Birthday balloons and another letter

So, it's my friend, C's, birthday today. She lives around the corner from me. Well, to be precise - down the road, around the corner, past the kid's school with the animals painted kiddilly on the wall (I love the lion - rowr!), around another corner, some more steps, then another corner, over the stop street, and you're there, at her front door. Important information, that.

Not that that has anything to do with my story, it’s just setting the scene really. The point is, it’s her birthday and she gets a bit stressy about birthdays. Winnie the Pooh once said, very wisely: “Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon.”

And it is for that, exact reason (I am a Winnie-the-Poohist), that I found myself in the car watching the neighbours peer through their window, watching me watch them, in the dark at 6:10am this morning, while a balloon got tied to her gate. Keep in mind that this is South Africa, and there tends to be a certain amount of suspicion due to a slightly worrying crime rate. I decided it deserved a letter.

Dear C’s Neighbour (the boy one, not the girl one),

While I can completely understand that possibly a strange car parked outside your house at 6am in the morning when the stars are still bright, may elicit a startled response in you, can I make one small suggestion? Two words: dressing gown.

There are some really nice dressing gowns, at a number of stores at The Big Shopping Mall down the road (I saw them while baby-shopping for my sister last week - she's having twins - I'll be a double aunty! Let me not stray from the point, though). Alternatively, there are even cheaper ones at the factory shops in the other direction – I can completely understand not wanting to waste well-earned cash on such frivolities. But do get one. Your girlfriend/wife/girl-you-brought-home-last-night’s two piece pyjama set is really sweet, but your outfit of ill-fitting shorts and NOTHING ELSE was a little too much for me at 6am.

It’s just that I think you’d look very fetching in a lovely dressing gown. I’d even be happy to come with you to pick one out. You know, just in case somebody parks outside your house in the dark at 6am to tie a red balloon to one of your neighbour’s gates again and you wish to pull back your curtain to peer out. These things do happen, apparently.

With much neighbourhood love,
Shiny.

So, yes. I was very glad to be up so early though, as The Weatherman provided a spectacular breakfast show this morning – lightening and thunder, served up with the most beautiful, brilliant pink sky and clouds as the sun rose over the mountains on the other side across Cape Town which I got to see from my perch up here on the fifth floor. Incredible.

And then I have a fabulous, Mexican, birthday celebration to look forward to, to celebrate with C this evening. Life is good when one has the prospect of frozen margarita's and lots of friends celebrating a birthday after work.

Should dressing gowns be made law I wonder?