New Year's Eve was an aberration. Instead of spending the night groping drunk women and tying fireworks to the tails of police horses, I took Clive to see a film called Peter Pan. I thought it was about the leader of a Chinese motorcycle gang who is abducted by a Triad drug lord and abused by his pet gimp.

Instead, it was about a mixed-up kid who floats around in a camouflage netting loincloth while a giant rubber crocodile chases some poor hook-fisted bastard whose only crime is the inability to act.

Look, I don't want to grow up either, but when it comes to choosing whether to spend the rest of my life with a peach-faced pubescent Lolita or a two-inch fairy with Tourette's Syndrome, I know what I would do. That Peter is one sick puppy. In the old days, the Censor Board would have slapped a 2-18 age restriction on this thinly disguised debasement of all that is good about humanity. So much for New Year's Eve.

On New Year's Day I took Clive to an abattoir outside Escourt to show him why cows have to die and afterwards I made him eat half a beef bunny chow which is another rite of passage for anybody who has ties to Durban.

That Peter is one sick puppy

Later in the afternoon I took the family down to Addington Beach for a swim in the hope of drowning out the weeping and recriminations, but it takes more than that to get Brenda off my case. I was fighting a rearguard action when help arrived from an unexpected quarter.

Boxed in by heavy traffic at the robots outside the Ice Rink, the car fell silent. Then I felt it. The eyes. Hundreds of eyes watching us from a thick tangle of taxis, all staring at the first white people to go near the beachfront since North Beach fell to the hordes in the summer of 1994.

I shouted to Brenda to put on her friendly face but that only seemed to excite the natives even more.

Clive's outcomes-based education kicked in and he began waving like some dumb Peace Corps volunteer from Oklahoma. I know from bitter experience that hand signals in KwaZulu-Natal can lead to sudden death and I snarled at him to desist.

In the meantime, Brenda was caught up in some sort of touchy-feely racial togetherness thing with the driver of a minibus called No Fear.

A shallow end made up of 10 parts urine to one part water

He had Dingaan written all over him and I hit the electric window trapping Brenda's arm at the elbow while she was in the middle of one of those African handshakes that start off well but invariably end in a showdown with blunt machetes.

A Kombi in the lane next to me stalled or ran out of petrol or the anti-theft device kicked in and I took the gap.

I broke through enemy lines with a fine display of offensive driving and managed to get the family safely across the Umgeni River where decent clean-living folk have succeeded in retaining the character of their neighbourhoods through a creative combination of artificially inflated property prices and boerbull dogs.

But none of that matters now because I am back in the bosom of the Mother City.

However, I am writing this on Sunday in 47 degrees heat and I can actually hear my brain bubbling and popping like a live squid thrown on to an open fire.

Brenda has collapsed somewhere in the house and Clive is struggling to shave the cat on the grounds that nobody should have to wear a fur coat in this weather.

I live within spitting distance of the Sea Point swimming pool, so earlier on in the day I headed down there to cool off and found myself competing with half-a-million other people wedged in a shallow end made up of 10 parts urine to one part water.

Smelling like a pissoir I fled the area and began combing the rocks for a seafood supper.

The Atlantic Ocean is like one enormous buffet. All it takes is a quick arm and a plastic bag. I have procured several fine meals for the family since we moved to Sea Point, which is a good thing because Brenda still refuses to cook.

But it hasn't been easy. Clive won't eat anemones which is fine because it means more for me. And Brenda refuses to eat sea urchins on some kind of twisted ethical grounds.

A seagull dropped a small fish at my feet once. Okay, so it's not much of a buffet. At least that's what I thought until I discovered the joys of krill. The sea is absolutely packed with these nutritious little devils.

Strangely enough, it took the Norwegians to discover them. After creating the Nobel Prize and supporting Hitler, there wasn't much else for the people of Oslo to do but wander around the fjords looking for new stuff to name and perhaps eat afterwards.

The Norwegian word kril means "young fish". The Oxford-trained academics who write dictionaries added an extra "l" to make it more difficult for Norwegians trying to learn English.

But be that as it may, I am a man who knows his krill and I can tell you that they are nothing like young fish.

In fact, they bear a startling resemblance to the Sea Monkeys that were available via mail order in the 1970s but which turned out to be just another scam perpetrated by our parents so that they could sneak out into the back yard for quick sex or a hit on the bong while we were pressed up against the fish tank waiting for the goddamn krill to perform high wire stunts and dance about in tiny tails and top hats. It never happened, of course, and an entire generation was left scarred.

Now it is open season on the little swine. Marine and Coastal Management has given the go-ahead to exploit krill. And about time too.

If there is anything that deserves to be exploited, it is krill. Whales have a weight problem because they guzzle three tons of krill a day.

That's right. A day. And this, while Africa starves. They are worse than Americans.

What we need to do is start pumping krill into the Sudan, into Eritrea, into Zimbabwe.

I was about to grab my net and head out to Mouille Point on a krill harvesting expedition when I read in the paper that Nan Rice of the Save Antarctica Campaign was saddling up and preparing to ride in defence of these sneaky shrimplike crustaceans.

I always thought that Nan Rice spoke for the dolphins and the whales. Now it turns out that she speaks for the krill, too.

Maybe she even speaks krill. Maybe she goes to Kommetjie on Thursday afternoons and chairs strategic planning sessions with the mesopelagics and periwinkles.

C'mon, Nan. You can't have both. Give us the krill and we promise not to eat the whales.

E-mail: ben_trovato@hotmail.com

• This is Ben Trovato's On The Run column, published in the Cape Times. E-mail him at ben_trovato@hotmail.co.za.