salmagundi

At last! A thumbs-up for a Malmesbury business

2012-01-28T13:09:00.000+02:00

Malmesbury, the town that taste forgot, is the closest thing we have toa commercial centre, although I use the term ‘commercial centre’ loosely. It’sseldom that anyone from our valley returns from a trip to Malmesbury – where wehave to go for medicines, since there’s no pharmacy in either of our twinvillages; and periodically for supplies, since both our retail outlets (again,a term loosely used) make up in expense for what they lack in stock – without their lives having been considerably shortened.

Malmesbury boasts three large supermarket outlets: a Shoprite Checkers,a Pick n Pay and a SuperSpar. I was, for many years, a committed Pick n Pay shopper,partly because it’s the supermarket my mother always shopped at, and partlybecause, at least in the earlier years, the Malmesbury Pick n Pay did actuallystock most of what I needed. And when they didn’t have what I was looking for,they’d find it for me. This often resulted in charming miscommunications, twoof which stand out in my mind – once when I was looking for capers, and thesecond time for poppadoms. Take into account the language (English/Afrikaans) andcultural (urban/rural) divide, and you’ll get an idea of the problem. How doesone describe capers and poppadoms? I tried ‘a kind of edible pickled flower’and ‘a thin Indian bread that goes crispy when you fry it’, without any luck. Bothtimes, after much fruitless discussion and a rousing round of charades, I wasasked to simply write the name of the ingredient on a piece of paper, and thenext time I went in, they’d found it for me. (Also, I once won a washing machinein a competition they ran.)

But let’s just get Pick n Pay out of the way immediately: it was recentlytaken over as a franchise and, although I’ve since shopped there once or twiceout of loyalty, it’s never been the same.

Then there’s the Shoprite Checkers, until a few years ago a rather tackyOK. Then they did a huge revamp which included a (presumably massively expensive)redesign of the store itself, which resulted largely in gratifyingly wideaisles. The revamp didn’t, however, extend to the staff, an unfortunate oversight.Still, I like to go there sometimes, just for a change and perhaps because Ihave some sort of sado-masochistic streak that requires occasionalindulgence.

So last week that’s where I went, with a long shopping list in hand. I’mgoing to gloss over some of the smaller irritations and go straight to thebig one, which serves as a perfect example. On my shopping list was ricottacheese. Shoprite Checkers boasts ‘more than 400 cheeses to choose from at ourCheese World!’ so an expectation of ricotta cheese wasn’t unreasonable. Ilooked through the cheeses on offer (there weren’t 400, or at least not 400different ones) but couldn’t find ricotta. And then I went through a ritualthat many people from our valley go through every time they visit Checkers (orPick n Pay) in Malmesbury. It goes like this:

1. You ask a passing person in a Checkers uniform if they have ricottacheese. They say, ‘This isn’t my aisle. I’ll go and get the right person.’ Theywalk off.

2. You hang out around the cheese section for about 5 minutes, duringwhich time nobody turns up. You ask another passing person in a Checkersuniform, and they say, ‘This isn’t my aisle. I’ll go and get the right person,’and you say, ‘Somebody’s already done that. Where is the right person? Should Igo and get her? Or can’t you just help me?’ They ignore you and walk off.

3. You hang out for another 5 minutes until somebody in a Checkersuniform comes and stands next to you. She says nothing, but finally you twigthat this is the right person (apparently), and you say, ‘Do you have ricottacheese?’

4. Although you’ve already looked through all the cheeses on offer, andknow there’s no ricotta cheese there, she then carefully looks through all ofthem again. You say, ‘I’ve already looked, it’s not there. Do you have some inthe back?’ She ignores you and continues to search. This takes another 5minutes.

5. Triumphantly, she hands you a tub of cottage cheese. You say, ‘No,not cottage cheese. Ricotta cheese.’

6. Another person arrives. Without any communication between them atall, the first person leaves. You say, ‘Oh, are you the right person? Ok, I’mlooking for ricotta cheese. Do you have any?’

7. The second person begins another careful search of the cheesedisplay. You clench your hands into fists so tight that you leave moon-shapedwounds in your palms and you say, ‘I’ve already looked, there’s no ricottacheese there. Do you perhaps have any in the back?’

8. The second person triumphantly hands you a tub of cottage cheese. Yousay, ‘No. I. Do. Not. Want. Cottage. Cheese.I. Am. Looking. For. Ri. Cot. Ta. Cheese.’

9. The person snatches back the cottage cheese as if you’ve just spat onit and says, ‘No.’

10. You say, ‘What do you mean ‘‘no’’?’ Do you mean you don’t have it?How do you know? Have you checked your stock list? How can Checkers offer 400cheeses but not have ricotta? What’s the matter with you people? Are you doingthis just to annoy me? Is there a hidden camera somewhere?’ Then you either breakdown in tears or foam at the mouth.

The torture at Checkers in Malmesbury doesn’t end there. Once I’d gotall I could find (about three-quarters of my shopping list – which, quitefrankly, is as bad as nothing at all, if it means I have to go to another shopfor the balance), I trundled my full trolley to a checkout. There, I had to queue– although there are 12 tills, only 3 were open. (My called request to a very,very fat manageress sitting at the ‘customer service’ – excuse me while I laughmy arse off – counter to open another till was roundly ignored.) Then, when myturn finally came around, I was observed in a lazy way by about 5 packerslounging against the cigarette counter* while I began unloading my trolley. As theitems went through the barcode scanner and started piling up on the other side,I realised that nobody had the slightest intention of packing my groceries.

And last week, at Checkers in Malmesbury, that’s when I cracked. I stoodup straight and yelled, ‘Stop!’ Everybody turned and looked at me – the othershoppers with surprise, the Checkers staff with bored loathing. I said, ‘I amnot putting one more item through this till until one of you comes and helps mepack.’

It was an interesting stand-off because it was immediately clear thatnobody wanted to do it. (Just to clarify things: these are packers, paid topack.) Finally, after what seemed like a week, one of them disengaged herselffrom the cigarette kiosk; I fully expected to hear a *pop* as the vacuum sealbetween her butt and the counter was broken. She didn’t bother to hide her disdainof me and my groceries as she started packing, and when I asked her not to put allthe tins in one bag (and I even explained that this was because it would makethe bag too heavy to lift and probably break it, something I would assume wastaught in Packing 101), she casually did exactly what I’d just asked her not todo, while occasionally shooting me challenging looks.

I left there with my life considerably shortened, and now I can finallycome to the positive part of this post. I loaded my Checkers groceries into myboot (as I did so, the bag with the tins in it broke) and drove straight toSuperSpar. There, I found ricotta cheese at the cheese counter (also:anchovies, fresh basil, tinned Italian tomatoes, crème fraiche and short Frenchloaves, among other things). All SuperSpar’s tills were open, and I didn’t haveto queue. Two managers patrolled constantly, answering queries, responding tobells, stacking trollies, etc. The packer leapt into action, and packedsensibly; and she wheeled my trolley to my car for me, helped me unload intothe car boot and wheeled the trolley back. (I realise this is so that thetrollies aren’t left around the parking lot by customers, and thus aren’tstolen, but it’s still a nice touch.)

So, a big THANKYOU TO MALMESBURY SUPERSPAR!! And I put on recordthat while this excellent service is delivered to customers, I will never shopanywhere else in Malmesbury.

* On the subject of cigarettes, if you want to buy a carton of fags atShoprite Checkers, ask for it when you arrive and before you start your shopping. If you don’t, and leave it untilyou get to the checkout, someone will be summoned from the other side of the shop,handed a key, and asked to fetch the carton, presumably from a storage facilityin another town. This person will wander off as if she’s on a weekend ramble,stopping on the way to have a lengthy chat with the security guard at the frontdoor. And the chances are very good, even if you’re patient and wait for 20minutes, that you’ll never see her again.

How stupid does Hollywood think we are?

2012-01-28T11:16:00.000+02:00

I’ve had the unfortunate experience recently of watching not one but twomuch-vaunted Hollywood productions – one TVseries, one movie – that made me absolutely bloody furious to have wasted mygood money and time on them. (Again.)

The first was Steven Spielberg’s Terra Nova, which debuted on DStvearlier this week. As usual, MNet ran and reran its teaser for weeks inadvance, until every time I saw it I wanted to smack a teenager. I’m repeatedlyreminded by my children that neither of them is a teenager any more, so I hadto be satisfied with screaming at the TV “For chrissake we’ve seen this fourhundred fucking times already!” which is nowhere near as satisfying.

It didn’t help that when the series finally aired, much of the cast wasmade up of unbearably irritating teenagers. When one got eaten by a dinosaur, Icheered.

But that was the only high point. Oh, and the set’s pretty marvellous, mainlybecause it was shot on Australia’s Gold Coast, one of the most beautiful placesin the world. Other than that, from the storyline to the script to the actorsto the score, it was bloody dismal.

The clichés came so thick and fast that I have to wonder if the writerswere either stoned or taking the piss. There are plot holes so big (and someholes that are plugged with explanations so facile) that you could ride a Tyrannosaurusrex through them. And even for a non-scientist like me, the ‘science’ (whichis, annoyingly, spouted by the Hollywood-cliché nerdy teenage girl) is justsilly.

When it comes to the characters, I have no problem with the fact thatthey’re mainly extraordinarily goodlooking – in fact, I expect my movies to bepopulated by gorgeous people. But, really, it stretched the steel cables onwhich I tried to suspend my disbelief to breaking point to accept that JimShannon (played by Jason O’Mara) spent 2 years in solitary confinement in aghastly prison breathing poisoned air, only to break out and into the futureclean-shaven, pink of complexion and with a body that screamed good nutrition,plenty of exercise and piles of pampering.

As for Commander Taylor (Stephen Lang), the father-figure of Skye Tate (anotherteeth-grindingly irritating teenager, played by Allison Miller), he’s sofreakishly creepy that I wouldn’t leave him alone in a room with my dog, nevermind a nubile 17-year-old, no matter how annoying she is.

The musical score (by Brian Tyler) is blatantly used to evoke emotion –and I can only assume this is because the makers of the series realised thattheir plot, script and characters never could. So it’s soaring orchestral music– cue awe and wonder; short sharp violins – cue fear and loathing; and so on.It’s simply shameless.

The other movie I watched was The Hangover Part II. I loved The Hangoverwith its quirky (although not exclusively gorgeous) cast, ridiculous story-lineand wicked (if at times tasteless) script, so I was looking forward to thefollow-up. And when comic-gangster Leslie Chow (played by Ken Jeong) came intothe movie penis-first (and shortly afterwards with his underpants around hisknees), I assumed it was going to be more of the same.

I was wrong. It was as if the script of The Hangover had been handed over for rewriting to agroup of male college students along with a large supply of Klippies and Cokeand several baggies of dagga. And the change of location, from spiritedly sinfulLas Vegas to the depraved and dissolute backstreetsof Bangkok, setthe scene for a film in which almost everything was both unfunny and offensive.

Casual cruelty to an animal, the tattooing of a 9-year-old boy, thekidnapping of a Buddhist monk and subsequent noisy invasion of the monks’sanctuary, the stereotyping of a Thai father with unreasonable expectations ofhis children, the blatant bigotry, the selfish, snobbish stupidity (as opposedto simple cluelessness in the first movie) of Alan (Zach Galifianakis)… I satthere open-mouthed, wondering how this load of rubbish had actually made it ontothe screen. And in a film crammed with low points, the very lowest was the graphicdescription of Stu (Ed Helms) being ‘fucked in the arse by a ladyboy’ whilebeing watched by his friends and Chow, who was being jerked off by a nicotine-addicted monkey.No matter which way I spun this, I just couldn’t find the humour in it.

There was one sequence that, in this sad shambles of a movie, entertainedand (almost) amused me. It’s when Alan – who we have to assume has some sort ofmental disorder that causes him to see the world through the eyes of a 12-year-old– has a flashback to the previous night, and all the characters are played by youngboys. In Alan’s memory, these naughty, out-of-control tweenies (he is one ofthem, of course) wreak havoc in the tawdry bars of backstreet Bangkok. Unfortunately, this sequence alsorevealed the movie’s ideal audience: pre-teen boys. Assuming, that is, thattheir mothers wouldn’t mind them seeing full-frontal shots of ladyboys and beingsubjected to play-by-play accounts of how these ladyboys have sex with theiroff-their-tits clients.

· Oh, I also tried to watch X Men: First Class. It’spopulated largely by teenagers. I managed to sit through 20 minutes of itbefore I had to switch it off and pour myself a large whisky. Which was much theway I made it through my own children’s teen years.

A clue that everything isn't going to be alright

2012-01-26T13:09:00.000+02:00

There are many reasons the only marriage I’ve ever had failed, and there were clues as early as our wedding day that things were going to go bad, ifnot immediately, then some time shortly after that. (In the event, it took the traditionalseven years for things to truly fall apart, but I spent six of those gettingpregnant, giving up smoking, having children, getting very fat, taking up smoking again, getting verythin, and going mad. So they don’t count.)

First, I chose green as my key colour. How was I to know that of all thecolours a bride may wear, green is the one not to opt for – it’s badluck. (‘Married in white, you’ve chosen right; married in green, you’re ashamedto be seen’, apparently.) Also, I carried arum lilies, my favourite flowers –but which are more usually used at funerals (more bad luck). And we got married in May,traditionally the only month of the year to avoid for nuptials (‘Marry in the monthof May and you’ll surely rue the day’).

But it was about a week after the wedding, when my new husband and Iwere house-sitting for my parents, that an incident highlighted the almostcertain future downfall of our partnership. My mother had a wall of familyphotographs, andshe wasted no time in blowing up one of our wedding pictures, framing itbeautifully and giving it pride of place.

I came across my husband staring thoughtfully at it one morning. “What’swrong with this wedding photograph?” he asked me. (This is the actualphotograph.)

I examined it closely. “My brother’s face is partly obscured?” Iguessed.

“No,” he said.

“My sister’s hand on my mom’s shoulder looks like a tarantula?”

He shook his head.

"My other sister looks like she has antennae?"

"Uh-uh."

“The two women in blue shouldn’t have been standing together?”

"Nope," he said.

“Okay, I give up,” I said. “What’s wrong with this weddingphotograph?”

“I’m not in it.”

*

My ex-husband actually showed remarkable good humour about this. He took the picture off the wall, and carefully prised open the back. Then he went through our wedding pictures and chose a suitable one of himself, which he cropped into a head-and-shoulders format. This, he glued into the top right-hand corner of the pic, in much the same way as a member of a sports team who isn't present on the day the team photograph is taken, is represented in a school magazine. Then he put the frame back together and hung it back on the wall. And that's how it stayed until my mother finally realised what had happened, and with much apologetic bowing and scraping, replaced the pic with one that included the groom.

Fire!

2012-01-16T18:38:00.000+02:00

When you live in a place of temperature extremes, you tend to forget, whenit’s hot, how cold it can get; and when it’s cold, how hot it can get. Like thesimply stupid pain of childbirth, the memory becomes but a signpost to the reality:you know it’s wild, but until you’re right in it again, you forget just how wildit really is. To drag this metaphor out into its own extreme, I recallscreaming, ‘Bring me drugs! BRING ME DRUGS YOU BASTARDS!’ in my 18^thhour of ‘natural’ (har-de-fucking-har) childbirth the first time around; thesecond time it took me all of about 15 minutes to hiss at the expectant father,‘I swear I will tear your face right off your skull unless you get me drugsthis second, and I don’t care if you have to sell our first child to do it.’And I meant it.

So although I’ve been waiting for the stunning (and I mean this word asit’s meant, rather than as something a 16-year-old might say about her BFF’s madhair) heat of summer to hit, it’s still been a slight surprise that it has.And, to be perfectly honest, the catch-phrase ‘bring me drugs, bring me drugsyou bastards’ applies every bit as much to the berserk things constant 40-degree-plustemperatures do to your brain as it does to the simply stupid pain ofchildbirth.

And then there are the fires.

Just as in winter, you would sell your first child for two rain-freedays so you can get some winter woollies dry and not go out smelling as if yourclothes have been in Fungus the Bogeyman’s waterobe for a month, in summer, youwould sell your second child for the slightest hint of moisture from the ironsky. And that, thankyou unforgiving universe, is when the fires start.

Fire season is a big deal in these parts because much of it is farmland.I can’t begin to imagine the despair you must feel after having nurtured a cropfrom planting through to near-fruition, only to have it decimated by fire.

The latest one (and it won’t be the last) burnt spectacularly in the valleynext-door to ours for about a week. By day 2 it had turned our valley – and oursis, not to boast or anything, a pretty vast valley, encompassing serried mountains,several towns, hundreds of farms, a huge and I mean HUGE dam, and so on – dark.As the sun rose on Monday we were coaxed out of doors by preternatural light, andI would not have been in the least surprised if space ships had landed and spatout tall people with podlike heads who demanded to be taken to our leader. Whichobviously would be interesting, because where does Jacob Zuma actually live?And anyway would I be okay with taking them to him? I’d be more inclined totake them to, say, Johann, who would at least offer them a glass of somethingrefreshing before finding out if they’re going to turn us all into sex slaves,which actually Johann might like, so that might not be the best… but I digress.

I love how the flaming sun reflected on Jill's firepit
mosaic - it really brought it to life!

The day the sky went dark was also, coincidentally (some might even sayserendipitously), a full moon. Wild, hey? Directly below is my pic of the smokey full moon through the Natal mahogany in my back garden; (taken with my phone camera because some piece of vomit stole my Olympus) below that is Dan Bush's gorgeous full moon through a tree - for more of his amazing moons shots, go here.

Everyone needs a chill-out spot. I came in from admiring the moon to find this lovely Cape toad cooling its heels (and everything else) in the dogs' water bowl. I obviously wanted to take a picture of it there, but I laughed so loudly that I scared it, and it hopped away - I snapped it as it hotfooted across the verandah.

A busy couple of months

2012-01-04T11:07:00.001+02:00

A car for one day

My son finally got his driver’s licence in September, so the next stepwas securing him a car. We found a lovely little CitiGolf, which languished in thedriveway until all the paperwork and other admin was sorted out: licensing,insurance, fitting a gear lock, that sort of thing. Finally, he was fully legaland able to take his car out on the road, and off he went to buy mosaics for acourse he was taking with mosaic artist extraordinaire Jill Gordon-Turner.Alas, a particularly badly signposted and busy intersection in Bellville,combined with his lack of experience in heavy traffic, resulted in a collisionthat instantly wrote off his little car. (The Land Rover he hit had a couple ofscratches on it.)

On the plus side: Nobody was hurt.

On the minus side: My insurance covered only balance of third party, so theloss of the CitiGolf was a sizeable financial blow.

A lunch a month later

Bestselling author, lover of tacky ’70s music and all-round good guyTony Park and his wife, the irrepressible Mrs Blog, put me on their yearlywestern Cape visit list, so I was thrilled to get an email early in Novemberthat read ‘see you on the 20^th’. I gathered a posse of party peoplefor a lunch on the verandah, but by the time 3 o’clock came round, the Parkshadn’t arrived and I was beginning to worry that they had missed their plane orotherwise come unstuck. I phoned Tony, who was still in the Kruger Park.‘I meant the 20^th of December,’ he explained.

On the plus side: We had another lunch on the verandah on the 20^thof December.

In the pic: Chef BelAir and Tony Park hang out on the verandah on themorning of the 21^st of December (the lunch, as usual when the Parks visit, went on into the next day).

Thieves in the night #1

Early in December, my daughter extended my hospitality to a stray whowashed up at the pub she worked at, waking me at midnight to ask if he couldstay over in our house as he’d missed his lift home. Although I generallyoperate an ‘open door’ policy in my home, I wasn’t thrilled about this as Iprefer to actually meet the people who end up in my house overnight, and mymisgivings were well placed: the man left at some stage during the small hours(after, bizarrely, having a shower), and so did R400 out of my bag and mybeloved little Olympus digital camera.

On the plus side: My daughter learnt a valuable lesson about how crapsome human beings can be.

On the minus side: I had to chalk up yet another financial loss.

Thieves in the night #2

My friend, photographer Tracey Derrick,spent New Year’s Eve with us. She lives on a fairly remote farm on the otherside of the mountain, so she slept over. When she got back to her house atlunchtime on the 1^st of January, it was to discover that somebastards had broken in and stolen her brand-new digital camera (a gift, as ithappens, from a group of us for her 50^th birthday) and various otherthings.

On the plus side: That old South African adage, ‘it could have beenworse’ – she and her children weren’t in the house when the thieves broke in,and they didn’t actually clean her out.

On the minus side: Financial loss, that awful feeling of having beeninvaded, the wake-up call that even out here in the country, life is changingfor the worse.

A surprise flower

I’ve had this golden arum plant for about 10 years and it’s neverflowered – I didn’t even realise that it could flower. Then, amazingly, the dayafter Christmas, it produced this astonishing bloom.

A Christmas present for Goldie

Goldie the mad hen hatched out two more little chicks the day beforeChristmas – Dot (the yellow one) and Dash (the black-and-white one). Goldie isa remarkable hen – she’s a consistently excellent layer and a marvellous mom toher chicks. She’s at least five years old – the lifespan of a domestic hen isaround seven years, although some chickens have been known to live a lot longerthan that, and I’m hoping Goldie will be one of them.

Say hello to Dweezil

Our friend Ruan was sitting next to the pool on New Year’s Eve when thisberserk little bird flew into the garden and landed at his feet. Ruan tried toreturn it to a nearby tree, but it was having none of it: it had, apparently,chosen Ruan as its foster parent. We named it Dweezil (after Frank Zappa’sson). It is a charming but very noisy and demanding little bird, and Ruan veryquickly tired of his parenting duties. Dweezil, a young pied starling, is nowresident on the barrel in the back garden, where he gets a meal of dogfood andbananas every morning. He loves it when anyone comes outside, and immediatelyflies onto their head and shouts loudly.

On the plus side: It’s fun having a tame wild bird around the place.

On the minus side: He craps everywhere.

Seeing in the New Year with a totally needless bang

Change is inevitable, and our little village has been experiencing itover the past few years – some good, some bad. A very unfortunate developmentis that locals and visitors are now setting off fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Manyanimals are made crazy with fear by the noise, and try to escape it by runningaway, and end up being run over or lost. I’m not a fan of legislation, but Iwould love to see fireworks banned in all built-up areas where there are pets thatmight be affected by the noise.

On the minus side: People who mindlessly terrify animals for the sake ofa few minutes of visual spectacle.

Poor li’l Lucy

2011-11-23T16:36:00.001+02:00

While I was growing up, there was always one dog (although notnecessarily the same one) in our household whom my Dad called ‘The Flying Nun’,because it had to wear a head cone to stop it scratching at some injury orother.

The original Flying Nun was the annoying (and annoyingly ageless) SallyFields, who played the part in a 1960s sitcom produced for American TV. Thepremise was that, thanks to her very light build and heavily starched cornette(headpiece - brilliantly, if a little disturbingly, illustrated at left), she could catch any passing breeze and fly. In this way, she solved theproblems of her community. (I know. Sheesh.)

Since I’ve had my own household of animals, the dogs have escaped theFlying Nun treatment, but our cat, Evan, did not. When the vet fitted the cone,to stop Evan scratching at a mysterious gaping wound on his back, I expressedserious reservations about him actually keeping it on for the requisite 10days. And I did finally have to take it off when Evan simply would not learnthat he couldn’t take a running leap between the burglar bars as usual – thecone would cause him to bounce back, which was absolutely hilarious to watch,but made Evan embarrassed and depressed.

And now it’s poor Lucy’s turn. She developed some sort of ulcer on hercornea (probably caused by running pell-mell through a prickly bush, as she soloves to do, and impaling her eye on the tip of a thorn) which didn’t respondto topical treatment, so the vet decided to stitch her eye shut to give thecornea time to heal.

