The Soutpiel Phenomenon

Wild, Wild Wailing Wanting!

2011-12-14T12:36:00.000+01:00

Eish. No blogging in over 2 months of wordlessness. So - where to begin? Hmmm....
Perhaps a few little jottings about the Mother City? Cape Town, the cradle of all that I am, the archive of all my most precious, magical memories.
After two months back in Cape Town, it seems surreal and preposterous that I ever actually chose to live away from it. England for 4, and then another 2 years (reneging on my vow to never return to the muddiest of isles!) A year and a half in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape -- dry, a little too rustic and quaint for this Capetonian and distinctly and painfully lacking in friends and family. (Sjoe - it feels soooooo good to be writing again.)
'Bananas in Pyjamas' is on the TV, babysitting Layla in her new granny-made buzzy-bee 'tutu' --- so I'll make hay-words while the TV-sun shines!

A lekkerly special adventure I took Layla on, was to meet up with my sisters and Layla's little cousin, at Mouille Point's lighthouse, and walk across to the Blue Train - where I remember being joggled and boggled around inside it, around and around the simple little play-park, the turquoise sea glittering a little way off. HELL of a noisy - to the point of near-pain and temporary tinnitus - Layla adored every minute of it, especially the pitch darkness of the tunnel. Nate, her little cuz (2 months younger than her) wasn't quite as excited about it all - not surprisingly with all that cacophonic rumbling! He had a similar sort of reticence when Layla called him into that yellow sound-pod at the Iziko Museum (remember from all those school outings? the glass submariney thing under the gargantuan whale skeleton?) Layla fell immediately in love with the symphony of whale-song that fills the pod - but Nate would only venture in once, gingerly, with a Marie biscuit for Madame MarineBiologist! Conversely, he is such a rough-and-tumbler - frighteningly fearless - where Layla is hyper-cautious, whining for my hand to climb down even the lowest little step. Amazing, the little people!

After that, it was the V&A Waterfront for lunch and two exhausting tantrums from an overtired prima donna. (No, not me!!) Tantrum #1: That 'Build A Bear' shop. (*groan*) Layla spotted a pink surfboard. And 'wanted' is the most extreme understatement of the century. And Nate just watched his cousin, worried about her and absolutely angelic in his not-wantingness! Tantrum #2: The ferris-wheel. Damnit!! Layla's current l'il passion is the fun-fair. And her sighting of the ferris-wheel ignited another state of 'want' that caused me to hunt through my wallet in frenzied desperation for R40 for the ticket, instantly slapping a silencing smile on her tear-wet face. And then... that crushing claustrophobia of parental realisation that: there was not enough money in my wallet to pay for the ticket, and not enough con-artistry in my arsenal to talk her out of her VERY bitter disappointment. Yebo. Fun at the fair, eh?
Last week, however, I was able to make good on my promise to take her for a ride on the ferris-wheel. (The ticket was R80, by the way. Under 3's go for free.) And - the views from our little spot of circling tourist-heaven left my heart hammering in 'And I live here!' bliss, awe and gratitude.

No more animated (in every sense of the word) bananas bouncing around on the TV, so time to do the 'adios' thing!
Love,
Lisa

The Write Stuff (snigger-worthy pun)

2011-09-10T18:55:00.000+02:00

Princess Goofy-Ballerina : 30 months old already!

MUCH has been consuming my midnight, noon, morning and every-other-time-of-day oil - from greenly snotty noses, phlegmy coughs (my personal favourite) and crochetty toddlers to writing, writing and more writing! Of course I am having an absolute ball - but I ache for the day when Layla can go to playschool. (113 days of aching to go, koeksister. Vasbyt en sterkte!)

A very efficient new website for soon-to-be expats, Just Landed, caught my attention on Twitter. Though the editor is keen for me to be a features writer for them, focusing on the South African's experience of living in the UK, I am more busy with writing and guest-blogging than I ever thought I could be! Hopefully we can reach a happy compromise?! Despite the fact that I know I will never be an expat every again (unless kidnapped by force -- and then hopefully by a devilishly handsome Italian who would feed me only dark chocolate, red wine and romance by candlelight in his Tuscan villa) my mission of passion for the expat phenomenon deepens with each home-soil month. Perhaps a book is waiting in the wings?

There are so many of us expatters and ex-expatters (the ones in the UK are the cowpatters!) writing about our journeys and joltings that it proves just how life-changing, mind-opening, heart-growing and trajectory-altering the expat experience is, whether permanent or temporary.

English Snowscape by Uber-African, Dave Rieger

A friend of mine, Dave Rieger, a South African expat in the UK's East Midlands, has also begun writing (at last - and what a treat!) His style? He is expertly cynical satirist with such sophisticated (dry!) humour that it often takes me a mini-eon to catch his quips - but he also pushes my thinking-boundaries. His most recent blog post details a business-related adventure through the mango plantations of Brazil. Being quite the photographer as well, his blog is definitely worth subscribing to! Here is the link to his blog: A Ramble From Mpondondo .

Here are links to my most recent articles (and always juiced up with lots of eye-candy!

My first two blog posts as a writer for Boutique Mademoiselle Vintage (a Canadian e-magazine that specialises in all things vintage)

*Blame It On Chanel
*Two Teaspoons of Wishful Thinking (where I nepotistically but still genuinely celebrated my sister's jewellery business-boutique!)

There have a couple of updates to my own 3 blogs:

*A Self Indulgent Little Yarn
*Expats & Eskimo Kisses
*Sublime, Sublime Simplicity (farmhouse zen: a recipe with eggs in tomatoes!)

Also recently published at an SA magazine reviewing e-mag, Hy-Se-Sy-Se
headed up by poet&wordsmith, Elsibe Loubser.
*The Metaphysics of Knitting (my story is below the first one!)

As always, I THRIVE on feedback and comments (however cheeky!) So - leave
your thoughts, or even a simple 'x' as an encouraging kiss!

Expats & Eskimo Kisses

2011-08-31T14:08:00.000+02:00

Eskimo Kissing Uncle Gazza!

Sunshine outside. Not so sunshiney inside. We're sad. All my words run like sand through my fingers, leaving me with only the hard, cold stone of 'sad' clutched too tightly in my hand. But upon closer inspection, I see it's not a stone, but an old piece of dog sh*t. Yip - saying goodbye to our Soutified loved ones is just plain sh*tty. Hate it. So no more poetry or witty yarns from me today - just some photographs to rub salt in my wounds.

(That's what I wrote yesterday. And despite not feeling any happier about their absconding, I've at least had some time to see the flip-side: the happy side --- and that is this: that absence and distance highlight the reasons of why we love and adore them so deeply.)

Here are some pics from the 2 months they were home here on holiday.

Dave was the ONLY one that night who could perform
the miracle of teethbrushing! (Gary also proved
to be a magician in the medicine-giving department!)

Cheetah Education at Kragga Kamma Game Park

Gary visited us in Grahamstown for a night.

Beachfront Bye-Bye Breakfast, at Lav Vela's

Yet another little miracle: Layla fell asleep outside the
circle of my arms: Dave, her flavour of the month!

This is one of a zillion couch-cuddles, morning/noon&night
(as you will see from the other pics below!)

It was mindblowing to see Layla scamper up the chair into
Dave's arms, throw her arms around his neck,
and announce - in no uncertain terms -
'I LOVE YOU!'

The night we got back to Grahamstown after The Big Goodbye,
Layla announced in the bath, in the gravest of toddler-seriousness,
'They must come back now.'

Grahamstown, Fled (again...)

2011-08-05T15:01:00.000+02:00

I'm cramped into the over-packed back of our 4x4 bakkie while Craig navigates us safely from Grahamstown to PE on the notoriously dangerous N2 - terrorised by giant kudu at night, and giant arseholes by day. Overtaking on blind turns is apparently the most fun to be had on this bleak, rainy day in the bundu - and everyone's playing except us! The low-cloud's massively decreased visibility adds a bonus bullet of fun into this Road Russian Roulette. (*eish*)
A few months ago, we were witness to an all too regular South African statistic: a taxi accident that left limbs, and screams, and blood steaming off the summer-tar -- the minibus a crushed accordian of dead and alive. It had only just happened... I desperately wanted to stop, to console or offer my hands in help...but with my little girl in the car, I had to let it go. (At least there were already about 15 cars parked along the side of the road. We crept past too slowly; wordless prayers poured from my eyes: tears.)

(The length of the journey and unrestricted access for a Blackberry addict to her device resulted in the additional 2 photos: my to-do list for when I get my internet set up on my laptop this afternoon (13 months to the day since our arrival back in SA!!) - and my poison for 'ce soir': a Leopard's Leap Shiraz Cinsaut!)
'Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.' Albert Camus

A-maize-ing!

2011-08-04T08:53:00.000+02:00

I guess this should really be a post for my 'Samp & Sushi' blog which is an emaciated little waif of a blog --- and some advice that Blackberried to me yesterday suggested I may just a few too many blogs... So: I'll 'hide' that one -- and if I am overcome by a desire to write about South African food -- I'll do it here, ok?

One of my favourite things is the juncture between culture, food and graphic-design/packaging : and exactly why I chose this packet of Ace porridge from the breakfast shelves in Pick 'n Pay! I certainly know more than a handful of South African who would reject it with scorn for the exact same reason I chose it: it's Africanness. How just looking at it amongst the rest of the Kelloggs and Bokomos tells you about a dry, dusty red road, and the long walk home, her groceries gracefully balanced upon her head, and slumbering toddler upon her back. It must be the unfettered absence of visual seduction: no strong cardboard boxing, or glossy, hallucinogenically gaudy graphics emboldened by brand ambassadors we can't say no to: the jean-size dropping, white leotarded brunette brandishing her tape-measure like an accusing snake, or the 'Mommy, I want ________' cartoon-lures.

For me, the Ace packaging makes me taste the maizey soulfulness of my gran's 'pap en wors'. It sings to me about the samp-and-beans of my schoolday afternoons. Perhaps, though, it is a reminder of poverty: your own? those whose less-ness terrifies you, or exhausts your nights with guilt? I know a few older South Africans who even struggled to digest the concept of cous-cous (pun unfortunately intended) : that it wasn't an 'African' food but an African food. (Do I need to explain that? Leave me a note in 'Comments' if I need to!)

(I've got a horrible boomerang cold, and a dramatically different toddler to entertain solo till 9pm - so best I conserve what brain and body energy I DO have!)

Liefde as altyd en vir ewig, my Suid Afrika,
Lisa

'Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.' Albert Camus

MY hindsight, YOUR foresight : grab it by the balls!!

2011-07-31T13:06:00.001+02:00

As absolutely, bloody marvellous as the Internet is, there are some vile little flaws that daily drive me bananas. For example, just as I finished a painstakingly heartfelt tweaking of a prior blog post and hit ‘publish’, all my changes had vanished. Ka-boom – in a puff of Google-smoke!

C’est la vie, non? A year on into our homecoming, and this is perhaps the lesson we have learned most exquisitely. Now, remember that ‘exquisite’ can relate to both pleasure and pain. And pain there has certainly been. As you will see in my previous post, I was unable to sugarcoat the disappointment and trials of the last 12 months, even though there were a number of cowardly moments when I wanted to delete the post before publishing it. That yellow-streaked pride of mine at being such a devout South African recoiled in horror at my honesty. It screeched, a banshee, in my ear: “Why on EARTH would you hand yourself over on a plate for those expat-wolves that hunt you down? Do you WANT to die a slow, Mzansi death, listening to the cracking and crunching of your bones between their teeth?” But, I had always been honest in my pro-SA liturgies – though that never required courage - only passion and joy. Now, I had to let my pride slither off me, a sad little snake, and be bravely, terrifyingly real.

Being this honest made me realise the coming home is not for the faint-hearted or the cowardly. Coming home requires every ounce of strength, love, compassion and patience you had no idea you were capable of. And the truth is that you don’t possess it. Your homecoming draws it out of you, teardrop by sigh by sob – until, a year later, you find yourself astounded at the deep, exhilarating depths of your heart, where peace is the air you breathe in this canyon of your heart. (Yes, yes, the drama, the drama. But how else could I describe a journey that tears your dreams apart? A journey that unravels who you are, so that you pick up the Ariadne-thread of yourself right at the beginning, knitting yourself together again, in a stronger, more intricately beautiful stitch.)

I wrote that article for you. So that you can reap the rewards of my (kinda humiliating) hindsight. Do not let your heartache overwhelm your head.

1. WAIT for the very best job – IN the town/city that makes your heart sing (and where your mother can drop off a milktart and a box of tissues when you’re sick, or where you can have a family braai every single night if the mood took you, and the piks could sleep in Aunty Mandy’s room while the conversation sizzled hotter then the wors.)

2. And SAVE, SAVE, SAVE, damnit!! When my sister shared a mouldy, grey little flat with a mix of Brazilians, Polish and Aussies in London, she was so hellbent on saving, that she would use only one, papery square of already 1-ply toilet paper --- or drip-dry! (My nugget of wisdom? It may be hellishly miserable for a year, but if you can starve, scrimp, scavenge and save, you will come home to the comfort you deserve.)

Saying that, it really hasn’t been as bleak as I made it out to be in my previous post – I just wrote it on a particularly sad and blue day. So, to even out the little sadnesses, here is a list of incredibly precious South African moments that have blessed my heart in the last 53 weeks:

The wild vastness of the African sky… that if you gaze into it for long enough, you will into its turquoise sea of peace.

Starlit braais in the middle of winter after a balmy, dry day spent in awe of the African sun’s luminous and loving warmth.

Samp-and-beans made especially for me by our nanny who still works for our family, and who used to walk to pick me up from playschool when I was three – and whose cheese snackwiches rival Jamie Oliver’s most gourmet sarnie!

A spectacular moment of Africanness: Regal, graceful Nguni cattle walking across the road --- in the middle of the town, and in the suburbs. The delight of its surreality made me actually slam my brakes on, mouth agape in wonder! (Other variations on this very Eastern Cape thing that continues to be a novelty for this Mother City girl are the wild donkeys let loose to graze the pavements’ grass --- and, on one occasion, to rummage through our garbage bags all the way down our driveway! There have been herds of pedantic goats stuck, undecided, in the middle of our road. Driving back from Joza (the location) and executing my first (immaculate!) emergency stop since my driving test in 1997, so I could protect a mommy-donkey and her little one who decided he needed a drink of milk, and stopped in the middle of the highway for a dawdling suckle. Bonus? Flagging down a passing Department of Roadworks vehicle, I was bursting with pride as out the car spilled smiling and efficient Department of Roadworkers, who – with infinitely gentle patience – coaxed the pair safely across the road. (I was proud because the flak our government gets blinds us all to what they DO get magnificently right! There have actually been many moments of municipal efficiency in my last year here in Grahamstown, and – the odd, random minor catastrophe (though those are only hearsay – and probably a gross exaggeration. *wink*)

I could go on for pages and pages and paaaaaages, but let me say adios for tonight --- and see you sooner rather than later. (I always say that, don’t I? Eish… sorry….) But: there is light at the end of my erratic-blogging-tunnel: I have a benefactor who is gifting me with the blessing of internet so I can write full-time! I can finally have those daily word-parties I’ve been dreaming about --- and make a nice little living from it!

And so, on that triumphant note, see you (I promise) soon.

A little Soutie...

2011-07-24T17:43:00.000+02:00

It has taken me a month (or maybe more) to overcome my dread of Blackberry-cramp to write a new blogpost. Sorry, guys. But better late that never, huh?
In the last month I've spent more time in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth than Grahamstown. Craig and I have both been unable to help hating, ever more frustratingly, the winter of our Grahamstonian discontent - hence why we take shelter in our hometowns so often and for so long. And more and often, much to my repatriated pride, I'm beginning to wonder if our decision to flee home was just a wee bit too hasty? Perhaps if we'd rearranged our living and spending arrangements, and stayed on another 2 years, we may have been able to return to South Africa with the ability to buy property : and also to have waited for the best possible job-offers in Port Elizabeth. (I didn't mention settling in Cape Town: my dear, darling husband is VIOLENTLY averse to the apparent iniquity of (my) Mother City... *sigh/adolescent_eye-rolling*) And though these thoughts of a too-hasty-return plague us more and more often, the deep joy and peace of being in Africa, and in the divinely appointed bosom of our wonderful families still (kind of) keeps these almost-doubts at bay.
Our little house, decrepit, devoid of storage so we drown in cyclic chaos and regularly prone to heavy flooding and blocked drains hasn't helped our sense of homecoming serenity. Even my life-creed of: "what is healing but a change in perspective" didn't help, despite the gorgeous idea of Anais Nin's: "In chaos is fertility." Our most recent little domestic crisis is an about-to-overflow septic tank right at our front door!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (I'm not a fan of using more than one or two exclamation marks, but this sh*tty problem is the final, final straw. Really.)

When we first got to Grahamstown, we rented a delightfully quaint Settlers cottage with a 'Bible' front door (a wooden cross set into it) and warm, creaky yellowwood floors that gleamed with the polishing of 200 years of feet. (See pic insert) The garden's dappled shade saved us from the dry, summer's heat - and this garden taught me to cherish our indigenous floral heritage --- and to develop a succulents obsession (and a minor cuttings-kleptomania!) We also indulged in almost nightly braais - slap-bang in the middle of 'winter'. Glorious. Heavenly. Utopic!
And then, we moved into the school's accomodation: a miniature section of a boys' hostel, replete with a urinal and two small and low-set basins. Fab. Utterly v*kken fab.

Ag - I really shouldn't complain - but hell's bells: the fact we still pay rent for this humiliation... Aai, aai, aai...
But having to live like this, with pilfering and sloppy builders, floods and frog infestations (I didn't mention that, did I?) is humiliating and exhausting. The other thing about moving into such a tiny little dorpie is that I am so far away from the my family, AND there are no jobs for me as a writer and artist. Unless you are a teacher or lecturer, there is very little scope for a meaningful career.

And so, my advice for those of you planning a homecoming is this: save your geldtjies bedonderd -- and make sure the city or town you choose to settle in contain your family, friends and career opportunities.

PS. A big, big 'sorry' about my unusually sombre approach in this post, and even though I nearly deleted it all (twice!) I felt that we should always give what we have learned to others.

'Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.' Albert Camus

2011-07-24T14:27:00.000+02:00

It has taken me a month (or maybe more) to overcome my dread of Blackberry-cramp to write a new blogpost. Sorry, guys. But better late that never, huh?

In the last month I've spent more time in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth than Grahamstown. Craig and I have both been unable to help hating, ever more frustratingly, the winter of our Grahamstonian discontent - hence why we take shelter in our hometowns so often and for so long.

More and often, much to my repatriated pride, I'm beginning to wonder if our decision to flee home was just a wee bit too hasty? Perhaps if we'd rearranged our living and spending priorities, and stayed on another 2 years, we may have been able to return to South Africa with the ability to buy property : and also to have waited for the best possible job-offers in Port Elizabeth. (Cape Town was my dear, darling husband is VIOLENTLY averse to the apparent iniquity of (my) Mother City... *sigh/adolescent_eye-rolling*) And though these thoughts of a too-hasty-return plague us more and more often, the deep joy and peace of being in Africa, and in the divinely appointed bosom of our wonderful families still (kind of) keeps these almost-doubts at bay.
Our little house, decrepit, devoid of storage so we drown in cyclic chaos and regularly prone to heavy flooding and blocked drains hasn't helped our sense of homecoming serenity. Even my life-creed of: "what is healing but a change in perspective" didn't help, despite the gorgeous idea of Anais Nin's: "In chaos is fertility." Our most recent little domestic crisis is an about-to-overflow septic tank right at our front door!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (I'm not a fan of using more than one or two exclamation marks, but this sh*tty problem is the final, final straw. Really.)
When we first got to Grahamstown, we rented a delightfully quaint Settlers cottage with a 'Bible' front door (a wooden cross set into it) and warm, creaky yellowwood floors that gleamed with the polishing of 200 years of feet. The garden's dappled shade saved us from the dry, summer's heat - and this garden taught me to cherish our indigenous floral heritage --- and to develop a succulents obsession (and a minor cuttings-kleptomania!) We also indulged in almost nightly braais - slap-bang in the middle of 'winter'. Glorious. Heavenly. Utopic!
And then, we moved into the school's accomodation: a miniature section of a boys' hostel, replete with a urinal and two small and low-set basins. Fab. Utterly v*kken fab.
Ag - and I really shouldn't complain - but hell's bells: the fact we still pay rent for this humiliation... Aai, aai, aai...
But having to live like this, with pilfering and sloppy builders, floods and frog infestations (I didn't mention that, did I?) is humiliating and exhausting. The other thing about moving into such a tiny little dorpie is that I am so far away from the my family, AND there are no jobs for me as a writer and artist. Unless you are a teacher or lecturer, there is very little scope for a meaningful career.
And so, my advice for those of you planning a homecoming is this: save your geldtjies bedonderd -- and make sure the city or town you choose to settle in contain your family, friends and career opportunities.
(A big, big 'sorry' about my unusually sombre approach in this post, and even though I nearly deleted it all (twice!) I felt that we should always give what we have learned to others.)
'Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.' Albert Camus

Megamind vs Malema

2011-05-19T13:12:00.000+02:00

Laptop dusted in sad neglect on a chair in the lounge, its screen dotted with sticky toddler fingerprints. Why? I'm just too busy: mothering, playing, handcrafting toys from scrap fabrics and mother-of-pearl buttons circa 1890 - 1950 who are supposed to be Megamind and Ben10, making a hopefully exhibit-worthy body of art, tidying up, and gardening: weeding, gingerly avoiding spiders, throwing obese/constantly gorging caterpillars over the wall, nurturing my succulents and their cuttings with obsessive love, mourning the death-by-negligence of my rare 'Serissa foetida'/'thousand stars' 4 year old bonsai, and carefully tending to my baby stinkwood bonsai in green-fingered repentance! (As it is, I'm typing this on my Blackberry at Club Duvet while Layla sleeps next to me!)
Though my heart hungers to write for this country of ours, I just can't seem to find the time. At least I get to talk about it a LOT - and get pro-expatriates thinking, and encourage repatriates or potential repatriates in the return home. But still... I just feel like it's not enough.
Speaking of pro-SA activism, an expat friend of mine just messaged me to ask if I still have Julius Malema's cellphone number. My first reaction was humiliated hurt. Because I failed miserably - letting many fellow patriots down, and delighting many skeptics. Or - DID I fail?
Here follows the messaged chat:
D: ‎Do you have Malema's cell number still?
Me: ‎1. It turned out to be a really sh*tty idea.
‎2. But: it sparked the most amazing healing and transformational debate after my story was published in various newspapers and news blogs both in SA and the UK.
3. It got thousands of South Africans thinking after my interviews were aired on the headline news bulletins on Cape Talk, Radio 2000, Highveld Stereo and Kfm.
‎4. I made some very special friends.
5. I facilitated some fiery confrontations which started in pain, woundedness, mistrust and disappointedness - and which ended in phenomenal transformation and relational healing.

Sometimes we have to risk looking foolishly, madly, idiotically idealistic to achieve a deeper-lying victory than the first, superficial thrust of our mission.
(Why did I 'fail'? Because I came home. And coming home consumed me entirely: my time, my love, my energy, my mind, my creativity. Being there for my little daughter was critically more important for me than nurturing my revolution of patriotic, open-minded, transforming love. I had to put my ego aside as I chose to fail so I could win. Ah - I'm a saint, aren't I? *wry eyebrow raising*)
And so, with Blackberry hand-cramp setting in, it is time to say adios till my next rare and random pocket of free time.

Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom - let your email find you!

A Domestic Affair

2011-04-15T11:03:00.000+02:00

Bellville Home Affairs - being chilled to the bone on an already frosty Cape autumn day by an aircon on steroids! Arrived at 8.53am, got parking in a cinch (getting to proudly watch a brisk and efficient municipal team of street cleaners finishing up from what must have been a VERY early start to the day, leaving the streets immaculate!) Saw a bergie's Pick 'n Pay trolley double-deckered with neatly tied bundles of treasure - and instead of it being the eyesore so many South Africans despise with such absent compassion, I let my linger on the sight of Africa. Of my South Africa. As I always say (ad nauseum) : "What is healing but a change in perspective?" So next time something pees you off about our country, do a 'bollemakiesie' and discover the childlike joy of seeing everything upside down!
(A queue of only one more person, so better finish off here, tik-tik-tikking away on my Blackberry which is letting me blog again at last!) Want to tell you next time about: the irony of our UK-born children's Golden Ticket of the apparently divine, worshipped and much coveted British Passport. And my next blogging opportunity after that? My sister's Bantry Bay burgalry!
Ciao, mense - later praat, ne? X
Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom - let your email find you!

A is for Apple, Anxiety, Africa

2011-04-12T11:07:00.000+02:00

Driving back from Grabouw - the tranquil apple farming valley nestled quietly between mountains that can only be so savagely romantic as to be undeniably South African. (Yip, I'll always be the passionate little soutie drama queen *wink*) I've made absolutely bloody sure to save this as a draft as I go along after my blogging disaster on Sunday... (I typed up what I felt to be one of my most heartfelt pieces ever - and it simply vanished into thin air as I saw Melanie waiting for me in their driveway: AAARGH!!!) My folks drove me from Durbanville to Grabouw for me to see one of my most precious friends 'for one last time': and the bittersweet anxiety of my heart at a): the sweet: finally being together on our home soil after 7 years of what we thought surely an impossible fantasy and... b)the bitter: that it was only the most temporary of realities: Melanie and her little family are merely in a soutie-transit between the UK and Sydney Australia... (My Blackberry battery's running low... So better say ciao from my heartsore little plekkie in Mel's mom's bakkie as she drives me away back to Durbanville...) More later x

Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom - let your email find you!

Mngqusho (Can You Click?)

2011-04-05T14:57:00.005+02:00

Because food is a passion for me - and because, as South Africans, we have such adventurous palates, I wanted to introduce my newest blog to you: called 'Samp & Sushi' (*wink*) I'll be posting random tidbits of gastromic trivia, taste experiments, South African and 'world food' recipes that are foolproof, sinfully sublime and DEFINITELY not hip-proof!

Have a squizz and... as always: blerry well comment, mense!!

Safrophiliac Moves Back (to SA and her old Soutpiel blog!)

2011-03-28T11:08:00.007+02:00

Here are the posts from my 'Safrophilia' blog that just lacked the passionate oomph of this blog!

Friday, March 25, 2011

Patriotic Pelargonium Pride Parade!

After watching Carte Blanche's feature on the German pharmaceutical rape of the Eastern Cape's pelargonium crops, the budding (no pun intended) gardenista in me jumped at the idea of expanding my gardening repertoire from my current succulents obsession, while simultaneously raising awareness about this mass pillage. The local Xhosa whose sole source of income comes from the trade of pelargoniums (for their potent medicinal properties) to the local and foreign pharmaceutical giants are being blindly robbed - specifically by one German company (who have, ironically, always been such avid anti-apartheid supporters...)
But, my bugbear with South Africans (and though it seems to be universal human nature - but I'm picking on ourselves because the health and future country of ours is my life's purpose!) is twofold: that though this kind of corruption has been brought out into the open via the mass-watched medium of Carte Blanche, how many of us will actually step into the breach and take personal responsibility to do something about? And we don't need to fix the problem as a hugely maginficent South African superhero, but we can, as Mother Teresa says: "We can do no great things,
only small things with great love." Do you even ask yourself, when faced with a specifically South African problem or tragedy, ask: "What small thing can I do to help? How can I be a small part of the solution? What small thing can I do - out of great love - for my country and my people?" How many of us use our lack of time to bow out conveniently as a coward? Or say just one person (i.e. ME. YOU) could never hope to make even the slightest dent in the problem? Well... For starters, God has given us creative brains, compassionate hearts and a conquering will. We can CHOOSE to NOT unthinkingly follow the trends of the herd. We can come up with a solution that fits in with our unique personality, talents and situation within the South African social and working scene. Perhaps we could boycott said German pharmaceutical company by not buying their products and also raise awareness among friends and colleagues to do the same. Are you a letter-writer? Blog it. Write to newpapers and magazines - and suggest solutions readers could act on.
Oh yes. My second bugbear about The Pelargonium Problem: did anyone notice it was not a South African source of corruption? So many of us (here and abroad) hang on for dear life to this sick notion that the rest of the 'first' world is NOT corrupt. This is a 'first' world country - that has always professed support for a liberated South Africa - hypocritically robbing the previously oppressed and STILL poverty-stricken among us. Sies, man! Grab our South African reality by the balls - and DO one SMALL thing: for you, for us, for our children. (It's a blerry mission to get a British passport; infinitely easier to do one small thing out of great love.)
Bugbears aside, my passion for succulents never stops growing (too many accidental puns today...) And though I've only ever been partial to roses, I am cultivating (groan *pun*) a new love and respect for our South African flora. Pelargoniums, here I come! (Hey - maybe one of us could donate pelargonium cuttings and seeds to the blighted pelargonium farming community highlighted by Carte Blanche to replace their pillaged stock and save them from spending their depleted livelihood on seeds? And don't so cowardly accuse me of idealism, capiche?)

