Cabbages and Kings

2011-12-05T20:06:00.000+02:00

UNBELIEVABLE

My son has been without a job for a few months.

The history behind this is not mine to tell. For it would unleash a great big story which, at this moment in time, is not appropriate to reveal.

But, he is without a job.

He has applied for many jobs.

Being white-skinned doesn’t help.

It’s AA. It’s EE. Or it’s BEE or it’s something else, as long as you are dark-skinned!

During the course of applying for jobs, he has to give his ID number which he has done on numerous occasions.

The last job he applied for had the agency coming back to him to inform him that he had a criminal record for ‘ illicit behaviour’.

He was panic-stricken.

This is a guy who was brought up with the strictest values and morals. ( Not that I’m suggesting that he is an angel. Not that I’m suggesting that he hasn’t taken a chance or two. BUT he does know the difference between right and wrong and I believe that, in the end, he makes the right choices.)

He didn’t even know what illicit means.

He took himself off to a police station in the hopes that they could enlighten him.

What had he done that could prevent him from getting a job?

The police officers looked it up on the ‘system’.

And they laughed!!

My son, 7 years ago, was caught by the Table View police, having a wee at the side of the road, late at night, not a soul in sight. I can vouch for that. He is a very modest person and would not make a public display of himself.

At the police station he was offered the choice of either paying R50 admission of guilt or spending the night in jail.

He paid the admission of guilt and, unknowingly, got a criminal record!

And he has only just found out!

Now I ask you this.

Is there a man in this country who has not taken a ‘slash’ somewhere?

Men have the most convenient equipment. ( Which tells us that God is most certainly a man.)

Is there one single male in the whole of South Africa who has never peed or wee’d or pissed or whatever you want to call it, at any time, wherever?

We live in a country which, to my sorrow, has a high rate of assault, murder, rape, hi-jacking, child abuse, theft, armed robbery and so on, and so on, and so on!

Excuse me for being angry! ( And excuse me for having a quiet giggle because it is just so ludicrous!)

My son has a criminal record because he was caught short, late at night, and relieved himself out of sight.

WELL DONE, TABLE VIEW POLICE! WE ALL SLEEP MORE SAFELY TONIGHT BECAUSE YOU CAUGHT THE PHANTOM PISSER!!!

Unbelievable!

Does anyone know how to get rid of a criminal record? Or does it haunt you for life?

And do I now harbour, in my home, a criminal?

2011-10-14T11:39:00.001+02:00

A DIFFERENT PLACE

We have been here at OASIS LUXURY RETIREMENT RESORT for just over a month.

A friend of mine said in amazement: “ I can’t believe you guys have booked yourselves into this place.”

Nor can I! ( But she makes it sound like a loony bin or a rehab centre and as far as I know, we just signed a lease!)

The last two years have been dreadful and perhaps I wasn’t paying too much attention. I think my brother-in-law’s sudden and unexpected death perturbed the dear man more than I realized.

I think the suddenly swift sale of the house, after 3 long and drawn- out years, precipitated a rash decision?

I don’t know.

All I know is this.

Here I am. Perched in a very nice apartment, 9 floors up from ground level. Sort of being in an eyrie.

It is much more than what I was expecting. It is bigger than the average Edgemead house.

We have a large living area which has managed to accommodate most of my lounge furniture as well as my dining room table and chairs.

We have a large master bedroom with a small dressing room and an en suite bathroom.

There is a second bedroom, also with an en suite bathroom, and a third bedroom with its own bathroom although it is not en suite ( just across the passage).

We also have a fully fitted study with ( oh joy!) double desks. One for me and one for the dear man.

The kitchen has a lot of cupboard space. In fact I have some empty shelves and am beginning to regret all the things I gave away so ruthlessly.

We have a small scullery, one of the few things I don’t really like. I do like to have a source of water in my kitchen and don’t enjoy having to traipse off into the scullery to fill the kettle.

As little extras, there is a guest loo and a long balcony as well as an outdoor patio, right up top of the roof because this is called a penthouse.

I love having the outdoor space and the dear man has already planted some herbs in pots and we did bring some roses in pots from Plattekloof.

The spare bedrooms look disgusting and I fear even to look at them.

Our bedroom reminds me of a hospital ward. Sterile, plain and stark.

All the windows have vertical blinds which is my second worst nightmare. ( The first worst nightmare is face brick!)

OH But sorry!

Scrap the first worst nightmare. Face brick goes to second and vertical blinds to third.

THE first worst nightmare IS A GAS HOB!!!

I have always been scared of gas. At Leentjiesklip in our Plettenberg trailer home, we had a gas hob and a gas oven AND a gas hot water geyser.

They used to pop and spit at me. When we had to light the oven I always felt that we were trying to commit suicide!

I hate gas! But everyone keeps telling me how brilliant a gas hob is.

Caroline tried it out the other day. She surveyed her dried- out spaghetti sauce and mourned: “ I think gas is all or nothing, Mom.”

I reiterate: I HATE GAS!

I have spent the last month working out what I can cook without having to use the hob. Challenging!

Oh! I forgot to mention that every room in the flat has piped music ( if you so desire) and a television screen, and that includes the kitchen!

We have a huge unit in the lounge with all the stuff that men seem to love and, at last count, there are 12 remotes! A big screen projector hangs from the middle of the lounge ceiling ( how elegant! How me!) And there is an automatic big screen that descends when you feel like having a movie night or watching sport. Enough to keep any man happy!

But to get back to gas. It doesn’t tiddle and you need tiddle for a fine curry or stew or a pot of soup! Gas simply has no tiddle in it!

And what a bugger to clean! No more just swiping a cloth across the hob. Oh no!

It’s remove the cast iron stands, scrub them and rub them. And after that, clean the shiny black glass and then clean the burners and then re-assemble it all. And then do it all again tomorrow.

Gas, as far as I’m concerned, can go to a place where a lot of gas usually explodes from. And I don’t mean the gasworks!

Apart from the thinking of what to cook without using my hostile gas hob, I spend a lot of time on the balcony.

We ARE 9 floors up, not easy for someone who battles with heights. I don’t but the dear man does. Fortunately, the balcony has frameless glass which protects you from the wind ( which is horrendous here in Century City) and it also provides a barrier from ‘the drop’ of 9 floors.

I spend my mornings on the balcony. Ironically, I look straight back at the Plattekloof Hills where we once lived, not all that long ago.

We do not have a view of the mountain, something that I miss so much. We have a GREAT (?) view of the refinery which is not attractive during the daylight hours but which is very pretty at night.

I have decided that with each post from now on, I will have a little comment called ‘FROM MY EYRIE’

So today: FROM MY EYRIE

The lady who parks her car just across the road and who walks her two Alsatians on the grassy area there, has a new puppy. It gambolled along quite happily with its bigger companions.

Lovely to watch but makes me miss our big fellow who left us just over a month ago.

Too many changes

2011-09-07T21:03:00.002+02:00

I miss my beautiful house.

I miss the views of the mountain and the sunsets and the pretty lights.

I miss my dog.

I miss my courtyard garden with the fragrant herbs and the vine which should be just about ready to shoot.

I miss my daughter who was always there for me. We did not always agree. That was healthy. But she was a good friend to me. We had a lot of fun together.

I miss my little robin family that was becoming so tame and so cheeky.

I so miss my two little magical grand-daughters who made me laugh and rejoice every day.

I grieve for all that I have lost.

Where do I go from here?

Why did it all have to happen at the same time?

I know I have choices to make.

I just hope that I make the right ones.

Everything that I thought I had has been taken away from me.

Where do I go now?

So pathetic, this post, I know.

I suppose it is all about choices.

I need to make up my mind.

My dear man got an e-mail from a 'friend'.

It said, " Old age is not so bad. It doesn't last long".

Is that what I have to look forward to ?

Faithful Friends

2011-08-23T13:10:00.002+02:00

When I was expecting my first baby, we acquired our first dog. He was a Pyrannean Mountain dog; a huge and majestic fellow. The breed was known as 'the gentle giants', and that he was.

Gentle with our children and very protective towards our family.

We have always allowed our dogs to be house dogs which caused a few problems. Napolean, as he was known, chewed his way through all of my cushions, tore down my curtains, ate pieces of carpet and did a few bits of gardening too! Whole young fruit-trees were uprooted from the ground with a huge ball of soil attached. He was a powerful animal!

When fully grown, he would stand on his hind legs, put his paws on my husband's shoulders and gaze down at him.

He was a loving dog. We had him for 11 years before he had a sort of stroke and had to be put down.

Next on the list was Andrew, a Yorkshire terrier. We had really gone from one extreme to the other even though Andy was not a minature.

Yorkies are small in stature but they have the spirit of a Rottweiler. They are tenacious and cheeky as well as highly intelligent.

Andy was a lap dog and a great companion. I would talk to him and I swear he understood every word. Not a destructive dog, but very difficult to house-train. We reached the stage when he had made a puddle in the house, he would bring me the floor-cloth to let me know what he had done.

He was 6 months old when we got a second dog. Oleg was a Bernese Mountain dog. A really beautiful animal with the loveliest nature. Because Andy was number one dog, he took it upon himself to be the pack leader. How ridiculous! Ollie was 20 times his size yet he accepted Andy as the boss. And when Peter went away on business, Andy became the boss of me too!

Sadly, at 4 years, Ollie started having fits and the vet established that he was diabetic. Nothing much could be done for him and so he had to be put down.

Andy was 16 years old to the day when he died. he was going blind and deaf and the day after his birthday, we found him floating in our swimming-pool. What a shock for us all. We buried him in our rose-garden and I placed a little plaque there to honour him and his loving companionship for so many years.

We decided there would be no more dogs. But 8 years ago, instead of a ring for our 30th anniversary, I got a bull mastiff puppy. We called him Winston. He was the baby of the family and we guarded him rather than the other way round. He was good-natured, playful and devoted to the dear man. When the little girls came along, I was worried about how he would adapt.

No problem. When they were babies, he found them a curiosity.

As they grew, he learned they were a good source of snacks and so he was always to be found in the kitchen at their meal-times.

But as they got bigger, he grew fonder of them and would wait at the top of the stairs for them when they came home after being out.

You may have noticed that I have been talking about Winnie in the past tense.

That is because, this morning, he paid his final visit to the vet. He has been sick for a long while, battling with a bacteria in his system that refused to be quelled. Three months ago he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer.

After four lots of pills he finally gave up. The latest pills were not even finished.

He was a very sick boy this morning. We had no choice but to do the deed. The vet was in total agreement.

So now my house is even emptier.

But I am grateful that he died while he was still here. There were big changes coming for him as he was going to stay in Langebaan with the little family because we were not allowed to take him to our apartment with us.

He would have moped for the dear man, I know. He would have been puzzled.

So it all ended as it should have.

We have been so lucky with our 4 faithful loving canine friends.

So much part of our lives.

In our memories forever.

Rest well, dear Winnie.

By the way, two weeks ago in Langebaan, the dear man and I took him for a stroll on the beach.

The dear man showed me the little cove where he planned to scatter Winnie's ashes.

So it will be.

Moving On

2011-08-21T21:18:00.002+02:00

So many people, just lately, seem to be moving home.

Perhaps, it's in the planets and their alignment?

All I know is that I am moving home.

It is not easy.

My dear man and I have been married for 38 years.

We have been in this house for nearly 13!

So much has happened here, not least that my two little grand-daughters have spent the greater part of their lives here.

They are not coping well. They watch as the things that have been part of their lives are removed right under their very noses.

Amy came home from school on Friday just after the removal people had been.

She hung onto the door-frame and moaned, " Oh No! where have the tables gone?"

I explained that they had gone on a holiday and that she would see them again soon.

She was happy with that.

The house is rapidly becoming empty.

My son, who doesn't visit often, remarked last week: 'It's all looking pretty bare.'

So it is.

What I am happy about is this.

The house is being emptied of furniture, carpets and art-work.

But I look with a critical eye and I know that the 'bones' ( for want of a better word) remain good.

This house will work for anyone. It is gracious, it is classy and it will work for anyone, no matter what their taste is. That pleases me.

For me, it was a labour of love. I have loved this house beyond measure, for all sorts of reasons.

But now, the dear man and I are busy throwing out huge parts of our lives.

Today, it was his turn. He had to tackle his study.

Boxes and boxes of what was his career, his dreams, his projects and his life.

I know it hurt.

It is what was . But now it is over.

Today we had an unexpected message to say that the man, Jon Levin, who ran the little kiosk at our shop, had died this morning. He was Jewish so the dear man had to phone around to find out at what time the funeral was.

Jews bury their dead swiftly. The funeral was at 1'o clock.

So the dear man got dressed quickly and took himself off to a very wet and cold funeral.

He is, because of his history, well versed in the rites and rituals of Jewish funerals.

When he came home, he was visibly upset. He wished us all 'long life' for that is what Jews do at funerals.

It made me realise that throwing material things away means not a thing.

I still had a loving man to hug.

That will make the next 2 weeks so much easier to bear.

Don't Stop! Don't Think

2011-08-04T20:29:00.001+02:00

Today I have been sorting out my stuff.

This...to go to charity.

This...to go to Langebaan ( which, by the way, is just becoming a storage facility for the things I can't make up my mind about.)

These bits and pieces are received with great joy by Rodwell ( our gardener and handyman) and Mary, my domestic helper.

I was about to throw out 3 decanters which are very beautiful but quite superfluous in our lives. I already have 3 antique decanters from my aunt which are lovely, except that they are lead crystal and so can probably poison you while you enjoy your tipple of choice.

But I decided that I did not need another 3.

BUT! Then I stopped. Then I thought.

I decided that I could not get rid of them. An article in the latest Taste magazine helped me along the way.

' A thing of beauty is a joy forever.'

Keats!

So they are off to Langebaan!

My daughter mourns all the things she would love to take off to the UK.

They have packed their boxes. They have no space left.

Don't stop! Don't think!

Then it all becomes too hard to do!

I am so close to going downstairs to unpack boxes and to change my mind.

But I won't.

Thank you, dear Universe, for allowing me the pleasure of all these things.

I have loved them, I have enjoyed them. They have lived with me and my company for a long time.

I wish for them someone who will be delighted with their boot-sale purchase.

I know they will go home with someone who cared enough to buy them.

Pass on the joy!

And I am content.

I've had the joy and the pleasure.

Now it's someone else's turn.

Enjoy!

WOW

2011-08-03T20:29:00.002+02:00

I'm so excited. I have not been able to post for ages for all sorts of reasons. My son-in-law who is very clever at these things helped to sort me out.

But! Where are you guys?

Where are you Dragonfly?

Where are my regular bloggers? Only Susie blogs regularly and she puts me to shame with her lovely stories and most beautiful photographs.

I think that being a blogger is hard work!

You need to think carefully. You need to scrutinize your own writing. And edit it and at the end, wonder if that was what you really wanted to say!

Facebook is a cheat. It's just an indulgence.

Twitter is just that. Twitter! A total waste of time.

I believe and I don't care if you think I am wrong! I believe that blogging is a more intelligent exercise. It is an essay in thought and emotion.

It is a sharing of the human experience! No matter what that may be!

Blogging requires thought. It requires some sort of intellect. It requires emotion and a sharing with people all over the globe of some common humanity. At least that is what I believe.

Tonight my daughter read out some things from Post Secret.

I hate that site. It is full of really angry people saying all sorts of horrible things. Sharing things that I would rather not know. And even if I do know them, would it make a difference?

We live in a BIG world. It's a global village, as it is said.

Why, I wonder, are there so many hurt and damaged people out there?

And why are these angry tendrils reaching out across the cyberworld into our lives?

I don't know. Call me an ostrich, but I don't care.

I think that people must deal with their own lives. Someone on the other side of the world can hear you but they can't help you.

But I understand the need to be heard. The need to be recognised. I understand that!

Just how sad is it that it all has to happen through an electronic device.

There will be no real hug. No real contact. No real communication.

Just a computer screen.

I am so lucky to have been born when I was.

Time to Say Goodbye

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

Well, it has finally happened. We have sold our house. Three years on the market! Many viewers later. Many stupid offers, many silly would-be buyers. But finally a buyer, out of the blue.

We have 4 weeks to pack up and move on.

It is harder than I thought it would be. Sorting through all our 'stuff', wondering why we even have it or why we kept it!

There are things that I love that have no place in our new life.

I must get rid of them. I have given things away. I am sending the Lions of De Grendel a load of things that will send them into a spin.

My char-lady walked down the road yesterday with my bedspread ( silk!) on her head.

Without a doubt, I have been a collector.

But I've come to realise that as my daughter says: " One man's Wedgewood is another man's Tupperware!"Or vice-versa!

But these are the things that I find it hard to say goodbye to.

My lovely herb garden where I could go out each night to pick what I needed.

My peaceful kitchen courtyard where we could sit and pass the time of day and, on a lovely evening, share our meal.

My dear robin family who visit each night and sing and chirp until they get their treat,

The twinkling lights of the city that sparkle at us each evening. And let us not forget the sunsets. Each and every one different. Let me not forget either the pale moon that rises every evening " over a shadowed hill'.

Saying goodbye to a well-loved home is not easy.

I think that I am going mad but I spend much of my day stroking the walls of my house and murmuring quietly to them.

I assure the house that the new owner will appreciate it. I do believe that.

I think he will be able to afford to give it the make-over that it actually does need right now.

So I am happy for my house.

But it is hard to pack up things that I have treasured. It is hard to say goodbye to them.

It is even harder to say goodbye to all the memories that we hold in our hearts.

Amazingly, I find that once I have made up my mind, I can be quite ruthless.

But I do know that I must not stop and think about it.

I am throwing things away that are quite valuable. But they are going to charity and I find comfort in that.

The one thing that amazes me is that most people today place no value on the names that we valued.

Royal Albert, Royal Doulton, Wedgewood, Waterford crystal

. None of these names seem to mean a thing to younger people today.

Imagine saying to your child one day: " This is a Mr Price plate!"

Sure I'm being a bit of a snob now, but imagine!

My advice to young people today is, just collect and collect. One day all the finer things in life will be gone. Replaced by ' Made in China'.

So here I am. Surrounded by books, magazines, bric-a-brac and some very nice bits.

Mt wardrobe is almost empty. I have a very nice collection of hangers.

We have a beautiful art collection. Collected by me over the years with the dear man just indulging me.

What to do with it now?

We are moving to a rented apartment. We can't hang things on the walls.

What shall we do with it?

I am plotting and scheming. Some things I will not let go of.

Our apartment is a man place. Designed and planned by a man.

There is a tv in the kitchen but no broom cupboard.

There are, horror of horrors, vertical blinds at all the windows. But there is piped music throughout.

I think I will, after I have tried to place all my furniture into the apartment, have a bilious attack!

I guess I will have to learn to live with it.

It won't be easy. I have always taken pride in my home. Decorating has always been a passion and a hobby for me. It is not easy to move into a place where I cannot change very much.

However, I guess life is a challenge.

At least I have a roof over my head and a lot of comfort that others do not have.

So right now, I am dismantling my life.

I promise you, it is the hardest thing I have ever had to do.

I'm Back ( I think)

2011-06-08T18:47:00.002+02:00

For a while now, I have been declared illegitimate by Blogger. So anything that I have tried to post simply was not allowed and so with much frustration, I gave up.

I have been extremely frustrated because there was much I needed to say and share with those who follow me.

Tonight I was griping to my son-in-law who came to my rescue, as he frequently does for us Geries ( as he calls us), and that stands for geriatrics, by the way, and he managed, I know not how but am filled with great admiration for him, to legalise me.

So, now I can post. And so now that I can, all those wonderful and meaningful thoughts that have been building up in my head have quite disappeared!

But I do know that they will come back.

Hope some of you will be there to share them with me.

Test

2011-06-08T18:37:00.001+02:00

My blog has been out of action for a while due to technical difficulties. This is a test!

catching Up

2011-05-02T22:16:00.000+02:00

I haven't posted for ages. I can't give you a good reason for that.

Suffice it to say that I have been in a really sad place for a long while and have not wanted to burden any of you with my sorrows.

So why am I back?

Strangely enough it has to do with the death of Bin Laden.

I have been watching the news. I have been dismayed at the reaction of people that I would have liked to call decent.

Yes! A man is dead! A man who was hardly popular and who was blamed for many atrocities.

Yes! He is dead. But I find the vicious spewing of anger, the self-rightous rhetoric quite disgusting.

I am no Bin Laden fan. He was a man who carried his beliefs beyond decency.

But! Do we not do the same? Does America not do the same?

It all depends on what side you are on!

It all depends on your own personal beliefs!

And who decides in the end who is right and who is wrong?

The man is dead!

At the end of the day he met the death that, I am sure, he knew he would eventually meet.

Why can we not just simply say: " That is it. It's over".

But I listen to people bray with bravado and false pride. I hate it.

At the end of the day, we all believe in what we believe.

Who says he was any more right or wrong than we were?

He was, at the end of the day, a person who believed, like we do, that he was right.

He was a human being with his own beliefs.

Let us dispose of him with dignity. America's self adulation at this moment does not impress me any more than their invasion of Iraq impressed me all those years, and lives, ago did!

It's just my thoughts.

Apparently they are going to just throw him into the sea?

Is that right?

So that a shrine cannot be made of him?

Is that right?

Are we still afraid of him then?

We should not be afraid if we feel and know that we are true.

Why do people feel that they need to celebrate and feel good about the death of one man?

As one person said today on a tv programme that I watched.

‘Bin Laden is dead. El quaeda is not!’

Exactly!

Terrorism has not died with the disposal of one man!

Let us be bigger. Let us be satisfied that one person that we, in our westernized world , believe to be evil has gone.

But let us not be self-satisfied nor virtuous.

Let us rather examine ourselves quite closely!

We might be quite shocked at what we see!

However, I am back and I am very happy that something can still stir my spirit and my soul.

SOS

2011-03-14T22:28:00.000+02:00

Do you pray?

Do you meditate?

Do you just think?

Please, whatever it is that you do, keep us in mind this Friday!

We need all the positive vibes that we can get!

Thank you.

Slap and Smack

2011-03-14T21:41:00.000+02:00

We have been going through a dreadful time on a personal level. And then came along the earthquake in Japan, followed by the tsunami and the additional threat of a nuclear problem.

It all kind of puts things into perspective!

I know it sounds awful but the Japanese have been quite guilty of plundering the seas and destroying dolphins and so on and all that kind of stuff. I wish them no ill and I grieve for what they are all going through.

But somehow, it just seems so right that our earth delivers a great big 'klap'.

Gracious me! Our planet deserves better than what we give it.

Why should we be surprised when it hits back?

And isn't it amazing, when we watch the absolute devastation, that we suddenly realise how small we are and how little we mean on this planet and how insignificant are all the things we hold dear!

I commented to the dear man yesterday that amidst all the devastation and chaos that there was no mention of looting.

Today, the anchorman or whatever he is called, said that there were shops destroyed with their goods open to whoever wanted them. There was food, saki, wine and whatever people were willing to take.There has been no looting!

The Japanese people have displayed a demeanor that is a lesson to us all.

They are stoic, they are brave and they show a great sense of community and togetherness!

Perhaps, because of our xenophobia towards everyone. we have underestimated the other people who live on the same planet as us.

From what I have seen on TV, the people of Japan are to be greatly admired. There is no sense of entitlement. There is no feeling that they are owed anything by anyone.

In fact, one almost gets the feeling that, were it not for the huge extent of the disaster, they would rather get on with it themselves.

I have watched extensive coverage and the Japanese are so dignified, they are so brave and they are so loyal and disciplined and organised.

They are not screaming for their rights. They are not rioting in the streets, not looting.

What a dignified nation

I keep my fingers crossed for a nation that deserves it!

All that is required is a true heart.

2011-03-08T20:41:00.000+02:00

Pia's Portal has required me to respond. Not just to her. I have held beliefs that have upset many people.

Adam goes to CBC. The original Christian Brothers College was in Green Point. Part of my past, part of my village.

My dear man went to CBC. Pia, that might either comfort you or dismay you.

I was an Anglican. My family worshipped regularly at a very beautiful and charismatic church called Saint Alban's.

We lived in the very close knit village of Green Point. Catholic or Anglican, we all knew each other, we knew each other's business and, above all, we cared about each other.

The dear man went to CBC. He was a charity child, did you know? His mom couldn't afford to pay his fees so each year, because he was a decent lad, he 'won' a scholarship to help with his education.

My dear man was a devout Catholic. Pia, phone him one day and he will sing the mass to you in Latin!

He went to confession every Saturday, he did not eat meat on Friday and he attended mass every Sunday morning and Benediction every Sunday night.

He too ate pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and came home with an ashy cross on his forehead on Ash Wednesday. As did I.

He too spent 40 days denying himself things that he loved.

'40 days and forty night thou wast fasting in the wild."

What I am trying to say, and I only know it from my experience and the dear man's, is that somewhere along the line we make up our own minds.

Very few people that I know understand the Bible. They will argue with me but they cannot even quote a single line from the Bible to support what they say.

They say they are Christians but they don't go to church.

I say. Be what you believe you are but then do it and follow it with all of your heart.

Do not choose the bits that suit you and ignore the rest.

Adam will find his own way. He is still very young.

I am totally, in spite of my very religious background, agnostic or atheist. I'm not sure which but the dear man and I read and debate and seek the truth.

I am quite different to my sisters who are very dogmatic in their faith. They fear for me and believe that I will not dwell in heavenly pastures with them.

I love their concern. But I am content in my belief.

The one thing that I do believe is that most of the main religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam all subscribe to what I call rules for social living.

Hinduism and Buddhism also subscribe to these decent rules.

All these rules are fading away. People are forgetting them.

I believe that religion has a great role to play in order to keep the masses in line. Fear of punishment or hope of reward.

This is what religion does for people. It keeps them in line, so to speak.

Religion plays a big role in keeping people aware of the good and the bad, and the consequences thereof.

I believe, I the non-believer, that we need religion now more than ever. Our society needs it, our world needs it.

I have not a problem about our children receiving this kind of doctrine. We can point out to them that there are other options. But don't do it too soon. That will just confuse them.

Teenagers, and yes! your babies are going to get there before you know it, pretty soon come up with their own ideas and objections. They may or may not drift off to their own belief system.

But if they have had the foundation of faith, charity and love and have understood the basic decent rules for co-existing with their fellowmen, they will never go astray.

Believe!

And love!

All the rest is dross.

It's a strange, strange world we live in...

2011-03-07T21:48:00.000+02:00

Over the last few weeks I have regretted that I do not have a fancy camera like Pia and Susie have.

They take such beautiful photos. But I know that I am not capable of being in charge of such a camera.

When my nephew was here, for his dad's funeral, ( but I am determined that this will not be a sad post because I've done enough of those), my sister jumped into the pool and all 3 little girls joined her. My sister was yelling in desperation because she was being overwhelmed by 3 little girls who wanted to have fun with her. So Caroline yelled to me: " Mom, take some photos!"

So Mom did. Mom didn't quite know what she was doing. Mom was trying to be quite intuitive. I hope I took some decent pictures but I do know that I took at least 2 very nice ones of the tiled floor. Sorry, Andre. But at least I knew to take the lens cap off!

But just recently, the dear man and I have seen a few scenes that have really amused us and I have wished that I had had a camera at the ready.

We went off to Langebaan this past weekend.

Travelling along the road that links up to the West Coast road, we passed a herd of cattle drinking from a trough. And one big fellow had his two front legs in the trough! It was a hot day. It was, as they say, 'a Kodak moment.'

We passed a very overloaded 'bakkie', people who were obviously moving house. Just before we passed them, a large carton fell off the 'bakkie' and a whole box of someone's possessions bounced off the tarmac and shattered into pieces. The bits and debris were still there on the road when we returned home today.

And as we approached the Langebaan turn-off, we saw a man with a rope over his shoulders, dragging a car behind him onto the shoulder of the road. And I hate to say it, but we laughed. Life is so full of strange stuff!

And today, as we left The Cove I noticed five starlings sitting on a palisade fence, each in their own little space. I really wished I had had a camera.

I realised that life is full of 'Kodak moments'.

I have also realised that we don't need a camera to capture them.

Our minds give us Kodak moments. We replay them over and over again.

It's not about the camera and what it cost. It's not about the skill of the photographer.

It's about what is captured in a moment in time and the meaning of it.

The dear man and I agreed to leave our DSTV card behind in Cape Town because Caroline and Craig simply had to watch this series that they have been following for a long time.

We have a whole lot of DVD's which have been converted ( I think I mentioned it a while back) from old 8mm movies. We didn't have the heart to do it. Too many people passed on and especially Gerrit which is too close and too raw.

So we entertained ourselves by watching SABC3.

Peter entertained himself by counting the adverts in between.