It’s been a difficult time for Lucy’s mom, Tanya, not only becausehaving an ailing loved one is worrying (‘you’re only as happy as yourunhappiest child’, as the old saying goes), but also because Max, the love of Lucy’s life, turns out to be something of a lookist. He is one of the mostbeautiful dogs on the planet, it must be said, but does that really make itokay for him to be so disdainful of Lucy, temporarily disfigured as she is? Sure,she’s not as pretty now as she was – but she needs lots of love and support, okay??!And it’s not forever!! Ugh, men!

One of those dogs?

2011-11-23T09:45:00.001+02:00

I get very excited when I see a dog that resembles my Balu, as the dog’sowner will almost always confirm that the dog is (a) a rescue, and (b) ofunknown origin. All the owners suspect Rottweiler is somewhere in the mixbecause all these dogs have ‘Rottweiler eyebrows’ – but I know this isn’t necessarilythe case, because Balu’s parents were both pure breeds, a chocolate Labrador and a border collie.

Elvis (left, and below looking groovy), a lovely big male dog we met here in Riebeek Kasteel a few monthsago, and also a rescue dog, threw in another possibility: he’s probably aHovawart. This German breed (it originated in the Black Forest region) has been around since the 1200s. Hovawarts are intelligent,loyal and devoted working dogs – much like many of the other mixed-breeds thatresemble them. They come in three colour forms – black, tan and Elvis’sblack-and-tan mix.

I managed to find this picture (below) of a full-breed Hovawart in Elvis’scolour-form, and it has to be said that Elvis does appear to be a perfectHovawart specimen.

Some last Dutch tales…

2011-11-08T18:18:00.002+02:00

Smoking it

The Netherlandshas had strict tobacco-smoking legislation* in place since 2008, and there arevery few places where you can enjoy a cigarette or 20. Apparently it’stechnically legal for a restaurant or pub to set aside an outside smoking area,but because of the weather and the very restricted space in Amsterdam, this hasn’t happened in a big way(or anywhere we went).

So, after a very truncated meal on my birthday, my sister Bev, my friendMichele and I were left wondering how to spend the rest of the evening. Wedecided to take a walk from our hotel and see what presented itself, and whatdid was simply delightful: a corner pub that totally ignored the smokinglegislation, and was staffed by a friendly young Dutchman who might have beenLeonardo di Caprio’s younger and better-looking brother. We were by far theoldest people in the pub – all the other customers were Mr Di Caprio’s friends,all in their 20s (and it’s worth mentioning here that the Dutch are, generallyspeaking, a very goodlooking nation, particularly the youngsters). Not onlythat, but these young people were playing, listening to and dancing to ‘our’music – not the doef-doef-doef crap that, for instance, my own kids are suchfans of, but Dire Straits, The Police, Bob Marley, David Bowie… We were inheaven, sitting in a dark corner, smoking fags, and occasionally breaking intosong, while the beautiful young Mr Di Caprio kept us supplied with red wine. Icouldn’t have asked for a better way to see in 47.

* An interesting adjunct to the Dutch tobacco laws is this: marijuana istechnically illegal in Holland,but a ‘tolerance’ programme is in place, where as long as long as you’re over18, you won’t be prosecuted for smoking joints. However, you will be prosecutedfor smoking tobacco in a smoke-free space, which means that if you smoke a puremarijuana cigarette in an Amsterdamcoffee shop, you’re not really breaking the law; but if you mix it withtobacco, you are.

Hoofing it

I’ve never been a girl scout but my sister made clear her reluctance tobe the chief map-reader in a foreign city and my friend Michele has troublefinding her way off a rugby field. So I ended up clutching the guidebook andsteering us through the streets of Amsterdam.It’s not a hard city to negotiate, as it’s laid out in a semi-circular patternaround a series of canals, but it takes a while to get used to it. So, thefifth or so time I was asked, when we’d been walking for what seemed like hoursand still hadn’t found our hotel, ‘Are you sure we’re going the right way?’, Ihad a sense of humour failure and snapped, ‘No, because I don’t live here either.’

And map-reading is by no means the only challenge to the Amsterdam pedestrian. As mentioned, the city teems with trams, buses, cars and bicycles, and a moment’shesitation at a busy cross-street might easily see you flattened by any ofthem. We laughed hysterically at the notion that a tourist should rent abicycle to get the best out of the city – cycling here might be physically easybecause it’s so flat, but just negotiating the streets on foot requires eyes inthe back of your head and the reflexes of an Olympic gymnast; we simplycouldn’t conceive of trying, as newcomers, to join the huge population offast-moving cyclists. (Above: a very rare sign in Amsterdam - the only one of its kind, in fact, that we saw.)

We were on Utrechtsestraat one evening, looking for a place to havedinner, and because the street is lined on both sides with restaurants, we hadto cross it several times to squash our noses up against the windows and stareat what the people inside were eating. Michele took such severe emotionalstrain each time we crossed (taking life and limb in our hands, and oftencausing racing cyclists to ding their bells crossly at us) that the fourth timewe decided to do so, she said, ‘That’s it. I’m not crossing again. If youdecide to eat on that side of the street, you can just bring me a takeaway.’

Hearing – and watching – it

Also in Utrechtsestraat is a record store called Concerto, and we werethrilled that same night to discover that a Tom Waits CD, Bad As Me, was beingreleased there. A Tom Waits tribute band was installed on a tiny platform andthe shop was crammed with fans. The band was absolutely amazing – the singer gavea very convincing Waits rendition, and I developed an immediate crush on thebear-like trombone-player, and would have thrown my panties at him if I hadn’tbeen wearing two pairs of tights over them, which made them hard to take off.We loved just coming across this fabulous impromptu concert on a random andfreezing Wednesday night in the city centre.

Boating it

My sister, my Dad and I did a little boat tour of the Naarden canals which,together with various battlements and casements, constitute the fort-village.It was our first day so we were still battling with the language, and theboatman had only a smattering of English, so mainly we just sat there andenjoyed the scenery while he kept up a non-stop Dutch narrativeover (bizarrely) a powerful sound system (it was just a little boat, as you can see at right). An hour later, when it came time todock, the boatman somehow misjudged things, and spent the next 20 minutestrying to park his boat. As we went fruitlessly backwards and forwards and *bump*and backwards and forwards and *bump* and backwards and forwards and so on, Ifelt like an embattled mom with children engaging in risky behaviour - my Dad was endangering his fingers by gamely trying to secure the boat to the embankment by way of a bungey chord, and my sister had a fit of the uncontrollablegiggles. We’d had only about 2 hours sleep after a very long and uncomfortableflight, and this was a sure sign of overtiredness; when this used to happen to my actual kids Iimmediately sent them to bed because tears were sure to follow. Fortunately, theboatman finally got the boat docked and we got off before my Dad crushed his fingers or Bev burst intohysterical tears.

Speaking it

I was pleasantly surprised, during the first couple of days in Holland,to discover how close to Afrikaans written Dutch is – the sentenceconstructions differ slightly but so many of the words are either exactly thesame or very similar that it’s really easy to translate. The spoken language isanother matter – the accent is so unfamiliar that it sounds, well, utterlyforeign.

But after a few days I realised something useful: if you speak Afrikaanswith an English accent, you’re basically speaking Dutch. It is the one and onlytime in my entire life that my atrocious Afrikaans accent (which is really justAfrikaans words spoken with an English accent, and is a source of hugeentertainment for my Afrikaans friends) has worked to my advantage, and I hadmany happy, completely understandable conversations with Dutch people inEnglish-accented Afrikaans.

I loved this plaque honouring the coastguard on the island of Ameland.The Dutch word ‘paraat’ (meaning ‘ready’) is the same in Afrikaans, and in SouthAfrica is often used by English-speaking people too – although in SouthAfricans of my age it has a slightly derogatory connotation, probably becauseit was used to describe the (mainly Afrikaans-speaking) officers in the SADFduring the 1980s civil war, when our brothers and boyfriends were conscripted,usually very much against their will.

Some random English words pop up in Dutch, for instance, ‘fruit’ (ratherthan the Afrikaans ‘vrugte’), as seen on this mobile market, which brings usto…

… Eating it

I’ve mentioned the fantastic food we had everywhere we went in Holland, but this was a real treat: the mobile fruit andveggie market that arrives in the town of Naardentwice a week in a gigantic refrigerated truck. It’s a one-man show – the ownerof the truck goes to the fresh-produce auctions at dawn’s crack, loads up hiscorner-shop-on-wheels, and drives to his customers. He had every conceivableseasonal fruit and vegetable on display, and everything looked fresh and crisp.He even had a nifty mobile connection to the bank, which meant you could pay bycard (if your card hadn’t been blocked by the automatic ticket machine at Centraal Station).

Stereotyping it

I last visited Hollandin 1981, and my pictures from that trip are mainly of windmills, clogs andflowers. It’s actually rare to see the old-fashioned type of windmill inworking order in Holland any more, but the new type of windmill – used togenerate power – can be seen everywhere. The Dutch consider them eyesores,apparently, but I think they’re marvellous – gigantic and monumental, and in myopinion an improvement to the otherwise somewhat mind-numbing landscape offlat-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see fields and canals.

No-one wears clogs any more, unless you count the woman in traditionalDutch dress at Madurodam in Den Hague, who posed for pictures with touristsclutching a huge wheel of cheese, and typed SMSs on her cellphone in betweenphoto ops. This clog tree was outside the ‘clog factory’ (not really a clogfactory) in Marken.

Dutch cheeses are, of course, utterly fabulous. (Although I tookexception to a Dutchwoman who declared all English cheeses to be ‘crap’ – I’vetasted some cheddars and cheshires that easily measure up to the Dutchcheeses.) One of the most amazing things is that in ordinary supermarkets thereare cheese counters that you could spend hours at, with every kind of Dutchcheese available, and all freshly cut from the wheel when you order it.

When it comes to flowers, I mentioned FloraHolland, the huge Dutchflower market. What I didn’t mention is that the flowers in Holland are ridiculously cheap, ridiculouslyplentiful, and all smell like flowers. A bunch of, say, 8 St Joseph’s lilies,which may cost up to R200 in South Africa and last about a week, cost about R20in Holland and seem to last forever.

Fabulous things about the Dutch #6

2011-11-04T15:41:00.001+02:00

They know how to do museums.

Any tourist, and especially those on a whistle-stop visit to a country,knows to limit their time in museums, churches and other ‘places of interest’,as if you do too many of them pretty soon all you’re thinking about is how sore yourfeet are and how much you’re dying for a cup of coffee, and anyway how manydamned churches did these people build, for god’s sake?!

So we did only the most obvious ones in the cities we visited and almostall were simply fabulous.

Much of the Rijksmuseum was, alas, closed for refurbishment while wewere there, but we did get to see Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (of course – and it was colossally stunning, even when you take into account theappalling fact that it was cavalierly ‘trimmed’ in the 1700s so that it couldfit into the town hall!). My walkie-talkie headset (at a rental fee of R100)informed me, among other fascinating things, that the subjects portrayed, ofwhich there are 26, paid Rembrandt various prices to be included, the sumvarying with the person’s prominence in the painting.

I also loved the two elaborate multi-storey dolls’ houses, one of whichyou had to climb a ladder to peek into. These were, my walkie-talkie told me,not children’s toys, but a very expensive adult hobby – one of them, witheverything exactly to scale (and the furniture and fittings made by some ofAmsterdam’s finest craftsmen of the day), cost as much to put together as areal house would have in the same era.

Another high point at the Rijksmuseum was Dutch designer Maarten Baas’s ‘humanclock’, where a 24-hour-long video gives the impression that a man inside agrandfather clock rubs off and redraws the time every minute – I was asfascinated as a monkey by this, and even searched the back of the clock to makesure there wasn’t a real man inside (while my sister rolled her eyes andpretended not to be with me).

The other tourist spot we went to in Amsterdam was the Anne Frank house,which was incredibly moving – in spite of being absolutely packed with visitorsat all times (I repeatedly thanked the heavens that we’d gone – against advice –to Holland in its autumn ‘off season’, as I can’t imagine how crowded the city andits attractions must be at peak tourist times). The upper rooms in the ‘annex’house behind a spice factory in which the four members of the Frank family andfour other people lived in hiding for two years before, heartbreakingly, beingbetrayed to the Nazis mere months before liberation, and shipped off to variousconcentration camps (where all but Anne’s father, Otto, died), have been leftempty, but scale-model reconstructions, plentiful illustrations, supportingvideos and other material give a clear and shattering idea of their life duringthat time. It’s not really possible to describe the experience; you have to goand see it.

In Den Hague we visited Madurodam, Holland’s‘mini-city’. It was swarming with people (and I offered up yet more thanks forbeing there out of season), and children in particular, but it was huge fun. Weespecially enjoyed the funfair (with tiny working bumper cars and arollercoaster), the waterskier (performing non-stop Olympic-level slaloms), theopen-air Golden Earring concert (with the ‘golden circle’ miniature people dancingtheir socks off) and the clog-making factory, where you inserted a Euro into aslot, then listened while your clogs were ‘made’ (hammering noises coming fromthe inside of a little workshop), and then waited for a mini-truck to drive outand deliver a tiny pair of clogs to you. Ag, we realised it wasvery touristy, but we loved it.

From there, it was on to the Panorama Mesdag (also undergoingrefurbishment), a gigantic cylindrical painting that you view by climbing a spiralstaircase in its centre. You end up in what feels like a beach gazebo, gazingout on a 180-degree 19^th-century beach and city scene. There’s aglass dome (hidden by draped fabric) above the painting which lets in naturallight, so the experience is somewhat surreal – the light changes as you standthere, right in the 120-metre-long painting-in-the-round. The primary artist,Hendrik Mesdag, was a banker until he turned 35, when he suddenly decided he’dlike to be an artist instead (good for him!). His wife and various artistfriends contributed to the Panorama; he included his wife in the artwork – she canbe seen down on the beach, under an umbrella, working at an easel.

My sister and I had gone to Den Hague intending to spend the night, butwe don’t know anyone who lives there, so we asked the woman at the PanoramaMesdag main desk if she could suggest a reasonably priced hotel. She immediatelygot on the phone and arranged for us to meet Basil, who runs a hotel rightoutside the gates of the Palace Gardens. We walked there,giggling, expecting to meet John Cleese, and instead got what Basil Fawltycould only ever have hoped to be as a hotelier: repeated assurances of only thebest possible service at all times, utterly devoid of any venom-spitting, and alovely room at a good price, above a busy pavement café where we could sit in thesun and drink red wine and smoke cigarettes without being shouted at by anyone.Heaven.

The next morning we set off early to see the Palace of Justice (because, you know, you have to – and very beautiful it was, too),

and then marchedsmartly on to the Escher museum, which has been on my wish list since my Dad told me about it. Alas, Dutch museums are closed on Mondays! A bit of insider informationyou’d have thought a Dutch person might have told us about! (This recalled, forme, my one other major life-tourist-spots disappointment, when the Statue ofLiberty was closed for refurbishment when I visited New York in 1985 – the onlytime until recently that it’s ever been off-limits to the public.)

But there wasn’t much time for weeping and wailing and gnashing ofteeth, because Rotterdamand the Euromast awaited. My sister and I are both afraid of heights (I can’tgo on the escalators at Cavendish Square because the last time I did, I feltstrangely compelled to jump into the gaping four-storey drop below and had to –to my children’s intense embarrassment – sit down until I reached the nextfloor), so this may seem an odd choice of tourist attraction for us to visit,but everything else was closed – it was Monday. We debated the wisdom of whatwe were about to do for some time – I had gone on the ‘Amsterdam Eye’ a fewdays before and, mainly by keeping my eyes closed, gripping on for dear life andbabbling frantically, had managed, even if I did tremble for several hoursafterwards, so I reckoned I’d be okay. (Showing near-inhuman courage, I prised my fingers from the safety bar for long enough to snap the two pics of Amsterdam-from-above at the top of this post.) My sister wasn’t so sure – but, in the spiritof adventure, she finally said she’d try. And up we went. We were terrificallybrave, and had a lovely lunch up there in the sky, and came down feeling as ifwe’d just done a Moon landing.

A couple of other attractions deserve special mention. First, the littlemuseum in Naarden, which is the historic fort town (with five ‘points’ to itsfortress, much in the style of Cape Town’s castle) in which my Dad lives. The town and itssurrounds are, to all intents and purposes, a living museum, having changedlittle in structure over the last few hundred years, but the museum wasintricate and interesting and informative, and I loved it. (And an added bonuswas the oddness of the family of goats living in one of the battlements, whichpoked their billy-goat-gruff faces out of their houses on the rainy day wewalked past.)

Also, FloraHolland, a gigantic flower-auction market that is as large,in total surface area, as the kingdom of Monaco. We watchedsome of the auctions in progress and stared down in astonishment at thegigantic warehouse below, where thousands upon thousands of cut flowers are tradedevery day, ending up in all parts of the world; it was organised chaos on sucha grand scale that it’s another experience that has to be seen to beunderstood. And, third, our canal-boat tourist trip in Amsterdamwas good fun – we didn’t learn a whole lot (the recorded commentary, in severallanguages, was too soft and a bit scratchy) but travelling the canals, and outinto the harbour for a while, on a warm boat was a marvellous way to pass acouple of cold, rainy Amsterdamhours.

If you’re ever in Holland,I’d suggest you skip the Marken museum. It’s madly overpriced and all you getfor your bucks is a look at some mannekins wearing strange and not terriblyattractive clothes, a video presentation about the pig-headedness of the peopleof Marken (discussed here), and the knowledge that Dutch people slept in cupboardsin the old days.

Fabulous things about the Dutch #5

2011-11-04T11:44:00.002+02:00

They have a public transport system.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say they have a good public transportsystem, but coming from a country where public transport is a national outrage,any public transport system is better than none at all. (That said, South Africa is trying: the Rapid Bus Transportsystem in Cape Town is apparently making a bigdifference to traffic flow between the west-coast suburbs and the CBD, and wenow have the Gautrain, which whisks people between the airport, Sandton and Pretoria. But it’snowhere near enough.)

Required early one morning to negotiate, to a tight deadline andcarrying baggage, a tram to Amsterdam’s Centraal Station, and then a train outto the suburb of Naarden (only about 20km away, which is practically walkingdistance for South Africans, but requires packing padkos for the Dutch), weabandoned the idea of trying to find the right tram. We were told we could getthe number 18 tram, or the 7 or maybe the 9, but I (as chief transportorganiser and map reader) deemed the chances of getting hopelessly lost toohigh. So we took a taxi and were charged directly through the nose at R180 for a 10-minute ride.

We’d also been told that the automatic ticket machines at the stations areso easy they could be operated by a 2-year-old (presuming the child carries achair around to stand on so he/she can reach them). Well, either Dutch2-year-olds are a lot brighter than me, or I’m a lot stupider than I thought –or, wait, here’s an idea, maybe the Dutch automatic ticket machines, which takeonly cards (ie, no cash), don’t accept money cards inserted by non-Dutch people?No, not even Euro MasterCards of the type I had specially acquired beforeleaving South Africaand whose emblem is proudly displayed on the screens of the automatic ticketmachines. The ticket machine I tried to use took such exception to me that itblocked my card, managing, in a few quick seconds, to create a seriouscash-flow problem for me that I spent irritating time and energy trying to sortout for the rest of the trip.

Anyway, long story short, we finally found a human being dispensingtickets at a ticket office and paid cash for them. (We should simply have beendirected to the ticket office in the first place, which highlights the notionthat Dutch people who don’t actually use the public transport system shouldprobably not give advice about the public transport system to visitors.) We’dwasted quite a bit of time by then, which necessitated a mad dash down theplatform and then some very lucky guesswork about which way to go (right orleft) to get the correct train, which we flew onto as the doors closed. Phew!

On another day, we decided to catch the train from Naarden to Den Hague.On this occasion, we weren’t on anyone’s time but our own, which made the wholeexperience a lot less fraught – but not without its problems. When we arrivedat the Naarden-Bussum station, it was to find the ticket office closed (and theautomatic ticket machine wasn’t an option because, oh yes, the one in Amsterdam had blocked mydamned card). So we just got on the next available train, assuming we could buyour tickets en route. Well, we couldn’t, and the fine for not having a validticket was 35 Euros each (that’s about R700!). Fortunately, the conductor was alovely Dutchman who realised we weren’t trying to scam a free ride but weresimply clueless tourists, and instructed us to get off at the next station,where the ticket office was open, and buy tickets.

Which we did, and then waited for the next available train. I wassuper-excited to see that it was a double-decker one, and we got on and rushedup the stairs. Safely seated, we chatted for a while before I began realisingthat there was a strange stillness in the carriage. While my sister continuednattering away, I looked around: all our fellow passengers were sitting inpreternatural silence, and I began worrying that we’d somehow slipped through awormhole and were on our way to Zombieland. ‘Don’t you think it’s weirdly quiet?’I whispered to my sister, whose mouth snapped closed like a Dutchman’s wallet.‘Gosh, yes,’ she whispered back after a moment, and we craned our heads andstared around, fearful of what we might see. What we did see was ‘STILTE’(‘SILENCE’) printed on all the windows of the carriage – we’d somehow ended up onthe ‘silent’ carriage, where music and children and tourists talking loudlyaren’t welcome. Once we’d got over our embarrassment, we both appreciated thisvery civilised innovation and sat in contented quiet for the next hour, beinglulled into semi-consciousness by the infinite sameness of the passinglandscape.

We caught trams in Den Hague (and were laughed at good-naturedly by adriver who informed us we were going in entirely the wrong direction) andRotterdam (where you don’t buy your ticket from the driver, as is the way inDen Hague, and who gets annoyed when you try to; rather, you buy it from theconductor). And we took the ferry to Ameland (a fabulous hour-long trip across waterthat is actually shallow enough to walk, if you don’t mind tramping throughfreezing seas for about 20 km; in the pic above, me, Bev, Catherine and Tuti the dog wait for the ferry; and, below, the companion ferry to the one we're travelling on passes us at the midpoint), and a water-taxi back from Ameland (noisy – butthen, I’m not a fan of high-powered water machines).

We also did private transport, which I found stressful as the onlyperson in our party with a valid driver’s licence. There’s something about driving a strangecar on unfamiliar routes in the dark in the pouring rain on the wrong side ofthe road in morning peak-hour traffic after too little sleep that can make yourheart go pitter-patter. And my sister’s vocal chords went squeak-squeak fromthe back seat when I suddenly found myself on a highway onramp with a verylarge articulated lorry bearing down on us and realised at the very last secondthat it had no intention of giving way (in fact, it probably didn’t even see usin our miniature car). My Road Angels must have been with me, because I canhonestly say that it’s a miracle we’re alive. (The speed limit on all Dutchhighways is 100kph. I was the only person, probably in the whole of Holland, who kept to it.)

One other notable thing about the people who use public transport, andin fact just Dutch people out and about in general: there isn’t the obsessionwith cellphones we see in

South Africa

. With a few exceptions, nobody used aphone at a restaurant table or whittered into their phone, ‘I’m on the train toAmsterdam!’ orconducted a loud phone conversation on a street corner or blocked your way into acafé because they were telling their friend, by phone, about their date lastnight. It was very refreshing.

Fabulous things about the Dutch #4

2011-11-03T15:35:00.001+02:00

They hold back the sea – something that even King Canute (of nearby Denmark) didn’tmanage.

You could argue that if you’re going to choose to live in a country thatborders a massive ocean and is below sea level, you can’t complain about a bitof damp now and again, never mind actually being washed away from time to time.And hats off to the Dutch: not only do they not complain, but every timethey’re flooded off the face of the map by the implacable ocean, they simplybuild more walls and dykes and sea-gates. And houses.

