Happy 70th birthday to me! It bizarres me that I have arrived here at all. 70, in my experience of parents and grandparents, is an age for sensible knickers, shoes and rigid opinions. I relate to none of those. I still feel mischievous, my sense of fun and the opportunities for seeing the fun in pretty much everything and everyone, is childlike still. The very thought of becoming sensible, according to the world, is enough to send me up the curtains, in my mind, at least. Life is such a glorious adventure, a troublesome pain in the ass at times, yes, but I will not focus on those times, only learn from, and survive, them. People keep saying Life is too short, and then spend endless moments, hours and days, worrying about a future that hasn’t even arrived and probably never will. Such a ridiculous cliche and meaningless when you think about it unless the core truth of it is imbibed and digested.

This past weekend in Africa, I was feted and celebrated until my smile threatened to dislodge my ears. Taken out for lunch, out for breakfast, gold and white helium balloons and golden streamers dangling all around the big open kitchen; champagne toasts, lovely new friends over for a wonderfully daft evening with good food on the braai, good wine to drink, shared anecdotes and jokes, conversations and laughter tossed into the sky, high enough to join the stars, which, I might add, are in all the wrong places and tilting dangerously. Even the moon is on her back, the saucy madam. Something to do with the Equator or an attitude to Latitude or whatever.

Although I knew bits about what might be happening, I didn’t know it all and it felt odd at first not being the one to organise a surprise, the celebration of another. Let go, I tell myself, and shut the dufus up. You think you don’t deserve to be celebrated? Stupid woman. Look at your family, friends and other animals, how they keep coming back. This, my dear, means something. Drink your blue gin and be thankful. And I get it and I am. I loved every single minute of the weekend, gathering up the memories like wildflowers, saved into a file in my head to be enjoyed over and over again when I return to my little island home.

For the past couple of warm African nights I have not been alone in my bed. A large contingent of ants has chosen to join me and we cannot work out where on earth they come from, why they are in my bed and what ion earth they are up to. Ants are intelligent wee critters so this is no random invasion just for the hell of it, just to upset me, not that I’m upset. I studied them the first night, my miners lamp on my head (in case of power outage overnight) and my goodness they looked busy. I pulled the duvet over me, brushed a few stragglers away and wished them well. In the morning they were gone. However last night I believe they lost their moxie a bit as I noticed a lot of dithering and fleeing aboot, all the way up to me. It tickled me awake. Okay, I sigh, clock says 01.15, and I want to sleep. I wished them well and took myself off to the couch, a very comfortable ant-free zone. It is still a mystery, this incoming tide of small black busybodies, and one I hope we can solve without destroying their lives, but none of us speak ‘Ant’ and nor do we have feelers to waggle, so a mutually agreeable result is only a possibility for now.

I could easily freak out over this but that is not my style. However, if we were talking scorpions or poisonous spiders, my moxie would also be challenged, I admit, and my curiosity wouldn’t even lift its head to engage in any study. But these harmless wee people are a fascination because there is such intent and dynamism in their ordinary little lives and they very obviously do not want to be in my bed. Something has disturbed them and they are de-camping. Solid walls are preventing this, or so I guess. I wish them well and I wish them gone, obviously, but I know what it feels like to be unsettled or discombobulated and I also know that in this so-called short life of mine, sleeping with ants is rather an unique situation, a story for the telling sometime when I am home again.