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Island Blog – From Flame to Ice

It feels so weird turning over two calendar pages. I did say thank you to the one I flipped past, something to do with not being picked for the netball team I think. Strange how the past triggers thoughts of being unimportant like mist when the sun comes out. I see how my home has been nurtured in my absence and I feel truly thankful. I have great and good friends who probably would pick me for the netball team, even just for laughs. I unpack, downstairs because my huge suitcase is way too heavy for an upstairs attempt. It’s good for me, I tell me, to do a lot of stair rising, which it. is. People my age give up too early. The wash is on, the mail opened and mostly binned, the fire lit, the range turned right up and the upstairs of this old home ever-so-slightly warmed. Lordy, it’s cold, and snowing now, a lot, like meaningfully determined. The tulips are flattening, ditto daffys and soon the anemones and wee other things will disappear completely. I tell them, snow gets warm as a coverall. I hope that’s true.

I was, I confess, afeared of my journey from mainland to ferry port, the chance of said ferry being offed for about ten reasons, the roads being busy, wet, rainfilled, the clouds so heavy they just land right in front of you, but none of that happened. My journey through quiet roads was easy, my arrival way before time, my name on the list and the ferry (not the bathtub) was shorter than expected as I met and talke with a lovely young islander woman all the way through a dodgy cup of tea. There was nobody on the boat we knew, we agreed. The season has begun. We talked of the ferry disruptions and our thoughts on the proposal for a tunnel and we both blanched at that. The thing about island life is that it is safe just because nobody can get here without a ferry ticket.

It’s snowing. This stupidly named gale is coming apparently. The roads may slip us or they may not. The visitors may grumble or they may not. There may come a storm that threatens life and limb, or there may not. The weather reports. always give us. the disaster thing. It is nonsense. All anyone has to be is prepared. I learned ‘prepared’ even before Tapselteerie. I learned it from the boots up in Norfolk, married to a farmer who could look at me, all puzzled, when I freaked out about something he had encountered and managed for years. In my defence, I was only 20. I. learned quick and why was that? Because I want to be an agile and vibrant part of an active life. I still do. It. does. wonder me. Are there gazillions of people out there who just don’t want to face what is clearly ahead?

Enough now. Unpacked and chilly, I am morphing myself back into. the now of the now of island life, the life I love. And I wish you all a very happy Easter.

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Island Blog – Pecking at Authority,Mischief and Kathy

Watching the Hadidas pecking all day across a wide expanse of grass, I’m thinking beyond the obvious. There are worms down there and other numnums with wings, a load of legs, all not quick enough to avoid those long beaks. The birds are patient and they need to be. Their daily life is spartan. I started counting the pecks, all the way up to 100 and there are still 20 birds out there, pecking. The ground is authority to them, a solid backbone of earth, the truth of survival. And that’s what thinks me.

In our human world, we don’t need to peck. Or do we? Authority presents, finite, solid. Think about a work situation, a relationship, the rules in church, a community, even inside a family. Rules is rules. Rules is solid ground and, for a while, a safe landing. But for those of us who peck at the authority of said safe ground there is the likelihood of holes, holes we made, I made. In this scenario I am destructive. I create holes, but not only that. In my hole-making I discover a lower world, a hidden one. Down there is a change of soil at the very least, an interesting revelation, mine. I also pecked sideways and up, into the fabric of authority, into the above and beyond of confines and restrictions and was always surprised, nay astonished, to find I only ever had one friend who appeared alongside. RIP Kathy. Together we got quick and grew silent. We could move like shape shifters along old oak corridors and past evil matrons and in the dead of night. I’m not sure of our agendas beyond gentle mischief. We just wanted to peck at authority, make holes in the nonsense of scratchy grey nickers and galoshes on Sundays, at church every five minutes and nobody allowed to move sideways on any accepted subject. Life was stifling, but not for us because we always found mischief in everything and anything; a latin word, the shriek of a head girl on a mission, the way everyone took everything so seriously.

I laud her now, my dead friend and say hallo in these words. Tomorrow I fly home from SA, from 18 degrees to 7. I will go into the authority of an airport and my own tension will meet the onslaught of everyone else’s. I will feel it all. This bit can be stressful and challenging, all the doubts coming in, all the fears. For me, there is no fear once on a plane. My discomfort is within the terminals, and yet, and yet, here lies opportunity along with authority. The perceived authority is within the walls of the concourse, but is it? Yes, to an nth degree but where is the vowel in that, the ‘I’? So I peck holes. I smile at everyone, knowing they are tense. I say hallo and ask for help and pay a compliment. A lot. I laugh at myself, skidding along the moving floor, dithering alongside the underground train in Heathrow, trying to read the information, and more. And I make a little mischief, I play, I make fun, have fun, because it isn’t fun if nobody makes it.

