reflections in, on and round about
Gandalf is a clever cat, but sometimes he is too clever for his own good. There is a feral cat that comes calling – literally. He also leaves his smelly mark in The Sandbag House kitchen because he uses the cat flap. It’s bi-directional so at night it is now set so that the princess…
Things have been a little crazy at The Sandbag House this last while – we have had a borehole drilled – and we found water! So, that and a couple of other things has meant little time to actually pour the “brew” out of my head. Suffice it to say, there is a stock building…
She came into the kitchen, clearly distressed, and asked, “Do you vear licenses?” pointing at her eyes. “Umm….ye-e-s…” “So could I pliz have some of zat liqvid to clean mine?” Then the penny dropped. Lenses. Contact lenses. I had taken a flyer and thought that our Ukranian house guest was talking about prescription spectacles. This…
We were a pair; twins, actually; mirror twins. Elegant, black, sleek and with a touch of gold at the toe that showed off her pert, perfectly lacquered toes. The feature of which she was most fond: our four-inch stiletto heels. For her, it had been love at first sight. A student, on a meagre allowance,…
Fire is devastating: we had a fire in the mountains above our village in spring (September) 2014. It burned for what seemed like a month and because, to start with, it was in inaccessible parts of the mountain, it could not be effectively fought. So it spread and threatened prime agricultural land and vineyards. So…
A woman in my family is a rape survivor. August is Women’s month in South Africa with the 9th being the anniversary of the Women’s March to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, protesting the proposed pass laws which would effectively rent families apart. The month is now dedicated to women in a country plagued by…
As so often happens in life, stuff happens and this August has been no different – in and outside the blogosphere. Beginning with the latter: the penultimate weekend in August is usually a weekend of poetry in our village. It’s a time of happy energy and busy-ness and this was its seventh edition. This year,…
Having grown up in a small town and in high school, having gone to boarding school in another town, road trips were commonplace. There are, however, some trips that remain embedded in my memory. The first that I really remember would have been in 1967. It was the year after we arrived in South Africa…
When Princess Pearli was a kitten, she was often in a pickle. This is the last of a series I wrote in her first three years. You can read them – and some other stories here, This all happened when we thought she’d grown up a bit. Grown up (for a cat), at nearly three,…
In 1986, I moved into my first flat (apartment); it had a gas stove. Even though I only lived there for six months, that gas stove was seminal to the development of my cooking skills and more importantly, my love affair with gas. It was an antique,…