Nowhere is this stick-to-it-ness more obvious than in the tiny town of Marken. This littlevillage used to be on an island in the Zuiderzee, a huge inland extension ofthe North Sea. Nowadays, the island is a peninsula,joined to the mainland by a purpose-built raised causeway; and the Zuiderzee isno longer a sea, but a giant lake known as the IJsselmeer.Today Marken is more tourist trap than anything else (it’s where we took ourde-rigueur pictures in giant clogs, outside a ‘clog-making factory’ that sold alot of stuff made in China),but that’s not how it began.

Way back when Marken was still an island, the people grew crops. But thesea came in and washed away their harvest and their houses. So they rebuilt theirhouses and, because the saltwater had turned their land brackish, they beganfarming livestock instead. But the sea came in and washed away their sheep andtheir cows and their houses. So they rebuilt their houses (on raised mounds,this time) and decided to be fishermen instead. But the sea came in and washedaway their houses (which they rebuilt, on stilts); and then their countrymendammed the Zuiderzee and created the freshwater IJsselmeer in its place, which putpaid to offshore fishing, so the men of Marken were compelled to travel intothe North Sea to catch whales.

I mean, golly! Not once did anyone say, ‘Hey guys, I don’t know aboutyou, but I’m getting mightily weary of this being-washed-away-by-the-sea thing.How about we go live somewhere above sea level?’

To a greater or lesser degree, this amazing doggedness applies acrossall of Hollandand its people. It’s a steely-willed persistence that has kept the nation fromdisappearing under the ocean, thanks to a staggeringly complex system of dredgers,dams, dikes, walls, sluices and canals. (It also makes for a landscape that’sinteresting for about half an hour – then you realise the entire country looksthe same.)

Interestingly for me, it’s also a characteristic that can be found in manyof my fellow South Africans, for the simple reason that they’re descended fromthe Dutch. Back in the 1800s, farmers of mainly Dutch descent (‘boers’) livingin the Cape Colony (the Western and Eastern Cape ofSouth Africa today) had a decision to make. The Cape Colonyhad been established by the Dutch in 1652, but had ping-ponged between them andthe British for a couple of hundred years, and by the early 1800s was onceagain under British rule. The boers didn’t like this (as is true even today,the Dutch don’t like being told what to do, and particularly not by members ofother nations), but the alternative was pretty intimidating: to pack up theirentire lives and move, lock, stock and barrel, into the then largely unexploredinterior of South Africa. It was a hostile country, not only because of itsgeography, with a giant escarpment to climb, and a massive semi-desert plusseveral raging rivers to cross; and its stock of fatal diseases to catch,including malaria and sleeping sickness; but also because the indigenous peopledidn’t hesitate to protect their own homes and families by killing anyone whothreatened them.

On balance, but I would have been tempted to pay my taxes, free myslaves* and learn to drink afternoon tea. Not the boers. These Voortrekkerspacked up everything they owned and headed north. The story of the Great Trekis one of almost indescribable hardship and heartbreak, but not once did theTrekboers consider turning back. For better or worse, it’s an intrinsic part ofthe history of South Africa,and the inherited Dutch characteristic of fortitude against all odds contributedto it in no small part.

* I was told by a Dutchwoman (bless her) that the Dutch never ownedslaves. They did. They were enthusiastic proponents of the slave trade, and importedabout 63 000 slaves to South Africa between 1658, when the Dutch EastIndia Company gave Jan van Riebeek authority to deal in slavery, and 1808, whenthe British abolished the trade.

Fabulous things about the Dutch #3

2011-11-03T11:26:00.001+02:00

The food everywhere, from the smallest hole-in-the-wall takeaway to the mostelaborate restaurant, is unfailingly delicious.

Coming from a country where going out to eat is usually a gamble – with theodds normally stacked against having a great meal – it’s a revelation to always,always get a plate of food that’s hot, fresh and seriously yummy; and it’sworth mentioning that the service, too, is lickety-split, entirely without theinfuriating waiting game South Africans often have to play in restaurants hereat home. From the ‘designer burgers’ we had at Burgerz in the bustling centreof Den Haag to the catch-of-the-day at Land en Zeezicht in the tiny town ofMarken, and an endless array of fantastic cakes at many coffee shops in between(the heavenly ‘slut pie’, a chocolate-and-cherry marvel that I had at De Taartvan m’n Tante in Amsterdam springs to mind - the pic above is of my sister and my friend Michele in the shop, which was also visually fabulous), the whole experience was agastronomic delight.

As, it could be argued, it should be – eating out in Holland is a Very Expensive Undertaking. Theplate of ravioli I had at a little Italian restaurant in Amsterdam was, for instance, utterlydelicious, but at +-R150 for 8 pockets of filled pasta (yup, that’s about R20per bite), I would have been annoyed had it been anything other thanastonishingly appetising.

And let me not even begin to talk about wine prices. It’s only when you’repaying from around R120 for a very so-so bottle of wine that you can begin toappreciate how lucky we are in South Africa (and, in my case, in thewine-growing region of the Swartland) to have access to good, reasonably pricedwine. I took with me a box of Riebeek Cellars’ merlot as a present for my Dad,and we finished it on the first night (here he is, above, honouring that verySouth African tradition of squeezing the papsak for its last drops) – somethingI might not have done had I known what it was going to cost to keep my red-winelevels topped up. (Okay, I would have.) (Oh, and for any wine snobs out there:the boxed merlot is the same inexpensive, easy-drinking wine that RiebeekCellars puts in its bottles.)

The Dutch are very proud of their traditional dishes, some of which Iadmit I did find a little challenging. For instance, the morning-aftertradition of eating a whole raw herring by throwing back your head, opening yourmouth and munching the entire fish from top to tail, chased by raw onion, leftme cold. The ‘stamppot’ sauerkraut also didn’t really do it for me. Croquettes,which consist of a batter rolled in a crumb and deep-fried, and often served ona white roll, were a bit carbohydrate-heavy for me (although necessary, Isuppose, to keep warm in a country where the sun don’t shine). And although Iliked the speculaas, I quickly got bored of its flavouring in everything, up toand including ice cream.

One tradition I loved, and will continue here at home, was mayonnaise onchips – and Dutch fries are unfailing hot, fresh and crispy, regardless ofwhether you buy them from a street stall or order them in a chi-chi restaurant.

In the spirit of ‘what goes in must come out’, a word about Dutchtoilets. The Dutch are generally a fairly tall people, so it’s a matter of somepuzzlement why their toilets are built with, apparently, Hobbits in mind. Andis it really necessary to have a kind of dry ‘platform’ onto which yourleavings are deposited, so that once you’ve stood up and rearranged yourclothing in a space so tiny that it’s sometimes literally impossible to turnaround, you’re forced to look at what you’ve done before flushing the loo?Really, yuk.

The Dutch tend to be a bit arrogant about their cuisine, often subtlysuggesting that any other country’s is somewhat lacking, so it was fun to findthis made-in-Cape-Town salt-and-pepper set in the restaurant halfway up the Euromast inRotterdam – so, clearly, our table condiments are good enough for them!

Fabulous things about the Dutch #2

2011-11-01T19:29:00.000+02:00

Boy, can they make coffee.

When my sister Bev and I arrived in the small Dutch town of Naarden,after a very nasteh night flight on KLM (note to occasional travellers abroad:opting for the night flight doesn’t give you an extra day because you sleepduring the flight; it gives you a day you can’t remember, because your braingoes into hysterical catatonia from exhaustion after having tried to sleep for11 hours, but instead wriggled around vainly trying to find a place for yourfeet, knees, hips, shoulders and head – and isn’t it amazing how you onlyrealise how heavy your head actually is when you’re required not to lay it downon fellow passengers while sleeping on a long-haul flight?), it was to a very,very small and very, very strong cup of coffee.

‘I don’t drink strong coffee, usually,’ my sister said, but it waspressed upon her, so she did. (My sister also ‘didn’t drink’ neat whisky in themorning, but the last time we travelled together, 20 years ago to Scotland inthe dead of winter, she quickly realised the medicinally warming benefits of a ‘nip’in a pub at 10am.)

I love coffee, so I did. And it was like dying and going to heaven.

Goll-lee but the Dutch know coffee! There wasn’t a single place we wentwhere we didn’t get a cup (usually miniature, sometimes of teacup proportions,and very occasionally about 200ml – but never, ever the giant crud that passesfor restaurant/takeaway ‘coffee’ in South Africa) of the most astonishinglyheady, fragrant, PERFECT brew. I mean, they gave us a cup of this astonishinglyawesome coffee at the car-hire place while we waited to fill out forms! Seriously,if it weren’t for the boring landscape and the neverending rain and theteeny-tiny toilets and all the bloody stairs and the kamikaze cyclists and theeye-poppingly expensive cost of living and the bossy Dutch, I would move to Holland for the coffee.

They always serve the coffee with speculaas, which is a thin, crispy cinnamon/gingerbiscuit of which the Dutch are inordinately proud. I say ‘inordinately’ becauseit’s, you know, lovely, but after a while I wouldn’t have minded a Baker’sLemon Cream. Call me a philistine.

But niggles aside (and I’m assuming the Dutch won’t mind my criticism, becauseI’m kind of liking this ‘being straightforward’ thing), I have to give Holland a full,enthusiastic 10 points for their coffee. It was fabulous.

Fabulous things about the Dutch #1

2011-11-01T18:43:00.000+02:00

There are no hugely fat Dutch people.

I was told (repeatedly) that there are, in fact, obese people in Holland, but they mustkeep them all in one very large room somewhere, because you don’t see them on thestreets. Rather, you see energetic folk of all ages and styles enthusiasticallyriding their bicycles hither and thither (and often right up your arse, if youdon’t get out the way quick enough). Above: Dutch people cycle to the train station, then commute to work. These bikes are at Naarden-Bussum station (a relatively small stop) - every single one belongs to someone who's gone to work, and will cycle home on it at the end of the day. When it rains (which it does all the time), they cycle one-handed, with their umbrella open above them.

South Africa now has an obesity problem to rival America’s, and it’samazing how quickly one becomes accustomed to seeing gigantic people heaving theirhuge bulks through shopping centres, into movie-theatre seats (usually next tome) and up to the KFC counter.

So one of the first things I noticed about Amsterdam(and Den Haag and Rotterdam, although admittedlythis may not be true of other major centres in Holland because we didn’t go to all of them)was that most people are of the normal size. Some of the women are buxom (and Imean this word as it’s intended, not as a euphemism for obscenely fat) and someof them men are portly (ditto), but in 10 days I genuinely didn’t see onesingle person who made me think, ‘Golly, I wonder how many pies made that?’

Oh, except once. At Schiphol airport, the morning my sister and I left Holland. There was a verylarge couple sitting in the air-side waiting room, between them occupying threechairs (but only just). Because the flight was full, my sister and I had beenseparated, and I (I thought) had drawn the short straw: it was my seat that hadbeen re-assigned. I whispered to my sister, ‘See them? I’m going to end upbetween them, wait and see.’ ‘Think positive,’ she whispered back to me.

Two things: first, the fat couple were South Africans (I heard the wifesay to her husband, ‘Ek hoop hulle bedien ontbyt op die plane want ek’s honger.’)(Okay, I didn’t really, but seriously, you can tell a South African anywhere, can’tyou?) And, second, I ended up in a bulkhead seat, with plenty of legroom,between two normally sized and perfectly wonderful gentlemen who adjusted myTV, stowed my tray, ordered me orange-juice-and-vodkas and didn’t mind when Ifell asleep on their shoulders and drooled down their shirt-fronts. (And I didn’teven think positive!)

We were way too afraid to ride bicycles in Amsterdam, where simplystepping out into the street is challenge enough, but we did hire bicycles onthe North Sea island of Ameland, and my Dad, my sister and I cycled for milesalong pretty, friendly bike paths. It was fabulous.

What I got shouted at for in Holland

2011-11-01T18:15:00.000+02:00

It’s fairly alarming, and not a little dispiriting, to be constantly orderedabout by people who can’t seem to mind their own business. The Dutch call this ‘beingstraightforward’; those of us from other (thinner-skinned) nations mightconsider it a titchy-tad bad mannered.

I attracted what seemed to me (and at least some of my travellingcompanions) an unfair number of ‘Nee, nee, nee!’ admonishments, among them:

* When I helped 2 hungry swans, trying in vain to reach stale bread lefton the wall of a canal – I broke it up and tossed it to them, and was roundly reproachedby a passing Dutchwoman who hissed, ‘It brings rats!’ Try as I might, I couldn’twork out the logic of this.

* A Dutchwoman on a station platform who ordered me, ill-temperedly, totie my shoelaces, which had come undone in our various rushes for trains. (Theyare actually rawhide strips that tie my boots closed at mid-calf, are too shortto reach the ground, and have never, ever tripped up me or anyone else.)

* A Dutchman who took the trouble to actually stop his car to shout atme for not controlling my dog. I felt like Peter Sellers when I said to him,‘It’s not my dog’ – it was simply a hound that was occupying the same pavementspace as me, and was behaving impeccably at the time, lyingdown in an alert but relaxed state.

* A Dutchwoman who snapped peremptorily at me for pushing the ‘walk’button on a traffic light - which, incidentally, is the only safe way to crossa street in Amsterdam, where pedestrians wage a losing war against a tidal waveof bicycles, trams, buses, cars and other pedestrians, all moving as if they’relate for a theatre opening (and on the wrong side of the street).

* A Dutchwoman who ticked me off for lack of manners for requestinganother bottle of wine at a dinner, and went on to suggest to all who wouldlisten that I have a ‘drinking problem’. Which was amazing to me, given thateveryone around the table was at least half-toasted by then, and our hostesshad just poured herself yet another generous glass of potent brandy liqueur. (And anyway: me, a drinking problem??!)

* A guard at the Rijksmuseum who crapped on me soundly for pointing outsomething in a painting, although my finger was nowhere near the actualartwork. I was hugely relieved that he didn’t produce a steel ruler and rap meover the knuckles with it.

* A shopgirl who yelled clear across the shop at me for attempting toremove a T-shirt from its packaging to have a look at its size and design (youknow, what we do in Woolworths all the time) – and who treated my sister thesame way, rebuking her for looking through a row of scarves for one she liked: ‘They’reall the same!’ the shopgirl growled, although they weren’t.

My Dad (who lives in Holland) gave me a book for my birthday while I wasthere called The UnDutchables: an observation of the Netherlands, its cultureand its inhabitants, which describes the Dutch as (among other things) ‘moralising’and ‘criticising’, and I suppose I would have had a less stressful time if I’dread it while I was there. Alas, we were too busy, so I only got to that partwhen I got back to dear old SA. Forewarned might have been forearmed.

There are, however, also lots of extremely fabulous things about theDutch and their country, and I’ll tell you about them in future posts.

Long-distance birthday licks

2011-10-28T09:59:00.000+02:00

I was in Holland for my birthday this month, and my neighbour looked after my dogs. I missed them enormously, but was very cheered up when I got this picture via email. (Thanks, T, for risking your white floors for the cheerful red paw prints!) From left: Sara, Balu, Lucy and Max.

(More about Holland in posts to come...)

Tanya turned 40

2011-10-11T22:06:00.000+02:00

I finished my contract.

There were dogs.

And earth, air, water and fire.

And friends.

What I’ve learnt from 5 weeks of working in the city

2011-10-04T18:41:00.001+02:00

At the beginning of September I was torn from my quiet country life into the turmoil of fulltime big-city office work. New Media in Cape Town was contracted by City Press to put out their new Sunday magazine, ‘i’, and I was contracted as the launch editor.

I used to do spans of this kind of work when I was younger and hungrier (and lived in the city), but I'm not mad about it. As much as I’d like to be, I’m not a fabulous supervisor of people; and, although 20 years of raising children without benefit of anything even vaguely resembling a memory has turned me into an excellent organiser (I Do Lists), I dislike managing stuff.

Still, it was an interesting experience. It taught me several things and reminded me of others, some being:
• Life is better in pajamas
• If you have dogs and other animals, you need to be with them for longer than a few hours a day (and their devastated expression when you leave them in the morning can bring you close to tears)
• Sleeping only 5 hours a night makes you dizzy
• Walking your dogs in the early-morning dark can cause you to fall into holes
• Weekends are really necessary - all work and no play makes Jill excessively grumpy
• Working 9 to 4 with 2 hours driving on either side (ie, 7 to 6) means you can’t get to the shops, the bank, the vet, the chemist, etc – and there’s a circle of hell that closely resembles Shoprite Checkers on a Saturday morning
• Indulging your love of cooking/TV addiction/blogging fetish/need for an afternoon snooze/desire to work at 2am if the spirit moves you isn’t possible when you have a fulltime job
• And don’t even think about joining your friends on a midweek bender
• Sealed windows plus airconditioning is a bad combination, particularly if the aircon doesn’t work
• Alarm clocks are evil fuckers
• As are the Sunday Blues
• Driving for 4 hours a day is bad for your spine, your wallet, your nerves and the environment
and
• There’s no place like home.

On the plus side, there were:
• Cape Town Food Market
• The solar-powered traffic signboards, which warn you of what lies ahead (my favourite: ‘congestion on elvated freeways expect delays’)
• Reconnecting with people who’ve been in publishing for 20 years and really know how to get things done
• Connecting with smart youngsters who are keen and talented (like Julia)
• Producing an excellent product in an impossibly short time with a great team
• Coming home in the evenings to my dogs, cats and chickens, who go crazy when they see me (although mainly, in the case of the chickens, because they want food – but that’s ok!)

And, my god, Cape Town drivers!
I travelled the route between Riebeek Kasteel and Cape Town daily both ways: 20km to and through Malmesbury, including a tortuously slow detour because they’re apparently simultaneously re-tarring every single road in the town; about 50km on the hell-run that is the N7; then about 10km on the N1 into the city, including daily congestion that can add up to 40 minutes to the trip. Every day, I’ve been held up by an accident – but the fact that it’s only one accident amazes me. Most people drive like they’ve checked their brains at the door, and I can’t count the number of times:
* some arsehole has tried to overtake 10 cars and a slow-moving lorry on a blind rise, and missed oncoming traffic by millimetres, and often then only because the oncoming car has moved onto the shoulder to avoid a head-on collision (hey, nitwits – if you cause an accident, the rest of us will be involved in it too!);
* 3 snail-pace trucks have slow-motion diced each other up one of only 2 double-lanes on the entire inland route, infuriating the long line of cars behind them who could get moving if only the trucks would get the bloody hell out of the way;
* cars going at 60kph have refused to move over (and often drive, inexplicably, practically in the middle of the road, making it difficult to see past them), creating irritating logjams that make people do dangerous things to pass them;
* drivers doing 160kph have tailgated me and then every car they’ve leapfrogged ahead of me, creating incredibly dangerous road conditions, only to be stuck in the same traffic jam as all of us as we neared the city;
* people have treated the N7 onramp onto the N1 as a stop street, causing a hazardous backlog for absolutely no reason;
* accidents have attracted bizarre numbers of ‘emergency vehicles’ (in one case, a fire truck, 4 police cars and 7 (SEVEN!) ambulances), which have served only to create more havoc and congestion (are private ambulances the new tow-trucks?!); and
* huge traffic jams have been caused by municipal grass-cutting on the road verges (everyone stops to look; and by the time everyone has stopped to look, the backlog takes 40 minutes to clear – hey, municipality, maybe you shouldn’t do this in peak traffic time?).

My contract finishes tomorrow, and after work I’ll be heading straight to Ceres to join my friends on a midweek getaway (something you can’t do if you work fulltime!), stopping in Riebeek Kasteel only to fetch the dogs and a bottle of peach mampoer, which I plan to drink while lying on my back in a meadow with a mountain somewhere in full view. And no alarm clock anywhere within a 100-kilometre radius.

To my colleagues in the office: a luta continua!

Life in the chicken run

2011-09-22T19:46:00.004+02:00

She’s no spring chicken • he’s a cocky as a rooster • maintaining the pecking order • he’s hen-pecked • it’s chicken feed • she’s like a mother hen • don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched • there can be only one rooster in a henhouse • her feathers have been ruffled • he’s preening • she’s broody…

Chicken metaphors for human behaviour are legion, and for anyone who’s spent an afternoon on my verandah, watching the chickens go busily about their business, there’s no doubt why. Even ‘melded’ flocks like the one that quarters my garden all day (only Goldie and the Things – about which more shortly – are mine; the others are loyal daily visitors from an adjoining property) do establish and maintain a pecking order; the roosters are indeed cocky and, with the current three (ie, two too many), there are often spats; the hens who hatch out chicks are almost always amazingly good mothers; and when a hen gets upset, you can literally see her feathers ruffling.

Johann (who also has chickens) describes my affinity with my flock as ‘unnatural’ and perhaps it is. (Okay, it definitely is. Sit down in the back there.) So there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from me on Sunday when my dogs, inexplicably, killed one of the Things (recently renamed Beatrice), who’d hatched out a tiny baby just four days before.

Once I’d got over my initial shock, I had to go through the tedious process of the five stages of grief (somewhat modified for this occurrence).

1. Denial was immediate: on finding Beatrice’s corpse, I wandered about muttering, ‘I can’t believe it.’

2. Utter and complete emotional collapse followed. On realising that Beatrice was indeed dead, and that my dogs had indeed committed the murder, I stood in the garden, my head on my daughter’s shoulder, and sobbed like toddler.

3. Anger swiftly brought up the rear: ‘I’ll kill those fucking dogs!’ (The fucking dogs fled to the relative safety of the daybed on the verandah, where they lay in uncharacteristic silence, looking suitably forlorn and guilty, all day.)

4. Bargaining came next: ‘If the chick has survived, Beatrice won’t have died for nothing. Please let the chick have survived. Please. If it has, I promise to…’ (Oh, come on, I’m not going to tell you what I promised. Especially since the chick did survive.)

5. Depression set in at about 2 the next morning, when I was changing the chick’s hotwater bottle for the third time that night (it was billeted in a large box in the bathroom, on a hotwater bottle and a bed of straw, under a teddy-bear); it deepened around 4am, when I realised I’d have to get through a busy working Monday on about four hours of sleep.

(I’ve left out Acceptance until it happens. It hasn’t yet.)

Coming home on a chilly, windy Monday evening to a four-day-old chick with freezing feet and a lot of complaints (where was its mother? why was it being expected to eat grownup seed at its tender age? why had it been in this box all day? did I really think it was going to go through another night of straw/waterbottle/teddy?), which it expressed in a neverending series of ear-splitting PEEP-PEEPs, I realised I was ill-equipped to hand-rear a newly hatched chicken. Johann came to the rescue when an emergency neighbourhood poll revealed that a nearby hen had a six-week-old chick – maybe, just maybe, she’d foster the orphan.

I drove to Riebeek West with the baby in my shirt. It wriggled without cease, mercilessly scratching my chest with its little claws, and it wasn’t happy until its tiny head was peeping out of my cleavage and surveying all in a preternaturally bossy, mother-hen way (so it’s probably a female), which made wearing a seatbelt impossible (I kept a sharp eye out for Officer Erasmus).

The gardener at Warrick’s place, the site of the possible foster mom, told us unequivocally that the hen would peck the chicken to death, and who were we to disbelieve him? But the option (hand-rearing) wasn’t really a possibility, so we thought we’d give it a try.

And ag shame!! That mother hen – a lovely little creature with pristine white plumage and a complicated hairstyle – examined the baby with typical mother-hen curiosity, then, seeing a need and realising she could fill it, scooted that unhappy little chick under her matronly breast. Her six-week-old natural baby (a carbon copy of its mom) gave up its prime spot and instead crept graciously under a wing.

Shedding a discreet tear of gratitude, I turned to Johann: ‘See? A mother hen! She just knows!’ Johann scoffed, ‘Oh please! She’s a chicken! She’s so brainless that she just thinks she had twins but didn’t notice until now!’

