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!

Jingle Bells...

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:

HEADLINE: "Stiff Upper Lip" Proven Pure Fallacy!

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.