The Write Stuff (*snigger-worthy pun*)

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!

{ in memoriam }

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.

Wanna Hear Some Good News?

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.)

Africa, my Love.

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.)