I’ve since had reports that the chicken and mother have both adapted beautifully and are very happy together. (Beatrice would be glad.) I have, of course, claimed visitation rights, and am looking forward to seeing how the koekoek chick, who’s going to grow into a black-and-gold-flecked giant, will relate to its tiny snowy bantam mom as time goes by.

* There’s one other chicken metaphor that I love: ‘roosters crow, hens deliver’. It’s so true! (Although I’m passing no comment on what this says as a metaphor for the human condition.) And roosters don’t only crow at daybreak – they often start their noisiness long before sunrise, at 3am or so (ask any city person who’s visited me in the country ‘for some peace and quiet’).

When wrap skirts unwrap

2011-09-13T05:12:00.003+02:00

My daughter has lost quite a bit of weight recently, and was telling me how she has to wear long shirts because her pants keep falling down and exposing her midriff to the world.

I love being able to say, ‘That’s nothing! You should hear what happened to me’ so I said, ‘That’s nothing! You should hear what happened to me!’

I have a silk wrap skirt that I wear from time to time. On this particular day it was rather windy, and I obviously hadn’t tied my skirt securely enough, and as I bounded out my car and onto a crowded pavement, it quietly detached itself from me and went billowing down the road.

Early parachutes were made out of silk, for the material’s light weight and strength, and its ready ability to react to air currents – which will give you some idea of how enthusiastically my skirt blew away. So not only was I left in public in only my knickers (and really this isn’t how anyone would want to see a 46-year-old woman), I had to run after the bloody thing.

Which is one of the many reasons I prefer wearing pajamas in the daytime.

A hat-trick of achievements

2011-09-09T05:53:00.005+02:00

On Wednesday this week, my daughter turned 20. She’s been waiting for, well, 10 years not to be a teenager any more, so this was a biggie. She did, of course, immediately go into that peculiarly female nosedive about her age, and mooch about muttering, ‘I’m getting so ooold,’ which we on the shady side of 40 found amusing. My birthday present to her was this tattoo; the word is ‘veritas’, which repeats itself in her contribution to one of the garden mosaics.

Talking of mosaics, Jill finished the firepit one on Wednesday. This one was particularly fiddly, as each flame had to be positioned separately, and then carefully grouted. My word contribution – 'geselligheid', Afrikaans for 'conviviality' – is here. The mosaic is already stunningly beautiful, but once the lippia lawn has grown in around it, it’s going to be simply astonishing!

And the third achievement, also on Wednesday, was that my son finally got his driver’s licence (on his second try). This has been a long adventure involving countless trips to the Malmesbury Traffic Department, and plenty of frayed nerves. It means that not only is he now truly independent, I can retire my ‘Mom’s Taxi’ job description - one I’ve held, and seldom willingly, for two decades.

We all celebrated this hat-trick with some limited-edition Klein Optenhorst Pinot Noir Method Cap Classique 2009 (thanks Naas and Melissa), a delicious lunch at Bar Bar Black Sheep, and a slice of this charming lemon cake made by my daughter and our friend Ruan – if you look closely, you’ll see that they wrote ‘Happy 20 and licence’ on it.

What a great start to spring!

Ha-ha, hadeda!

2011-08-30T11:19:00.003+02:00

It’s breeding season in hadeda-land which, if it’s in my garden (and it is), is a pretty fraught time.

‘My’ hadeda family – which started about six years ago with a mom and a dad, and has grown every year since - lives in a huge pepper tree quite near the house. They share space with about a gazillion weaver birds and, occasionally, a maurauding gymnogene, which hangs spectacularly upside down and digs its double-jointed limbs into the nests for those delicious little babies. (Ag shame.)

Anyone with a hadeda family in their garden will know them by their screeching calls – a protracted and ear-splitting haa-haa-daa that is bad enough during the day, but at night causes you to wake up with the hairs on the back of your neck bristling. Who knows why these birds are sometimes moved to shriek in the middle of the night – my best bet is that they’re woken by a terrible nightmare because they sound like a tortured soul being dragged down into the pits of hell.

Hadedas are ibises and go under the wonderfully chewy scientific name of Bostrychia hagedash. They’ve only relatively recently – since the late 1960s – colonised the western Cape, and by the 1990s had become breeding residents in these parts. They use their long, curved beaks to probe the ground for earthworms, grubs, insects and even small snakes, so their range expansion probably has something to do with the increase of irrigated areas (making for softish soil), including suburban gardens and agricultural land.

They’re sociable birds, and out of breeding season can gather in quite big flocks (up to about 100). In breeding season – which is usually after the winter rains, from about July – they get together in pairs. They tend to use the same nesting site year after year. For such big birds, they build very flimsy nests, and eggs and chicks often fall out of them.

Both parents incubate the eggs (the female may lay up to six), and they hatch after about a month. Then there’s another couple of months of frantic feeding – again, by both parents – before the babies are ready to fly the nest.

And that, in our garden, is where the fun begins.

Out of breeding season, Mr and Mrs Hadeda and their offspring from previous years tease my dogs unmercifully. They hang out casually in the garden, making a big show of not noticing the dogs stalking them, and then fly off with their shrieking calls at the very last second. It drives the dogs completely dilly – in all the time they’ve been ‘hunting’ them, they haven’t come even close to catching one. (Thankfully.)

But things change when it’s time for the new babies to test their wings. A baby hadeda on the ground has zero chance of survival – they have no way of getting back into the nest, and if the dogs or cats don’t get them, some other predator will. So it’s an incredibly stressful time for Mr and Mrs H – and, in our case, the two babies they spent about four days teaching to fly.

It’s all done with a great deal of wing-flapping (not surprisingly) and even more noise, with the result that everyone in hearing distance is alerted to the goings-on and in a constant state of tension. The dogs are on watchful standby in case of a happy (for them) accident.

This year, it was mission accomplished for our hadedas, and Mr and Mrs H successfully launched two babies. Here’s the one (if you look closely, you can see it’s still got some baby feathers on its chest and head), proudly atop the garden shed, a short but successful flight from its nest.

So next year we can look forward to an even more expanded hadeda family, and even more noise.

Magnificent mosaic #1

2011-08-29T14:12:00.016+02:00

With my new Zen-Karoo garden planted, there wasn’t much left to do but sit back and wait for spring (then summer, then spring and summer again, and perhaps one more spring and summer), for the plants to grow in and the garden to start looking established. But two areas still disturbed me – both were untreated grey cement.

The pool pump, which had always been something of an eyesore (left, before renovations), was hidden and contained by the handy lads from the Riebeek Valley Garden Centre, using breeze blocks (below). The result, although it cut down on the noise and hid the pump components, was still umistakably just a big grey block between two beautiful beds. What to do?

I’ve tried to use only local inspiration, materials and labour in my house project, so I didn’t have to look far for who could transform these – my long-time friend Jill Gordon-Turner, an artist of exceptional imagination and talent, and the genius behind Hungry Heart Mosaics.

From initial discussion to completion of two mosaics took about four months. For the pump-housing mosaic, I asked Jill to work along a Karoo/endemic flower/plant theme, and, in May, we had several discussions about form and colour. Then Jill spent careful time taking measurements – because she works in her studio, these have to be exact so that when the mosaic is transferred, it fits perfectly.

This (left) was an early fitting, in mid July – Jill’s vigilance with the measurements was worth the time and effort, as it was exactly right.

And, last week, finally, after hours and hours and HOURS of intensive and concentrated labour, the mosaic was ready for installation.

Installation itself is a big job – which is why a mosaic artist needs to be multi-skilled, with not only oodles of artistic talent, but also plenty of know-how about the materials she works with, how the weather affects setting, grouting, cleaning and so on. And completed mosaics aren’t light, so a bit of muscle-power is also necessary.

The heavy lifting in this case was supplemented by Gerald, who prepped the wall to take the mosaic (above left), and then helped Jill lift it off the base it had been living on for so long (right). Between the two of them, they positioned it against the wall (above left), and then Gerald did the grouting (below right). This took a good couple of hours, and the job was still far from finished.

Over the next few days, Jill sat (literally in all weathers!) and carefully positioned the metal pieces, cleaned each tile, dug out grout that had covered itsy-bitsy pieces, regrouted sections that had been overlooked, and generally put the finishing touches to her amazing creation.

And here it is! Isn’t it just fantastically beautiful? It has a protea and a disa in it, plus a gasteria (with gorgeous, delicate iridescent detail in the leaves); a Swartland landscape (I love the two little houses in the middle-ground); several interesting flower- and mountain-shaped pieces of metal; a binding rune (in the circle), requested by my son; and ‘in vino veritas’, which was my daughter’s contribution. (This small picture doesn't do it justice - click on it to make it bigger so you can see the detail.)

The line that runs down the left side and along the bottom (also with its surprising little sparkly tiles) continues on the mosaic that Jill is busy installing on the firepit – the second mosaic has a completely different theme, and this line carries the eye between the two, especially when viewed from the verandah.

Thumbs up for Passport Services

2011-08-23T05:31:00.002+02:00

A few years ago when I went to the UK, South African passport holders were still welcomed without the botheration of visas. Then the massive corruption that is prevalent in some of our government departments apparently made it necessary for the UK to declare South African passports insufficient proof of honourable intentions (taking us back to the days of the ‘green mamba’, which is what South African passports were called during apartheid, when they couldn’t get you access almost anywhere in the world).

Having gone through the horror-story of trying to get an American visa for my daughter a few years ago (an infuriating process that we finally abandoned), given the choice of trying to get a visa for the UK or never travelling again, I decided I’d just never travel again. But then my dad moved to Holland and I thought it would be nice to go and spend my birthday there with him in October. And that’s when I remembered that South African passport holders require a Shengen visa for travel to EU countries.

Getting a Shengen visa is almost as big a pain in the arse as getting an American one.

Digging around in my ‘important documents’ file (shoebox under my desk), I discovered my old UK passport, now six years out of date. Hmmm, I thought. I went on the Net and discovered that I could get it renewed, for an eye-watering sum, and as long as I presented myself in person to the British High Command or something. Obviously, what I wanted was a new passport that would give me access to all countries in the known universe, which cost nothing, and which I could get without moving from my chair.

We can’t always get what we want, but sometimes we can get a bit of what we want, and in this case it was through the exceptionally efficient and friendly means of the exceptionally straightforwardly named Passport Services. For a not inconsiderable but not actually usurious sum, and some running-around (I did say we can get a bit of what we want), I got my British passport renewed, and now can travel anywhere in the known universe should the spirit move me.

And here’s a thing: I contacted Passport Services at 8am on Monday 3 August and a real human being answered the phone on the second ring. Within literally minutes he had emailed me all the information I required. I took a few days to gather all the bumf, which Passport Services arranged for a courier to collect on Thursday 4 August, so it arrived in Johannesburg (where they’re based) the next day. Another call from a real human being assured me that by Friday lunchtime my documents and application had been submitted. And my new passport was delivered by courier, signed and sealed, yesterday, Monday 22 August. Which means that the entire process, from initial enquiry to passport-in-hand, took only 3 weeks!

There was one almost-glitch, which was interesting: I had my passport photos and application documents endorsed by a local policeman, but was subsequently informed that SAPS ratification of documents and pics is no longer allowed by the UK because of the huge corruption in certain of our government departments. (Gosh, it’s fun being a South African! Even though it’s no longer 1982!) Fortunately, I have aged so little since my original passport photo was taken when I was 30 that my pic 17 years later is still apparently recognisably me. (I find this laughable: my new passport photograph looks nothing like my old one – and, in fact, it looks nothing like the current me either, as I appear to have just been given the standard large dose of hallucinogen that everyone gets before their passport photos are taken, which causes them to look as if they’re doing mental battle with gila monsters.)

Now, here’s the South African equivalent of this story: my sister, who decided to come to Holland too, was unable, for various bureaucratic reasons (none the fault of Passport Services), to renew her expired British passport. So she has no choice but to travel on her South African passport, which means applying for the Shengen visa. Three weeks after she began the process, she’s still trying to get together the ludicrous mountains of documentation required, with no end in sight. I suppose we should just be grateful that her South African passport was current and didn’t need renewing.

Eating local

2011-08-22T08:03:00.009+02:00

The locavore movement (also called, with charming political overtones, ‘food patriotism’) encourages people to eat food that’s been grown and processed not further than about 600 km distant. The aim of the movement is both to save on the eco-costs of transporting foodstuffs long distances and to promote economic, environmental and social sustainability within communities.

If you keep an eye on what fruits and vegetables are ripening when within your area, eating local is easy. Here in the Riebeek Valley, we’re fortunate to have a small Crisp outlet, and a regular Crisp emailer that tells us what’s in season.

I recently was given two unusual local ingredients.

Table Mountain mushrooms

‘Are you mad?’ That was Scrumptious author and foodie Jane-Anne’s comment when I told her I’d made soup from mushrooms harvested on Table Mountain. But I did get the mushrooms from my brother-in-law, Buzz, who, like Jane-Anne, is a kitchen wizard, so I didn’t worry about their safety for eating.

Perhaps I should have. I work for Buzz, and our professional relationship isn’t always plain sailing – in fact, it’s fair to say that we spend much of our time in varying states of near-murderous rage with each other. Last year, when my sister (Buzz’s wife) asked him what he thought of the idea of taking me away for my birthday, he replied, ‘As long as it’s near a high cliff so I can throw her off it.’ (My sister sensibly booked a weekend away in a low-lying valley.)

Anyway, to make the soup, I reconstituted the dried Table Mountain mushrooms and supplemented them with bought button mushrooms. I softened onions and garlic in butter, added the mushrooms (including the liquor from the reconstituted mushrooms) and some homemade chicken stock, let it simmer until it thickened up a bit, added lots of fresh parsley, and served the soup with a swirl of cream. The button mushrooms were nicely chewy, while the Table Mountain mushrooms had an almost sponge-like texture and a very strong flavour. By coincidence, a sous chef from a local eatery was visiting, and he declared the soup delicious. And none of us frothed at the mouth (Jane-Anne’s concern).

Shoulder of springbok

My friend Herman is a hunter, and he shot a springbok last weekend, and gave me the shoulder to cook. Springbok is a challenge to prepare, I discovered, because it has almost zero fat, so it’s got to be done with a very light hand if you don’t want to end up eating hot biltong. I marinated the shoulder in a bottle of red wine, lots of garlic, onions, juniper berries, lemon zest, herbs and various other goodies. Then I seared it and wrapped it in bacon. I cut up onions and celery and put them in a large roasting pot, added the springbok, the marinade and some chicken stock, and oven-roasted it for just under an hour.

Using the strained juices, I made a rich gravy by adding a bar of dark chocolate, a splash of port and about half a jar of quince jelly. We were all hungry by this time so the gravy was a bit thin – it should have reduced a bit more. I served it with lightly steamed whole baby marrows and pan-roasted potatoes.

Dirk did an excellent job of carving. The meat was very tasty but fairly tough – it was still pink near the bone, so this wasn’t a product of overcooking; springbok is just like that.

It’s hard to say whether the springbok or its method of preparation had anything to do with how the evening unfolded. We’d started early because everyone was tired after a long week, so when someone mentioned that they could hear a rooster crowing, I said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything, they just sometimes do that.’ Then I went and had a look at the clock and discovered it was 4.30am. We’d been playing Very Loud Music for hours, so I had a moment of panic about having kept the neighbours awake – but then I pulled myself together and just fervently hoped that we’d given the three yappy dachshunds over the road a sleepless night, to get them back for the endless hours they wreck the neighbourhood peace.

We stripped the springbok shoulder of its meat, but even the bone didn’t go to waste – here’s Sara, polishing it off. (Thanks, Herman, from all of us.)

When dressing down pays off

2011-08-10T20:45:00.002+02:00

I’m not a snappy dresser. I’m not being falsely modest. If I could spend my life in pajamas, I would, but cow-patterned flannelette two-pieces don’t go down well in business meetings with banking/insurance clients (more’s the pity).

Fortunately for me, I live in a part of the world that fashion forgot. For instance, I recently bought a gold bra by mistake (it looked beige in the shop), and Johann immediately pointed out that I could wear it outside my clothes on my next visit to Malmesbury, and fit right in.

So today I was in Malmesbury, trotting around doing chores (among other things, trying to find a red bath mat – not, apparently, available in Malmesbury for love or money, which is a shame, since I’m going through a red phase), and dressed in my usual bag-lady Helena-Bonham-Carter throw-on-the-first-thing-my-hand-touches-in-the-wardrobe style – holey tracksuit pants, a questionable long-sleeved T-shirt and well-worn old takkies.

As I was rushing across a parking lot, a beggar stepped from the shadows. ‘Mêdêm, asseblief, mêdêm,’ he said (Missus, please, missus) – the standard South African precursor to a usually long (and, sadly, often true) story about his house burning down, a grievous bodily injury, dire poverty, and the need to hit me up for as many bucks as my conscience might compel. Just I was making moves to dig about in my bag, the beggar gave me a closer look and said, ‘Ag, nee, moenie worry nie, mêdêm, ek kan sien mêdêm het geen geld.’ (Oh, don’t worry, I can see missus has no money.)

The irony of this is that I was actually on my way to the bank to pick up my Amex gold card.

The nature of happiness (and whether money can buy it)

2011-08-10T17:02:00.003+02:00

I was standing on the mountainside this morning and the sun was rising across the valley. The dogs were scuffling enthusiastically through the vegetation and I could hear the sounds of birds and livestock. Just then, a steam engine pulling a dozen carriages toot-tooted down below, and I watched for about 20 minutes while it traversed the valley, puffing out little belches of smoke and hooting at crossings. I really, really love trains, and I suddenly felt so happy I wanted to cry.

We spend so much of our lives in pursuit of happiness, often without really knowing how to find it or even what it actually is. And, sometimes, we’re so busy searching that we miss the times we really are happy – we don’t stand still for long enough to appreciate the feeling.

Happiness means different things to different people – for instance, a total lack of responsibility can be bliss for one person, while someone else might get real joy out of being in charge of many tasks. Still, happiness is often cited as being connected in some way to good health, fulfilling relationships and an appreciation of our environment – all things that are attainable without being wealthy.

Of course, if happiness, or at least contentment, can be defined by an absence of certain things, such as disease, loneliness, anxiety or hunger, then an absence of poverty must also be an indication of happiness – as my ex-mother-in-law, who made piles of money (and, incidentally, subsequently lost it all), once snapped at someone who accused her of tackiness, ‘I’d rather be nouveau riche than nouveau poor.’ But can money actually buy happiness?

Apparently it can, initially at least: as a colleague says, ‘If I have to be unhappy, I’d rather be crying in a brand-new Land Rover than in my buggered-up old Toyota Corolla.’ But once the new-car smell has worn off, that Land Rover becomes just another car. So what happens is that having pots of money raises your aspirations, and those aspirations then turn against you: once you’ve eaten in the finest restaurants, travelled business class, bought your dream house and gone on a 6-week holiday to the Far East, then takeaways from the Spur, flying steerage, living communally with friends or going away camping for a weekend lose their capacity to bring you joy.

Not only that, but too much money corrupts – as the Bible has it, ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ (1 Timothy 6:10). In fact, several studies on lottery winners have proven this: many people who win the big bucks ultimately find themselves worse off than they were before they struck gold – bankrupt, in jail, fighting substance abuse or depression, avoiding hitmen, in litigation with family members … none of which can reasonably be said to bring happiness.

Someone suggested that if your money isn’t buying happiness, then you aren’t spending it right, and perhaps that’s the reality. If you suddenly have access to vast funds, to use it to help you achieve happiness, you should spend it on * activities that help you grow as a person (painting lessons, say) * things that strengthen your connections with others (modest trips with friends) * contributions to your community (donations to needy organisations) * activities and experiences rather than material possessions (a family reunion) * several small pleasures (a weekly massage) rather than a few big-ticket items.

And, of course, anyone who’s saved hard and long, and finally gets to buy that car or go on that overseas trip or put down a deposit on that house, knows the satisfaction of achievement – which could be another indicator of happiness.

Some things that make me happy
• Clean bed linen
• The silence when the three dachshunds over the road aren’t yapping incessantly
• Completing a project to brief and on deadline, and knowing I’ve done it well
• Cooking for friends and/or family
• Those breath-taking summer mornings, when it’s already warm by 5am and the world still looks new
• When it’s wet and cold outside in winter, and I’m inside, warmly dressed and with a lovely big fire roaring
• The insane way my dogs greet me when I get home (even when I’ve been out for, like, 10 minutes)
• Goldie’s craziness
• Having my kids home (usually)
• Getting an email from my Dad
• Winning the Lotto (just kidding)

What makes you happy?

This is why I don’t like eating out

2011-08-09T19:08:00.002+02:00

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the nice things about growing older is staying in. This makes me a curmudgeonly going-out-to-eat person, because when a well-meaning friend suggests a get-together for dinner at a restaurant, it’s just boring to go through all the reasons I don’t want to go. So instead I say, ‘Sorry, I’m busy that night,’ and when I say it enough, nobody ever invites me anywhere. Which I suppose is a bit sad but does serve the purpose of freeing me from the awfulness of ever eating at a restaurant (with the recent exception of Bar Bar Black Sheep).

But today was National Women’s Day, so I drove through to Stellenbosch to take my daughter out for lunch. Neither of us knows much about Stellenbosch restaurants (me because I don’t live there; she because she lives there on about R10 a day), so we opted for safety and went to the Cape Town Fish Market.

It was full and there was a new manager on duty (I know this because he mentioned it a bit later – I’ll come to that) but we found a nice outside table in a patch of sun. Our waiter, Arno, practically skidded to our side, delivered our menus, and came back lickety-split to take our orders. I began relaxing into what turned out to be an utterly false sense of security.

Starters were chicken spring rolls (definitely bought in, a shame when you consider CTFM has sushi chefs on call, so it wouldn’t be a stretch for them to serve home-made ones) and ‘vegetable’ (um, green and red pepper) tempura with bottled sweet-chilli sauce and not a drop of soya in sight.

Mains were hake and salad for me – the hake looked yummily golden-brown on the outside but proved to be horribly mushy within, and the salad smelled like wet dog but was, paradoxically, as dried-out as a wino’s tongue; and calamari and chips for my daughter – and the nicest thing I can say about that was that it was unmemorable.

Desert was chocolate brownies (I think they were nice but by then I’d had half a bottle of wine and my standards had dropped precipitously) and a chocolate-fudge cake that looked and tasted like the plastic equivalent you might get in a little girl’s Christmas tea set. (Here’s the proof of the pudding: I took the plastic cake home to my son, who will usually eat anything that hasn’t actually been taken out of the dustbin and had the coffee grounds brushed off it, and he had a look and said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’)

And then the fun started.

We’d got there at 1pm and finished our meal around 2.30pm. All that remained was for us to have some coffee and get the bill.

At 2.55pm (by now I was timing it), I went inside for the third time to find our waiter, both to order coffee and to ask him to clear the table of the desert plates. Somebody else came out and picked up the dishes and took our order for coffee (‘and the bill, please’). The coffee arrived, cold, at 3.15pm, but not the bill. I tossed back the coffee, waited another 5 minutes, then went inside again.

While I was asking around for someone who could possibly please please organise our bill (for which we’d by then been waiting for 45 minutes), a woman came storming in from outside. My Afrikaans isn’t great, but the gist of her shouting, frothing and arm-waving was that she’d ordered sushi for 8 people at 2pm and nothing had yet arrived. This beat my problem hands-down, so I stood back and gave her some airtime.

Just then, another customer came out of the women’s loos with an expression of Apocalypse Now-type horror in her eyes. ‘There’s something wrong with those toilets,’ she said, pointing at the door. A passing waiter asked, ‘Which one?’ and she whispered, ‘All of them.’ So that put the kibosh on having a wee to pass the time (and of course just then I realised that I really did need to wee).