But we scored by watching a CSI Miami which we enjoyed and a programme called Interface which is controversial and topical and we found it really stimulating and hopeful.

And this one black man said: ' It is immoral if one person makes the same amount of money in one deal in a few days that it took the Opperheimers to make in 100 years!' Good for him!

But there are so many moments out there. So many scenes which simply encapsulate this country of ours so that I desperately want to capture them forever.

We live in strange, strange world.

But we have to love it!

What else is there?

Funeral Thoughts

2011-03-03T01:39:00.000+02:00

Well, whoop-de- doo, I am sure you are all saying.

Here she goes again! It's been a long time since I have written a post that makes anyone laugh and that includes me.

We, as a family, have ridden a roller-coaster of emotion.

We have lost, as most of you know, a founder member of our very close family. And a great many people have lost a dear friend.

The last 12 days have been sheer hell.

We have all staggered around in a very confused state.

My heart goes out to my big sister. But my admiration goes to my second big sister who has been a pillar of strength and sense in this hard time.

What amazes me is how so many people suddenly step forward to help in whatever way they can. People can be so great. Help comes from the most unexpected places. And love appears from everywhere. It's so sad that the deceased person doesn't know. Why do we wait for someone to die before we can say we loved you and we cared for you?

I always say, as a Cape Town resident, we don't go up the mountain because it is always there.

I spent Gerrit's funeral service in the 'cry-room' of the church. Caroline and I were minding Nina and Addy and Amy was at play-school. Fortunately, we were able to hear the service and to be part of it. To be honest, I wasn't really needed. I was just being an emotional coward which is one of my weaknesses.

Funerals are very strange. The church was packed as I thought it would be. Gerrit touched many people in so many ways.

Afterwards, it was a trip down memory lane.

We had quite a few Clydebankers who recognised each other with joy and with lots of memories and laughter.

There were loads of people that I did not know. They are part of my sister's life and they were there because of her and what she means to them.

It might seem strange, but for me what is most important are the pall-bearers. It's a horrible task but it is an honour. I liked the way it was done for Gerrit.

His closest family carried the coffin into the church and his dearest friends bore it out.

It is the last gift that one can give. Literally, a labour of love.

And all these thought of death brings questions. Caroline asked me what kind of funeral would I want?

I asked Peter what would you want?

And I also said: ' for goodness sake, sort your stuff out! I wouldn't know what to do if you die before me.'

And I don't know what kind of funeral he would want because he is an atheist ( as am I ) and that's quite a hard one.

I've done some research and amazingly there is a lot of help out there for those who are atheists.

I think I would like to compose my own farewell ceremony. To be followed with lots of sparkling wine. And, I think, lots of Irish music. The Irish are so good at melancholy.

But pretty good at joy too. A good reflection of life, in fact!

Why so morbid do you ask?

Death is not reserved for the old! We are ' born astride the grave'

There is nothing worse than to leave your loved ones bewildered and muddled as to what to do with you when you die.

Your best legacy is for them to know what you want in the event of your sudden death. Doing what you want is your way of granting them some peace amidst the unbelievable mountain of paperwork that is required when you finally shuffle off to some other place.

So write a poem, burn a CD, let them know what it is what you would like as your final farewell. It will help so much in the midst of all the bewildering turmoil that will. I assure you, follow your departure from this world.

I really liked this little poem that I found in my quest for something meaningful.

REMEMBER

Remember me when I am gone away

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Where have all the ducks gone?

2011-02-21T20:46:00.000+02:00

I am only writing this because I have tried, without success, to write to the Tygerburger newspaper and have had no success.

My daughter took her little daughters off to the duck-pond in Plattekloof today. They had bags of bread, were wearing their sunhats and were very happy about the whole expedition.

The whole thing was a disaster.

There were no ducks.

The pond was almost dried up.

The grass had been mowed within an inch of its life. This little space has been one of Plattekloofs little secrets. A place known only by the residents who cared.

When we owned the Spar in Plattekloof, we had people who would come to ask for bread for the ducks and geese at the pond. Which we gladly gave them.

What has become of the pond?

Where have the ducks gone?

I don't even want to go there. We all know about exterminating alien things.

But Plattekloof has lost the only thing that ever made it special.

The suburb has nothing more to say about itself.

But we had a great duck-pond. And now it has gone!

The Tygerburger will still have a letter from me once I get hold of the contact address.

I live in a pathetic suburb and it's taken me 12 years to realise it.

I am ashamed! And so should be everybody else who lives here!

Totsiens

2011-02-19T21:55:00.000+02:00

Today we bid farewell to our brother-in- law who was also husband to my sister, Eleanor, brother-in law to my other sister, Maureen, father to Andre, uncle to Richard and Caroline and great-uncle to Amy and Nina as well as and not least, gramps to Addy in America.

His death was unexpected and sudden.

Although he had a few months of illness just a little while ago, he seemed to be improving. He was back to his painting jobs, was looking forward to his annual fishing trip to Namibia with his twin brother and some friends.

He died in Greyton where he was staying with his brother for a few days. We believe his death was swift and painless. He died in his sleep. I believe we all wish that for ourselves.

Tonight he lies in Hermanus while we go through all the technical procedures to get him home here to Cape Town where he belongs.

But the shock is enormous and we are all still reeling from it.

I feel I have to write this post as a sort of tribute to Gerrit.

40 years ago, we were 3 sisters who were doomed, it seemed, to remain spinsters for the rest of our lives. It was different then. Reach 24 without being married...well, then you were well and truly 'on the shelf'.

Then along came Gerrit and then Peter.

Enough to send my father over the edge because Gerrit was a Dutchman ( read Afrikaner) and Peter was a 'holy Roman' ( read Roman Catholic) and both of those were taboo in our family.

I think, although I have never had it confirmed, that my mild mother suddenly decided that enough was enough and she pretty much informed my dad that he was not to interfere.

My dad was very possessive of his 3 daughters and only stopped short of erecting a small gun-turret on our roof to keep away potential suitors.

So the mad Dutchman and the Holy Roman were permitted into our home and, as they say, the rest is history!

Gerrit came from a very different background. For a start there was the language difficulty, there were the political differences and there were cultural differences. He was a policeman and a dog-handler who spent months up on the Caprivi Strip, defending the borders of our country. No matter what your political ideals may have been in those days, Gerrit did his job with belief and loyalty. He suffered deprivation and fear. He spent long months away from his home, his wife and his family.

He followed this with a stint in the bomb squad during the time where all South Africans lived in fear of being blown up at a station, in a bank, a shopping mall or even a church.

He lived his life in fear, never knowing if he would return to his home that night.

Gerrit did his duty. He was proud of what he did.

When he became a member of our family, we embraced him. I will never forget the first birthday he celebrated with us. We did all the usual things: cake, candles, gifts, a special dinner and 'happy birthday to you!!!!'

He was astounded because in his family, birthdays were pretty much passed by, as was Christmas, Mothers' Day, etc, etc.

Gerrit was the fixer-upper, the do-it-aller, the handyman in our family. There was nothing he could not put his hands to. He built cupboards in my room and in my parents' room in Clydebank Road.

He made a beautiful dressing table for Maureen and a lovely bedhead for Eleanor.

When Peter started travelling overseas on business, it was Gerrit who took him to the airport and who fetched him home. It was Gerrit who helped me out when things went pear-shaped when Peter was away.

He was always there for everyone but especially family.

We laughed at him when he made his little mistakes like calling a torch a 'torts' and we still giggle when we remember a holiday in Plett when he had us all running about the place looking for something called 'rollux'. Maureen whispered to me: 'What ARE rollux?' Well, it turned out to be row-locks...you know, those things they use for the oars on a boat!

We have shared so many memories together. Although Gerrit didn't quite GET us, he learned to get along with us. Sometimes I think he thought we were all mad.But he was a good, kind and loyal family member. He was also a really good friend to all who passed his way.

He was passionate about fishing and boating and was still planning to build another boat. That was still his dream.

He had a kind death. It is we who find it so hard. Too sudden, too soon.

All I can wish him is 'stywe lyne' up there somewhere in the great ocean in the sky.

Rest well, dear brother, dear friend!

Take your pick

2011-02-10T21:39:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow we were supposed to go a friend's house for a braai and she phoned me to cancel.

You see, her mom who is in her late 70's is dying ( and yes, I have said the word!) of ovarian cancer.

She, my friend, was sobbing on the phone and so I removed myself to a quiet place where I could speak to her without other people listening or offering their opinion.

I spoke to her with the best heart I could offer. I could have said 'advice', but who needs that when your mother is dying and you can't bear to even face that!

This is NOT about me.

But my mom died suddenly and unexpectedly after what was supposed to be a routine operation.

20 years later, I still regret the things I did not say to her. All the things that should have been said and were not! My son, who was only 8 years old at the time, still grieves about the fact that on his gran's last night on earth, he and his cousin were playing in the lifts in the hospital.

So, as the post title says: 'Take your pick'.

Would you like the chance to speak to your loved one, be it parent, child or partner? Would you like to have the opportunity to tell them what they have been to you? Meant to you? Would you like one last chance to share with them what memories you have together...a remember when moment?

Of course you would.

So take your pick and do it now.

Life is uncertain. We have no guarantees that we will have the time later to say what we need to say now and share what we need to share now!

Do it NOW!

I told my sobbing, grieving friend tonight, how fortunate she was to still have time. She still has time to say all the things that matters to her mom. She still has the time to hold her mom in her arms and whisper in her ear all the things that matter between a mother and a daughter.

And, may I even say it, she needs to give her mother permission to let go!

Moms don't let go. They battle on forever for those that they love.

But, sometimes, we need to let go of those we love.

We do not want them to have the pain or the discomfort or the indignity that illness brings. But we don't want them to go.

Sometimes, we need to be less selfish.

I just wish my dear friend and her very lovely mother the farewell that they both deserve.

I'm Back ( I think)

2011-02-02T20:45:00.000+02:00

Thank you so much, all the people who have sent me messages of support and encouragement. Some I know but at least two I do not. It's a strange feeling to realise that there are people out there who don't even know you but who have bothered to send some words of support. Thank you so much. It is comforting to know that humans can support each other across countries and borders. We do not know each other but the human condition is the same for all of us.
Our life continues to be a roller-coaster of emotions. I so much regret that I cannot at this stage even enlighten those of you who would really like to know what is going on.
Suffice it to say, that at this point in time, I am so disillusioned and cynical about everything and everyone.
As I said to my dearest elder sister today: " I didn't realise how many creeps there are in this world!"
And nor did my dear man.
We have just lived our lives believing in other people and thinking life is good.
I wish, I really wish, I could tell the whole story. At the moment I cannot. But...come the day!
On a brighter note, we have had a strong interest from a buyer who would love to buy our home. Things are being set in place but there are all these guarantees and FICA requirements and rules and everything and we still don't know what is going on.
It would really work in our favour and our present battle to have a buyer for our home. Please cross everything you can think of and pray to who or whatever you pray to. We so much need this right now.
I am appalled that one person who sent me a message of support was a person who had never read my blog before. I am appalled because it was my worst post ever. So self-pitying, so miserable. I am embarrassed! Dear Abby, if you ever come this way again, please read some of my other posts. I can do a whole lot better than misery!
Life is full of allegories.
Nature provides us with a lot of them.
We had two last week. Nature lessons that provide us with some sort of meaning.
LESSON NUMBER ONE:
A very small gecko lay on the floor. It was writhing in agony. I spotted it first and called Caroline's attention to it. We examined it closely and saw that its tail was gone, its back legs were crushed and a strange red bulge extended from its tummy area. I don't know what happened to this poor little creature but my two grand-daughters were peering at it and muttering sounds of distress.
My daughter took the girls off on an outing and I promised I would despatch the little gecko in the best way I could. AND I COULDN'T!
I had to call my son-in-law and shout help! I was planning to just wrap the gecko in some paper towel and flush it down the loo.
Craig just picked it up, crushed it between his fingers and told me that was far kinder than drowning it!
LESSON NUMBER TWO
The two little girls were playing in their playroom when Amy yelled for her mom.
Rolling across the floor was a very large rain spider and a very angry wasp. And they were fighting for their lives.
As the little girls watched in fascination, my dear and very brave daughter ( who does not believe in killing anything!) allowed the very wounded wasp to stagger away and then she picked up the Fisher-Price record player and dropped it onto the rain spider who had just been robbed of his wasp lunch!
We had spider juice everywhere. It took a lot of cleaning up and the little girls were shouting, 'Pider, pider!" and showing me ( like fishermen do) how big it was!
Life can be cruel but it does give us some sort of meaning.
I think there is always a meaning in nature, somehow!
I shouldn't say this and my daughter will chastise me, but I really wish there was someone out there who will drop a Fisher Price record player on our predators!

Hello, 2011

2011-01-20T21:09:00.000+02:00

I have not been in a blogging mood. Judging from all the pathetic posts from all my favourite bloggers, I guess they have not been either.
Exceptions being 'Dragonfly' and Suzies blog, both which keep us up to date and for sharing such inspirational things. I almost hate them for being so happy and optimistic and for making me feel so pathetic and ineffectual.tWhy do I expect a number to make the slightest difference in my life?
Why do I expect 2011 to be any different to 2010?
It is just a change in numbers really, isn't it?
We are experiencing an extremely difficult period in our lives. I think I can safely say that it is the worst time of our lives ever.
I can't say too much. We will probably be sued from here to kingdom come.
But once it is all over, I will do what I do best. I will shoot my mouth off and tell the truth.
I have had good friends and even my family tell me that I should learn to keep my mouth shut.
I say, 'WHY?'
And again, I say why?
However, I sit tonight at my computer and I write and I wonder what the dear man and I have ever done to deserve what we are getting.
I believe we have been good people. We have, as the dear man as always said, shared the joy.
My greatest hurt is my dear man's bewilderment. He can't understand how he has managed to acquire enemies .
I don't know how to answer him.
We will continue to fight to the death for that is what it is.
I am so grateful to our dear and supporting family who continue to be there for us.
I am grateful to the few friends who remember us in better times and who have not let go of us.
Last night I had what I believe was a stress attack. It had all the symptoms of a heart attack and I truly thought my moment had come. The dear man phoned our son who came immediately to be with me and for quite a while I thought it was my last day on this earth. I cannot even begin to describe to you how it feels. It continues to haunt me.
Afterwards, when the pain goes away, you feel quite stupid. And relieved.
But I watched, through a gripping pain, my dearest and most loved people worrying about me and it occurred to me that I am loved.
I realised that my life has not been in vain.

The Week in Between

2010-12-27T20:46:00.000+02:00

First it's Christmas and then it's New Year. A week where nothing is as it should be and where we do not feel as we should. It's as though we cast off our 'normal' lives and live in a kind of festive limbo.
Too many drinks, too many indulgent treats and too many late nights.Actually, I exaggerate. The dear man and I were in bed at about 8.30pm on Christmas Day. Never before in history!
I had cooked a 3 course meal for 12 people all by myself. Apart from the gift shopping and the food shopping, I stood for hours deveining prawns, making soup, battling with unco-operative phyllo pastry and juggling turkey, pork and lamb.
Everything worked out just fine and it was a lovely Christmas lunch.
The little girls were spoiled rotten and have many weeks of playing with all their lovely things.
I just feel so lazy. Like I could do with a good holiday and Langebaan beckons like a siren.
Alas! It is not to be. The dear man has shifts to work and spends long hours in the shop.
So we dwell in this holiday hiatus...nothing is normal but life, especially in a retail business, must go on. We had customers who were quite indignant that our shop was going to be closed on Christmas Day!
And so we head towards the new year, 2011.
I hope it will be an improvement on 2010!
We, personally, have had a horrific year . I hope that the new one will be better.But it will be, I know, because of new determination and resolve.
I will tell you all the story one day if and when it is appropriate.
In the meantime, with the new year fast approaching, I practise " The Gratitudes" ( and resolve to go and get my eyes tested!) and strengthen myself for what lies ahead.
A new year should be about hope and promise, not dread.
And hell, that rhymes, doesn't it?
Wishing you all a really good 2011 filled with all the things you hope for ( just be realistic!)
Stay safe!

The Ghost of Christmas Past

2010-12-13T20:57:00.000+02:00

At this time of the year I find myself, in between doing all the things that need to be done, thinking way back to the Christmas times I had with my family.
We were not a well-off family but I do not remember or feel a sense of deprivation or loss.
We had a tradition which we followed year after year. It was always the same and I personally found that very comforting.
It was tradition. it was ritual, it was what we knew.
On Christmas Eve we all, with the exception of my dad, would take ourselves off to St Albans, our Anglican church set in the heart of Green Point. We would go to attend the Midnight service which would start at 11.30pm.
The Crib ( as we called the Nativity scene ) would be set up in a little corner of the church. The baby was missing.
As we approached midnight, the priest and his servers and his altar boys would proceed around the perimeter of the church with the little ceramic baby lying on a cushion. The candles would flicker, the incense would pervade the air.
Just before midnight, the little baby was laid in the manger at the crib.
We would light the candles as midnight approached.
Then at midnight, the verger would go outside and ring the church-bell with all his might.
And the organ would start to play the opening chords of " Christians, Awake! Salute the Happy Morn!"
It was the most glorious of moments. It was the most meaningful of times. It was the simple joy of believing!
My poor mom would stagger home. We would eat mince-pies and then flop into bed.
She would get up with the lark to heave a huge stuffed turkey into the oven. In those days, turkeys were formidable birds! They took hours and hours to cook!
And sometimes, ( vegetarians, read no further!) my dear and generous uncle would supply us with a suckling piglet!
If you have never tasted suckling pig, you do not know what you have missed!
But, I have to admit, I did not enjoy opening the fridge and seeing his reproachful little face staring at me!
But my mom was intrepid! She did what she needed to do to feed her family.
As a slight digression ( as most of you know, I am inclined to digress!)
Many years ago the dear man and I found ourselves in a sleepy little hilltop town in Tuscany.
We found an outdoor restaurant in a quiet courtyard under an ancient vine.
The special of the day was sucking pig. To this day, I have yet to enjoy a meal so much! And it wasn't even Christmas!
We did not often get new clothes or new shoes but my mom made sure that we did. She used to do this thing called lay-by.
In those days there were no accounts or credit cards. It was cash or lay-by! or whatever.
And there was the Christmas tradition that on Christmas Day, she would lay out our dresses and socks and panties and shoes on our beds and we would don all those things with much pleasure and joy.
And then we would all sit down at the Christmas table. Sometimes we were as many as 20 people. My aunt and uncle and their 3children would travel down from Uitenhage to be with us. Sometimes we had boyfriends and friends and even strangers sit at our festive table. And the table just seemed to expand and accommodate them all. And there was always enough food.
We, as kids, were always allowed a small glass of champagne.
It used to knock us out so we would shed our glad-rags and have a sleep.
Because the day had only just begun.
Come the evening, we would go off to Aunty Letty and Uncle Dave's house up on Ocean View Drive.
Such generous people. They were childless, but embraced our family and various other folk with great love and hospitality.
Sometimes I feel that a lot of what I have done in the past stems from the memory of Aunty Letty who was truly a great hostess.
We would round off the day with a movie. 16mm , do not laugh!!!
It was great, it was all wondrous, and it filled our young lives with pleasure and happiness.
Today I still try to carry on some of those memories and traditions.
My sister still makes the traditional Christmas pudding, money and all.
I still cook a turkey although they have gotten so much smaller, and I cook deboned leg of pork ( and grieve the loss of that divine sucking pig, although I know that Gavin, our master blockman, would arrange one for me if I so desired!)
I love looking back at my Christmas past.
It helps me to make the Christmas present so much better for everyone.
So! If I don't post again before Christmas, Have a great one all of you!
Enjoy the silly season. Enjoy the season when we suddenly realise how much we love those people who are meaningful and close to us.
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Blame it on the Magi

2010-12-11T20:28:00.000+02:00

I've had more than one e-mail going on about the greed and commercialism of Xmas ( and I'm saying that Xmas on purpose because today I weazled it and learnt a lot and it all quite confirmed what I had suspected in the first place!)
The giving of gifts!
Well, you can blame it all on the 3 wise guys ( as one of my Std 3 pupils called them.)
Their names were Melchior, Casper and Balthazar. They brought, from afar, expensive gifts for whom they believed was a new great king.
I can just imagine Melchior instructing his wife or hand-maidens to get his robes ready. Shouting to his servants to ready his camels. Making sure his wife had prepared food for the journey, and above all, that she had bought ( and wrapped!) his gift for the new king.
Gold, frankincense and myrrh!
Well! Even today we can't do better than that! No matter which designer shop we visit!
SO! I'm pretty much afraid that the trend was set a long time ago!
I've gone back in time and read my previous Christmas posts just so that I do not tediously repeat myself.
I am no longer affiliated with any particular church.
I will not say that I am not religious because I am in my own way. ( Look up the meaning of the word, and you will understand what I mean.)
I love the tradition. I love the meaning of it all.
I still try to incorporate that into our Christmas season.
Today the dear man is working and he is closing the shop and, at this moment in time, is still not home.
I've spent time looking for my old Christmas carol books in the piano stool.
For those of you who do not know, a piano stool has a lid that lifts up and underneath is a storage space in which you can keep your sheet music and your music books. And my carol books are no longer there. I wonder where they have gone?
It was with much sadness that I realised that I do not have a copy of the nativity play that I wrote for the Sunday school at our church.
I also regretted that I do not have a copy of the Christmas carol lyrics that I wrote and for which a friend of my sister wrote the music. My Std 3 class sang that carol at our annual carol service.
However, I do remember the one wise man picking his nose at an inappropriate moment and one of the shepherds scratching his bottom. I remember the little angels waving madly to their parents in the audience and I remember my sister and I hissing out the words, which had been forgotten, to the hapless little players on the stage.
And I do remember everyone in the audience standing up and clapping. And then insisting that we did it all over again. ( It was not a very long play!) And so we did!
So, big gifts or small, it doesn't really matter, does it?
It really is the spirit in which they are given.
And received!
PS. Xmas! the x comes from a Greek letter which stood for Christ. Not irreverent at all!

Yeah, yeah,yeah, yeah, yeah!

2010-12-08T20:56:00.000+02:00

Dragonfly reminded me in her latest post that it is 30 years since John Lennon died.
I haven't kept track but I do know it is 24 years today that my most beloved mother died.
This morning I lit the yahrzeit candle as I have done for the last 24 years. It is still glowing quietly ( but then does a candle ever glow noisily?) I will blow it out just before I go to bed.
Each time I passed it today I nodded to it in recognition of a person I loved so much. I whispered quiet messages to her and just hoped that somewhere, somehow she could hear me.
If she could, she would. I know that.
And I really wished that she was still around so that I could just weep on her shoulder and tell her my troubles and hear her telling me to 'pull myself together."
Tonight, a most beautiful night, warm and still, I sat out on the balcony and admired the pretty lights of the city.
I suppose my daughter would tell me that I was meditating. I think I was.
The dear man came out to join me but, being the understanding person he is, realised I needed to be alone and so he left.
My sisters came to visit today. They saw the candle. They too still mourn the woman we called 'Mom'.
When my mom died, the four of us, I and my two sisters and my dad. Well, we kind of came unstuck. She was the glue that held us together and when she died, so unexpectedly and suddenly, we all fell apart and our hearts broke.
But in a way, she is still the glue that keeps us together. A love superglue. That is my mom!
Today, we, the three sisters all getting older and only too aware of our own mortality, watched my lovely little grand-daughters playing around and having fun.
We laughed so much at them because they are so lovely. Amy, so old-fashioned, being the big sister.
Nina, absolutely hilarious, so alive.
But to get back to John Lennon.
My mom and dad just knew him as one of those strange blokes who yeah-yeahed a lot and who had strange hair-cuts.
In 1964 my sisters went off on a 3 month long holiday overseas. It was the height of Beatle mania.
I was still at school and lived their holiday vicariously as regular letters and post-cards arrived.
They nearly got crushed to death in their attempt to see the Beatles in person.
They brought home for me, as gifts. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and a copy of John Lennon's book, 'In his Own Write.'
That just shows you how versatile I was!
They also brought back a plastic Beatle's wig which my Dad loved and often wore when he was doing one of his home theatre acts. ( Another post to follow soon I hope on that subject!)
I have John Lennons book open on my desk.
He was a talented and thoughtful man.
Let me share one of my favourite bits with you!
I SAT BELONELY
I sat belonely down a tree
humbled fat and small.
A little lady sing to me
I couldn't see at all.

I'm looking up and at the sky,
to find such wondrous voice.
Puzzly puzzle, wonder why
I hear and have no choice.
'Speak up, come forth, you ravel me,'
I potty menthol shout.
'I know you hiddy by this tree.'
But still she won't come out.

Such softly singing lulled me sleep,
an hour or two or so
I wakeny slow and took a peep
and still no lady show.

Then suddy on a little twig
I thought I see a sight,
A tiny little tiny pig
that sing with all its might.
'I thought you were a lady'
I giggle- well I may,
To my suprise the lady,
got up-and flew away.

So there you go. A 1964 copy of John Lennons book. Not worth much. About 7 pounds on e-bay!
But priceless in terms of memory and moments!
My mom and John Lennon!
They couldn't have been more different.
But they had one thing in common.
They both gave something to the people who loved them!

Just Wishing

2010-11-17T20:23:00.000+02:00

That my two most beautiful granddaughters never find out that:
Balloons pop
Bubbles burst
And ice-cream melts!

Mrs Finn

2010-11-08T21:15:00.000+02:00

It's a joke, a family joke that goes back many years.
I've become a boot-sale lady along with my daughter who seems to have it in her blood. Read her blog, Rhymes and Reasons, to get her perspective.
I've had erstwhile friends cruising past my little stall with smirks on their faces. I think they came just to see me selling things at a boot-sale. I think I have always been thought a snob.
I have never been that. And they do not know where I came from or what my roots are.
The stuff I am selling are things that have lurked in cupboards and under beds and in the garage.
I have had the most beautiful things but I am not parting yet with the best.
We have had return customers who have been so complimentary about our 'stock'. If they had the money to buy, I know they would have.
I have taken the greatest pleasure in people who bought something at our first sale who came back to the second to tell us how much pleasure they have got out of their purchase. And it makes me so happy that the things I once loved are now being loved by someone else.
I am learning to let go.
And by searching through my house for 'stock', I've had a laugh or two with my dear man. Dear me, we were collectors!
So I'm very glad I've made a start on clearing out my home.
It's very cathartic, but apart from that, it brings so many memories back.
So it's a bit of cleaning out your mind too.
We will be back at the boot sale on the 4th of December. I plan to add some new items to add more interest.
So Mrs Finn I am.
I'll tell you that story another time!

Halloween and Guy Fawkes

2010-11-04T20:50:00.000+02:00

We had a lovely Halloween party on Sunday.
The daddy carved a beautiful pumpkin and we had ( not too scary) spider-webs and home-made pumpkin and bat pictures stuck up on the windows.c
The two little girls were a joy.
Amy, dressed in green and orange, wore a lovely pumpkin hat. Nina, in black, was along with her wings, a bat!
They carried little pumpkin lamps and little orange baskets for the goodies they hoped to get.
All the people they visited were people we knew.
By the way. THE MUMMY was a witch and a very lovely witch she
was too!
When they eventually came home with their loot, we had a very nice Halloween party along with family and some friends.
Tomorrow is Guy Fawkes.
" Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The gunpowder,treason and plot.
I know of no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot."
Well, it has been. It has no meaning here in the new South Africa.
But looking back, I remember Guy Fawkes very well.
There was a whole build up to it and people, before all the by-laws were in place, used to start building bonfires on the Mouille Point beachfront in anticipation of the event.
Crackers and fireworks were on sale everywhere. I remember my dad and everyone else's dad coming home with a big box of fireworks. There were starlights ( my limit, I'm afraid as I was a real sissy) There were strings of lady crackers that gave off a series of polite little pops. Then there were the big bangs which did just that! There were the catherine wheels which needed to be nailed to a wooden fence or gate and which, when lit, would turn and twirl in a circle of colourful sparks.
There were the snakes. Nasty folded things which the dads would light and then run like hell because they used to spit and jump all over the place.
The roman fountains would simply be just beautiful. No banging just a shower of lovely pink and white light.
And then of course, there were the rockets. Always left 'til last.
They would be placed in a bottle, lit and we would all cover our ears and hope for the best.
And when they finally soared up into the sky, we would cheer and watch as they bloomed into the dark and then faded away. And we would sigh!
And for some obscure reason, we kids would scour the streets the next day to pick up all the spent remnants of fireworks.
It simply was what we did.
I don't mind that there is no Guy Fawkes now. It really doesn't have too much to do with us now and things have gotten out of hand a bit and people do all sorts of crazy and cruel things in the name of a rather obsolete celebration.
Personally, I don't miss it. I spent most of the night standing in my mom's bedroom at the window with my hands over my ears.
And for at least two weeks I walked to and from school in absolute terror because I knew the boys from our 'hood' were waiting to throw big bangs at me.
I've been in Philadelphia on Independence Day.
I've been in Paris on Bastille Day.
I am no lover of fireworks!
But tomorrow is Guy Fawkes day and in a way, I find it sad that it will pass not " with a bang, but a whimper".