I remember you, Kathy, spoke of you today, wee elfin friend. We did no harm, but by golly we pecked holes in authority, back in the grey nickers, Sunday stifle-days. We lost touch over the years you lived out here in SA and then found each other in London. 45 odd years later and see us in a wine bar, big glasses of Chardonnay and we hadn’t missed a beat. We laughed and remembered as if we were still 17. Thank you my pixie friend, my co-mischiever. I’ve never met another.

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Island Blog – Eluctation, elucidation and endings

The ending of my son’s golden retriever is a wonderful thing to follow. He sways all sassy without having a clue he’s doing this sassy thing as we walk through the vineyards over sand tracks all cobbled with stone-rush thanks to the recent heavy rains. He has four legs so his walk is more of a glide than mine as I pick my way over ostrich egg-sized stones. The sun is already fire-bright and hot at 0900 and there is red sand between my toes. My feet look like I haven’t washed in weeks which isn’t the case. As the three of us walk, there are many strides of silence peppered with sprinkles of shared ideas or information. The vines are turning gold and copper now, curving into rest, their long and important work done for another year.

We talked of how the world is now, for a bit, but didn’t stay there too long. The thing about my family is that, whatever comes (or came) our way, we always see the wotwot of it, are as aware as we can be, and then quickly find what we can control and all that we cannot. That is where we begin because we have all learned the dangers of being an ostrich. You just get run over by either the next ostrich or worse, a lorry. When there is a moving on in someone’s world or over the whole damn world, those who freeze will not survive. I know many of my ageless age who say they are glad they are old, and I have said it myself, but once I thought that through, I pulled up my head and looked around.

I cannot stop what is happening, and, by the way, nor can anyone. This is not an ending. To watch the news every day only hurts the watcher because I never do and it is all happening to me as well. My mind is clear, my limbs old, my usefulness……..? Good hesitation there. What is my usefulness? A simple question and a sort of park bench reflective moment. Elucidation, the light moment. In my community, within my family and wide circle of friends, I can bring some light. How do I do that? Oh, not with wise words, not with uplifting nonsense, not when they may well be downed as starving rivers, carving whatever path they can through red sand valleys just to get somewhere that isn’t here. Not that. So what is my call? What is my walk when false eluctation will only result in a turnaway?

To remember the magic, that’s it. There are children here still with unicorns and stars in their eyes. And not just the children. We all have a choice here. We moan and groan, grow grey and shallow, lightless and downturned, or we rise to this. We’ve done it before, after all. Perhaps we just need reminding.

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Island Blog – Betty’s Bay and Baboon Balls

We walked this morning through the fynbos and down the wide open beach. There is something so recognisable about the Atlantic Ocean, something to do with my history and the breakers high and white with spindrift. The smell of salt and seaweed floats around and through us as we walk over a spread of bleached pebbles and shells that sparkle like jewels. In the shallows, vast tracts of floating kelp sway and lift as sunlight catches each rise, turning the mass into moulten gold. The fynbos is almost done with flowering now, as Autumn moves closer, but still some tiny flowers spread their petals wide, purple, scarlet, butter yellow, blue and spindrift white. We follow tiny sand-ways, curving this way and that, narrow and respectful, for this expanse of life is both protected and essential for all of us, breathing with us, and, unlike us, lifting goodness into the air.

Behind the house, huge mountains climb into the sky. This is where the baboons live, whole troupes of them. It is completely possible to live alongside such animals providing you don’t go out leaving a window open. Nobody does it twice, for they will wreck a house in search of something to eat. We talk of those who would like them eradicated, those who own a schmancy elevated beach front house but visit twice a month. Those who live here have learned baboon lessons and would never leave a window open when going out. There is, in short, a mutual acceptance between the species which, in my opinion, is most gracious of the baboons, because this land was exclusively theirs once. We are the invaders who dug up the precious fynbos and closed the land shut with concrete driveways and big fat holiday homes, with high fences and entitlement, fast roads and supermarkets.

Back home for coffee on the stoep, a huge male baboon leapt easily onto the roof. We quickly moved the dogs indoors and closed the door. He swivelled around to eye us. We eyed him back. Perched on a roof strut, he yawned wide and scratched his balls as if in comment. Then, with a leap, he was gone, back into the fynbos.