I finally found a ‘manager’ (it said so on his name tag) and practically rugby-tackled him and dragged him to the computer. ‘I need our bill,’ I said. Wiping sweat from his brow, he asked me my table number. ‘I don’t know,’ I said (do you memorise your table number when you sit down?). I pointed out the window at where we were sitting, and the manager poked a few buttons and a bill came up that looked like ours (I scanned the screen and saw it had hake, calamari and a bottle of white wine on it). ‘That’s ours!’ I shrieked, over-excitedly, ‘print it out!’ He did, and presented me with a bill that staggered me a bit, but eating out is expensive, and anyway I was now really desperate for the loo, so I threw my card at him and told him to do the necessary.

But while he was fiddling with the card machine, I looked at the bill again and said, ‘Oh, sorry, no, this isn’t ours, it’s got a whole lot of stuff on it we didn’t have.’

This was clearly a nasty curve-ball because the manager let out a groan and I thought I may have to catch him under the armpits to stop him slumping to the floor. ‘I’m new here,’ he gasped, ‘today is my first day.’

‘Where’s our waiter, Arno?’ I asked, because for goodness sake someone had to take charge of the situation, but the manager just looked embarrassed (and faint) – I looked for Arno, he shouted for Arno, and several waiters went searching for Arno, but it appeared that Arno had absconded in the middle of service. We never did see him again.

Another ‘manager’ (it said so in his name tag, too) came over, and we went to a different computer, and between the three of us, we managed to remove the 4 items that weren’t ours, and add the 2 that were but hadn’t appeared on the bill (the cold coffees), and finally I was able to pay. And by then I was in such a state of cross-leggedness that when manager #1 asked, ‘Should I add 10 percent for the tip?’ I just gritted my teeth and nodded – I was afraid the outrage any other response would elicit might cause my bladder to betray me.

And we finally got out of there at close to 4pm.

It’s just as well I was with my daughter, who has a bizarre sense of humour, so the whole afternoon was actually rather funny, but for R320 plus change and almost 3 hours of my life that I’ll never get back, our restaurant experience was exactly what I’ve come to expect from eating out.

Which is why one of the nice things about growing older is staying in.

My, how they’ve grown!

2011-08-04T13:43:00.006+02:00

Thing One and Thing Two (pictured here as little balls of fluff back when they hatched on Valentine’s Day this year) have grown up into nice strong koekoeks who each lay at least one egg for us every day.

We were going to call them, oh, Jan & Maria or Nelson & Graca, or even Ellen & Portia or Elton & David, once we knew if they were male or female. But time passed and the original names stuck. And anyway, it’s fun to go out in the morning to feed them and call, ‘Come, Things!’

(Interestingly, the Agricultural Research Council’s website tells us that you can tell the gender of koekoeks practically from the moment of hatching, as ‘the females are completely black while the males have a white spot on the head’. As is clear from the chicks’ baby pic, both had a white spot on their head and their chest – and yet both turned out to be female. Hmm. Perhaps they’re not as pure-bred as I like to think.)

As you can see by the sun rising in the background of this picture, they like their breakfast nice and early. That’s their mom, Goldie, in the foreground and the Things behind. The rooster and the Goldie-lookalike (who has white rather than black tail feathers) live on a neighbouring property but have formed a little melded family with Goldie and the Things, and spend most of their time subtly vying for Goldie’s attention. Goldie shamelessly plays them off against each other all the time, so one of them is almost always sulking.

All four females are prolific layers. The Things lay huge brown eggs; Goldie’s doppelganger lays dinky little ones; and Goldie herself churns out at least a couple every day. And it really is extraordinary when you eat a true free-range egg as opposed to battery eggs or even the ‘free-range’ eggs sold in the shops – these chooks produce eggs with a dense, deep-yellow yolk and very little white, and with a flavour that has to be tasted to be believed.

Running for the fun of it and other stories

2011-07-31T15:04:00.002+02:00

‘Who would have thought,’ said my brother-in-law Buzz, ‘that the Hawthorne family would be pounding around the countryside in an organised road race!’

His scepticism arises from having had close contact for many years with a family better known for knees-upping to Neil Diamond and our ability to raise our drinking arms often and keenly than running for profit or pleasure.

We – my two sisters, my brother and I – were actually all pretty athletic at school and broke various running and jumping records, but later in life we’ve all become somewhat sedentary. Then my sister Bev suddenly became a half-marathoner. Quite where this madness originates is hard to say, but her enthusiasm inspired us, so yesterday saw us up at dawn’s crack, preparing to go to various lengths out on the road. Bev did the PPC Bergmarathon 21km, Buzz and his son did the 10km (here they are, above, heading off into the pre-dawn chill), and my kids and I did the 5km.

The 5km was completely undemanding and unwound across gorgeous countryside bathed in early-morning winter sun. There were lots of little kids and older people and mums and dads pushing baby-strollers. Even the start was low-key: the starter tried to get some competitive spirit going by doing an animated count-down – ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, on your marks, get set, GO!’ – but on the word ‘GO!’ everyone just sort of ambled away from the start line. It was terrific.

We had lunch later at the incomparable Bar Bar Black Sheep restaurant here in Riebeek Kasteel. Honestly, how often do six people order different things off the menu, and all six absolutely rave about their food? And it wasn’t post-race hunger that made everything so delicious, because we’d all snacked at home after the runs. (And also had cold showers – which was a little embarrassing for me, because I’d boasted long and loudly about my new solar geyser, not taking into account that two days of rain and cold temperatures had sapped the solar cells. And, annoyingly, this morning, after a full day of sunshine yesterday, the water was wonderfully piping-hot again – just when it wasn’t needed by six grimy, sweaty people.) Anyway, if you’re in this neck of the woods, I can personally highly recommend BBBS's lamb burger or any of the pies (I had chicken and leek; my sister had pork and apple; both were scrumptious), and the onion soup has also had rave reviews.

While we were having lunch, Bev told us about relating the post below to Buzz – with unfortunate timing, as she told him the story while they were driving here from Cape Town, with Buzz at the wheel. Buzz, who does that male ‘tuning out’ thing whenever female nattering becomes too much to bear, did indeed tune out. So when Bev related the ‘Brake! Brake! Fuck! Fuck!’ part, Buzz suddenly tuned back in, slammed on anchors, stared wildly around, saw no reason for her apparent panic, and turned on her in fury. ‘Why the hell must I brake??!’ he snarled. (Backseat drivers – you gotta love them, otherwise you’d fling them from the car.)

My daughter was so inspired by the 5km amble that she immediately decided to do the 21km next year. I don’t think she’s entirely thought this through – she doesn’t realise, for instance, that ‘doing the 21km’ requires actually running for 21km – so I’m encouraging her to aim for the 10km first.

But one thing’s for sure: we’ll all do some distance in next year’s PPC road races. It was such fun!

Learning to drive #2*

2011-07-22T19:53:00.002+02:00

* Parental advisory: there is swearing in this post.

If there’s anything that will turn your kids against you (and in some cases actually kill you), it’s trying to teach them to drive.

Having seen one learner-driver – my daughter – through to legal status, and aged a good 10 years in the process, I did everything possible to wriggle out of going through the same with my son. But one thing all learner-drivers need is practice, so it becomes practically a parental duty to allow them to drive your car, with you as the accompanying licensed driver, at some stage.

This morning my son accompanied my dogs and me up the mountain for our morning walk – something that necessitates a 10km round-trip drive. He hates walking but the opportunity for a practice drive proved marginally stronger than his loathing for good, healthy exercise in the outdoors (he’s doing his driver’s test on Tuesday).

My son said little. I said much:

‘Give it a bit more petrol.’

‘Look. Did you look? Look! Oh god.’

‘Okay, ease off the … take your foot off the … stop. Stop! STOP!’

‘That’s okay, ignore him.’ (Referring to a driver tailgating us.) ‘No, don’t go onto the hard shoulder, there’s a cyclist… The cyclist! The cyclist! Oh Jesus! Christ. I think I just wet myself.’

‘Next left.’

‘Left. Left here! Here! Here! Turn! TURN!’

‘Listen, don’t leave it until so late to turn. If you… okay, slow down. Slower. Slower. Slower.’ (I had to put my head between my knees to draw breath at this stage so I didn’t see how he got across the intersection.)

‘Okay, treat this as a stop street. Wait until you can see what’s coming. No, really, stop. Stop! STOP! Fucking hell! Oh Christ, the bollards. Watch out for the… Fuck!’

‘The car’s going to stall. Okay, hand brake and restart. No, out of gear. Clutch. CLUTCH! Okay. Now take it forward slowly. SLOWLY!! Fucking hell!’

There was a 40-minute break here while I stormed up the mountain with the dogs. My son brought up the rear and I could feel the lasers of his eyes penetrating the back of my skull.

Back in the car for the return journey.

‘Okay, remember, treat this as a stop street. AS A STOP STREET! Jesus Christ.’

‘Edge forward. EDGE forward. You can’t go unless you can see the street is clear. Can you…? Aaaargghghgh!’ (And head between knees again, this time to quell imminent upchuck.)

‘Okay. Cool. It’s clear, you can go. You can go. Go. GO! Go, for god’s sake! What? It’s a million fucking miles away! Go! Oh god, more petrol, more petrol, more… Jesus. Quick, into neutral and restart. Don’t panic. DON’T PANIC!!’

‘Turn. Turn! TURN!’ (Out the window) ‘Sorry! Learner driver!’

‘Good. You’re doing well. Don’t accelerate down the hill. No, seriously. Brake a bit. Brake! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

‘Okay, turn. Slooowly. Slowly. SLOWLY! Ow.’ (Head hits dashboard.) ‘Okay, get out, let me park it.’

‘Not bad at all. You just need a bit more practice.’

Saying goodbye to an old friend

2011-07-20T18:45:00.010+02:00

Before I ‘semigrated’ from the city to the country, I saw in my last Cape Town New Year morning – the year 2000 – on the slopes of Lion’s Head with lots of other partying people, including my boyfriend, Marc.

Lion’s Head was special to Marc and me – we often went up there (in the days before you were regularly mugged) to have picnics, and on one particularly memorable occasion, we took magic mushrooms and had an astonishing sunset, then spent what turned out to be an entire night watching the grass grow and being utterly entranced by it.

That was Marc: ask him if he was game for something, and he’d always say, ‘You can’t scare me.’ And, really, you couldn’t. Nothing could.

I met him at a mutual friend’s birthday party. My date for the evening was an old and understanding friend – fortunately, as it turned out, because Marc moved in on me as if chum had been thrown in the water and he was a feeding shark. (He wouldn’t mind me using this analogy since it’s one he himself came up with.) My date gracefully bowed out, and Marc ended up driving me home, after the party, from Hout Bay to Observatory, where I lived at the time, in a raging Cape winter storm, in his soft-top Beetle.
Above: Marc and me at Burns’ Night at Kelvin Grove. The necklace I’m wearing was a gift from him. It won first prize in an art competition. We went to see the exhibition and I loved it, and Marc bought it for me as a surprise. (It was later stolen, a loss I still grind my teeth about.)

It was the beginning of a tumultuous relationship and six years of mayhem. Marc, a twice-married, reformed bachelor who at the time had just (along with his partner, Gary) sold the very successful MG’s Coffee Shop franchise and opened The Blue Plate restaurant in Kloof Street, lived a largely nocturnal existence (as restaurateurs do). I was – as I still am – an early riser, with two small school-going children and a daytime freelance career. As a result, finding time to spend together (even when we lived together, as we did for several years) was a constant battle – and as a result of that, when we did both have an evening off, we tended to go a bit wild.
Above: About to go horse-riding in Paarl. Marc was a cowboy at heart, so this is one thing he didn't mind doing with me.

Marc was a very friendly, sociable creature – there was nothing he loved more than hosting a party, along with good food, great wine and plenty of ’70s metal hippie music (he adored Clapton and Hendrix). I was – and again, still am – much keener to spend time one-on-one and often got freaked out by too many people; and, of course, I love Abba and Neil. And his friends didn’t like me, and mine didn’t like him. So it was always a somewhat difficult match.
Left: Marc often did things I liked but he didn’t. (But, hey, and vice versa!) Here, we’re finishing the Cape Times Big Walk. You can see how much he’s enjoying it.

One way we did connect was in hedonism – we both loved getting out of it. We’d go, just the two of us, to The Corner House or some other Cape Town club and drink tequila and dance our feet off. And sometimes we did the same at home – putting on CD after CD and drinking wine and smoking endless cigarettes and dancing and chatting until morning. (Those were, I think, my favourite times.) We loved the Red Herring in Hout Bay for long Sunday lunches. And occasionally I’d go and meet him after The Blue Plate had closed for the evening, and we’d join the other night-owls at the Kloof Street restaurants that catered for that stay-awake-all-night, sleep-all-day community.

Marc had two children from his first marriage whom he adored – they lived with their mother in Joburg, and he never really got his head around life away from them. Once a year they would arrive for the holidays, and that was Marc’s real Christmas. Even though his kids were considerably older than mine (so, another mismatch), we somehow muddled through – Carols by Candlelight at Kirstenbosch, climbing Lion’s Head (of course!), picnics on the beach, playing boules (with tennis, one of Marc’s all-time favourite games) in Cecilia Forest, going to movies at the Waterfront. By then Marc had a left-hand-drive Alpha Spider (a totally unsuitable car for a South African 6-foot-6 man with a family!) so we’d have to travel in convoy (I had a little red Golf). It was always disorganised but mainly fun, and Marc would takes weeks to get happy again after his kids had left.

It’s probably fair to say that Marc and I went at it too hard and too fast, and when our relationship ended, we needed several years (yes, years) to both process what we’d gone through and appreciate what we’d had. To Marc’s endless credit, he achieved this both more quickly and more graciously than me, and was much more willing to let bygones be bygones.

But I’m happy to say that we never completely lost contact, and that the last email I got from him, last Saturday, told me that he was listening to one of our favourite songs from that time, ‘How Bizarre’. ‘How fabulous,’ he wrote. Both his children are grown-ups and he was so proud of them – and he had a grandchild. I think he was happy.

Marc died on Monday 18 July – not incidentally (I like to think) the birthday of one of his heroes, Nelson Mandela.

A vote of confidence in the sun

2011-07-14T17:34:00.004+02:00

I’ve just had a solar geyser installed. In July. In the western Cape.

It’s hard to get more optimistic than that – but what else can you do when the weather is so determinedly bloody glorious? The surrounding mountains have even tried to have snow on them, as usual for this time of year, but it’s hopeless. It’s just way too damned sunny.

The whole having-a-solar-geyser-installed exercise is fraught with niggles and worries. The technology is new and relatively expensive – so, will it work, and will it be worthwhile? Sure, it should pay for itself within a few years – but what if a piano falls on me and kills me next month? And the stats are all so iffy – will it really save up to a third on my power bill or is that just so much hot air (so to speak)?

One way to find out is to get in some quotes. I had two vastly differing experiences of this, and it’s worth relating them because it shows how new this industry is and how easy it is to be bamboozled.

The first quote was provided by a rather yummy man with the most luvverly gravelly voice and steely-blue eyes – in fact, I kept him talking, telling me a lot more than I really wanted to know about solar power, just so I could have the pleasure of basking in the charismatic warmth of his presence. Let’s call him Guy Blue.

The second was provided by two young, keen, chatterbox brothers, eager as anything to tell you that they’re complete newbies to the scene, but keen to do whatever it takes to get a foot in the door. Let’s call them Guys Bright&Shiny.

Guy Blue warned me right at the outset that I’d have to pay him to quote: R250. Not a vast sum, to be sure, but enough to make you aware of his presence (as if his eyes weren’t enough).

Guys Bright&Shiny said they’d be there lickety-split, and they were. I suspect, if I’d pushed, that they would have paid me to quote. I liked them right away.

Guy Blue told me repeatedly that a 150-litre tank was too small for a household in which there are usually two people, sometimes three, and occasionally up to 10 (although not all of us showering at once, or, sometimes, several people showering together). The 200-litre tank (his suggestion) was considerably more expensive.

Guys Bright&Shiny said, ‘One hundred and fifty litres? Well, that’s what you’ve got now. Is it working for you?’ I said yes. They said, ‘Well, that answers that question, then.’

Guy Blue told me that his company would pay my Eskom rebate upfront and thereby ‘act as your bank’. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a bank - I’d rather my plumber just act as my plumber. And I dislike this ‘added extra’ sales-talk that makes it clear that a ‘favour’ is being done for you, the customer, when anyone who isn’t using a new brain for the first time knows that you get nothing for nothing.

Guys Bright&Shiny told me, in sad tones, and with frequent use of the word ‘unfortunately’, that there was a lot of paperwork to be filled in to get the Eskom rebate – but then they cheered up and said that as soon as it was all done, the rebate request would go into the system and four weeks later I’d be several thousand rands richer (or less poor, depending on how you look at it).

Guy Blue quoted me about R12 000 for a 200-litre lightweight fibreglass solar system that ‘might make your water smell funny for a while’. (I thought about making a joke about asparagus wee but lost courage.)

Guys Bright&Shiny quoted me R9 000 for a 150-litre standard cylinder that will probably stand up to an air-to-ground missile strike. I asked them about the fibreglass cylinder. They said, ‘It makes your water smell funny.’ I said, ‘But only straight after you eat asparagus?’ Not really, I actually said, 'But only for a while, apparently?' And they both kind of kicked their feet and said, ‘Um, ja…’ (So, no, then.)

Guy Blue quoted me R2 500 for ‘pipe and fittings plus hot-water mixer’ (solar-heated water can become so hot that it literally melts your tap’s washers; a hot/cold-water mixer has to be included in the installation to prevent this – I didn’t know that, did you?).

Guys Bright&Shiny quoted me about R2 000 for all the bits and pieces that go with the solar system. I asked them why the hot-water mixer wasn’t included in their quote and they looked puzzled and said, ‘Because it comes with the system – it’s not a separate item.’

It was at this stage that my misgivings about Guy Blue started turning into serious doubt.

Guy Blue quoted me R2 400 for ‘water mains and lagging’. Guys Bright&Shiny quoted R340 for ‘lagging’ but didn’t mention water mains. I asked them why not. They looked surprised and said, ‘Because we don’t have to do anything to your water mains – you’ve already got an existing geyser, so it’s all there, ready to use.’

Right.

Guy Blue quoted me R450 for ‘plumbing CoC’ (certificate of compliance). Guys Bright&Shiny again looked surprised when I asked why this wasn’t in their quote: ‘Because it costs us only R48 to buy the document itself, and we don’t feel it necessary to pass on that cost to the customer,’ they said.

Okay, then.

Guy Blue quoted me R3 800 for labour and installation. Guys Bright&Shiny would cost me R2 800.

And Guy Blue’s quote included this unwelcome proviso: ‘Your electrician is to do all electrical connections and issue an electrical CoC.’ (Guys Bright&Shiny’s quote cited a R750 electrician fee – for the installation of an Eskom-approved timer, basically – which included the electrical CoC.) Now, I ask you, who wants to go to all the trouble and expense of employing a contractor to install a solar geyser, only to have to go to yet more trouble and expense to get an electrician to do the extra fiddly bits?

Guy Blue also sent me, via email, a vast document including five pages of legalese which absolved him of all responsibility for everything, up to and including the coming of the End of Days, which I would be required to sign before he deigned to start work.

Guys Bright&Shiny asked, ‘When can we start?’

In a nutshell, Guy Blue quoted me R24 000, excluding the electrician’s fee (and I would have to employ the electrician separately) – which would take over five years to pay for itself. Guys Bright&Shiny quoted me R15 000, all in – a three-year investment.

I was, to be honest, very worried about this huge disparity in the quoted sums. Why would Guy Blue so unashamedly quote so incredibly high? I kept telling myself, ‘But it’s only a geyser, for god’s sake – why should it cost the same as a small yacht?’ Was I missing something?

Then I read an article in last week’s Sunday Times that told me that a solar geyser shouldn’t cost more than R9 000 plus installation, and it all came clear: Guy Blue was visiting from a parallel universe, and there’s nothing worse than running into trouble with a recent plumbing installation when your plumber is contactable only through the ingestion of generous quantities of magic mushrooms.

So I went with Guys Bright&Shiny and now I have free hot water – or will have, in three years’ time.

Hello Lucy, may I shag you?

2011-07-13T18:13:00.003+02:00

Our next-door-neighbour-dog Maxi (right) has a new sister. Girlfriend. Sister-girlfriend. It’s confusing.

For the first 10 days or so, while 8-month-old golden retriever Lucy (left) was getting used to her new environment (standing on the coffee table, gnawing the floor, that kind of thing), Maxi watched her with a somewhat bemused expression. You could almost see him thinking, ‘Vegetable, animal or mineral?’

Then she came on heat and that was one question well and truly answered.

So pervasive and public was the pooch pornography that at one stage Sara, who is generally completely fine as long as she’s with me (whether that be rappelling down the inside of a volcano - something I don’t, admittedly, do very often – or lolling about watching movies), performed satyagraha one evening when we were visiting next door: she sat down at the back door, on full alert and nose pointed unswervingly homeward, and refused to budge until I’d given in and removed her from the salacious environment.

Balu (no longer the Monster Baby, but certainly keen to teach Lucy a few tricks) was unfazed by the unrelenting shagging but a bit annoyed that it excluded her. And Lucy didn’t help by showing off – swaying past Maxi and driving him into lathers of lust, and then allowing herself to be rogered ragged while Balu looked on and barked frenziedly.

Fortunately I wasn’t there to witness the kinky stuff but Max and Lucy’s mom, T, took this photo to prove that straightforward sex is a gateway drug, and often leads to more extreme sexual behaviour, including fetishism, S&M, domination and being bridled and ridden like a horse.

The heat is off now (so to speak) and Maxi’s behaviour has returned to normal, but it’s going to take me a while to see him again as just our innocent, lollopy dog-child. As for Lucy, I doubt I shall ever be able to look her square in the eye again.

My best friend went to Mauritius and all he brought me back was this lousy anti-smoking picture

2011-07-04T10:14:00.003+02:00

Johann recently visited Mauritius and returned a chastened man. Not only because he had to keep up with The Indestructible Wife and their equally mad friend, A (two women who put the ‘rave’ in ‘depraved’), but also because the anti-smoking warnings on the cigarette boxes there are specifically designed to scare the hedonism clean out of you.

This picture* of a diseased heart in situ appeared on the carton of Dunhill he bought, and the pics on the packets themselves are equally terrifying. (Click here for an interesting story about the USA’s FDA’s decision to follow suit. But if you’re a smoker, you might want to light up first – you’ll need to calm your nerves.)

The recent history of the rise and fall of the cigarette is almost a modern parable about morality, and nowhere is this more obvious than on the endless (and I mean endless) repeats of 1970s, ’80s and ’90s movies we’re subjected to on poor-man’s DStv.**

In the 1970s and early ’80s, as seen on TV, everyone smoked – indeed, it wasn’t unusual to see a movie doctor in a hospital, delivering bad news to a woman (with big hair, shoulder pads and blue eyeshadow) in the waiting room, and offering her a cigarette as solace. Also, the good guys – both men and women – were seldom seen without a fag in hand at some point during the movie, giving added credence to the term ‘smouldering sexuality’.

In the late 1980s and ’90s, smoking started to fall seriously out of fashion. In movies made during this era, only the baddies smoked. In fact, that’s mainly how you could tell, ahead of their dismembering the non-smoking bikini-wearing college sex-kitten with a chainsaw, that they were baddies.

And I’m afraid I can’t comment on what’s happening in TV movies made in the 2000s, because we don’t get those on poor-man’s DStv.

On that subject, I don’t know how DStv station managers (or whatever they’re called) come up with their movie lists, but I assume it’s like this: someone, let’s call him Mr Universal, decides to start up a TV station – one that we who have poor-man’s DStv will get. Along with all the other capital costs, he invests in a modest stock (say, 20) of fifth-rate and/or decades-old and/or Canadian-made-for-TV movies, and these play on endless loops for the entire rest of the lifespan of the TV station, be this one year or one hundred.

