Off to the Karoo

I’m so excited that I can hardly breathe. Tomorrow we set off in The Silver-Winged Unicorn to the vast expanse of The Karoo, one of my favourite places in the world. Two of my favourite people in the world, and I. We will stay in Nieu Bethesda where the air is clear, my heart squeezes in pleasure and the stars are sprinkled liberally in the night skies. A place where donkeys amble about on the dusty streets and there is no petrol station, no grocery store, no ATM. Bliss.

I hope to be inspired, to write.

Busy busy on holiday

See what happens? I make these wild statements of finshing Thirty Days of Truth before the end of November and then, suddenly, it's the 19th and I've been busybusybusy (on holiday) going to wonderful galleries with high ceilings and white walls and beautiful photos; having lunch at a friend's hole-in-the-wall restaurant filled with happy people and healthy food and love; wandering around the city seeing the throb of life there; popping in to the Reserve Bank; walking the fan walk to my beloved stadium, a sea of yellow people, to watch Bafana Bafana against the USA (I saw the president!); being sad at the arrival of the period of a wanting-to-be-pregnant friend; celebrating the birthday of another friend in a Cuban bar full of people talking and laughing and smoking cigars.

And writing, writing, for my course. But now, I am going to write, write for me. This weekend will be filled with TDoT's - truth spouting left, right and centre. Because I want to be back with writing about what's going on in my life. The people I saw, the conversations I had. But first, let me get through the self-inflicted therapy of TDoT.

Aqua aerobics mirth

It was one of those perfect Blue Sky Saturdays as we drove away from the city, its string of cars pulsing out bad breath and loud noise. We waved them goodbye as the road stretched before us, through golden wheat fields full of hawks swooping above as, I’m sure, little mice gathered sheafs of wheat below. Or picnicked. Maybe mice picnic amongst the wheat when it’s waiting to be harvested. And play mouse cricket, with a tiny bat and even tinier ball. Whatever they were doing, I hope they were paying attention to the birds of prey above.

We went to stay at a beautiful old farmhouse on the edge of a little village with a big mountain backdrop. It’s one of those villages that is full of the artistic, the eccentric, and the trees whisper of secrets and goings-on that happen when the sun sets behind that mountain and fairy lights begin to flicker in the trees.

The owners are retired from The City Beneath the Mountain. He started a string of security businesses here at the right time, knowing it would become booming business as crime stats gripped at our throats. Before that he was a publisher, and even before that, he was a musician (while he was ‘courting’ her). They burned themselves out over 30 years of it and now live idyllic lives there, in a little piece of paradise.

We went into the village to watch the rugby. Well, G watched the rugby, while I read Huisgenoot (I’d left my book at the guest house and Huisgenoot seemed apt) and watched the people – the wholewheat family at the next table, six adults and an endless supply of children doing a very good job of ‘communal parenting’ – pizza slices, dummies, bottles and Daddy’s laps being shared.

At the next table a girl who looked young, but apparently isn’t, drank herself silly on the local cocktail, the Italian Stallion (my mother should do some cocktail naming for them), which, on tasting, contained a mixture of alcohols with, I think, Sparberry (fizzy raspberry) – alcopop to the extreme.

Then home to bed in our house with a wide passage and stories of a ghost donkey who runs down the road with its tail on fire (purely fabricated by our proprieter apparently – he says it’s the most brilliant security measure). The morning brought with it a brilliant blue sky and the still heat of the Swartland. The lady of the house persuaded G to do aqua aerobics in the beautiful pool as I sat in the shade of the wide stoep overlooking the vineyards beyond the pool.

Our proprietor busied himself playing old show tunes and languid French-sounding love songs on the piano in the depths of the cool house while I laughed at G cheating at her aqua aerobics and the lady of the house pirouhette and dance in the pool. My best bit though, the Chinese face exercises which included various sticking-out-tongue-while-raising-eybrows manouvres:

Lady of the House: Okay, now rub the tip of your nose with the palm of your hand.
G: Like this?
LotH: Yes, it’ll make you sexy.
(Snorts of mirth from Shiny on the stoep).

They were lovely and tried to get us to stay another night, on the house (and in the house, snigger). We’d have loved to, but schedules didn’t permit. With sighs we drove back toward the mountain, playing music loudly all the way to push back any creeping Sunday Blues.

Honestly, what can be better than a Blue Sky Saturday?

Tannie Anna and the wheat fields

I loved the window in our bedroom. It was tall and thin, like everybody in my family. Outside the window, which had shutters on the inside, was a white wall with the tendrils of a new, growing creeper peaking up and the branches of a big tree above in which birds tweeted.

That’s all we woke up to, the birds tweeting and the wind howling through the enormous eucalyptus trees in the garden. I could’ve sworn I heard Tannie Anna’s voice too, singing, carried on the wind, notes from her red guitar dancing like leaves on the wind’s breath.