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Island Blog – The Astonishment

That’s one hec of a word. If I’m honest, I am fonder of short words that snap at me, tell me sharp, done. I remember in class, English Language my absolute favourite, yawning at long words. It was as if they couldn’t find their way until some guru/literary someone brought them into land. I have learned since then, shed my sass and arrived in the wonderful world of wordage. I muck about with it all the time, play with timbre, new lingos, new words for so many things. And so much lifts me into astonish. An elevation, a wow, a pause, a gasp and then I come to land. That land for me, in this new language, of fast move, of AI, of shifts in schooling, of restrictions, controls and of governmental appalisims, I can still be astonished at the wonders of a life.

Twinkles of time in a car ride for fuel, a catch of talkshare.

That lift when someone really looks at me and wants to know the rest.

I’m going here, for nothing much. Want to come?

My step granddaughter sending me an I Love You WhatsApp

Mimi, who cleans my room, every day, saying, I Love You Mama.

One of my kids sending a voice mail.

A sudden change in anything. I feel it like an animal would.

astonishment.

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Island Blog – Think Switch

We do it all the time, or I do. I think we all do. We in a situation that isn’t quite how we thought it might be: Please excuse my Africaans ‘we’ without the ‘are’ bit. A think switch. Perhaps it’s in the translation. I just hear it and adapt, even me, the English language corrector. And there’s another switch, because language conjoins and evolves and there are words, phrases, commas and hyphens which, even now, confabulate me. Once, they were sediment to my lift of words. Now, the ground is uneven, soggy and beneficent, once I think switch. New growth appears, like spring green shoots, leaves I cannot name, leaves seeking the sun, just like me.

In this turmoil, and it is turmoil, I have opinions. They’re like rocks in an ocean of fire. I don’t know much, but I do feel it, the war cry, the rise of fear, the way many think it will never really come to anything. I am no longer a linguist because language changes by the minute. I don’t want war, not for anyone. I don’t support oppression, domination, all those things. But, in the skinny place of me, with a voice, and I do have that, I do have a choice, a think switch, and that will be my thread of connection.

When you go down to the streets, the reality of life lorn, life lived, life downed and shunned and ignored, meet someone. We have marched too long ignoring, eyes averted, fear driven, those of us who own things, homes, jobs. Time to connect. Do we ever actually look at another? Do we?

Language changes, shifts, twists, commas skitter off like trips, but we are are all humans looking for connection. And it does take a think switch. Black, white, coloured, mixed race, gay, lesbian, trans,bi,queer.

In the turmoil of my teenage years, I found safety and fun with those who made me think switch, and, I confess, I was firstborn, white, middle class and protected from everything. But, over life I have made my own shifts. And whenever I sense a roadblock, an old way of thinking rising like a twangle over flowing water, I recognicise.

That’s a made up word, by the way.

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Island Blog – GR Attitude

My kids have left for their anniversary celebration. 12 years, years of bumps and scratches, hatch plans, falls, lifts and a growing commitment. I hear it in their interactions, the way they share, the way they know each other, feel each other. 12 years, a beginning and a good one. It thinks me about beginnings because they come at us all the way through life. I hear conversations about perimenopause. Such a strange word and an even stranger beginning. I can hear that it feels like an ending which, I guess, it is, but it is also a beginning. To be free of all that monthly stuff, albeit eventually, sounds like a relief to me. I see skin smooth on beautiful faces, legs and arms and hear the whimper in the revelation of a few lines around the eyes. Later, in private, I see my own wrinkles, flipping tons of them, face, lips, arms and more, and I laugh. I have taught myself to see this aging process as a funny thing, because, let’s face it, it is funny. As gravity claims a body, and I speak as a woman who once was firm, who once could be certain that, with each step forward, the whole of her would land on the next. And that laughs me too, as I swither and caution myself, or is it ‘selfs,’ down hillsides, up high steps, across dips on the track. I am olding but I am not done yet, for there is beauty in this beginning, this olding, and the one who really needs to see that is me.

My eyebrows have all but disappeared. I used to colour them in, but just looked like a clown. It is impossible to get them both perfect. One is, the other looks like a starving caterpillar no matter what I do with my brush or pencil. And so, I stop. I know I have eyebrows and others who frankly give a damn will also know this and can probably see them, unlike me, even through bottle-glass specs. My face is still my face but now eyes are a bit sunk and my mouth is a thin line, no canvas for lipstick. And, I really don’t mind any of it, because here’s the thing. I am mobile, lithe, able and I have marbles aplenty. What is not to be grateful for? And that is my daily thankyou. I have what many don’t have, health, strength, determination, attitude, family, friends, community. I have my home, security, warmth, choices, laughter in my eyes and heart, a sense of fun, a love of people and moments. In all of these I forget completely how I look, whether or not I stumble or what mistakes I have made, the things I forgot, the way I tell the story again and to the same person.