Cash in the Attic

2010-10-19T20:48:00.000+02:00

It is clear out time.
No, we have not sold our house but I thought it was time that I made a start on clearing out 37 years of accumulated things.
Because, when we do eventually sell our house ( and it will happen probably at the least convenient time), it will be a huge task.
So, I thought, I might as well start now.
So I did!
I plan to take a load of stuff to the local boot-sale.
It has been very hard, trying to decide what to throw out and what to keep.
My dear daughter said to me: " Mom. throw out what you don't want."
But the point is, you see, the very reason I have it IS because I wanted it. Why else would it be there?
Gracious me, I have been a collector.
And there are all sorts of dilemmas.
What if I am throwing things out that people have given me as gifts?
What if they come to the boot-sale and see that I am selling something that they gave me?
How do I get around that?
I don't really know except that I cannot hang onto everything that has been given to me over 37 years!
And I agonised over everything as it came out of the cupboards.
I hummed and I haa-ed over each and everything.
But two items kept me busy today.
The first a Chinese sort of looking plate which is quite crazed and old looking. I spent hours on Google trying to find the providence of this plate. A lot of detective work later, I discovered ( I think) that the plate is at least 120 years old, coming from a pottery in Staffordshire which closed in 1883!
The second 'cash-in-the attic' find is a boxed shaving kit. Made by Wilkinson Sword round about 1910. it is called the 7 day razor. Named that because it has a set of blades each engraved with a day of the week.
I also found a really old pair of Hiatt handcuffs. Do not ask me where they came from or why they were in my family bits.
My son claimed them and please don't ask why!
My dining-room table is full of things that I know were never mine.
We had a lot of parties and functions in this house over the years and people go home, forgetting their things, and the bits and pieces languish away in my cupboards and their owners never come to claim them.
Well, they sit now on my table waiting to be claimed.
And if they are not claimed by the 30th of this month, they will be going to the boot-sale!

My Poor Bathroom

2010-10-12T21:00:00.000+02:00

It looks so bare. It has holes chopped into the floor and wires where, once, underfloor heating existed.
The wall, where the vanity unit once existed, is stripped bare. The marble slab has been removed and the mirror has disappeared.
"Don't you dare break the mirror," I warned the joiner.
"That will be 7 years bad luck!"
He thought I didn't hear or understand and muttered to another worker:
" So lank as dit is joune en nie myne!"
This dear plumber man had slept on the problem.
Somehow, I like that idea of someone who goes home and doesn't leave his work behind him.
It sort of says something about who they are!
They take what they do seriously.
And he came up with this really good plan so that we could avoid hammering through the bulkhead, the ceiling and the moulded cornice.
So clever, and accomplished within two hours!
As soon as I know the name of his business, I will let you know!
Free advertising for a very decent young man and his very decent team!
My bathroom wall now has a splendid array of really shiny new copper pipes ( and I read all the writing on the pipes myself before they even moved them into the house! SABS approved! Let's hope that still means something.)
I have learnt not to trust anyone. Unfortunately, I am unable to get up into the ceiling space myself. I am, after all, 63! Not very agile and I'm not sure if I would even fit through the trapdoor!
But I did make the plumber cross his heart! He thinks I'm mad!
So the saga continues.
The dear man is afraid that someone will want to view the house while we are in this state of disarray!
I say so what.
What they will see is a bank of bright brand new copper pipes.
A vanity unit that is being totally refurbished.
How honest is that?

Half full? Half empty?

2010-10-11T20:34:00.000+02:00

I would figure that I have always been a half-empty sort of person and I wonder which queue I stood in, right at the back, obviously, that I did not get this gift. The whoop-de-doo gift, the Pollyanna gift, where all is well when you " Always look on the bright side of things, te-dum, te-dum!, te dumty dumty dum!"
Many optimistic and spiritual bloggers write about this stuff as though it is so easy. People like me, on reading their words, feel so inadequate. So helpless and so useless.
It's not like we do it on purpose, you know!
Today I was very much half-empty.
Our bathroom had sprung a leak.
8 workmen later, my vanity unit stripped out, water welling up under our tiles, said men scratching their heads because they had no idea where the leak was....yes, my glass was half-empty!
But under the vanity-unit, it was pretty full...of water!
What made this exercise so much easier was the quality of people that we had chosen to help solve the problem.
Our insurance company wanted their people and we said no way.
We went that route before and the service was abysmal.
This time we chose people that we have used before and have come to trust.
And they showed their loyalty.
They came at a moment's notice and really worked together to find the problem.
I am so grateful to these lovely people who worked so hard and, more importantly, so honestly to solve a really big and horrendous problem. They made it easier for me.
The dear man was occupied with other work related issues so ( to give him credit) he left it all up to me.
I watched and I asked questions. I told them when I thought they were on the wrong track.
I made suggestions and filled them in on our plumbing history when I thought it would help.
I told them when I thought they were making a judgement error.
In fact, I was a pain in the butt!
BUT! They listened to me. They did what I asked and as a result, the whole job is being re-done tomorrow.
I don't care. At least it is going to be done properly.
My bathroom is a nightmare! So at least make it worthwhile!
But what I want to do is pay tribute to these great guys.
I have never seen such goodwill and patience in tradesmen before and I've learnt that loyalty to people pays in the long run!
We have a long way to go yet.
The mess is awful and all sorts of people have to come and do their bit. But we will get there.
So perhaps, my glass is half-full.
It has been, as my son's girlfriend used to say, a 'nagmerrie', and I'm still trying not to hyperventilate!
And we have way to go to get there!
And I am trying really hard not to be one of those negative people that all of you Pollyanna types find so hard to understand!

Memory Lane

2010-09-27T20:41:00.000+02:00

One of my favourite bloggers, Dragonfly, wrote recently about memories that made her tear up.
Perhaps it's the prerogative of older people to do just that.
We have so much life behind us. We do not know how much we have in front of us.
I spend much of my time just remembering.
And it is an interesting journey!
The pleasure and the joy and the sorrow too makes for a very interesting trip down memory lane.
Another blog that I follow, written by a young woman who, bereft of her husband, has been a single mom doing all the stuff that usually couples do. But she's been doing it on her own.
One of her latest posts was about silkworms.
Here we go! A trip down memory lane.
In Green Point there was but one mulberry tree.
Fig trees and loquat trees aplenty. There was even a pomegranate tree growing in a small garden behind the local chemist shop. I believe it is still there.
But THE mulberry tree, so essential for silkworms, grew in a very large garden situated in a place known locally as ' Blacks Field'.
It was a huge piece of ground. As young children, we used to creep through the broken-down piece of wall at the bottom of the plot and then walk across the field to a broken gate on the other side. We used to say it was a 'short cut' on our way to school.
It wasn't really a 'short cut'. It just seemed more interesting and adventurous.
But there was a mulberry tree, So we used to creep into Black's Field and climb the tree and pick all the leaves we needed to feed our silkworms.
One day I was merrily up the tree picking leaves, calling down to my friends and then notiicing that there was suddenly a silence.
I looked down to see a very old lady, stooped, shabby with huge scabs on her arms. I remember those. Big black, dried blood sort of scars on her elbows. She yelled at me and told me to get out of her tree.
I did, with alacrity.
I got rid of my silkworms quite soon after that. Their strange and musty smell reminded me of her. This poor woman who owned a huge piece of land in the middle of Green Point, who was plagued by the local children, walking all over her property, taking short cuts every day and climbing in her mulberry tree to steal the leaves for their silkworme!
I don't know who she was. Now I feel quite sad to think how we, in our innocent childishness, must have made her life a hell!
She must have died. The property was sold off. Two blocks of flats were built on the plot with a road running between them.
A local child, one that I played with, died hanging one day onto the back of an earthmoving truck which reversed over him as he fell.
I remember silkworms. How we placed cut-out shapes in the shoe box, which they then would obligingly cover with their silk spinnings. We would feed them beetroot leaves and rose leaves and we would get differently coloured silk.
It was a learning experience, much like the collecting and keeping of tadpoles.
I often wonder about the history of 'Black;s Field'.
Who was that old lady who lived all by herself on that great big piece of property?
She scared the shits out of all of us but we still dared to venture onto her land.
She must have belonged to someone. She must have had relatives.
I often, when I think of silkworms, think of her.

SUNDAY TEA

2010-09-13T20:23:00.000+02:00

It was tradition, Sunday tea. Yes, it was.
Not as posh as the English high tea, but a tradition nevertheless.
When we were young, my mom used to fill the cake tins with all sorts of good things. Her famous chocolate cake which most kids in the neighbourhood would die for, her lovely flapjacks which she could whip up in a minute. Her divine apple cookies and her crustless milk tart.And cupcakes, long before they became popular, with raisons and cinnamon.
We used to make a big deal out of Sunday tea!
We often used to go out to some pleasant place with a flask of tea and a cake-tin filled with my mom's home-bakes.
And we would sit under the pine-trees or the gum-trees and drink tea and eat fresh cake or flapjacks and we would think we were having the greatest time ever.
On winter Sundays, it was tradition to wander into the kitchen and one or other of us would make something sweet and comforting for Sunday tea. My sister, Maureen, was the expert. She didn't care much for cooking but she had that deft touch with pastry. that talent with the baking bowl. She turned out wonderful things to eat on a Sunday afternoon.
This past Sunday seemed to be a pretty boring one.
I took myself off to the kitchen to bake some scones ( my sister's recipe which has never failed me!) Amy was very excited and insisted that she would help me bake.
So we ended up with some very wonky scones and a wriggly worm or two made out of the left-over dough.
I think, after this past Sunday's experience, that the way you eat a cream scone says a lot about you.
Firstly, there is the great debate.
As my daughter said yesterday, " It must be how you were brought up!"
OK! The scone is basic and so, perhaps, is the butter.
But how do you do it?
Jam first and then the cream? Ot cream first and then the jam?
The dear man and I grew up with the cream first and then the jam!
And then there is the way you eat it.
Amy sat and delicately licked her way around the scone.
Nina just slammed it into her mouth and coped from there on.
Does that say something to us...how we eat a cream scone?

Teaching is not a lost art but the regard for it is a lost tradition- Jaques Barzun

2010-09-01T20:14:00.000+02:00

When I was in Matric our class teacher was a very charming and simple woman who taught Afrikaans.
We, who were contemplating becoming teachers, sat one day to listen to her.
Her advice was: ' Teach in a small town. Those people will value you, as the teacher, third only to the pastor and the doctor!'
Well, I'm not sure if Claremont Public qualified as a small town but it certainly did as a suburb that resided below the line ( that being the railway line!)
I was a teacher at the age of 19. In charge of a class of 36 children.

36 little boys aged between 8 and 11 years old.
I was adrift because training college does not teach you what to do when a child suddenly pukes in the middle of a lesson. Nor does it teach you what to do when a naughty little guy, who keeps going to the toilet because he's bored, suddenly has a real and urgent need for the toilet and you say no! And then he pees his pants, embarrasses himself, amuses the rest of the class and you are left wondering if you have just helped to spawn a serial killer!
At the moment this country of ours is going through some sort of educational crisis.
It grieves me. Do you know, there was a time when South African education was amongst the best in the world?
Whatever happened?
What I do know happened was that I got married. The minute you did that in the good old days, your post was advertised.
Married women were not welcome in the teaching profession!
You had a husband to support you ( please, my husband was still a student, and I was earning more than him which was saying something!) But because I was married, I lost my post.
It is interesting to consider that had I chosen to 'live in sin', we would have been fine! I could have kept my job!
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." Derek Bok
Indeed.
We get what we pay for. Sometimes I wonder if we even measure out the values we place on things?
My nail lady, who I love dearly, was moaning the other day because she had to go to the doctor for a routine check-up and it was going to cost her R240 !
I didn't but I should have reminded her that my little nail session was costing R165!
The doctor had studied for at least 7 years and had done internship and so on.
With all due respects, she had done a 3 month course on nail-sculpting!
And she was moaning about how much doctors charge?
Oh dear!
However. To get back to the teaching dilemma.
" Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more!' Bob Talbert.
And lastly, and just so relevant to this day and age!
" We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children." John Sculley
I don't support teachers jumping up and down, wagging their ample bums in the camera lens. No, I don't!
I don't approve of teachers deserting their pupils just before exams.
No, I don't.
I don't like teachers who rock up to collect their pay-checks knowiing full well that they haven't been in the classroom for a good while.
I say, shame on you!
I quote Harriet Martneau.
' What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable than teaching?'
This country has messed up big time. It got rid of experienced teachers ( and I include myself) for all sorts of reasons.
They changed the curriculum for political reasons and forgot what counted. The old way was the best way.
Forget history and its distorted context! Just a big pain and what has changed?
Today's government does no more and no less than the previous one.
What counts is the 3 R's.
Reading, writing and arithmetic!
Education is what counts.
I always felt that if the child understood, that was great.
If they didn't, then just show them the way! Even that helped.
For example, and I'm sure that a lot of you don't understand what I'm trying to say.
But this is it and I believed it all the years that I taught.
Some kids understood immediately that 7 groups of 8 would give you 56.
Some kids never understood that. But...they could learn it as well as they knew their own names!
I freak out when I go to a shop and the assistant works out on their calculator what your 10% discount will be!
We used to be able to do that 'in our heads'!
Good luck to those who have decided that the present system doesn't work.
Keep politics out of it all.
Just teach!
" The basic idea behind teaching is to teach people what they need to know.' Carl Rogers
'To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching." George Bernard Shaw

THREE!

2010-08-25T20:50:00.000+02:00

It takes a very little girl a lot of effort to curl three fingers to show you how old she is going to be!
Yesterday was my elder grand-daughter's third bithday.
We have had all sorts of things going on. THE MOMMY has been very busy making flowers and leaves and a Tinkerbell to sit on top of the cake.
The party table was a great success! It looked beautiful!
Amy wore her Tinkerbell outfit and looked suitably fairylike. Her little sister waddled around in a ladybird outfit and looked too sweet for words.
It was the usual chidren's party. CHAOS!
But Amy enjoyed every minute. She knew it was her day and she enjoyed every minute of it. She flitted around singing, 'Happy Birthday to Me!"
Today she was suitably prosaic. Her birthday was over and she understood that. She is now just simply enjoying the lovely gifts that she was given.
But there is a sad part to all of this.
In our family it is the tradition for three year olds to give up their dummies..
Amy only has it at night. But she understands that when you are three, the dummy fairy comes to take the dummy away to fairyland, where she will hang it on the dummy-tree.
So tonight my little granddaughter will surrender her dummy, her much-loved companion and her comfort for three years, to the dummy fairy!
I did it with my children and it was fine!
So why do I feel so heartsore for Amy?
Maybe I just feel heartsore for myself.
It is a stage in her little life. She is growing up and I watch with dismay.
My first little baby-girl!
Yesterday, she opened her gifts from us in our bedroom.
She left one of her toys when her mom called her.
She pointed her finger and said to me:
" I'll be right back, Granny. Don't break it!"
My darling child. Granny will try never to break anything that is meaningful to you!
I hope that the dummy fairy will leave you a gift that will help you not to miss your dummy!

A Silent Salute

2010-08-18T21:11:00.000+02:00

Perhaps it should not be silent?
This is about all those people who do things and we forget to thank them or even acknowledge them.
It's human nature, you see.
We have become a nation of moaners. We scream and we shout when someone gets it wrong.
How often do we compliment and praise when they get it right?
My dear man has been spending more and more time at our shop at The Paddocks in Milnerton.
He is more on the floor and so more vulnerable to customers and their complaints.He doesn't handle it well. He is, literally, because of the kind of person he is, at a loss for words.
It is a whole post all on its own and one day I will write it. We all hear how the shopkeeper rips the customer off. Well, believe me, you need to hear how the customer rips the shopkeeper off! You won't believe it!
However, this post has been inspired by an article I read in the evening newspaper and it set me thinking.
Every day we come into contact with people who do certain things for us, be it a plumber, an electrician, a handyman, the chaps who empty your bins once a week or the cashier at your local supermarket.
There are lots of people doing a great job out there and they are never recognised.
Because they do it properly.
My dad used to say: ' The squeaking door gets the oil."
When I was a teacher I came to realise the truth of this.
The naughty kids got all the attention and perhaps that's why they were naughty. For the attention.
The well-behaved kids were left alone because you knew that they would just get on with things.
A few weeks ago we went up to Langebaan. The road to The Cove, where our house is, was being re-surfaced. We couldn't believe the difference it made. We were so appreciative. I felt we should write a letter of thanks to whoever had done it.
Needless to say, we have not. Which makes me wonder why we are so enthusiastic about complaining and less so when it comes to praise?
The other day I was in a shop where the assistant was so helpful. I concluded our transaction by thanking her for being so good at her job. A brief expression of amazement flitted across her face before she told me it was a pleasure.
So this post is a silent tribute to all those people out there. The ones who do their jobs honestly and well. There are many of them. But we often don't see or recognise them because we are too busy watching out for the ones who would cheat us!
So!
Thank you the guys who empty my bins every week.
Thank you the chaps who repair the traffic-lights that some drunk person has knocked over on a Saturday night.
Thanks to the people who wander along the highways with black bags, oicking up the rubbish that we have thrown out of our car windows.
Thanks to the people who re-paint the lines on the roads so that we drive easier.
Thanks to the lady on the phone to my bank who could not have been more pleasant or helpful.
Thanks to the waitresses who bring baby-seats and balloons and extra milk and serviettes when we go for lunch.
There is so much that we just take for granted and so we don't notice.
As someone said at some stage when we bought our first shop.
'Don't find something wrong. Find something right"
To all those good people out there ( and there are many) thank you for doing your jobs right!

BLOG BLOCK

2010-08-10T20:33:00.000+02:00

I have it and it seems to me that you all have it too!
I so look forward to my blog posts from all my favourite people. And it doesn't happen!
Where are we all that we have nothing to say?
I feel like writing something really outrageous because I know that will get your attention!
It worked before!
However, I do have blog block.
So many things in my head but just can't get them out!
Tonight I had an interesting conversation with my son-in-law who is very comfortable with the great cyber-world out there.
Question?
Does the internet make our lives better?
My dear man commented: " That's a philosophical question or debate."
We spent a good time talking about it.
Are we better off with the internet, face-book, twitter???
What do you think?
I am a real amateur at all of this. For many of you it is your life.
I do not go on facebook even though I have 14 people wanting to be my friends.
I don't see why I should invite them into my cyber-life!
They are not in my real life, are they?
You see, I belong to the old school of thought.
Real life, real friends, real stuff!
Very old-fashioned, I know!
And somehow I just feel that putting yourself out there for all to see is like sticking your resume up on a suburban noticeboard!
So I may have insulted a few people by declining to be their facebook friends, but that's too bad.
If I'm not your friend in real life, then I see no reason why I should be on facebook!
How pathetic!
People I have long forgotten, people who live in the same town as me, people who could come and physically visit me in my home want me to be their facebook friend!
PLEASE!
If you want to be my friend and if it is possible, come visit me, why don't you?
We could drink some real tea, or coffee or ( yay) some good wine.
We could even give each other a hug!
We could be real friends!
I know that there are some folk out there who can't do that real stuff.
Like my dear nephew, Andre, who lives so far away and I so wish that he didn't.
We miss him every day of our lives. He is so much part of our family. And I don't want him as a facebook friend because he is more than that!
But all those other folk, who just don't want to be forgotten or overlooked, well it's just ego, isn't it?
Who can bear to have lived and to be ignored?
Not many of us, I bet!
You see, I believe, we all find it hard to understand that we are born, we live (often without meaning) and then we die.
Most of us find that hard to deal with!
It's true.
Going on facebook or twitter or even posting on a blog doesn't change any of that!
Perhaps we hope that it is our moment of importance!
Not!
I have fallen into that trap!
This post tells you so.

Blast from the Past

2010-08-01T20:20:00.000+02:00

Times have been hard for the dear man and me.
I have to be very careful here because this is not a pity-party as my lovely son calls it.
I am not feeling sorry for myself. I know that everyone out there is feeling the effects of the recession. Everywhere you go and whoever you talk to has a sad tale to tell.
It's just that my life changed so suddenly, just as I had got used to it and accepted it, and then it changed.
And I continue to see and feel the needs of others and know that I am so lucky to have what I have.
We have not done much these days. I do not blame our circumstances. I blame us because we have allowed ourselves to fall into a big black hole. That happens, you see, when you lose confidence and faith!
But! Today the dear man took me out to lunch at the Waterfront. A rare occasion now whereas it used to be the norm.
It was a magnificent day.We went to Selera, a restaurant that we always enjoyed.
It was wonderful. We always enjoy the food. The waiters are attentive and friendly. The view, especially on a day like today, sublime!
We just felt so normal and civilized again.
And then, we met the blast from the past!
One of the dear man's 'brothers'.
It all belongs in the past.
But it is all so hurtful.
We sat for an hour or so and exchanged views that perhaps should have been shared a long time ago.
It might have made a huge difference!
But people were hurt. They were manipulated.
Relationships suffered. Some things ended that should not have done.
At the end we all laughed and agreed that it was all over and done with. Just tough!
But just a little sense of sadness.
The way a mother feels when she gives up her baby for adoption?
These men today felt that.
It was theirs.
And then, for all sorts of reasons, it was taken away!
One of the men lightheartedly suggested that we two women should write a book about it all.
I would love to, but I wouldn't dare.
I would have the pants sued off me!
I believe that the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine!
Vengeance is not mine.
Time will take care of all of that.
That is my belief!
In the meantime, it was nice, just briefly, to touch sides with two people who featured in our lives so much a few years ago.
They are ok.
We are ok.
And life goes on and we deal with it day by day.

Play Dough

2010-07-31T20:43:00.000+02:00

A friend of my daughter's recently brought one of those 'just because' gifts for Amy. It was a kit of two colours of play-dough, along with cutters and moulds and a 'tool'.
For the last two evenings we have sat at the kitchen table.
After supper.
After the littlest one has gone to bed and she no longer whines plaintively at us because she is just so tired and simply can't anymore.
This is Amy's time. This is where she reaps the benefit of being the older one.
She gets to stay up later and she gets some undivided attention.
She has grown wiser too. The other night we were playing, the two of us, and she put her finger to her lips and informed me that she wasn't sleepy. So I told her, in a conspiratorial way, that if she kept quiet and didn't make a fuss, her parents would forget she was there and so she could stay up later!
She so loves it, sitting there with her best loved grown-ups, playing with us.
The play dough has been a huge success.
Tonight we made teddy bears, butterflies, flowers, stars and even a goat and a pony.
But I did notice that the adults were having more fun than Amy!
We all got very creative. I made a snowman. Craig's was better than mine so I squashed it and somehow got a really good tortoise!
I made a pizza with cheese and blueberries. And we ate it, Amy and I.
'Just play-play, Granny,' she said.
Craig admitted it was the first time he had played with play-dough. He is really good at it. Very competitive, but very good. And the joy Amy has playing away with us is so amazing.
If anyone had told me, a few years ago, that my Saturday night's entertainment would be playing with yellow and red playdough with my not quite 3 year old granddaughter, I would have had a good laugh!
But I did and I enjoyed it.
Just the sheer simplicity of it.
And there is something very therapeutic about it.
Perhaps someone should run a play dough therapy class!
I think in all of us there is a child just longing to be let out.
So go out and buy some play-dough, why don't you?
You might even discover a Jean Doyle lurking around somewhere inside of you!

RATS!

2010-07-28T21:22:00.000+02:00

The other evening, like any other evening, Caroline and I were in the kitchen doing our usual kitchen thing, while Nina was doing her usual kitchen thing which is emptying the cupboards and throwing everything onto the floor.
Amy, being more sedate, was pottering around and suddenly announced: ' Look, Granny. There's a little mouse!'
She was gazing out of the glass panel of the kitchen door, so Granny went to have a look.
'Well', said Granny. " What a sweet...mouse?? RAT!!!
We watched in fascination, not really wanting to give Amy a rat thing, if you know what I mean?
But he was a hefty fellow and very interested in my rosemary plant, of all things.
I promptly had a quiet fit. I'm not very fond of rats and could tell you a few good rat stories.
But I've grown kinder and more forgiving in my older years and think that rats are just doing what the rest of us are doing in these times of recession. Just trying to make ends meet?
We had discussions about using Rattex, not a kind thing to do at the best of times. Caroline was horrified and really felt that we should practise good karma and leave the poor creature alone.
It all brought to mind a poem once learnt by my sister, Maureen, many years ago and I think I used to listen to her reciting it over and over again.
" Come in," cried the mayor, looking bigger. And in did come the strangest figure!
So I weazled it ( ok, so thats my own word and I had my family in fits of laughter tonight. I got muddled up between Wicky..whatever and Google, and came up with weazle. I like it. It will remain my own!)
So I weazled it and discovered to my amazement that, firstly The Pied Piper of Hamelin was written more than 100 years ago and, secondly, the poem was written by no-one other than Robert Browning, surely the same romantic fellow who had that amazing love thing with Elizabeth Barrett??
' They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheese out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles'
Surely, that's enough to change Caroline's opinion of Rattex?
While weazling away, I discovered that ABBA wrote a song called 'The Piper' based on the poem of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
" We're all following a strange melody
We're all summoned by a tune
We're following the piper
And we dance beneath the moon...
We're following the piper
And we dance beneath the moon for him
And we dance beneath the moon.
SUB LUNA SALTAMUS.
The other thing I think the original poem teaches us is never to go back on a promise.
It's a sad story really. A contract made and broken by greedy and dishonourable people.
Once they had got what they had wanted, they failed to honour their side of the agreement.
They got what they deserved.
The mayor cried, now that the town had been cleansed of rats:' You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
Blow your pipe there till you burst!'
And so he did, this fellow, who had completed his contract, done what he had pledged to do, only to be crooked by a corrupt and greedy group of men.
' Once more he stept into the street,
And to his lips again,
Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
And ere he blew three notes....' '
.....and I'm missing a great many lines here! '
'And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain-side shut fast!'
So thinking about rats has certainly set me a-thinking.
We still haven't worked out what to do about ours.

A Learning of Lessons

2010-07-15T19:48:00.000+02:00

What a miserable title for a post but I couldn't think of a better one!
But, maybe, it is an appropriate one, seeing that I was a teacher in the great days of yore!
Life teaches us lessons all along the way.
At some stage, we look back...or let's be honest, this IS about me, so I look back at the lessons I have learnt along the way!
I thought, over a few glasses of wine...( now come on, if you have been reading my posts, you know I love my wine!) that I should write one of those posts. You know, 50 things about me...20 things I should have done...or 45 things I should do...well I hope you get the picture!
I thought tonight, in one great huge illuminating moment, that I would post about the 50 lessons that I have learnt in life!
And do you know what? I concluded that, even though I am 63 years old and I keep advertising that fact and why I don't know unless I am quite proud of the fact that I have got this far, I can't come up with 50 lessons I have learned!
That's not even 1 a year!!!
But I am going to give it a go!
It really should be 63 lessons I have learnt but I'll do my best and if I run out at about 20?? I hope you will forgive me!
1. Blood IS thicker than water
2. There is no such thing as a best friend.
3. I've said this before and I will say it again..appliances can hear you think!
4. Kind words and kind deeds often come back, unexpectedly, to reward you.
5. Believe in yourself.
6. When all seems lost, make a good curry.
6. When it is cold, make a pot of soup.
7. When you don't know how to make it better for someone, just simply love them.
8. A rat is just a little mouse to your 2 year old grand-daughter.
9. A few rugs make a tent or a little house when you are very young.
10. A weary man just needs a hug when he comes home.
11. If you smoke, never be without the means to light your cigarette!
12. Small gifts make friends, large gifts make enemies.
13. Know who you are and understand why people want to know you ( and why they don't!)
14. Your parents couldn't give you what they themselves never had.
15. The tennisette bat your dad made you was far more precious than the designer bat bought at the sports shop ( even though it broke your wrist)
16. You can't learn to swim if you have holes in your bathing costume!
17. Believe in yourself.
18. It is easier to discard all those things that you thought made you who you were than you would think.( ouch what an awful sentence, sorry!)
19. Never allow your teenagers to make important decisions for themselves. They are actually, mentally, unable to do it!
20. Buy property if you can. It will never be cheaper than it is now.
21. Don't sell it! Wait. Preferably at least 15 years. You won't regret it, I promise!
22/ Invest in South African artists, furniture makers etc. Likewise, you won't regret it.
23. Local IS lekker. Believe!
24. Give without expecting something back.
25. Learn to love yourself first. If you can't, then you will never know the meaning of love.
26. If your life is a disappointment, blame yourself not others.
27. Remember, even if the sun isn't shining in your part of the world, it sure is shining somewhere!
28. Dunk a rusk.
29. Believe in yourself.
30. Treasure the good times and when you are down, hug them close to yourself. You were not always lonely.
31. Understand the people who seemed to have turned away from you. Perhaps they have a reason.
32. Value those who stand by you and who love you.
33. Hope that they are right.
34. Buy fresh flowers. Sure, it's a luxury but what a joy!
35. Buy good linen sheets. They are expensive but they will last forever and everytime you get into bed, you will cry: Alleluyah!
36. Along the same line, buy the best towels, the really big and thirsty bath-sheets. They last forever and you will love them every morning when you step out of the shower.
37. Prayer is just a moment when you lift your mind to another place and wait in a quiet stillness.
38. The first cup of really good coffee is a good start to your day.
39. Stop yearning for foreign places. Know your own country first.
40. Watch the robin in your garden. He has a message for you!
41. When things get tough in the family, remember who the adult is!
40. Value the person you take most for granted. How will you feel if he or she was no longer there?
41. Every so often, give yourself a good talking to. It won't go amiss. Sometimes we don't see the big picture!
42. Stop biting your nails!
43. Every so often, do something you hate. Like cleaning the oven or ironing. It's a leveling experience.
44. Once in a while, especially if you hate cooking, cook a meal as if you were expecting the royal family!
45. If you have to do something, do it well.
46. Whenever you have the chance, sleep.
47. Whenever you have the chance, read!
48. Whenever you have the chance, be selfish. There is a virtue in selfishness.
49. Look back. Find out about your ancestors. Don't leave it until there is no-one left to remember.
50. Believe in yourself!!
Sorry couldn't do the 63!