We’d met Tannie Anna outside the Spaza shop when we drove into the town on Saturday. The golden wheat fields spat us out into a tiny town with a good feeling. It was like coming across a kindred spirit. There are fifty houses there, the Spaza shop, a bottle store (synonymous with Small Town South Africa) and a tiny restaurant. If you need petrol, you have to go 20km down the road to find it.

Tannie Anna and her husband are a tiny, wizened pair. They could be 40-years old, or 60. The cheap wine that they sell at the bottle store in a plastic bottle resembling those containing vinegar has turned their skin wrinkled and their eyes rheumy. She carries a red guitar that makes her look even smaller and comes up to the car as we stop. The pair launch into an old Afrikaans folk song, their voices thin, but her strumming beautiful.

That evening I watched dusk come over while I read my book with a glass of wine outside on the stoep and G watched rugby upstairs in the bar with some locals. After the match they joined me, pulling me from my book. Weekend visitors, but they own places there. Lucky fish.

What can be better than a Blue Sky Saturday trip on an open road that stretches as far as your eye can see?

A weekend in the country

I went away for the weekend to a funny little house on a baby dam overlooking a big dam with a huge sky above it. The sun set behind the big dam each evening flinging beautiful pinks and oranges across said huge sky. There were five of us, old friends, and the Big Black Dog (BBD) who C kindly sat squashed up with in the back of the car. She thought she’d died and gone to heaven (the BBD, not C.) It was lovely. On Friday we went into the little village across the valley for lunch and Shuzie wondered what I’d blog about. There was much blog fodder.

I could blog about the little house, with its neighbours sitting on top of us, their bathroom just on the other side of Pop and Shuzie’s bedroom, providing them with late night irritation entertainment of the bath/toilet sounds variety. Or the fact that the other three of us slept in the lounge, allowing for cosy five-in-a-bed lazy mornings of tea, chat, and impromptu Thirty Seconds challenges.

Or I could blog about the delicious lunch we had at a hidden little restaurant where a simley (moon-faced) Zimbabwean waiter served us cold beers in salad dressing bottles, ‘beautiful baby potatoes’ and risotto with ‘delicious pea sprouts’ from the restaurant garden and ginger beer out of a can which the barman swore had bits of ginger in it (as opposed to the rust it really was.) The BBD fell in love with a very elegant golden retriever and whined like a teenager to be set free to go and snog (or whatever Big Black Dogs do to their loves) around the corner.

Or I could blog about the prawns on a braai supper we had, followed by a Thirty Seconds competition as the most enormous wind storm buffeted the funny little house on a baby dam overlooking a big dam with a huge sky above it for the whole first night. I thought the roof would blow of. It didn’t.

Or I could blog about Pop, and her hair falling out in clumps from the chemo (she goes for her second session today) and our discussions of hats and scarves and healthy eating and how brave she’s being and how I want to wrap her in cotton wool and put her safely in a bejewelled box where she doesn’t need to go through all this, but that’s her story to blog.

Or I could blog about lunch at the place where the frogs live where we saw no frogs, ate not-particularly-good food but admired the deep blue of many, many peacocks and then went home to sit in front of the funny little house on a baby dam overlooking a big dam with a huge sky above it and looked at the dam and the sky and watched G and the BBD swim in the baby dam while fish jumped out around them, checking to see who was invading their territory.

Or I could blog about the revitalising feeling of spending a weekend with old friends who require no explanations, no airs and graces, no pretence. And then, a donkey to wave goodbye as we headed home toward the City Beneath the Mountain, a little cherry on top.

Or I could just not say anything about it, couldn’t I?

Small Town Sadness

There's something about Small Town South Africa that is dusty. Even a little town in the greenest, lushest valley has a layer of dust over it, like a house that needs a featherduster. The shops in the main street (and I'm talking generically here) generally have sparsely stocked shelves where you can find handcreams still in the bottles they were made in in the 80's and sewing kits with those little silver threaders in them. All made slightly dull with the layer of dust.

It's not only the literal dust, though. The buildings and, often, the people have it too. They don't gleam and shimmer like city buildings and city people. They don't knock down the ugly 70's shop that houses the Pep store (another Small Town requirement) to replace it with a steel and glass architectural monstrosity where beautiful people can sip cocktails while pouting their collagen-filled lips and blow air kisses at each other, falsely. Pep stays, it keeps the same stock of cheap and cheerful clothes, homeware and TV bars at the counter, as it did in my Small Town when I grew up. It still smells exactly the same.

It's real. I think that's why there's the dust. People are just humans, there is no need to silicone, liposuck, extend one's eyelashes because people here know who you are, they've watched you grow up, they've seen you fall, pick yourself up again. Good grief, they've talked about it on a Friday night at the bar. You've talked about them. It works both ways.