I decide to be thankful and, more, to show, to live out daily gratitude for who I am, the life I have lived, the gains and the losses, the failures, successes and joys, the mistakes which learned me, the awful clothes I bought online and couldn’t send back because they came, way too late, from China, and so much more. When I live this way, very little phases me because none of it is about me, but only my attitude to it all. I may growl, I may, but the laugh comes in super quick. We have one life, that we know of. And every single day is a beginning.

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Island Blog – A Culinary Change of Mind.

Not an ordinary day in Africa, but, instead, an invitation to work in a professional kitchen. Yes, I was nervous. I knowing without knowing a thing about it, that I am likely to trip over or be tripped over. Life will move fast and everyone there will already know the swerves required. I don’t want to be the one holding a hot pan of something bubbly without knowing the swerves required. I clean my spectacles, about 10 times, wiggle my toes just to check they are in sync and ask my neaural pathways to create me anything but spaghetti junction. There won’t be clear roads ahead, not once the Head Chef, Vernon, begins his breakfast traverse. However, having left home in the pitch mosquito dark in order to be here by 6am, there is an empty calm. I scan the room. Enough seating for well over 200, although they never all come at the same time. Nonetheless it feels daunting.

The film studios I will be working to feed number 6, including Deal or No Deal and Masterchef. Other studios are set up for shoots on all the most popular sitcoms and series in South Africa. The complete staff number over 2000 and I am lucky enough to get a dawn tour when most are empty, excluding Make-up, Costumery, Continuity, Editing Suites and other important and NO SPEAKING booths and units are already at work. I walk through Props for everything, see costumes hanging lifelike as if those who will put them on are already therein. We drink coffee and I hear the menu for breakfast. Cheese omelettes are already being mixed in the biggest bowls I have ever seen, seasoning added, Mercy tasting. I am to make a milk thing which looks like porage, but isn’t. 4 big packs of butter to melt. I can’t see over the lid of this pot and the burner is as wide as Mull. I add a bucket of flour and stir it all into a roux with a wooden spoon the length of a household broom. I add milk, keep stirring, the temperature rising in me and the kitchen, as Chef Vernon begins his prep for lunch. A thousand (not) chicken portions to wash and dry, season and herbify. He is a giant, quiet, gentle, solid as Ben Mhor. We all move around him. I am getting this.

We check the coffee machine, fill the hot salvers with hot things and pour lakes of juice into the juice things. And they begin to arrive. Some actors in robes, pre costume and make-up, some tech guys, some prop artists, directors, some producers and I am introduced as the guest chef from Scotland. The buzz is wonderful, the welcome genuine. I grab a portion of cheese omelette, delicious, and am ready now for chopping and slicing and dynamic swerving. In a kitchen where everyone knows their place, I am a swivel, a quick turnaround, a shimmy through skinny places, but although all the workers know that, they are smiling with me, laughing, sharing stations.

I am gifted the red MasterChef apron and wear it with pride. Although the next series won’t shoot till next week, this kitchen feeds all crew and staff, including those who work on that series. And I have been there, seen the studios, met the camera crew, the producers and directors, the costumier, the make-up team, the tech guys, the runners and sorters. All those who make it all happen, who arrive pre dawn, who leave last, who make sure that the standard is high and faultless. It was a huge privilege to see all of that, to be inside the mix of it all. I have never sliced 50 tomatoes, nor a whole net of onions before. Oh, chuckled Alpha, my onion chopping mate, You never? No, I said. I cooked for 20, perhaps once. I thought she would fall over backwards with all the laughing in her beautiful black face and I laughed along with her.

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Island Blog – Walking over Acorns, and a Green Lung

We walked this morning, before the sun burst into flames, through an Arboretum. It’s a wide expanse of trees, divided into countries. Today we moved from Africa to Asia. These trees, roughly 2,600 of them, were planted between 1959 to 1971, an inspirational Green Lung beside the River Berg in Paarl. As you can imagine, the trees in Asia are very different to the Indigenous ones in Africa. Long and wildy limbs with pompoms of bright green needles and fir cones large enough to knock you out, were you to be directly beneath as one fell. The shade is glorious, a softening for walkers and hot dogs, and the tracks wind on for miles, red sand, buffalo grass, benches for a sit down, bins everywhere and no rubbish. There is even the occasional security guard on his beat. It’s completely safe, unlike other such areas where big trees and bush proffer many hiding places. We wandered beneath the massive sequoias and gums, so old and so fat in the girth as to look as if they will last forever. I swear I saw clouds in the top of one of these giants on another day, one with clouds. Birds abound, skittering through branches, oblivious to us in their busy hunt for food. Sunbirds, sugar birds, such delicious names. Butterflies too, big and rainbowed . Everyone says hallo in passing. This place is a place within which to breathe and to ponder. The river, depending on rain, is either sluggish and silent or tinkling like timpany over huge rocks, white and sunlit.