PS. Another tiny step made with great love and a leap of faith? Read, research, reach out! Discover more at The Pelargonium Project blog!

Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom - let your email find you!

Monday, March 21, 2011

Random rambling...

Having neither internet at home nor time to sit at my PC with a cup of coffee to write up a storm, I've decided the best time and place to write is on my Blackberry! And so I shall brave the perilous finger/knuckle/wrist agony that comes from tapping away at the miniature keypad to satisfy my word-lust! (For some reason, I can't upload my posts to my Blogger blogs - and Wordpress just won't install... Grrrrrr!! So quite how I'm going to update from here ANYWAY is still an irritating mystery...)
I'm gatvol with my Safrophilia blog: because the name just seems too generic and not specifically 'me' enough... So I will try to transfer the relevant blog posts to my Soutpiel and Navel blogs sometime this week! I also want to begin writing more magazine and newspaper articles focusing on my obsessive passions du jour : expat vs repatriation, South Africanness, and mothering/parenting issues informed by attachment parenting vs 'breaking them in like a horse' parenting a la Gina Ford. As one of my favourite GP-Mommy-Bloggers says: parenting is not about 'managing an inconvenience'! (See, I am already cantering happily along on my high horse and I'm not even writing a topically specific blog post! As arrogant as it may be perceived to be so opinionated, it is actually a critically vital part of being human and being a self-actualised, unique individual - as long as one's opinions are not a form of approval-seeking copycatism. Opinions are both matters of the heart and the mind, so should also be well-researched and thought through.)
Getting progressively more 'naar' typing here in the backseat of an exceedingly bouncy bakkie, so time to adios before our arrival at the dilapidated but still entertainingly educational Port Elizabeth aquarium!

Sunday, March 20, 2011

The Bitch at the Braai

Yet another month goes by without internet at home. Was it really FOUR months ago that I last blogged here?? So much has happened that, to merely reiterate the cliche, I wouldn't know where to begin! But that doesn't matter because I'm going to leave that all out and bring you up to date on where we are at right now:
We are still living in Grahamstown (Eastern Cape) and I am finally beginning to feel like I belong in this dusty, gossipy little 'city'! At the beginning of December we moved into the accomodation the school converted for us from what used to be a boys' dormitory - hence the lack of internet and phoneline: it all has to be approved by the governing body, yadda-yadda-yadda. Being right across the road from the school means that I have the use of the car because Craig walks to school. Layla and I also spend an hour or so actually at the school - having tea in the staffroom during breaktime, helping Amy* in the library, sitting in on the music lessons, watching the (world class!!) marimba band practise, playing in the primary school's playground etc.
*Amy: Amy and her husband and 18month old Tom are also recently returned from the UK as of three months ago. So watch this space for more confirmation and information that it is the right thing to do to come home!
Anyway - that's all desperately boring compared to what kept me awake last night: what happened during our braai last night!
Picture this: Wors, chicken kebabs, lamb chops. Salad. Garlic bread. Coke. Red wine. Simple, unextravagant fare, but a feast for the average South African. (And if you know what it's like to furtively braai so your British neighbours aren't offended by the braai smoke - and to have driven all the way to the South African shop for astronomically expensive wors - then you will understand just how much more beautiful and meaningful it is to braai on home soil!) And the point of that parenthesis is that the South Africans who entered into the very heated argument with me last night have NEVER lived away from South Africa --- and they are adamant that there is no future here, they want to move overseas etc. (You know the story.)
Anyway, back to what was actually argued about. I can't really even remember what started it all off - but whatever it was snowballed out of control too quickly for me to keep my heart under lock and key. And so it was that I placed my heart on the table for all to see - and I think they mistook it for a lambchop! They stabbed at it with forks and spat it out again: I am distasteful, apparently, in my own particular South African outlook. I was defending the fact that South Africa is quite normal as a country. The particular point-in-fact was the corruption in our government. And when I reflected back at them the recent corruption by MPs in the UK who funnelled money into their own accounts to buy second and third houses for themselves, I was looked at as though I was an inexperienced little child who had no right stepping into their little bitch-and-moan. Ag, there is so much, much more that I want to tell you about this whole thing, but my free-mommy-time is running out (as usual) but I PROMISE to try and write again in the next few days before I forget the specifics of the debate. If only I could have recorded it on camera: it was a perfect microcosm of our whites' political attitudes du jour.
(a little note re: the post title: I am obviously The Bitch at the braai, but the 'bitch' is also the aggressive and apathetic bitch-and-moan. Just thought I should point out to you what a literary genius I am *wink*)
Here is a quote from the novel by Andre Brink I'm reading at the moment, "An Instant in the Wind":
Too white for the truth.
What a brave man to have written this story in 1976... I think that if you can arrive at the point of realising, if you are white, that the truth does frighten you/make you aggressively defensive etc, then you have arrived at a place where you can begin to invest in the present state of our country as a South African. That critical moment of change in perspective in just one mind will ignite the change in the other minds around it. But why is the white mind so lazy and terrified to apprehend the truth then? Hmmm...
Here are some recent pics of our continued and increasing joy and peace at being home.

Granny and Layla share the most special of kisses only grannies and grandchildren share - and something so frustratingly, saddeningly impossible on Skype...

My bedside table: an antique hand-embroidered 'lappie' from my best friend in Cape Town, a silk scarf that belonged to my late mother-in-law, my late grandfather's bottle of Old Spice from the 1960s...

Layla playing with our neighbours, Darry and Lukes, washing the tricycle they have given her. They also lived in the UK for awhile, but are another proud and very happy returned South African family! (We just never managed to make friends like this in our little English village... Lovely friends, but still somehow detached...) It was, um... bloody lonely!! (Apologies to Jody and Dylbo who we gratefully met in the last two months of our stay in the UK!)

Layla's first camping trip in the Wilderness! It was incredibly special to see my little girl experiencing all the magic of these idyllic Wilderness holidays that made my girlhood so magical...

To hear the hero-worship in Layla's hysterical glee as Granny pulled her along in the canoe is something, again, that Skype just fails at heartbreakingly!

And what could replace the perfect 'South Africa as home' combination of the Spur and Granny?!

Layla wouldn't let me put her warm top on before a braai - only 'Teve' (her beloved Uncle Steve) was allowed to!

Adios for now. Another post later this week detailing the attitudes expressed during the Bitch at the Braai.

Liefde,
Lisa

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

The Violets in the Mountains have Broken the Rocks...

Grooves: Plush (Rory Eliot - who I had the honour and joy of befriending when I worked as the art director for a fashion brand in Cape Town a few years ago, and we sponsored him and his band in clothes and publicity/gigs.)

Beverage: Earl Grey (it's that delicately decadent bergamot it's scented with... hmmm...) from a white teapot, festooned in painted pink floral filigree - and sipped from a cup handmade by Nosiphiwo: from the forming of the virgin porcelain, to the painting and glazing. (Hence why I recruited her so quickly into the Oodade ranks!)

Weather: deliciously cool, calm and drizzling with a misty rain that transforms my garden into a rainforest paradise!

After my last blog entry about the glories of our Makana municipality, the reactions it catalysed made me realise just how mindblowingly heart-based this whole South Africa/UK is: people react, their hearts volatile, and their brains not quite engaged. Facts are ignored, and fears and ideals blindly embraced. {Because I absolutely avoid conflict whenever possible in my lust to be loved and liked be everyone, writing about such a layered and paradoxical situation is pretty tough. I find myself wanting even those who negate what I have to say to accept the experiences that have shaped my understanding of the 'in vs out' South African dilemma. To accept my facts and feelings as a kind of living parable about how the grass can be greener on the other side only if you water it with your pro-UK convictions, and taking extra-careful care to tend the weeds of homesickness that creep into the garden of your heart, mercilessly.

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of
our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
{ Franklin D. Roosevelt }

I refuse to have an emotional attachment to a piece of ground.
At one end of the scale it's called patriotism, at the other end
of the scale it's called gardening.
{ Bob Shaw }

As the gardening guru of the book I'm reading says, "Weeds are a mirror of the condition of the soil - so pay attention to them and use them to read the condition and health of your soil." (I ad-libbed that - sorry, Jane!) Weeds can be suffocated, blow-torched away, pulled out at the roots or poisoned to death. Or, they can be seen for what they are: a symptom of the poor condition of the soil : acknowledged, weeds can be a blessing. Weeds can spur you into redesigning your garden, getting you more in touch with your earth, improving the health of your soil --- and, as a consequence, the fruits it bears. (Let's hope that wasn't too obscure an analogy?!)

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
{ Tennessee Williams }

Anyway, as someone who thrives on getting so messy with paints and glues and other random art materials that it has shocked the socks off some people, I've not really taken the same pleasure in getting dirty in sand and soil. But perhaps that's more to do with my terror of the spiders that lurk behind leaves, ready to pounce! But, since buying The Virgin Gardener and reading my pops-in-law's Jane's Delicious Garden, I've had an epiphany: we are one with the earth. (Not the New-Agey sort of 'One', but 'one' in the sense that ... (*oh gosh* I've been reading an anthology of quotes about gardening -- and they're all so perfect : the most perfect and practical philosophy, that I can't quite find my own words now... And to simply cut+paste a thousand quotes onto this page would be an enormous cheat... I think I'll go away for a few days to dig deep for my own words about this discovery that is slowly changing my life: my outlook, the pace at which I live and love, my priorities... Come back in a few days, ok?)

In the meantime, here are some of the fruits of my labour: each one a miracle that heals, delights, soothes and excites. (My favourite plants right now are succulents - and, quite fortunately so, what with this Eastern Cape drought which means water is too precious to waste on acres of lawn and thirsty plants! When we move into our new little plekkie at the end of the month, I'm going to get rid of most of the lawn and replace it with vegetables and succulents, layed happily between winding paths of stones...)

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Jasmine JazzTea & Municipal Magnificence!

Hot already at 10am. I have the morning to myself - and over the moon about the new look I created for my blog this morning: fresh, happy-happy-happy and real!
Sipping: steaming jasmine green tea.
Grooves: Thelonius Monk
Social State: thought I was alone, but my house has been hijacked through the Trellidor nogal by a lightning-bolt of somebody's errant ginger cat: last time I tried to chase outside for fear of a sneezing/eye-itch attack, we ended up in the bedroom, with him almost getting stuck as he scrambled and slipped on the wood floor to take refuge in the two-inch dusty blackness beneath our bed! (This is the second cat visitation we've had - and probably due to the birdfeeder Layla and I put up in the peach tree in the garden a few days ago... Ah, the cycle of life...)

re: this post-title, I've been wanting to write to our local municipality to thank them for making me a very happy and smug South African citizen. (And before any bitter reposts are slung my way, I will say that - yes - there are some sh*tty bits to South African municipal/governmental issues, but there are also good and bad bits to every other country in the world: e.g. the postcode-lottery in the UK on which hospital you end up in!) Anyway, I'll put my happy experiences in point form for the sake of keeping you here (*wink*)

1. My very first Sunday evening in Grahamstown, and it's time to bath Layla and get some supper on the go. It's the middle of winter, and darkening out. And we are suddenly plunged into a most primal state of electricitynessless! Now what?! Nothing showing on our switchboard. Our neighbours all have electricity. Hmmm... On a Sunday evening, who can we call? Not the Ghostbusters - but the emergency number for the Makana Municipality. Expecting the Electricity Department, someone (damnit, I meant to remember his name!!) answered, "Fire Department. How can I help you?" Turns out Grahamstown is such a small place (a genuine dorpie) that whether your mains have burst or your house is ablaze, all emergencies are routed to the same place! Within 30 minutes, two guys arrived in their Makana Municipality bakkie at our door, looked at the switchboard and had as sorted in no less than 10 minutes! Oh yes, and may I mention they were Xhosa (intelligent, skilled, professional, friendly) and they didn't try to steal or pillage?! (*Very wry chuckle*)

2. Another great moment that made me proud was after 3 months of anxiety about the dangerous crossroads a few metres from our house, seeing a beaming (and sweating!) municipal worker picking up the orange cones (do they have a proper name?) after painting bright, white yield markings on the road! Awesome!!

(Gosh - that tea was good...)

3. After really getting into the brilliant recycling thing in the UK with their red and blue crates, and the way they alternated the black household refuse bin with the brown garden waste bin, I missed the lekker feeling I got from minimising my waste there. In Grahamstown, there are no black bins! I was a bit appalled, and quite ashamed to find myself thinking the 'Welcome To Africa' thought... Seeing the black rubbish bags thrown out into the street each Morning, only to be ripped apart by foraging bergies and dogs, dirty nappies, rotten food and broken glass strewn everywhere, made me angry-sad-confused-deeplydisappointed ---- but it also galvanised me into action! I phoned the municipality's sanitation department, expecting (thanks to news-induced stereotypes) apathy, but was instead met with eagerness and interest, as well as information about a plan to introduce recycling to Grahamstonians who're apparently notoriously hardegat about not bothering to recycle! And what happened? Nothing? Nope. A few weeks later, exactly as promised, my packet of black refuse bags arrived, so that I could spend the money I would normally have spent on black bags on either clear or orange plastic bags, which would then act as the receptacle for all recyclables. These would be collected by the same rubbish truck, but taken to the recycling plant which is overseen by an NGO creating employment and environmental care.Well done, Makana Municipality! And, THANK YOU!!!

4. Because my job at Kip McGrath turned out to be a stunningly empty promise on behalf of it's manager, we haven't been able to pay for medical from Craig's teacher's salary after paying R5 500/month rent: and Layla's ears have tormented her (and me) with sleepless nights and irritable days, so when the GP here said it was imperative she have grommets, we were crestfallen. How would be solve our daughter's pain with no money? But, our kind doctor got us in at the local government hospital as state patients so that an absolutely phenomenal EN T oversaw the initial investigation and operation, and our GP and the other doctor in his practice did the anaesthetic: and all for nothing. (*Sjoe... Wow...*) And to top it all off, every single hospital staff member was impeccably kind and efficient. The building, inside and outside, sparkled with being clean, and cleaned with great care and pride, with lovely art adorning the walls and smiles on every face! The whole Day Of The Grommets is an entirely other story which I'll save the next rainy day - but here is the picture of a completely pain-free Layla, post King Cone ice-cream!

Monday, November 15, 2010

Back Home - 4 months and counting...

Since I last had a chance to write, I decided to send my little princess to playschool 5 mornings a week as the seeming randomness of only going on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays confused her - so as of this week she'll be at school every day, which also means that I can start writing again! (Not being able to write was, and I'm not exaggerating, like drowning. And drowing very, very slowly.)

Twice-a-week updates are what I'm aiming for, though I'd write every single day if I could! But there is so much happening at the moment, that I'll need to use this time that Layla is at school more wisely than I have ever used time!! For example, our house at the school (where we'll only be paying about a fifth of what we pay now (i.e. R5 500/month) and I think/hope that'll include water and electricity as well!) will be ready for us by the end of the month - so I've got to try and pack up our things here without Layla actually seeing me packing the boxes. Twice since we've arrived back from the UK, I've needed to repack our boxes when I was in Cape Town: first, when the boxes arrived in South Africa via Allfreight's fabulous service, and I needed to unpack them to check what was damaged/what I wanted to take with me back to Grahamstown. And then second, when I was in Cape Town two weeks ago, I spent many hot hours in my parents' attic sorting through the random bits of furniture and repacking my stuff for freight-by-truck to Grahamstown. And both times, Layla's anxiety levels skyrocketed upon witnessing this packing of boxes. Seeing just how perceptive and deeply sensitive my child has made me rethink my entire modus operandi of parenting... But more about this at a later stage.

And then there is the matter of me finding work for next year. Perhaps an art teaching position at St Andrews? And if that doesn't pan out, then I'll focus on setting up a studio for the collective/co-operative I've set up with two of my friends. At the moment, we're each working from home, but if I can find a space for us to work from together for next year, then we'd be able to work that much more quickly and efficiently! Our company's name is Oodade which is the Xhosa word for 'sisters'. Inspired by the work my sister commissioned me to do for her space at Kamersvol Geskenke, as well as by the bond of sisterhood I share with my fellow South African women, Nokwayiyo and Nosiphiwo arrived in my life like sunshine and blessings with their grace, warmth, joy and industrious talent! I'll link back here to the Oodade blog I've set up (*wink*)

Not much Safrophilic news there, but I thought I sommer just had to write AND to explain my long absence from these pages.

Friday, October 15, 2010

The Quickest History of an ex-Soutie's Repatriation Ever!

After crashing heavily to earth from quite shitty burnout, I've decided to end all my other blogs and writing commitments in an effort to simplify my life. Hence this new space where I can write about anything and everything in the context of South Africanness (where before I had a blog for my South African concerns, a blog for random generalities, two separate blog for Soutpielness, and a weekly column about motherhood. And on top of it all, that whole Malema project, my 'news revolution' AND all the newspaper articles I was writing and the resulting radio interviews. Eish - no wonder I burned out! Seems as though multitasking is something my female DNA lacks...) And so, I am back with a vengeance: to write purely from a selfish desire, tap-tap-tapping words out to the rhythms of my own particular heart.
A quick history of our first 3.5 months back in South Africa?
1. Living, as a devout Capetonian, in the Eastern Cape for the very first time, has been both intriguing and a bit of a drag. Grahamstown is hot, dry and dusty - and when the wind blows, there is nowhere to escape to (unless you are a student and the Rat & Parrot can slake your thirst/drown your sorrows for you. But I, alas, am too old at 32, too skint of pocket and - I'm not quite sure that a rowdy drinking hole is the most wholesome environment for an excitable 19-month old princess!
2. Craig's job as a primary school teacher at a Model C/government school is fairly peachy, while I was horribly let down by the company that 'promised' me a job upon my arrival in Grahamstown. No such luck. I should have gotten a written and signed commitment from this chick - but instead, she um-ed and aah-ed for weeks while I pestered her for opportunities. Eventually, I did one day of negligently-taught training and then one day of work, whereupon I received a Harry-casual sms saying I needn't come in the following week as the student had changed to another day. Ho-hum (*seething frustration/sense of betrayal*). Because we worked our finances when we were planning to come home to SA to within a hair's breadth of survival versus homelessness, I naively misplaced my trust in this girl in my excitement to return home. And so, with Craig's teacher's salary, our rent of R5 500 (excluding water and electricity) etc etc, we have had to tighten our belts a little more than we thought (I have lost 5kg!) Thankfully, we were able to still afford numerous doctor's appointments for Layla's incessant ear problems, ranging between R220 and R300 (Eastern Cape vs Cape Town prices) as well as all the medicine needed. (We'll get medical aid next year once I am also working.) When she had a bad fall once Saturday evening when I thought she'd broken the occipital bone under her eye, we took her to the clean and efficient-enough government hospital where, contrary to stereotyped doubts, we did not encounter any gunshot/rape/stabbing victims! (I'm sure there are government clinics and hospitals which have plenty of these, but Settlers Hospital made me proud!) I was also able to use the government mental health hospital for free and get free medication. The cherry on the top? Layla is having grommets inserted in a week's time by an absolutely phenomenal ENT specialist -- as a government patient. WOW!
3. Layla goes to a gorgeous little playschool three mornings a week - her classmates adore her as the youngest little soul among them! (She'll probably be fluent in Xhosa by the end of the year!) Her and I walk to school the three mornings a week, stopping to chat to new friends, neighbours and all sorts of warm, kind strangers. (Admittedly, there is a darker side to how Layla struggled with the move back to South Africa, but I'll leave that for another day...)

It's time for me to get my jersery on (freak thunderstorm and perpetual rain yesterday, with icy temperatures after the most summery winter I've ever experienced with highs sometimes of 30deg!) and walk to 'Little Blessings' and see my Layla's eyes light up when she sees me!

Maybe Two Blogs ARE Better than One?!

2011-03-27T23:52:00.002+02:00

Well, well, well... Long time, no see, eh? Despite having created a new blog that was meant to incorporate my 'Contemplating My Navel' ideas with my fervent Safrophilia into one more manageable headspace for me, it is actually not really tickling my fancy. It's just that my Navel blog satisfied the whimsical, chatty writer in me, while my near-obsession with South Africa and (ex)patriotism found a place to rant, rave and ... expose the truths and lies about the expat experience and what it feels like to come home. (Sjoe - I nearly went off on a tangent on my high horse there...)

Anyway, I will try to bring all the relevant posts from my Safrophilia blog back here - and now that I've finally figured out how to post to my blogs via my Blackberry, I am no longer a manically frustrated prisoner of no-internet-at-home! I am also hoping to do more writing for newspapers and magazines (not so sure about doing any more radio interviews...) : MORE SOUTH AFRICANS NEED TO KNOW THAT IT IS OK TO BE HONEST : about EVERYTHING!

Eish ... I am desperate to write more but my bambino is calling for her mama...

Safrophilia...

2010-11-15T09:16:00.002+01:00

Howzit everyone!

As part of the wholesale decluttering of my life, I've streamlined all of my writing commitments into this one, new blog called 'Safrophilia' (meaning: the love of all things South African!)

Check it out : Safrophilia

Love, love and more love,
Lisa

Spruitsdrift Musings...

2010-09-24T22:57:00.005+02:00

Howzit, guys! I'm visiting my folks in Cape Town (which feels magnificently exotic and oh-so-glam after 2 months in the Eastern Cape!!) and, because of a divine comment from a family coming HOME after a stint in the States, I just had to quickly link back here to my Homecoming Revolution blog update! (Repatriation is busy work, indeed! *wink* So there has been minimal time to do any proper writing... lol!)
Nevertheless, here is the link to some recent news. There is (as I seem to write every single blog post) just so much I wish I could tell you about moving back home, but time is too tight for words (literally.) At least I now have internet, so updates will DEFINITELY be more frequent and delicious with repatriation details - so post your comments and ANY questions and I'll answer them as soon as I can :)
(The 'Spruitsdrift' in the title is a not-so-oblique reference to my love affair with red wine - of which my parents always have an abundance!)

South Africa FOREVER! (last days in the UK, and first days back home)

2010-07-30T17:52:00.004+02:00

Below lies the depths and shallows of the few thoughts I've managed to find time to scrawl down... If ONLY I had managed to write every day... (*sigh*) Oh well. The writing that follows is quite incomplete - but I'm desperate to let you all know how my first 4 weeks in SA have unfolded! More to follow as and when my dear little pudding Layla allows! (*wink*)

"After I lost my last post to the Web-Gremlins, it was kindly suggested I use Notepad -- and what I love about this app is that it feels like I'm typing on my very own personal typewriter! Granted, it ain't a real vintage one that clack-clacks away with satisfying realness, but it's better than nothing - and at least this one won't run out of ribbon!

Anyway, today represents our 7th last day in England – and I can’t help but think that we will never again set foot on this muddy isle that has been my home for 6 years in an 8 year period. But… that’s what I thought the first time I left the UK for home, so perhaps I should not be so hasty with my wild supposings! Admittedly, my reason for returning to the UK was to study for a very concise two year period, and then take my newly acquired knowledge and skills back to South Africa (where this particular Masters degree is not offered.) But, a number of factors conspired to abbreviate this dream, and it was replaced by an even greater dream: we became parents to the most phenomenally delightful and inspiring little soul who taught me everything I needed to know about creating the fulfilment that evaded me for 31 quite tedious and searching years! Never before have I loved, laughed and cried with such ferocity as I do now that I am Layla’s mother. What a joy, what a miracle! Anyway, I am blabbing about something else entirely now – a topic for the book I am going to write about the Soutpiel experience --- so save up your pennies and look out for it on Amazon! (*wink*)
Last night, in a bid to squeeze in as much time with my friends as possible, I conjured up a feast from the dregs in our freezer – texting Anne and Lorraine: “I’ll supply the supper, you guys supply the plonk!” And what fine plonk they supplied – and in such fabulous abundance! Two bottles of Australian red, and one French white (which is still in my fridge, awaiting its role as gift for our dinner hosts tomorrow night: the neighbours we’ve been meaning to do dinner/braai with for 2 years running, and it took us leaving the country to spur us all into action and make a date! Crazy.) Anyway, I was bitterly disappointed when Anne sms’d me to say they’d be late: I was in an inconsolable state of dire craving for the promised vino after a day of such aggravated stress that, when Craig asked me how my day was, I venomously spat out the following maxim: “I would rather have my most stressful university exam over than relive today.” (And that’s being pretty damn brave – because the exam in question was an English exam I was devastatingly unprepared for – and was so excruciatingly nervous that I ended up dry-retching in the loos at least 3 times during the 3 hour paper! That’s one of the problems with being a perfectionist; I ended up with a 90% average for that paper, so the moral of the story is … oh dear, I’m getting side-tracked again!) Supper was: four decadently huge cloves of fresh, crushed garlic gently warmed in lashings and lashings of butter, lightly salted and scented delicately with ground black pepper and just a hint of chilli. On the stove, I threw two packs of capalleti (Microsoft Word is trying to tell me capalleti should be ‘cataleptic’ though it’s the perfect word to describe my state of mind earlier that day trying to make those blasted phone-calls, but more about that later!) filled with prosciutto di Parma and mozzarella, which I boiled to soft, melting perfection, drained and then tossed in the butter and garlic. Our aunt, who is taking over our lease and moved in last night with her husband and two teenage boys, brought all her herbs and lettuces to transplant into the garden here, and her selection of mint, chives and parsley was just perfect for my spontaneous night of cooking – and after plucking a very generous handful of the freshest parsley from outside the kitchen door, I snipped it all up with my trusty kitchen scissors, missing my mezza luna in storage in Cape Town but with so much less angst than normal, with only 7 days to go… Although I’ve never been a big parsely fan, making me automatically think of that verlep piece of parsely they used to stick on top of the packs of raw mince in Pick ‘n Pay, it was the most surprisingly perfect herb to accessorise the pasta with!
When Anne and Lorraine eventually did arrive, Layla was blessedly asleep and we sat outside in what can only be described as an evening so quintessentially English in its birdsong, bleating sheep in the nearby field, the soft warmth of lilac night, and all perfumed by sun-kissed roses and orange blossoms, that I suffered what can only be called pangs of nostalgia at the thought of leaving this English idyll.

Monday. 6 days to go. CRISIS – acceptance and strength that can be developed? One-room living ; no internet.

The lack of initiative of call-centre staff… Tesco car insurance etc. EXCEPT: Allfreight. 5 days to go, and I am incredibly frazzled, frustrated and exhausted – at the end of my tether. Layla… No cell reception in house – have to ask neighbour to use her landline. E-on overcharged despite my call on Friday. On the verge of tears. Brittle.

