Ten Things Update

A nudge from Marcheline made me realize I haven’t posted for ages. All my writing mojo is being spent on work stuff, so I’m falling back on an update in the ten things format to fill the black hole.

1. It has been raining now for two days and nights, practically without stopping. This is supposed to be summer in South Africa, not in England. Getting a bit worried about the pairs of animals that keep showing up too….
2. We went out for lunch to celebrate our anniversary on Saturday at Bukhara, a great Indian restaurant in town. Excellent food, but I never took my camera so am a totally incompetent food blogger!
3. Youngest brought back a reader from school, sat me on the sofa and read it through to me start to finish. I was really impressed as they start learning their letters from scratch in Class 1 in Waldorf and the others were only reading by the end of Class 2. She is raring to go and catch up with her big brother and sister.
4. My foot has been bothering me all week, with an arch that is misbehaving, so no belly-dancing tonight. Need to go and see a reflexologist or something to try and sort it out.
5. I’ve just received my first ever review copy of a book to review on my blog: Be My Guest by Fay Lewis. Maybe I am a proper food blogger after all! I’m going to try out a recipe or two first, before I write about it so will let you know.
6. Read ‘Little Women’ and ‘What Katy Did’ for the first time since I was a child. Still good stories but I’m wondering what my girls will think of them, with their fine moral lessons set among mild misdeeds, the terrible illness of Beth, and Katie being paralysed for so long.
7. Took our son to the homeopath for some more constitutional treatment. He’s getting dry skin on his face and we don’t want him to get the eczema back that he had as a baby.
8. The children are totally unimpressed with the old Toyota Corolla we are driving about in. We’ve sold our main car and are waiting to get hold of a second-hand Toyota Prado, but it’s taking longer than we thought.
9. We haven’t celebrated Guy Fawkes night since we came to South Africa, and it was a surprise to find out that it is still a big thing in the local communities here, with kids running around setting off fire crackers and throwing eggs and paint at each other. Our dogs were terrified by all the bangs and wriggled right under the children’s beds to take cover.
10. The school Spring Fair a week ago was a hot summer day and I wore my new summer dress for the first time, which seems a distant memory now when I’m back in winter clothes and still cold. Youngest won a prize in the fancy dress competition, dressed as a princess of course.

25 Firsts Meme

It's a meme kind of day. Charlotte posted this one this morning and here I am following suit.

1. Who was your first prom date? We didn’t have proms in England then, just a few school dances. Those of us not joined at the hip to a steady boy/girlfriend went as a mixed group and it was hard to get the boys to dance at all.

2. Do you still talk to your first love? No. It was a long distance relationship which was fading for me and I callously broke up with him by phone when I met someone else. He told me not to keep in touch.

3. What was your first alcoholic drink? Probably sweet German wine that tasted of flowers, which we were introduced to in a civilized way by our parents at dinner.

4. What was your first job? Temping as a data entry person in a London office. I’d hardly even made the acquaintance of a computer by then and didn’t know how to type, so it was the lowest of the low in the temping world.

5. What was your first car? A Peugeot 205 in my last year of university. It went well for years until someone drove into me and wrote it off.

6. Who was the first person to text you today? My phone is switched off. Probably nobody, unless the bank is trying to sell me something.

7. Who is the first person you thought of this morning? A swirl of family faces were in my mind as I awoke

8. Who was your first grade teacher? Mrs Holden. I remember learning times tables and colouring in sections of a picture to show which ones we knew.

9. Where did you go on your first flight in a plane? To Italy in my gap year, to learn Italian.

10. Who was your first best friend and do you still talk? Tiggy. We’ve pretty much lost touch, but I did see her at my father’s memorial service.

11. Where was your first sleepover? At Tiggy’s. I remember being given a new red suitcase for the occasion and worrying about being able to lock the door of the loo.

12. Who was the first person you talked to today? My husband.

13. Whose wedding were you in for the first time? My own. I thought it would be wonderful to be a bridesmaid, but when my uncle got married they didn’t have bridesmaids, so my only chance of a frilly dress was foiled.

14. What was the first thing you did this morning? Staggered into the shower.

15. What was the first concert you went to? It probably wasn't the first but the only one I can remember is going to see Bryan Adams at Hammersmith Odeon with my brother.

