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:

Rainbow Nation

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...

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

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.

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!

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

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 ;)