Tuesday. 4 days to go. Yesterday, my friend Jodie whisked me off to Kettering so I could cash a cheque – and all on a very tight schedule what with us closing our account on Thursday. (Layla is asleep still – and not surprising after heading to bed at 11pm last night! Goodbye drinks with Laura, Jules and Wends: Old’s pub The White Horse, and then pub-hopped to our ‘local’ for food. The barmen – the one sitting outside in the front saying we must have a safe journey. And then the broken-armed one and his bizarre surliness/friendliness: ‘curt’. The old man next to us rolling his eyes and listening in to our conversation. Must again attempt to tie up the loose ends after I gave up yesterday with Tesco Car Insurance: the call-centre chick told me to I should have hung on longer until someone answered the phone on Friday – after I ranted at her about the fact that they have now charged us another month when I didn’t want them to but couldn’t get through to them on Friday…. I was so angry I was shaking and LIVID. Whatever happened to that thing called ‘service’ by employees who were hired for their initiative? And then Craig comes home and doesn’t understand quite why making these phonecalls is such an incredibly difficult thing. I was hurt that he didn’t give me the support I needed but merely threw solution after solution at me, when all I needed was for him to hug me close and ask me to tell him, in all its gory, anguished detail, about how bloody stupid the people on the other end of the phone are, how nerve-wrackingly trying Layla was, how upset I was… Today I will try again – at Maggie’s house.
Lay awake till past 1am. The oppressive heat, and being trapped in our little room. Listening to the soft whispering of Maggie’s water feature, and further in the distance, the church bells tolling midnight. Mentally mapping out my day, I remembered I needed my list back from Dinee, and in case I missed her in the morning, I clambered out of bed, fumbled for a pen in the dark, and not finding one, went to the bathroom with my eyeliner – but it was too blunt to write more than the D of Dinee, so out came Craig’s shaving foam which I smeared across the mirror, and inscribed my very uncryptic message with a piece of Layla’s foam toy seaweed – and was intercepted by a venomous looking spider which I promptly dispatched with a blast of furniture polish, drowned in liquid handsoap and then swooshed down the basin drain!
Thursday. 1 July 2010. Just two sleeps until the day we fly, and then that night of semi-slumber on the plane. Last time, Layla slept on my chest, breastfeeding often due to the bizarrely different circumstances and the dry, dry air. This time, she’ll probably want to play,…………………Moms and Tots party.

20 July 2010, Tuesday. I am desperately sorry I didn’t steal the time from who-knows-where to jot down the facts and feelings in those last days in Walgrave. It was a manic, manic time – and my first week back home in Cape Town pretty much matched its level of frustration, exhaustion, emotion and constant activity (mostly in the forms of organising and looking after Layla.)

I sent my mom an sms yesterday saying, “I’ve had more fun in one day here in the middle of winter than in 6 years in the UK!” At 27deg, who would have thought it was winter?! Layla asked after her daddy all day long. And this morning, woke up asking for him, and we managed to at least catch him as he was was locking himself out the door – but Layla was inconsolable in having to say goodbye. If there was one thing I would re-do about that first week in SA, it would be sticking close to Craig’s side: Layla struggled terribly with missing him. (I’ve managed to find Finlay the Fire Engine on SABC3, and she’s plonksed down in a chair watching in televised bliss – one of her few constants that remind her of her first..)
Library/ pep and jet.

Much later, sipping a glass of vino and scoffing the last of Layla’s leftover French toast to the magnificent cacophony of Radio Algoa and Layla’s bathtime screeches. (How did I manage to convince Craig to give me some much needed (understatement) time-out by bathing Layla? Hmmm… I didn’t employ any of the usual female wiles, e.g. lustrously batted eyelashes etc. so perhaps it was the stain of unhinged mania colouring my voice and eyes that did the trick?

22 July 2010, Thursday – and I see the clock on my laptop is still set to English time… Somehow I quite like this little connection to my former life in Walgrave, Northamptonshire so for the meantime, I’ll leave my clock set an hour late. Layla’s having a zizz after a long night spent soothing her through her teething: this time, it’s her eye teeth. And after these are through, I think all that’s left for us to endure are her second set of molars! Spur has a special for Monday evenings here: buy one, get one free (how very English!) so, with Layla in tow, we reacquainted ourselves with the delights of beef burgers and the world’s greasiestly delicious onion rings – and, new to the Spur recipe of success: wireless! My ageing laptop died a number of times during start-up and for no apparent reason I could fathom, until it made its final irritating exit just as I managed to log onto my Facebook. Grrrrrr! Oh, for a snazzy, new notebook (*sigh*)! There is just so much I need to have documented in the way of facts and feelings in terms of this move back home – but it was such an intense period of time, jampacked with organising, (un)packing and hellos and goodbyes that there was, excrutiatingly, no time to even jot down a line or two in my journal. Were it not for the Layla, the move would have been infinitely easier, so if you’re contemplating a Groot Trek of your own, do it before the bambinos arrive on the scene!

Looking back to more than a month ago when our boxes arrived from Allfreight, I realise I’m going to have to tackle writing about it all in an ‘organic’ sort of way, instead of systematically and chronologically, because if I start at the very beginning, I will never get to today! And so, let me tell you about how today started:
After Layla’s sizzling temperature and teething pain had me (and her) up in the earliest hours of this morning, I finally managed to give her something to bring her temperature down and soothe her back to sleep, and we lay cuddled together till nearly 10am when a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door woke us. Decidedly unglam in my jarmies and non-salon bed-head, a smiling middle-aged woman introduced herself to me in a gush of welcoming – and invited Layla and I to lunch with her and our other older lady neighbours at the French Quarter. And as temptingly divine as that sounded to someone so detrimentally deprived of luxury, I refrained on various accounts too boring to mention here. But said middle-aged neighbour didn’t merely arrive to a)introduce herself and b)invite me to lunch, but also to c)tell me about the near-burglary that happened last night to our neighbours just across the road from us – a married couple our age with no kids but a noisy hamster! Louise and Brad had been watching a DVD on their laptop in bed, the random noises Louise heard being casually blamed on the hamster and their washing machine – until the outside motion-sensor light slammed on and voila, there was an unwelcome interloper, knife blindingly shiny against his hat-to-shoes blackness. (Now, I use that word ‘blackness’ with deliberate caution – but I’ll get back to this later.) Rugby-induced foot blister and all, Brad (limping today) in all his shouting glory, charged after the man down the road, while his wife got the apparently breathtakingly efficient local security company, Hi-Tech, to haul their asses down to the crime scene! The sweet ol’ duck warned me to keep my security gates locked at all times and to keep the panic-button on hand (i.e. around my neck). Awful. Admittedly, in my accentuated state of homecoming bliss, I’ve overlooked being as security-conscious as I maybe should be – so maybe this was a timely little wake-up call for me. One of my biggest bugbears about this whole ‘The Crime’ vibe is that so often the fear that so many of us allow ourselves to succumb to is just as destructive to ourselves as individuals/a collective as an actual mugging or burglary. And please, I’m most definitely not underplaying the trauma violent crime exacts upon us, but the daily, unconscious fear that robs us of our present joy is so devastating that it has the power to destroy our future as a nation. One of short stories for Matric English was called ‘Once Upon a Time’ by Nadine Gordimer – and it describes a young (white) family who, in an attempt to protect themselves from violent intruders, crown their walls with coils upon coils of barbed wire, alarming their house with a wailing siren should anyone arrive uninvited. Their little boy, chasing the family cat, ends up getting himself caught in the very barbed wire that was intended to protect him, and each wrench and twist to escape wraps him up tighter in its bloody embrace. His tortured screams are confused with the house alarm by his parents – a sick, sad irony but which rings with a poignantly South African truth: “*********quote about fear************”. And so much about the fear we cultivate as South Africans is intrinsically wrapped up in our apprehension of blackness as whites. And hoo boy, don’t the media just abuse this notion to sell more papers and advertising?! Using the word, ‘cultivate’, in relation to fear describes how fear is something that is a) growing and b) needs feeding and tending/attention for it to thrive. And it is more like a weed than a rare orchid in that it runs destructively out of control in the blink of an eye, is ugly to behold and painfully riddled with spiky thorns; and once in the garden of your heart, almost impossible to get rid of. But, as any seasoned gardener can profess, once you recognise and then accept there is a problem (not pretending, through denial, that the weeds are a delightful fynbos hybrid to be prized), diligent and daily weeding is the simple remedy that requires only commitment and love. “Love casts out all fear,” is something I’ve been trying my whole life to completely grasp in my relationship with God, but only right now, this warm winter’s Grahamstown morning while my daughter sleeps and my jasmine green tea cools, as I wrote those words about how fear is like weeds, do I so fully understand, in my heart and in my head, how true love banishes fear.
Because so many people have accused me of rose-tinted idealism in my understanding of the South African condition, I’ve wrestled with their accusing questions of, “Let’s see what you have to say when you’re robbed/raped/hijacked!” And honestly, I can only say that I will be angry, terrified, traumatised, bleeding/..."

(and, I am SO sorry that there is nothing more, but more WILL be posted up here as soon as I possibly can! COMMENTS PLEASE!!! They make each word worthwhile!)

Below is a pic of Layla and I mere minutes before our departure for Heathrow!

The Last EVER Blog Post on English Soil?!

2010-06-20T13:40:00.006+02:00

With our internet connection stopping on the 23rd, this may be last blog post for awhile... Read about the boxes, the tears --- and the JOY!
"Only 14 Days till Mzansiness!" (Homecoming Revolution's blog for expats and returning South Africans called 'African Souls')
PS. This is my landlord's wife, Katie, when we had them over for supper the other night... The goodbyes are, perhaps, even more painful and stressful than the logistical organising and actual move...

'n Doos of Twee

2010-06-09T09:50:00.004+02:00

'n Doos of twee - and our packing-up is suddenly a million times easier! Visit my article for Homecoming Revolution's African Souls.

How To Return From Exile!

2010-05-27T09:08:00.012+02:00

Sjoe. So much to do - and only 5 weeks of time left to do it in! Mind you, not that I'm complaining! The sooner we can get on that plane, the better. All that stands between me and Heathrow, Terminal 5, is an endless list of loose-ends to tie up. (Needless to say, this miles-long list is quite welcome in its sense of signalling 'the final chapter' after I made a rather radical decision to begin packing up six whole months ago - and the house has been this kind of topsy-turvy, semi-packed chaos ever since: something I do not recommend at all to those of you planning your own Groot Trek.)

1. The car. Our sweet little blue Fiat Panda needed an MOT (plus new tyre!) and a year's worth of tax, and don't even talk to me about the insurance: and all just a month before our EDA. Eish... what a monumental waste of 250 Big Ones.

2. Phoning all the utilities etc. to explain we're leaving the UK (forever! YAHOO!): i.e. water, electricity/gas, council tax, Virgin (broadband, tv), BT (phone)

3. At least we don't have an ounce of debt - so the banking side of things is easy-peasy. But Craig has had to organise that his post-dated salaries go into his brother's UK account who can then transfer it to us in SA.

4. Furniture: I have four incredibly precious pieces of furniture that I wish with ALL my heart I could send home, but the shipping costs (even for half a container) was just too expensive, so I am going to have to find loving homes for these beautiful things. (I've run out of time to eBay them - but I reckon I could've gotten some nice cash for 'em if I'd been a bit more on the ball!) On the plus side, Craig discovered a company that can ship four boxes home for us (door-to-door) for only 150 GBP (and I better order them tomorrow! *where are those Post-it notes when you them?!*) In these four boxes will go Craig's rather gargantuan collection of Stephen King books: an altar to his impassioned devotion to this writer of some really brilliant stories, and... some totally crap ones! That leaves me with three boxes into which will go my little antique cups/saucers, lovingly folded scraps of rich, raw silk, crochet hooks, an eclectic family of books, my journals, some of Layla's tiny newborn clothes I can hardly remember her being able to fit into...

5. Our landlord, a feisty fishing fanatic (owns two fishing/hunting shops and is currently adventuring in Cuba, hunting down bone-fish!) bought the house we live in the year Craig and I were born! And - he also had a pet rabbit, and - his bunny's favourite spot was also the cool stone tiles around the fireplace! Anyway, he is an utter darling - and because we haven't had any estate agents involved (as well as no officially documented lease!) we haven't had to worry about sorting all of that out.

6. Um... I can't really remember everything off the top of my head - but I feel pretty much on top of it all. A nice feeling, really. Oh yes! We'll be renting a gorgeous old Settlers Cottage with lustrously warm yellow-wood floors and an exciting little garden for Layla to explore - and then we've also found a perfect car: air-con (for Layla - but I'm hell of a grateful too!), CD player (WOOHOO!) and low mileage. I'll tell you what: this whole move has been so, so exciting - and such a pleasure to organise: but really, it's only thanks to the people we've gone out of their way to help us! Adele Barnard must be the world's most thoughtful and kind (and hard-working) estate agent; Stacey (my future boss and first new friend in G-town) who runs Kip McGrath in Grahamstown, and Trygve Roberts from Autolink!

(Someone once gave me a card in which they scrawled, "travel light, and travel far." And as long as I have Layla, I am home.

Pimp My Ride! (guest blogger)

2010-05-04T08:45:00.013+02:00

After my dad's 4x4 adventure in and around the Eastern Cape's Baviaanskloof, he wrote this epically hilarious piece I just had to share! Here it is *wink*. Enjoy!

I have been wanting to experience the Baviaanskloof for many years.Perhaps it was the hint of a sore throat two days before departure that promised all would not be nirvana. Much has been written about the Baviaanskloof so I will pass the superlatives by for this story and focus on the people in our group. To be honest, it was the weirdest collection of bodies and souls I have yet had the pleasure of observing.

Our final evening around the campfire is on schedule. The stage is set for some pleasant bonhomie including the inevitable “strafdop” procedure and the burning of an absurd amount of wood. That alone had me wondering – Why do we do that? The outdoor folk, the environmentalists, the protectors of nature, the carbon kids. Why do we build a braai fire so large that bacon and eggs can still be done 10 hours later without adding a single log? Maybe the same reason we drive a 4x4 that consumes fuel at a rate of four and a half kilometers for every one liter of fuel?

So we are sitting there, in the African style, intensely focused on the roaring flames as the river rustles softly by in the darkness behind us, with the croaking of frogs and the zapping of bumble-bee sized mosquitoes, helping the Whiskey soak quietly into the primordial, inner mind. A group of strangers who have travelled the glorious Baviaanskloof together for three days, yet we barely know each other names. The weather is kind for late April and the brandewyn and red wine have gone through round three, (or was if four?) as everyone starts to finally relax. We are eight vehicles. I need to explain the group dynamic to help you understand what is coming next. There are three Land Rover Defenders (Allan, Guillermo and Steven) ; one Land Rover Discovery3 (Pietman), one Pajero DiD SWB (Henry) ; One Nissan Patrol LWB bakkie (George) , one Nissan XTrail (Tony) and my solitary Toyota Land Cruiser 105 GX. Names have been changed to protect the victims of what will surely be construed as public slander by the end of this story. Let’s start with the Defenders. I have some questions. Why do the owners like to attach so many items to the outside of their vehicles? There were spades, axes, gas bottles, jerry cans for each type of fuel, more jerry cans for water, roof top tents, gas bottles, ladders, huge spot lamps, Hi-lift jacks, cables to protect the windscreen from flailing branches, a few extra spare wheels, tool boxes, ammo boxes and all manner of quasi-military type kit tied or clamped on in the most ingenious fashion. The latest Defender trend is to cover the HiLift jack, axe, spade and gas bottle with a stout canvas cover. I am puzzled. For vehicles already notoriously heavy on fuel, they reduce the existing brick like (with apologies to Corobrick) aerodynamics of a Defender to a level akin to a camel loaded for a Gobi desert crossing. Why? Then there is the issue of the CG (Centre of Gravity). One only has to look at a Defender from behind to see that this thing will roll easily. But now they add so much k*k on the roof that the CG careers right off the scale. Smart? Mmmmmm.....I think I will let you decide that. Then I figured it all out. There are two types of 4x4 owners. Minimalists and maximalists. The first group take everything that is necessary but pack it in such a way that their vehicles don’t look like they have just emerged from a Sumatran jungle covered with mud and Camel man stickers with a long haired, white bearded driver throwing mosquito nets at the locals. And the last part of that sentence more or less describes what the maximalists like to achieve. A deep seated need to advertise the fact that........ I AM A CAMEL MAN!!!!!!

Later during the trip, there were a few muddy puddles by the roadside. I watched in my rear-view mirror and sure enough, all the vehicles studiously avoided driving through the mud, except for the three Defender drivers. Why? Because I want to to be a Camel Man. Bwaaahhhhaaah. I had one of the Defender drivers chat to me on the second day into the trip. He asked me how we managed to get by on so little. Where was my roof rack? And my spare fuel? And my water? And my hi-lift jack? And my spade? ....... “It’s all there”, I reassured him.” If I can’t get it into the Cruiser, it stays at home.” I remove the back seat and am left with a very large self contained packing space. I have no sliding packing systems. Everything I could possibly need fits comfortably inside the Cruiser and there is still enough space left to take almost twice the volume of kit, should I need to. Why take empty jerry cans or even full ones, with you on a trip where one has more than sufficient fuel to last easily for the entire trip? Suddenly this 4x4 owner was confronted with some very basic common sense. He didn’t answer but resorted to some very puzzled frowning and head scratching. The Land Rover Discovery3 as well as the Pajero owner, had (like me) nothing attached to the outside of their 4x4’s. No roof carrier and no roof top tent. That got me onto the second part of my theory which is that not all Land Rover owners are maximalists. It appears to be a Defender thing. Chatting to Pietman (Discovery3) I was astonished to listen to the pretzel logic of his product defence. "The reason the Land Rovers break half shafts so easily is a built in form of self protection so you don't damage the diff" He went on to say: "I have a light in my roof which goes on if I hit a bump too fast. It is the early Land Rover warning system to slow down" I am convinced he was serious. Then there is this brand new, black, Nissan X Trail. The ground clearance when loaded up is about 100mm. On the back window there are stickers of international flags – lots of them – about 60 in total, including the new SA flag, covering about half the rear window. Why? I ended up asking lots of those ‘why?’ questions during the trip. I can’t help it. The owner is 62 and sports a spectacularly low slung pot belly on an otherwise ordinary frame. He is a pleasant, nice person who chain smokes. He has decided, on initial sighting, that I am targeted as his new best friend. Now let me tell you, anyone that knows me understands my abhorrence of cigarette smoke. I was to be subjected to endless tales of self importance for the entire trip at each stop surrounded by clouds of recycled smoke. And then there's that first thing in the morning 'climb out the tent, light a fag, stretch, fart, good morning' routine which makes me want to run for the hills. We will get back to Tony later in this story. He has two kids inside the black X Trail – they are his grand children. He proudly informs me (he is one of those smokers who has acquired the ability to talk, smoke and breathe all at the same time hands free without removing the cigarette from his lips) that he has invented a wonderful device so as to avoid pollution and prevent forest fires. He explains further: “You see – you take an old beer or Coke tin and fill one quarter with water. Then you tie this onto the air vent on the dashboard with a cable tie. Then you can extinguish your stompies safely and without polluting the environment (which he pronounced enviament). “That is very clever” my wife said to him, coupled with a quick glance to me which said “Don’t you dare!” At that point I was about to ask him about his grand children having to endure passive smoking, but I rephrased it as a silent WHY? OK. Where was I? Oh yes, the campfire. Defender #2 driver, Giuseppe, at this point decides he would like to know what occupation each person does. So we go round the group like a bunch of drug rehab patients saying: “My name is Robby. I’m a car dealer” and so on. Each of these profession confessions is in turn interjected by some very witty remarks from Giuseppe. There are 16 of us sitting around the campfire. So we go.....car dealer, fashion designer, tour guide, meteorologist, vintner, bicycle mechanic, bicycle shop owner (which is bicycle mechanic’s wife), wine distributor, marketer, restaurant owner and finally the moment of truth for the XTrail owner. “And what do you do Tony?” asks Giuseppe. “Are you retired?” Laughter... “I am a pimp” “Ja, ja....come on. No seriously, what do you do?” “Seriously. I am a pimp. I own a brothel in the city.” Guiseppe: “Can my wife get a job with you. She is 40” Tony: “Sorry. Seriously. She’s too old” No more laughter. You could have heard a pin drop as the sounds of the fire burning seemed abnormally loud. He went on to explain further.... “I make good money. My new car is paid for in cash. My grand kids go to a private school. “ It was time for a topic change and probably just as well that everyone was inebriated at that stage. Did I forget to mention he was wearing a T shirt made from the old South African flag? There was more but not for telling here......So maybe I will buy a new carbon bicycle from Guiseppe and I might well sample the pasta at Guillermo’s restaurant, but I think the massage parlour will have to be deleted from my contact list. I’ll be buggered if I am going to fund the paint repairs on that black X Trail. The Baviaanskloof? Why? Because it is magnificent and I will be returning on my own or with a few friends. It was dry with a few wettish river crossings but absolutely nothing that could not have been done in a bakkie. We camped at Herons Cliff on the final night – a sort of B grade campsite with fairly basic facilities. Nearby there is an obstacle course which most of us went to play on later on the final day. The Camel men made a big hooh-hah about how effective their traction control systems were as they all successfully, amidst multi attempts, clouds of dust and stones, managed the fairly steep ascent with two nice axle twisters thrown in. I waited till last, then showed them just how capable the Cruiser is as I idled up the obstacle without a single wheel spin. They were subdued after that, but I did get a strafdop later, for being cocky. Defenders indeed. The weather was great. 25 to 31C during the day and -1 to 8 degrees at night. Having a sore throat and head cold made for grumpy nights sleep with SWAMBO wanting to “put me out of my snoring, gasping misery” by smothering me with a pillow. She later confessed that the only thing that kept her from executing (excuse the pun) her plan was the knowledge that I had not yet signed the new will. Now I know why! People are fascinating......

Adrenaline Addiction?! Not just for Bungee Jumpers!

2010-04-23T11:43:00.008+02:00

Awhile ago, I wrote a post about the difference in crime between South Africa and the threat of terrorism here in England. The main point I tried to make was that I could, to a degree, rationalise someone who was brought up in such dire poverty that crime was all he knew - as opposed to a terrorist killing on behalf of his chosen ideology. THIS got me into serious hot water with a South African ex-pat who attacked me for my short-sighted view of terrorists, saying: "You cannot understand why someone would make a statement for a political ideology but can understand children being killed for no apparent reason," and saying terrorists are 'freedom fighters'. Admittedly, I rashly used the word 'humanity' to describe the human element in our poverty-related crime such as hunger, fear, the need for shelter etc. and it was this that was misinterpreted by a few readers. Needless to say, I've at least been able to apologise for my thoughtless choice of word, thanks to the wonders of the 'comment' blog function! (Read the blog post and comments here to add your own *important* opinion.)
Today I am going to have to backtrack over my very own words - and if only there was a rewind button or virtual Tipp-Ex in Life - because I don't think I can honestly stand by what I said about our crime in South Africa since accidentally reading two devastating news clips that have left me reeling, and with tears. Normally, I refuse to read the news in a positive boycotting of what I see as the media's unnecessary thirst and glorification of blood - i.e. anything that resembles scandal, murder, assault, corruption, abuse, you name it, and the media relies on our bloodlust to sell advertising and column centiimetres. I prefer, thank you very much, to not ruin my day, so perfect with potential, with the horrors of 'the news'. My husband says I am unrealistic, but I honestly believe there has got to be a more constructive way of presenting what is actually important to us as a nation. I'm going to post the two links here for you to follow if you have a strong stomach - and if you are able to see why I have posted it.

And here's why. An experiment: mindfully read the two articles - paying very close attention to what happens to your heart rate, your breathing, if you begin to sweat, if you have a surge of adrenaline, what your most honest thoughts are, and your emotional state. (If you have the guts, please leave a record of it in the 'comments' section at the end of this post!)
Did you notice an initial sharp intake of breath? Perhaps your heart lurched forward as it was flooded with adrenaline? Palms sweaty, maybe? Did you think about how lucky you are to be 'safe', have electric-fencing or how you should get some - as in NOW?!
What I am proposing is that with the advent of the media and now its literal explosive presence and seeming inescapability, we have become adrenaline junkies. We live from fix to fix, from one shocking news report to the next. Tough to digest? I just Googled 'adrenaline addictive' and - sjoe! Go on - try it. And maybe, just maybe, you might be able to honest enough with yourself to admit that yes, the news keeps us informed, but I do not need to feast upon the terrors and tragedies of others. I can choose to tune it out. I can choose to not read these articles. And if you're afraid of 'losing touch with the world', ask yourself these two questions: if, after I make sure I and my family are as safe as is reasonable,
1. How did people live, say 200 years ago, without the kind of news we crave and are bombarded with on a moment-by-moment basis?
2. Why do I feel such a compulsive need to feel in control of 'the world' by knowing what's supposedly 'happening'?
The answer lies in a cycle of addiction to adrenaline. And the hallmark of an addict? Denial. The answer to recovery (and serenity) lies in our ability to be so honest with ourselves that we can come to a point of accepting we are addicted, and then - choosing to help ourselves.
Here are the two links: Parents and Baby. (Please, brave souls, leave your observations in the comments box.)
PS. Adrenaline Addicts Anonymous.

Braais, boerewors and beer!

2010-04-18T10:43:00.011+02:00

Ah! Spring has arrived magnificently early to adorn the memories of our last 9.5 weeks in England with happy nostalgia! Truly - yesterday was absolute English perfection; so much so that I had faintest whisper of regret that we'd be leaving so soon.
After months upon dreary month where the sun rises late and sets chillingly, perversely early, the sudden onset of spring and its 4am sunrise (almost!) dispels any memory of the perpetual winter darkness. And the sunsets... the gloriously late sunsets! It is this that makes the English summer so delicious, where the gentle warmth of the day sidles on late into the night, so that you find yourself sitting outside, blissfully daydreaming your way past your bedtime. But I'm getting stuck in poetic humdrum here - so let me tell you about yesterday and what was so perfectly English about it.
Layla and I waltzed down the stairs to find a blanket spread out on the grass, lamb chops defrosting on the garden bench (our boerewors supplies depleted) and a visibly ecstatic Craig sunning himself like a literate lizard, Stephen King book in hand. (To my horror and rampant frustration, Craig continues to worship the sun as if there were no such thing as skin cancer. AAARRRGH!!!) Anyway, after a quick rifle through the fridge, I decided a quick trip to the One Stop was in order! But then, relief like the coldest beer on a hot day flooded over me in as I remembered that our village now boasted its very own 'country store'. More like a deli with fresh veg, fruit, herbs, spices and racks of the most marvellous breads and fresh rolls, the exuberant and helpful owner, Lee, makes you feel as if you are in Franschoek! It has a certain 'Cape Town' vibe about it in its layout and ambience - so much so that I am blissed out into thinking I am back home already! (Lee's going to be opening out the back and the front of the store into a cafe - so at long blerry last I will have a place to go and boer with a cup of coffee! There are two pubs within walking distance of our front door, but the typical pub atmosphere with its frumpish dourness just wouldn't satisfy that constant craving I have for the kind of coffee culture we are so lucky to have in South Africa. The biggest problem, for me, with English pubs is not so much the olde worlde decor or the beer-guzzling patrons leaning against the bar as if they were holding each other up, but the simple fact that it feels too... exotic. I feel uncomfortably out of sorts in a pub - a 'sore thumb', if you will. Every single time (and perhaps I am overly sensitive) I enter a pub, I feel as if the usually close-knit beer-guzzlers turn around to stare, long and hard, in territorial defence of their turf. I even feel as if I have to talk quietly for fear of being teased out as a usurper! Ja, okay - I admit that's pretty ridiculous...) Ag no - I'm getting sidetracked again into complaining about being in England when, as I wandered along the blossom-strewn road to the shop yesterday, I had wanted to write about how beautiful and peaceful our little village is. And now I've run out of time. (Craig just got back after a trip to Kettering for what looks like twenty packs of boerewors! He saw how warm and sunny today promised to be, and he got a bee in his Eastern Cape bonnet and decided we had to braai --- again!)
PS. To make up for the fact that I didn't write about the loveliness of English village life, I've put up some pics of our village as evidence :)

Health24 - News, Columns

2010-04-10T13:34:00.000+02:00

Health24 - News, Columns
Want to get hold of this lekker lady - she has JUST the right attitude ;)

A Nation of Super-Heroes! (Do YOU have what it takes?)