Mr Universal also invests in an even smaller stock (say, 10) of ‘fillers’ called ‘Zoom In’ – these are ‘behind-the-scenes’ looks at usually good, mainstream movies that played on the circuit up to 10 years ago (and which, by dint of their very quality, will never, ever be shown on poor-man’s DStv). These are used as time-fillers between scheduled programmes, and it’s not unusual to see the same one several times in one day. This has the markedly double-negative effect of driving you almost out of your mind with boredom, and infuriating you because you know you’ll never actually see the featured movies on poor-man’s DStv.

* Johann didn’t really only bring me this. He also brought me two gorgeous cushion covers.
** Poor-man’s DStv = DStv compact.

Malmesbury business does it again!

2011-07-04T08:59:00.003+02:00

The Agrimark in Malmesburg is gigantic. It has an enormous retail section and, up a ramp, an equally huge warehouse which stocks… well, I’ll come to that.

Agrimark’s website boasts that it ‘aims to meet all agricultural requirements’, and also ‘provide in [sic] the needs of the outdoor and DIY enthusiast’.

Which I find a tad untruthful, as I’ve seldom been to Agrimark with my list of DIY requirements and left with any of them clutched in my hot little hand.

But, given the dearth of hardware outlets in this part of the world, I persevere in visiting Agrimark in the hope that one day I will leave with what I’ve come for.

Last week my list included:
• 2 L-shaped brackets from which to hang potplants
• an ordinary latch for a cupboard
• a tarpaulin
• a 135x150cm piece of lightweight material with which to cover my pool-pump housing

These four requirements, I’m sure you will agree, are precisely the kinds of things a shop 'providing in the needs of the outdoor and DIY enthusiast' should stock.

But no.

The brackets

I found some L-shaped brackets which were both ugly and expensive; then, after some rooting around, I found one L-shaped bracket that wasn’t too terribly ugly and wouldn’t break the bank. But I needed two.

After some wandering around looking alert and curious, I located an Agri assistant (the shop floor is so huge that these people seem to merge with the merchandise and have to be physically hunted down in order to get some service). I explained that I needed another of the not-too-ghastly and not-too-expensive L-shaped bracket I’d located under a pile of ghastly and expensive ones, and he agreed to go and see if one was in stock.

Allowing an Agri sales assistant to trot off to check the inventory is a somewhat worrisome exercise, because there is no guarantee you’ll ever see him again. In this case, however, he did return, but only to tell me that the cheaper, more attractive version was no longer stocked as ‘it doesn’t sell well’.

Even given that Malmesbury is the town that taste forgot, I found this hard to believe. First, why would anyone choose an expensive, nasty bracket over a cheaper, more attractive one? And, two, surely if stock of the cheaper, more attractive bracket is low, while that of the ugly, expensive one is plentiful, doesn’t that tell its own story?

But we’re dealing with Malmesbury here, so I put a little ‘x’ against ‘2 L-shaped brackets’ on my list.

The cupboard latch

I finally located the stock of cupboard latches but, bizarrely (or perhaps not – this is, after all, Malmesbury), there were about 50 right-hand bits (the piece that goes on one of the doors – let’s call it component A) and zero left-hand bits (the piece that goes on the other door and fits into the first bit, if you see what I mean – let’s call this one component B).

After another search, I tracked down another Agri assistant and pointed out this anomaly to him. He said (I’m not making this up), ‘Oh, yes, well, we assume that people looking for component A already have component B.’

I laughed. I honestly thought he was joking. But he didn’t laugh and I realised that he wasn’t. So I said, ‘That’s ridiculous. What about people who are looking for component A and component B – in other words, a complete latch system?’

He looked at me as if I’d just suggested he eat his own head.

‘And anyway,’ I continued (I am such a sucker for punishment), ‘wouldn’t you say that if your stock of component B is zero, and your stock of component A is plentiful, doesn’t that tell its own… Oh, forget it.’

I put a little ‘x’ against ‘cupboard latch’ on my list.

The tarpaulin

Since I already had an Agri sales assistant at hand, I launched straight into my next request. ‘Do you have tarpaulins?’ I asked.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘A tarpaulin. A groundsheet. Um… a big piece of plastic or canvas or some other study waterproof material,’ I said, somewhat desperately.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That’s upstairs in the warehouse.’

So I trundled up the ramp to the warehouse, where I found four Agri assistants sitting around having a chat. I had precisely the same conversation as above with one of them, who responded, ‘Ah. That’s downstairs in the retail section.’

So I put a little ‘x’ against ‘tarpaulin’ on my list.

The 150x135cm lightweight cover

This one was going to be a breeze – while I was up in the warehouse section, I spied, nailed to a wall, six samples in six different colours of light plastic that was exactly what I needed for my pool-pump housing. And not only that, but a big sign above them read, ‘Cut to any size and shape.’ My joy knew no bounds.

‘I’ll have a piece of that one,’ I said, pointing to the light-green sample, ‘cut to 150x135cm.’

‘We don’t stock it,’ the assistant said, examining his nails. ‘We have to order it special.’

By this time, I was doing something I often do in Malmesbury – while tamping down incipient hysteria, I was also furtively looking around for the hidden camera and fully expecting someone to jump out and scream, ‘You’ve been punk’d!’

Needless to say, that didn’t happen, and I had to put a little ‘x’ against ‘lightweight material’ on my list.

I did manage to let off a bit of steam. As I was leaving the store, I walked past a supposed dog-food display that contained (you’ve guessed it) no dog food. A sign above it read, ‘Are you wondering why there’s no dog food in this display?’ (The answer, in small print below, was, ‘It’s because we’re upgrading our product blah-de-blah…’)

It was too much for me. Like a madwoman, I shouted to the shop at large, ‘No, I’m not wondering why there’s no dog food in this display, because this store doesn’t stock anything that anyone needs, ever!’

Then I drove home and lay down for an hour with a wet flannel over my eyes.

Men of a Certain Age: art imitating life

2011-06-22T18:54:00.004+02:00

There’s nothing funny about the TV series Men of a Certain Age, although I did expect it to be. It stars Ray Romano, after all. He poked fun at himself in Everyone Loves Raymond, and we all chortled at the scrapes he got himself into as a result of (mainly) his silly male ego, and lifted our eyebrows along with his long-suffering wife.

Men of a Certain Age is billed as a ‘comedy-drama’ but it’s mainly drama. And while it hasn’t made me laugh, it has taught me some things. Because I am a Woman of a Certain Age – a creature long denigrated in popular culture and literature for being bitter about romance, stuck in her ways and dry in her vagina.

To open this discussion, let me recount a conversation I had with a friend, a Man of a Certain Age who we shall call, oh, Harry. Harry’s wife – a bombshell we shall call, say, Gloria – divorced him some time ago and swiftly went through two more husbands before settling on a 10-years-younger playmate to brighten the days of her dotage. For his part, Harry had serial disastrous romances before snagging a woman literally young enough to be his daughter – viz, when he brought her along to visit me, she kept company with my then-17-year-old son while Harry sat around with us ‘oldies’ (his contemporaries) and drank wine and discussed food, music and Zimmer frames.

For reasons that are too boring to go into, Harry somehow ended up at the same hotel resort as Gloria, and he later told me the story of this in clipped tones. He was watching Gloria, he said, from the window of his hotel bedroom (why? you might ask; but I didn’t), which overlooked the swimming pool. She and the younger boyfriend cavorted (Harry’s word) for a while, and then, when they decided to get out, the boyfriend (who I imagine is built – Gloria is not a small gal) picked her up, carried her effortlessly around the pool and deposited her on her lounger.

(I was already both loving Gloria and hating her by this time – a mixed emotion, incidentally, I’ve had about her ever since I met her 25 years ago when we were all young and she was ridiculously pretty.)

At this point in the story, Harry laughed derisively. ‘It was pathetic,’ he said. ‘I’m sure people watching would have thought it was his mother, and that she was afflicted, and had to be helped out of the pool.’

Uh, no, Harry, not at all. I’m sure most people watching her, like me, would have thought that both Gloria (who, even at our advanced age, is still a bombshell) and the younger boyfriend were exceedingly enviable. But, to my endless credit, I didn’t say that. What I did say was, ‘Wow, Harry, isn’t that a bit hypocritical?’ (Let me press the point: Harry’s girlfriend is 23; Harry is 47.)

You’d have thought I’d caught and killed a small helpless child right in front of him. He visibly recoiled, then spat, ‘YOU’RE ONE TO TALK!’

Now, let me say this in my own defence: I am far from without reproach in the romance department, save for the fact that I’ve managed to be married only once. I won’t go into the index of indiscretions I’ve notched up over 47 years, but I will say this: if I’ve ever consorted with anyone younger than me, (a) he’s never been biologically young enough to be my son (although admittedly in one case by a matter of months), and (b) I have seldom kissed and told. So Harry’s comeback was a matter of some mystery to me.

‘I’m prepared to admit to very many character flaws,’ I said, ‘but hypocrisy?’

Harry sneered. ‘Oh, come on!’ he said.

‘Well, I’m willing to be corrected. Tell me when I’ve been hypocritical,’ I said.

Harry shot me a look that, had I caught and killed that small helpless child, would instantly have burned it to ash.

‘Staring at me like that isn’t telling me anything,’ I said. ‘Speak.’

Harry grunted, angrily.

I won’t go into the rest of the conversation, since it continued in more or less this vein – me asking for information, Harry making various animal noises and looking furious. In the end, I just said, ‘Oh, okay then, I’m a hypocrite, let’s just forget it,’ because Harry’s friendship is more important to me than winning a stupid argument about who did what when, where and why.

The conversation upset me but, in retrospect, it actually put some things into perspective for me. I’ve had a few run-ins with Men of a Certain Age (ie, around my age) over the last few years, and none has ended happily. There was the man who upped and married a mindless bimbo (and who asked what I thought of her, and all I could offer was, ‘Well, she’s enthusiastic’); the man who suddenly turned into a hormonal 16-year-old and said things like ‘nice tits’ when a woman walked past us in a bar (and who took such offence when I pointed out that this wasn’t really on – at least, please, when I was there – that he’s never spoken to me again); the man whose midlife crisis took such inexplicable form that he changed overnight from a longtime buddy into a bitter ex-friend.

So, as I say, Men of a Certain Age isn’t a comedy, it’s a drama – both in real life and on the small screen. And it’s a bit of a shame, because Women of a Certain Age are (in my experience, anyway) certainly more about having fun than proving a point.

Maybe the truth is that men and women (and boys and girls) are just always tragically out of syn. I’ve put together this comparative table to explain this (and this is just my experience – if yours differs, I’d be delighted to know how). (And, before you point it out, yes, there are always exceptions!)

Age 6
Girls: think boys are smelly and yukky
Boys: think girls are boring yet somehow also maddeningly mysterious

Age 10
Girls: think boys are smelly and yukky
Boys: want to see girls’ private parts

Age 14
Girls: think boys are smelly (and they are)
Boys: want to touch (or, even better, see) girls’ boobs

Age 16
Girls: think boys are stupid yet somehow also maddeningly desirable
Boys: want to get girls to have sex with them

Age 20
Women: wish boys would just grow up already – they’re such children!
Men: want to get women to have sex with them

Age 25
Women: wish men would get over their obsession with football/motorcycling/porn long enough to take them on just one proper romantic date, for godsake
Men: want to get women to have sex with them

Age 30
Women: want to have babies
Men: will have babies with women if that’s what it takes to get women to have sex with them

Age 35
Women: wish men would do a bit more about the house and help with the kids
Men: wish women would get out of their face so they could do more football/motorcycling/porn

Age 40
Women: having shucked the useless husband, rearing their kids alone and streaming ahead in their career, regard men as sex toys – necessary, but only now and again
Men: swear off marriage forever and start haunting clubs and trying out tired pickup lines (but only on women under 30); change their ex-wife’s name on the cellphone to ‘rancid bitch’.

Age 45
Women: if not in a more-or-less permanent relationship with a younger man, have ‘friends with benefits’ arrangements; have paid off their house and drive a nice (but not topless) car
Men: having been burnt several times by younger women, gather in bars to share war stories, but still say ‘nice tits’ to any attractive female who walks past; buy a motorbike, join a gym, have hair implants, start wearing jeans and takkies

Age 50
Women: either settled down with the pool boy or happily single and having occasional but discreet recreational sex; the kids have left home so they’re either travelling or spending money making their home gorgeous and/or buying beautiful clothes
Men: regretting not having formed proper relationship with their kids, so now scrabbling for foothold as ‘fathers’; dating their gym instructor; living in stupidly expensive rented ‘bachelor pad’

Age 55
Women: either go gay or give up men altogether (other than as friends); celebrate the stoppage of their periods; value walking as exercise; love cooking and do it well; belong to so many clubs and societies that their diaries are indecently full
Men: marry their gym instructor; buy a house they can’t afford

Age 60
Women: are excellent grandmothers; garden enthusiastically; write books.
Men: get arthritis; suffer from indigestion; go bankrupt

Age 70
Women: go to India to bliss out at an ashram
Men: die (unless the gym instructor has already killed them)

Annoyed by noise

2011-06-22T16:21:00.001+02:00

Lerato Tshabalala wrote, in her column in last weekend’s Sunday Times Lifestyle, about how she’s ‘at that age where noise irritates me – especially where there shouldn’t be any’. Her example was how the experience of going to the movies is ruined by people who bring along inappropriately young kids, munch on popcorn, and chat to each other and on their cellphones during the show.

I’ve long been annoyed by unwelcome noise, and a few weeks ago, when on what should have been my daily dose of mountain serenity, I was so infuriated by it that I momentarily wished I had a blunderbuss handy. It was a Saturday morning and early enough for the sun to just be clearing the distant mountains, so the village below me was slumbering in weekend bliss. There was scattered birdsong, and the occasional far-off moos and baas of livestock.

Suddenly, from behind a patch of trees down on the other side of the village, a tremendous noise erupted. It sounded like 20 power mowers all being turned on at the same time, which in fact wasn’t far off the truth: it was a microlight, blundering up off the ground like a giant drunken bumblebee. This obnoxious machine revved its way clear over the village and up the side of the mountain, then motored along the scarp in a slow, infuriatingly loud manner. What was happening is that the SINGLE occupant of this stupid contraption was getting a lovely, long bird’s-eye view of the village and valley below, while encroaching in the most insufferable way on the peace of its 2 000-plus inhabitants.

It reminded me of a morning some time ago in Yzerfontein, which is a dozy little fishing village on the Cape West Coast where I used to own a flat. I woke up to the usual delightful low-key harmony of swishing waves and twittering seabirds, which was suddenly broken by an appalling noise, very similar to that of the microlight. Stumbling out onto the verandah and staring maniacally seawards, I spotted – a jetskiier. With due respect to those of you who own and ride jetskis, I can’t think of a more brainless way to pass time on the water – hairing at noisy high speed hither and thither. And, in this case too, this SINGLE individual was getting whatever thrills jetskiing gave him at the price of the peace of the +- thousand residents of the town.

Some animals, too, can be clamour-monsters, and the three little dachshunds who live over the road from me are currently in first place for noise pollution. They yap frantically at everything that moves and many things that don’t. So hectic are they, in fact, that if I open one of my kitchen windows (which give onto the road and face the house opposite), all three of them rush to their fence, splay their back legs and bark their bloody heads off at me. They drive everyone in our road crazy.

One of my own cats, Evan, is also a racket-hazard, although he only bothers me – if he’s shut in at night, he mews to be let out; if he’s shut out, he mews to be let in. I love him, but sometimes I truly hate him.

So I’d like to see one of the circles of hell reserved for people who make a noise where there shouldn’t be any: I’d like all microlighters and jetskiiers, and people who talk during movies, to be stuck permanently in a room together over the road from the three high-decibel dachshunds, with my cat Evan as permanent company, eternally whining to be let out or let in.

Getting the kids out the house

2011-06-15T17:32:00.004+02:00

I find myself in a somewhat unplanned-for situation. Just when I thought my sprogs would be off my hands, studying to be rocket scientists or the writers of the next Great South African Novel (or, you know, washing cars or dishes for a living), they’re both back home again.

I wrote a column about this for parent24, in fact, some years ago; I didn’t think at the time it would come back to haunt me quite so soon.

So, to prevent my daughter lolling about in the living room and plaiting her hair into ever-smaller braids (I’m worried it might eventually all fall out, and guess who’s going to have to cough up for implants if it does?), I signed her up on a cake-decorating course.

She came back with these little treasures. And – bonus – they’re very delicious too!

Relaxing in the autumn sun

2011-06-15T17:17:00.003+02:00

Having two (three if Maxi’s visiting) dogs, four cats and a flock of hens (one of which, Goldie, is a nut-job) makes for sometimes stressful inter-species (and, indeed, intra-species) interaction. And especially where this cat, Flossie, is concerned – she is the half-cat, half-badger non-conformist member of the household.

At night, she creeps onto my bed and snuggles up to me in the most endearing way. But during the day, if she encounters me anywhere in the house or garden, she flees in apparent terror. And if I see her sleeping in the sun somewhere and approach her to give her a friendly little cuddle, she shies away from me as if all I ever do is beat her. It’s a bit disturbing.

So these pictures are particularly sweet. Not only is Flossie relaxing in the autumn sun with human and canine, she’s also generously allowing herself to be petted. Aaaaaw!

Another way to uncork wine

2011-06-15T16:46:00.005+02:00

I’m a bit of a fan of eco-friendly packaging, so at first sight I really liked this classy-looking glass wine-bottle stopper, which my brother-in-law, Buzz, introduced to me a few weeks ago in a bottle of Danie de Wet Chardonnay.

When I began researching it I was surprised to find that it’s been around since 2006. But, interestingly, nowhere can I unearth anything about its environmental impact. One thing I can tell you – it’s not readily reusable, as it doesn’t fit all wine bottles.

Can anyone throw any light on its carbon footprint?

‘If I’d known they’d turn out like this, I would have fed them to the shark’

2011-06-09T09:47:00.008+02:00

That was Johann’s take on what I should have said when he saw this appalling picture of me and my kids, taken at the Two Oceans Aquarium a few weeks ago – the shark in question being the big fish in the first Two Oceans pic we posed for (below), for the cover of Getaway magazine way back in 1997, when my sprogs were just 5 and 4 years old. (Patrick Wagner, the photographer who took the pic, died in a plane crash in Kenya the following year.)

We are not a photogenic family, as any regular reader of salma will be able to attest, but the recent Two Oceans pic really did take the cake – or that’s what it appears both my children have eaten, and lots of it. They are big people in real life – my son stands well over 6 foot – but believe me when I say this photograph seriously packs on the pounds. As for me, ‘You look like you’ve been sprinkled with dust by the Acid Fairy,’ said my daughter.

The photographer clearly found us a challenge – this was one of about five pics he took, and after each one he looked at his preview screen and frowned embarrassedly, then asked us to pose for another. In the end, it came down to choosing the best of a truly bad bunch, and we just picked the one that had the most fish in it.

We were so hysterical over this picture that we could hardly eat the sarmies we bought at a Waterfront restaurant afterwards – and it was just as well we were weak with mirth, because the bill was no laughing matter: R260 for three fairly simple sandwiches and three Grapetisers. Wow, way to rip us off, The Waterfront!

We took these pics ourselves with a camera-phone – see, we’re not monsters!
(And we managed to get the shark in this one.)

A toothache...

2011-05-18T09:32:00.001+02:00

The last time I had any teeth extracted it was my wisdoms in my early 20s (which Johann would probably say explains a lot). All four were impacted and the extractions were done under general anaesthetic. It was a largely unmemorable experience, except that when I returned six weeks later for a checkup, both the dentist and his nurse behaved rather oddly – giggling and whispering behind their hands and looking slyly at me. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more and asked them what was going on. Apparently I had gone completely mad as I came out of the anaesthetic, tried to punch the dentist, swore my head off and had to be restrained. I couldn’t remember any of this and they wouldn’t give me details, which I thought a little unfair.

Since then I’ve had a few unhappy adventures with the big molars at the back of my mouth and several concurrent unpleasant dental experiences. There was the dentist who tried to pull one of them, ending up quite literally with her foot braced against the chair in the attempt, before wiping her brow and giving up, and deciding to take an X-ray to see what the problem was (better late than never, eh?). The X-ray showed, alarmingly, that two of the three roots were entwined in my sinuses. ‘Just as well I didn’t manage,’ she said cheerfully, ‘I would have pulled half your face off.’

And there was the miserably hungover dentist who did some questionable emergency root-canal work on another large molar – I don’t hold him entirely to blame, as he did me the favour of dragging himself out of bed at 4 in the morning to put me out of my agony. But that’s the tooth that’s given me trouble for years – the crown has fallen off and been replaced a couple of times, and finally an infection developed in the root and earlier this week my current dentist said he’d have to pull it. And while he hammered and chiselled away at it, he told me something interesting.

Extractions in the chair used to be a big part of dentistry – at one stage, in the 1960s and ’70s, problem teeth were simply pulled (sometimes entire mouths of them) and replaced with dentures.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the thinking changed: then, everything possible was done to save the tooth, from fillings and root canal to crowns and bridges. Extractions fell completely out of favour.

Nowadays, there is the option of an implant – an individual synthetic tooth screwed into the jawbone on an indestructible titanium post. Although these come with a hefty pricetag (my dentist quoted me R10 000 for mine, which is the reason I shall probably see out the rest of my life with a sizeable gap at the back of my mouth), they are very handy replacements for comes to problem teeth, and for this reason, extraction has come back into fashion. But, interestingly, because dentists of a certain age – those who trained and practised in the 1980s and ’90s – did so few extractions, some of them apparently don’t know how to do this safely, and will refer their patients to either a much older or a much younger dentist to pull teeth in the chair.

I asked my dentist – who appears around my own age and therefore would probably fall into the ‘no-extractions’ category – if he’d done many. ‘This is my first,’ he said, and then waited until I’d reared up in the chair in panic before adding, ‘… today.’ Har-de-har-har.

… and a pain in the bum

I’d just like to give a shout-out to Officer GD Erasmus of the Swartland Metropolitan Police. He waved me down this morning at 8am outside the next town (five kilometres from where I live), when I was driving back from my customary early-morning mountainside walk with my dogs, and asked for my driver’s licence. ‘Oh, I live down the road,’ I said. ‘I’ve just taken the dogs for a walk up on the mountain, so obviously I didn’t bring my licence with me.’ The dogs, still lathered up from their run, wagged their tails in the back seat – it was clear I wasn’t making up a story.

‘You must carry your licence, it is The Law,’ he said, and took out his fines pad.

‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ I said. ‘Come on, if you’re going to be such a stickler, let me just go home and get my licence. I’ll be five minutes, if that.’

‘You have broken The Law and now you must pay,’ he said, and fined me R500.

Thanks, Officer Erasmus. I’ll sleep much easier tonight, knowing that you’re out there, upholding The Law. And I promise, tomorrow, when I leave home for my carefree morning stroll with my dogs, it will be with their leads in one hand and my bloody driver's licence in the other.

And on to happier things…

2011-05-02T16:33:00.003+02:00

We’ve had quite a bit of chaos here recently, and through it all Balu and Sara have endured, sense of humour intact. Dear things.

Balu has licked every person coming in (and, often, going out) as if her very life depended on it; quickly, the dozens of strangers through the gate every day clocked her raised hackles and frenzied barking to mean ‘Hiyyaaa!’ (in a good way). Lood of Fluksnuts, especially, won her heart – even if he’d just stepped out the gate for a second, when he came back, Balu greeted him with licky abandon, as if she hadn’t seen him for at least a year, and Lood good-naturedly returned the favour (minus, um, the licks).