Under the myriad Japanese oaks lie a gazillion acorns. Not small ones, the usual size, but easily an inch long, and just as we walked beneath the far-spreading bough, the wind luffed. It rained acorns. Pinging down, they made us ‘ouch’ and lift our feet in escape. We stood in safety to watch the fall until the whole wide circle of shade became a thick carpet of hopeful seeds. So random and so impactful and we laughed and thought of Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet and the others in the 100 acre wood. It was that magical. Walking back over acorns I thought of all the ground my feet have walked for 70 odd years. Through thixotropic mud, over pine needles and fallen leaves, over memories, rocks and mistakes, along dusty tracks and busy roads, over pavements and concrete, bad thoughts and poor decisions. Always moving on, no matter the journey, no matter the challenge ahead.

It’s what we do, those of us who decide to keep moving on and I was never going to sit for long. What inspires me, being among those trees, any trees, is that they have no care for our slightly ridiculous rush towards all the things which give us no nourishment long term. The way trees work is silent and beneficent, gifting shade, nutrition, food, homes, protection, love. We can only breathe because they do.

We can learn from that.

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Island Blog – Skinny Bathroom, Piddle, Little Things

After the rains, the air is fresh and smelling of citrus and sunshine. Last evening friends came to share a delicious lamb shank tagine, plenty wine and a load of laughter. We talked news of our week as many and diverse subjects flew about the table. Faces glowed in candlelight and the embers of an equally merry fire. It’s always the little things which uplift us most, even though they aren’t little at all. In this troubled old world it is what people can do for each other that truly counts, leaving legacies, memories and glimpses of how life can be when those who plan for war finally understand that they plan for the wrong thing.

Looking far out, beyond the garden, the huge eucalypts, oaks and other green-leaved old guys, across the huge expanse of grass and towards the lines of vines, now all harvested for the year, I can feel hope. I think we have to look for it and then see it, a wide open offering of beyondness, beyond ourselves, our own little prison walls, our own prickly thoughts and perceived ideas of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. Beyond the line of slow-moving traffic when we are in a hurry, the things she said, he said, the way someone looked at me in disdain, the deadly daily headlines, the neighbour’s barking dog. All of it, piddle, and about as useful, but, like piddle, it is there whether we like it or not. Our choices gives us voices, over which we have complete control, unlike most other things out there. It all begins with that choice, a cerebral decision not to drown in piddle. No special talent required. We all are gifted with that choice.

My little home away is in a different building. Across a lumpy brick-laid courtyard, where the earth refused to be accepting of all those bricks on her back, is an interesting journey, particularly after dinner and wine and hilarity and in the glorious pitch dark of an African night. I have the hang of it now, my feet have learned the ups and downs of this short traverse, and that makes me smile, because I love to know how connected I am with the vagiaries of Nature. My mind may be full of piddle, but my body knows the way and the way is not always a literal body walk. Oftentimes the traverse is more neural pathways with signposts as I navigate my way from complicated to simple.

In my skinny bathroom I have the usual equipment and a very efficient shower. However……..If I close the slide door which affords me privacy whilst naked, it is impossible to squeeze myself between basin and said door, en route to the very efficient shower. Impossible. So I gingerly de-slide, peek around the corner to ensure no unfortunate farm worker gets a scary shock, and dive into the shower, re-sliding it. Afterwards this performance is repeated in reverse. It has become a daily nonsense and no two days are the same. I am quite certain I have been glimpsed on occasions, and this smiles me too. After all, I am hardly ever going to hear “Morning Ma’am, I saw you butt naked yesterday’, now am I?

Last evening, pre lamb tagine and vibrant people, there was a tiny frog, obviously not of the voyeur variety, if, indeed, such a frog exists, which I doubt. I was already partially un-clad. I stooped to wonder at the spectacular markings on its tiny back, so intricate, so perfect and so not ‘just’ a frog. How extraordinary this big life is, for those who stop to notice. I bunched a bath towel around myself, picked it up, cold in my palm, soft, gentle, and opened my door without a single thought of farm workers nor maids with bundles of washing and wide smiles. I opened my hand among the pretty ground-creeping thingy with orange flowers and felt the frog leaving my skin, my palm empty yet still echoing that connection again, to all things, all people and all of Nature.

It’s always the ‘little’ things.