibly up to 30 knots on a good godly windy day. I expect if the truth could be told JC had a sky coloured kite (ordinarily secreted away in his 'cloaked' alien space ship) the day he put on his crowd pleasing 'walking on the water' performance for the punters at the Sea of Galilee.
However, I feel I must leave their temple very soon now for having recently received the 'word' that age is no barrier to entry I must either join them of wander in the wilderness, cast out with only my companion wolves for succour. It's a bit like those more conventional 'god botherers' the Joe's Witness crowd, in that once you have had the 'word' from them and you foolishly ignore it you are comprehensively fucked for all eternity, which is quite a long time.
I had the full wax version of their 'Word' too. All about how to achieve perfection you have use your subliminal instincts and believe in the vast untapped power of one's unconscious mind. A bit like that early Star Wars film, I think - you know the one where Alec Guinness tells a young and highly improbable Luke Skywalker to "use the Force" if he wants to find the tiny vent to drop his nuclear bomb into whilst travelling at impossible speeds in a groove on the side of an artificial planet.
Of course, if I really was able to harness my subliminal instincts and truly access the vast untapped resources of my unconscious mind I wouldn't need to bugger about in a frankly dangerous sea whilst perching on a balsa wood reinforced giant condom hanging on to an oversize kite to find my zenith of perfection would I?
Regrettably, a very real barrier to entry for me is lack of money. It's an expensive religion to join but then again aren't they all. Nobody wants an impecunious old tosspot turning up at their church and hogging space on a pew that could be more profitably occupied by a fatcat who arrives in a nice big, new, shiny Mercedes saloon car. The good old C of E would probably let me sit down on one of their pews occasionally but then again their numbers are dwindling fast these days and they are presumably getting a bit desperate, but in any decent upwardly mobile religion I'd be about as welcome as a kiddy-fiddler at a kindergarten.
Most of the Kite People are young adults, age 40 or under, but there is a significant representation from the coffin dodger fraternity who although actually well into their 50's or even their 60's and beyond pretend they are still 40. I estimate a great deal of time, money and effort goes into creating this physical illusion but, to the Kite People's credit, at least they are actually trying to make everlasting life happen in this world and not just doling out some vague and nebulous promise of something similar in a mysterious and undefined 'afterlife'.
Lack of money and advancing age aside, the real reason I wouldn't want to enlist as a Kite Person can be summed up with a one liner from the late, great Groucho Marx: I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member
.
So, onwards to the wilderness of southern Morocco it is for me and like the totally fictional biblical John the Bastard of old I'll be destined to wear clothes woven from coarse camel hair and eat locusts and wild honey.
Locusts and wild honey?
I should be so lucky!