2010-04-10T12:01:00.007+02:00

My PC is dragging its feet - my darling husband is half-watching some or other Super 14 game online - so I'm typing this post out in my Gmail as an email draft. (*sigh* the ever-present state of compromise/collaboration that characterises a happy marriage!) And I guess that brings me to what I want to write about today: accountability. As individuals. And as South Africans. (You know, I'm kind of getting tired of only writing and thinking (and dreaming!) about this whole Malema thing - and I yearn for something a little more frivolous and fun to discuss, but I am a bit like a bull-terrier: once I sink my teeth into something, there's no letting go until, well - for lack of a better analogy, the thing is dead. Kaput. Finito.
And no, I am not referring to the widely wished for death of a certain someone, because that wouldn't really solve anything. He is not actually the problem. He personifies the problem quite nicely, but I believe the problem lies much deeper. It is in your heart and mine. Let's face it: the heart of our nation is sick. It is damaged. It is weakened by rumours of war, plagued by ceaseless nightmares. And after this last week where I've been trying to roll out 'Malema, a Love Letter' across the country, what has made itself evident is the general South African attitude of lazy apathy, passive complacency, defensive/wounded egos and a tendency to blame. (Struggling with my mother-in-law's untimely death, I contacted a bereavement counsellor here in the UK for some outside advice - and ironically, she turned out to be South African. While I explained some of the issues surrounding our grief, she made a point I didn't like too much. She said that as a collective, South Africans tend to blame others for problems they themselves are actually responsible for. My immediate reaction? "No, I don't do that!" But since that day, and as I've been watching people reacting to my posts and things on the news, I am ashamed to admit that we do, in fact, blame anything and anybody we can. Blaming is the passive defence of a coward. The good news, however, is that it is never too late to change. And this begins with the renewing of our minds, one thought at a time. Be a hero! MAKE your voice count! Don't wait for miraculous change to suddenly appear out of thin air - or for somebody ELSE to effect the change you long for.

Blaming is the passive defence of a coward.

All my life, I've avoided politics like the plague that it is. So my current obsession with South Africa's political situation has taken me surprise - though, if I think about it, perhaps it is not that shocking after all: it is not so much about cold-blooded politics as a human drama with villains and heroes fighting for their own brands of justice. Seen like that, it makes our involvement as individuals that much more critical: we must fight with our own two hands, our minds, our hearts and our talents. Fight the GOOD fight.

So, what can you do today to make a difference? Write your letter to Malema.

(The mere fact that only THREE South Africans have purposefully taken this action is a direct reflection on the sick, sad 'passivism' paralysing us. Let's see if we can reach TWENTY letters by the end of the weekend. (The truth is, we need THOUSANDS of letters for this gesture to be noticed and broadcast by the likes of The Times and Carte Blanche.))

(This post is dedicated to Alan Straton and Edward Labuschagne from MyZA for personally choosing to champion this radically different approach! If you're on Facebook, join the group Edward created here.)

Malema, a Love Letter

2010-04-06T16:11:00.003+02:00

A few weeks ago, a story of mine called Homesickness or Headsickness was attacked by a South African expat bitterly living out his very obviously un-sunny days in Iceland. My initial reaction was one of sarcastic defensiveness (you can read the ensuing battle of words if you click on the aforementioned link) which had two disastrous effects:

1. All the hope and passion I'd been pouring into my Soutpiel project, as well as my imminent return home to South Africa was suddenly stained with the ugliness of egos clashing.
2. My response of lashing out at said expat only served to embitter him more, putting him on the defensive and thereby opening myself up to further attacks.

After the third vile comment was left by this clearly pissed-off soul, I found myself teetering precariously on the brink of a very dark and endlessly evil abyss: hate. And the feeling I was constantly fighting an enemy. Our instinctive reaction to being threatened is to fight back - fire with fire, an eye for an eye. But clearly, this 'natural' fight-instinct was doing neither myself, my 'enemy' nor my country any good. Instead, all it did was enrage us all and continue to poison the system that is South Africa's current state.

As in every situation, I had a choice: I could simply (and it is deceptively and beautifully simple) defuse the bomb before it went off. How? By smothering it with kindness and love. Logically, I did not know this person from Adam - so who was I actually raging against? He was a fellow South African and I was damn well going to embrace him - despite our opposing ideas. Putting my silly little ego aside, I chose to:

1. apologise for my sarcastic response, admitting that I was wrong.
2. try and answer his questions from a place of heartfelt and honest humility.
3. invite his comments again in future, even if they would be contrary to my own ideas.

And do you know what? After his barrage of comments on each and every post, I've never heard from him again. And, if I do, I will think before I feel. i.e. I will smile and sort out an ego-free response instead of blindly and childishly lashing out in defense.

The best part? Inasmuch as it is a universal human trait to fight what you feel is an enemy attack, it is also human nature to succumb to forgiveness, humility and lovingkindness as an alternative. Hence why I am proposing this nationwide project as a means to defuse the bomb that we are afraid is Julius Malema. Instead of sitting back, a herd of apathetic 'passivists and pouring all of our negativity (anger, fear, hostility) like so much poison into the closed system of our country, let us instead CHOOSE another way, a better way:

write a letter, personally addressed to Julius Malema, detailing your dreams and hopes for this country we love, showing the recipient why he should trust you. The only condition is this: IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER may you personally attack Julius Malema for anything he has said or done in the past. It is so easy (and short-sighted) to demand the very opposite, but let us try this as a nationwide experiment. Let us show, each and every single one of us, only a tiny mustard seed of faith as we put pen to paper.
Please post your letters to: P.O. Box 3955, North End, 6056

or simply submit them online here: write to Julius Malema

Once I have received all the letters, I shall unite them all into a permanent public sculpture which will be handed over as a gift of hope to Julius Malema and the ANC. (In the interim, I will be publishing the emailed letters online here at Ukukulisa.)

PS. There is no age or literacy limit: letters can be sent as drawn images, poems, collages and photographs.

Hero or Sponge?

2010-03-17T10:17:00.009+01:00

Analytically browsing today's news to see how much good news there was in comparison to bad, I happened upon this article: Baby saved from rubbish dump. Sadly ... no! Hang on! I am ashamed to admit that I succumbed to exactly what I'm trying to fight: all these negative stereotypes about South Africa, staged as 'facts' by the media. Right up until the 'n' of South African I typed before I thought, "No ways, this HAS to be a universal problem. We're not the only country that struggles with poverty... or postnatal depression..." But before I jump up onto my beloved soapbox, let me just say that I am impressed with News24 and Die Burger journalist, Kobus Pretorius, who managed to make this story more than just a wallow-in-more-apathy story by proactively introducing us to solutions to the problem and the heroes providing these solutions. (Check out - and support! - Molo Songololo in any way you can. "Molo Songololo" is Xhosa for 'Hello Millipede'!)

Isn't it strange how, when I initially read the news story, my first reaction was one of, "It's such a South African problem." This knee-jerk reaction is what the scaremongers and our mainstream media rely on - and in some ways, it feels to me like we're being controlled like puppets by our media. Think of all the times the news hypes something up, like petrol increases, swine flu, the recession, only for it to pass by with very little of the impact they forecast. I like to call this 'awfulising'; that is, when something gets spoken about from a completely blinkered and biased perspective. You will even notice this in your everyday interactions with colleagues, family and friends (and, let's hope not, maybe in yourself!) Awfulising functions like the most vicious circle, devouring any joy and hope in its path. Awfulising is a a sickness that starts with one and corrupts us all. A pandemic. The sad paradox is that the very opposite is true of truth and peace and loving joy: it is almost a Sisyphysian struggle to reverse the damage wrought by being relentlessly negative - but thankfully, it is not impossible. I think victory begins with us as individuals. We can choose what we allow into our lives (i.e. choose the newspapers you read etc.) and we can choose how we convey ourselves through life. Do we allow the negativity in the news to paralyse us into passive, unthinking sponges? Or do we confront the news with our emotions and minds fully engaged, ready to do whatever it takes to make a difference? Don't get me wrong - I'm not advocating saving the world. It's about being a proactive human being in your own world. For example, take the story of the little 8-month old abandoned princess. Read the story, and minutely examine your gut reaction and your thoughts. Instead of allowing your mind to be controlled by stereotypes, decide to examine the situation more deeply. Hunt down the real facts behind the story. Brainstorm ways in which you could personally effect change. Even if all you do is change your own mindset from an awfulising one, this will make a magnificent difference! It affects how often you smile, how deeply you feel, how you talk about things. This is as contagious as the sunniest smile!
Reading about Molo Songololo, I wracked my brains for ideas on how I, personally, could help them help our children. Because I don't have oodles of cash, at the moment all I can do is send a small amount in donation. But what I do have plenty of is contacts and access to the internet. Solution? 1. Email the charity to find out how I could specifically help them, also asking interview-like questions. 2. Write a story about them, with their contact details, for publication. 3. Generate dialogue about them with my friends and contacts to raise the charity's social profile (and hopefully their budget too!) and increase awareness of the issues surrounding abandoned babies. I could also suggest blankets, clothes and food be donated to Molo Songololo (and yes, I am STILL crimson from that ridiculous faux pas on live bloody radio! lol)

PLEASE leave your ideas about how you initially react to 'bad' news (if you're brave enough to be that honest!) and if you would like to join me in my quest to revolutionise the South African media one editor at a time ;)

PS. SAfm want to feature me again - this time for a ten minute slot on their Sunday evening show (faux pas and all!) And this weekend, I'm going to be interviewed as part of a documentary about returning South Africans! The media are taking notice! So leave your name as part of your personal commitment to this revolutionary adventure!

PPS. After reading page after page in the world's news about abandoned babies in Chine, Argentina, England, America, Germany and Kenya (to name a few), my heart bloated helplessly with anguish... I couldn't bring myself to look at another article about just how many babies are left for dead - and that's why, instead of writing about it as a world-wide disease, I told you about Molo Songololo and how to become a hero yourself!

Faux Pas Poephol...

2010-03-14T08:38:00.004+01:00

An unusually early morning for me - but at least the dark English nights are getting shorter and shorter! YEEHAAA!! (I can tell you what - there is NOTHING more disturbing to the African soul than this perpetual darkness that is the deep bleakness of the English winter. When I was teaching at a little school in Kettering in the very pregnant months before Layla was born, driving to school in the pitch blackness and coming home in it too, was incredibly disheartening... ).................................................. inbetween that first paragraph and now, SAfm called me for my interview and EISH!!!! I'm not too sure how I feel about the whole thing, but I wish I could have been a bit more prepared. As my dad warned, they tried to catch me out with a HIGHLY political question about Malema and this R250 million thingymajig in the news this morning... And I made a disastrous faux pas - and there's absolutely NO WAY on this sweet earth that I can go back in time to change it :( I mentioned how a child psychologist and blankets could be sent to the family of the young girl murdered in Pretoria a few days ago... but I was actually thinking about my original blog post the whole interview was based on in which I wrote about how, if you read in the news about a little baby having been raped in Khayelitsha, you should be spurred into action - e.g. to phone the paper and see how you could help: send blankets, food or maybe, if you're a child psychologist offer to do some pro bono work with the child and her family. Bugger. Bugger. Bugger. My heart's prayer is that I haven't upset that girl's family with my foot-in-mouth disease...)

{ in memoriam }

2010-03-06T14:46:00.004+01:00

Today I am finding it hard to write, let alone to even think straight... You see, one of my most special friends, Jules, woke up this morning to find her baby son had died in his sleep. Writing about it seems somehow wrong, and yet - also the only thing I can do. My heart pounds with a sick sense of sacrilegious guilt, but also the desire to honour her and her son, Jude, in the only way that I can.

I can only hold her in my thoughts like this - in words, and ask you to add your prayers to mine, because Jules and Simon live in Cape Town. So far away that I cannot drive to her house and tell her I love her, and hold her. So far away that we lost touch over a petty misunderstanding for more than a year, while we were both pregnant and new mommies - a time we should have shared, because we used to chat constantly about it with incredible yearning in our younger years. (Surely it was just yesterday that we met in the corner of the Primi Piatti lounge one late afternoon after work, and when Jules replaced her usual order of red wine with a non-alcoholic beer, she didn't have to explain that special smile on her face...)

It was only a few weeks after that, and Craig asked me to marry him - and then suddenly we were in England - and I was pregnant too. Jules came over to the UK, 6 months' pregnant with precious Jude, to shoot a wedding - and we planned to meet up somehow in the short window of time she was here. But between me and my incessant, debilitating nausea and vomiting, and Jules's mounting frustration with indifferent friends, we misinterpreted each other so tragically, that we stopped contacting each other in our imagined hurt. The thought of travelling via a daunting number of trains from Northampton to London with my new talent for unpredictable emesis was beyond my scope of possibility - but Jules felt she wasn't worth the effort. If only she had known the truth of my heart then. I feel like our emotional separation can partly be blamed on our physical distance apart; were we in Cape Town, this would never have happened. I would simply have phoned her, and she'd have heard the exhaustion in my voice and instinctively, and with her habitual kindness, understood. It was the double misinterpretation of our text messages back and forth that caused this sudden rift in a friendship that had run long and deep and true for so many years...

About 6 weeks ago, she sent me a message on FB, and we've been emailing each other - trying to catch up on each others' journeys inbetween being mommies and artists. Her last email to me expressed how much she loved her son as 'the MOST adorable child under the sun'... And to think I have been 'too busy' to reply to that email... I had so much I wanted to share with her, so many questions to ask her. And now, I can never ask those questions. Ever. I dreamed about Layla and Jude playing in the sand on Blouberg beach together, while Jules and I sat nearby, chatting and skinnering like old times - our eyes saying everything when words fail us.

This is why I am moving home. Home is where your heart has sent down its roots. Into the rich, deep earth that is hearing your friend's car turn into your driveway, jumping to pay for your coffees before she does, wrapping up that perfect book for her birthday you just know she's been drooling over all year but couldn't afford, picking up her little son when he falls because you love him like your own...

(I don't know how many of you noticed the 'PS' to my last blog post where I mentioned Jules and her photography? Before she was married to Simon, she worked as a temp doing random secretarial work -- and photographing things so exquisitely and with such tender clarity, that we all took notice and spurred her on to follow her magnificent talent! It became a figurative and a literal voyage. An exploration, an adventure, a pilgrimage... She travelled through Europe, and then eventually all the way back from London, with Simon in their sturdy and well-equipped Land Cruiser, through Israel, Egypt, Sudan ... all the way to their goal and destination, Cape Town. Her catalogue of photographs from this journey make visual the endless depths of beauty she so effortlessly gives us with her heartfelt, creative vision. We started writing a book together based on this African adventure, but I was 'too busy'. Today's tears cannot wash away how sorry I am, Jules.)

Only four more months to go.

Balls to the Wall: FIFA 2010

2010-03-03T11:30:00.004+01:00

The last week has been what some might call 'insane'. Layla's molars are pushing through her tender little gums, making for a desperately miserable little bub who just wants to be either in her mama's arms, on her lap or no less than a strict 1-metre radius away. Hence why there has been zilch writing on my part.

As I type, she sits behind me on the floor, unpacking the box of Craig's heavy collection of Stephen King books we're going to ship home - each book preciously hunted down at many consecutive car boot sales last summer. Anyway, that's besides the point. What I've been wanting to write about is the FIFA World Cup - of which yesterday marked the 100-day count-down. It feels like just yesterday when I drove to Cape Town International to pick Craig up when he was still so ardently trying to woo me into the holy state of matrimony, and flying down from PE every other month - and seeing the giant digital countdown below the advert for FIFA 2010 with 600-and-something days to still go! And now, only 99... And it's not just on our South African minds - the whole world is watching, even the sweet old man who helped me put petrol in yesterday in the village of Brixworth!

Putting petrol in has got to be one of the things I am simply going to ADORE leaving behind me when we come home in July! I have no idea why, but I find it quite a humiliating experience - and ---------- eish!! I think I'm going to have to finish this when Layla has all her gnashers above the gumline. Give me a few days (hold thumbs!) and I'll be back with a vengeance ;)

Wanna Hear Some Good News?

2010-02-23T16:09:00.012+01:00

Before he even asks how my day was, Craig asks if I read The Herald. That's how important the news is to him. I find reading the news a chore, a bore and mostly, something to ignore. Corruption, rape, murder, robbery. There is hardly ever anything to make you smile, reminisce or inspire.

I've actually often felt that, what I shall henceforth call 'The News', preys on the human mind's natural tendency to be drawn to the negative: moths to flames. It's a bit like gossip. Have you ever noticed how macabrely delicious it is to have a fat skinner about So-and-So who was caught doing such-and-such? Isn't it the same with The News? It never fails to cause me great existential pain to see why News like a baby being raped must be exposed and brutalised by so many eyes who, when they read it, seldom think about that specific child, but instead blow it up into generalisations (e.g. the crime in this country is out of control) and self-centred ruminations such as, "Thank goodness my child is safe." It is as if The News is simply reflected out like so much bad energy, instead of it becoming absorbed and then acted upon in a positive way. Perhaps money could be donated, or time, or clothes. Communities could gather and increase their sense of community policing. But instead, all The News seems to do is strengthen the apathy already out there, and ANAESTHETISE everyone into an unthinking, unfeeling, passive herd.

And so it was with kismetical delight that I stumbled upon South Africa - The Good News! as well as MyZA At last!!!!!!!! Hang on a minute - did I hear someone calling me 'Ostrich'? I am not 'in denial about the facts of South Africa' as someone recently said to me, but I seek to make myself aware of ALL the facts. And by that I mean that I actively look for the good news about South Africa, and try to view the negative news with a social activist's perspective: i.e. if you read about a baby being raped in Khayelitsha, allow your (righteous) anger to compel you to action, by calling up the newspaper and seeing if there was a way you could get a parcel of food or clothes and blankets to the child's parents; or if you know of a child psychologist, phone them and ask if they would be willing to work with this child on a pro bono basis. (Have I been watching too much TV? Is it only lawyers who do pro bono work?!) The other thing I do when people throw SA's crime problem in my face is counter it with facts about the crime in other countries. i.e. like how in the UK you are not afraid of a poor person mugging you for your spare change, but terrified of children. Kapish?

Wouldn't it be incredible to see everyone boycotting The (Bad) News, and switching over to The Good News until The (Bad) News underwent a radical transformation? I wonder what impact this would have on our collective South African consciousness? I could bet my HEART that a miracle would occur!

PS. For exquisitely heartfelt art-photographs of Africa, visit Jules Comley's website. (Her and husband, Simon, travelled down through Africa from London to Cape Town in their Land Cruiser a few years ago - it was how they decided to make their epic trek back home after quite a number of Soutie years oustide of London.)

Homesickness or Head-sickness?!

2010-02-17T17:52:00.010+01:00

Come rain or shine, hell or high water, Craig begins his day with a cup of coffee and The Herald. Besides the fact that he wishes his coffee was a 'regte egte koppie Ricoffy', reading the South African news is his way of maintaining his roots while we're living abroad. More importantly, his reading of The Herald connects him to Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Cape. If a place could be a religion, Craig would be the most zealous and fervent Port Elizabthanite! But what is so intriguing about this ritualistic reading of a newspaper from home is this: reading about home is the LAST thing I would choose to do precisely because it reminds me too much of NOT being home. Each to their own, I suppose. Last year, bursting at the seams with a Layla-bun in the oven, watching Madiba's birthday being screened by the BBC was so excruciatingly painful I fled the tormenting sweetness of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika for my bedroom upstairs, my pillow damp with being plain pissed-off with myself for choosing to come to England a second time. Being universes away from my parents and Craig's parents while their first grandchild was on its way continues to weigh upon my heart. To explain the extent of the guilt I feel for having prevented my mother from proudly rubbing my growing belly cannot be explained away in a self-indulgent blog post... But anyway, I'm getting carried away. What is so incredibly interesting is how each South African has their own 'heart-balms' they use to soothe the aches of the immigrant-soul. I would love to hear from ANYONE who reads this blog (yip - that means you!)about their own personal heart-balms. (-4C outside, and the soft, white snow --- no longer so exotic -- tumbles down from ashen skies... you can actually hear the snow falling, a hushed susurration - a blanket. Now too dangerous to drive, I'm kicking myself for not remembering to buy loopaper and the aubergines I needed to try my Bengali dish again! But - as a consolation, I have Radio Algoa and a glorious cup of rooibos warmly reminding me we will be home just now.)

Getting back to what I was saying about reading The Herald, since we made the decision to return home, I've been able to read it quite happily - with none of that angst that comes with living in denial about how darn shitty it is to live in another country. England, to be precise. (Maybe it's not so bad in Aussie?) And because we''ll be based in the Eastern Cape, I decided to get involved and register as a user so I could comment on the various news articles. Admittedly, I rushed rather unthinkingly to make my first comment. What a disaster!! The article in question involved various government officials flying to Bloem in an air ambulance to ... wait for it: watch a soccer match! Merely for the sake of making a comment, I jumped in and said something about moving back to South Africa from the UK. Needless to say, the other users climbed in with their apathetic South African aggro - and I'm still smarting from the humiliation of exposing myself without thinking. SO much of what is supposedly 'wrong' with South Africa can surely be blamed on the kind of attitudes exhibited below.

It's a big adjustment coming back to SA. I know the weather in the UK is a big factor on quality of life but think carefully about coming back. After Jacob (Loverboy) Zuma's state of the nation speech, I don't see much of anything getting better...this country is on the way to being Africa's richest banana republic.

The above user, I am absolutely, vehemently, adamantly certain, has never lived in England. Sure, the weather's not great - but it is more the pervasive, beige chill of the country as a whole that is a problem for an African who lives life in full colour! My advice to him? Travel a little - it's an instant remedy for blinkeritis.

The next user deserves a swift lobotomy-by-snot-klap. Only a white person would say something with such heartless cruelty that rings frighteningly of Adolf Hitler's 'Final Solution',

Aids is our only hope.

This oke says he lived in Germany for 2 years. And honestly? Two years in another country is more like an extended working-holiday than actual emigration. The first time I lived in the UK was for four years - and time and again, it takes between 4 and 6 years for the reality of it to set in. Mr Germany - if it's so bad in SA, go back to Germany for another four years. And actually - don't bother coming back. We don't need wet-towels like you.

think real hard before coming back. I immigrated to Germany for two years and made the biggest mistake of my life coming back...from structure, 1st world services to corruption and chaos. I urge you to think carefully.

This next quote is from someone living overseas - and thinks he as the right to decide what 'civilization' is! The crime in South Africa is a problem - but there is a serious problem with crime in England too. Children murdering children. Psychotic, knife-wielding teenagers. Terrorism.

are you utterly crazy? How can you think of giving up life in relative civilization to return to the third world shambles SA has become? I myself would rather die where I am right now than ever return to that corrupt hellhole.

I wonder if this guy has ever been personally touched by terrorism? On the 7th of July 2005, I called my sisters to cancel our date to meet them in London to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Tate Modern. Quite why I cancelled is hazy to me now, but thank goodness I did! That was the day London and the very trains I was going to be travelling on were targeted by terrorists. And to be very honest, I can rationalise poverty-induced crime. I can even understand the anger behind not-having and the violent hijackings and robberies that result from this. Don't get me wrong: I still lock my doors etc and believe ANY crime is wrong, but there is a degree of humanity in much of our South African crime. i.e. hate, anger, fear, hunger - and simply not knowing any better for lack of opportunity. But terrorism? No. There is nothing in the terrorist that I can relate to as a human being. I am choosing to take the necessary safety measures when I am back in South Africa, and living with the reality that I could become a victim of violent crime. But this is a much more tolerable choice than continuing to live in a country that is hated and continually targeted by terrorists.

Last but not least, Homecoming Revolution has been a magnificent source of encouragement and practical advice, and besides receiving their newsletters, I recently joined their Facebook page. And there, I couldn't help but comment again - though this time, more thoughtfully. The comment I replied to:

What home-coming revolution? They left of their own free-will because they didn't want to be a part of the New South Africa. The damn racists. Let them stay where they are.

This meneer , as I saw from his photo and name, is black - and I'm not just talking about his mood! He and our aforementioned Nazi friend should get together and have a lekker chat. That wouldn't accomplish much, I suppose... But wouldn't it be great if they could see how racism, as a double-sided coin (or is it 'sword'?) is the very cause of all their issues regarding the state of our nation?

"Invictus" partially reviewed!

2010-02-14T13:00:00.005+01:00

How many films has this film-addict seen since her child was born 51 weeks ago? Zilch. To only see snippets and beginnings of films feels like sacrilege, or a violent dismembering of my imagination! I'd rather actually not watch any films than this. Anyway, self-pity aside, Craig put 'Invictus' on for us the other night while we sipped our usual poison, munched our way through matching pepperoni pizzas and tried to entertain a rumbunctious, over-tired Layla. Half an hour into the film, not even having been able to hear above Layla's happy squawking if the 'South African' accents were a good copy or not, I had to make the irritated decision to pause the movie so I could get Layla off to bed.

But................ what I can say about the film is that Morgan Freeman is a man with such gentle strength and quiet dignity as to be the only actor capable of doing Tata Madiba the homage he deserves. Other roles that Morgan Freeman has portrayed impacted heavily (and not just on me - but the whole movie-watching world, I think) as a collective, iconographic sort-of influence on Mandela's persona in the film. If you think of Freeman's role of God in 'Bruce Almighty', his portrayal of a prisoner in 'The Shawshank Redemption', and another - slightly more obscure one - the blind piano tuner in "Danny The Dog" where Freeman's character is endlessly kind, wise and all-seeing. (If you never thought an action film could EVER be poetic and a work of art, you're wrong! Four years after seeing it, and my heart pounds a little faster...) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> my two brothers-in-law are making us boerewors rolls for lunch and then we're heading to a pub called 'The Aviator' at the aerodrome nearby: I'll have to finish up writing later ;)

...........After my pint of Guinness, I took Layla in my arms and follwed Craig and his boets to survey the vast grassy airfield, bereft of sunshine and blue skies, and sporting only a thick grey mist - probably why there were no planes to be seen. Two, most definitely African, couples walked into the glass-encased viewing space - and Craig and Co. exited politely -- while I, probably too inquisitively, chatted to them and asked them if they were also from Africa. "Zimbabwe," the one lady beamed. I don't really know how to explain this, but black people from Africa living in the UK look African - as opposed to looking like black Brits. Does that make sense? I don't know if it is something in their body language or their demeanor, but over the span of six years of fellow-African-spotting, I have never been wrong. Quite what it is continues to elude me. To use words like 'humility' might have a slightly racist slant... but there is definitely something Africans exude which is somehow magnetic, like a deep drumbeat, a vital heartbeat. And actually, to be quite honest, many white South Africans living abroad also emanate this same power. For example, arriving at Terminal 5 in June last year to fly to South Africa, Layla - at 3.5 months miaowed hungrily for a feed. And do you know, that bench after unbudging bench of waiting English passengers simply looked the other way in an obvious act of protecting 'their' space. But, a few benches along, an older woman waved us over, her smile telling us the same thing as her passport: she was South African! She shifted over to the most cramped corner of the bench, making it seem like the most welcoming oasis of calm and benificence. Within minutes I had Layla latched on for a feed, her frantic cries at last appeased, and Yvonne and I were chatting the hind legs off donkeys! (I still actually have her email address scribbled on a torn scrap of paper in my wallet... I must email her!)