Just Reflecting!

2010-07-07T20:53:00.000+02:00

When you get to be my age, you spend a lot of time...well, just reflecting!
It can be quite alarming. You find yourself thinking thoughts that you never knew you even had in your head.
I wasn't going to post tonight. A few glasses of wine! Dangerous stuff!
I am in the position where I have been there and done that! And doesn't it just sound so trite?
I have come to realise that no matter what your age, if you are a thinking and decent person, you do have opinions, you do have views, and, often, if you are older you have a hell of a lot more to say than a person 30 or so years younger than you.
You see, my darlings, older people have travelled a road that you still have to travel!
I I don't think that's great. I would rather that you didn't have to!
I so wish it could be different for you. Easier, more manageable.
But I just know that it's not going to be easier for you!
Life has changed. The urgency and the needs become greater. The demands are more, the pressure and the stress seem to increase!
We end up like little hamsters, trapped on a treadmill not of our own making!
But some of us, thank you Pia! take the time to absorb and appreciate the things that we so often take for granted.
Tonight, we watched the most perfect sunset
It was violently pink and red ( brought on, I am sure, by the pollution hanging over our city. The temperature had plummeted, and people were obviously lighting their fires and the smoke hung over our city and created this amazing sunset!)
It was beautiful!
Tonight is one of the semi-finals of the world cup. Germany and Spain, I think!
I can't be bothered to watch. I will go to bed and read my book.
The ancient Romans had this thing called, ' Panis et Circus.'
It meant, 'Bread and Games!'
Well, I don't know about the bread part unless you count boerewors rolls, pizza etc. And you have to pay whereas in Roman times I believe it was all free!
But the games were free. Unfortunately, FIFA doesn't allow that. So we are considerably worse off than the ancient Romans.
But the idea was the same. Distract the people from the real issues of the day.
Feed them! Entertain them!
But what happens when it is all over?
In the meantime, my son was notified today that his credit card has been cloned and has been used in Central Africa!
Our suburb is running a campaign to make it a 'boomed' area because of the rising crime.
Let us not be fooled by the waving flags, the 'gees' the atmosphere and the vibe!
Sure, it's all great fun.
But when the party is over, we have to get on with our lives. And we really want them to be better ones.
I know I sound like a party-pooper and I don't want to be! I love this country as much as the rest of you!
But we will have. I believe, a legacy from this world cup that we would rather not have!
So when the time comes to pack away your flags and silence your vuvazelas, I hope you will support the aftermath as enthusiastically as you walked the fan-mile!

It's the Sound of Victory..yah a yah a yah!

2010-07-02T23:53:00.000+02:00

I do not like football.
I did not like football until I watched the game tonight.
Tonight I was an African watching Ghana play against Uraguay.
Tonight I prayed for the Cinderella continent.
I so badly wanted an African nation to go forward into the semi-finals.
Africa always gets all the shit!
It deserves more. Ghana played really well.
That handball in the goal-post. Well, if it was rugby, it would have been a penalty goal!
But it wasn't rugby, and so it didn't happen.
However! Well done Ghana.
You made all us Africans proud!
And no matter what the outcome of the World Cup may be, our country has done a fantastic job. I think we have even surprised ourselves!
AYOBA

Dumb and just Dumber!

2010-07-02T20:23:00.000+02:00

I never thought I would apply these words to myself but it seems that I have to !
I hate it that I am so stupid when it comes to all this IT stuff, but I am! So stupid. It drives me mad.
I am fortunate enough to have 2 people living with me who absolutely know what is going on and they are always there to help out, but I hate being stupid. I'm not used to it!
It is very inhibiting. It holds me back. There is stuff I want to do, by myself, and I can't!
It is so frustrating!
And I don't need my family, however well-meaning, to be chuckling away at my stupidity ( because, hey, I'm not stupid!) and making me feel really incompetent and useless!
Do you know, I was born in 1947. That was a long time ago!
Do you know that I bought my husband his first calculator in 1971. It cost me my whole bonus! R130 ! Wow. But he was so thrilled with it.
We older folk just go with the flow. Everything just gets cleverer and smarter.
My dear man tries to keep up. He just loves his toys. If I wanted to divorce him ( but I don't) I would cite his I-phone as co-respondent!
And that brings me to the Kindle, or the Nook or the I something or other.
All substitutes for real books. You know, the ones made out of real paper? The ones that smell of new paper, that feel smooth in your hands, that crack as you bend them to read?
You know, the books that go to bed with you, the books that you mark when you finally put them down and they sit patiently next to your bed until you pick them up again!
You know the books that go to the beach with you and that pass a happy afternoon in the sun with you.
You know, the books that sit at airports with you and help you to forget the hours you are wasting while you wait for your flight. The books that spend time with you while you have your hair tinted or permed.
The books that while away a winter's afternoon with you while you curl up on the couch with your cup of hot coffee or tea?
The books that you hold firmly in your hands. You feel them. You turn the page when you are ready.
They are your company! They are your friends!
They are part of who you are. And even when you are done with them, they remain part of you. They sit on your bookshelf until you are ready to read them again.
Ot perhaps you pass them on to someone else who you know will enjoy reading them too.
Do not offer me electronic versions of books!
I have told the dear man that!
He can't understand it.
I am a reader. And that does not involve an electronic version of any book!
Real readers have a relationship with their books, and that does not involve an electronic device of any sort!
Give me a real book, made of real paper.
Let me have a relationship with it.
Real readers do!

At Last...Egg in a Cup

2010-06-29T21:41:00.000+02:00

I'm so excited. Today my dear daughter unravelled the mysteries of things, and set up my new blog, 'Egg in a Cup'.
I wish I could tell you how, if you are interested, to get the there but it seems it will remain a mystery for a while because I certainly don't know how to advise you!
But it has a real-life picture, taken in my own kitchen, and a recipe follows after. I am very pleased with it. And, if you can find it somehow, I hope you will be too!
I haven't written a post for a while and my daughter is nagging me.
So many thoughts in my head and I don't know what to write!
However, tonight was a lovely night. My dearest Amy was up late because she had had a good nap, something that she doesn't often do.
Somehow, she had the inner cardboard tube from the tinfoil roll.
I persuaded her to play the flute while I would play on the imaginary piano.
She sat very seriously and blew into the tube while her little fingers worked over the cardboard tube. Where did she learn that, I wondered, as I played away on the table. We finished our duet in triumph and stood up to bow to the applause! ( From Mommy, Daddy and Gramps.)
And she shouted, 'Again!'
And so we did it again and she was so earnest about her flute-playing that I felt like rushing off to the UCT School of Music to enroll her forthwith!
Then her Gramps came out with a recorder. I didn't even know he had one.
Amy tried it and told me she didn't know how.
"it's just like a vuvazela" I told her. "Just blow!"
So she did. And so we played some more music together.
What joy!
And it was all recorded on the camera and Amy demanded to see it. We were both very pleased with our performance.
Some little gene lurks around.
I know we are all proud parents and grandparents, but somehow I can't forget those little fingers working over a cardboard tube!
Where did she get that from?

Meatball? Frikkadel? Burger?

2010-06-08T21:13:00.000+02:00

It's all in the name.
This is all about my opinion of the facts. Is it a meatball? Is it a frikkadel? Is it a burger?
This is my theory.
The mixtures are pretty much the same, apart from a few differences in the herbs and spices.
I think it is the shape that dictates the name!
A meatball is just that. It is rolled into a ball.
A frikkadel is a meatball that has been rolled into a ball and then pressed flat between the palms of your hands.
And a burger is just simply a bigger meatball that has been pressed flat too!
I only make meatballs when I am making a pasta dish.
My history with these things goes way back.
My mom used to make spaghetti bolognaise when we were young. She made meatballs, yes those round little balls, and she used to layer them with a tomato sauce done with onion and bacon as well as layers of grated cheese and spaghetti.
Then it was baked in the oven until the cheese was melted.
One day she took me to town ( read Cape Town!) to buy shoes, always an occasion for celebration as it happened so seldom.
After the shoes were bought ( and that is another story!) she took me to lunch. We went to a place called The Red Monkey. I ordered spaghetti bolognaise. When it arrived at the table, I was horrified. A pile of spaghetti topped with savoury mince.
It was then that I realised that my mom's version was a far cry from the original! And at that moment in time, I far preferred my mom's version, as unauthentic as it was!
My mom used to make a big frikkadel. She used to make it to supplement the Sunday roast. Whether it was roasted pork, roasted lamb or roasted chicken, she used to always make her big roasted frikkadel which would sizzle alongside the roasted joint.
Her big frikkadel was quite famous and everyone who ate it loved it.
My sister's best friend, who ended up in Australia, wrote ( yes! that's what people did in those days!) to ask for the recipe. She wailed that it just didn't taste the same.
You see, there was a secret.
It may sound terrible and the heart foundation would have a fit and all we health-conscious people who count kilojoules and fat percentages would cringe but this was her secret.
My mom used to save her meat drippings. Everytime she roasted, she would pour the pan drippings off into a pottery jar which she kept in the cupboard just above her oven. And then the next time she roasted, she would use the same fat. Over and over again.
When the jar got too full, she would ladle a whole lot out into a container which she would give to our charlady who would take it home to spread on her children's bread.
And that was the secret of the big frikkadel! The drippings that it used to roast in. All those succulent flavours from all those roasted joints!
Impossible to copy today!
I have attempted, at the request of my son who has fond memories of his Gran's giant frikkadel, to make it . But it is a pale imitation of hers.
I continue to experiment with meatballs, frikkadels and burgers.
I love to use pork mince or lamb mince and to play with the seasoning and accompaniments.
In fact, I have decreed that Fridays will be burger nights ( or frikkadels or meatballs depending on how inventive I feel).
Now how did I manage to write a whole post about meatballs, frikkadels or burgers?
Don't ask me.
Next time, I might just bore you all with the recipes!

Sorry...Jammer

2010-06-07T20:24:00.000+02:00

This will probably be a bit of a mixed-up post because there is a lot of stuff that has been building up in my head.
Stuff that I've thought about, spoken about and stuff that I need to say!
To begin!
Yesterday morning, the dear man and I were doing our REALLY lazy Sunday morning thing. We were watching TV and came across a programme ( although my spellcheck is protesting vigorously in red, I have checked my trusty dictionary, and it is correct, unless you are American, of course!)
The programme is called 'Have you heard from Johannesburg'.
Basically, it is the story of Oliver Thambo. I had always simply thought that was the name of an airport.
I didn't really! I'm just being flippant! I decided to watch as I knew very little about the man.
I did the maths. In his day, when he was making history, I was just 13 years old.
It was very interesting. I learnt a lot. But in the end I gave up because the whole saga made me feel very uncomfortable.
Yes! Apartheid was a disgusting thing!
But when I was just 13 years old, I accepted the status quo. That's how it was. I never knew anything different.
And I did wonder, yesterday morning, how appropriate it is for such a programme to be screened, just before the World Cup.
When you are hoping for show of flowers, why dredge up the manure?
It seems to me that South Africa will never be allowed to forget its transgressions.
And there are people out there who continue to beat the drum. Unfortunately, it is in their own interests to do so! Tugging on the guilt-strings usually gets you what you want!
Today, Caroline and I and the two attachments went off to the shopping centre nearby to buy some crafty, arty things at PNA.
By the time we were done, the rain was pouring down and I had a two-and-quite-a-bit year old complaining that she didn't like the rain and she needed to be in the car, like RIGHT NOW!
Caroline had the pram with the littlest one in it. I had the trolley with the bigger one in it as well as the parcels.
We needed to cross the road in the parking lot to get to the car.
We stood in the pouring rain, with babies wailing, getting seriously wet while 4 cars drove past, the drivers nice and dry and not giving a hoot for our situation. Not one stopped to wave us across. One young guy just looked at me while he gunned his engine. I am ashamed to say that I mouthed that 4 letter word quite clearly to him. He looked quite startled. I suppose coming from an old Tannie that was quite alarming! Pity he didn't get out to challenge me on it because he would have regretted it. Big Time!
Allow my to digress briefly. I know I do this often but that is how I write as many of you know.
A few years ago we were in London. I love London for many reasons but the one thing I do not love is how rude the people generally are. If you find a really friendly person in London, he or she is usually from South Africa, Australia or New Zealand.
As an example. We were in Carnaby Street, sitting outside a Pret a Mangere. Not sure if that spelling is right and can't at this stage be bothered to check, for goodness sake!!. a French dictionary.
It's that really nice shop that sells lovely sandwiches.
We sat outside to enjoy ours. It was a gusty day and while we were munching away, the wind lifted up the very flimsy tray on our table and blew it into the path of a very smart woman.
She gave it a kick and gave us a really dirty look as though we had really planned to sabotage her with a tray!
I looked at the dear man and remarked that if that had happened in SA, the person would have laughed, said 'sorry; or 'jammer' and picked the tray up and returned it to the table!
You see, we were decent people, some of the most decent in the world.
We were friendly and helpful. We stood back in doorways ( and to be fair, there are many people in this land who still do!)
We used to make allowances for the female, the elderly and the frail. We held doors open, we had respect and kindness. We rushed to help if we saw someone struggling with a pram, a trolley or a stiff door.
We knew how to smile at each other, pass a friendly comment or make a little joke that put a smile on the face of the other person. We knew how to send someone on the way with a happy feeling.
We used to say 'sorry' or 'jammer' even though we had done nothing wrong.
It was just how we were. Decent people!
What has happened to us as a nation?
Are we angry?
Are we bitter and disillusioned?
Have we given up on ourselves as a decent people?
I hope not.
But I am happy to remember a country where people were friendly, polite and helpful.
As I said. Some people still are but they are mostly the older folk who remember a different time and a different place.
I don't want to offend younger people. I know many who carry the same feelings and the same values.
In them, we trust. (Where does that come from? I know I've stolen it from somewhere!)
But if I could come face to face with that young man who watched me and my little grand-daughter standing in the rain waiting to cross the road...the young man who saw us getting wet and who couldn't stop his car for 1 minute so that we could cross. I would give him a tongue-lashing he would never forget!

Bafana, Bafana!

2010-06-04T20:26:00.000+02:00

I hate football!
I have tried to like it. I used to go and watch my son play because he loved it and played it.
I would stand on the sidelines and watch him play and I would try to enjoy it.
I did not. I am a rugby fan. I love rugby, I understand it And I wish that my son had played rugby rather than football!
So the world cup here in South Africa has left me cold and I am sad that it is so.
The fever is upon us.
Today Amy sat in the car and counted flags. Those flags that people are flying on their cars.
It is very infectious.Even the dear man is flying a flag from his Pajero. He can't stand the flapping noise so I don't know how long it will flap away!
The dear nation has tried so hard. Things are spruced up and looking good. From our house we can see the Green Point stadium and it is impressive.
But we always have the spoilsports.
Those who want to go on strike and just make it harder.
And I fear for the innocent tourists who have saved up so that they can be here to enjoy the game that they love.
We have a beautiful country. We, in Cape Town, have a wondrous city.
I have lived here all my life and it still takes my breath away.
It is a proud moment for our country.
We are trying to show the world that Africa can do it.
I hope so!

Monday Moodiness

2010-05-31T22:19:00.000+02:00

After the weekend, whatever it might have brought, I embrace Monday as the day where I have to do housewife stuff.
I used to have , in the days when things were different. a full-time domestic worker.
Spoiled bitch, do I hear you cry?
Yes, I was and I am not ashamed to admit that I miss her more than I would ever have believed!
I have a domestic worker who comes twice a week. She is from Zimbabwe and is very pleasant and obliging, but she hasn't the faintest clue about how to clean or dust or anything.
Today being Monday. I set about doing stuff that needed to be done.
For example, I made a chicken pie on Saturday which spilled over onto the bottom of the oven.
Much smoke filled the kitchen. The pie wasn't burnt but the kitchen was filled with smoke.
So today, being housewife Monday. I decided to clean the oven!
I decided today that I don't like cleaning an oven!
As I remarked to my daughter, 'If I had wanted to be a domestic worker, I would have been one!'
One of the things I have always known about myself is this. If I do something, I do it properly.
That's why I don't like doing housework!
Take today for example.
The oven needed cleaning. So I opened it and scraped away at all the burned bits. So before I went any further, I fetched the dust-buster to suck up all the bits.
But then I noticed that the dust-buster needed cleaning. So I dismantled it and cleaned it.
By now I had cleaned the oven but noticed that the light in the one oven wasn't working.
Call in the dear man!
Then all the oven racks needed cleaning so I scrubbed away until they looked good.
In the meantime, I was doing the washing and noticed that the washing thingie, the one that takes the powder, was really clogged up. So that came out and had to be scrubbed and cleaned.
And then suddenly, I was dusting the chandelier in the kitchen while my youngest grand-daughter watched me in fascination and cheered me on!
I have never planned to be a housewife!
I have always tried to avoid it!
I'm not good at it.
When I do it I try to do it too well, which wears me out.
I have to admit, there is a certain pleasure in it.
The pleasure of knowing that something has been done well.
The pleasure of a clean kitchen, of neatly folded laundry and the joy of a house in order.
Is this me saying this stuff???
However, today is Monday.
It's the day when I have to get to grips with who I am and what I have to do.
I don't enjoy it. But I know I have to do what needs to be done.
No different to anyone else out there.
But I will not lie.
I hate it.
I would much rather be out there somewhere, sipping wine under a warming sun.
And Monday won't mean anything much other than it is the start of a new week.

Cooking from Scratch

2010-05-28T21:12:00.000+02:00

There are a few sayings to do with food that seem to create differences of opinion.
One such saying is: ' Bread and Look'.
The other is is 'Bread and Pullit'.
My mom, on a regular basis, would reply when we asked what was for supper, one of the above!
Bread and Look.
Bread and Pullit!
We never quite knew what it meant.
My guess is that what it meant was take what you get, and shut up.
But after some thought and research, this is what I have come up with.
' Bread and Look' was what the family did when they sat down to supper.
You see, in those days the man of the family was the sole breadwinner.
So when he came home, if there was meat to be had, he got it!
And the rest of the family ate their bread and looked at what the man of the house was eating!
'Bread and Pull-it' was explained to me by my mom.
Whether she was right, I don't know.
But she said that when families were poor and could not afford meat, they ate bread. But there was always a piece of bacon, tied to a piece of string, in the middle of the table. And each family member could eat their wedge of bread and just pull on the piece of bacon, just to get the flavour and the saltiness on their fingers.
Perhaps that's where my undying love of bacon came from?
Now cooking from scratch is another thing!
I think people imagine that it means that they cook right from the start.
No ready sauces, no ready prepared meals.
They think it means that you cook it yourself.
Real onions, real tomatoes, real fresh herbs, nothing pre-prepared but everything made by yourself, with no help from Woolworths or anyone else!
I think it means this, and this is my theory and no one elses.
It is the meal that a mother cooks when there is too much month left at the end of her money!
She literally scratches around in her pantry, in the garden, in her fridge.
She scratches up everything she can find and turns it into a meal for her family.
That, in my opinion, is what cooking from scratch really means.
I am a really bad housekeeper. Freezers and I do not get on very well.
Once I have put something in the freezer, I forget that it is there.
Several months later, I haul it out and need a microscope to work out what it is!
My dear daughter, who is well versed on the art of being frugal, is lecturing me on how to make the most of what I have in my freezer, my pantry and my fridge.
And so every so often, we scrummage around to see what we can find.
We make it a kind of challenge. We WILL use what we have available.
That, you see, is called cooking from scratch!

Power from the People

2010-05-21T20:15:00.000+02:00

WARNING: This is a silly post. Not as though most of my previous posts were not. But this one is silly because I know it is!
The dear man and I were driving home from Langebaan on Tuesday. We had had a very brief visit, mainly to check up on things because we hadn't been there for a month. And, as I have said before, houses don't do well when people are absent.
We chatted away about this and that. Then we passed the 4 windmills situated on a hill near Darling.
I love those windmills.
We once watched a program, from Denmark. The Danish ( you know, I can't say that word without thinking of delicious fruity and custardy pastries, but I guess they are people too!) are very into wind power. I believe they have had something to do with the windmills near Darling.
Whenever we drive past them, we look to see how many are working. Often, one or two are not.
Any way, on this program the very educated lady said that there was a lot of resistance to windmills as people felt they were ugly.
I was amazed!
I, personally, find them very beautiful.
They rise up against the sky, with very simple lines.
To me, they epitomise man's challenge. Man's cry that he will not be defeated!
Their vanes...is that the right word? just reach up into the sky' To me it is a message that we will not give up.
Ugly, never.
The dear man is very into alternative power and , perhaps now that the tariff is going up 34% , who can blame him.
He really wants to do solar power and wind-power too and he is reading up and studying all the information.
But we started this conversation about how we humans fail to utilize the power that is available to us.
My daughter once had a hamster that used to run round and round on her little treadmill and the dear man remarked that if we wired her up somehow, she would probably power the lights in Caroline's room!
So that is how the conversation, in this car with the dog nodding away quietly in the dog-box behind us, progressed.
Have you ever been party to a conversation of this kind?
It can be great fun. In a business environment, I believe they call it a 'think-tank'.
Well, the dear man and I entertained ourselves for the better part of our journey.
He reads all the big newspapers.
So he told me that the powers that be feel that Africa has the potential to develop the future power-houses of the world.
What? I wanted to know. Coal-powered? Nuclear? Hydro?
Then this is when it gets silly but I did warn you.
I, and I alone, decided that people power was the way to go!
The dear man always says that the gyms ( you know, the ones where you pay a monthly fee and sweat your hearts out on a treadmill or a bicycle) are missing a great opportunity. All that energy is going to waste. They could power their electricity bills from the toil of their members!
Well, I decided that if Africa is going to power the continent it could be through the power of the people!
Real people power.
Bicycles ( stationary of course), pedalled by people.
Think about it!
No skill or training required.
One or two shifts at a time.
It's green, it's clean.
It will provide employment
It even has health benefits.
People could power their own village!
Moms don't even need daycare while they work. Baby can sit happily on their backs while they pedal away, they can even read a magazine or book while they are working.
The dear man said that the Egyptians had the right idea. They built the pyramids from 'people power'.
True! But that was slavery. This needn't be!
It's a choice.
But people have so much energy and it is going to waste!
Anyway, I said that this was a silly post.
But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me!
At the end of the day, it's a choice.
If I was a starving mother with starving children, I know I would choose to do a shift of pedalling each day in order to survive.
And I would be helping the planet, not as though that would be my concern.
There are of course all the technicalities.
I tried to get the dear man to explain how it could all work.
Generator?
Alternator?
Direct power or indirect?
He is very knowledgeable.
I am not.
But I just have this wonderful vision of people who had no power suddenly having the chance to create, through their own efforts, power!
As I said, this is a silly post!

Kitchen Divas

2010-05-19T20:17:00.000+02:00

After a bit of research on Google, I discovered that the word 'diva' applies only to women but there is a movement to describe equally temperamental men as 'divos'.
I have watched BBC Food and watched all these chefs ( read cooks) strutting their stuff.
Kitchen heroes all!
Charging big prices for people to come and watch them show off, like no-one else on earth knew how to cook until they came along!
This post is dedicated to all those women whose job it was to feed their families!
Now I am going to indulge myself and take a little trip down memory lane and some of it is relevant and some of it isn't.
Ten years ago the dear man and I were going on a little trip to Italy.
Caroline had come out for the occasion of the dear man's 50th birthday and, thereafter, we were all travelling on a SA Airways flight to London.
Now, those of you who know me really well will know that I hate flying and cannot do it without the help of a certain pill which I think is called Ativan.
It's a great drug. It certainly calms you down, stops you from hanging on to the door of the plane, screaming, 'I won't go, I won't go!'
Which is certainly the place I have been in many times.
On this particular occasion, we were flying to London. The dear man and I were in business class ( in those days we had advantages!) and Caroline was in , well what was it called? Tourist class I suppose?
Suddenly, the pilot announced that there was a problem.
One engine had failed and he was thinking of turning back to Cape Town. But then he decided we would be much better off continuing on to Jo'burg. But he had to do all sorts of things, like flying low and I suppose hoping for the best!
Well, I was a bit high on Ativan and really wanted to go off to the cock-pit ( that's how good the drug is) to offer him my help.
We eventually landed on Jo'burg with attendant fire-engines and emergency services and ambulances!
It was my worst nightmare come true.
We had to spend the night in Jo'burg at the Holiday Inn, without clothing although we were supplied with toilletry items.
The next day we all boarded the next flight. And this is where SAA really excelled themselves.
Everyone got a free air ticket as compensation for the inconvenience!
And Caroline was up-graded to business class so that she could be with us and that was great.
So my dear daughter got a free ticket to visit us again. And we had free tickets to go on another holiday.
It was almost worth the fright!
I am certainly rambling now but you will see that it will all lead to the point that I am trying to make!
So, because of the delay, we missed our scheduled flight to Florence.
Not as sad though as the poor man who had sat next to Caroline who had missed his son's wedding!
So we went off to Florence, via Brussels.
I have to tell you, at this point, that we had gone to a huge amount of trouble to get our visas for Italy. Lots of money and lots of paperwork got it done.
We arrived, eventually, in Florence. It was on a Sunday and there was not a passport official nor a customs official In sight. In fact, to this day, there is no record that the dear man nor I were ever in Italy at that place in time!
Come the luggage on the jolly carousel!
Well, the dear man got his, but I did not.
Suffice it to say, that my luggage arrived back in Cape Town 10 days after I did!
I can't to this day believe that I did it but I had a 10 day holiday in Italy with 2 changes of wardrobe!
People don't believe me.
But we arrived in Florence on a Sunday.
The next day, as can be expected, was Monday. Late opening for the shops.
I managed to get underwear but that was all.
Bear in mind it was the end of summer. Still hot but all the clothes in the shops were for the new winter season.
Bear in mind too that I am not petite in any way! And banish the thought of big fat Italian mamas.
That is a total myth. I just simply could not find clothing to fit me!
And my husband, thinking that he was being helpful, was going around trying to explain that he had this big fat lady who needed some clothes. AND he was trying to do it in Italian.
Well, I managed 10 days in Tuscany with 1 blouse, 1 pair of slax, 1 pair of tracksuit pants ( The dear man's) 1 Mad Dog's t-shirt ( likewise the dear man's) and two shirts ( again, the dear man's!)
We stayed in some fine hotels.
And, I'm afraid to say that I rocked up in my one and only pair of often washed pants along with one of the dear man's larney shirts. And I sat down in a really larney restaurant where, believe it or not, they placed my handbag on a little sort of footstool next to the table.
And I give 10 out of 10 to those people. They did not bat an eye-lid at my strange attire.
As I say, I still can't believe I did it!
I know people who would have thrown tantrums or at least fallen apart at the seams!
I did neither. I just pretended that it wasn't me. Much like I did when I was giving birth!
And now, after much digression, I will get to the point.
In one of those very posh restaurants, I ordered as my starter ' Papa Pomodoro'.
The waiter kindly suggested that I would not enjoy it!
I asked why and he proceeded to explain to me that it actually was 'poor people's food'.
He explained its history to me
In short, it is one of those meals created by desperate mothers who have a family to feed and who have very few ingredients at their disposal!
It was made with stale bread, one or two tomatoes from the garden along with some basil, also from the garden. In fact, it was a kind of tomato porridge!
AND FINALLY: This is the point of my post!
Rick Stein travels around England and sprouts forth about food heroes!
Please
The real food heroes, the real cooks, are the women who every day, day in and day out, have fed their families. And through necessity, through impoverished circumstances, have taken what they have in their kitchens, and have created food that is still enjoyed today!
Think about pizza, think about pasta, think about Cornish pasties, think about French onion soup, about Minestrone and Yorkshire pudding.
Think about those really simple meals, that have now become favourites. The stews, the soups, the casseroles...the bread and butter pudding, the chicken bread stuffing!
All created by the best cooks of all. And all created by women who had to feed their families with whatever they had in their kitchens and gardens.
The mothers.
The meatballs, the bready omelettes, the 'papa pomodoro'.
I cooked polenta the other day. I had made veal with mushroom sauce and decided to make grilled polenta.
Polenta is known to be the poor Italians food.
Now it is quite in fashion!
So, my point is this.
Forget Gordon Ramsay, forget Jamie Oliver.
BBC food has focussed on all these kitchen divas.
The real award goes to the people who, day in and day out. feed their families.
They will never appear on TV. They will never write recipe books.
But they have fed their families forever. And created memories as well!
They are the real food heroes!!