Our little town we went to had that dust and the Pep store. We drove through it on the Monday evening when we arrived, the wide main road looked at us quizzically in the afternoon sun. It was quiet but we thought that was just Small Town. The vaguely sad, still feeling was there each time we went into town (from our cottage on a farm next to the river) during the week.

We decided to have our hair cut while we were there, entranced by the local hairdressing salon: Hair by Me, opposite the garage. Me seemed a good person to give one's hair a trim. Stopping outside the shop on the Thursday, we noticed a small bunch of flowers, and a poster with a girl's name on it saying "In loving memory. 2010/09/06". The Monday we'd arrived. Me, the hairdresser was not there. She'd be back next week, according to a sign on her door.

On the Friday we stopped in for a beer at the bar. And there we heard why the little town was so still. A little girl, she was to turn 11 that Thursday, had been knocked over by a bus that was coming out of the garage opposite Hair by Me on her way to school on Monday morning. She had looked the wrong way and stepped in front of it. The funeral had been that morning.

The stillness of the town was not just a Small Town thing, it was a palpable sadness, the heart-wrenching brokenness of a place that had lost one of its young, way before her time.

The girl in the bar

She could be fifteen or thirty-five, it’s hard to tell. Her hair is two-tone – blonde above, black below, and a little greasy. Standing up in her aubergine-coloured velvet tracksuit as we enter the bar, it is obvious she needs to lose a little weight. Her smile is sweet and kind, but her eyes hide something. The bar smells of smoke, as if the windows (which are all there, eagerly awaiting) haven’t been opened since 1976. In fact, bar the enormous flat screen TV in the corner blaring E!, nothing much has changed in this bar since then, with it’s stained carpet (each one, I’m sure with a story to tell) and fake leather chairs.

It’s early Friday afternoon and the place is desserted. She fetches us two wonderfully cold beers from behind the bar. It’s a typical small town South African bar – an enormous bottle of brandy half-full (she says the farmers come and drink five litres in a night) amongst multi-coloured bottles of too-sweet-headache-inducing-shots, the essential array of foreign notes stuck to the walls and a couple of ‘bar joke gimmicky things’ strewn about the place.

She plonks herself next to us, at our table, and first explains what’s going on with the Playboy-Bunny-Types on the TV, my inquisitive soul asks questions, encouraging her tales. Her family bought this hotel four months ago and she lives here, alone. They visit at weekends sometimes. She is essentially a small-town girl, who has had flashes of city life. They didn’t agree with her, you can tell, but she doesn’t elaborate. Her loneliness spills over our table in a sweet stream of strangely naïve but street-smart stories of her life. This girl has seen things she wishes she hadn’t.

The boys who manage the golf club arrive and they greet her by name, in a brotherly fashion they tease her. There is no question that they will join our conversation. They get their drinks, and do. It’s friendly, it’s small town, and it’s Friday afternoon. Then the local mechanic and his sullen wife with their two children (!) arrive. The children have a pack of cards and they sit at the next table and play Rummy. He turns his back on his wife, talking to the golfing boys as she sips on her alchopop. The Jukebox is cranked up to a volume where conversation becomes difficult.

We’re hungry so we leave them to it. The Friday afternoon sun shines on the dusty main road outside as we leave, loud music following us down the street.

Her eyes are haunting me still.

300th post... Well sort-of

Oops, I missed it. I'm not sure how, because (I thought) I was watching so carefully, each time I signed in and wrote a post, seeing the numbers click up... 298... 299... and then, whamo!, this morning... 301. I was planning a great 300th post. 300! That means I spilled out words onto a screen 300 (and 1) times. Sheesh. Obviously a pretty cloud scudded by or a hadeda flapped and shouted over at me, or something, which distracted me, and made me miss it. It's not serious, though, because this 'centurial' birthday, I don't think I have anything momentous to announce. No great blurts, like the 100th and 200th. You know my Tragedystory... you know pretty much all. Well, all of the things I'm willing to write in a public forum. Oh, the privacy thing, yes, it's still there.

So what to say on this, my 300th (+2) post? I think the thing I want to say is Thank You. To the world, really, to Blogland and the real one. I realised while thinking about this post this morning that both the real and the 'unreal' (blog) realm provide me with so much entertainment and just stuff to write about, be it sometimes just inane rambling. Had I not got into this blog thing I would be neglecting my writing even more than I do already. And I really do love it, once I start.

This all sounds a bit like an Oscar acceptance speech except that nobody is starting to play music so that I’ll shush and leave the stage. I am back from my break in the countryside to a little place on a big river in a village with an aching heart. We ate, we slept (a lot!), we played Trvial Pursuit (a lot), we read books, and we stared at the stars and the beautiful new moon. And it was quiet, except for the sounds of birds and the occasional tractor. I was meant to write while I was there. I didn’t open my laptop once. It was bliss.

