Where’s my festive friend?

I miss you, Aardklop, ou pêl. I miss the delirious and heady organised chaos that you once were.
Of course, I objected then. “Posters are everywhere!” we complained.
“The road next to the Bult square is one big, noisy, drinking hole,” we told our friends.
“Traffic is a nightmare. Stay home because ‘foreigners’ have hijacked our town”, we complained. “And that music!”
At the same time, we turned out in droves, night after night, to wander through the jumble that was the Bult. We tossed coins at buskers, enjoyed the free art, ate lewerkoekies and snoek and chatted to the neighbours we normally didn’t see over our garden walls. We walked and queued for shows and filled our cups of artistic needs to overflowing.
Aardklop remains a cultural gift to our town. And there’s none more grateful than I am that it was rescued a few years back, through local enthusiasm and ‘foreign’ funds.
But I miss my old friend.
Searching the festival programme on my laptop isn’t the same as unfolding the intricate and apparently purposely confusing printed version and slowly going through it with a highlighter, boere-cappuccino at my side.
I don’t like the tidy shopping, with Johannesburg-cloned stalls that seem to exclude the smallest of crafters, with the most original wares. There’s no fun in not getting lost in a tidal maze of shoulder-to-shoulder shoppers.
Looking back, it’s obvious that the gaudy and haphazard posters that hung from every fence and tree were what built the feesgees in me; that the bunches of beer-filled belching bellies that spread themselves across the tar actually made me smile and remember slices of my own misspent youth.
Aardklop is slick. It’s more organised; more profitable. It’s a bespectacled and suited adult now.
Art isn’t about order and streamlining and effortless searches, though. It’s about feeling and touching and smelling … about visceral emotions and a feeling of escape and the joy of discovering the next best thing.
I’d welcome the enthusiastic Aardklop toddler and the disheveled adolescent back, any day.