The Reaping Season

2010-05-14T21:24:00.000+02:00

There's a song, and a biblical verse, about a season for everything. Impatient one that I am, I did no research before sitting down to write this post.
You younger guys, and not so young, put me to shame the way you all quote lyrics and words.
But this week, I am quite sad because 3 people who featured in my life, have died.
I didn't know them personally but they all had some kind of meaning in my life, in some way or another.
Firstly, Aaron Searle. A big player in the textile and clothing industry, a socialite and a philanthropist, along with his first wife, Adele, a beautiful lady, much loved and well-known for her good works. She died of a rare form of cancer and Aaron,bless his soul and his optimism, went on to marry a lovely young woman who was younger than his eldest daughter.
Secondly, Lannice Snyman who died aged 62 of cancer.
A well known cook and recipe-book writer, she seemed to be a lovely person without airs and graces who just enjoyed life, her family and cooking.
I have 2 of her books.
'Free from the Sea' and 'Posh Nosh'.
Thirdly, van Zyl Slabbert, a handsome, eloquent and charismatic Afrikaans politician who dismayed his own people when he spoke out against apartheid.
He could have been a great leader. So many people believed in him and were devastated when he unexpectedly opted out of public politics.
I read his book 'The Last White Parliament' and had my eyes opened at the absolute lies the South African public was told by the Nationalist government.
All of these people gave something to the South African tapestry.
They all made their mark in some way or another, but always for the good of their country.
They believed and made it a better place.
R.I.P.

Gremlins.Chapter Two

2010-05-13T20:29:00.000+02:00

Well, to day we had our telephones restored to normal, and actually I omitted to mention that in my previous post! That was another gift from the gremlin contingent!
We have, however, found out that we are not alone in the gremlin invasion!
What is this? A communist plot or something?
At least, in the good? old days, that's what we all used to say when everything went pear-shaped! It's a communist plot we would cry....and then we would all rush off to vote for the national party! ( Just kidding! I never, ever did. But I'm a really unlucky gambler and so of course the party that I voted for didn't stand a chance in hell of winning!)
The undercounter lights are still not working, so if the food was burnt, tough luck!
I have sourced the tiles that fell off the wall. The internet is a wonderful thing. The good news is they have stock. The bad news is that's in the UK. In good old SA, not available! I'm am so surprised. But the lady on the phone tried to be really friendly and helpful. But, at the end of the day, she couldn't help.
So I have a huge decorating dilemma.
The storm last night blew over one of the cypresses in a really big pot in our kitchen courtyard. The pot didn't break nor did the tree fall out of it but I am amazed at the force of the wind.
There are branches and leaves everywhere. The garden is a mess, and our gardener from Zimbabwe is slouching about, huddled in his coat and muttering about the truly foul weather we have here in the Cape.
If you have ever been to Zimbabwe, you will understand exactly what he means. From a weather point of view, and totally and absolutely discounting that man called Mugabe, it is God's own country!
So it drips and it is cold. Both the little girls have colds again and so does their mummy.
I sometimes feel that I am a horse in one of those horse-trials that we see periodically on TV.
You know those. The horses have to do the two bar jump and then the three. Then they have to jump the hedge and the water obstacle. And then they have to do the fancy one that goes in and out and around the corner or whatever!
Well, at the moment I feel like I am one of those horses. Just take one obstacle, one at a time. You will eventually get to the end.
What really annoys me and what would REALLY annoy me if I was a horse, is this.
After all that effort and all that sweat and toil, all you get is a pat on the neck and a lousy ribbon rosette!
And the rider gets to drink the champagne!

A Visit from the Gremlins

2010-05-12T20:30:00.000+02:00

They are a strange band of little folk.
Who knows what their purpose in life actually is.
But they drift from life to life, from house to house, and their sole purpose in life seems to be to cause grief to people who are just trying to get on with their lives.
It must be a strange thing to be a gremlin!
No-one really wants you around!
You are never welcomed by anyone! Perhaps that's the problem?
But they joyfully arrive at someone's home and set about causing as much havoc as they can. It's one visit, so they must make the most of it before they move on to the next most unfortunate person!
Sadly, at this moment, we are hosting a group of gremlins.
Perhaps it's because of the Soccer World Cup.
Perhaps they booked into our home and I didn't notice and they are aggrieved.
But yesterday, whilst Craig was showering, several tiles just dropped off the shower wall. And that is a whole story while the dear man and I argue about how best to fix it!
And my domestic worker came to inform me that the plugs in the laundry had stopped working. OK. So I just go to the distribution board and flip a switch. But I am always terrified when I do that.
I mean, things trip for a reason. What if I electrocute her or something?
And tonight, when I went to the kitchen, the under-counter lights refused to work...likewise the laundry lights.
I felt like I had gone blind, trying to work without my under-counter lights.
So the gremlins are alive and well and living in Plattekloof.
I have to go now so that I can put clean towels in their room!

Going to Town

2010-05-11T20:34:00.000+02:00

Tonight, the dear daughter was host(essing) a dinner party for her friends.
Well, Madam Zingara eat your heart out!
The table setting was too beautiful and I was so caught up in the moment, that I found myself hauling out an embroidered shawl bought in Hungary, and old feather boa bought for some do or other, my old family photo album which is falling apart at the seams and even my opera-length pearls which I felt would bring some lustre to the occasion!
The table was magnificent.
Such a shame that 4 ladies declined to attend! It was their loss!
! went in briefly to say hello. On the table I espied a brooch. A brooch that was my Mom's.
Such memories! My mom wore that brooch on her summer coat and her winter coat. And she only wore those, along with her hat and her gloves, when she 'went to town'.
I wish I had the technology to show you a photo of that brooch. I can remember, as a small child, sitting on her lap and 'springing' the brooch open to see 4 photos of my mom's husband and her 3 daughters!
And there it sat, tonight, on the table, as part of my daughter's dinner party.
And I spoke briefly to my daughter's friends, about what 'going to town' really meant in those days.And some of them understood and even remembered the flash-street photos that you had taken outside the general post office. I mean, all of us oldies have one of those somewhere in the archives!
'Going to town' meant a day out for the harried housewife.
It was her time to herself.
It meant popping into Garlicks to check out the wool ( people knitted in those days, you know!)
It meant having tea in a tearoom, so larney!
Even I can remember when OK Bazaars ( do not laugh!) used to serve a really lovely tea, complete with a 3 tiered stand of delectable cakes and the service was so grand and you went home really feeling like you had truly 'been to town!'
And I knew the days when Mom had been to town.
She would always come home with something as a sort of peace-offering.
Mothers do that, you know! If they have been somewhere fun, they always buy something for their kids or their husbands, just to say: I was having lots of fun but that doesn't mean I don't love you!
My mom used to bring me slices of roasted pork from the OK Bazaars which had a really great deli! And great big fat gherkins wrapped in greaseproof paper!
Yesterday, Caroline and I, along with the two girls, went to The Green Valley at Tyger Valley. It is a little secret place hidden within Stuttafords. It has been there for years. I remember going there with my kids when they were very little.
It is self-service which makes it quite a challenge when you have two kids in tow. You have to juggle trays and kids and it all becomes quite difficult.
The food is comfort food. It is homecooking but it is good.
Yesterday, I took a personal trip down memory lane.
Not good healthwise I know. But I had a pie and chips with salad and gravy!
You see, once a term, my mom used to take us 'to town'.
We bought the new shoes ( usually for school) and then she would take us to..... you guessed it!! Good old OK Bazaars.
And we would sit on the verandah, which overlooked Adderley Street, and we would order pie and chips with gravy!
That was our treat. That was all we ever had. In those days there was no KFC. No Wimpy, No Spur!
And now, at the age of 63, pie and chips just does it for me!
And yesterday, while I was enjoying my pie and chips with gravy, and DO not forget the lettuce, Amy eyed my food and said: More sauce, Ga!
Do you know, lettuce with gravy is one of life's well hidden secrets. Try it sometime, why don't ypu?
So we trip off to the malls. We visit all the chain stores. It is boring, boring, boring. All the usual suspects.
Every mall is a clone of the other!
I long for the days when we went' to town!'
It was so special.
It was an outing of note.
You dressed up for it because it was an occasion!
And when you came home with the purchases that had been long saved for, you felt so elated. And you just knew that it would be a long time before you 'went to town' again!

The North winds doth blow...

2010-05-06T21:13:00.000+02:00

Ah! Winter has arrived! And with it, all those winter memories!
Pots of soup!
I promise you! the first downpour. apart from the pleasure of switching off the irrigation system, my mind shifts to curries, stews, hot-pots and soups!
The colder it is, the more I feel compelled to cook up a storm!
There is such comfort in cooking robust and rib-sticking food when it is wet, rainy and cold!
In our home, we have had ,over the last two weeks ,the two men in our home, cooking ox-tail stew, and ostrich neck stew with waterblommetjies.
Not quite my thing, but it smells wonderful and they really enjoy it.
Ostrich is really cheap in comparison to other meats!
It has very little fat and so is very healthy.
We kept some of the gravy for our dog. I was surprised at the non-existence of fat when I spooned it into his bowl.
I will not lie to you! I do not eat this stuff.
But I do enjoy watching the men in our house doing their Gordan Ramsay thing!
Tonight, I cooked Kingklip. I think, quite personally, I cook the best Kingklip! Maybe, I just cook it the way I like it!
There is never a scrap left!
I made Greek-style green beans to go with it, another of my personal favourites!
The recipe lurks somewhere on my blog-to-be, ' Egg in a Cup!'
Come Winter, my culinary urges come to the fore!
I itch to cook good food!
Food I know my family will enjoy.
So, while the wind howls around our house and everything just drips everywhere, I read my recipe books and wonder what I can cook next.
It's such an act of love, isn't it?

ENVY

2010-05-03T22:47:00.000+02:00

Isn't that an awful title?
Today I was filled with envy when I read the blog post of Lisa's 'Days like today".
You see, she is so young!
She is filled with the joy of life.
She has a whole new life ahead of her.
She and Ivan are about to embark on a whole new life together. They seem to be a really great couple and I just know that things will work out really well for them.
And I am so envious! Doesn't that sound so pathetic coming from a 63 year old woman?
Yes, it is pretty pathetic!
At this stage of my life, I know that I have failed to do the things that I really wanted to do.
Too late!
This is a pathetic post.
But I hope that Lisa and Ivan have a great life.
Part of me travels with them!
Go well and always be hopeful!

Here we go again...

2010-04-30T20:07:00.000+02:00

This time, 34 years ago, I was about to give birth to my first baby!
Admittedly, she arrived 10 days earlier than she should have.
My dear man was laying carpet tiles ( turquoise) in her nursery and I was lying on our bed, convinced that I had a tummy bug!
Our dear Pyraneon mountain dog was lying on the bed with me, licking my hand. I think he knew more what was going on than we did.
We phoned the doctor. He thought I was being neurotic, and besides which he really wanted to finish his squash game.
We set off to the Mowbray Maternity Hospital ( which is all we could afford at the time!) and promptly got lost!
We ended up at the Mowbray police station, asking directions while the kindly policeman peered into the car and probably wondered if he was going to have to deliver a baby, right there on the Mowbray main road!
We got there, just in time!
We arrived at 8.30pm and my lovely daughter was born just 25 minutes later!
What a shock! I think any new parent knows what I mean!
Peter was the first to hold her, and I remember the nurse saying to him: 'You have a little ash-blonde here, Daddy!'
She mewled like a kitten, and I still remember the dear man holding onto her with a dazed look on his face!
Any new parent will know what I am now remembering.
It's such a shock but so wonderful to become a parent. And so scary!
And now she is going to be 34 years old tomorrow! My first baby. And now she is a mommy herself and I am so blessed to share that with her! I have the two most beautiful grand-daughters who fill my life with joy everyday! We have such fun together, we 4 ladies!
Happy birthday, my darling daughter!
Thank you for being you and for bringing so much pleasure and joy into my life!
Love you!

Lessons

2010-04-26T20:16:00.000+02:00

I've been sick for the last 10 days or so. Am just recovering but am feeling very fuzzy-headed. I've managed, as a result, to mess up my card pin number so had to spend some time in a bank queue to sort it out.
Caroline has been clearing out cupboards and has found some boxes which we packed up when we left our Edgemead home. She was in London at the time and so the boxes got stored way up in some cupboard or other, only to be unearthed now.
Well, we found the Fisher Price toys that I had saved for my grand-children.
She found the one and only prize I ever received in my entire school career It's a book, looking somewhat ravaged, but nevertheless, it was MY PRIZE that I got when I was in Sub B, as it was known in those days.
She also found a whole bunch of my school reports and those made very interesting reading. I read them all and then tore them into shreds and dumped them in my bin!
There were one or two things that I enjoyed reading. It's not like you recognise yourself. This is someone else's viewpoint of who you were.
For the most part, I was described as hard-working and conscientious. My English and composition work received high praise.My Literature teacher in Std 9 remarked that I showed great perception and depth of understanding.
I was amazed at the numbers in the classes. In Std 2 there were 36 pupils. In fact, the classes averaged about 32 pupils!
One report moaned that I had not performed as expected. I got an aggregate of 81% and came 3rd in a class of 36! What the hell were they expecting of me??
I also found my little certificate for a poem that I recited for some speech competition. Strangely enough, my previous post, 'The Apostrophe' reminded me of this little exercise.
I stood, on the platform, hands clasped in front of me as I had been taught and announced with due importance:
'RABBITS"
" I love rabbits best by far
They're very funny animals, rabbits are.........'
That's all I can remember. But today, I looked at the certificate that I had got and the examiner very kindly remarked that it was well done but I must try not to hurry!
And while I'm thinking about prizes, a whole lot of things come to mind. In my days at school, we had this annual thing called a prizegiving. And all the clever people sat and waited for their names to be called and then they would march up to the stage to receive their prizes. The trouble was that if you were clever, you were very clever and you usually got more than one prize, and usually two or three or maybe even four!
And everyone got very bored and we all went 'hey-ho!' so what's new here?
In Std 9 I was very excited. I got the highest mark in English Literature which was in those days and at our school a whole subject all on its own. I got 79% which I thought was pretty good but the powers that be decided it was not good enough and so no literature prize would be awarded that year! that's my kind of luck! But it was disappointing at the time!
When I was teaching, I found this prizegiving thing very difficult.
You see, I found out as I went along, you get different kinds of children.
You get those who are academically clever and they excel in all things academic.
Then you get those who are blessed on the sportsfield and who excel in all things physical
Then you get those who are truly blessed.
They excel in the classroom and on the sportsfield.
And then you get the poor little folk who I think stood at the back of the queue for everything. They just aren't any good at anything no matter how hard they have tried!
So when I taught at Sea Point Boys' Junior, I decided that I had had enough of this.
The bright boys got their due and sometimes it was ugly to see how the parents competed and vied with each other. I mean, they even used to audit the marks on the reports and woe betide me if I had got my calculations wrong!
So after the school prizegiving, after all the cooing and the pats on the backs and the ego-stroking, I used to have my own little prizegiving in my own classroom with books I had bought with my own money. And at that prizegiving I honoured the children who had worked so hard to improve, who had really tried to lift their game.
No. They would never be Einsteins.
But they had tried so hard. They could never match the truly bright, the truly clever to whom everything came so easily. When you are naturally clever, it's no chore at all. It just is so easy!
But those who try, who persevere, must be acknowledged, and so I did.
So I honoured those hardworking little souls.
The clever ones were cross with me. They couldn't understand what I was trying to say.
Surely being the cleverest is all that matters?
Not at all!
I tried to explain that to them. Somehow, my prizes were far more desirable than the 'official' prizes from the school. They seemed to be more meaningful and the really clever ( and they were REALLY clever) little boys were so upset that they didn't get a prize from me.
They, I am sure, will have found life easy. They were very bright, so much so that it was almost not fair.
I chose to mark the others. Those who just tried really hard, who put in the extra effort. Those who never, ever had a parent come to a PTA. Those who wore keys around their necks because they were going home to an empty flat, who had to care for themselves. Who never had a sandwich in a lunchbox, who had dirty rings around the collar of their shirts because they didn't have a mom to care about it. Children who didn't want to go home when the bell rang at the end of the day. Children who would hover around and do anything for me, anything...just as long as they didn't have to go home.
It's so sad, isn't it?
I often wonder what became of all those children.
When I read my very old school reports today, I was sure that someone somewhere must be wondering what became of me!
Perhaps not. I am quite old!
They are probably dead!

The Apostrophe

2010-04-13T21:56:00.000+02:00

Writing this heading made me smile.
And, yes, I am about to digress before I get to the point.
The title just seems to have an air of importance about it and it reminds me of the days when I was at school, and yes we did have such things in those days!
We had dedicated lessons for poetry. And we had to learn the stuff 'off by heart'.
Do they do that, nowadays, in school? I wouldn't know.
But when I was at school and when I was a teacher, learning 'off by heart' was a very important part of the learning experience.
And my little man ( see previous post) is very busy because I am singing, as opposed to reciting, these little rhymes that the little old man is busy retrieving from the filing-room.
I am singing them to my older grand-daughter.
" Come little leaves, said the wind one day
Come o'er the fields with me and play.
Put on your dresses of red and gold
For summer has gone and the days grow cold.
As soon as the leaves heard the wind's loud call
Down they came tumbling one and all.
Soon fast asleep in their earthy beds,
The snow lay a coverlet over their heads,"
I sing it with my Amy and she tries to sing along with me. But that little poem came from my Std 3 days.
You see how clever my little old man in the filing-room is?
But let's get back to the apostrophe.
Apparently there is a strong movement to get rid of it. The reason being is that no-one really knows how to use it.
Well, I think that is a pretty poor reason to get rid of a humble punctuation mark!
And what does that actually say about us?
Are we stupid? How difficult can it be?
I have just one thing to say and this is it.
PLURALS do not sport an apostrophe as so many people seem to think.
It's very easy actually.
One girl, two girls ( no apostrophe)
One cat, two cats ( no apostrophe)
One book, two books ( no apostrophe)
One shop, two shops ( no apostrophe)
One road, two roads ( no apostrophe)
Do I really need to go on?
Apostrophes have two purposes.
They denote possession.
They indicate where a letter has been omitted.
For example: The girl's book. One girl possesses a book.
The girls' books. Many girls possess books.
I am: contraction is I'm
You are: contraction is you're.
Do not: contraction is don't
Were not: contraction is weren't. Where a letter is missing, we use an apostrophe!
It's not really so difficult at the end of the day.
I love the English language and I am appalled at how it is being abused and destroyed on a daily basis,
The sms messages that I get with numbers instead of letters, I hate it. We, who speak this language, should be ashamed.
If you are going to speak or communicate in English, then do it well and with understanding!
Otherwise, in years to come, we will all be speaking gobble-de-gook.
Shame on us all!

My Little Old Man

2010-04-12T20:00:00.000+02:00

NO! It's not my husband! I call him my dear man. Remember?
My little old man is in charge of my memory bank or my filing cabinet in my head.
Now, I have studied Psychology and do fully understand the physical workings of the human brain. All that technical stuff!
But somehow I still have this picture of my little old man.
You see, for those of you who are still young and don't think they will ever get there, older people have this little joke. We call it Altzies!
We all fear it and as we get older we can be quite fearful.
BUT! I have my very dear little old man.
To digress. In the very old days there used to be public conveniences on the Green Point common. ( That's another post coming on, however!)
There was a public convenience ( isn't that just such a lovely and discreet phrase for a public toilet?
It was in 3 Anchor bay. Just past the tennis courts and just before the bowling greens.
We often used to stop off there to use the facilities, because in those days you could. You would not be accosted, exposed to ugly stuff or frightened.
To put it simply, you could use the loo in safety and then go on your way.
There was a little old man who would sit on a chair outside the 'chalet' which was a delicate term for what was actually a public toilet.
I remember there used to be a large sign up in the facility. It had all to do with venereal disease and what you could do about it. It puzzled me no end and in spite of me pestering my sisters they had no answers for me. To be honest, I'm sure they had no idea what it was about themselves! How could they then explain it to their little sister?
I've just turned 63! Wow!
But I remember that little old man who used to sit, in his pale brown coat, outside the public loos. His was an important job. He kept the 'convenience' safe for those who wished to use it!
NOW! In my head or in my brain, I have a similar little old man, no doubt modelled along the lines of that fellow who featured so long ago in my childhood.
He was a keeper. He was a guardian and a custodian.
And I have a custodian ( isn't that a wonderful word?) of the files in my head.
He is old. He sits on a chair, wearing his dust-jacket, nodding off until he receives a summons.
And then he bustles off, into the dusty filing-room, searching and hunting through the files. And the older you are, the more files there are. And some of them are SO dusty!
But I have the greatest faith in him.
Admittedly, I sometimes send him a query and he doesn't respond until about 4am, which can be a huge nuisance.
But he comes up with the answers and I am so happy because he produces files that I have forgotten were ever there!
I love my little old man in his dustcoat.
He is getting slower and he takes more time than he used to to find the right files.
But when he does, what a triumph.
In the past 24 hours, he has explained to me what happened to my big square blue tablecloth that just simply disappeared.
He also gave me the name of the stick that my dad used to use when he nicked himself whilst shaving.
What a strange thing you might think to want to know, but we needed to know and my little old man, after much rummaging, came up with the answer.
I love my little old man in the filing-room.
We share a history.
And so far, he hasn't let me down!

EGG!

2010-04-08T21:33:00.000+02:00

We have just come home from an almost week in Langebaan.
The weather wasn't great but who needs weather when you have the most divine little girls helping to make it such a fun ( and exhausting ) weekend.
Of course, the Easter Bunny came. and what fun we all had. Amy was waltzing around with her little Easter Egg hunting bag while Nina...well Nina had nothing. You see, we thought she was too young to care. But she did care. I just wish you could all have seen how she joined in the egg hunt. She was so excited. She had an egg in each hand. And when Granny said:'What have you got?' She declared very loudly:" EGG! I heard her, the dear man heard her and so did her daddy.
So she got a box to put her eggs in. Not as glamorous as a fancy bag, but she seemed happy at the time. Let's just hope that she doesn't spend hours on a shrinks couch because she didn't get a bag like her sister did!
Today it was time to leave Langebaan. I always hate it.
When we woke up this morning, it was misty and very autumn-like. And as we made coffee, we drew back the curtains to gaze at the lagoon as we usually do. The mist started to dissipate and then the dear man said to me: " just come and look at this.'
I have never seen this in Langebaan for as long as we have been going there.
TEN!!! dolphins just swimming around no more than 15 meters off our beach. Just moving through the water, back and forth in a silken-like movement. We watched through binoculars and we took photos.
And as we watched, the news spread somehow and soon there were lots of people just watching quietly and enjoying the rare privilege of seeing these very beautiful creatures so close to our shore.
What I really loved was that there were no stupid people wanting to go out on their boards or boats. There was real respect and awe for the moment. We all seemed to understand that it was indeed a privilege that these special creatures had paid us a visit.
People just sat quietly on the dunes and watched as the dolphins played in the waves.
What a lovely way to end our stay in a place that means so much to us.
It just makes it harder to leave each time!

Saying Goodbye

2010-03-31T20:30:00.000+02:00

Today is the last day we will be the owners of one of our supermarkets.
It has been a long and painful journey.
We sold, not because we wanted to, but because we had to.
Today's economic reality made it a necessity.
The area is overtraded.
Who can compete with the supermarket giants?
For me, and I speak only for myself ( the dear man is far more pragmatic) it has been a very traumatic experience.
You see, it has been a personal experience.
I have known the people.
I have known the problems.
I have watched my dear man and my son juggle money until who knows where it was being juggled to?
We have done our best and it just was not good enough.
Egg on the face time, I think.
We can do egg on the face. We are not proud people in spite of what many may think.
The interesting thing about all of this is how you learn who your friends are and who your friends aren't.
I signed off my account at the shop in question today.
How sad I was.
These people have been my colleagues and my friends for 6 years.
I have shopped there daily. I can walk the aisles in my sleep.I know the products, what is there and what isn't there.
How badly I will miss the familiarity of it all. The friendly faces, the folk who come up to chat to me, who try really hard to please me. The butcher who would de-bone a giraffe if I asked him to. How I will miss him and his skill at the block! Nothing was ever too much trouble.
The kindly fruit-and-veg man who really knew his stuff and who knows how to wheel and deal and who delighted in trying to trick me in coming up with products that he was sure I wouldn't know. Madumbi was the famous one and I wouldn't have known what it was unless I had read Woolworths Taste magazine!
I will miss them all. My grand-daughters would go into that shop like royalty. Everybody loves them and they smile and wave at all and sundry, thinking that they were great. And so they were, because the staff of Plattekloof made them feel so!
And so I have to bid farewell to all those good people.
I know some of them think we have let them down but we really haven't. I know that.
We tried really hard but at the end of the day I suppose I can say that we had our arms twisted and so we had no choice.
I think that's the bit I can't handle.
People thinking that we bailed out without a thought for them.
Nothing could be further from the truth!

Egg in a Cup

2010-03-29T20:37:00.000+02:00

I actually have another blog-in-the-making. It is called Egg-in-a-Cup.
It's not active. I am busy building what I believe is called 'stock'.
I am doing it because my family keeps bugging me about it. They want me to create a recipe book for them.
However, that is not the point of this post.
Today, my little Amy has been decidedly unwell. She has been a little shadow today. Pale and quiet.
Asked at 4 pm to go to bed. Got up and switched off the TV!
The dear man hates it. He can't stand it when anyone he loves is ill, especially not the babies.
He asked today whether our kids ever got ill and if they did, he can't remember!
Well, of course he can't. He was working really hard to earn a living for us all, and that stuff was my job.
But egg-in-a cup has a long history.
It is something that my mom used to make for us when we were 'under the weather'.
I loved it. It wasn't so much about the food as it was about the message!
It said: " I love you and I care about you and I'm sorry that you are not well. I have made this for you out of love and because of that, it will make you better!"
And it, somehow, just did.
Today, I had a strong urge to make my Amy egg-in-a-cup.
But these days it is not PC. The eggs are only partially cooked, so we have to worry about salmonella.
So egg-in-a-cup has to sort of go away.
To this day, when my daughter is not feeling well, she says: " Mom, I need egg-in-a cup!
We, my daughter and I, spoke about attitudes towards illness. How different we all are and how differently we all react to not feeling well.
My mom was a great believer in Disprin. No matter what was wrong with you, she would say: " Take a Disprin, and we'll see how you are in the morning!"
I'm afraid I followed pretty much the same pattern.
I was never a particularly concerned mom. Most times I knew that it was homework not done, a test not studied for, an assignment not completed.
I was quite hard on my kids.
As a result, they do not cave in to illness and they know better than to moan to me.
But, when they were really ill, well then I knew the difference.
Our doctor had the utmost respect for me. He knew that when I presented myself at his surgery, there was a very good reason for it and he treated us with due attention.
Today, little Amy was washed out and pale. Her hair was lank and greasy. She just looked so out of it.
I wished I could have made her egg-in-a-cup!