I have lots of stories to write now – of the village with it’s sad tragedy that happened, unbeknownst to us initially; the young girl Heidi-like, up in the hills, doing wine tasting; the old man, youngest of eight, at the bottom of the hill, making wine; and the talkative girl at the hotel bar, fixated on E!’s inane ramblings of blondes drinking too much and taking their clothes off, her story too dark to tell in our fleeting meeting, but I could feel it was there.

Best I get to work then, isn’t it?

Moments away from holiday

We're going away. To the country. Next week. To get there we will mount the silver-winged unicorn and she will carry us gently away from The City Beneath the Mountain, with her fast cars and fumes, bright lights and loud people. Through the dark tunnel where gnomes mine for precious gems we'll travel and out the other side to unpolluted blue skies and fresh air, the mountains towering above us, watching as we trot along the narrow black strip at their feet.

And then toward the gentler, greener, hills, vineyards dotted about (and hopefully a donkey or two) toward the big brown river that meanders through, creating an emerald landscape. On the banks of that river, our silver-winged unicorn will come to a stop and it is there, in that peaceful place, that we will rest. For the better part of a week. No internet access, intermittent cell-phone reception, and oodles and oodles of air.

A place to read, to write, to breathe and think. To look up at the stars, an uninterrupted upside-down paint-by-numbers, no city lights to dull it. A fireplace to stare into, not just at night, but at 10am, if we feel like it. And with a glass of red wine too, if it takes our fancy. It is only just coming in time, before I murder a colleague or jump out of my fifth floor Ivory Tower window myself. A holiday. Away.

Is it obvious that I can't wait?

Desperate

I’m getting that air of desperation. You know the one? The one that whistles and whips around you, like a tornado, sucking all your energy from you and ripping it to shreds in its nastly little whirlpool of exhaustion. I’m desperate for a holiday.

It’s time for me to take a break from Real Work before it either swallows me whole, I murder one of my colleagues or I throw myself out of my fifth storey window in the Ivory Tower, to a gruesome death below. It’d be a bit unfortunate to do that really as, depending on my timing (say I did it at lunchtime), I may disturb a merry little band of students enjoying the spring sunshine on the lawn in the quad outside. Seems a little unfair to disrupt them thus. Honestly, smushed-up-person doesn’t do anything to brighten one’s day.

Therefore: holiday needed. It just seems to be an administrative nightmare to organise. Which makes little to no sense. But then, not much in my life (I am finally beginning to realise, and try to make friends with), does. Let’s just say it’s not as simple as taking some days off and disappearing into the wild blue yonder, as much as I wish it were.

Wild blue yonder… bliss. The idea is to go just there. There, on the other side of the mountains where the city lights don’t dull the stars and the air is not cluttered with city breath. There, where cars are a rarity. There, where we can breathe. And write.

All that’s needed is to find the right days to take off, that coincide with everybody. Then to find a place. Then to go.

Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

Grindstone

I survived. Day one back at Real Work… tick. Day two busily carrying on it’s business as I write. Note I said “I survived.” Not “I took it by the horns” or “It was brilliant.” Reason being? I seriously did just survive. There was no horn-taking or brilliance involved. Just surviving.

On entering the office, I was astounded by the fact that my desk seemed to have been magically transformed (and not in a good way) from the pristinely clear workspace that I left, into a seemingly insurmountable pile of work. And so it began. And continues.

I miss my afternoon nap.

In case it’s not obvious in the tone of my writing… I don’t want to be here. When I’ve waded through a bit more of it, and have time to actually blog properly (as opposed to whinge), I will write my next post about all the fun I had while on holiday.

That’ll be much more palatable, won’t it?

Holidays fly by

There is a bunch of St Joseph's lillies on the table next to me. My mother brought them over about a week ago, in the middle of my holidays. They were still buds then, and opened slowly, petal-by-petal, allowing their beautiful fragrance to waft through the house. They are over now, petals litter the table, leaving blood-red pollen-filled stamens staring nakedly down at the fronds that made up their skirts, slowly curling up in the heat.

I go back to Real Work tomorrow and I am not ready yet. I just don't wanna. I feel like one of those lillies, staring miserably down at my beautiful long Summer holiday days, a thing of the past now. I am trying very hard to force myself to revel in a new year at work, be excited, anticipatory. But I'm finding it a bit hard.

Let me stop being a miseryguts and be off into the sunshine to frolick for my last day of the holidays, shall I?

Hooray to heritage

It's a holiday here on the tip of Africa - Heritage Day - a day on which we celebrate our heritage. And we have lots of it, so I must away to celebrate all of it!

xxx