Sara has been less enthusiastic about the people influx but no less willing to accept that for weeks on end her living environment has been turned upside-down and sometimes she can’t even be in it.

The one dog disaster was, of course, Balu’s fault. Caine, the master-plasterer, spent special time plastering the edges of the Zen garden, and later, because the dogs had been inside all day, I thoughtlessly let them out and didn’t keep an eye on them. Balu immediately barrelled straight across a plastered section, destroying hours of work. Caine’s fury was terrifying. The dogs (and I) spent the next two days cowering inside.

Immutable

2011-04-30T00:23:00.004+02:00

My son turned 21. Wow.

True Blue & Zen Karoo: The Wine House

2011-04-29T22:59:00.027+02:00

The garden has to establish itself and there are a few other structural changes to come but we're almost there.

Before: front

2001

2011

After: front

Before: side

2001

After: side

Before: back

2005

After: back

Before: back

2009

After: back

And...

The Zen garden

Colyn christens the firepit

Balu loving the Karoo beds

Stonework

Kees's weather vane

Rosemary sink

Neil Diamond: a 24-carat gem

2011-04-12T13:23:00.000+02:00

My friend Amanda and I didn’t think we’d find an ‘old rockers’ experience to match Smokie, who we saw at Grand West in 2008 – but then, how were we to know that the incomparable Neil Diamond would, at age 71, embark on a World Tour that included Cape Town?

I was in no rush to book our seats – I am, after all, regularly sneered at by my friends for my devotion to The Solitary Man, and didn’t for a minute think I’d have to hustle to secure our places when 36 000 tickets were up for grabs. So when, a week later, a news report told me that they were almost sold out, I rushed to my nearest Computicket – and, indeed, there were only a few seats left, dotted here and there about the stadium.

It was the biggest seated concert ever staged in the Western Cape – and yeah, yeah, you can laugh all you like about the fact that there was no standing room other than for those with Zimmer frames, but you’ve got to hand it to him: the silky-voiced septuagenarian played an energetic two-hour concert to a stadium packed with screaming fans.

Politely screaming fans, that is: the audience was (as Amanda noted, and included herself and me) largely fair, fat and forty – white and middle-aged. And because – let’s face it – Neil was never a renegade rocker, everyone there was incredibly well-behaved. There was a total absence of drunken delirium or drugged-up hysteria; rather, we all sang and swayed and clapped politely, and the only breach of civility was in the occasional wolf-whistle and heart-felt shouts of ‘Neil, we love you!’

And the crowd goes (mildly) mad: Neil sings 'Sweet Caroline'.

Neil himself led this low-key charge: his on-stage presence was – given that he was playing to tens of thousands – almost intimate; he spoke directly to his audience in a laid-back way that made it feel as if he were playing down at his local pub (with, admittedly, a very large and accomplished backing band). After singing one of his love ballads, he remarked, ‘I’m watching you guys, and I can see that the men and the women here react differently to my songs. The women listen carefully to the lyrics; the men stare up at the spotlights, and I can see them thinking, I wonder how they make them work?’

But he was playing to a stadium of 36 000 people, and here, perhaps, was the only drawback – in our R550 seats, Neil was so far away that he looked like an ant. And for people of a certain age (as we, and most of his audience, are), this isn’t ideal. It took a lot of eye-squinting to make him out waaaaay down there on the stage, and eventually it made more sense just to watch the twin big screens to get the measure of the man. Which begs the question: wouldn’t it be more comfortable (and much cheaper) to watch one of his live concerts on DVD?

I suppose it’s not just about ‘seeing’ the man live (even if it is from half a kilometre away), it’s the whole bang-shoot – the hype and build-up, the getting to the concert and going home afterwards, the sharing of the experience with so many like-minded people*, and of course the truly fabulous sound. Cape Town Stadium’s acoustics are brilliant, and hearing Neil sing was a once-in-a-lifetime deal – especially since he sounds exactly the same live as he does on his records, even those recorded 50 years ago.

* Not everyone, of course, is as big a fan of Neil’s as the 36 000 people gathered there last night. The man sitting behind us asked the woman next to him, ‘So why isn’t John here?’ And she replied, ‘Because he said he’d rather stay at home and stick pins in his eyes than go to a Neil Diamond concert.’

A word about our beautiful city

I lived in Cape Town for 20 years before I moved to Riebeek Kasteel, and I always thought it an exceptionally beautiful city – but the improvements that were implemented for last year’s World Cup have transformed it into a real gem.

Cape Town Stadium is simply mind-blowing – not only is it monumentally gorgeous, it’s so cleverly designed that even a huge press of people can move in and out of it without any of the queuing, pushing and shoving that usually marks human movement on a grand scale.

The old Greenpoint traffic circle, now elevated on elegant concrete plinths above a pedestrian walkway, is a wonder of modern engineering and materials.

And walking back through the Waterfront towards the CBD after the concert was an adventure in itself – every building we passed was a little artwork in its own right, and the way everything has been designed to cater for pedestrians (including, all along the route, traffic marshalls with lights who stopped vehicles to allow people to cross roads on foot) is just so impressive.

Clearing out

2011-04-06T18:40:00.000+02:00

I have a store-room which is so artfully built into my front verandah that it’s easy to overlook. So I overlook it. Except on those occasions when I have things that I don’t know what to do with, then I put them in there.

‘Putting them in there’ was once a fairly normal activity that involved unlocking the door, finding a space on the floor or a shelf, and putting the thing there, then locking the door again. As time went by, however, and the store-room became more and more populated, ‘putting them in there’ became, first, sloppy – unlock door and kind of chuck it in, then relock the door while thinking, Hmm, I should really sort out the store-room some time – then tinged with madness – unlock the door and chuck it in hard and high, hoping it doesn’t either rebound or dislodge a pile of crap and bring it barrelling down on you, then slam shut the door and relock it (sometimes while pushing your shoulder against it, because the press of things inside was so strong) while thinking, Hmm, I should really sort out the store-room some time.

The ‘things’ I put in there were, apparently: broken chairs (an amazing number of them, I discovered today – how did I get so many chairs, and why are so many of them broken?); boxes and boxes and boxes of tiles left over from tiling projects (and definitely a disproportionate number of leftover tiles given the number of tiling projects I’ve actually done in this house – perhaps they multiply when left for long enough in a dark, spider-infested place?); so many tins of leftover paint in various sizes and shades that I really began wondering if someone else had maybe also been using my store-room as a kind of communal DIY dumpsite; financial records going back over a decade which I’m too scared to chuck out in case someone steals my identity and marries me to an illegal immigrant; spare mattresses; camping equipment; many bags and baskets; suitcases (literally, suitcases) of old curtains (from where??)…

So, very little of value.

And the store-room would have remained thus, an invisible blot on an unseen landscape, only ever entered into briefly, and with shame and half-shut eyes, like an affair with a 26-year-old photocopier salesman, if I hadn’t been required by the builders to open it so that they could get to a window whose frame required repainting.

The builders’ reaction reminded me of when my family moved, when I was a girl of about 9 years old or so, from a small Johannesburg miner’s house into a palatial mansion in a more salubrious suburb. I think the reason my mother agreed to buy the house was the built-in wardrobes in her and my dad’s bedroom – mirrored marvels, they stretched from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, ran quietly as a whisper on runners, and had enough space to store a Cape Town Fashion Week’s worth of raiments.

So how was I to know, when a friend of my mother’s visited and was given the Grand Tour around the new house (and I trailed along behind), not to throw open the wardrobes to show them off? All I recall of the actual incident was how my mother’s eyes suddenly widened, and her desperate grab to try to stop the doors from sliding all the way open. But I clearly recall the aftermath: my mother firmly pointing out to me that Some Doors Are Best Left Closed. (I realise now that my mother was probably less than neat – one of the many genetic gifts she’s bequeathed me.)

Anyway, when I opened the store-room today, the builders were clearly gobsmacked. Not only did several broken chairs fall out onto our feet, but beyond the pile that had accumulated around the door was a fetid mountain of … things. As the builders cut their eyes at each other and exchanged thin-lipped smirks, I thought, Hmm, I really should sort out the store-room some time.

So I did.

The builders, bless them, took all the chairs – they are handy, they will fix them – and the curtains and some of the mattresses and most of the bags and baskets; and my friend Willie-of-the-Lorry took an entire flat-bed truck’s worth of things down to the dump (excluding my financial records, which I will burn in my new firepit once it’s built).

And let me say this about hoarding (although you probably already know it): there’s very little you keep in case you will need it some day, that you will ever actually need some day.

PS. I have kept all the tiles.

Preparing a time capsule

2011-04-06T17:27:00.000+02:00

Several truckloads of rubble are soon to be dumped into my back garden, which will raise it about two metres – and which I’m hoping will finally be the Zen section of my new Karoo-Zen garden, although I must say at the moment I just can’t imagine living with anything other than noise, dust and confusion.

My kids and I decided that we’re going to bury a time capsule under the rubble, with the romantic notion that one day in the very distant future, in some post-Apocalyptic world, it will be found and we’ll become the Mrs Pleses of some yet-to-be-established new human society.

First, we decided what the time capsule would be - a plastic ice-cream container, since plastic takes a very long time to decompose, and in ideal conditions (without exposure to sun, moisture and bacterial activity, for instance) can last thousands of years. (Which is why, incidentally, they shouldn't be going into our landfills.)

Then, over the course of a warm autumn evening, sitting outside on the veranda, we each wrote a letter describing who we are and what we do, and also made a list of what to include in the time capsule.

It all started out politely enough, but obviously we opened a bottle of wine to feed our creativity, and, coupled with the arrival of a variety of people during the next few hours who all added their suggestions, and several more bottles of wine, things did get a bit messy.

I made up the time capsule today (in a somewhat desperate bid to get the goddess of construction, Cloacina, to blow some speed into the garden project), and had to laugh at how the handwriting in all three of our letters had deteriorated over the course of two foolscap pages and about four hours (and mine was – surprise! – stained with red wine). My daughter’s letter is incomplete and stops in the middle of a sentence – which will be an interesting thing for those people of the future to ponder over (did her mother suddenly up and kill her? anything is possible).

I also had some trouble finding everything on the list – several of these suggestions were added by the various droppers-in: a cockroach (dead, I presume; although I would imagine there would still be enough of those living even thousands of years from now, not to make them a vital inclusion); a spark plug (!); an iPod (yeah, right – I don’t even have one of those for my own use, never mind a spare one to bury); a head of marijuana (which just seems a waste); a tampon with the instruction leaflet (!!); and Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 (I wonder who the literary soul was?).

The things from the list I could find and did include were: the letters, copies of our birth certificates, lots of photographs, a lock of each of our hair, a champagne cork with its wire basket and some current South African stamps. I also tore a few pages out of our current valley handbook and folded them in; they include a short history of the area, and lots of information about where you can eat and sleep here, and what you can see and do.

And I added: my kids’ milk teeth (I once thought about making them into a necklace but… no), a packet of condoms, a flash drive with PR information about Cape Town on it, some old South African coins (1990), and the coin we found in the back garden (with an explanatory note), which in its own way is a little time capsule itself.

Given that the container is small (it’s a 5-litre ice-cream tub), is there anything I should still add that you think humanity of the future would be thrilled to find?

They’re everywhere, they’re everywhere!

2011-04-05T07:19:00.000+02:00

I always knew Balu the Monster Baby was special, and now I know why: she’s part of a secret breed that is slowly but surely taking over the world.

These three mixed-breed dogs aren’t related in any way at all but the resemblance between them is uncanny. They’re all medium-sized dogs with a strong border collie component in their black shaggy coat and fountainy tail; and all three also have a tan muzzle, collarbones and legs, and (especially) ‘Rottweiler eyebrows’.

The first picture is of my very own Balu, who is the known product of a border collie and a chocolate Labrador (ie, definitely no Rottweiler).

This one is of Stanley, who lives up the road from us. Stan, a 'pavement special', is a very energetic dog in which the border collie is strong (he’s obsessed with playing ‘fetch’) but who’s also a fantastic water-retriever (which makes me wonder if there isn’t Labrador in him too). Stan’s owner, Chris, says that he met some people on the weekend who had a mixed-breed who (again!) very closely resembled these dogs, complete with the ‘Rottweiler eyebrows’. (See? quietly taking over the planet.)

And this one lives with her owner, Kristine, in Chicago, on the other side of the globe!

I rest my case.

More noise! (But this time I’m making it)

2011-04-01T12:06:00.000+02:00

I’ve posted before about the noise I’ve endured since I moved to this small country town over a decade ago, and now it seems I’m getting my own back.

I have builders. I have lots of builders. I have builders installing fascias and gutters, repairing walls, painting, mixing concrete in a concrete mixer, pouring foundations, using jackhammers to loosen rock-hard soil and chainsaws to cut down trees… I have builders cutting, hammering, yanking, carrying, wheelbarrowing, driving bakkies, emptying bakkies, filling bakkies... The commotion is incredible.

But, yesterday, even in the midst of all this, there was one sound that was driving me absolutely nuts.

While I was working in my study (which, being a home office, is right in the middle of this maelstrom), I heard someone out on the front verandah having what seemed to be a long, bossy and one-sided conversation with (I assumed) the foreman. She went on and on and on, until I thought, Oh, for goodness sake, give the poor man a chance to get a word in!

I just had to find out who this garrulous person was, so I crept into my kitchen and peeked out. The verandah was empty. And yet the woman was rabbiting on.

Strange, I thought, and went to the front door and threw it open. And there was a transistor radio, tuned to a talk station, babbling loudly away, with no-one around but me to hear it. All the builders had moved to the other side of the house to do some hammering, yammering and clamouring there.

I stalked outside and switched off the bloody thing, then went back to my study to work. But about an hour later, the chattering was back.

This time, I didn’t bother with the curtain-twitching – I dashed to the front door, flung it open and stared around wildly, intending to crap on whomever was insisting on this additional noise element. But no-one was there. Someone had evidently come to the front verandah (perhaps to fetch a tool of some sort), noticed the radio had been switched off, switched it back on again, then returned to the other side of the house.

God! I thought only teenagers left radios on in unoccupied rooms, but apparently builders do too. Perhaps they also switch and leave on lights for the mere joy of doing so, and open the fridge then stand contemplatively in front of it for several minutes, scratching their bums. Maybe they are also incapable of finding their socks without shouting, ‘Maaa! I can’t find my socks!’

I switched the damned thing off and went back inside.

An hour later… well, let’s just say The Battle of the Transistor Radio was on.

Throughout the course of the day, I turned off the radio three times, and it was turned back on by a mystery person three times. Still, I may have lost the battles, but I won the war: the transistor radio is no longer in evidence. I am getting some hostile looks, however, from one of the builders, so I’m pretty sure I know who the owner of the radio is.

Oh crap

2011-04-01T10:45:00.000+02:00

I so love my new deep-red winter sheets, and wasted no time in sticking them in the washing machine so that I could have fresh-smelling linen on my bed. I threw in a few other 'whites' to make up the load, because everyone knows that bedlinen is colour-fast.

Not.

I'm happy with my newly pink bra, but my son isn't so thrilled with his no-longer-crispy-white jockeys.

You go, Grandad! (and a short partial family history)

2011-03-10T17:53:00.000+02:00

I remember my then-teenaged cousin David’s gobsmacked horror at happening upon, in the 1980s, at his local hangout Father’s Moustache in Durban (since closed), our grandfather, who was then well into his 60s.

My maternal grandfather, Jack, is one of the only real male nurses I’ve ever come across - the other one, unreal, being the unspeakably annoying Ben Stiller character in the movie Meet the Parents. He and my grandmother – a feisty woman who, my mother told us when we were kids, as a cautionary tale against smoking (or maybe against powdered eggs), often swapped the family’s powdered-egg rations for cigarettes during The War – were Scots immigrants to what was then Rhodesia. They had already lost two children to the rigours of the Scots winter and their youngest, their only son, was a frail creature, so it was south to warmer climes with them. My mother and her father, Jack, came out as the family vanguard on one of the Union Castle liners (my mother, then all of 18, had the menu, signed by the crew, for years), then travelled by train across the vast wild hinterland of South Africa before crossing the border and arriving, finally, in what was then Salisbury. Pic: Jack with me at my wedding in 1986. I love how beautifully he's dressed, and his shades. He died not long after this pic was taken.

Jack had secured a job as a male nurse (he was not a porter – we kids were often reminded of that) at the government hospital there, and he was given a tiny house in the hospital grounds. We often travelled there from Johannesburg for Christmas holidays when we were kids – my mom and dad and three of us kids (and, some time later, four) in the Studebaker station wagon on those paired cement strips that passed for roads, with extra fuel in the boot and warm apples and stinky hardboiled eggs in a picnic basket at my mom’s feet. And sucking sweets called Sparklers – endless Sparklers, for when the heat began to overcome us and, three kids crowded together in the back seat, we began to kick each other. (I still can’t suck a Sparkler and not feel hot air, prickly thirst and an itching irritation that can only be relieved if I pull someone’s hair.)

Jack’s house in Salisbury was tiny – even as a littlie I knew that. It had only two bedrooms, one leading into the other, and, when they finally all arrived in the new, death-free promised land (back in the 1950s), my mother and her two sisters slept together in one, and Jack and my grandmother Elizabeth and their frail son Robert in the other. I can’t remember how they accommodated all of us – five extra people – when we visited over Christmas holidays, but I don’t remember any discomfort so I suppose, in the way of children, we just curled up like puppies and were happy to sleep anywhere as long as our tummies were full and there were people around who loved us. Pic: My grandmother Elizabeth with me and my mom and my little sister Beverley, probably taken in what was then Rhodesia in about 1966/7.

Later, our Rhodesian family was caught in the vortex of the Bush War there, and some members were lost and/or badly damaged. Others moved as the situation worsened, and Jack and Elizabeth ended up living over the docks in Durban harbour. It wasn’t ideal but at a time when my dad was helping other members of my mom’s family relocate, and trying to raise a family of his own when journalists weren’t exactly the flavour of the month in South Africa, it was the best they could do.

Later still, my dad built a house in Salt Rock, on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast, which we would go to for holidays – by then, two cars were required to ferry a family of six plus two dogs and often several hangers-on. And, of course, provisions for a three-week shift from our shambly Jozi home.

It was during one of those holidays, when Jack and Elizabeth came up from their Durban-harbour flat to spend some time with us, that we realised that Elizabeth – a child of the First World War and a slum start; having weathered the deaths of two children, a continent’s move and a civil conflict; and now into a dotage rubbing shoulders with Durban’s port prostitutes – was starting to lose her grip. They missed their flight up to Joburg (to see other members of the family) because the air tickets had been unaccountably lost – they were there just minutes before! – and after my dad, in his no-shit way, had conducted a search worthy of a forensic detective’s, he found them in Elizabeth’s luggage. She said she had no memory of putting them there. I believe she didn’t. Poor Elizabeth.

Anyway! Elizabeth died, finally, of undetected and untreated cancer that had metastasised madly – she was of a generation that didn’t like to have their ‘privates’ examined, so bore up for years with intense pain; I remember her often sitting sideways, so as not to stress her sore bottom bits.

And Jack, freed from long years of responsibility and perhaps having to deal with severe weirdness (because Elizabeth did prove herself, ultimately, to be a gifted kleptomaniac – stealing her own air tickets was very much the cream on top of a deep, rich dessert), became a Grandad Gone Wild. He kept unsociable hours in the company of unsuitable people, and that’s why my cousin David bumped into him at Father’s Moustache – he was there dancing.

And I come, now, finally, to the point of this post.

My own father – grandfather to my own grown-up children – is 76 years old. And this last weekend, he got his wallet lifted.

Was he queueing to get his pension? No.

Was he in a crowded place where tea and biscuits were being served? No.

Was he in a doctor’s waiting room, perhaps? No.

Okay, then – was he milling about at a Feed the Elders outing at a chi-chi wine farm? Uh-uh.

A crowded dinner for captains of industry? Nyet.

He was at The Bronx.

Pic: My dad and me in 1980. He was cool then, he's cool now.

Meet the author: Tony Park’s South African book tour

2011-03-01T08:08:00.000+02:00

Tony Park is one of the hardest-working writers I know. Not only does he produce two books a year (one fiction, one non-fiction), and maintain several blogs, he’s also a publisher’s dream when it comes to promotion. And his latest book tour, to promote The Delta, is proof of that. Mrs Blog (Tony’s wife) showed me his promotion schedule, and it’s the kind of 10-day blitz that most normal people would require an intravenous feed of Red Bull to manage.

Fortunately for his publishers, Tony isn’t normal. His gigantic editorial output is matched by his capacity for intake – of wine, beer, rich food and meeting the endless streams of people that a whistle-stop cross-country promotional tour requires.

He’s also remarkably unsnobby, which is why the small West Coast town of Darling made it onto his The Delta promotions list. So innocuous is this little village that when I invited my kids to come along with me to the promotional evening in Darling, my son said, in some surprise, ‘Do you mean our Darling?’ (‘Our’ Darling, because it’s a mere 40-minute drive away, which makes it one of our neighbours.)

The other reason Tony did a promotion in Darling is the town’s remarkable book shop, the Book League. This thriving little business started as a mail-order outfit, and is now also a fully fledged retail store, stocked with everything a bibliophile of any age may desire (their children’s section is wonderful). For a book lover who lives in a town serviced only by a satellite branch of a second-hand book trader (Wellington Book Traders, which lays claim to a small corner of one of our clothing stores), this was a treat indeed. And the fact that the Book League is sited in a leafy courtyard serviced by a coffee shop, and with two resident cats, made it all the more delightful. (My son thought he’d died and gone to heaven: his favourite things in life, in order of preference, are books, cats and cake.)

So we duly arrived at 5pm, as requested, and I must admit I had some moments of expecting the worst: we were, for at least 20 minutes, the only guests. But our hosts, Wendy and Anne, fed us wine and invited us to help ourselves to the snacks, and soon enough other people started to arrive. And by the time Tony and Mrs Blog pitched (they’d got caught in traffic leaving Cape Town), the courtyard was jammed with Tony Park fans – more people, in fact, than Tony had entertained at a big book chain in Cape Town.

Tony gave one of his signature funny, self-effacing talks, and was presented with a book by a member of the local book club, then he spent an hour chatting with his fans. And then his hosts were kind enough to invite my kids and I to join the VIPs for dinner, which was a well-oiled affair in a pleasant local eatery.

Tony will be making appearances in Durban North (today), Sandton City (tomorrow) and Brooklyn in Pretoria (on Friday). Go and meet him.

Miffed in Malmesbury (again)

2011-02-22T23:59:00.000+02:00

I so wish I’d written this while I was still fired up with ire, but alas real life intervened and I am now no longer burning with righteous fury. And anyway, if I had to vent my spleen every time I got crap service in Malmesbury, I wouldn’t have a spleen left to vent, so it’s probably just as well.

Last week I popped into my ‘local’ DVD-rental store (in Malmesbury – the actual local ones aren’t worth bothering about) and bought three DVDs on ‘sell-through’. For those who don’t know about ‘sell-through’, these are the DVDs that have been rented out a gazillion times, and are now being sold to the weak of mind (or those who are geographically disadvantaged by not having a Musica within a 100km radius) at a frankly usurous price. I didn’t think - silly me! - to check if all the DVDs were in a usable state because (get this) I assume that if someone is going to lighten my wallet by 60 bucks for a DVD that’s been rented out a gazillion times, they’re selling me something that is in a usable state.

I drove home, unpacked the groceries, did a few other chores (not really, but I don’t want you to think that all I do is buy food and watch DVDs), then put on It’s Complicated in my bedroom. It whirred and clicked but didn’t start playing and I - innocent that I am! – assumed that there might be something wrong with the DVD player (which, admittedly, I haven’t used since I got DStv in November last year).