Earth Hour

2010-03-27T22:06:00.000+02:00

Just one hour, that's all it was.
How meaningless it was in the scheme of things.
But it was a nod of recognition from those who cared.
It was a moment when caring people acknowledged the role of the planet on which they live.
So many people did not.
Where I live, I have this wonderful view of the city below us and all the lovely lights which I tell my grand-daughter is 'fairyland'.
Tonight we stood on our balcony and I hoped I would see a vote of faith and belief in this world of ours.
We did not. The lights of Cape Town continued to sparkle and glimmer.
Nobody, it appears, really cared very much at all.
We quite enjoyed our hour of candlelight. It was really pretty and sort of cast a different light on our evening.
My dear man has told me. more than once, our planet is finite.
It cannot last forever. It cannot continue to be abused and used.
Alas, it will be.
I will not be here to see the day when it finally dies.
Perhaps, nor will my daughter or my grand-daughters.
But the end will surely come.
I recycle, we compost, we grow our own herbs and veggies.
I do not kid myself. It makes us feel better but it does nothing to help the planet.
It does not rest with us, the little people. It rests with the big guys. And they don't really care, you see! It's all about money and profit and the bottom line.
There is no hope in it.
Little guys don't win.
But I hope that tonight, for just one hour, some people were reflecting on the planet that has given us so much.
And I hope that you were one of them!

Got to love Words

2010-03-23T14:11:00.000+02:00

Words. So important in our lives. We speak them, we listen to them, we communicate with them, we read them and I most certainly think in words and dream in words, although I know that loads of people think and dream in images.
There is that strange stage just before going to sleep. That sort of twilight stage when your conscious state has almost disappeared and your sub-conscious seems to creep out of the shadows of your mind. And one has wonderful ideas and beautiful thoughts and really inspiring words going around in one's head! I've always thought it's a shame that some really clever person hasn't come up with a device that can somehow record or capture those twilight thoughts. Because when one finally goes to sleep, or finally wakes up properly, they dissipate and cannot be recalled properly. So frustrating!
We should be able to fit some thingies to our heads and set the device to record. And all that wonderful stuff will be there for us to revisit later.
Last night I was twilight musing and came up with what I thought was an amazing saying. I don't know why I thought it or what led me there but I thought it was so brilliant, I made a hugely conscious effort to store it.
I tried to repeat it to the dear man this morning but, alas, the gist of it was there but the accuracy was not.
It went like this: ' In the present, we create the future's past.'
The dear man looked at me in a bemused way, just as he often does when he doesn't know what I am talking about.
He understood the meaning, he said, but wasn't it a trifle muddled?
I tried again: ' Today we make tomorrow's yesterday."
He thought that was better but I'm not so sure.
I just love the way words can conjure up images that can touch us, make us thoughtful or tearful. I love the way words, used cleverly, can entertain and amuse us.
I love clever graffiti or signs.
The two best bits of graffiti I have seen are these. Many, many years ago when Mandela was still languishing on Robben Island. groups of radical students at UCT used to go around spraying " FREE MANDELA!' on walls and bridges, which was at the time a very bold thing to do.
On a bridge in the City Bowl area we saw that message sprayed in strident letters.
'FREE MANDELA!' it said, and beneath it some wag had added in smaller letters...'in every box of Rice Krispies!'
The other was in the ladies loo at UCT ( perhaps they did a degree in Graffiti in those days?).
In order to discourage unsuitable behaviour in the toilet stalls, the doors had been fitted with quite a large gap above the floor. While I was using the loo I noted a message scrawled on the back of the door.
' Beware of limbo dancers!'
One of the best signs I've seen was a sticker on the inside of a revolving door at a shopping centre. It read, in very small print, 'By the time you have finished reading this, you will be going around for the second time'.
So clever!

ABC

2010-03-18T20:24:00.000+02:00

About 14 years ago, we went off, as a family ,to holiday in France.
I cannot do without reading. I liked to read on the flight, to distract me from the strange vibrations coming from the left wing or the rumble coming from underneath the aircraft. In fact that's a whole separate post!!
But we were off to France, in Richard's matric year. We were off on a canal cruise and a week or two in France, driving around and just getting to know the place. The dear man's choice. He's always been a bit of a Francophile and I have not!
But I need to read even though I am travelling, so I took myself off to a shop called Paperweight and bought a few cheap novels that I wouldn't mind dumping when it was time to come home. Any reader knows that books weigh a ton and it is not always easy to bring them home again.
One of the books that I found was called, 'B is for Burglar'.
I read it while puttering down a canal in France. I loved it.
Believe it or not, when we were in Monte Carlo, I visited a bookshop and found 'A is for Alibi.'
I had discovered Sue Grafton!
I have read her books ever since and there have been times when I have worried if she would not be able to complete the alphabet.
Her books have indeed become known as the 'alphabet murders'.
Yes, I am afraid that we are back on the murder trail!
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here, but she is one of those writers who go from strength to strength. Her character matures, her plots mature and her writing just gets better. Her 'heroine' , Kinsey Millhone', is a strange person and yet one can totally sympathise with her. She isn't really a heroine. If you have followed her right from the beginning, as I have done, she actually becomes one of your favourite people!
However, the point of this is: I have bought the latest of the Alphabet Murders. 'U is for Undertow".
And in the book, Kinsey meets one of the strange people who live in her life as a private investigator. ( That's what she does, by the way. I don't think I mentioned that!)
I quote: " Two sailboats tacked towards the islands and a speedboat, at full throttle, paralleled the shoreline, keeping a para-sailor aloft, attached by a towrope scarcely visible against the pale blue sky.
Hang gliding and parasailing are second and third down on my list of the one thousand things I never want to do in life. The first is have another tetanus shot."
So now really, the point of this post is to list all the things that are on MY list of things I never want to do in life.
Unlike Kinsey, I do not have one thousand., but I have come up with 20. And here they are:
1. Bungee-jump
2 Para-glide/sail/chute
3 Have root canal treatment
4 pluck my eyebrows
5 eat snails
6 ditto frog's legs
7 ditto mopani worms
8 ditto monkey-brains, sheep testicles and any offal of any description whatsoever!
9 Fly in anything smaller than a Boing
10 Sail in anything smaller than the QE2
11 Join a gym
12 Cross-stitch
13 Weed a garden
14 Clean windows
15 Go on a hike
16 Wake up early
17 Go to bed early
18 Go without something good to read
19 Join WeightWatchers ( again!)
20 Jog
So there you go. We drift through life, not always realising that we have certainly made up our minds about some things! Sometimes we do them, just to prove that we can.
And once we have done them, at least we can say: " That's not what Tiggers like!"
And while I'm on this sort of trail, I have two more coming up:
' 20 Things I wish I had done'
and
'20 things I should do'.
Hope I've got you all at least a little bit thoughtful!

The Magic of Bubbles

2010-03-04T00:01:00.000+02:00

My last two posts have been really miserable ones, for which I apologise most sincerely!
Who needs morbid?
There is joy in my life! Their names are Amy and Nina.
Tonight, Amy and I sat outside blowing bubbles. Winston, our dog, was trying to catch them and got very annoyed when he couldn't .
Amy was entranced and was impressed when I managed to blow 'big' ones. We watched them float around and then they would go 'pop'.
She so enjoyed it all and so did I!
Nina is impossible. She cannot sit still or be confined in any way. She just wants to go, go,go!
Her confidence is amazing. She is strong and active and is quite the opposite of her sister. But she adores her big sister. I love to watch the two of them inter-act.
Nina will be 1 year old next week. I can't believe how time has passed.
My home resembles a day-care. I have bibs and bowls and spoons and bottles and dummies all over the place!
My ornaments are all placed up high so as to avoid 'hurricane Nina!'
I don't actually care. I am long past the place where any of that matters.
I know how lucky I am. My sisters come around often to share my grand-daughters with me. They love them so much and I know my elder sister grieves for her grand-daughter far away in Florida.
We have beautiful babies.
I just wish, but I don't have the words, that you could have seen Great Aunty Maureen and Great Aunty Nor playing " Wolfie,Wolfie, what's the time?"
It was hysterical, Amy was hysterical and I laughed until I had a stitch in my side.
We are having fun, we five females.
We older ladies, the granny and the great-aunts, and the mummy and the two little girls.
I hope that one day they will remember.
And that it will all become part of who they are, or who they will be.

CSI Cape Town

2010-03-01T20:47:00.000+02:00

Previous post. An attempted break-in at our home.
I'm not sure, but do the police do nose prints? Because we had a perfect one on our window where the ******* pressed his face up against the window.
My really decent dear man phoned the police and thought they might like to take fingerprints or nose-prints.
Hey, this isn't TV. We do not have the resources of the USA in this country, not the manpower nor the budget.
It is quite odd. I found that, although my instinct was to fetch the Windolene and clean the window, I stood staring at this big fat nose-print, wondering:Who are you, this person who pressed your nose up against my window, peering into my home and wondering how you could best accomplish your mission?
Why do you do these things that you do? What would you have done if you had succeeded in breaking into our home?
And most importantly, does your mother know where you are? And what you do for a living?
And why do you prey on people this way?
What happened to you along your life-path that led you to this point where you find yourself invading someone else's space and scheming how you can get the most out of it?
I do not doubt that had you succeeded, you would have harmed us all in some way.
Peter and I have spent 18 months in this house on our own and we've had a few scares and false alarms. That's fine. We are older and have had the best of our lives.
But having my little grand-daughters in my home adds a new dimension.
I do not even want to share my thoughts on that because they are too awful to entertain.
I am very happy that 6 cops were out on the road catching drunk drivers. That is important.
But where are they when bad people roam the streets in suburbs and do their wicked deeds?
When decent people cannot even lay their heads on their pillows in peace, without fear or concern?
I have had some really absurd thoughts today. I think shock does that to you.
We have had one or two good friends visit or phone to share their concern and their worries.
I found myself being quite silly.
At one stage, I thought: 'Come back, Piet Retief! Your countrymen have need of you!'
And I thought that perhaps we should all go back to the laager idea.
Where concerned people just get together ( safety in numbers) and care for each other, share their skills and look after one another.
I see the impotence and frustration of the men in the family. They feel the need to protect their families and feel so powerless.
I see the despair of good-living people who no longer recognise the country they have lived in all their lives.
And they do not know what to do.
It is all so sad.
Quo Vadis?

Hamlet says it all!

2010-03-01T15:25:00.000+02:00

'When troubles come, they come not single spies but in battalions.'
I'm not planning to bore you all with my woes but the last few months have been filled with one problem after another.
The last two problems happened just this last weekend.
On Friday night my son was arrested for driving over the legal alcohol limit.
I hope he won't be annoyed with me for going public it but as quite a few people already know it's no big secret.
And I'm doing it for two good reasons.
The first is that I would like the facts to be true with no embellishments. People are inclined to do that as we all well know.
He wasn't speeding, he thought he was legal ( more about that later) and there was no accident and no-one was hurt in any way.
He was simply on his way home at about 1am and he was pulled over by cops at the side of the road as were about 20 other drivers. He was tested and while his blood alcohol level was not very high, he was nevertheless over the legal limit.
He passed the night in a police cell along with about 40 other people, an experience which he found scary and humiliating. It also taught him a very valuable lesson and certainly gave us and his friends food for thought.
He had to appear in court this morning which was also an eye-opener for him. He has been to court a few times to give evidence in a few theft cases but this is the first time he has been one of the 'criminals'. It was a lowering experience for him and he is not feeling good about it at all. The case has been postponed until July so we have no idea what sort of outcome there will be.
So, those are the facts of the matter. The truth!
The second reason I am posting about this is a lot of us, and that includes Peter and me, do drink and drive. We do it, our friends do it and some members of my family do it. The only member of my family who doesn't drink can't drive!
Peter took the time yesterday to read up on the rules and we were astounded at how very little one can drink if you are driving. Please take the time to find out the correct facts. Everyone says 2 glasses of wine. It is actually only 1 glass. And then remember, there are glasses and 'glasses'! it's the capacity that matters!
A single cocktail will put you over the limit!
Altogether this has been a learning curve for all of us. I know that he was wrong and it's good that they are cracking down on drunk-driving. My son was pulled over randomly and was caught. Next time it could be you, a member of your family or a friend. I am just so grateful that he wasn't hurt in an accident and nor was anyone else.
Our second woe this weekend happened last night.
Someone tried to break into our home at about 4am. Fortunately Caroline is a very light sleeper mainly because of the babies but she always has been right from young.
She heard a scratching noise and got up to investigate. To her horror, she saw someone peering through the passage window.
She raised the alarm, Craig pushed the panic button and the intruder/s ran away.
ADT came around. We found that cloths had been taken off the washing-line and draped over the CCTV cameras, and that the wood of the window frame had been scraped away, obviously so that the handle could be reached.
We are alarmed that they had chosen to break into the bedroom area. My handbag with quite a bit of money was just lying on the table in the family room. Peter's AppleMac and mine were in our studies.
I'm afraid their intention was not just to grab and go. I don't draw curtains at night so they could look through all the windows in the living area. Obviously there was nothing they wanted from there.
My sense of indignation and anger is immense. It is horrible to have your home breached and violated in this way. It is disturbing to go to bed with fear and worry.
At least nowadays, I have so much to worry about that each night I can pick and choose!
So it's never boring!

What Goes Around

2010-02-23T21:59:00.000+02:00

Wendy's Lily Land post made me smile because I've been there and done that.
My kids hate this story but it is true and reminds us of things that, perhaps, we would rather not be reminded of.
It doesn't worry me. Needs must.
I was pregnant with Caroline. We were pretty broke. My husband was still battling to establish his career, we were building a garage onto our house, which it had come without, so we were pretty strapped. And we didn't have parents who could afford to help out.
My one cousin lent us a crib. Another cousin passed on a pushchair. My mother-in-law bought a beautiful pram.
My parents bought a bed and my sisters bought a chest-of-drawers and a bookcase for the nursery.
One day, we were at my parent's house in Green Point, my dad looked out of the kitchen window and noticed that the neighbours opposite had put out a cot, in bits. Ready for the dirt-cart to take away.
Quick as a wink, my dad hustled Peter outside our back door and they collected the cot and brought it inside.
My dad spent hours sanding it and re-varnishing it. We bought a new base-board and mattress.
And that cot did for both of my kids.
When Richard came along, we could have afforded a new cot but we didn't bother.
That cot did the trick!
By the time Richard had finished rocking it to and fro, it was pretty done with, but I passed it on to my char who passed it on to one of her grandchildren.
Well recycled I would say!

Winnie the Pooh and Me

2010-02-19T20:37:00.000+02:00

The other day Caroline and I and the two appendages took ourselves off to NI City.
Now. before you all howl in horror, let me tell you that this centre holds a special place in our hearts.
There was a place called 'Tootsies'.
It was very popular. I used to go there every week with 2 of my dearest friends. We would eat the best toasted sandwiches and chat away before we went off to do our shopping. Those were the best of days. But that is not what this post is about.
Just recently Caroline and I, along with the two millstones, took ourselves to NI.
Just, really, for the outing. Amy was bouncing about chanting, 'Out, out, Amy out!'
She was so excited.
She had the deal done. 'Amy, juice. Amy eat. Amy, balloon!'
We went to Maxi's. Not the greatest of places but very child friendly and if we go on the right day, Shumi is there. We have known her for years since my kids were in school. She adores Caroline and is so thrilled to see her babies.
Well, we went to Maxi's and Amy knows exactly where to turn the menu. To the back page, of course, where we have the 'Smiley Ice-cream!
She points very coyly to the waitress.'Amy, dis.'she says.
At the end of our meal she gets a balloon.
'Pink,' she says decisively to the waitress, who obliges.
Thank you Maxi's for being so great and understanding of little people!
So off we went, sauntering through the mall, Amy proudly holding her pink balloon aloft.
Suddenly, I heard a great big bang. I knew what had happened. And sadly, I knew that every child has to, some day, realise that the balloon can pop!
I was expecting crying and weeping and heartbreak!
Amy stood for a minute and then she giggled. She found it really funny, and we, well, we were so relieved that she had taken it in her stride.
So I assume that you are all wondering how Winnie-the-Pooh comes into all of this.
I have a book printed in 1948. Just called 'Winnie-the-Pooh'.
I believe my uncle's wife gave it to me when I was just 1 year old.
The episode with Amy reminded me of Chapter VI, in which Eeyore has a birthday and gets two presents.
Have any of you ever, apart from Disney, read Winnie-the-Pooh?
Let me give you a little example.
Just randomly:
'That's right", says Eeyore. " Sing. Umty-tiddly, umpty-too. Here we go gathering Nuts and May. Enjoy your
self."
But the point I"m trying to make is this. It was Eeyore's birthdy. Pooh was going to give him a jar of honey. Which ,Pooh being Pooh, ate on the way to the party.
Dear little Piglet had got a red balloon. Unfortunately, he fell on it and it went 'pop'.
So Pooh had an empty pot and Piglet just had a piece of red rubber.
While all the friends were trying to be friends and were realising that they were not doing a really good job of it, Owl ( and I just have to share this with you. I used to write it up on the board for my class to share with me!)
" Hipy Papy BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY".
So there you go. And much respect is given to an owl who can spell!
So when all the friends arrived at Eeyore's place they all offered him the gifts that they had intended to give him.
Pooh, the now empty jar of honey. Piglet the popped balloon!
Eeyore asks Piglet: 'You don't mind me asking but what colour was this balloon when-when it was a balloon?'
And then Pooh brings Eeyore a very useful pot. It's for putting things in.
'I'm very glad' said Pooh happily, 'that I thought of giving you a Useful Pot to put things in.'
So you see, we have much to learn from our friends in the 100 acre wood.
And when I watched Amy staring at a pink piece of rubber and having a good giggle, I couldn't help wondering if there was a lesson there, somewhere!

My Dad

2010-02-17T20:12:00.000+02:00

Today would have been my Dad's 99th birthday.
I always find that quite amusing, the way we do that.
We keep count. My gran died a week after Caroline was born.
She was a month,just, short of 90.
She never saw Caroline.
I still find myself saying daft things like; my gran would have been 124years old today!
Now how dumb is that?
But, today would have been my dad's birthday and so, appropriately, I have spent a lot of time today thinking about him.
Next week, on the 25th, he will have been dead for 7 years. And I will burn a candle for him and it will flicker away all day as a quiet and soft reminder of someone we loved dearly. And if you think of them at no other time, you will be reminded, as the candle glows quietly,
Caroline doesn't like my little tradition. By the way, it is based on the Jewish tradition of honouring the dead. They even have a special candle called a Yorztheit candle. I'm sure I've got the spelling wrong here, but who cares? It's the sentiment that counts!
She feels we should mark their birth. I feel we should mark their death and thereby honour their lives.
My dad was a strange fellow. In fairness to him, he lived in a house with 5 women. His wife, his mother and his 3 daughters.
Enough to drive any man to drink. And it did!
My dad spent most of his after-work life in pubs. And he would come home after closing time. And my mom will have kept his food warm for him. And he wouldn't eat it.
But he could be the most amusing and charming fellow.
He could play the violin. All of his family could play some musical instrument.
Aunty Letty played the piano, Dad played the violin ( which by the way, I still possess), Uncle Norman played the mandolin, and I believe Uncle Arthur played the sax.
We, as his 3 daughters, were all sent off to learn the piano. That's what girls did in those days.
I was the only one who kept it up. Not very successfully but this is not about me. This is about my dad.
My dad had the most amazing sense of humour.
He would dress up and act out until he had people rolling with laughter.
He liked to do magic tricks which most times didn't work but that just added to the fun
He had a collection of toys. battery operated, that had everyone begging him to show them off.
He couldn't make a braai but he could make the greatest kites.
He was a sort of inventor and I believe he was the first to come up with the idea of rings to fry eggs in. Except his were not rings, they were the same shape as the slice of bread.
He had no patience with ties. Couldn't stand the long bit that used to flap around so he used to cut them off.
He invented his own brand of hair gel, based on wallpaper glue, and believe it or not, people used to buy it from him.
He had a great love of spray paint, especially gold. When all else failed, well then, you sprayed it gold.
He was a very handy kind of man and many people used to call on him whenever they needed some help.
We had a lady who lived down the road from us. She wasn't quite all there but everyone felt sorry for her and helped out when they could.
One day she ran up the road, having spotted my dad, shouting: 'Mr Taylor! I need a screw!'
I still remember the panic-stricken expression on my dad's face!
He loved junk. He went often to auction sales with my Aunty Letty ( who by the way had the most wonderful taste and a really good eye) and he would come home with the biggest load of junk.
I remember him, having bought a whole load of old 78 rpm records, making flower pots out of them. He thought it was great because they already had a drainage hole in them.
We had a flag pole in our garden. My dad made a merry-go-round with little horses to place on the top of it and when the wind blew they would go round and round and all the kids in the neighbourhood would sit on the pavement to watch.
Believe it or not, we used to braai in our lounge, over a coal fire. We would make toast and braai chops and wors. I'm amazed that we didn't all die immediately and forthwith.
We all went to church in those days but not my dad. He used to say he only dealt with the man at the top. He didn't deal with agents! Our minister used to laugh and happily have a drink with my dad!
Every year, my mom used to throw stuff away and give it to the really nice lady who used to run the white elephant stall at our church bazaar. My mom did it on the quiet. But! Lo and behold, after the church bazaar, my dad would come home with all the very same things that my mom had turfed. As I said. He loved junk.
He annoyed the hell out of me.
He embarrassed me.
Sometimes I wanted to kill him ( in the nicest of ways, of course!)
But he was in his own way, a very decent fellow.
On his birthday, the one before he died, we had persuaded him to go to bed. I went in to say goodnight to him. I didn't know it then but it was the last time I would see him alive.
I hugged him and told him to be good.
He said: 'Sandra, I did my best!'
I thought to myself: 'No Dad you didn't but you did the best that you could!'
My dad died on his own terms. That's what I believe.
He went off to the Stadium Home, a place that he always said he would go to 'over my dead body!'
He meant it.
He was there no longer than 4 hours when he had a heart-attack and died.
He bowed out on his terms.
He certainly was a man for all seasons.
So tonight I remember him. I forget the bad bits and cherish the good.

Cluck,cluck!

2010-02-15T20:56:00.000+02:00

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SUBJECT MATTER THAT MIGHT OFFEND YOUNG PEOPLE. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE OFFENDED OR UPSET, THEN READ NO FURTHER. IF YOU DO, PLEASE DON'T COMPLAIN BECAUSE I AM NOT INTERESTED AND WILL NOT RESPOND!
I have been invited to a 'hen-party'.
I am looking forward to it simply because my social life has sucked lately and times with young women can be a whole lot of fun.
But, at my age (62) I am a little bit puzzled over this 'hen-party' thing.
You see, this young lady has co-habited with her loved one for quite a while. They have a home and a kitchen. They have the cutlery and the plates and the corkscrew and the egg-lifter, the soup ladle and the pasta spoon and the slotted spoon and the.....well, the everything!
In my day ( sigh, here she goes again), we were setting up home. We hadn't lived together. We REALLY were starting from scratch!
We ( the ancient ones) called it a kitchen tea.
It was always supposed to be a surprise and sometimes it was. And all the women, young and old, would be there to laugh and joke and make their little contribution to what, I think now, was a rite of passage.
I got all sorts of 'useful' things, most of which I stared at in horror.
An ironing-board? A wash basket? And horror of horrors, an iron!
But it was loads of fun and eventually when we settled in, I was very grateful for all those boring but very useful things.
It occurs to me now to write some more stuff about how different it was when we were young but I would embarrass
the hell out of my kids. As Richard has always declared: " You and Dad have only had sex twice!
My darling young ladies out there. You think you have had the best of it.
I say: Oh no, you haven't!
So, cluck, cluck, I am off to a hen-party. And I am not required to bring a spoon or measuring cups or even a sieve.
Apparently, I must bring underwear ( size given) or something sexy!
Now, hello ( and please dear friends forgive me!) these young people have lived together for a few years!
He has seen her shaving her legs, washing out her undies, dying her hair. He has seen her moping because it's 'the wrong time of the month!'
She has heard him farting, seen him throwing his dirty socks onto the floor.
How romantic is all of that?
And quite frankly, how many pairs of sexy panties can a girl handle?
I am putting on hold the gift that I will give this hopeful young bride.
I am thinking about it.
But it won't be a g-string!

3rd and Bird

2010-02-08T16:58:00.000+02:00

It's one of Amy's CBeebies programmes and I also like it a lot.
From a song the other day: ' Somewhere over the hill, my shooting star is waiting.'
I found that very cheering.

Mixed Blessings

2010-02-03T20:33:00.000+02:00

They are back, our little family. They number one more than when they left.
It has been chaos.
My home has been turned upside down.
But times are hard and we do not turn our backs on those we love, no matter what the sacrifice.
The dear man and I had only just gotten used to being just two. In every kind of way.
Our lives were calm. We pleased ourselves in every way. It took us a long time to get used to being alone and once we got used to it, we had to press rewind!
There are the pleasures of being a family with two very vocal children.
As my son said today: That is the best kind of contraceptive
Perhaps I won't see his children after all!
But I love my girls dearly and I treasure the time I have with them.
And I am so grateful that we are able to help them out.
I resent that the life we were trying to build for ourselves has been put on hold. We really were hoping to just enjoy the fruits of our ( or really the dear man's) labour.
But we come from a family that does not let go.
Times are hard. Things we took for granted do not exist.
We just simply have to be there for each other.
And I know that there are parents all over doing exactly the same thing for their children.
So in the morning, and I don't do mornings very well, I walk into the kitchen and see my two grand-daughters eating their breakfast and they grin at me and Nina waves her spoon at me and I wonder what on earth I'm complaining about?

Today's Advice

2010-01-26T11:41:00.000+02:00

They say, "Keep your chin up!"
Don't! You just get punched, again.
From now on I'm doing what the boxers do.
I'm keeping my chin well tucked in.

Nina

2010-01-20T21:30:00.000+02:00

I have been trying, for my last few posts, to avoid a personal, diary-kind of post. I do not want, at this stage, to make my posts a tedious personal narrative of my very tedious life. I really do not want to bore the socks of all of you.
But my second grand-daughter begs to be written about!
She hasn't featured much in my posts. I used to write a lot about Amy. I haven't said too much about Nina.
But she is such an individual character that I feel I simply have to give her a big nod of recognition, at least once, in a post.
Do you know, I come from such a loud and verbal family. I do believe it is the Irish gene in all of us.
In the old days, when there were a lot of us, the row was unbearable. That's why I thought I was the quiet one.
Now, I realise that I just couldn't get a word in edgeways.
I have told you in a previous post how my dear man had all our old 8mm movies and old videos converted to DVD's.
Well, my goodness me. I was a really noisy lady and there is no denying it because when I watch the old videos, all I can hear is my own voice, going on and on! It is actually quite embarrassing.
The dear man is very kind. He says I was a very vibrant person. But I suspect I was just a very noisy person who couldn't shut up!
Do any of you ever have that kind of experience?
Where you look back and cannot recognise yourselves?
However, this post is supposed to be Nina's.
From tiny, she has been a singer. She has inherited the humming gene. So when I held her and rocked her and sang or hummed to her, she would join in most heartily. And we would warble away together and she would often give me the giggles because she took it so seriously and I could feel her little chest swell with air so that she could complete the duet with gusto! And she seemed to have a sense of timing too. She would stop when it was appropriate, wait and then pick up the tune again.
And now she is so robust and naughty in the nicest kind of way. But she is strong and really noisy. She yells and 'talks' and shouts at everyone. So much so that when we are out and about, I sometimes put my hand over her mouth.
She is really noisy. She will not be ignored!
And poor Amy, who really loves her little sister and who spends a lot of time looking out for her, finds all the noise a little bit much. She seems to roll her eyes heavenwards and often shouts, when she can't take it anymore: " No, baba. no!"
Today, Caroline and I decided to go out for brunch at a new little place just over the hill.
What a disaster. My grand-daughters were in full voice. It was quite enjoyable but we both decided it was a venue best visited without children.
But my dear Nina continues to embrace life with joy and vigour.
I have no idea where it comes from.

