This month the face on the page belongs to the acting magistrate — the colleague who has carried a court whose permanent officer is on leave, on a circuit, on a shortlist, or simply unappointed. Acting is a mode of sitting, not a lesser species of officer.
Milo — a living footnote on the blotter
Milo, the little sailor — recovered, and still in the room.
This is Milo, who is known in his house as the little sailor, and who should not, on paper, still be here. One ordinary afternoon he was out with the helper who walks him when a Regional Court Magistrate’s car met him in the road. It was an accident. Accidents happen even to careful people, and they happen even to people who spend their working lives deciding what other people ought to have done.
What happened next is the part worth keeping. The magistrate stopped. She got out. She picked Milo up from the tar and she did not leave the helper to carry the rest of the afternoon alone. Together they walked him home, and she placed him in the owner’s hands. That walk, from the road to the front door, is remembered here with gratitude.
Milo was taken at once to a proper veterinary hospital, where the quiet work began — the examination, the pain control, the right food, and the follow-up visits that never make a photograph. He recovered. He is well. The owner has forgiven what was an accident, and has been clear that the forgiveness includes an appreciation of the magistrate who picked him up and brought him home. The Animals Protection Act 71 of 1962 still makes neglect an offence, and in National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals v Minister of Justice [2016] ZACC 46; 2017 (1) SACR 284 (CC) the Constitutional Court reminded us that animals have intrinsic value. Kindness, though, is simpler than a statute. It is the decision to stay with the living thing in front of you.
If there is a lesson for the rest of us, it is only this: when something living is hurt in our presence, we pick it up, we walk it home, and we see that it reaches a doctor. Milo is still in the room. That is a heartening sentence to be able to write.
A note from Neelan Karikan. Authority stems from action, and the action that afternoon was to stop, to pick him up, and to walk him home. The building understands a colleague who does that.