Gosh - what a tangent that was!! The Zimbabweans.
"We watched this cool film, 'Invictus' - have you seen it?" I told them I had watched the beginning half hour - and Morgan Freeman was hailed by them as the perfect man to portray Madiba. They had actually all seen "Danny the Dog" - what a stroke of serendipitous African kismet! I could have chatted to them all afternoon... But the boys were on tenterhooks, trying not to look impatient as they waited to leave for the next game of rugby, so Layla and I bade adieu - and my heart felt a little (no, a LOT) lighter for having met them.

Time has run out for the day - and I'm going to head to bed to read a couple more pages of Julie/Julia but which I continue to read with slightly irritated skepticism, knowing how Julia Child really felt about 'The Project' and that Julie actually divorces her husband in real life. Yes, in real life.

Part 3: Chubby and Proud!

2010-02-04T09:37:00.009+01:00

Having just scoffed some of last night's tortilla (i.e. not the pancake, but an authentic Spanish omelette but with a Lisa-twist: instead of King Edward potatoes, I used sweet potato and bacon, laced with garlic and chopped, fresh coriander) for breakfast in front of my laptop while checking email, I realised I hadn't written for aaaages on this blog, and couldn't really think of anything specific I would even want to write about. Why? With only 5 months to go until we are back in our magnificent South Africa, I am so focused on preparations that there's simply no time for brooding on things 'Soutie'. Obviously, the discrepancies between my homeland and this land of a 1/8 of my ancestry are still glaringly blatant on a moment-by-moment basis, but I've just got no energy to try and metabolise them through writing. (Other ancestral input? Norwegian, Sicilian, Dutch and German... 'n Regte-egte pavement-special, as we say in South Africa!)

A couple of days have passed since the sudden full-stop of the last paragraph. (There was even a bit more writing that happened last night but was interrupted, and made no sense this morning, so I deleted it: and instead of allowing myself to become angry about this constant state of interruption and the fact that my writing never seems to amount to more than these little blog posts, I've decided to let go of my quite selfish ambitions and focus on the source of interruptibility: my Layla. Before too long, she won't need me and I will be the needy one! Besides which, there is no point in fighting something which feels impossible, at this stage, to change. i.e. asking for some time to write, or paint (or catch up on sleep) is just not something my better half can quite understand from my point of view, no matter how hard and eloquently I try to explain. (I know I am not alone, ladies...) Conclusion: 1. My time will come (both senses of 'time' intended.) 2. In a roundabout way, I have illustrated 'What is healing but a change in perspective' with another real-life scenario, without ever having actually successfully explained my first scenario.

To go back to that, because I knew that sugar was my main problem, I decided I needed something to radically alter my perspective on it. Googling 'why sugar is bad for you' was enough to detrimentally sober my addiction to it forever! Besides a list of 146 things sugar does to your body, including myopia, my biggest spook was that when sugar is metabolised, alcohol is released as a byproduct, giving you a high not dissimilar to that given by my beloved vino. And, as alcohol is a mind-altering substance, I could see how I was *ab*using sugar to get me through the day both physically, in terms of energy, and emotionally/psychologically. The crunch? I was an addict. It was this that was the trigger for me: I did NOT, under ANY circumstances,want to be an addict - especially not a fat, (even more) myopic, constipated etc addict! Perhaps the biggest wake-up call for me was realising that an addiction to sugar is a precursor to alcoholism. (And that is another whole set of blog posts altogether...)

And so, suddenly, my perspective on my health, the food I was putting into my body and the reason why, underwent a shockingly swift change: that milky, sweet coffee that reminded me of my mom and our family home was suddenly not so nostalgically innocent. (Puts a whole new spin on sweetly sentimental, doesn't it?) Here I was inducing a high every few hours throughout the day to ease the homesickness. (Oh *&$@ - I just realised: I got my two blogs confused!!! May I blame it on not having slept the last two nights please?!) It suddenly became so easy to switch that sugary coffee for an unsweetened mug of rooibos tea. And now, every 3 or so days, I will make myself a 'Mommy-coffee' - but then I savour it, sip by indulgent sip, mindfully enjoying it for all it represents - instead of mindlessly glugging back mugfulls of it every day.

(A quick note before I head upstairs to fold some laundry: I was only drinking about 2 or maaaaybe three of these cups of coffee a day (1 heaped teaspoon of sugar), but it was also the biscuits I had WITH the coffee that contributed to my escalating addiction -- and widening hips!)

In the pipeline is a book I may be writing on my own or co-writing with an expert in the chosen field, as well as my own Etsy shop (though I am still looking for the perfect name to work under...) which I may or may not be sharing with my darling mom. (We've been dreaming about this for absolute YONKS, but we both allow mediocrity to distract us. Maybe this'll be the year, hey Mommy?)

{PS. Wishes vs Resolutions, I cheated and Part 1 and 2 of Chubby and Proud are on my other blog.}

Jingle Bells...

2009-12-17T17:12:00.002+01:00

As Christmas draws near, being a Soutie becomes harder than ever. Harder in what way? Well, it's difficult to hear the sad longing in your mother's sigh which screams with her ache to spend her grand-daughter's first Christmas with. It is unbearable to face the guilt that it is ME who is robbing her of this. It is also hard to be a tiny little South African family, celebrating alone amidst the Christmassy chaos of huge English families - where Christmas seems to go on and on and on and on... and on... Christmas is so very different here that it doesn't feel so much exotic as alien. Having grown up on songs and imagery of the iconographic white Christmas, I still hunger for my hot, sweaty Christmas where we swim to cool off and sommer stick the turkey on the braai. (Saying that, I must admit that as the softest flurry of snow swirled outside our lounge window, I did think it was beautiful and special. Especially as the log fire burning in the fireplace glowed lovingly just for us.)
Another way in which I find Christmas here hard to bear, is the whole Christmas card thing! It is a national hobby here, where everyone competes for the supposedly covetable prizes - namely, "I Got The Most Cards" and "I Sent The Most Cards". I see my friends' FB status updates about how many cards they've managed to write out, despite suffering from various viruses etc etc etc - and here I am, the disorganised new South African mum who hasn't even managed to THINK about shopping for Christmas cards, let alone actually managing to buy them! At one point I had the idea of doing the charitable thing and sending online cards - i.e. save trees, save clutter, save time and save the world's famine/homelessness/etc in one happy swoop! But, alas, I haven't been back to the site to actually do it - but I have a few days, I suppose. (It's a wee bit of a cop-out from my usual way of doing things - but heck: being able to get to the post-office in this s*%$#y weather and about 300 other excuses would be a success I am not sure I'm very capable of achieving these days! Last year, it was because I was heavily pregnant. Hang on a minute - I did manage to send postcards to South Africa last year! Ok. So we can blame it on Layla then!)
Layla's first Christmas is going to a complicated affair, but one which will never be forgotten! To keep it as concise as possible for you (and for me!), here are our arrangements in point form:
21st Dec: Craig gets paid and we'll put our heads down, hold our noses closed and plunge into the claustrophic depths of Kettering's white-trashness to hunt for affordable gifts for our guests.
22nd Dec: Get the house ready for the onslaught of friends and family (what was that I said earlier about our little lonely Christmas?! lol)
23rd Dec: Welcome Ricky and Emma who'll be arriving in their Spaceship (a converted Toyota camper van) as well as Gary (Craig's boet who lives near Reading.)Craig and Gary will probably do a massive food shop (good luck to them!) at Sainsbury's.
24th Dec: eating, drinking, sleeping, talking - what else can you do here?! (Celebrate my mom and dad's wedding anniversary, and also relish my inexhaustible collection of memories where we celebrated Christmas Eve as a family because of our Norwegian roots: swimming all day, into out pyjamas, singing carols, waiting to hear the reindeers' bells approaching from the golf course, looking out the window to see if we could spot Father Christmas who would invariably interrogate us about having been good all year long (or not!) and checking to see how tidy our bedrooms were, before sitting down in the family room with his big black bin-bag spilling over with the gorgeousness of Christmas! All the kisses that would be bestowed on the givers, and that magical feeling of waking up the next morning, knowing you had all this new stuff! (Sjoe - this is when I wish I had access to the amazing photo-albums my mom has created for us over the years -- I know EXACTLY which photograph I would scan and stick up here: the photo of me with my twin sisters, 8 and 7 years' old respectively, neatly pyjamaed up, my hair in a just-brushed plait - our skins burnished with the summer gold of swimming and playing outside every single day of the holiday. Our eyes are actually glittering with the overwhelming excitement of anticipation - over our sung carols, we are straining to hear the gentle jingling of bells... and the soft plodding of my father's black rubber gardening boots on the brick paving outside. Realising my dad was Father Christmas at six years' old actually did nothing to diminish the perfection that was Christmas. Thank you, Mommy and Daddy! WOW! What a lucky girl I was - and am!) From next year, I am hoping my dear old Pops will dress up again - but this time, for another little girl he adores! Oops - sidetracked. What's new?!
25th Dec: An Antipodean-style Christmas with our Aussie pals, minus the swimming and braai/BBQ. i.e. lots of alcohol and meat!!!
26th Dec: Gary and Craig will drive to Heathrow to pick up their youngest brother, David, who is going to brave the UK to teach for a few years. And then Christmas all over again: with the addition of David, Dinee, Gareth (their aunt and uncle) and two cousins (teenage boys who eat mountainously huge portions). So: more booze and more meat.
27th: say adios to Ricky and Emma, and go to the most bizarre but lovely couple for drinks: I met her while singing in our village choir: a bit deaf, talks louder than me (!), and with teeth as crooked as her sense of humour. Her skinny-ness and spiky, thinning, dyed-red hair contrasts so blaringly with her husband's soft roly-poly quiet well-spokenness (a barrister), that it binds them together in a kind of perfection so touted by that cliche of 'opposites attract'!
New Years? Fireworks (if you can't beat them, join them!!) and something random in the cuisine department: Mexican maybe, with Tamara and Dave: South African friends we made here!
I hope your Christmas will be delicious and divine!
PS. We met Ricky and Emma the day after our wedding in Addo - and spent the night happily cementing a friendship which feels like we have been friends forever! Here they are with Layla the day we met them:

Rainbow Nation

2009-12-13T15:19:00.001+01:00

Oncorhynchus_mykiss, originally uploaded by Michael.Alexander.McQueen.

Layla's asleep, and I'm about to try and get as much done on my A2 watercolour of a rainbow trout - a surprise gift for my darling landlord's 60th birthday. Who knows how long Layla will sleep for - but hopefully long enough for me to lay down the basics in pencil!

Ras, rugby and reefer...

2009-11-16T10:04:00.004+01:00

Gosh. It's been awhile, hey? I can't actually remember the last time I sat down to write on my blog. There've been a few rushed scribblings inbetween steaming vegetables for purees, changing nappies, kissing tears away, playing on the floor pretending to be a rabbit with Layla's pink stockings on my head and shaking my 'ears' about just to hear the most INCREDIBLE laugh you have EVER heard! I know that on the first morning she goes to school, I will sit down with a quiet cup of lonely tea and wish that I hadn't wished for more me-time...
Not being a fan of any sort of sport, I do manage to get excited enough about the Bokke to watch their odd game. Especially while languishing in this chilly, grey outpost, awaiting my self-imposed exile to end! (Yip - feeling pretty bleak at the moment with another English Christmas approaching.) But back to that fateful, or is it fatal, game between the Boks and France. I didn't watch the game - but instead watched Craig watch the game on the laptop - and from where I was sitting, it looked painful. Groans, anguished grunting and winces of humiliation said it all. Personally, and despite not having an ounce of rugby knowledge, I can DEFINITELY diagnose the cause of the demise: Ras Dumisani.
To quote my dear father: "What a shocking disgrace. He must've smoked a whole arm of boom before the performance. Idiot. Not one note in key and he didn’t know the words either. He should get a flogging for that." I'm not too sure it is Ras's fault. I mean, did he even know he was there? He looked to me like he was flying very high, somewhere very far away. So can he truly be blamed for this atrocity? I blame the poephol who hired him! Whatever HE was smoking must be a thousand times stronger than ol' Ras Dumisani's brand of boom. A little French schoolboy would have done Schalkie a lot more patriotically proud than this 'goefed', has-been, ex-pat Rasta. All I've heard is it was the South African Embassy in France who hired the oke. He should've hired him some bodyguards at the same time - Schalk's face at the said: "Ek gaan jou blerry bliksem, jou &%(**&^%&^%&%&^$$$@*(*)(!!!!!"
Time to go - again. But please be sure to leave your comments about Ras, rugby and reefer!

Abakwetha, plump nudes and whatnot

2009-10-02T09:09:00.007+02:00

Being an artist in South Africa in the days before the Internet was a bit like living in a very dark, frustrating vacuum! Access to anything wonderful, new - or even very, very old - in the art world was limited to library visits, randomly few and far between television specials (actually, I think I'm making this up because I can't even remember ONE!) and expensive art journals shipped in from the blue yonder of all wannabe artists' dreams.
The overseas art market pretty much sucked, unless you had vast sums of money to travel overseas promoting yourself. But then (grateful sigh of relief!) the Internet arrived - and I remember 'surfing the Net' (thought I sounded SO cool saying that) in the little IT lab on campus whenever I possibly could, stealing time from even my precious lie-ins to see what was out there. Admittedly, the going was rather slow, and my heart would pitter-patter-pound-pound-pound while each page downloaded in hesitant agony.
A decade later, and I have my very own laptop, digital camera, printer - and lightning fast, 24 hour Internet access: information/stimulation heaven! (There's a darker side to all of this, of course: like mindless distraction.......... and when I type 'plump nudes' into Google Images looking for images of non-skinny women to draw... Needless to say, there would have been a little TOO much for me to draw. Shall I leave it at that?)
And before Layla needs me to put her down for her first morning nap, let me get to the point: I discovered a website created specifically for South Afican artists so they can sell their work at home and - more profitably - abroad. Pounds, dollars and the general American/British/European desire for the exotic African mean there are plenty of buyers out there typing 'African art' into dear old Google! As I said in my last post, my work at the moment is about African mothers - and South African iconographic things in general: i.e. free-roaming, road traffic-ignoring nguni cattle in the Eastern Cape, the modern abakwetha with their ingceke painted faces. So it was with some shock-and-horror (and mild nausea) that I discovered there are thousands of other South African artists out there painting these sorts of thing. In short: I have become a bit of a cliche. Eish... Perhaps the key is in HOW one portrays the subject matter? (I KNOW this is the key, but hopefully those pound-jingling, 'African art' Google-ing buyers will see this too! (Here is the link to my page on this site : http://www.southafricanartists.com/home/LisaRoberts -- you'll have to cut and paste it into your web browser ... this ol' mommy brain has forgotten how to add a link that actually works!)

Africa, my Love.

2009-09-14T09:22:00.005+02:00

Phew. It's been a while. A LONG while... My Layla is 6 months old now and this means I have suddenly got a little more time (and freedom) on my hands: I've started painting again, and at long last, I can spend more time writing too!
There have been so many Soutpiel issues in the last 6 months, and I just WISH I had jotted each of them down for a time like now, because with this porridge-brain that motherhood has induced, I CANNOT, for the life of me, remember more than a handful. (My standing joke is that when I gave birth to Layla, they didn't remove my placenta, but my brain! Funny? Not when you've misplaced your keys for the third time in as many hours!! There's even been a missed dentist appointment and double-booking coffee dates with friends... Upon leaving Cape Town to return to the UK, my mom said, with a grandmotherly frown, "I'm really worried that you're going to forget to feed Layla!" Thankfully, Layla knows exactly how to let me know if she's hungry - so at least Layla gets fed, bathed and changed with devoted punctuality!)

In my second year of my Fine Art degree at the University of Cape Town, I allowed myself to be robbed of my creative self-confidence by an aggressively 'cool' young lecturer only a few years my senior, but with such a threatened sense of self, that she lashed out at anyone who possessed some degree of what she so obviously and painfully lacked. She was one of those who carefully cultivated her rebellion, inside and out. Built like a scarecrow, she dressed her emaciated, boyish frame in black combat boots and bad attitude - her hair short, mousy and spiked into intentionally aggro spikes. So it was no wonder then, that I, with my long (pretty) hair, pearl earrings and dungarees posed a terrible slap in the face to everything she stood for. Volunteering (perhaps a little like a too-helpful teacher's pet) to run a photocopying errand for her, she accepted but with a humiliating glare that, typically, left my cheeks more than aglow.
Peggy Delport, another lecturer - but infinitely more mature as an artist and human being, and - incidentally, one of South Africa's top painters even in her 60s, had left me to my own devices the previous semester, saying, "Lisa, you know what you're doing! You have the most incredble sense of light in your work." The work I produced, my first experience with oil paints, is something I am still damn proud of - but the sense of self-confidence Peggy left me with at the end of the first semester was ravaged with brutal speed by this new young lecturer in only the first week of that second semester. After that first withering look on my way to the photocopy machine came only more disdain and drama. The result: an incomplete body of work which raised many eyebrows in the distinct lack of ability it presented. Weeks and weeks worth of her brooding, black moods and barbed comments wore me down, down, down - all I was left with were paintings that had me apologising to the examining lecturers, and blushing a sad crimson with shame. (I threw the paintings away.) By the far the most damaging of all her afternoon critiques was when she kicked my paintings just enough for them to fall over, jabbing her finger at them, telling me, "You don't know how to paint!!!"
Her mean bitch of a ghost has haunted me for years. Eleven years to be exact. Even seeing her on the cover of a local decor magazine made me physically flinch! I guess it's the mark of a young sensibility that I didn't have the wisdom to take her with a pinch of salt, and only taking into my heart what the truly talented and renowned art lecturers said of my work. Too late now, but better late than never.
Anyway (sigh), when I was in South Africa for the most incredible 2.5 month holiday, I started painting again! GONE was all of that accumulated artistic baggage I'd started hoarding in my Michaelis days - WHAM BAM BOOM! Just like that! I think it was giving birth to the child I have longed for ever since I can remember... Quite why I think she's been the cure I can't quite say, but there has definitely been a huge, HUGE shift inside me since she arrived. Amazing little miracle that she is ;)
And so the crux of this Soutpiel entry is finally about to be made evident: I'd been promising to paint something for my mom for years, but having to perform as a bizarre, cerebralised Michaelisite meant there was never anything truly beautiful that wasn't just a touch horrific (i.e. watercolours of kidneys etc.) This holiday, I resolved, would be used to paint something for my mom at long blerry last.
In the matter of a few days, a small but richly coloured painting of 'The Barefoot Diva' emerged - as well as a new way of painting that I can only say came from somewhere deep in my subconsious. It felt like heaven painting again - such joy and a sense of satisfaction after so many barren years of unnecessary angst. Yippeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yes - the Soutpiel slant on all of this? Africa. I have fallen in love with Africa as only one who has lived in (self-imposed) exile can be! Driving through the Port Elizabeth township of Motherwell, I wanted to hop out with my camera to photograph the big-boude'd mamas gracefully balancing a sack of potatoes on their heads, a baby tied to their backs ... reminding me of when our domestic used to tie my baby doll to mine. And the Nguni cattle roaming free amongst the rainbow of proudly painted shacks. (Why didn't I get out the car to take the photos then? That's another day's worth of writing.) But the long and the short of it is that before I would have literally fainted with kitsch embarrassment at the thought of painting anything remotely African. Now, it's a different story. Every single image I can lay my hands on that reminds me of home makes me burn to paint it!

(Attached is a photo of my painting of Cesaria Evora. In acrylic.)

HEADLINE: "Stiff Upper Lip" Proven Pure Fallacy!

2009-02-13T16:41:00.007+01:00

You know, it's quite incredible how almost any situation can be twisted to comply with my Soutpiel perspective - whether it's the snow, the current contents of my fridge or my little walk to the village post office this morning! Sometimes, though, I wonder if I sound a little pedantic? But then again, what would be the point of this particularly themed blog if not for its South Africanisms?
Often during the day I think of things I want to write about here - but then it gets swept under the carpet for another day when I think I may have more energy, only - by then - it's completely lost its relevance. Perhaps a solution would be to jot these thoughts down as they happen instead of waiting for some miraculously tantalising topic (which as yet has still never happened upon me.) Hmmm...

Unbelievably the snow swept down upon us last night in another magical but now slightly pain-in-the-arse-ish blanket of icy, dysfunctional whiteness. Joy, my midwife, sms'd me to say we should stay home --- driving in the snow is like wearing two snowdomes for goggles: stupid and dangerous. (We were missing out on the class about pain relief. Figured this isn't too much of a problem: just give it to me, dammit!!) This morning, lovely yellow sunshine really managed to break the coldness that's been keeping this dangerous ice on the roads. So it was in my pink wellies and coat that I ventured outside for a short walk to the village post office. No longer so soft and fluffy, the snow now lay in clumpy, clumsy mounds - looking more like a stale dirt-flavoured Slush Puppy accident - and there were no rock hard, icy bits to slip 'n slide on.
My walk was filled, there and back, with visibly grateful horses being ridden for the first time since the snows began more than a week ago. All women riders, and all with that cultivated English air of tea and cucumber sandwiches, looked down upon me with gracious, elegant smiles, making me feel like nothing more than a waddling belly, desperately camouflaged in a threadbare brown tent of a dress and pink wellies - even drawing a compliment from one lady, "Oh, I just love your wellies!" I glumly threw a reply over my shoulder - "Well, they're the only shoes that fit me these days!"
The post office is usually populated by 2 to 3 pension-aged people, picking up their medication, a card or two, or simply posting letters. And today was no exception. Brenda passed over my medication (an arrangement made for us villagers who can't get to their surgery a few villages away - no bus), and I was hoping for a bit of a natter, as we've always done since I arrived in the village last year. But today, she didn't even ask how I was! Odd. And then she said, in a cold tone as bleak as the pointless, melting slush outside, "That'll be 30p, madam."
"But I've never had to pay before," I managed to squeak.
"Well, you should have been!"
(In my head, I tell her that she's always given me my medicine before and never, EVER asked for this before. My cheeks are red with shame - and immediately, I blame it on my hormones making me overly sensitive.)
"Could I bring it round on Monday?" - she must've heard the tears in my voice. Surely? And do you know what? She didn't even say goodbye. How strange...

Thankfully, shielding my eyes from the sunshiney brightness bouncing off the still pure white fields opposite our house, I bumped into my neighbour Maureen - and within 30 seconds we'd arranged a tea-date for later in the day.
She arrived at our front door, as eager to see the nursery as I was for her not to the see the general mess that comes with being utterly incapable of doing housework! After admiring it all, we ended up back at her house, sipping tea that was so strong and dark that it looked more like coffee: she had me put my swollen feet (look like fat little pig's trotters than feet actually!) up on cushions while the rest of me was draped across her leather sofa, nibbling biscuits and having a grand old conversation like we always do. Popping out the room to feed her cat, she returned with a white plastic packet, sort of rolled up. But inside, was the most gorgeous little pink and grey pullover she'd knitted just for Layla Rose - despite the agony of her visibly arthritic, gnarled hands. Beautiful, perfect.
And what is my Soutpiel thesis for today's story? It is this: we can so easily box people into national/cultural stereotypes - but my encounters with today's English folk prove that we are each unique: uniquely unpredictable, uniquely kind, uniquely spontaneous.

Zulu Dating Styles of the Royal Persuasion

2009-02-04T13:18:00.008+01:00

My sore butt finally won in the battle to unplug myself from my little writing area! I've set everything up in this perfect little 'hokkie' where I am constantly plugged into music, electricity, the scanner/printer, the telephone. A happily functioning little office. But after 2.5 hours on a chair that curiously grows more and more uncomfortable till eventually you feel as if you're waiting in purgatory for a bus you know will never come and you are glued forever to the coldest, hardest concrete bench ever invented by the most sadistic, cruel busstop designer - where was I? I got lost in needing to describe my bum-pain!! Oh well - all I'm saying is that I have been forced to forego all the other comforts of my little office in lieu of easing the pain in my gluteus now-very-MAXIMUS!

Craig has been so good to me during these sometimes awful months of pregnancy, that I hardly cook dinner - but last night I concocted a creamy, garlic sauce of pesto, parmesan and buttery leeks to go with the shop-bought gnocchi I usually make by hand. With my bowl balanced on top my bump and between my boobs, I asked Craig to see if there was anything decent on TV. It was either a sickening show about Paris Hilton finding a British best friend - or yet another, bloodily gory* episode of 'Trawlermen' which we'd seen before - or... "Undercover Princes".

Three princes from abroad in Brighton - looking for a soulmate to take back to their kingdoms to rule beside them. Prince #1: Pseudonym 'Mani' from India. Painfully thin, moves like an old man who needs a walker but refuses in his ancient stubbornness. Oh yes - and very gay. Prince #2. From Sri Lanka. Currently exiled with entire family in Holland due to wars - but hoping to rebuild the monarchy and be a 'people's prince'. Is looking only for a woman 'of the blue blood' -- hardly likely when he was living in Brighton and spending his evenings speed-dating!

Prince #2: Pseudonym 'Africa'. From Africa. Original, huh? We tried to unlock all the clues of his accent, body language and other quirks to see just WHICH part of Africa he was a prince of. After just a few sentences, we decided, proudly, he must surely come from South Africa (in fact, he's a Zulu prince) -- but then: shock and horror! when asked what he was looking for in a future princess-bride, he says: "It is not the inside so much that is important to me but the outside. And, aah, she rrreally MUST be pretty. Her personality - we can work on that. But first, it is her looks." How EMBARRASSING!!! His manner and attitude of speaking to his dates was quite abrupt - and he certainly didn't know how to dance the delicate dance of flirtation! Instead he bumbled his way pompously and bombastically like a bull in a china shop. As an ambassador for South Africa, he was closed-minded, quite arrogant and didn't have ANY sort of royal bearing at all. Mind you, the producers of the show didn't do the royalty of these princes much justice. They had Prince Africa Zulu rowing a boat with an 18 year old lapdancer! Perhaps had he been introduced to a segment of the British female population more suited to his upbringing and expectations, things may have panned out differently! It was VERY interesting to see how not a single black woman was presented to him. Was he particularly looking for a white princess? Or was he presented with a racially varied group of girls and his choice included only the white ones in the end?
His final choice was an outdoorsy British brunette of which the Prince's Zulu mama said reminded her of Lady Di!

The Sri Lankan prince took his polite but not-at-all blue-blooded,office-worker blonde home to Amsterdam after revealing his true identity. The Indian prince found true love in his peroxided blonde shop assistant, Mike - returning with him to India to seek re-admittance to his family after being the first Indian royal to step out of the closet! (We can't wait for the final episode which shows how these potential 'brides' feel about becoming part of a foreign royal family!)

*that was for you, Dad ;)

WHAT Credit Crunch?

2009-01-20T18:28:00.005+01:00

Craig had to ref a football match ('soccer' is tantamount to a swear word here: don't use it!) on Saturday somewhere in the nether regions of Milton Keynes with his under 9s roughing it out in the sub-zero afternoon against another larny private school --- while it was suggested I head off to IKEA to see what they had on my "Get That Nursery Finished!!" list.

Parking was a trial for me as I waited and waited for a parking space, my baby girl bouncing vindictively on my poor bladder and my blood sugar screaming out for an orange juice - ANYTHING!!! Rushing inside, I felt a bit Liliputian and lost -- so many people scrambling and hovering around, escalators chock-full, no trolleys, screaming kids, ice-cream eaters. Stepping behind another pregnant female, her eyes as glazed over as mine with nesting hormones, the escalator deposited me in a chaotic vestible where I had too many choices where to go. My stomach decided for me: an expensive but deliciously and incredibly dimuntive bottle of orange juice and an as dear fruit muffin later and I was as ready as I was going to be for a whizz round IKEA with 25GBP to spend on things for Layla Rose's little bedroom.