Manners in a Box

2010-01-11T22:07:00.000+02:00

My Amy is not big on manners. She doesn't say please or thank you or even 'ta'.
I told her, over the last festive holidays, that I hoped Father Christmas would bring her some manners in a box.
It has had some impact. She, very reluctantly. has managed a 'ta' especially when she realises that her grown-ups are serious about manners!
But it has occurred to me that Amy is only 2. And there are a few people out there who could do with some manners in a box.
And they are a lot older than 2!
Richard and his significant other have just celebrated her 30th birthday in a very generous way. They hired a venue, arranged a caterer, organised a DJ and, because it was a Western style party, they even organised a mechanical bull.
Well, I didn't count but the 100 people who had pledged to be there weren't. Quite a few who had said they would come, didn't.
But it all had to be paid for. It's not the caterers problem if people don't pitch! But they have to be paid for! Tough.
I'm sorry but I'm shooting my mouth off again!
It appears to me that these days younger people are selfish and rude. They have no manners. If you accept an invitation then you go! Too bad if something better comes up!
If you have accepted an invite, especially if it is catered, then you go, come hell or high water.
When my kids were younger, they hated me for that rule. But I insisted and they honoured their promise to a friend.
In my opinion it is just sheer bad manners to accept an invitation and then back off at the last minute!
Tell me that I'm wrong.
It appears that young people today just please themselves.
There is no loyalty, no decency and most definitely no good manners!
I find that very sad.
Who the hell brought these people up?
Manners are manners and it's about time someone wrote a book about it.
Young people today could do with a good lesson or two about manners.
And perhaps Amy was not the only one who needed Father Christmas to bring her some manners in a box!

2010 Collage

2010-01-06T20:31:00.000+02:00

NEW YEAR GREETINGS
Happy New Year everyone! May the year bring you all that you hope for, and if it doesn't may you have the courage to accept it!
ERRATA
The teacher in me continues to rear its ugly head. Errata means a mistake or an error.
In my previous post, I mistakenly named one of my new recipe books as Decadent ( a Freudian slip I am sure!)
It is actually called 'Sumptuous'. It is still a great book! Sorry about that.
RESOLUTIONSI
Generally I don't make any.
One usually ends up with egg on the face, especially if one has announced them to all and sundry.
I have although made one or two determined decisions. I'm not sure if those count as resolutions?
LANGEBAAN
We have just had a spell of 10 days in Langebaan.
The weather was a bit of a mixed bag. Some wind and a slight chill, and then the most glorious days that you can imagine.
We had a lovely New Years Eve. The traditional fireworks display was lovely. To this day I have no idea who does it but I hope he or they know how much pleasure they bring to so many people. We had wonderful food too: Shrimp Salad, beef fillet, potato bake and loads and loads of prawns. Lots of champagne and wine. It was great. There were a few people missing that I would have loved to be there. Perhaps next year?
MY GRANDDAUGHTERS
Amy and Nina continue to be a source of endless pleasure to us.
Amy's speech is an enigma to us all. She has a vocabulary of about 25 words and the rest is a language that makes sense only to her. But she makes up for it with facial expressions and hand movements. It is amazing what she manages to convey with that. I think I will miss it when she finally, as her dad says, 'speeka da Eenglish!'
Nina is robust, strong, noisy and loves her food. She has, over this past holiday, eaten Waterblommetjie Bredie, Melanzane Parmigiana, litchies, biltong ,,,well you name it. The seal of approval is 'NUM' If she doesn't say that, then it's no good!
She is also the happiest little being. She always has a smile on her face.
So our stay in Langebaan was less peaceful than it normally is. Always a baby shrieking somewhere, loads of toys lying everywhere, bottles and bowls and bibs and dummies all over the place. But we loved it! Plenty of time to be quiet in our old age!
THE YEAR AHEAD
We have lots of hopes for this year. Hopes that we will sell our house. Hopes that the business will improve. Hopes that we will eventually make up our minds as to how we want to spend our twilight years.
Hopes that our children will find their feet and forge on to a life of their own.
So many hopes.
So much beyond our control!
GOOD SIGNS
I love the casino as most of you know. I had a really good win up at Mykonos this last week.
And when we came home, the friendly ghost had switched on the lights in the lounge.
I like to think it was saying, " Welcome home."

A Christmas Collage

2009-12-26T16:27:00.000+02:00

A Box Full of Memories
Every year I am spoiled silly by the dear man. His gifts are always so thoughtful and consider every aspect of who I am. Some people may be puzzled by some of his choices but I know where he is coming from and why that particular gift is in my stocking.
This year, apart from a new watch and various other lovely gifts, I was presented with a cardboard box full of DVDs.
During a session of clearing out and de-cluttering he had come across old 8mm home movies and old home videos which, of course, are now so out of date,from a technology point of view. So he had them all transferred to DVDs. I am so thrilled and can't wait to sit down and start viewing them. Memory lane here I come!
Recipe Books
I have a large collection of recipe books. The greatest and most cherished of them is my very own recipe book which is actually a hard-covered exercise book into which I have pasted recipes from magazines and from friends and family. I started the book when I was 15 and was suddenly appointed the cook when my mom went away. The glue has dried out, the pages are coming loose so the whole thing falls apart when I pick it up. But it is my favourite book and contains some of my most cherished recipes which have journeyed with me through the years. Some of the recipes have become firm favourites in my family, like Bread and Butter pudding, Spanish Chicken, Van der Hum and Coffee pudding, Christmas Stuffing, Pea and Lettuce Soup and so on.
This Christmas, I got 3 new books to add to my collection.
South Africa Eats by Phillipa Cheifitz
La Petite Ferme by the owners of the restaurant of the same name in Franschhoek
Decadence by Marlene van der Westhuizen ( I think!)
Cook books these days are not just about recipes, have you noticed?
They are little works of art with the most beautiful photographs, not just of food but of people and places too. They are mini-travelogues and nostalgic excursions. Nowadays, you can really read a cookbook!
I really love Decadence ( the cookbook!) because the writer has a food studio in Green Point Village as it is now known. There are photographs of places and streets that I am so familiar with. So I really love this one because it contains a few of my memories as well.
Christmas Food
This year I made Cream of Cauliflower soup and Prawn and Avocado Salad as starters, both of which went down very well.
The main course was the traditional turkey, roast pork and roast lamb which the dear man did on the Weber which is always such a help to me, stuffing as well as roasted potatoes and a vegetable medley. I also made an asparagus and artichoke salad.
I cooked 2 turkeys this year for 2 reasons. The first is that the turkeys are so much smaller these days. I can remember the huge bird that my mom used to heave into the oven early in the morning. It took hours to cook and could feed an army all by itself. The second reason is that I love turkey and so I must have leftovers. I must have leftovers so that I can make my really mean turkey salad sandwiches in the evening or on Boxing Day and so that I can make my traditional Resurrection Stew which the dear man and I love and which the kids always hated. Next year I will probably cook 3 turkeys so that I can try out the recipe I found for Turkey and Ham Pie. In fact if our shop still has turkeys in the freezer, I won't even wait for next year. I'll make the pie quite soon!
Our Christmas Pudding was made by my sister. That has always been her speciality and last year, when she was in America, we really missed it. The Woolies one didn't even come close and ended up getting turfed.
She puts money in hers and when the kids were little they would wade through the pudding and custard on a treasure hunt. Yesterday, I made a big show for Amy and spooned out a R5 piece. She looked at it with interest and then casually threw it back into my pudding! I guess money doesn't mean too much to her at the moment.
In the old days we also used to put little charms into the pudding. They all meant something. So if a lady got a thimble it meant she would not get married, if a man got the silver button, he would remain a bachelor. If you got the little money-bag, you were going to be rich, if you got the little silver wishbone your wish would come true.
The tradition came to an abrupt end after my uncle swallowed his charm and nearly choked to death at the lunch-table! Served him right for not chewing properly!
I also made a plum and cranberry trifle and it was not my finest culinary moment! I failed to follow my own advice and I went ahead to make something I had not made before for a special occasion.
It should have been great. I poached fresh plums in cranberry juice and Cointreau so far so good, but then the recipe demanded gelatine leaves instead of powder which I am more used to. I followed the instructions faithfully but when the jelly still seemed very wobbly added another gelatine leaf. A night in the fridge, my jelly still looked somewhat fragile and I went on to do the swiss roll and custard layers. Silver balls on top, so pretty.
Well, talk about the dessert that keeps on giving! No matter how much was dished up, the bowl just kept filling up. You might have heard of Eton Mess... this was a Friggin' Mess.
Oh well, Nobody's perfect!
We're off to Langebaan tomorrow for a little break.
Enjoy your New Year celebrations and keep safe!

..ingle...ells!

2009-12-23T20:16:00.000+02:00

I've always loved that advert. " Christmas wouldn't be the same without J and B!'
I just want to wish all of you out there...the ones who read and comment...and the ones who read and do not... a very happy Christmas and a very joyful time with those you love the best.
I reminded a friend of ours the other night...he was grumbling about a guest he didn't know who was going to be at his Christmas lunch. I reminded him that that is what Christmas is about.
Every table should have a place set for a stranger!
The recession has hit most of us and we are all embracing new standards and new frugal rules.
I'm not going well in that regard. In spite of my intentions, I have gone just a weeny bit over the top.
Quite restrained for me, but still just a teeny, weeny little bit over the top.
And do you know what?
I don't care. I can tighten my belt in the new year. But I have two beautiful granddaughters this Christmas and I want to make Christmas memories for them
I think of all the Christmases when I won't be here and I know that this Christmas is the one that counts. This is the Christmas when I AM here!
So come sit at my table on Christmas Day, stranger!
Open your gifts with pleasure, my darling girls.
Christmas is all about the warmth we should feel and the love we have or at least a nod of recognition to our family and those that we care about.
We pretty much don't do it during the year!
That's, for me anyway, what Christmas is about.
The recognition of our bonds, the acknowledgement of our common humanity. For a while we stop and do silly and generous things. We laugh and indulge and, just for a little while, brush our troubles and worries away.
So say: "Cheers!"
Why don't you/
Merry Christmas, everyone.

Down on the Funny Farm

2009-12-14T21:09:00.000+02:00

Many years ago...or once upon a time...the dear man and I bought our very first house in Edgemead.
He spent a long time examining which way the sun would shine at a certain time, which wind would blow where and when and how much ground we had to do all sorts of things with!
While I, well I was plotting which wall to chop down, which room to extend and what colour to paint the house eventually!
We were, and still are, a very good team.
The dear man was delighted with our large plot. In those days the powers that be were very generous with the piece of ground you got with your cheapish house. They seemed to understand that you would not always be broke and perhaps later you could do something with your little piece of ground.
Peter chose to garden.
We started with the grass and with ripping out all those horrible Port Jackson trees that seemed at the time to invade every inch of ground in Edgemead.
Then he made a vegetable garden. So we grew radishes ( by far our finest crop!) and have you never noticed how very little one can do with radishes? Just little additions to a salad or side garnishes to a platter. If you were very clever, you could make roses out of them which today is very passe. And one could plant them in between all the other things to distract the insects. They were a kind of bait, as it were, which I think is quite nasty to a humble radish.
The dear man also grew tomatoes, and gem squash, melons, carrots and leaves that I think were meant to be lettuces.
He also, long before it was fashionable, believed in organic gardening. He had a compost heap and eventually compost bins which were sort of upside-down black bins. The bees loved them for they made perfect hives. Unwittingly we almost became beekeepers as well!
We even had our two-week-at-a-time gardener digging telephone directories straight into the garden beds because they were 'bio-degradable', you know. I thought perhaps they should at least have been shredded or something, you know, but the gardener man would have none of it.
My pet peeve was when the gardener would go forth into the fields and pick his 'crop' which he would then dump, dirt and all, into my kitchen sink. Duty done, he would then piss off and leave me to make sense of the mess.
Now here in Plattekloof the gardening took a back seat for a while because the dear man was far too occupied with his career, but once that came to an end, he resumed his interest in gardening.
And so, as most of you know, I have a wonderful herb garden and a glorious grape-vine covering our pergola.
But the nutty gardener is back and he keeps planting all sorts of seeds for all sorts of veggies, which is great but bear in mind our house is up for sale! We might never reap the harvest of his efforts and perhaps the new owner will not particularly want a vegetable garden!
And now the dear man wants an earthworm farm!
He really does! The very idea gives me the creeps. And what if we sell the house? It's bad enough having a dog to worry about and now I must fret about the worms?
And we have gone one step further than the telephone directories.
We need to keep the birds away from our grapevine. Apparently, old CD's, hung on thread from the pergola. will do the trick. They catch the light and so scare the birds away! How elegant!
Do you know any gardener who keeps digging up his beetroot crop to examine the beetroot, and then if they are not big enough, well then he just replants them until they are?
And my blender has been hauled out of the cupboard because some woman who has written a book says your compost decomposes more quickly if you blend all the waste first.
The dear man was demonstrating this to Rodwell, our gardener, who remarked quite correctly: " It looks like sewerage!"
Say no more!

One potato, two potato. three potato four...!

2009-12-10T19:58:00.000+02:00

So many posts buzzing around in my head! Which one to choose? Every day a new thought pops up in my head and it's ( please note the correct use of the apostrophe!) so difficult to decide what it is I want to say today. So most days I don't say anything.
Sometimes I think I should just write a magazine post which I think would be a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Other times I have this great big post in my head with all sorts of things to say, unfortunately some of which would upset a few people. But I've been down that road and am reluctant to repeat it!
The dear man says: "*%$@# That! Perhaps he is right and I have earned the right to say what I feel and, what's more, what I know is true because I've learned the lesson and I've walked the road.
My dad used to say: ' What I've forgotten, you still have to learn!'
My dear nail lady and I had a lovely session the other day when she was talking about Christmas presents and her problems about how to choose just the right one for the right person, and she has a few extra people to think about right now because she has met a very special man whose family now features on her gift list.
So I gave her a few ideas and she was so delighted and made copious notes and exclaimed:' How do you know so much?"
Well, after 62 years I should know a few things about gift-giving!
My tickey saga continues. The site that I visited and unthinkingly e-mailed turned out to be very larney. Mint coins in fancy boxes and all sorts of details and information that I only read later ( after I had e-mailed). Thank goodness I didn't follow the dear man's suggestion to 'clean them up a bit". You know, a bit of Silvo and a lot of elbow grease and they'll look as good as new!
Apparently, that's the worst thing you can do.
So here I have a man phoning me from Jo'burg about my tickeys and I am so embarrassed. I have 400 tickeys dating back to the 1920's all thrown together into a Black Cat peanut butter jar. As the dear man observed: 'The peanut butter jar is probably worth a fortune!' Interestingly, all it has is a label that says ' Black Cat peanut butter.' No warnings ( Contains nuts!), no nutritional information, no list of ingredients.
The tickey has occupied my thought for a few days now. Young people have no idea what it was.
When South Africa converted from imperial measures to decimal we used to have a song on the radio that played over and over until we all knew it off by heart.
It went something like this:
'Decimal Dan, the rand cents man changing cents for pennies whenever he can.
One for one, and two for two
And two and a half for a tickey!'
A tickey was used in the public telephone box to make a call, hence the name 'tickey box'.
When I was a Brownie, we had the mantra which we recited before we left for our Brownie meeting. ( By the way, I am not talking about those delicious chocolatey biscuit things!).
It went: 'Hankey, pencil.notebook, string. Tickey for subs and a tickey to spend.'
Why we needed the string I have yet to figure out.
The tickey to spend was up to us. We could use it to catch the bus home from Sea Point, or we could walk home along the Main Road ( I kid you not! We could walk home along the Main Road on a Friday night!) And then we could pop into the Greek cafe and spend the tickey on sweets!
And there was a dear old lady who lived just down the road from us who grew the most wonderful parsley in her front garden. Organic too ( although that was not a word we were familiar with at the time!) And she sold it to her neighbours for a tickey a bunch.
And then there was the friend of my older sister who went off to the UK on a holiday. She wanted to send some postcards home and asked at the post-office for three tickey stamps. The clerk looked at her in bemusement and replied, in a typical British way: " Madam, all our stamps are sticky!"
While Googling away about tickeys, I saw them described as ' South Africa;s most beloved coin.'
Small wonder then that on the bidorbuy site I saw a 1943 tickey sold for R255!
And we have 4 rolls of them!
Anyone want to buy a tickey?

Friday's Child

2009-12-02T21:51:00.000+02:00

I have always believed that I was born on a Thursday. So I have gone through life bemoaning the fact that Thursday's child has far to go. That conjured up images of battling away, sweating away, working my arse off like forever! And probably getting nowhere!
Today, the dear man and I were trying to de-clutter our lives a little bit.
I found an envelope with a lovely laminated certificate, written by my big sister, and some photo-copied editions of the Cape Times and the Cape Argus, as published on the 11th April 1947.
The day I was born!
And it was a Friday!!!
Well! Fridays child is loving and giving! I have always thought that I have been given short shrift!
Some headlines from the newspapers on the day I was born:
Farmers refused right of grazing.
Cause of flabbiness in Cape fish
Gold Key for Princess...City's 21st birthday present.
Garlicks offers rayon blouses for 14 shillings and 5 pennies!
Ok bazaars sells wine glasses for 6d each ( so do the maths!)
So here I am, loving and giving!
The other thing is that we found a jar full of tickeys!
The dear man's Grandfather had collected them and rolled them into little rolls, according to the date, and each roll adding up to 10 shillings. We are planning to sell them if we can find a buyer. Unfortunately, there is not a 1931 tickey in the lot. That would be worth about R35 000 today!
However, the point of this post is that something I have always believed about myself has turned out to be untrue.
It will take a while for me to accept that I am Friday's child!

And I thought you were in my imagination!

2009-11-18T10:40:00.000+02:00

And I thought you were in my imagination!
The dear man and I attended a wedding on Saturday. It was a strange wedding in that the main people involved came from different backgrounds and different cultures. And they also spoke different languages! But it was beautiful in that love knows no culture or history. The language of love is universal! Two young people who gaze into each others eyes and who speak only to each other at that moment? There are no borders here nor any rules that intervene! I have said it before and I will say it again. Weddings always make me cry. Because it is a beginning. And those two beautiful young people do not know what lies ahead. However, that is another post and that is not why I am here. I was totally entranced because I have never before seen in one place at the same time so many lovely young men! When I commented to the dear man, he said, rather drily, that he wouldn't know as he had never fancied young men! BUT! I found my Timothy Simmons, almost as though I had conjured him up out of my imagination! You see, he is a character in my chapter of 'Chain Story", the book that Caroline and I are writing as a sort of joint project. And there he stood, totally as I had imagined him! I almost felt like going up to him to ask his name. He was so much my character that the dear man did some skulking with his i-phone and took some ( unobtrusive) photos all in the interests of research, you understand! And there was another divine young man, smartly dressed in a 3 piece pin-striped suit, wearing a pair of brown leather shoes with no laces! That really intrigued me. Before I left ( having had several glasses of wine), I made it my business to go up to him and ask, out of interest, why? He laughed and gave me some silly sort of explanation, something to do with two pairs of shoes and one pair of laces, and he seemed to be totally amazed that I had even noticed! His name was Joshua. I know it sounds stupid, but I found these young men just so interesting and attractive. Where, I wondered, were their young women? Oh, to turn the clock back! However, it was just wonderful to meet a figment of my imagination. And when the dear man showed the photos to my co-author tonight, she agreed. It was exactly as she imagined Timothy Simmons to be! So! do keep up with Chain Story. And meet Timothy Simmons. That is, if Caroline allows him to exist. She might just wipe him out with a stroke of her pen ( figuratively speaking, of course!)

On the Menu

2009-11-11T11:03:00.000+02:00

This isn't a recipe so keep reading!
In the latest Food and Home three well-known people wrote about their food memories. It sparked my interest and I spent a few happy minutes remembering my own.
It has always occurred to me that cooking is an amazing thing. We have a finite number of ingredients at our disposal. Sure, occasionally someone will come up with something new, although somewhere in the world it is not, and that becomes the flavour of the month or the 'must-have' ingredient in any restaurant worth its salt ( pardon the pun!)
Take pomegranates for example or quinoa or preserved lemons, balsamic vinegar and rose-water. All 'new' ingredients.
However, I digress.
With this finite number of ingredients we manage to do new, delicious and wonderful things with them. At least some of us do.
My mom was a great cook but she never used a recipe. She made it all up as she went along. She cooked basic food and simple recipes but she actually disliked cooking, so she was very happy when her 'girls' got old enough to do a stint in the kitchen. My folks seldom went out to eat. It wasn't big in those days and anyway, they couldn't afford it.
My mom's once-a-year treat was when my dad would take her out on their anniversary. He would take her to the Railway Buffet on Cape Town station.
Don't laugh. I'm sure you are conjuring up an image of a sort of down at heel canteen serving baked beans and bangers, and stewed coffee in thick chipped mugs!
You would be wrong. The Railway Buffet was actually quite up-market for the day. It was a 'silver service' restaurant with crisp linen, heavy silver cutlery and an extensive menu of well-cooked food. Those WERE the days! And I do wonder whatever became of all that beautiful silver when the restaurant eventually closed its doors!
As the youngest in the family I was still at school and then college when my sisters were already working. So it fell to me to do the shopping and cooking when my folks went away on holiday. That is how I learned to cook.
I always maintained that anyone who could read could cook. Today I am not so sure.
Recipes take a lot for granted and many of them assume that the reader is already familiar with cookery terms and basic methods, which often they are not. Many aspiring cooks fall apart if they do not have one or two ingredients and lack the knowledge and confidence to simply substitute them with something else. But that's how new dishes get created, isn't it?
My mom used to be very impressed with me and loved it when I cooked. I introduced her to mushrooms, the canned variety...ugh I can't remember when last I have used canned mushrooms but fresh mushrooms were virtually unobtainable then...and she thought them very posh. She felt they lifted food from ordinary to sublime.
I always laugh to myself when I remember coming home one day and asking what she was making.
"Carrot stew," she replied and then, seeing the look on my face, hastened to add, " It's got mushrooms in it!"
Gus Silber, one of the people who wrote in the aforementioned article, said the worst day of his life was when his mom discovered Wenresepte in the Huisgenoot magazine. He felt that his mom's culinary skills declined from that day.
I can't help agreeing with him. I have always hated recipes of that sort.
You know: Mix crushed cream crackers with some margerine and make a crust, Mix 1 tin of pilchards with a packet of brown onion soup and 3 tablespoons of custard powder and put into the crust. Sprinkle with grated cheese and some dried parsley and bake for 20 minutes.
OK so I made that up. Please don't try it!
But I'm sure you know what I mean.
I hope I'm not stepping on any toes here, especially if you own a copy of Wenresepte!
I'm not a food snob. I'm all in favour of a clever cheat when it's called for.
But Wenresepte isn't cheating. It's disgusting!
On the other hand, there are recipes around that are also awful simply because the creator is just trying too hard. Taste magazine has a lot of those. I love the magazine. It is a veritable visual feast but I seldom find myself saying, " I really must try that." And then when I do find something I fancy it is usually a 'cheat' recipe: 'Take 1 WW ready-cooked chicken, 1 packet of WW mushroom sauce...etc, etc!
I wonder what my children's food memories will be. They often ask my advice or want a recipe so I think I've done ok.
I spend a lot of time talking about food with both of them. Caroline shares her successes with me and Richard tells me on a daily basis what he will be cooking that night.
Then he helps himself to some fresh herbs from the kitchen before he goes home.
If you think about it our lives are inextricably linked with food. We celebrate with it and we mourn with it. We plan most of our life around it.
Someone once said, and I think it is the only sensible and decent thing I ever heard him say:
' The good Lord made sure we would enjoy all the things we have to do to survive, Sex...and eating!'

Oops!

2009-11-05T20:13:00.000+02:00

We went up to Langebaan last Saturday.
I spent most of the weekend in the company of unicorns, panthers, pirates and I also met the Munsters, which turned out to be a whole lot of fun.
I'm very much afraid that I forgot about meatless Monday and found myself halfway through a Knysna pizza at Pearly's when the penny dropped!
OK! It was just a bit of ( you guessed it!) bacon, but meatless my meal was not. The dear man couldn't care about meatless Monday, but he had chosen fish anyway which is often his meal of choice.
I felt too dreadful. Perhaps like a Roman Catholic of the past when meat could not be eaten on a Friday. And if you did eat meat on a Friday, to confession you would have to go!
I felt so guilty and thought I should indeed rush off to confession!
It put me in mind of the programme Father Ted, which I love and which pokes gentle fun at the church and its followers.
Dougal is Father Ted's assistant.
In one particular episode, he asks a bishop about the meatless Friday rule. In those days, if one ate meat on a Friday, straight to hell you would go, and apparently a great many meat-loving Catholics went that route.
Then, you see, the church changed the rule and suddenly it was OK to eat meat on a Friday!
Whatever, enquired Dougal, became of all those folk who had gone to hell because they had eaten meat on a Friday?
Now that the rule had changed?
He was just wondering!
I have decided that I simply cannot live with this rule.
I will do one meatless meal every week but what that day will be will be up to me and my mood!

Life in a Showhouse

2009-10-27T11:52:00.000+02:00

For the past two Sundays we have had a showhouse.
I have tried very hard to avoid it but was persuaded that it was a good thing. So the boards went up outside and suddenly the fact that our house was REALLY for sale hit me.
Viewing was meant to be by invitation only but I know for a fact that at least two people just rocked up to 'have a look'.
It's an uncomfortable feeling knowing that strangers are wandering around your home, peering into all the rooms and looking at all your possessions.
We had to disappear for 3 hours on each occasion and take Winston, our dog, with us. Fortunately the Avnits were kind enough to have the three of us for the afternoons in question.
Preparing for a showhouse or a private viewing is not a lot of fun.
The cleaning and tidying is exhausting. Fresh flowers every time is expensive.
Clearing the clutter is annoying as I hide things in cupboards and drawers and then I can't find them afterwards!
Suddenly you are aware of that little stain, this little mark, the wonky doorknob and all those other little things that we learn to live with and eventually don't notice.
And as the viewing process at the moment is ongoing, we feel as though we are living in a museum, afraid to bring out all the evidence of habitation because it will all have to be packed away again.
Even my kitchen looks as though it is never used. I have to think about what I cook as fishy smells are not very appealing and a messy hob and splattered tiles are a pain to clean up. I would like to live on toast at this stage but then the poor toaster has to get packed into a cupboard each time. Apparently people in showhouses don't make toast!
It's called 'staging' your home.
People get put off if it is too obvious that someone lives in the house. Silly, isn't it?
We are having portfolio photos done today for a prospective buyer who lives far away.
After that we have another private viewer coming around.
The latter I only found out about after I had started cooking...being 'meatless Monday", guess what it was?
Fish!
So today I have to spray Oust in my kitchen in the hopes of getting it smelling sweet again.
My fingers are crossed that we find a buyer.
I am very tired of living in a showhouse.

My poor little statue

2009-10-20T20:45:00.000+02:00

We have had the painters around. With the house more or less permanently on the market we have to keep it looking good.
But oh dear some people have no respect for things and my dear little statue was beheaded, by whom we do not know. No-one owned up to it and the dear man found her lying on the step with her little head quite chopped off.
So now, at this moment, she is lying on the kitchen table like an effigy from some ancient cathedral. She has been patched up with some Pratley's glue and we hope she will be back to normal in the morning.
Personally I hate patched up things. Perhaps a legacy from my childhood, but if it is broken, it is broken and I love it no more!
Caroline was to inherit this 'little reader' as I called her.
Alas she now has a broken neck, repaired yes, but still broken!
She lies in repose, serenely, on my kitchen table. Tomorrow, we will pop her back amongst the pot plants where she has spent so many happy hours.
A crack can be mended but it is always there.
It's never quite the same afterwards, is it?

Good Grief, It's Monday Again

2009-10-19T20:01:00.001+02:00

Well,yes, it is!
As I cooked bacon and egg sandwiches for Rodwell, our Zimbabwean 'handlanger', I thought it smelled so good
Bacon is truly one of my favourite foods.
If I was on death row and was asked what my favourite meal would be my last I would say: " Bacon please!"
With cheese, or pasta. or eggs, or omelette, or spinach salad, or whatever. As Long as there is bacon in it! A stew, or a casserole or beef olives. JUST LET THERE BE BACON!
Alas, I remembered as I was cooking the bacon, that meatless Monday actually applies to breakfast and lunch as well.
I was very strong-willed, not something that is generally associated with me.
Rodwell got his lovely bacon and egg sandwiches. And I...I sadly folded up the rest of the bacon and stored it in the fridge for another day.
The dear man was very pre-occupied today so there was no consulting session about meatless Monday. I made up my mind and knew that by the time he came home he would be so hungry that he wouldn't care!
It was a success!

