Selebi and his stuff

Today will be day number eight that I will spend seated on a hard wooden bench at the Joburg High Court watching our former chief of police give evidence in his own defence. I would rate banging your head against a wall, sticking pins in your eyes or having sulphuric acid squirted into one's armpits as more enjoyable, but hey - this is a job, and somebody has to do it. Somebody has to let the nation know what goes down in courtroom 4B, where the security guards stationed at the door make you sign in and take a stupid red tag on a lanyard with you into court so that you can hand it back to them when you leave again. Never mind that this trial has been ongoing for over 40 days already - stupid tags remain the order of the day.

The crowd of journos covering the trial has become like a small dysfunctional family, sharing intimate details of personal lives, squabbling over plug sockets for laptops, offering opinions on the body odour of the strange characters who cram in next to us on occasions when movement is limited to the length of your cable and the open space on another bench is just not an option for the hacks and knocking over each other's cups of coffee bought from the little extortion racket, I mean coffee shop across the road.
Yes - there have been fun moments. Like when Selebi has forgotten his politeness and revealed his arrogance and badness. Or when he mistook a documented R10 000 payment to "Clinton's Balustrades" for home repairs and admitted to having paid out R10 000 for his son Elton's matric farewell suit. Yip - classic slip I reckon, misreading 'Clinton' as 'Elton'. Claiming that you have no "alternative sources of income" to your R32 000 salary, and then letting slip that you sprung 10 gorilla's in cash for your kid's matric monkey suit! Oooopsie!!
Anyway - another day of court antics ahead. It has been intense. It has been boring. I have notebooks of information and can reliably tell you stuff like Selebi spent R197.05 at the Pick 'n Pay in Britz on March 1, 2005. Lots and lots and lots of facts like that.
But I won't.
It is for me to bring you only the exciting story, sifted out of the junk that is spewed over hours and hours of court proceedings.
*sigh*