Through a process of elimination (more putting things back than putting things IN my temptingly spacious trolley) I was able to cross off enough things on my list to make me feel as though I'd achieved a minor miracle! But while I was contemplating the rattan storage boxes, muslin squares for burping and 5 bibs for 1 pound, I couldn't help but feel as if I was drowning in a selfish whirlpool of buy, buy, buy. Fellow customers pushed ahead without so much as a thought for the person trying to get past them in the narrow aisle - the body language like brainwashed automatons: 'buy this and you will feel better'. I had a little aeroplane flying a glaring red banner round and round my head, saying: 'WHAT Credit Crunch?!' It seems as if the gloom and anxiety created by this recession has had the very opposite effect on people's spending habits. Perhaps people aren't buying houses and cars - but they sure as heck don't seem to be curbing their other sorts of spending -- that desperate craving to fill their emptinesses with 'stuff'. (My friend, Andrea, had a post on her blog awhile back on 'BE MORE, DON'T BUY MORE'. I scribbled it on a now curling yellow Post-It to remind me when I sit on the loo (sad but true AND effective!) that it buying stuff is not the answer at all to filling that need for beauty and truth and peace and contentment...

Layla Rose's nursery is testament to this new commandment: there is NOTHING there that is not absolutely necessary. I ask myself: they had babies two hundred years ago without this - so do you really need it, or are you falling for First Time Mommy consumerist ploys? I just wish I had a camera so I could take photos for you to see the transformation from desolate guest room to cosy nursery! But my favourite things in it are the handmade quilt, the beech cot we bought second had for an absolute song - and the antique cupboard I've spent weeks laboriously but lovingly stripping now just needs a lick of pretty paint!

The Mother City

2009-01-14T12:22:00.008+01:00

Homesickness. (Do I really feel like writing about it? I said I would the last time I wrote.) Oh bugger! I better. But just quickly, mind you.
What I've noticed about homesickness is its mutability: how it affects people to differing degrees and in different ways. And, radical generalisation: it affects women more profoundly than men; though perhaps men are more able to compartmentalise their homesickness: i.e. box it, tape it up, and shove it to the back for later contemplation. Whereas in women, it seems to bleed out into every part of daily life and consciousness, steeping everything with its relentless, heavy, dark stain.

When I lived in the UK before (2003 - 2006) my homesickness was caused by two things: my living situation was such that I was told we'd never return to South Africa, as well as the fact that I was so deeply hurting, lonely and unhappy that I became physically ill for years from this desperate hopelessness. (I cured it by booking a plane ticket to Cape Town and never looking back! Ha!)

But now, my homesickness cannot be blamed on an unhappy relationship, because I am treasured, adored and incredibly cherished: and I can't help but be amazed, day after day, by this kind, gentle, strong and patient man who I fall more deeply in love each day. So ya - cross that one out. However, I can definitely blame the acuteness of my homesickness on being pregnant. Since I was a little girl, I always imagined my pregnancy to be a sort of family affair, involving my sisters, my Mommy, endless cups of tea, hours of sentimentally sweet shopping for little white babygrows... The closest we've managed to get that fantasy to match my English reality is getting both parties set up with a webcam. e.g. my mom'll hold up a cute, stripey baby vest to the webcam or I'll fill the screen with my naked, swollen-with-baby belly! THANKFULLY, my darling mom has worked her poor backside off to be able to buy a ticket over here for the birth and to help with the initial stages of settling in with Layla Rose. (What would the world be without mothers?)

And despite the gorgeous house we rent (relatively cheaply) in a sought-after location in a pretty little village nestled among verdant, sheep-dotted farms -- I still long for the life I had in Cape Town where I had seemingly less financially. Walks along whichever stretch of beach I desired (a 5 minute drive from home or work), sundowners on the beach (toes buried deep in the cooling sand) or in a slightly seedy but wonderfully exotic little beachside bar... Craig would often arrive home with St Elmo's pizza, a bottle of wine and roses. AT LEAST once a week! Seeing Table Mountain (one of my favourite things in the world) in the blushing sunrise or at ANY time of the day, from my big bathroom window. Popping over to my parents for a braai whenever the fancy took us. Long, lazy evenings at Lemon Butta drinking too much red wine and succumbing to the earthly delights of the freshest, most artfully prepared sushi, sashimi and nigiri on the planet... Saturday morning rummagings around the seafront liquor depot for excellent bottles of red wine and paying only R16 a bottle... Sitting out on the little stoepie near midnight, sipping Jack-on-the-rocks, being utterly and receptively still to the velvety black night air, the tumbling, glittering stars, ... the South Easter! lol

You see - it is only when you are unable to experience these things that once you left unnamed, that you realise what 'home' means to you. And with the terrible, apocalyptic gloom over here in the UK blamed on The Credit Crunch tainting everyone's attitude, how bad then can what people call 'South Africa's crime and government' be? Truly, each country has its very own uglinesses and 'issues' - but I have come to the point where I would rather put up with my own country's rather than this one's. It's like tolerating a loved but annoying sister. Better the devil you know...

Hence why we are making serious, practical plans to get our African asses back home as soon as we can! Our biggest hurdle is - of course, money. But hey, money is something that putting your nose to the grindstone can readily guarantee -- so it's not an insurmountable hurdle. And until we can return home, we shall indulge in 2 months at home every year - and though we're 'missing the English summer' all I can say to that is: 'So I'm going to miss out on 3 days of windless perfection and 60 rainy, muddy days?' BIG ****ING DEAL (wink)

PS. Click on the pic to make it bigger!

The Telly and the Cow

2009-01-12T15:05:00.007+01:00

Confession: I am one of those wretched, painful people who don't really like TV - and, this is the part I am most ashamed about: I don't actually approve of it. Admittedly, there are evenings when I'll plonk myself down in front of the TV and mindlessly let whatever's on wash over in a numbing wave of colour, movement, noise and questionable information. I'll watch things like 'America's Got Talent' and 'The X Factor' for the early rounds of auditions, but lose interest once things supposedly 'get serious'. Sometimes a documentary will catch my attention - but even then, it is so often a disappointment: it never delivers enough information to sink my teeth into! And then, of course, there's Jamie Oliver and that sweetly scraggly guy from the River Cottage which I enjoy for their almost perfect package of information, personalities, visuals.

But where is all this leading, Lisa? Well, in our house we have a disparity of opinion regarding television. Craig can watch TV from the minute he walks through the front door. It's his way of unwinding. Where I can watch maybe an hour's worth before needing to do something 'more constructive' (you can see my snotty bias, huh?), Craig can spend the entire evening soaking whatever may be on - even content to randomly switch between channels, mid-programme. THIS infuriates me beyond reason - usually throwing him a glare of such hot indignation very quickly has him hunting for the channel we were on before!

I want to know that a programme starts at 8pm -- then I'll settle in to watch it from beginning to end. Not so the man of our house! But, truth be told, I think it's really me who is the problem. I'm the one who's potentially anally retentive/ eccentric - where Craig is probably the most normal and well-balanced. And, to combat my need for TV that is stimulating and satisfying for me, Craig joined Lovefilm.com so I could at least get my weekly dosage of nourishing television!

Last night, we watched 'Atonement' and 'Brick Lane'. 'Atonement' was beautifully filmed and layered in meaning and iconography - speaking of love, mature and immature - as well as truth, betrayal, time lost, forgiveness and, naturally, atonement/penance. (My mom, a dress designer in Cape Town, had to make a replica of Keira Knightly's green silk dress for a client. Throughout the entire film, I found myself being distracted by how the dress managed to stay on --- did she need double-sided tape to keep the dress glued to her willowy, flat chest?!)

'Brick Lane', also mostly set in London, was filmed with the most exquisitely sensual attention to detail, and especially colour and light. The story reminded me so much of my friend, Pakshi, who was forced to marry an older, Indian man in London - exiled from her cherished sister and the land of her heart to live in the crowded grime of alien London. Slow-moving, like a languid poem, the story unfolds like a fading sari until the very end is reached... (of which I can say nothing about - but for Soutpiels living in the UK, it will surely surprise you!)

Our domestic television habits aside, I must also tell you that my homesickness reached such a devastating low, that it has taken weeks of building myself up again with hope and keeping busy. But this is a conversation for another day...

Did I kill my blog?

2009-01-08T13:41:00.005+01:00

Did I kill my blog?

With working, I got so completely out of the swing of writing, that getting back into it feels quite overwhelming, as if I've forgotten how to write. For me, writing is a daily habit, which once immersed in, is like breathing - second-nature, essential! But, throw in a double skewball (like working fulltime when exhaustingly pregnant) and writing becomes only a mere memory, a distant longing. And now with baby Layla Rose on the way, I can only imagine how my writing will be affected... But I've tried to make a sort of promise to myself: that I won't lose my self in the role of motherhood - that the one thing I will cling to tenaciously will be my daily writing. Even if all I can manage is my long-hand journal writing... (Or is this all just wishful thinking?)

This is all for today. I'll write again tomorrow - and hopefully with more VOOMA!

PS. This is Layla at her 28 week scan but measuring like that of a 30 week old!!! Is she waving frantically to get out - or am I already beginning to project my own thoughts onto my daughter? Heh heh...

Two very different Christmas Eve's...

2008-12-24T17:03:00.004+01:00

Christmas Eve, and at 4:03pm, the sky is the bruised colour somewhere between lilac and grey. Complete darkness will be here in just moments. Not so in Cape Town, where my folks (their wedding anniversary!) are probably parking on the road lining the boisterous Bantry Bay sea - above which is a little amble up some sunbleached stairs to the renovated post-war apartment where my sister, Julie and her husband James live their glamourous Cape Town lives (of which I am obviously and unashamedly jealous!) where a typical evening can include sundowners on Clifton beach, or a long, languid evening out at one of many divine Cape Town restaurants where their laughter is coloured in shades of merlot, shiraz and ruby pinotage. Julie has her studio at home - she is undoubtedly one of South Africa's up and coming jewellers: owner and designer for her own range/brand : see www.collectjewellery.co.za
In recent months her work has been featured in fashion in no less than the likes of Marie Claire! Most recently, she herself was showcased alongside a few other jewellers - but she definitely is the shining star among them all with her incredibly unique style and creative vision -- and you can see for yourself that I'm not just a baised older sister when you look at her work! And darling James, my brother-in-law from Hull, has his own architectural firm in town - doing fancy, avant-garde work for glamourous German clients with his mad Swiss business partner, Jan. Anyway - I'm blabbing.
Their plans for tonight's Christmas Eve celebration include, like we did last year, chilled champagne and bowls of olives, while on the braai/BBQ fresh king prawns and sizzling rectangles of halloumi sizzle to the sound of James and my dad yacking away like two old women. Inside, Julie will be ensuring the bubbly is constantly topped up, inbetween getting a big pot of shining, black mussels ready for cooking. Last year, she did them Thai-style... Undoubtedly the music will be laid-back Miles Davis or vintage Irakere!
Here, Gary and Craig are sharing the sofa watching absolute crap on TV, and I'm still in my pyjamas having suffered all day long from some sort of pregnancy induced ennui... Supper is Gary's version of their mom's divine, lasagna-like pasta - and more mulled wine. We've had a serious discussion about tomorrow's plans: the unanimous decision is to cook and drink all day long, finally eating at about 4pm. (At least we'll have enough Christmas pudding: After I moaned at Craig's measly purchase of the piddliest little Christmas cake I've ever seen, we now have THREE of them awaiting indiscriminate consumption - along with three tubs of cream!) Gary's spoiling us with a juicy leg of lamb stuffed with brandy-bathed dates, rosemary and garlic! Ooh la la! I'll rustle up modern versions of carrots and the very British brusselsprouts - as well as peeling a couple of potatoes for roasting.

A glass of mulled wine, and I'm now ready to settle into an evening that will no doubt be like the rest of the week's evenings: mindless TV, some quilting, a long bath and probably another early night for me and the growing little lady in my tum.

Winter Wonderland!

2008-12-14T11:58:00.007+01:00

Being pregnant has it's benefits, granted: such as waking up at 10.30am, rolling languidly over and spotting a pack of chocolate digestive biscuits, much the way a lioness will spot an unawares little bokkie in the distance - and going in for the kill, not an eyebrow is raised because it is 'natural'. (Craig did laugh a little incredulously, though, at the apparently serious look of intent as I shimmied free another biscuit from the pack!) Three chocolate McVities later, and a smallish bowl of fruit salad, it's time to begin the day with some painfully ached-for writing!

With Christmas round the corner, I feel I should write about how it feels to be a Soutie away from that Christmas braai, lazy afternoon swim and your precious family - but there's so much else that's happened while I've been 'away' working, that I simply have to keep you fully up to date!

The first thing relates to (please don't yawn - I promise it's exciting!) The Weather, while the second is about Putting In Petrol.

Our dear little Fiat Punto, in it's faded red, somewhat dinged glory, remains a faithful car in most weather conditions, though it's given us a little bit of grief these last few weeks when the temperatures have plummeted to the Minus Zone. In a desperate rush one morning on our way to work, BOTH our doors were frozen shut!! No amount of jostling or jiggling could budge the door apart from it's icy clasp! Beginning to feel the ice eating through the soles of my little leather pumps (ignorantly minus stockings or pantihose) I couldn't keep the whine out of my voice as I told Craig to try the boot! It popped open without a fuss, and Craig climbed through the back, kicking the doors open like a madman - reminding me simultaneously of a Rescue 911 hero and a giant trapped spider, all legs, arms and elbows in his smart, dark suit! Needless to say, I made a determined detour on the way home that evening past Tesco to buy that marvellous, though toxic, British invention: de-icing spray. Quite cheap at under 2 quid for each item in the range, I opted for the more powerful looking aerosol can (sorry, Mr Ozone), imagining the bliss of aiming a powerful squirt between the car door and it's clinging frame - instead of having to witness the dramatics of Craig cursing and kicking again!

It seems as if the main roads and highways get salted/gritted much more efficiently than these quiet back roads that wend their serpentine way between villages - i.e. the roads we travel on between home, the village of Spratton where Craig's school is and Kettering - where my school is. Generally, by the time we're on the roads, there's been enough traffic for the ice to have been melted (tyre friction). BUT: the particular little-used byway that snakes off to the side of the main road through Spratton is a nasty little trap of higgeldy-piggeldy parked cars and ice in all it's frightening forms: from smooth, shiny black ice that pretends to be a puddle to the caked-up white frosting that is hideously perilous despite the fact that it looks so, so beguilingly pretty: like icing sugar on a chocolate cake. Craig safely deposited at Spratton Hall, Radio 1 pumping through tinny speakers, lipgloss reapplied after the goodbye kisses, I mentally prepared myself to get to school a) on time and b) in one piece. However, when this pretty cake-frosting decides to nail you, you forget everything you know you should do - like pump your brakes in and out etc etc etc etc etc...................... Driving a little absently round the corner, I spotted the warm glow of approaching headlights on the white, fluffy (NOT) duvet of the road - and, as I always do (such a conscientious South African driver!) I begin to slow down so I can pull behind the car parked not so much on the side of the road, as almost in middle of it! HOWEVER. It doesn't go AT ALL to plan, and the pretty white frosting carries me like a skater on ice faaaaar too close to this badly parked car than I'd have liked. The Fiat's unsure bum does a tango across the ice, ignoring the fact that my foot is on the brake and my heart is pleadingly pumping out a hundred prayers for mercy! Thankfully, I glide to an ungraceful stop a metre or so from the backside of said badly parked car - and the oncoming car flashes their lights compassionately at me - that they will wait for me! (Fact: English drivers are generally a fantastically polite and sensible bunch - excluding 90% of lorry drivers and the young yobs in their souped up little jalopies.)

When I lived in West Berkshire and Hampshire, the winters were noticeably much more mild than the weather we've experienced up here in the East Midlands. Even the wind patterns are different up here - it is wild and obstreperous, beating the trees and moaning like a ravenous wolf (yip - been spending too much time teaching the kids personification and metaphors at school maybe?!) But the biggest surprise was driving past the always beautiful, open expanse of Pitsford the other morning, where the rolling farms and bristling hedges shimmered the purest, softest white (taking my breath away) - and the lake was almost entirely frozen over. A comparison escapes me - it is only something I've seen in the movies, or imagined what a true Northern Hemisphere winter must be like. But where the fragile sheets of ice lay flat and matte upon the waters, time seemed to stand still. Rippling and glossy water broke the heavy hush of the ice in large, liquid fingers - as though it were playing with it, trying to dismantle it, piece by tenuous piece. A winter jigsaw puzzle. (I could never forget this.)

Phew. Lastly - on a more amusing note, I'd like to begin a mini-discussion about our South African Culture of Petrol Attendants & Grocery Packers. Whenever I pack my groceries, it is sure to slip out that in South Africa, we have 'people' to do it for us as 'it creates employment'. The response? A look of 'you lazy white, racist South African' expelled in varying degrees of malice, from the most mild glint in the English eye to the bulging shock of horror! Maybe I should have already learned my lesson by now - and should keep it to myself? But a wicked little part of me enjoys the reaction - because, I think, it reminds me that I could never really NOT be a South African; that the talking about home as often as it slips out is what keeps me connected, there. The same can be said for our lack of experience in putting in petrol. Before I venture into this little story, please leave your own stories in the COMMENTS section below -- and hopefully it won't be another long week before I can tell you my story.

2008-12-06T12:40:00.011+01:00

OK, so I lied. But REALLY, I didn't mean to! HONEST! It's just that I was swept away (again) on a tidal wave of exhaustion. Conclusion: when they say you should go on maternity leave from 11 weeks before your due date: do it. Do not even bother to dither about the issue. It is not even worth a minute's contemplation. And if the idea does happen to pop into your hormone befuddled head, drop me a line - and I shall remind you of exactly why you should rather be at home resting, daydreaming about your little one, and getting their nursery (and your house!) ready instead. Comprende?

School this week has been no less traumatic and frightening than the week before... I witnessed a teacher being kicked, and I, myself, was violently sworn at, shouted at, screamed at and threatened physically. On a brighter note, yesterday I was showered in little tokens of love and gratitude - a choc-chip biscuit at lunchtime, a packet of Doritos, a handmade pink plastic beaded bangle of stars, butterflies and hearts, a letter signed by a bunch of little 10 year old girls, and - at the end of the day, a Siberian tiger keyring.
All the kids had rushed out to their weekend in the darkening Friday frost, while I gathered my coat, scarf and other general 'stuff' together, dreaming about getting home before it was completely pitch black outside (i.e. before 5pm), a long bath --- the classroom door suddenly exploded open, with little redheaded Phillip breathless and pink cheeked, pale green eyes glittering.

"Hey Phil, shouldn't you be on your way home?"

"Miss Roberts, look here!" And from his pockets which I know from many prior warnings and idle threats contain various pens, football cards and grimy red rubber bands gleaned from the street where a careless postman has left them in his hurried wake, he proudly extracts a keyring. A square, perspex-encased photo of a blue-eyed, white Siberian tiger...

"Oh wow, Phillip! What an incredible tiger! It's a Siberian tiger - it comes from a very cold, snowy place. Not like the yellow tigers you get in India where it's really hot." He's persistently silent, saying nothing at all while I run out of things to say about it.

"Is it for me, Phillip?" (I don't know what else to say.)

"Yes! It was two for 1.50 - and I got myself this Man U one!" I try to give him a big cuddle of a hug (something we're not actually allowed to do at all at school - but which we all do anyway!) He doesn't so much fall into my arms as stand like a stiff little embarrassed soldier - and yet I can almost hear his precious little heart almost explode with joy at being so appreciated. You see, he comes from SUCH a rough home where he is one of many children - most of them not even sharing the same father, a hard, gaunt mother who looks as though no-one has ever said a kind word to her and hangs her head in heavy, perpetual hopelessness.
I release Phillip from my maybe claustrophobic hug, and he darts away for a second so that I'm about to say goodbye to him for the second time - but then he hovers a little closer and says, "Miss Roberts, the reason I bought this for you is because you are the best teacher I have ever had. And because you are always kind and nice to me." His little pale, freckled face works hard to get all of this out of his heart which I sense usually stays fiercely locked up. If any other teacher shouts at him (he is a naughty little bugger - but mostly because he's bored, I think) he reacts extremely violently, shouting, glowing red-hot - chairs get flung across the room, cupboards get kicked. All it takes from me is one raised eyebrow and he's back in his seat, trying to refocus. And I think this is the key to working with these broken children: they're craving the right kind of attention. That is, consistent, loving, firm and mutually respectful... But so often it seems a futile mission trying to turn these hearts from broken to fixed. (And I realise I suffer quite badly from the Saviour Complex...)

I think Phillip's about to leave, but as his hand reaches the door, he turns around - and again I see how internally his heart is churning like an intricate machine, about to overheat. I say nothing - wait for him to speak.

"I've decided, Miss Roberts."

"What about, Phillip?"

"I've decided I'm going to become a designer. A designer of pictures."

And now I want to run up to him, and hold him forever - take him home with me and give him everything he might ever need. But I know this is not right - that I need to step back from my own overworking heart even though it feels like I'm squeezing all the blood out of it so that it gasps from pain and surprised anguish. (Melodramatic but more true than most things I've ever felt.)
A few days ago, I'd spent an entire morning treating the class to a big art class in which we explored trees - their shapes, personalities, textures and colours. I laid out all the graphite, charcoal, pastels and paint I could find - demonstrating all the exciting possibilities and variations inherent in these simple materials. Every child responded as a child should - even another problematic redhead I've managed to forge a relationship with -- except for Phillip, which astounded me because he is ALWAYS drawing - in Maths, in English, during breaktime. His copper mop shone from above the cave of his arms he'd buried his face in - and nothing I said could coax him out of what looked like terrible fright.
I took him outside with me, making sure he had his beloved blue rollerball pen and his sheet of paper, on which hid two abandoned attempts at trees. On the itchy, nylon carpet, our back to the pink wall padded with a hundred puffy winter coats, I asked him about the trees he'd begun to draw. Repeatedly, he moaned and grumbled, "I just can't draw trees!"

"But, Phillip, you can draw huge galactic wars between monsters and men! You can draw intricate machines for your monster armies! If you can draw THAT you can draw a tree!" His body language said he didn't believe me.

Grabbing his piece of paper, I asked if I could borrow his pen and began to draw a very designed, geometric tree, replete with compartments for birds instead of the usual nest. Next to it, the typical tree I draw looked downright boring and predictable in comparison.

"Which one is your favourite tree, Phillip?" A grubby little finger immediately shot out towards the designed tree. "Tell me why you like it the most."

"Because it's cool."

"But why is it 'cool'?"

"The shapes you used. And that line of dots. That little machine-bird you drew."

We chatted about the difference between artists who work in a realistic way, copying directly from life - and artists who have a whole universe tucked away inside their heads from which they draw. How miraculous and amazing it is if you have an imagination and don't have to copy what's out there! I also explained the difference between designers and artists who draw from life. After thinking about this for awhile, he blurted, "But I can only draw monsters!"

"Well then, why don't you design a monster tree?" He just looked at me, his jaw unstuck and his eyes not quite sure if I was being serious or sarcastic. At last it dawned on him that I was being very serious indeed - and straightaway he bent down over his piece of paper and began doodling and sketching what turned out to be a brilliantly conceptualised and executed piece of art!
The very BEST part about it all, was that what had happened between us had made such a deep impression on him, that he'd actually had a huge ideological shift and made a brand new life-decision - where before he'd assumed he'd simply become a builder like all of his school buddies and their dads...

So, in the end, not a very 'Soutpiel' issue, but I sometimes can't help allowing myself to be seduced by tangents and sidetracks! Originally I was going to write about my experience at the local petrol station - maybe later today or tomorrow? At least now I know not to make any empty promises ;)

Gestational-Occupational Hazards

2008-11-30T14:00:00.005+01:00

More than two weeks have passed since I was last able to indulge my fetish for opinionising and storytelling - and oh, what a MINDBLOWING two weeks it has been... If I hadn't been broken by the exhaustion that comes with working full-time when 6 months pregnant, there would have been reams and reams of stories for you to read, but instead, I've been coming home from work with only one thing on my mind: sleep.
Getting up every hour or so to pee (the good Lord's way of preparing you for the ultimate post-birth shock of deliriously sleepless nights)is already not a very good way to ensure optimum rest for a long day at work. In the later hours of the morning - the icy, black night air clamped around me in our draughty little loo, I somehow manage to feel grateful delight that my baby girl is alive and well in my belly (then my selfish need to be warm again overtakes this motherly altruism, and I remember to turn the heating on again so we don't have shiver and shudder getting dressed in the 6am cold.) Between our quick showering, getting dressed and leaving the house at 7.30am, Max is given the quickest of runarounds and a top-up of bunny muesli, Craig glugs back a strong cup of coffee while he catches up with the latest news on the Guns 'n Roses site and I spoon ungraceful mouthfuls of muesli into my mouth while trying to apply eyeliner, mascara and blusher in double-time.
It's a wonderful thing for one scatterbrain to live with another sufferer of this disease: I don't have to feel too guilty if I forget my cellphone -- and I don't mind too much when the reverse happens and Craig forgets something of his. Between us, though, we are never ever late: a point of great pride for both of us! The drive between Spratton (where Craig's school is) and all the way back past our village to Kettering takes about 45 minutes - but it's a picturesque and peaceful drive along winding country roads with sprawling views of the farms and villages - where every day is different to the one before: sometimes veiled in a luxuriously thick mist, sometimes everything is asparkle with dew and immaculate sunshine...

I so badly wanted to write about all the things that've happened in the last two weeks, but now, unavoidably, the groceries need doing. And so, I must say goodbye - but with a promise to write a little every day instead of never writing because I'm waiting for a fat chunk of time to suddenly pop along out of the blue!

Until tomorrow, adios.

The Kraut, the strippers and all the little children

2008-11-20T20:40:00.011+01:00

A week of work - and indeed, WHAT a week! Getting out this lonely house and cramped little village has given me so much food for thought (and writing) that I feel I might explode with all the stories that've bombarded me every moment of my last 5 working days! Where on earth would I begin?!

Having hungered to write every evening, today was D-Day for letting my post-work exhaustion get the better of me. And so, here I am, back at the keyboard and blissfully happy! (A chubby glass of red wine would, however, make me ecstatically happy!!) Today's BlogPatrol statistics showed that one of today's six readers found my blog by typing: "names of strippers at teazers durbanville" into Google! Eish! This is what they discovered http://contemplating-my-navel.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html - but whether someone looking for the the names of strippers at a specific Northern Suburbs titty-bar would be inclined to read the actual blog entry is utterly dubious, let alone understand the 3+ syllable words!! A slightly twisted German found one of my other blog entries after searching for 'medical fetish'!! This reminds me of a Swiss-Italian colleague of mine at university - a giant and burly, bizarre sculptor who specialised in sculpting from stone and marble. One sultry windless night, on the slopes of Vredehoek in Cape Town, he regaled a handful of us with a sickening but somehow (I'm ashamed to admit) still intriguing story of a surgeon friend of his who just couldn't get it off, or get it up (ahem!) without his pretty nurse slicing open his poor, innocent scrotum - and then delicately stitching it back up again.
Gosh - and now I have a German hunting for medical fetishes on the Net on my blog!! Hopefully (and with a prayer attached) it was not the sort of information he ached for... (he -- or she! -- found my entry about 'Foodie Fetishes' that South Africans suffer from when living away. Wonder what he thought? Anyway, I'd far rather be a food-obsessed South African than a medical fetishist Kraut!!)