The sofa in my sitting-room sofa is every bit as comfortable as my bed, and anyway I’ve got a ‘home theatre’ system there, so when I play a DVD, the sounds come at me from all sorts of interesting angles, so, without examining the DVD – more fool me! – I just took it out, went into the next room and put it in the other DVD player.

This DVD player, being more sophisticated than the little machine I have in my bedroom, told me ‘disc unplayable’. Hm, I thought. I took it out and looked at it, and lo and behold, it had a dirty great gouge in one quadrant, a deep score through another, and what looked like a gangrenous patch in a third.

I have supported this DVD shop (which is Stax in De Bron Centre in Malmesbury, and now consider yourself warned) for many years, despite the fact that they once kicked me out because I was accompanied by my well-behaved dog on a leash. So, presuming on this long history, I phoned the shop and told them what had transpired. The clerk, one Lomi, was polite and understanding, and said that they had another copy, and that I should just come in and she’d replace it.

I explained to her that I live 20km distant so wouldn’t be back that instant, but that I would be in Malmesbury again on Tuesday (today), which is when I’d do the swop. No problem, she said. She’d write my name and phone number on the DVD, just so it wasn’t given to anyone else in the meantime.

I went there today, on my way to a meeting in Cape Town, expecting to pop in, swop the DVD, and swiftly be on my way. Instead, I was met by a clerk whose attitude I can only describe as sullen. Actually, if I give it some thought I can describe it other ways: disinterested and rude. After listening with patent suspicion to my story, she said, ‘I have to phone the boss.’ (I asked her repeatedly to look for the replacement DVD with my name and number on it, but she was curiously deaf to these requests.)

After a fairly lengthy conversation with ‘the boss’, which included, for the last few minutes, a bit of giggly chit-chat while I stood looking pointedly at my invisible wrist-watch, she plonked the receiver triumphantly back into the cradle and, without even bothering to look at me, said, ‘The boss says no.’

Although I seldom expect anything other than absolutely appalling service in Malmesbury, this floored me. I didn’t say anything – I just stared at her.

She finally looked at me. ‘The boss says she would never have sold a DVD in that condition.’ (And I might add here that I have never, in all the many times I’ve visited Stax in De Bron Centre in Malmesbury, actually set eyes on ‘the boss’ – so how the hell would she know?!) And while I continued gaping at her, she hunched her shoulders, kicked her right foot a bit, and added, ‘Anyway, Lomi should have checked them before she gave them to you.’

‘But Lomi didn’t check them!’ I said. ‘And it’s not my fault that Lomi didn’t do her job! The DVD was damaged – I phoned her literally half an hour after I’d bought it. If you think I did this to the DVD, that just wasn’t long enough for me to do that kind of damage, unless I had some sort of psychotic turn and attacked it with a pair of pliers!’

And she gave me the kind of look that said she wouldn’t put that kind of behaviour beyond me.

Well, fukkit. If ‘the boss’ is short-sighted enough to let go a long-standing customer who regularly rents DVDs worth, oh, about R150 a month from her store, for a very well used DVD worth all of R60, so be it. (Yet another example of why I continue to be completely gobsmacked at how businesses in Malmesbury survive.)

And I long – long! – for the day the new consumer protection laws kick in, and that old standby, ‘caveat emptor’ (‘let the buyer beware’), that infuriatingly useful hiding-place of sellers of dodgy goods, is turned on its head, and anything anybody sells us better bloody work, because it’s going to be all ‘caveat venditor (‘let the seller beware’) from then on.

The Good Voice goofs

2011-02-16T15:02:00.000+02:00

I don’t have much time for Bono and his tinted glasses. Anyone whose name is really Paul Hewson but who opts to go by the name Bono Vox (‘good voice’) deserves all he gets.

Still, I did feel a bit for him for putting his foot so thoroughly in it on the eve of U2’s South African appearances. And, unfortunately for him, the phrase ‘It was taken out of context’ is now just South African politician-speak for ‘Whoops’.

That said, even if you are an astronomically rich globe-trotting do-gooder, fighting poverty in Africa and what-what, you should probably familiarise yourself with the cultural and sociopolitical nuances of the country whose people’s wallets you've lightened to the tune of tens of millions of rands to watch you sing (not cure cancer, eradicate slavery or cool the planet) before you offer your views. Because, in South Africa, we have abundant living proof of that old adage: ‘Opinions are like arseholes: everyone has one.’

And we don’t need more. Of either.

An existential question (and it’s not ‘What’s the meaning of life?’)

2011-02-16T13:55:00.000+02:00

It’s not even ‘Why are there always carrots in vomit, even if you haven’t eaten them?’

It’s ‘Why are there always frozen peas in the ice trays, even if you don’t have frozen peas in your freezer?’

Mimicry gone mad?

2011-02-16T13:05:00.000+02:00

A lot of licking goes on in my bedroom at night. It’s not as rude as it sounds – both dogs and at least two of the cats (and usually all four) sleep in my room, and for some reason it’s during the still, quiet hours of night that they do most of their personal maintenance.

With the dogs, this consists mainly of licking their bottoms. The sound drives me nuts, but usually it takes not much more than a furious look to stop them (if only momentarily).

With the cats it’s a different story. The two boy cats (Evan and Maui, pictured here) are devoted to each other, and spend most of the night in passionate mutual grooming. Missy the tabby-wildcat mix is a nasty little piece of work who prefers to groom herself, and if Evan (who is ridiculously needy) tries to groom her – and he always does – there’s a spitting, hissing fight that requires me to wake up fully and bodily hurl cats off the bed. (Floss, the calico cat, is freakily antisocial and grooms neither herself nor any of the other cats; but to make up for this, she sleeps on my head.)

Sometimes Maui is absent at night for reasons of his own (doing whatever it is that cats do in the dark hours), which leaves the emotionally deprived Evan in need of someone – or, in this case, something – to groom.

This cow cushion started the night as a soft, fluffy, dry pillow and saw in the morning flat, damp and smelling of cat saliva. I took this pic a few hours later, and you can still see the places where it’s been groomed into wet submission by Evan. Its colouring is very similar to Evan’s – I wonder if he mistook it for a very quiescent cat?

Goldie is a mommy – AT LAST!

2011-02-16T11:46:00.000+02:00

Two and a half years ago I wrote a post about Goldie the broody hen. Although much has happened in the neighbourhood flocks since then, this hasn’t included Goldie hatching out chicks.

Poor Goldie hasn’t had much fun. L’s rooster didn’t take to her (and so never fertilized her eggs, poor dear) but, worse, his harem absolutely hated her. They pecked her and harried her until she found a way back over the high fence dividing our properties and settled herself back in the henhouse (okay, the dog kennel – but that’s another story; if you want, you can read it here).

In time, L’s flock next door became unruly – there were, quite literally, simply too many roosters in that henhouse. L and her husband also became very busy with a thriving catering business and growing extended family, and decided that the chooks had to go. So they were all farmed out to new homes.

Except for Goldie, who continued living a quiet and hermit-like existence on my property – and who continued to lay huge clutches of unfertilized eggs and sit on them for months at a time. (There were two reasons I stopped collecting Goldie’s eggs: 1, she pecks; and 2, she went into such a terrible decline after each collection that it became a matter of ‘what’s worse’: allowing her to sit tight, albeit fruitlessly, on utterly unviable eggs, or removing her eggs and then watching her amble aimlessly and miserably around the garden, cluck-clucking quietly to herself in a patently depressed way.)

Anyway, finally, about a month ago, we decided Something Had To Be Done. Goldie was not going to be dissuaded from her deep-seated need for motherhood, no matter what – and we knew that she wasn’t going to be able to take much more of the fasting that sitting for months on eggs requires. So Johann donated three fertilized eggs from his flock, and was brave enough to remove Goldie from the henhouse (wrapped in a towel) while I slipped the (hopefully) viable eggs into the nest. (Johann, who was the first person in some time to get close enough to Goldie to actually examine her, reported her to be woefully thin and dehydrated.)

So you can imagine our delight when Goldie emerged from the henhouse on Valentine’s Day with two perfect little day-old chicks. (The third had also hatched, but seemed to have died immediately.) Goldie’s babies look nothing like her, of course (Johann’s chooks are black-and-white bantams), but you have never seen a prouder mom. And she is wonderfully protective – the two resident dogs and the four cats are, naturally, fascinated by (and probably hungry for) the miniature fast-food that has suddenly appeared right in front of their eyes, but if any of them goes near them, Goldie puffs herself up to about four times her normal size, instructs her babies to get under her wings, and prepares for battle. So, thus far, they are being left well alone to peck about the garden.

I can’t wait for the new consumer protection laws to kick in

2011-01-20T14:07:00.000+02:00

In the four hours of this working morning alone, I have had to deal with the following:

• Three SMS spams: a ‘Direct Plus Loan invitation of up to R150 000’; someone who will clear my name from a credit blacklist (and throw in the offer of ‘a loan, cell contract or visa card’ too); and a ‘win a car by answering this easy question’ bit of nonsense;
• A phonecall from Margaret of Vodaphone, telling me I had been ‘specially pre-selected’ (ie, randomly chosen) for something or other involving a free phone and a 24-month no-one-gets-out-alive contract; and
• A person who knocked at my door to tell me that her company could save me ‘up to 25%’ on my electricity bills.

In between those six interruptions, I’ve also met two deadlines, done an interview, dealt with a few legal matters, scanned some pics (and then rescanned them – my life would undoubtedly be easier if I could learn how to work my scanner), answered over 40 emails, put on a load of laundry, mopped up when the rinse cycle decided it would be more comfortable on the kitchen floor, backwashed the pool, walked the dogs… you get the idea – I’m busy!

I’m definitely too busy to spend precious time dealing with entirely unsolicited invitations to spend my hard-earned money on stuff I don’t want and probably can’t afford.

The spam SMSs, which are always disappointing (not, then, an invitation to lunch or a bit of fabulous gossip?), are easily dealt with: press delete.

The phonecall had to be handled with a bit more aplomb: one of my New Year’s resolutions is not to be nasty to telesalespeople, who are, after all, only doing their job. ‘I’m sorry, Margaret,’ I said, ‘I know you’re only doing your job, but I’m absolutely not interested.’ But I still felt bad when she said, ‘Oh,’ in a small, sad voice.

But the knock-at-the-door woman!! Are you serious??!

First, I have the frenzied-dogs element to deal with. The young woman at the door, hearing the furious barking (my dogs always think that any stranger – they sniff them under the door, then decide on their strategy – must first be ripped to bits), was wise enough to swing closed the security gate. When I inched open the door, using my knees in Nadia Comaneci style to keep the hounds of hell at bay, while poking one ear through the small gap, she said, ‘Hi!’ brightly. I caught a glimpse of artfully highlighted hair and carefully applied makeup.

‘What do you want?’ I said. (I didn’t have to snarl, the dogs were doing that.) ‘Make it snappy, I’m having a bit of a problem here, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

She upped the volume to be heard over the dogs’ barking. ‘We can save you up to 25% on your electricity bill,’ she shouted. ‘I need a few moments with your husband.’

Now, there were so many things wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. First, unless you’re bringing me wine, flowers or news that I’ve just won an all-expenses-paid trip to Tuscany with four of my closest friends, don’t knock at my door uninvited.

Second, am I really going to believe that you, as a third-party representative, are going to save me ‘up to 25%’ on my electricity bills? How, prey, are you going to make your money? Or do you just have a citizens’ concern that Eskom is ripping us off, and want to make life easier for us? (And pigs, flying, and all that.)

Third, if that’s really the case, please do me the favour of spamming me via email or cellphone – it’s so much kinder to our blood pressure to just press ‘delete’, and unfortunately it’s not yet legal to kill cold-callers.

And finally, what’s with this ‘your husband’ shit? If there’s anything that made me want to slam the door in her face (and there was plenty), that did the trick. I haven’t had a husband for 20 years and quite frankly that’s still not long enough.

‘Not interested,’ I said, and slammed the door.

Then I watched, with some interest, while this woman and her young male compatriot hit every house in our street – walking up to the door, knocking, and then very quickly being sent on their way. No-one was buying.

But I can’t see my neighbour T’s house from my kitchen window (alas!), so I SMSd her (like me, a very happily unmarried woman) a short while later. ‘Did the elec woman come to your house?’ I asked. ‘And did she ask to have a word with ‘‘your husband’’?

‘Yes,’ she SMSd back. ‘And I shouted, ‘‘HUSBAND?? I DON’T HAVE A HUSBAND!’’ and slammed the door in her face. She’s probably thinking, Gosh, I’m not surprised that these women can’t find husbands!’

Which at least gave us reason to laugh in a very raucous and unwifely manner.

But here’s the thing – do you know that the Protection of Personal Information Bill, which was passed by Cabinet in August 2009, states that if you don’t specifically agree (for instance, check a box to say that you’re willing to receive marketing materials, ie, ‘opt in’), the enquiring company may not contact you again? And, if you’re already receiving info (and this very much includes spam of any kind) without your consent that you don’t want, you have the option to ‘opt out’ – that is, request that the company stop contacting you.

We’ve all got a bit leery of doing the ‘unsubscribe’ thing in response to spam, because in the past all this did was confirm your details for the bastards who were sending you the stuff. But if this Bill gets passed into Law, you will have the law on your side: be specific about not wanting further communication (tick the box, click the ‘unsub’ option, tell the cold-caller you don’t want them to call you again), and if they do, sue the buggers.

Also, the new Bill says that consumers be allowed to ask cold callers where and how they got your information - and they can't fob you off with some 'specially pre-selected' crap: not only do they have to tell you exactly where and how, they also have to send you all the records they have on you if you ask for them. Seriously, read the Bill summary - knowledge is power, after all.

Incidentally, there’s also a new Consumer Protection Act that takes effect in April this year that is going to make South African consumers the most protected in the world. No more ‘caveat emptor’ (‘buyer beware’) – at long last, the seller is going to have to take responsibility for what you end up with in exchange for your hard-earned bucks.

Cool, hey?

The old and the new (and hot and cold) of Christmas food

2011-01-11T18:18:00.000+02:00

I was moved to write this by Nicole’s post on the stupidity of a traditional Christmas dinner in the sticky heat of a southern summer.

My late sainted mother was a Scotswoman, and as a result, took Christmas very seriously. I was quite amazed, when I visited the UK two years ago, to discover how ingrained and important those end-of-year rituals are. The sending of Christmas cards to practically everyone you’ve ever met in your whole life, for instance, is a chore not done only by the most slovenly of households. And it requires forethought: cards to foreign destinations must be posted a good month in advance of Christmas. Ironically, the card destined for my friends’ neighbours in Hitchin was the last one to be despatched: on Christmas Eve, the task of exiting the front door, walking five steps to the left, putting the card through the neighbours’ letter-slot and returning home - which had been put off by the father (‘Can’t, the turkey needs basting’), the mother (‘Can’t, I’m doing every-bloody-thing else around here’) and the two teens (‘Ah maaa, do we have to?’) – was finally accomplished by, yes, the mother. ‘Well, that’s the Christmas cards done at last,’ she said, with some satisfaction.

But back to the food. For years – decades – our family did the traditional Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve. Like Nicole’s experience, it was always hot, bothersome and, ultimately, not a meal you’d choose if you were on Death Row. And it was wasteful – for instance, my mother always prepared a large bowl of Brussels sprouts, which was never so much as touched (although lots of people made nasty comments about them). She tipped the whole lot into a Tupperware and put it in the fridge the next morning, and a few weeks later discovered them slowly liquefying and tossed them in the bin. And this happened every year.

Eventually, when we were all finally grownups and could smoke in front of our parents and sometimes tell dirty jokes without being sent to our rooms, we suggested that we ditch the traditional meal and do something that didn’t involve several days with the oven on at 180 degrees. My mother wasn’t madly keen but we talked her round – as long, she said, as she could cook the turkey the day before, and we could have it cold. Deal.

I’d long been responsible for the dessert – in the days of Christmas cake and Christmas pudding (both of which I consider a gustatory abomination), I would simply ask someone’s gran to make it for me (and often the brandy butter too), pay her the bucks, and turn up with it. The first year we had our non-traditional dinner, however, I was tasked with making a vanilla/apricot-chocolate bombe. My mother, who I suspect was enamoured with the shape of it (it’s also round and looks, at least, like a Christmas pudding), sent me the recipe early in December, and I stuck it in my diary to attend to at some other time, which turned out to be the morning of Christmas Eve. So I was quite shocked to read, when skimming the recipe to go shopping for the ingredients, the phrase ‘Leave in the freezer overnight’ appearing not once but twice.

Before I left for the shops, I cranked my freezer up as high as it would go. When I returned, and with the temperature hovering in the high 30s, I started making the bombe. I discovered several things about making a vanilla/apricot-chocolate bombe on a hot Christmas Eve morning when it is required for dessert that evening. I discovered that some things that aren’t left in the freezer overnight don’t actually freeze; I discovered that trying to fit a Christmas-pudding-shaped mould of apricot-chocolate sludge into a reverse-Christmas-pudding-shaped mould of vanilla sludge is a messy business and causes swearing.

I also discovered that vanilla/apricot-chocolate sludge doesn’t travel well in high temperatures. I packed the thing in ice in a coolbox and gunned it the 100 kilometres to my parents’ house, and when I got there I quickly whisked it into my parents’ freezer, hoping that the four hours that remained until it was required on the table would do the trick. It didn’t. Instead of tipping out elegantly onto the waiting plate, it made a sound like an elephant farting, then lazily shook itself free of the bowl before settling into a large puddle of what looked like the crap of an elephant that had eaten too many apricots. Not exactly a Nigella moment.

This year I was entrusted with the salmon mousse (another make-ahead-and-put-overnight-in-the-fridge project, with similar travel-distance requirements). I could not find a salmon mould in which to make it, so it went into the same bowl I’d used for the apricot-elephant-crap bombe (thoroughly washed, of course). The mousse looked suspiciously wobbly when I removed it from my fridge for transportation, and I steeled myself for more hoots of derision when it flopped out looking like, oh, fish-shit. But it didn’t! After a harrowing few seconds during which it clung tenaciously to the inside of the bowl, it sighed quietly, then let go. And voila! A perfect dome of salmon mousse – not as elegant, perhaps, as it would have been in a fish shape, but gratifyingly not looking like poo. I immediately had five glasses of champagne to celebrate.

Hairdressing in the 21st century

2011-01-07T15:43:00.000+02:00

I’ve just been for my second professional haircut in about 20 years. The first was in December, when I asked the hairdresser just to tidy up the back of the chop-job I’d done myself. I’ve been cutting other people’s hair for years, and was quite chuffed when she said, ‘Who cut your hair last?’ and I said, ‘I did,’ and she laughed and said, ‘No, really, who?’ (I think she said this because she was impressed, obviously; Johann thinks it’s because she was horrified and wanted to report my previous hairdresser to the Boss of Hairdressers*.)

I went to her again this morning, for two reasons: 1. It’s unbelievably, unbearably hot here at the moment, and the salon is airconditioned; and 2. It’s unbelievably, unbearably hot here at the moment, and I wanted all the hair on the back of my neck removed and that is the one place I can’t do cutting myself with any acceptable degree of accuracy.

These are the things that have changed since I last went to a hairdresser for an actual cut-and-style back in the 1980s.

The shampoo basins

Twenty years ago these were devices of torture. They were one-size-fits-all, and definitely not made for six-foot women. My choices were: sit with my bum hanging off the seat so that, with my neck in the gap, my shoulders weren’t forced up into the base of my skull; or sit with my bum on the seat so that, with my neck in the gap, my shoulders were forced up into the base of my skull.

Nowadays, the shampoo basins have flexible bases, and the chairs are on rollers, so you can adjust both until you’re comfortable. So at the end of the shampoo ritual, you don’t stagger out of the chair requiring the services of a physiotherapist to realign your spine.

The shampoo ritual

I hated the old shampoo-shampoo-condition ritual. The double wash stripped your hair so that it squeaked and the conditioner was always one-size-fits-all heavy and was so strong on the chemical scent it made your eyes sting. Also, the shampooers always made the water too hot, liberally doused your ears and/or eyes with it and/or caused litres to gush down your back, and worked mainly with their fingernails.

Nowadays, the double wash is quick and gentle (and the shampoo is gentle too – no inkling of a squeak here), the conditioner is agreeably light, and the shampooers seem to have a firm grasp of how to use the spray attachment. (I asked about this – apparently this is because in the old days, the shampooers were the lackeys who were also required to sweep up the hair, wipe the surfaces and make the tea; these days, the shampooers are apprentice hairdressers.)

Best of all, though, is the 5-minute head massage you get, which includes the pressure points on your forehead and temples and the knots in your upper back. By the time the shampooer is finished, you’re so relaxed you find it hard to stand up – a far more pleasant reason to stagger out of the shampoo chair than crunchment of the vertebra.

The style you request

The last time I went to a hairdresser, back in the 1980s, was when my fringe had finally grown out to around chin length (I have infuriatingly slow-growing hair), and I said very clearly to the hairdresser, ‘Whatever you do, don’t cut me a fringe.’ And – I wish I were making this up but I’m not – the very first thing she did was comb my grown-out fringe down my face, carefully line it up, and snip it across at around nose-bridge height. Perhaps she was hearing-impaired; perhaps she was just stupid. I probably gasped, but I said nothing: I was only in my 20s then, and intimidated by hairdressers - there was something about being trapped in that seat under a big black plastic apron, your scalp and back aching, looking at your red-eyed drowned-rat reflection, while the purple-haired skeletally-skinny much-pierced sloe-eyed hairdresser pranced around you with scissors that could cut a throat, that made it impossible to assert yourself. (This isn’t the worst hairdressing story I’ve heard from those days, when practically any woman who went for a cut-and-style ended up with a Princess Di, the patron saint of Elton John, and look at his hair.)

Today, when I sat down, the hairdresser asked me what I wanted. ‘Take it all off the back and trim the rest,’ I said, and that’s what she did. In fact, she did a bit more – my hair is woefully fine, and she did something artful to the top of it that made it look kind of bouncy and thickish. It restored my faith.

And these are the things that haven’t changed since I last went to a hairdresser for an actual cut-and-style back in the 1980s.

Magazines you never get to read

I don’t buy magazines (okay, except Heat and Time), so I was thrilled to see a lovely selection there before me: Reader’s Digest (‘10 things you never knew about Sigourney Weaver’), Country Life (‘Cook up a Christmas feast’), GQ South Africa (‘6 sex position you never knew you knew’), etc. But hairdressers, like dentists, have a captive audience, and instead of boning up on the square-jawed one, tantalising my tastebuds or improving my sex life, I was required to chat inanely about the weather, my kids and what I did for the festive season (but mainly the weather).

Blowdrying

I’ve never liked what hairdressers do to my hair with a blowdryer. I end up looking like ‘my mother’ or ‘Hitler’ or ‘as if a flock of seagulls have squabbled on my head’ (these are all verbatim observations), and anyway, I’m going to jump in the pool or march up the mountain the minute I’m home, so what’s the point?

Today, I requested no blowdrying, but I got it anyway. Hairdressers just can’t help themselves. ‘Uh, do you have to?’ I asked, as she switched the thing on (aside from anything else, it was hot, and hot was exactly what I was trying to avoid). ‘Just a quick finger-dry,’ she said, breezily, and proceeded to blow and brush my hair into a style that accentuated my turkey-wattle and made my ears look enormous (a strange thing to do to what was, before she began with the blowdryer, a rather nice style).

The bill

R180 for 15 minutes’ work. Not bad if you can get it.

* I've been doing some third-party work for the South African Setas (Sector Education and Training Authorities), and was thrilled to receive, in one of their amazingly labyrinthine communications, a note from a woman whose job title is ‘Client Care Services: Hairdressing and Postal Coordinator’. (I checked: it wasn’t a joke.)