Cheese and Leek Pie

1 onion sliced
50 ml butter
60ml olive oil
about 450g leeks, trimmed and well washed ( omit this part at your peril. Leeks can be very sandy!)
1 cup plain flour
a half teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
3 large eggs ( and seeing we are being so good, make them organic!)
1 cup of Greek yoghurt
300g feta cheese, cubed
115g grated Gruyere cheese ( save some for the topping)
3-4 tspoons of fresh dill ( or 1 t-spoon of dried)
Ground black pepper

Saute the onion and the leeks in a mixture of olive oil and butter. Cook until soft and allow to cool.
Preheat the oven at 180 degrees.
Sift the flour and the bicarb into a bowl and stir in the beaten eggs, the yoghurt and the feta cheese. Add the cooled leek mixture, the dill and the gruyere cheese.
Mix well and add some black pepper. Don't bother with the salt as there is plenty of salt in the cheeses!
Spoon the mixture into a prepared and greased springform pan, about 23cm round.
Grate the saved gruyere cheese over the top of the pie.
Bake for about 40 minutes or until golden brown.
Allow to cool slightly before un-springing.
This is best served at room temperature.
I served it tonight with a warmed mushroom sauce and a small salad.
It was good. The dear man didn't even ask where the meat was and he went back for seconds.
I did not even miss the bacon.
And the rest of the pie is wrapped in foil waiting for Caroline tomorrow.

Unexpected Joy

2009-10-15T21:19:00.000+02:00

A good while ago we went to Caroline and Craig for supper. I remember it quite clearly because it was the evening where I taught Amy to make mud pies, much to Caroline's disgust.
When I got home, I discovered that I was missing an earring.
I had this pair of gold and amethyst earrings that Peter had bought me in Harare in Zimbabwe.
And it appeared that I had lost one. Caroline searched everywhere as did I.
I finally accepted that it was gone and just the other day sat staring at the lonely partner lying in the drawer of my bedside cupboard.
You see, the dear man and I, in anticipation of leaving our home , are doing a sort of de-cluttering process.
So, I wondered, as I stared at the lonely earring, what do I do with you?
You are one of a pair and your partner is gone. I really love you because you represent a very happy time in my life.
But one earring, on its own, is a bit useless.
Yesterday, Caroline invited me as well as my two sisters, to lunch.
The day was a bit brisk and so I had donned one of my fleece jackets. I stood outside indulging in my awful habit of smoking and Craig stood and chatted to me.
I fiddled in my pocket and fiddled and thought there was something there.
I fiddled some more. It wasn't in the actual pocket but in the inside sort of secret pocket.
I couldn't believe it.
After I had turned the pocket inside-out, it was my missing earring.
I was so thrilled.
I also felt that it was a kind of message. Silly I know but I just felt it was.
But I am so happy to have my earring back.

Memory Lane

2009-10-14T20:24:00.000+02:00

The dear man and I sat at our little kitchen table tonight.
He had had a very stressful day. I had had a lovely day, thanks to my dear daughter.
We had gone out together. She needed to buy a gift for the daughter of a friend. And I...I wasn't sure why I was going along except that a granny can be very useful when you have 2 kids in tow!
We went off to Woolworths and as most of you know by now that is off limits usually to me. But I did my usual thing and got stubborn. After all, I am basically without a car and the dear man was off on a mission ( which is a whole other story which I may not disclose) and so I did what I had to do! Which was shop at WW.
While we were there, we signed up for the WW littleworld card. I was delighted to find out that grannies could have one too! As the lady next to me wryly commented: " Well, it's the grannies who do all the buying!"
But I digress.
While I did my very frugal shopping in the WW supermarket, I bought the Taste magazine.
Dear man wasn't home and it was already 6pm.
I tried not to worry too much and read Taste..
Now when I buy a magazine I firstly flip through it. Then I do a re-read and focus on what interests me.
Much later, when I am bored I read the stuff that didn't capture my attention in the first place.
There is a journalist called Sam Woulidge who writes a regular column for Taste magazine.
This edition really captured my attention.
She was writing about her Oupa. She could have been writing about my dad. So go back to the start of this post.
The dear man and I sat at our little kitchen table to night.
And I read the article out loud to him and said: " That's my dad isn't it."
He said: So write a post about him.
I will but just not now.
But I will. I just need to think about it a bit more.
This young lady, I think must be about 23...24... years younger than me.
But she remembers Venezia,the place of the awesome ice-cream!The ice-cream shop where the queue snaked around the block. And there were many Capetonians for whom a summer's day would not have been complete without an ice-cream from Venezia
She remembers Blouberg before it was over-developed.
She remembers the Blue Train at Mouille Point and the joy of the ride.
She says: "...always I eat from the cones of my childhood as my oupa taught me."
She also says: "...you cannot be unhappy while eating ice-cream. My oupa taught me that."
How lovely is that?

Reading, Books and Words

2009-10-12T21:39:00.000+02:00

From the time I was 4 years old, I have been a reader. I kid you not. My sisters will vouch for that as they were the ones who, in their ignorance and not knowing that you shouldn't interfere with the reading process or at least the officially sanctioned one, taught me to read. My very first reading books were Enid Blyton's Famous Five.
When I hit Sub A as it was known then, I was bored stiff by Janet And John, the accepted reader at the time.
Unfortunately, all the childhood diseases were waiting to pounce on me and I had, in my very first year of school, measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken-pox and scarlet fever, the last of which landed me in the City Hospital for 6 weeks.
Fortunately for me, my sisters had taken care of the reading bit and so I was moved on to Sub B without too much ado!
I was turned to stone by the simple easiness of the readers. I used to while away the time by reading ahead of all the poor souls who found reading so difficult and was often in trouble because, when I was called upon to read out loud, I had lost the place in the book. Nowadays, the enlightened teacher would recognise a pupil who needed a little bit more. But not then. I had to bide my time, toil away with the worst of them and just hope for the best.
In Std 1 I was in the top group of readers and found that one of my duties was to help the weaker readers.
In Green Point , at the bottom of the road where we lived, was a little corner shop run by a very decent Jewish family who worked very hard to make a living. Their son, Joe, was in my class and he was my reading student. It was my job to help him make sense of those strange scribbles in a book.
When I used to go to that shop for my mom, Joe's dad always used to say to me: " You'll look after my Joe, won't you? You'll help him to read."
What a big responsibility for an 8 year old!
I too remember going to the Sea Point library at least twice a week with my sister, Maureen, We used to stroll along the Main Road looking at all the shops and then we got to the library. It was a lovely building. It was also the Sea Point Town hall. It had a certain elegance and grace about it. It was a far cry from todays utilitarian buildings. It even had a special smell about it...old, musty and bookish! Marble staircases and elegant balustrades, it housed the children's section on the mezzanine floor. It was a light and sunny room filled with reading treasures. I hated the fact that I was only allowed 2 books at a time.
Later we switched to a very little library in Green Point. I used to often go along to choose books for my mom. I knew what she liked and, naughty,naughty, she used a little secret mark in the books so that I would know what she had already read.An amusing fact is that when I started teaching I applied for a library card at this very library. I wanted to take out books to read to my class. I had to get my mom's permission and signature because I was under 21!
I also remember a little private library that someone had started, as a money-making endeavour, in the cellar of their house on the High Level Road in Green Point.
The lighting was really bad and little candles used to burn on a shelf here and there. But what atmosphere!
So for me, for years, the pleasure of a book yet unread is one of the greatest treats I know.
I don't buy books as often as I used to. When the dear man still worked at Clicks his job took him away more times than I care to remember. But before he went, he always took me to a bookshop and allowed me to choose several books to read while he was away. I guess he wanted to keep me out of mischief, but I know he just wanted to keep me happy! And I'm never happier than when I hold a stiff, glossy, new book in my hands and anticipate what adventures, new thoughts and what imaginings lie ahead within its pages.
The love of reading? Nature or nurture? Who knows. It is an ongoing debate.
I always read to my children. I read the books that I personally loved. I think they enjoyed them. I read what they wanted and I enjoyed it too. We took them to the library every week and we did it as a family thing. It was an outing that we all enjoyed and mommy as well as children came out clutching books.
I once read that people who say they don't have time to read, are not readers.
Perhaps that's not fair. I do know, however, that nothing has ever stopped me from reading.
Nurture?
Caroline loves a good book. She loves a good read.
Richard is also my child. He has been read to as often as Caroline.
But I can count the number of complete books he has read on my one hand.( And perhaps still a finger or two left over!)
For 3 years Richard managed to submit a review of ' The Diary of Adrian Mole'. Stds 5,6 and 7 I think!
When he was very in touch with his music and very moved by the lyrics I thought I had made some progress with him. I don't remember the name of the group but the lyrics were powerful. I listened with him.
Edgemead High had a reading policy that a certain part of the day was spent reading subject matter of the pupils choice.
I had listened to Richard's music and had suggested to him that the lyrics were in fact a sort of poetry. I used the moment to introduce him to the War Poets.
He happily took the book to school. At last he had found something meaningful.
He was given detention by the presiding teacher who told him that she wasn't fooled. He had just picked up the first book he laid his hands on!
I cannot tell you how angry I was!
No, I did not go stormimg off to the school. But I was very disappointed and sad.
So Richard is not a reader. But something has rooted. He spells extremely well ( something sadly missing these days), he can talk fluently and persuasively ( his Irish roots, perhaps?) and he has a really good vocabulary. So although he doesn't read for the sheer joy of it ( how sad!) he still has a strong grasp and respect for the English language. So perhaps my efforts were not in vain!
And as for words, well I just love them.
Words are extremely powerful. They have conveyed, for centuries, emotion, thoughts, opinions and have made us use our minds to conjure up all sorts of images, There was a time where there was no TV, no computers, no DVD's and so on. Words alone, whether in a book or magazine or on the radio had to do it all for us.
Such power!
And then there is my pet belief.
Words sometimes sound like what they mean. Hush, snooze, hum, boom.
Words sometimes look like what they mean. Ugly, sparkle,snob. Don't you think so?
This morning I was thinking about words. I used to ban the word 'nice' when I used to teach. It is such an insipid word, an empty word totally devoid of any meaning. There are so many great words out there yet we choose not to use them. What a shame.
Take the word smell...and I'll come back to that.
What else do we have? Perfume, aroma, fragrance, scent, pungency...all wonderful words each with its own nuance ( and isn't that a wonderful word?)
But right now. Look at the word smell... and tell me it doesn't look like what it means?
Look at the m..doesn't it resemble a wrinkled-up nose?

Meatless Monday

2009-10-12T13:46:00.000+02:00

I woke up this morning and remembered today was supposed to be meatless.
Went to check on my veal steaks which were destined for Veal Florentine tonight and decided that they would be fine still for tomorrow. Hauled out my recipe book and looked up my recipe for lentil cottage pie.
The dear man wrinkled up his nose and suggested fish instead.
Now while fish is not meat and is therefore still in tune with the idea of a meatless meal, I somehow feel that it doesn't really fit with a 'save the planet' theme. After all, we are all well aware that our oceans are being fished out at a rate of knots and that many types of fish are already on the red and orange lists.
And to continue along those lines, do eggs, cheese, cream, milk and yoghurt really belong here?
Herds of cows still have to exist in order to provide cheese and milk and any other dairy product. So how can we feel self-righteous as we eat our meatless meal if we are using a dairy product?
And if we use eggs, do we pause to wonder under what conditions those eggs have been laid. OK so maybe we calm the conscience by buying organic or what we hope are organic eggs. And surely millions of tons of chicken poo also do something to the ozone layer? Do chickens pass gas? Not sure about that one!
So it looks like we'll be having fishcakes tonight, made with hake which at least is still on the 'green' list.

So here is the recipe for the spurned lentil cottage pie. I can see I'll have to work on the dear man before he will tuck into this.

30ml olive oil
2 chopped onions
a good handful of chopped soup celery
3 large carrots, coarsely grated
400g chopped tomatoes
30ml tomato paste
500ml vegetable stock
100g lentils, well washed
salt and pepper to taste
60ml pesto ( optional)
5ml sugar

TOPPING:

1kg potatoes peeled and chopped
1 bunch chopped spring onions
100ml milk or cream
50g butter
100ml grated cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil and saute the onions until soft. Add the celery and the carrots and fry for 10 minutes.
Add tomatoes, paste and stock together with the lentils. Cover and simmer until the lentils are soft.
Season well and add the pesto if using and the sugar.
Spoon into an ovenproof dish.
To make the topping, boil the potatoes until soft, mash well with the butter and milk ( or cream).
Stir in the spring onions and half the cheese and season.
Spoon the topping on top of the lentil mixture and sprinkle with the remaining cheese.
Bake at 180 degrees for 30 minutes.
Will serve 6-8 people.
I think a green side dish such as thin green beans, tenderstem broccoli or a lettuce and cucumber salad will go well with this.
One could also use one of the special tomato mixes from All Gold such as Indian or Mexican to add a little zing .

PS: The dear man has just phoned. He was despatched to buy the fish and decided on a nice bit of Kingklip! Oh dear! while our meal will be meatless, our consciences should be troubled. Kingklip is on the orange list and is in danger of being fished out!

Back to Normal

2009-10-06T21:05:00.000+02:00

Whatever that may be.
The dear man and I have just had 2 weeks in our dear Langebaan.
Strange times. I dare not call it a holiday although that is what it was supposed to be.
The phones never stopped ringing.
The dear man had brought up loads and loads of papers related to business and spent a lot of time working on them whilst fielding queries on the phone, e-mail, sms's.
The little family joined us for a few days and we did enjoy that although the peace was shattered somewhat with Amy throwing her two year tantrums and dear Nina wailing away about one thing or the other. We had to mind where we walked because there were toys everywhere and my chairs and furniture suffered from Amy's artistic endeavours.
But we did actually enjoy having them and when they left, the silence was deafening.
It was all a kind of an experiment. Could we live in Langebaan permanently?
We spoke to loads of people, young and old, who assured us that we could. They all swore they could never return to city life. They have never regretted their decision to live there.l
For us, however, the jury is still out.
But it is all about reality. We can't make a decision until our house is sold.
But I did have an alarming experience.
As most of you know, I love going to the casino and there is a casino just down the road. A siren call to the addicted.
But even I am practical enough to know that I can't spend every day there. ( But I would if I could!)
So I read 4 books.
I pasted photos into an album.
I cleaned out the fridge.
I cleared out the grocery cupboard.
And I chose the hottest day to shampoo the mat outside in the courtyard and nearly fainted with the effort.
I tidied and arranged things until the dear man asked if I was feeling hormonal.
He was quite alarmed. To see me doing such things was quite scary.
It scared me too!
And now we are back home and it all seems so strange...and yet so familiar.
And life moves on. We are invited to two weddings. And people have milestone birthdays coming up...and the circle just turns and turns.

MEATLESS MONDAYS

I will meet Caroline's challenge and the dear man and I will have from now on a meatless Monday!
Now I am not a big meat eater but I would be lying if I said I can do without it.
Even if it is just a little bit of bacon I need it to be there!
When Caroline and Craig lived with us I soon learned to cook for a vegetarian ( Caroline!)
The dear man and I have been trying to eat the Greek doctors way. We have strayed from the straight and narrow much to my disgust. How easily we are seduced by a little extra fat in the form of cheese or butter. And it is hard to eliminate pasta, rice and potatoes!
So combining meatless and low GL carbs it all becomes quite difficult!

However it is all about planning.
I want to share this 'meatless' recipe with you.
As Richard's ex said when I first made it: " How stunning is this?"

ASPARAGUS AND HERB TAGLIATELLE

500g tagliatelle
1 bunch asparagus
40g butter
1 Tsp chopped parsley
1 Tsp chopped fresh basil
300ml fresh cream ( low fat if it makes you feel better)
salt and pepper to taste
125ml freshly grated Parmesan ( and I mean that, compromise with cheese dust if you will, but real Parmesan is the REAL thing)
Add pasta to a pot of rapidly boiling water and while that is happening, cut the asparagus into short pieces ( and hang on here, in case there is any misunderstanding, we ARE talking fresh asparagus, god forbid, not canned!)
Heat the butter in a pot and stir-fry the ( FRESH) asparagus for about 2 minutes no more! otherwise the spears will resemble a willy in need of viagra! You need it bright and perky!
Add the chopped parsley and basil, cream and seasoning. Cook for a scant 2 minutes.
Add the parmesan and stir well.
By now the pasta should be cooked. Remember...al dente...just a little nutty bite to it!
Add the mix of asparagus etc to the drained pasta. Mix through. Add a little glug of olive oil if you like, and I do.
Serve in warmed pasta bowls with a little extra parmesan on the side.
A rocket and lovely red tomato salad will go well as a side dish.
Enjoy.
I plan to contribute a meatless Monday dish every week. Partly to inspire me and partly I hope to inspire you!
PS: We have just received a wedding invitation. On it there was a little quote.
" If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you."
From ( believe it or not) Winnie the Pooh.
I just love the sentiment although the maths doesn't make sense!
But who cares?

I c

Today's Thoughts

2009-09-16T20:28:00.000+02:00

I am sitting at my desk, a lovely Pierre Cronje desk in what I think is Brazilian mahogany, and on it I have a photo of the dear man consulting his map in the middle of Athens, a free calendar from Conde Naste House and home, a pewter frog from Caroline, a pot full of pens, an elegant ashtray ( no, I haven't stopped smoking, yet!) a book on abnormal behaviour and a coaster with a picture of olives to place my glass of wine upon! So what does that tell you about me.
Today I went off to NI city mall with my girls...Caroline, Amy and Nina.
We went to Mugg and Bean for lunch or brunch?
Amy was fascinated by the lift next door which went up and down, up and down.
I was interested in the school groups which were visiting the mall, obviously as part of their education.
These children were fascinated and enthralled by the lifts. They all got a turn to go up and down. They laughed and clapped and screamed with delight.
I watched with interest as the one and only teacher, eating an ice-cream, handled her group of ( and yes I did count) 30 children.
Not much has changed, I thought. I used to handle 36 kids at a time, and no, I didn't eat an ice-cream while I was doing it.
But goodness me, one word from her and they lined up, 3 in a row holding hands. We used to do 2 at a time holding hands. She watched them with an eagle eye, issued a few sharp instructions, and off they marched to explore the rest of the joys of the mall.
I was filled with admiration and hope. Ice-cream or not, the world needs women like that!
And then all my optimism was spoiled by a piece of news on TV which discussed a stabbing in a school in Bishop Lavis, and this in spite of a newly installed metal detector.
How things have changed. ( I keep saying that, don't I? But they have and who can deny it?)
When I considered becoming a teacher, one of my teachers in Matric said to me. In every community, the most important people are: The preacher, the doctor and the teacher!
I certainly found that at my first school. I was only 19 when I started teaching. And what a responsibility it was.
Parents would come to me looking for answers. I didn't even have a child of my own. How could I have helped them?
I like to think that I did my best.
But today, teachers are actually in physical danger and instead of having the parents on their side in a common goal of what is good for the child, they actually have to fight the parents who believe their child is not capable of doing anything wrong.
But today, I spent time remembering the outings, once a term, that we took the kids on. It was such fun and so important to us all. The children had to be inspected before they could go. Blazer and cap, brushed and clean, shoes polished and everything tidy and neat.The double-decker bus would arrive, the cooldrinks ( supplied by the school) would be loaded onto the bus, all the lunch-packs were stored, we would pile onto the bus, the principal would stand by to wave us off and off we would go, with great excitement and I would have kids fighting about who would sit next to me on the way!
I loved it, I loved them. We went to the castle in Cape Town, we went to Groot Constantia, we went to the Civilian Blind workshop, we went to the Baumanns biscuit factory, we went to a bread bakery where John Rigby dropped his cap into the huge vat of dough so that it had to be scrapped, but he did get his cap back! ( By the way, we didn't do this all in one day! Outings only happened once a term!)

So, today, watching a very efficient teacher controlling a large group of children certainly gave me a blast from the past.
I realised how much I had enjoyed what I did for a living before I became a stay-at-home mom.
Not that I regret that at all. But I was one of the lucky people who loved what they did.
I Like to think that I was good at it.
And that brings me back to the book which I mentioned in my last post.
The Library of Shadows.
I so enjoyed it. The end was a little Dan Brownish but I did really enjoy it. Because I am a person of words. I love words, used rightly or wrongly, I love them.
I could write a whole blog on how words look like what they mean: plop? murmur? splash? hum?
Don't they? Don't they?
They just look like what they mean.
And they are so powerful!
I have always been a good reader. I know it sounds arrogant of me but I just simply know that I read aloud really well. It is a gift that I have been given.
And when I read out loud, I know that I can captivate my audience. I used to shave a few minutes off all my lessons so that I had a half hour to read to my class. The rule was: tidy desk, tidy floor, bags packed, homework written down. And then we would all enjoy a half hour of reading whatever book was in favour at the time.
We all enjoyed it!
Except for one little guy, Steven Drury, who simply hated story time. He would wail and moan. He would cover his ears. He would irritate all the other children who were waiting for their daily dose of fiction.
He truly hated being read to.
The Library of Shadows, for some reason, made me think of him.
Having read the book, I think I am a transmitter. When I shared this with the dear man, he looked at me with a perplexed expression, and agreed but I think he has no idea what I was talking about.
However, I had a good trip down memory lane today.
I am so glad I did what I did, even if it was only for a short time.
By the way, Steven Drury, at the end of the year, gave me a beautiful marquisite brooch...a swallow with a little green eye.
Miss Taylor, he said. So you won't forget me.
I haven't, Steven, I haven't.

The Birthday Party etc

2009-09-10T21:49:00.000+02:00

Well, the dear man's 60th birthday has come and gone and he has discovered, like me two years ago, that the sky does not fall on your head.
The party went well. I cooked and cooked. Then I was stupid enough, deep into the evening, to dance Zorba the Greek.
The next day I was reminded of my age. I was so stiff, I spent most of Sunday hobbling around like an old crone!
The food was good even if I say so myself.
But the dessert table was ridiculous. Caroline had made her divine chocolate and black cherry trifle, my sister Maureen had made a big lemon meringue, a Jerusalem pudding ( I have no idea why it is called that, but perhaps it is because it is so delicious that when you eat it, you think you have finally reached the promised land!) and a Greek coconut tart. One of our guests brought a Portuguese dessert and the bakery at Plattekloof Superspar had baked an enormous cake, measuring about 45cm square!!!
And I in my stupidity had bought 4kg of strawberries and 3 tubs of ice-cream.
We were drowning in desserts.
Much of it was farmed out afterwards and most of the cake was taken through to the Valkenberg club by my sister Eleanor.
Rodwell our helper also enjoyed a lot of the leftovers and my sisters and brother-in-law as well as Caroline came around on Sunday to enjoy a resurrection meal.
It was all good fun. The dear man enjoyed himself and it has been a long while since we have had a good dance.
We have a tradition, introduced by an old friend Eugene, of playing Afrikaans langarm music. In fact Eugene has spent many years trying to teach all of us how to do the traditional Afrikaans langarm.
It is such fun and I simply love watching him and his wife strut their stuff on the dance floor. He is a great dancer and leads so well that when you dance with him you feel as though you have done it forever. But gee, you really need to be fit!

The Avnit family has not been well. Nina has had the sniffles, Amy is very out of sorts and Craig is as sick as a dog, although he seemed a little better today when we saw him.
Peter and I have been quite neurotic about the kids. With this swine-flu going around, I am so afraid for our babies. When poor Amy pointed to her head and told her mommy, " sore", I nearly freaked out.
What seems to be so strange is that I don't remember panicking about my own kids in the same way. In fact our doctor in those days said to me once, " If you come to me, then I know it is serious."
Perhaps it is because the world has changed and there is more to be fearful about?

We are off to Langebaan next week on Friday for an extended stay. I can't wait. We have been promising ourselves this longer break for ages. We are just going to chill, do some sightseeing ( yes, there is quite a lot to be done in the area) I want to catch up on my reading and am hoping to treat myself to the P. D. James series of DVD's if I can get them from Kalahari.

Talking of reading, I have just finished reading 'The Magicians' by Lev Grossman.
What a weird book. An older Harry Potter goes to Narnia. Most odd. Don't quite know how he got away with it!
C. S. Lewis is long gone and so can't object but I am surprised that J. K. Rowling isn't kicking up a bit of a fuss. I was hoping that along the way something completely sinister,
different and unexpected will happen. It didn't and the resonances of Harry Potter and the Narnia books was so strong that it was all kind of spoiled, for me anyway. I couldn't help thinking, but this is just me being influenced by a recent TV programme, that perhaps it almost a story about young people who were creating a sort of cyber-life for themselves. To the extent that they actually believed in it and it became their reality!
I have now just begun 'The Library of Shadows'. I can't remember the authors name at the moment but 50 pages into the book and I am already intrigued. It is a translation and I am usually not very fond of those as I feel the text loses something in the translation.
I will let you know. I hope that some of you will notice that I have departed somewhat from my favourite genre of crime, mystery and murder!!
Often for me, it's all in the name..or title when it comes to books. I can't resist a good title and that instinct has rarely let me down. I have 'discovered' lots of unknown ( to me anyway) authors simply because the title appeals to me.
The dear man and I play this game called 'That's a Good Title for a Book.'
We have promised ourselves that one day we will write a book called ' Good Titles for a Book'!

This and That

2009-09-02T20:42:00.000+02:00

Spring has sprung...or so we are led to believe.
This weekend up the west coast, I would argue that it has not.
There is an absence of flowers, why I do not know. We have had plenty of rain and now a reasonable amount of sun, but the flowers have already gone. Strange!
I believe we have a second generation of kestrels nesting around our house in Langebaan. Previous posts mentioned them and now they are back, still roosting on our balcony, still crying out in their hoarse, raucous cries, still swooping onto the dunes to catch the odd mouse or two. They have become familiar companions as have the wagtails who can't wait for us to arrive. They wait at the door as soon as we arrive and then waggle in to search for all the lovely insect tidbits that have expired by the doors and windows. I think they are really sweet but wish they would stop pooping all over the place and especially on the furniture!
I have a catering job on hand at the moment. The dear man turns 60 on Saturday and so I am busy arranging things and shopping and starting to cook a 3 course meal for 30 people.
I am quite a single-minded person. I could never have been a professional juggler. If I am cooking, then that is what I am doing. Do not ask me to do flowers or table-settings! I stick to what I am good at!
I have, however, conceded my limitations, so the desserts have been farmed out ( much to my sorrow because that's my favourite part!) and I am left with the rest! And quite frankly, that's enough to keep me busy.
I won't bore you with the menu, but it has a sort of Mediterranean theme with strong nuances of Greece, which is of course our favourite country.
I need to make a speech. The dear man has already insisted that I should. Why I don't know. He doesn't know what he might get. Do people always assume that a speech will say good things about them?
I once attended a 40th birthday party where there was the most amazing movie of photos and commentary and music. It was fantastic! Then followed 12...yes 12 speeches by the wife, the 3 children. the sister, the brother-in-law, the best friend, the psychologist etc. At the end, I felt that the theme from Handels Messiah ought to have rung out...you know...Halleluyah, Halleluyah...halleluyah...etc.
When the birthday boy came around to our table, I felt I should kneel!
Well, the dear man won't be getting that! That's overkill!
But I have been having sleepless night trying to compose a speech that will convey what he is all about. In a way, I don't feel I need to. All the people there already know him well, albeit in different ways.
I do not plan to offer a eulogy, nor do I plan to canonize him.
It is also quite hard to separate our marriage from his milestone birthday. This is not an anniversary speech. It is not about me or us. It must be about him.
It has offered food for thought. And in the process, I have realised what a very good man he has been.
But I also wondered, which we women don't often do, how many sacrifices he made for those he has loved and how many dreams he has abandoned because of it!
So wish me well as I attempt, right after this post, to write a speech that will be honest and true, one that will honour the goodness of the man without being over the top!
For he has been a good man.
TWISP UPDATE
I have egg on my face!
I am a complete failure.
Normally I buy a carton of cigarettes, but now I buy them by the packet. I did a calculation today and the maths says I might as well have bought the carton. So no progress has been made and I feel I have let you all down, all you dear people who were egging me on.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to give up an addiction?
It horrifies me to contemplate what an addict I am, a supplicant to the great god, Nicotine.
The Twisp does not seem to help at all and I spend most of my time wondering if the tip is glowing. That's the only way I know it's working ( or not). Between you and me I think it is a great big scam. I believe the tobacco companies have shares in the device which says enough for me!
So once again I am the victim of my own weakness.
But I am determined to keep trying but I keep moving the goalposts.
It's a horrible thing to be such a victim.
It's unbelievably hard to give it up. Only ex-smokers will understand what I am saying.
Smoking is my crutch, it is my comfort, it lifts me when I feel I can't go on! It keeps me company when I am alone and it gives me the patience and calm when the shit hits the fan.
With a cigarette in my hand, I can cope with anything.
Without it, I am a blithering idiot. I am the witch from hell, I am irrational and mean. I recognise all of that but I can't change it!
I am determined to keep trying. In fact, at this moment in time, I have only 2 real cigarettes left. And then it's up to the Twisp.
God help Peter!