My eyelids are struggling to defy the inevitable law of gravity, my muscles are whining, like nagging, over-tired children: please, take us to bed... NOW!!!! But before I succumb to this delicious and long awaited eventuality, let me tell you a little about my week of work at a primary school in Kettering that first employed me for just a week of 'cover' - but have now asked me to please stay as long as I possibly can(proud wink)!
Branded a 'special measures' school, I had absolutely no idea WHAT I was letting myself in for when I emailed my agency straight back agreeing to take up the post - seeing only, kaching-kaching, money in the bank. Day one was manageable - the staff impressed me with their welcoming, co-operative team spirit (a wonderful surprise after my very chilly one day in another state-run primary school a few months ago!) The kids seemed ok - until the Monday, Day 2, when I found myself in a storm of pre-pubescent clawing and biting! Another incident had one writhing, twisting boy being physically restrained by the headmaster and another teacher while he screamed, red faced and fuming frantically, "I'll kill you! I'm gonna kill you!!"
Besides this constant threat of violent verbal and physical behaviour, there's the children who make your heart break for their lack of love and care at home. A little girl was caught stealing the others' lunches, after weeks of it disappearing - the school is going to press charges against the mother for neglect. She doesn't feed her child. Another little one is so stressed that she broke down in class saying, when pressed by my questioning, "But I've got so many problems, Miss Roberts... I don't know where to start."

Hmmm... as usual there is just so, so much I need to say. But I simply have to cut myself short here - I will have to write more on the weekend...
The long and the short of it, is that the two headmasters heard about how I was working with these more troubled children from the rest of the staff, and that they want me to run specialised, therapeutic art classes for these particularly 'special' children. Eight of them. I'll be able to design how the classes will be run - gives me an excuse to buy the art therapy textbooks I've been itching to buy for the last 10 years! So at long, long last I have found a very special spot which feels as if it was opened up just for me! BLESSED!!

Sorry this was such a short, squat bit of story - but I will be back on the weekend with a vengeance!

A Week of Work!

2008-11-13T16:22:00.002+01:00

YIPPEEEEE!!! YAHOOOO!!! HURRAY!! At long, long last I have some work from Protocol Education!! From tomorrow till the next Friday I'll be a teacher's assistant at Avondale Junior School in Kettering - and why exectly I'm telling you is because I'll probably be too tired to write in the evenings -- my blog will be stuck in limbo for awhile. Though, who knows, I may just have a story I'll be bursting to tell you!

Until then, keep the comments and stories rollin' in, folks! And, while you have some time, why not explore my other blog listed just here to the right? See it?

Four spoons of sugar, please!

2008-11-09T20:28:00.016+01:00

Though there have been some very exciting and rather distracting things I would love to have written about instead - including a trip with another 2 South Africans to an Indian takeaway hidden in the dark bowels of a ghostly industrial estate. But, I had promised to write more about our family's 'domestic worker'...

Eunice Thenjiwe Nozulu. (Though I think, in all likelihood, it's probably Thenjiwe Eunice Nozulu - the issue of carrying both a Xhosa name as well as an English name is a whole nother matter: it could be psychoanalysed and deconstructed and stripped 'moer-toe', but at the end of the day it is about two things: fitting in / belonging outside of their Xhosa culture and the general white laziness to pronounce the clicks and curls of Xhosa names.) I can hardly remember back to being three years old and Eunie's first day at work - but there are beautiful, richly coloured memories of Eunie arriving at our pre-primary school to take Melissa and I home, a short walk in the swelteringly perfect summer afternoon, babbling and giggling as if we were all three years old - Eunie telling us she'd made us strawberry jelly for after our lunch! I mean - what more could two little girls want? It was only as we got a little older that the roles reversed a little and we were the ones who made her hot, cheesy toasted sarmies for lunch - and, it would be hopeless to try count the cups of dark, scaldingly hot tea saturated with at least FOUR heaped spoons of sugar! It was round about this time too that Eunie began to scold us, albeit playfully, for our messy bedrooms or leaving crumbs on the kitchen counter.
She gave birth to identical twin girls - Ayanda and Siyanda - when I was about 5 or 6. I decided then and there that black babies were definitely the most gorgeous and adorable in the world! And oh, how deliciously they smelled: like hot, crumbling spice cookies just out the oven! We used to beg Eunie to bring the babies to work so we could tickle them, tease them and carry them tied tightly to our backs with their baby blankets! And as we got older, we watched the twins grow from plump dumplings to shy schoolgirls. (But you see, as I'm writing, I'm editing and heavily censoring myself to the point where there must be a thousand intertwined stories that deserve telling - and here I am giving it all to you in cutesy-pie, neatly wrapped up sentences. Whatever shall we do about this? Perhaps I should devote the rest of the week to telling Eunice's story in full? Actually, it is not so much a story, as stories: hey,it could be the basis for my first ever novel! So maybe I shouldn't spill the beans here in this blog - maybe I should keep it all under wraps till it is a published novel? Let's take a vote!! Let me know your vote in the COMMENTS option below!)

A domestic affair

2008-11-02T16:25:00.008+01:00

Since the very minute I opened my lazy, Sunday-sleep-in eyes, I’ve been trying to get on top of the housework. And I don’t just mean the basic day-to-day of laundry and dirty dishes – I mean: deep cleaning -- every crack and cranny and nook and dusty cobweb! On days like this when my hands reek of bleach and I blush, all alone on the bathroom floor, for shame at the accumulated filth, I wonder if it’s just me – or do you also suffer from this same domestic affliction?

For example, our bathroom. The bath gets washed after every use – as well as the basin. The shower sort of looks after itself – though the persistent build up of that stubborn milky limescale on the glass doors is something I should tackle more often – but the damn fumes from the cleaning agent give my asthmatic lungs a nasty shock and it takes so long!! And yes, I’ve tried the domestic-goddess eco-equivalent : a dysfunctional paste of baking soda and white spirit vinegar which requires more elbow grease and brute strength than I possess! And so, window wide open, I dribbled limescale-remover over the glass shower doors, scrubbing it hopefully (and holding my breath) over every square inch. A thorough rinsing and voila! the shower looked fabulously a-sparkle! But the limescale monster lurks invisibly in the water-pipes, just waiting to begin its unstoppable, ugly destruction!

Sometimes I wonder if it’s that I was spoilt by the very South African tradition of having a ‘char’. Heaven forbid I say ‘maid’, so let’s stick with ‘domestic worker’, shall we? (By the way, as a quick aside, does anyone agree with me about how profoundly irritating and petty it is when ordinary, unharmful words suddenly accrue a new, derogatory – even blasphemous – meaning altogether? Take, for instance, the word ‘maid’.

Noun
1. a. An unmarried girl or woman
b. A virgin
2. A woman servant
3. A housemaid or chambermaid
[Middle English maide, from Old English maegden]

Now… Please… (sigh) tell me that the journey this word has taken from its ancient and simple origin is not a ludicrous one!? How did ‘maid’ become a swear word in South Africa? (And the more I think about it, the more I am confused by the stupidity of it!) Radio 702 DJ Jeremy Mansfield received a vigorous handslapping for using the word in what could only be called a rather unthoughtful manner -- see below:

“The word meid is defined in the Afrikaans/English Dictionary, … as a derogatory reference to a (coloured) maid servant, servant-girl. Although the term maid or meid can also be used in an endearing manner, we have no doubt that the term was used and understood in its derogatory and racial meaning here. We accept in favour of the Respondent that it was never the intention of Mr Mansfield to be derogatory of black women.”

Obviously, the way in which a word is spoken can speak volumes more than the specificity of the word itself – but was it really necessary to revamp an entire vocabulary? Yes, the word has been used with venom and violence, but so have other words describing certain vocations whose nomenclature has remained unchanged. So why this particular one? Our domestic worker began working her two-days-a week at our house when I was about 3 years old. We shared Eunice with my best friend’s family – and she really was like an aunt to us: walking to pick Melissa and I up from playschool, making us cold red strawberry jelly on hot summer days and the most delicious toasted cheese snackwiches. 27 years later and she still works two days a week for my mom and dad – in the same house… (this is a story all on its own – I’ll write more about it tomorrow!)

But back to the crux of the matter: can I blame my erratic style of cleaning on my cyclic nature of doing things (i.e. chaos jolts me into frantic, obsessively detailed order which slowly disintegrates into eventual chaos…) or can I blame it on having grown up with a maid/domestic who did all the big household chores like vacuuming, ironing, floor-mopping and window-cleaning so that I never observed and learned for myself? Here, in my little English house, I must be my own maid – and truth be told, like Eunice works two days a week, I should probably (I guess it’s downright unavoidably obvious) do the same: design a housekeeping schedule and stick to it religiously.

(I’m really intrigued by this idea of my generation basically being the last to have grown up with a Xhosa, Zulu or Sotho woman in their daily life – so a) I’ll be exploring it more deeply over the next week and b) how can I convince you all to tell me about your stories?! Do I have to pay you? Just kidding – but I am BEGGING you for your own stories, ideas and opinions – kapish? And besides - I think I've just scraped the very top of a very hot iceberg indeed - so the more that can be a part of this juicy and important debate the better!)

PS. Thanks, Jeanne, for your Bovril advice - and your delicious blog : http://www.cooksister.com/

Foodie Fetishes

2008-10-26T12:20:00.003+01:00

Wanna know something really silly? I’m slowly nibbling a Crunchie in bed as I write as though it were, instead, a rare and luxuriously expensive chocolate imported from somemagnificently exotic land! And just why it’s so silly is because all my life, I’ve been an uncompromising Bar One devotee – probably only ever having consumed a total of 4 Crunchies in my entire South African childhood – and only then as a last chocoholic resort! But for some reason, the melting, sticky sweet roughness of the honeycomb in my mouth comforts my homesick little heart!

Funny how food has such a strong visceral link to your heart and memories… Some of the patriotic foodie habits I regularly indulge in are:

1. BOVRIL on hot toast into which the butter has softly melted, reminding me of so many breakfasts before school – even lazy Sunday morning breakfasts – where it was our family ‘thing’ to sit together every morning for breakfast: a half rule, half ritual. Never rushed, it was a time for stories, question-time, teasing, sulking, laughter… Now, every SINGLE time I spread butter into my hot, hot toast so that it turns the very toastedness of the toast to a warmly delicious mush, it makes me think of my dear dad and his strict penchant for insisting on toast that remained just that: crisp, hard, barely warm! How he glowered at us girls, drowning our toast in great big buttery dollops and oodles of marge, jam, Bovril – the works!

2. What I call ‘Mommy Coffee’: one generous teaspoon of good quality instant coffee, just about a third of a cup of milk – ever so slightly sweetened with half a teaspoon of sugar. Stir. Whizz around in the microwave for 30 seconds. THEN add the boiled water.

After pumping the cafetieres and milk steamer as a trainee barista at Starbucks for a few months back in 2005 in Newbury’s High Street, I became a bit of a coffee afficianado (actually, more of a fanatic!) what with the in-depth education we received via coffee-tasting, conferences and a brick-thick coffee manual we were regularly quizzed on. And so, I took to drinking my coffee pure and black so the top notes, bass notes, fragrance or body could never be insulted by the adulterous dousing of milk, cream, sweeteners or sugars --- looking down my caffeinated nose at any pleb who deigned to ruin a coffee like that! (In the back kitchen, us baristas even used to get ‘high’ on the literally intoxicating air that was left behind after we emptied a brand new pack of coffee beans into the grinders, pushing our faces deep into the bag and inhaling like a sorry addict – looking more like an old donkey with his feedbag than a glamorous coke junkie!!)

3. Carnation Treat Caramel : oh, the ecstasy, the rapture (!) of unhurriedly winding that can-opener in a circle to reveal a glimpse of what maybe heaven could be like!

A knocking at my kitchen door made me peek through the square of antique French lace that serves as a curtain, to see Ang (fellow SA and neighbour) grinning madly and pointing frantically to the tin of caramel she’d bought for me. Oh boy – it was only 3 days later, and there was only a mere memory left for me of the delights of that tin! Sjoe, and how it reminded me of home – of my mother’s well-stocked and enviously organised walk-in pantry… When either my dad or I couldn’t find something lekker to sate our sweet-tooth, we’d head straight to the back of the pantry to the tin section, right next to the noisy ol’ deep-freeze – and there, never ever disappointed, we’d seize upon a tin of caramel or condensed milk – for which we were fully prepared to endure the wrath of that question, “Who ate a tin of caramel?” It was never hard to find the culprit.

Something I have looked for, year in and year out, in every Tesco or Sainsburys I patronise is : tinned smoked oysters! For me, these reek happily of late afternoons, camping in Wilderness – the sun that hot gold that turns everything glorious, sipping some of Daddy’s cold, cold beer – and sharing a plate of salticrax dotted luxuriously with an oily, brown but deeeeeelicious smoked oyster!

If I just BEGIN to talk about biltong then we’d all be here till at least one of us turned grey! So, let me return to what I ACTUALLY set out to write about: my friend Caroline’s comment relating to my last entry about the NHS and midwives:

My first son was born in SA with all the best of what medical aid had to offer. It was very reassuring because I was very nervous so I can understand what you are saying.

The other two had midwifes deliver them although a doctor was called for no. 2.

That's the nice thing about having your delivery in a hospital - the doctors are never far away if need be.

I found the English midwifes very caring and (over) concerned. They react to every little thing. Although my midwife did try to persuade me to have a home delivery for no 3.

At some point in my third pregnancy I was sent to a gynae for a checkup and when he asked me about my 'birth plan' I looked at him with a look and said "what's up with all that - nothing ever goes according to plan anyway!. I just want a hospital bed and an epidural!" He burst out laughing...

Three very different deliveries --- though none of them sound like there was any disappointment or frustration on Caroline’s part (VERY reassuring for me!!) I’d have to agree that there is certainly a ‘culture’ of midwifery here which I haven’t heard happening in SA, where the whole pregnancy and birth process is overseen by a gynaecologist. My mom and I were both initially quite sceptical about a midwife being the sole carer for me during my pregnancy. I suppose it’s a mistrust based on the idea that a gynaecologist is more qualified. But saying that, women have been acting as midwives for each other since literally forever, and in each and every culture – except until the recent Western advent of the male-dominant ‘doctor’ culture (late 19th Century?!) This is when men put us on our backs, bent legs opened up, ankles in stirrups, in a very convenient position for the doc doing the delivering, but hellishly illogical and a bit pointless for the woman giving birth! Even ancient cultures had women walking around, squatting, sitting – doing what came naturally – and doing what is suddenly again (thankfully!) fashionable today.
And so, I’d have to agree with Caroline and all the masses of hearsay I’ve adsorbed through television, magazines, books and conversation: my birth plan’ll be just the same: get the baby out in one piece and help me not commit husband-homicide in my agony!

Health & Safety?!

2008-10-22T19:16:00.010+02:00

In the UK, a normal, healthy pregnancy is presided over by a usually benevolent midwife until the actual birth. However, if there is some sort of complication such as high blood pressure, or - like me - you take 'non-approved' medication daily, you get referred to an OB-GYN in the antenatal clinic. Admittedly, some may not see this as a positive but for me (and my worried mom back in Cape Town) it was SUCH a relief!! It seemed ludicrous to not see a bona fide gynaecologist AT ALL during my entire pregnancy -- though this is not to say NHS midwives are ignorant or inept.

In South Africa, the norm is that your medical aid (for which you pay through your, um, ... nose) pays for regular visits to gynaes of considerable reputation and skill who're lodged in a private hospital or medical centre. At the birth, the gynae is the one who oversees the most crucial parts of the process --- a reassuring thought at the least.

A number of my friends've had babies delivered via the NHS -- the children are all healthy little buggers: so how bad could it be? Care differs from hospital to hospital, apparently... An article in the weekend paper told about the tragedy of a mentally 'all there', gracefully dignified 72 year old who was shifted from one NHS hospital to another - and received appalling 'care' from the nurses on her ward: they were apparently verbally and physically rough with her, belittling and often just not available! Thankfully, a South African friend of mine works as a PA in Northampton hospital and has guaranteed it's quite okay in terms of all those things I'm just a tad concerned about: hygiene, consistently efficient and kindly care etc.

However... now safety can't really be included in that list! While I was visiting the antenatal clinic (with my Nigerian gynae!) there was what is commonly called, here in the UK, 'an incident'. A 63 year old man had JUST been examined by a young cardiologist in a ward of 28 people -- nothing seemed out of the ordinary or alerted the young doctor of what was about to happen... While examining the next patient, through the thin separating curtain he heard what sounded like a loud scuffle --- his previous patient had shot himself in the head, the gun slipping to the floor from his suddenly lifeless hand... No doubt the other 27 patients are receiving some sort of trauma counselling while the hospital's Big Guns (oops -- no pun intended) will be seriously revising their beloved Health & Safety standards!

No-one would think to check an incoming patient for weapons - but maybe when I'm howling and barking in a wheelchair from hideously powerful contractions at the reception of the labour ward in March next year, they'll be rifling through my overnight bag of nappies and maternity pads, doing a full body search for knives, guns and who knows WHAT the paranoid in the NHS might then deem a 'weapon'!? Car keys? (see )

On a less sarcastic note, the man who took his life had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. (And here, I am silenced.)

Ad nauseum

2008-10-17T16:17:00.007+02:00

Two newspapers. A local South African one, and BBC News. Hunting for something juicily South African to write about, there really was so little to choose from: 'Luke the Puke' Watson being sent anti-nausea medication to cure his need to 'vomit all over the Springbok jersey' (I wonder how many eyebrows this raised?); a debate over whether or not to capture wild dolphins from Algoa Bay for the aquarium in P.E ; Zuma's court case --- I don't know which of the three is the most reminiscent of a circus? Certainly the dolphins must be the most evolved of the mammals mentioned!

I recently approached The South African regarding the possibility of writing a weekly column for them - but when asked what I'd be interested in writing about, there was one hot potato I wasn't prepared to pick up: and that's politics. Scanning the BBC headlines and our SA ones made my stomach churn with confusion, frustration and fear. It doesn't seem as if politicians anywhere can be trusted! (Pardon me? You've heard this before? A zillion times?)

Can anyone explain to me just how someone can be accused of 16 years' worth of fraud and corruption, and then abracadabra suddenly be set free of each and every allegation? Could so many allegations merely have been someone's deluded and fickle imagination?

I doubt it.

But who am I to comment? I worry about getting into some sort of trouble...

And so, from now on, I'll probably be steering clear of politics as something worth writing about. Let's stick to the things of this world that actually make sense. Like ol' Pukey Lukey and his incurable nausea!

Where is Pakshi?

2008-10-14T18:29:00.005+02:00

Maybe it was a subconscious thing that I ended Pakshi’s story on such a grand, distracting note as Part V … Part V wasn’t really “The End” . You see, Pakshi somehow disappeared – and I haven’t been able to find out why. Sometimes I lie awake at night agonising over how I could have let her slip away like that – was it my fault?

In June 2006, Pakshi was heavily but elegantly 7 months pregnant with a son. Her in-laws were, obviously, ecstatic – and suddenly Pakshi’s status rose from kitchen-girl/youngest, childless wife to celebrated and cherished carrier of a male grandchild. This meant new freedoms : a cellphone, enrolment in a driving course and being able to meet with friends more freely. Her response to this new regard was somewhere between guarded relief and cheeky triumph!

The drive up from Southampton to Newbury from where I’d hop onto the London Paddington train was fraught with such deep anxiety that I had to stop at a motorway petrol station to be sick. For two years I’d been trying to leave my ex-husband – and trying to make it work. But by March of 2006, the marriage was as good as dead and buried – and I was buried alive with it. Eventually, the fear of dying completely overcame my sick paralysis and June 21st was the date stamped on my SAA ticket back to Cape Town. I didn’t yet know, the day I last saw Pakshi, that I was indeed going home, but my buried heart knew and I didn’t know how to explain to this beautiful, gentle friend of mine I was going away.

Sitting across from each other in a darkish, yellowly-lit Indian restaurant in Southall, she teased me about my nausea – begging me with her eyes that I be pregnant too. Aloud, she daydreamed about how our children would be like cousins and how we’d visit each other for weeks at a time. The icy kulfi I tried to swallow in my unrealised shame was too cold, bitterly sweet – the clear noodles swam, insipid worms, in the pink, melting milk forcing my eyes shut, queasily.

“Lisa?”
“Yes, Pakshi?”
Her face was pinched in such earnestness – what was she going to ask of me? It had to be a favour.
“You are the closest I have to family here.”
I blinked. Raised my eyebrows.
“Please would you be with me at the birth of my son? I have already told my in-laws you would be with me. And you could stay for two weeks with me at home to help me.” And her eyes said, ‘I need you so badly. Please, please don’t let me down, my sister, my friend.’
How could I refuse? Her sense of familial isolation was something I knew more and more intimately with each passing week – I, too, had wondered over the years how I would cope without having my mother and family around me during such a devastatingly precious time…
“Yes. I will be with you.” And because she was wedged behind the table by her son-filled tummy, I jumped up to meet her there in a hug that said ‘everything will be all right’.

The next week and a few days slipped by excruciatingly -- trying to understand just HOW I was going to run away from this man I had lived with for 11 years, with no money at all to my name, but JUST enough to cover my ticket home. It all made so much sense – and yet seemed like the most frighteningly mad and impossible thing on earth to do. I telephoned Pakshi a couple of times at her home to tell her I had to leave. She never answered -- was she ever given the messages? Instead, I emailed her – something we did on a weekly basis anyway, but found almost criminal to do with the news I had for her.

The 21st of June arrived. At Heathrow, I saw a blonde check-in clerk – harshly pretty - berating a cowering man in front of not just his blushing, stupefied family, but in front of everyone within earshot. It was all just muffledness by the time it got to me – I said a quick prayer under my breath that I didn’t get her when I got to the front of the queue! The polite, unquestioning worm of travellers inched forward, watched by ruddy-cheeked police in their black bulletproof gear, their guns scanning the crowds like a probing, x-ray eye. The fluorescent light was cold, the air hot and thick with the smell of people coughing, crying, laughing, dusty rucksacks and shopcounter perfumes.

The acidic blonde beckoned me forward from the front of the queue – and my heart sank. Though she was South African, she was curt and NOT in the mood for South-Africans-Away-From-Home chitchat – and she weighed my luggage with a mean look on her face which looked like she was actually HOPING I’d be overweight! And, I was. Five kilograms. With my cheeks burning and my aching heart pounding, I begged her to please let me go through – that I was starting my life all over again with nothing but what I had in my bags.
“I don’t care. You can pay the extra or you can unpack right here.”
I was in such a deep state of shock already, that this completely broke me and I almost collapsed – but my friend, Melanie, got me under her control so I could at least get through this moment and get on that plane!! Every single item in my bags had been agonised over, again and again – and weighed against other things I should or could take – and having to unpack in front of this hard heart of a woman and a thousand staring strangers was one of the most humiliating moments in my life. I wondered, stupidly confused, what to leave behind and what to take. It was so, so hard…

In the end, I got through (literally and figuratively) and was home in Cape Town 12 hours later.

Within a few weeks of arriving home, I had found myself a fabulous job and had a car (FOREVER thanks to my dad and mom). Life was sweeter than I could have ever imagined it could be! I had been reborn – and every moment and freedom was almost too beautiful. I felt like I was 5 years old again, gazing about in wonder, curiosity and the most indescribable joy! There were so many new friends and so much going on, but still I sent off regular emails to my friends in England – receiving quick replies. Except from Pakshi. After awhile, her emails started bouncing back with a message saying her inbox was too full and could not receive any new emails. By that stage, I couldn’t even phone her – my cellphone had been swiped off my desk at work by a devious and invisible colleague.

Facebook lists a few hundred Pakshi Veturi’s – but none of them are MY Pakshi. How else can I track her down? Where is she now? Since about September of the year I left, I’ve had this revolting, ominous feeling down deep in my gut that Pakshi died in childbirth. It is nothing I can explain – and surely, these days, women don’t die from complicated childbirths? Surely not… She would never have cut me out of her life for leaving her and the UK. Her heart was too strong and too wise to do that. Maybe she ran away back to her family in India? But everything I have ever read or heard from Indian people is that divorce is not just taboo – it simply does not exist as an option. What ever happened to my Pakshi?

Coping to just cope!

2008-10-13T15:10:00.006+02:00

Two tranquilisers and a double Jack-on-the-rocks later, and I somehow managed to zombie my way through the most traumatic goodbye of my life! It was April 2003 and at 24 I was heading off to live in the UK on what I had been promised was a mere two year stint. Visions of romantic weekends in Paris and exciting skiing holidays in the Alps helped anaesthetise the thought of living away from everything I had ever known – my family, my Cape Town…

In 2006 I headed back to Cape Town on my own, determined to never again live away from Home.

But hell, now I am back in England! At least this time it is of my own volition, which makes coping a somewhat different kettle of fish: I can’t blame anyone else for my homesickness! Every day sees me doing something to ease the pain – whether it is eating a tin of Carnation Treat Caramel, yakking two hours away on the phone to my mom or simply sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. We all have different ways of coping with living overseas – and though we each have our very own personal little things we do to manage our feelings, there are some things which are common to ALL of us expat South Africans!

1.Deliberately seeking out fellow South Africans. When I first came over to England, I specifically decided to NOT do this – but to rather make friends with whoever came across my path. My main goal was to become a part of England – TO BELONG – and not to socially and ideologically isolate myself by sticking to my own. At first I thought I found the English to be aloof and unkind, but some of the most precious and loyal friends I have ever had are English… But now that I have South African neighbours (one of Craig’s childhood friends and his darling wife) I DO find their companionship fills me up in a way that being with my English friends doesn’t.
2. Buying exorbitant prices for South African products. Yes, admittedly I do buy boerewors – but other than that, I couldn’t be bothered to buy South African things like Pronutro and Ouma Rusks. (I didn’t buy them when I shopped at Pick ‘n Pay!!) But the proliferation of these South African shops and their obvious success all over England must mean that smells, tastes and even the homegrown logos must meet the need for ‘home’ in plenty of the South African hearts out here.
3. Braaing. I refuse to "BBQ". No way, Jose! We braai with lekker ‘stuks’ of wood and real wors – none of those fatty, grey burger patties and limp pork sausages for me! Our one neighbour commented over the fence a couple of braais ago, “Hey, you Africans are a destructive bunch chopping wood for your BBQ – always needing to burn things!” Hmm… a rather random comment from an otherwise educated, pleasant man – but it shows two things: firstly, how innate our cultural connection to braaing is (and the sense of home and family it creates for us) and secondly, how two cultures, though they seem to do the same thing (braai vs. bbq) are not doing the same thing at all! (Eish – did that make sense?!)

The first 3 years, I found myself drinking plenty of red wine every single night and never once realised it was a daily habit of trying desperately to numb my heart. My walls were constantly bare of any photos of family and friends – as though I could visually block off any reminders of those I’d left behind. Now though, I have as many photographs up as I can – and regularly look through my collection of pics on my laptop in the folder called ‘loved ones’ – because now I’ve realised it is healthier to feel your feelings: it is part of the process of maintaining your emotional health and identity, because otherwise numb denial eats away at you from deep inside like some dark, black sickness…
Craig reads his local Port Elizabeth newspaper on-line every single day! I admire his ability to stay so connected – I cannot bring myself to read the news from home. But at least I’ve gotten used to him playing Radio Algoa on lazy Saturday afternoons! Before, the sound of South African accents and advert jingles was CRUSHING. (The most devastating was hearing ANYTHING by Johnny Clegg and Savuka!!!)
Being pregnant has turned my homesickness from a pesky, persistent 'flu' into something more like fatal cardiac arrest that doesn’t want to stop!! My heart aches neverendingly for my Mommy… Not being able to share this miraculous time with my family is torturous – made worse by the fact that I’d always imagined it would be a very shared, daily adventure – AND, well, these blasted hormones are not making things ANY easier!
Oy, that’s enough for today! Just writing about it is making this ole heart ache…
I’d love to hear how YOU coped (or didn’t!) There is a comment box right underneath these words for you to capture your thoughts (wink).

Pakshi's Story - Part V (The End)

2008-10-08T12:57:00.003+02:00

Passing back through the archway, Pakshi quietly thanked the old, cross-legged lady in faded pink with a small bow, as if that was the signal for the spell to be broken – and Pakshi broke into immediate chatter about our next stop in the temple: the communal eating hall.
Along the one side of the small hall was a row of trestle tables, laden all along its length with steel pots and dishes, each manned by an oldish or ancient Indian man. Pakshi handed me a steel, compartmented tray, a spoon and a little see-through plastic mug. As each man dished up his fare onto my plate, I was met with a heavy, suspicious glare – each one slightly different from the next -- as if they were silently asking: “White, Christian woman, why are you here to eat our food that has been blessed by our priest?” I was asking myself the same question – guiltily, embarrassed. Their eyes were so hard. It felt terrible to be so obviously scorned and unwanted.
Sitting on the floor with our food and hot, sweet tea, Pakshi quickly explained we needed to face a way – that is, in the direction of ‘the great book’ in the hall we’d visited before. The younger women and their little, noisy children smiled openly at me, as though we’d just passed each other in the street – and I wondered what it was that made the older generation seem to hard and hurt. Pakshi tore off a piece of still-warm chapatti and showed me how to grasp it in my fingers to dexterously mop up the spicy, yellow lentils. She ate quickly, habitually, while I laboured slowly over the mopping and soaking up of the different glowingly spicy vegetables and sauces which I gratefully diluted in plain yoghurt. (While I write this, I now suddenly remember that one older man at the food counter did smile at me: a magnificent, happy smile that seemed to apologise for everyone else – making his white, waxed moustache twitch as his face stretched to accommodate his smile!) Next on my plate was a small portion of pale, runny rice pudding worlds apart from the almost chokingly sweet one of my youth – and scented with the barest hint of rosewater. Thank goodness I had a spoon to eat this with!
Pakshi clangingly stacked our plates against the far wall with all the others before we headed out to the reception area to get ready to leave. I can’t say I wasn’t relieved to be leaving this place – but then, it was one of those experiences that change the very make-up of who you are. What I learned, quite harshly, was what it felt like to be on the receiving end of mistrust and contempt – and all because I was not one of them. And yet, as soon as we stepped out of that temple, the roles were suddenly reversed and I was the ‘normal’ one again – and no-one would dare look at me as they had in the temple. Their temple was their sanctuary in more than just a religious way. It was the one place where they were back in India. Where they could BE Indian without the West interfering. And, I know that by being there, I was like a finger of that white interference twisting its way into their sacred India. I understood their hard, hurt eyes now.
Back on the streets of Southall, we headed towards a well-known Indian supermarket that Pakshi says was set up by an Indian man who won the lottery! Along the way, we were accosted by glittering silks and sequinned shoes that overflowed from the interiors of the shops, the sounds of sharp bartering going on inside. There were sweet stalls selling intriguing shapes, colours and flavours of traditional Indian confectionery that we stopped and gawked at – Pakshi explaining how each was made and the ingredients before hurrying me along to the next shop (of which there were so many) which sold all their jewellery for 1 pound each!! Needless to say, each trip to Southall saw my handbag full of bangles, necklaces and earrings – what more could a girl want? The jewellery wasn’t of the best quality, but it was wildly fascinating to me because it wasn’t Accessorize or Topshop: it was all the way from India and very obviously, exotically so!
The supermarket was an adventure in itself with its heavily layered scents and aromas, brightly colourful packaging and menagerie of Indian sounds: questions being asked, instructions shouted, Hindi music dancing through it all like a thousand fluorescent butterflies. Oil was sold in big, yellow plastic containers the size of a very thick briefcase. Sacks of basmati rice leaned against each other like old, fat people. Pakshi dragged me excitedly to the spice section where she started pointing out the various spices I needed to buy: ground cumin, green cardamoms, black cardamoms, garam masala, ground coriander… My mouth watered crazily and my eyes felt like they might pop out of my head! And, amazingly, it was all so very, very cheap! I left with two heavy plastic packets of all the spices I could ever need – my favourite purchase being a smallish white plastic jar with blue Indian script listing its ingredients: it was a ready-made concoction of the five chai spices! Pakshi had seen it and gasped with being pleased to find it on the shelves for me, saying (with that cheeky wink of hers) she could hardly imagine me doing it her way, rolling pin and all – and all I’d need to do was put some of this straight into my tea! (I’ve guarded that little jar jealously while I was in South Africa the last two years, only deigning to share it with my mom. On the way to the airport in May, she said, “Oh darling, you forgot to pack your bottle of chai! Shall we go back and get it?”
“No, no. It’s okay. Let’s just get to the airport now.”
You see, I had two thoughts: one selfish, one not. Firstly, after my expired passport debacle and being separated from Craig for a month, I didn’t want to jeopardise ANY chance of getting to the UK. And secondly, I thought it would be good for me to leave the chai for my mom so she could enjoy it and think about me each time she uses it. (Though knowing my mom, she will have put it aside to post to me, or put it back in the pantry awaiting my return home…)

Pakshi's Story - Part IV: Southall, Sikhs & Scarves

2008-10-06T10:14:00.007+02:00

The first adventure Pakshi and I shared was to Southall, at her suggestion. We met at Paddington, wrapped up in our thick, wool coats and scarves, and clumped along in our heavy winter boots to the train bound for this little Indian kingdom of temples, bazaars and restaurants. We complained about the dreadful English cold that ate into our bones, and how the sunless days turned our skins, robustly tanned since childhood, into nothing more than translucent white maps of blue veining. Our winters back home were almost like the English summers, and our entire 15 minute train journey to Southall was devoted to discussing the overheated English shops which blasted you with stifling, stale air which turned your layers and layers of clothing into nothing more than obsolete and the ensuing claustrophobic struggle to free yourself. She brought up our initial meeting at the Home Office, telling me how she just knew I could not have been English by the very fact that I warmly extended myself into more than a courteous hello (and no doubt, too, by the fact that I was there to apply for something a British citizen certainly wouldn’t need!) Obviously flattered by this, we thrashed out this peculiar English penchant for cold reserve – especially toward foreigners. Having both come from cultures with sad and violent histories of racial/class discrimination, we were both acutely sensitive in our assessment of the English’s reaction to us, but it is something I have discussed with a number of South Africans and English, but to which the responses have been incredibly varied so as to not help me reach any sort of understanding at all, except that it seems to be a highly personal and individualised thing. I think that perhaps it is rooted in a person’s particular experience of foreigners in living in their country. For example, my neighbour, Maureen, is a lovely, gentle and intelligent lady in her early 60s – but had the rather unlucky experience of working in the same office of a young South African woman who arrogantly and loudly told anyone and everyone that the only reason she was in England was to be awarded British citizenship – as though the actual living in England were a trauma and trial to be endured for this particular prize. What a bloody cheek! I felt embarrassed and defensive when Maureen tole me this story – and because this girl behaved so appallingly, there was nothing I could say except blush in agreement. To make matters worse, the girl would natter deliberately in loud Afrikaans to the young South African psychiatrist in whose office they were secretaries – causing each group to be isolated in or outside of this language barrier. “And yet”, Maureen says, “I felt no resentment at all towards the young man as a South African. He was an excellent psychiatrist and exhibited none of the ugly arrogance of the secretary.” And so, in this one little story, it can be seen that the problem is not so much to do with being South African, as much as the South African’s attitude toward England and their reasons for being here.

When I first moved to the UK in 2003, it was supposedly only for my ex-husband to attempt the Olympic Games as a British citizen. After four years, it became painfully obvious he never intended for us to return home. He had a bizarre loyalty to a country he wasn’t even born in and had only briefly visited once or twice before in his young lifetime. (I didn’t share his warped sense of national allegiance and returned home without him - for good, in 2006, just three days short of attending the ceremony where I was to be awarded my British citizenship, having written a ridiculous little test I apparently wrote in the fastest time they had seen and paid obscene amounts of money to the government – but I had decided that breathing African air was more important than this sought after document – a decision I have since come to regret… The laws changed while I was back in Cape Town between 2006 and 2008 ; I now have another 5 years to go before I can think of applying for British citizenship again. This time, however, I am more concerned about attaining citizenship – the main reason being that I am in the middle of my first pregnancy and suddenly having a family’s future to consider rules out the faithful love I feel for my country which seems never to stop struggling with so many turmoils. For the first time, I find myself among the ranks of foreigners who are seeking some kind of asylum and financial refuge.

Hmmm… that was quite a digression! Where were we? Ah – Southall! Alighting at the station, we were immediately swamped with the surreal sense of being in another, more exotic country. Darker skins in so many shades ranging from sun-starved caramel to the richest darkness shimmered inbetween tightly wrapped dark blue turbans, thick black beards, sparkling brown eyes, orange chiffon swirls of sari and fuschi, turquoise, emerald, gold… The street outside the busy station was even busier – cramped with hurrying pedestrians and hooting, tooting cars and taxis. Descending the little hill from the station, Pakshi pointed out the various temples explaining the religious and cultural differences, saying she considered herself a Sikh and that, for lunch, we would be eating inside the temple she worshipped at whenever she came to Southall. It was not so much the free fare as the exciting and novel experience she wanted to feed me. Like many white South Africans, I have been a Christian my whole life – and the thought of eating the blessed food in this alien temple felt exceedingly uncomfortable – even unnerving, maybe even ... a little frightening. I suppose I was afraid of the reactions I’d provoke. The furthest away from a regular, suburban church I’d ventured was on a primary school outing. We explored an old mosque in the historically rich Bo Kaap area in Cape Town – feeling only the tiniest threat of awkwardness at the outskirts of my fascination – protected by my identity as a gawking spectator as in a museum or curiosity shop. No-one looked at us through slanted eyes – and probably largely because during its 'off hours', the mosque operated as museum of Cape Malay culture and was mostly deserted by worshippers! This penetration of mine into a Sikh temple where I most certainly did not belong made me feel more afraid and awkward than I am able to admit… Pakshi merely laughed at me in her wise way and led me by the hand through the big, metal security gates which were dwarfed before the colossal, white marble temple which glistened luminously in the pale winter sun. Apparently the marble had been shipped laboriously but faithfully all the way from India, costing the Sikh community in Southall an astronomical 17 million GBP.

Inside, the temperature confused me – being too clammily hot but also cold, austere. Pakshi’s voice dropped to a reverent hush as she pointed to the wicker basket overflowing with scarves, miming the action of choosing one and placing it over my head. Burrowing into the top layer of scarves, I found a translucent pink scarf amongst a sea of thick, navy ones, polka dots, striped ones, sheer silk ones and colourful woven prints. Amongst the bustle of people buzzing quietly around us, Pakshi stood in front of me, arranging the scarf proudly over my head, wrapping it deftly around my neck, letting the ends fall gently over the backs of my shoulders. A satisfied nod later and I was following her into a large, brightly lit cloakroom lined with pigeonholes and lockers glaringly bare of any locks. We wrestled our boots off, leaving our thick, woolly socks on, and stuffed them into the same locker along with our handbags. (I didn’t want to ask if they’d be safe or not.) At the top of a very wide flight of white marble steps veined with the same grey as the clouds outside, we were met by an old woman rocking meditatively, cross-legged on the floor. Swathed in a threadbare pale pink sari, she barely registered our arrival except for reaching with a practised hand into the bowl to pinch off a piece of the pale brown, sweet dough for Pakshi as she kneeled before her. The quiet exchange of melodious words between them sounded like an oft-said round of blessings, but I couldn’t be sure because I was under the spell of the awed spectator, locked in deep fascination at every new detail and sound that unfolded itself so generously before me. Because I also felt a sense of shame at being so noticeably alien, I kept my eyes pressed down onto the once plush red carpet as I trailed Pakshi up the aisle between what I could sense were many worshippers on either side of the aisle. I prayed they were too absorbed in their own prayers to notice my interloping intrusion into their sacred place, unable to bring myself to look to my right or my left. A loud, praying voice was transmitted via surround-sound through the cavernous hall over what sounded like giant speakers sunk deep into the cold, stone walls. The warbling, rumbling incantations seeped into my bones and made my brain hum with its hypnotism. Up ahead I discovered the focus of worship (and the source of The Voice) – a large, square tent dazzled amongst spotlights and acres of luxurious brocade and glimmering gold fringing. A large, turbaned priest swayed, mesmerised, before an enormous and ancient looking book. It was before this man and book that Pakshi kneeled and kissed the floor with her forehead. I felt perplexed and ashamed of my unfair witnessing of this intimate moment, wishing I’d rather waited for her outside.

(More to follow very soon - promise!)

Pakshi's Story - Part III : Of Samoosas & Spices

2008-10-03T17:08:00.006+02:00

Pakshi was a veritable artist in the kitchen, surrounded by her herbs and spices! The first and last time I went to visit her at the house feels as though it were yesterday – and I think my tongue still bears the scars from all that chilli! Her in-laws were a little paranoid about her social contact with this ‘Lisa’ and so it was decided I should travel all the way up to North London where they lived in a very Indian community to meet them (and their approval!)

It felt like forever and a hundred different tubes and overland trains for me to reach Pakshi’s town. The station was a dusty, crumbling place through which a cold gale whipped through, making my hour long wait for Pakshi to fetch me rather unpleasant. The cellphone issue didn’t help as there seemed to be no-one at home when I called form the station to say I had arrived. It turned out we’d miscommunicated about my ETA, but we were like two little girls in our joy in seeing each other again, that it didn’t matter at all. We walked in the bristling winter wind to her house which was a large brick affair amidst a row of unkempt plastered ones, though not as large as I had imagined with all those nine other people living in it! Stepping into the thick warmth of the house, I was greeted at the door by the mother-in-law who looked exactly as I had imagined: roundly overweight, long greasy grey hair tied up in a lazy chignon and eyes that looked both kind and cold. The lounge was obviously decked out for the occasion, the tables heavily laden with spiced almonds, cashews and a variety of biscuits. Even a pot of tea steamed in the middle of a tray of immaculately floral tea-cups. Pakshi’s body language screamed awkwardness and we both found it hard to talk to each other as we usually did. The mother-in-law was not the chatty type and I was grateful for my verbal diahrrea, managing to chat a storm and thereby convince the mother-in-law I was good, happy and wholesome company for her daughter-in-law. The sisters arrived next in a whirl of designer clothes and loose, long black hair. My previously attained knowledge of them didn’t help to predispose me to them too kindly and I struggled to not see them as my friend’s piggish tormenters! Reason conquered in the end, and they were pleasant, well-educated women who it seemed would never marry, and if they did, it would be for love. I couldn’t begin to imagine them living as Pakshi did. It is still hard for me to understand the paradoxical way in which Pakshi’s mother-in-law treated Pakshi versus her own daughters. Archaic and traditional compared to modernly Western.

When Pakshi could see I had the situation under control, she disappeared briefly, only to return with a silver tray of the biggest samoosas I have ever laid eyes on, lined with oil-spotted paper doilies. My eyes must have either bulged or watered because Pakshi laughed and assured me she had used the most mild of chillis in her samoosa filling. Relieved, I popped one onto a plate and sunk my teeth deep into the soft, oily pastry expecting a gently spiced mince to fill my mouth. Instead, I felt my mouth actually ignite – and then my tongue became a red-hot, burning coal which seemed to burn brighter and harder with each passing second. And this time, I KNOW my eyes bulged AND watered, because everyone in the room had a big fat guffaw and began hurriedly pouring me more tea and showering me with paper towels for my watering eyes. (What I really wanted to use the napkins for was to get rid of the hellish morsel in my mouth!) Needless to say, I didn’t suffer a single bout of sinusitis for at least a year after that! Having finished my giant samoosa, Pakshi begged me to please have another one – and I could only rub my tummy in response to say: no thank, my friend, but I am full to bursting! As an alternative, she wrapped two more up for me in tinfoil for my long journey home (though I could hardly imagine attempting this voluntarily again!) With the entertainment now over for the day (i.e. watch the uninitiated South African try to eat our food as politely as possible) the sisters and mother left us to ourselves in the lounge, both relieved to finally be able to talk as we usually did. What I didn’t expect was for Pakshi to announce, while we cleared the lounge of the leftover spiced nuts and empty tea cups, was that it was now time for lunch! Besides the fact that I was already full from that Samoosa (it was so big it deserves a capital S!), I couldn’t bear the thought of having to force more chilli down my poor, virgin gullet still searing and blistering from what felt like 3rd degree burns! My first thought was: escape! I must go NOW! I hoped my phone would ring from someone urgently needing me back home – or that I could suddenly remember a once-forgotten dentist’s appointment: ANYTHING! But as my reason kicked in, I knew I had to stay for this lunch – but I would have to tell Pakshi how burny her food was to me. While she showed me the five vegetable dishes she had so meticulously prepared, and the three meat dishes, I plucked up the courage to explain my dilemma. She laughed till the tears rolled down her cheeks, looking much like I did in the middle of munching my Samoosa – consoling me with the fact that she would place big bowls of dessicated coconut and cool, white yoghurt on the table for me. She let me help her carry the bowls and trays through to the dining room, which was dark and strangely colonial in style with it’s almost black, super-glossy mahogany table and pink damask wallpaper. And while the food stayed warm in the server (she had set the table before I’d arrived) she showed me how to prepare the chapattis and naans. Nothing had been bought from Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s but had been hand-prepared that morning (and knowing Pakshi, probably before sunrise!) I watched in awe as she flung and bounced the chapattis over the naked blue gas flame on the cooker – amazed at the grace that years of practice had endowed her movements with. Imagining myself attempting the same manoeuvre brought up images of sleeves catching alight, scorched chapattis and screeching smoke-detectors, leaving me quite happy with giving my Tesco chapattis a cowardly, unauthentic spin the microwave instead!

A round bamboo lidded container swallowed the warm, steaming chapattis which I carried behind Pakshi to the diningroom. As she dished up each portion for me on a rather large white plate, the room filled with layer upon layer of spicy fragrances – I could pick out cinnamon here, clove there… and here a lavish dash of garlic… Despite myself, I salivated hungrily and couldn’t wait for Pakshi to finish dishing her plate up so we could tuck into this incredible feast. Surprisingly (though I think the Samoosa had either anaesthetised my tongue or permanently killed off every one of my tastebuds) the food wasn’t nearly as hot as I predicted it would be. Instead, the bouquet of spices I’d smelled before eating, was realised in my mouth as deeply scented and exquisitely flavoured sensations, each dish beautifully different from the next. I was so enthralled and intoxicated by the delicate intensity and versatile complexities that poor Pakshi suffered through a veritable inquisition of questions and more questions. I’d never understood Indian cooking before and now I felt like the sun was inexplicably rising in the middle of the day! At last I understood: I had finally attained gastronomical nirvana: there was more to food than the Italian food I’d been fascinated with since a young girl. My poor mom had to suffer rolling eyes and the whinging of three daughters whenever she cooked a curry – and like Pakshi, kindly producing bowls of chopped banana and coconut to ease the apparent burn (though twenty years later, I realise it was also to stop the high-pitched whine of three impudent daughters!)

With lunch finished and a new passion in me ignited, we tidied up the dining room, Navot wiping down the table leaving the room spotlessly immaculate. Back in the kitchen, the dirty dishes piled next to the sink, Pakshi submitted once again to my renewed interrogation of her cooking methods and ingredients. While a pot of water was set to boil on the stove for chai tea, Pakshi began an extensive explanation of her particular style of Indian cooking. Each region in India has its very own method and style of cooking – from techniques to actual ingredients. The problem in our Western Indian restaurants is that they generalise to form a menu of Indian food which is presumed to be more palatable for the Westerner. Probably the most efficient and exciting way to truly discover the delights of authentic Indian cuisine is to invest in a couple of very good Indian recipe books which will teach you everything about, for example, why the spices, in order to release their flavour and fragrance, must be warmed up in the oil at a specific point in the cooking process as opposed to just randomly throwing them in at some point when one remembers! Opening up the monstrosity of a fridge (for nine people, an ordinary freezer won’t do) Pakshi began pointing out how she organised her fridge and deepfreze, and then hauled out two huge round aluminium trays, each filled with what looked like a kind of paste cut up into blocks and covered in a tight skin of clingfilm. She explained how every two weeks, she’d stock up on fresh garlic and green chillies – usually about a Tesco packet full each – and then haul this home to prepare for the next two weeks’ worth of cooking. Every single night sees me carefully select two lobes of garlic, carefully peeling the papery envelope from the flesh I’ll crush into whatever it is I am making that night. Yes, it is a bit of a mission to do that peeling and crushing every night but so worth it when one compares it with the synthetic flavour of garlic flakes, or the stale onioniness of those tubs of yellowing pre-crushed garlic. Now, can you imagine peeling not just two little cloves but head after head of garlic until you had enough to crush so it would fill a deep aluminium tray with it? And now that you’re finished with the garlic, you have the fresh, green chillies to prepare (though the exact process of that remains a mystery to me. I think Pakshi decided, after my close encounter with her samoosas, that I wouldn’t ever need, or want to know the fine art of preparing chilli!)

As she showed me around her immaculate and fascinatingly organised kitchen, I asked her why she didn’t consider becoming a cooking teacher. She blushed her modest little blush and tried to change the subject, but I persisted: “You really are quite phenomenal – and I just know that with your personality, talent and knowledge of Indian cooking, you would be an instant success!” But she just mumbled something about not being allowed to, even though her eyes, sparkling, were telling me otherwise. I decided not to push her but hoped she’d at least consider it. It would get her out the house, give her some sort of independence and most importantly, make her some friends. Of course, that was only my personal point of view and it was impossible for me to understand her circumstances completely and the subject was never raised again.

It was time for tea and almost time for me to head back to West Berkshire, which felt like an entire universe away from this dark, bizarrely colonial but still very Indian house, its walls infused with years of oily spiciness and regret. Next to the stove, against the wall, was a tall wooden chest of square draws which looked as if it was very old and had endured a rough sea journey from India to England in a trunk lined with saris and spices. With a pot of water bubbling furiously on the stove, Pakshi plopped in two Earl Grey tea bags which were sucked under the boiling surface and then thrown back onto its furious surface again in a vicious whirlpool. While the tea got tumbled around and around, Pakshi opened various unlabelled drawers, bringing out small handfuls of the particular ‘chai’ spices. Laying each type of spice down on the wooden chopping board next to the stove, she crushed them with a long, pale wooden rolling pin, releasing the fragrance trapped in the oils of the black peppercorns, green cardamom, nutmeg, ginger and sweet cinnamon. Carefully tipping them into the boiling pot, she readied the teapot and some milk in a jug while the spices saturated the brew with their magic!

The tea was like nothing I had ever tasted! It was as if I was transported to another place and time which whispered to me of the exotic and the precious… My mouth tingled as if from the most passionate, illicit kiss and each sip was like another kiss. In India, chai is drunk milky and quite sweet – in bitter contrast to the darkened, sugarless brew of English teapots. What does this say about cultures? I don’t really know, but perhaps it has something to do with hedonism and a lust for beauty, as opposed to polite austerity. All I know is that I drink chai tea whenever I can - even becoming a bit of a ritual for me when I write. It is as if it has the power to unlock my memory and ignite my imagination! (But please don’t be tempted by the Westernised version of chai tea – it is weakened by dilution into something which would embarrass an Indian!)

Pakshi's Story - Part II :The Wedding

2008-10-02T13:01:00.003+02:00

The wedding was a momentous affair, in India, with over 500 guests! When, a few months later, Pakshi showed me her wedding album, the opulence and glamour seemed garishly ugly and pointless in comparison the bride’s tear stained face. Red, swollen eyes brimmed with tears in every single photo, the kohl running down her cheeks in smudged, grey stripes. Her response to my obvious questions was double-edged: as a bride worthy of her dowry, she was expected to be in mourning for her lost family. It would show her to be chaste and pliable. But, Pakshi said, hers was not an act which some brides perform with macabre virtuosity. Hers were real, raw tears. Tears of fear, loathing, brokenness, anger. Even as she spoke, her eyes shone with tears and she tried to distract me by opening up her big, wooden trousseau where her blood red wedding sari seemed to mock us in a kind of glittery defiance.
Although it shocked me, I suppose it wasn’t much of a surprise when she told me how it took 3 months for their marriage to be consummated. This is so impossibly different to our understanding of weddings and honeymoons; it would be futile to even attempt a comparison of values and dreams and disappointments. But what is so miraculous about being human is the ability to console another hurting heart – and that thing called empathy – despite any apparent borders of culture. Fingering the intricate gold embroidery on her red wedding sari, her tears tumbled down her cheeks, the pain still so tender, as a wound which will not scab over. The past pain must all have blended with the current agony of her living situation – which was something beyond which I could imagine coping with. As the youngest member in a family of 9 other in-laws, her role was basically that of an indentured servant to the rest of them. And without having any sort of family or even friends no closer than India, it must have been humiliating, desolately lonely and frightening – not to mention exhausting! She was always the first one up in the mornings and the last to head to bed. She had two sisters-in-law – both in their mid-30s – who Pakshi said behaved like spoiled little children who left their coffee cups for days beside their beds and often forgot to flush the loo. The one, I remember, was a successful criminal lawyer! With her husband the first one to leave the house in the mornings, Pakshi would get up with him at 5am to prepare his breakfast and a cup of tea. He was also, incidentally, the last one home at night, often returning after only 10 or 11pm. It was Pakshi’s job to cook the supper for the family of nine, and then wait up until her husband returned home and then reheat the food and only then eat supper with him. And while he was preparing for bed, she would do the last of the dishes and clean the kitchen. She complained about how she hardly ever saw her husband because he worked so hard – and that she still hardly knew him after a year of marriage. I’ve heard many South African women (and British!) complain about the same thing – but it can hardly be compared: how many of these South African women could be found living as the youngest and expectedly servile member of a family of 9 in-laws? The loneliness must have been unbearable. Her mother-in-law prohibited her from having a cellphone and disliked her having any friendships outside of their closeknit circle of family friends. It was only when Pakshi fell pregnant with their first grandson that they deigned to give her a cellphone – for obvious reasons. Staying in touch with her was a matter of phoning the house’s landline and inevitably having to face one or the other’s brusque hello, and then the awkward wait while Pakshi’s name was barked and screeched till she appeared from whichever corner of the house she was working in. And meeting up with her at Paddington station was always a logistical nightmare, because so often a train was running late – but there was no way for us to know because of her lack of cellphone contact. And even when she did receive one, it was with great reservation: she didn’t ever use it so send text messages – its function was purely for her safety while pregnant.
Perhaps I seem harsh and critical of her situation and her culture – but what I am saying is mostly shaped by her own words and feelings. No doubt she was somewhat prepared for the life she would lead as she would have grown up with the knowledge that marriages are arranged. That love is something that should grow – and is more akin to devotion and loyalty than romance and passion. She spoke about her own parents’ deep love for each other – despite their marriage being arranged as well. So must have been this that convinced her that marriage produces love, and not the other way around. Perhaps the mere fact that one is marrying a virtual stranger you know you must come to love is a more realistic basis for marriage: there is very little place for disappointment, and one certainly cannot fall out of love! Whereas so many of our Western marriages are based on unrealistic ideals of love and beauty that shatter at the slightest pressure. Maybe spending one’s childhood and adolescence observing and understanding this Indian notion of marriage prepares one for hard work and the ability to make the most of every situation. As a wannabe feminist in my university years, I would have blatantly chastised the Indian version of marriage as feudal and barbaric – downright colonialism and slavery! But, with my own failed marriage behind me, I can see the simple and functional beauty of the Indian way. Pakshi believed she would come to love her husband more and more as the years passed – though she still wished he could spend more time with her, and dreamed of living in their own house minus the hoard of in-laws. Even having my ex mother-in-law over for dinner left me reeling in general pissed-offness – and a brief holiday seemed like sugar-coated hell to me!