16. First tattoo? None, but my kids are now crazy about play tattoos. We’ve told them they have to wait for the real thing until they’re 18!

17. First piercing? My ears, but not till I was about eighteen. I was going to do them when all the other girls at school did at about 14, but it was immediately vetoed.

18. First foreign country you went to? France. We were taken to Brittany when I was about 4 and refused to eat anything much because it was foreign. After that it was Scotland for several years. Then later we had several family holidays driving through France again, once we were old enough not to turn our noses up at foreign food.

19. First movie you remember seeing? Can’t remember which came first: the Herbie ones about the Beetle car, James Bond movies, Star Wars.

20. What state did you first live in? England

21. Who was your first room-mate? At school we were in dorms that changed every term. By university we’d progressed to single rooms, but our corridor formed the core of my group of friends for the next few years.

22. When was your first detention? I remember being mortified at being made to stay behind after class to finish or re-do something, when I was about nine, and then hiding rather than go into tea late and have everyone look at me, which of course resulted in a far more embarrassing school-wide search for me.

23. If you had one wish what would it be? I ought to be like Miss World and wish for world peace, but right now I’d settle for a regular and ample income stream... the joys of freelancing!

24. What is one thing you would learn, given the chance? How to paint gorgeous pictures in luscious colours and textures

25. Who will be the next person to post this? Any of you that feel inspired to.

Around the World in 80 Clicks

Is it possible to traverse the world finding mothers who blog in 80 clicks? Do mothers raising children in different places have different perspectives? Catherine at Her Bad Mother teamed up with her friend David to find out. She listed 5 things she enjoys about motherhood, linked to 5 other mom-blogs, and threw out the challenge...I copied this paragraph from Poppy Fields who tagged me and had copied it herself from Planet Nomad's post about this meme.

Five things I enjoy about motherhood:

1. Having children brings the wonder back into your life – they are there to share the joys of rainbows, sunsets, moonrises and funny looking bits of wood that may or may not resemble a penguin.

2. They are a reason to decorate at Christmas, invent festivals, make a fuss of birthdays and have a Sunday lunch at every opportunity, even on a Monday.

3. Children are the fast track to personal development. Until I had kids I thought I was a calm, organized, logical person. Now I know that was just an illusion and am coming to terms with being a flawed human being.

4. Children anchor you and connect you to a place. Without children you can easily drift in and out of places without putting down roots. Children make a shy person brave. When you move to a new place you’ll introduce yourself to any likely looking mother with kids the same age on the slightest pretext and wangle a play-date, just to get your kids into the social fray.

5. I love having a house full of bright sunny drawings with I Love You Mum or I Love You Dad on the back.

That’s five things already and I didn’t even get round to kids giving you an excuse to bake cakes and re-read favourite children’s stories and have loads of hugs and all the rest. And when I started this post I also meant to include that I love hearing almost the entire lyrics to Jesus Christ Superstar being bawled out dissonantly from the shower by Son and Middle Daughter in chorus.

To help send this around the world I’m now tagging two bloggers at home and three overseas: Homemade Heaven (SA), Charlotte’s Web (Germany), Diary of Domestic Hiss (UK), Twaddle and Twak (SA), Comfort Food (Australia)

If you then comment back at the original post you will be included in the round-up here.

The Interview

The interview meme is doing the rounds again and I can't believe that it is already a year and a half since the last time I did it. Back then I sent questions to Charlotte and yesterday when I saw she had done another interview I couldn't resist asking to be interviewed by a real journalist - fame at last!! If you'd like me to interview you, leave me comment asking for questions and I'll think of some. These are the questions Charlotte asked me:

1. Your blog is a little quieter than it used to be. Are you a) tired
of blogging, b) too busy with with real life, c) blogging under a
pseudonym somewhere else? Discuss.

It is definitely b. I still love the blog world and am reading blogs as much as ever. Right now though my creative juices seem to be sucked up by work and everyday life, school, food, sleep, school food, sleep, leaving me with no inspiration to blog at the end of the day. It also has a lot to do with my work involving sitting in front of the computer all day, so that in the evening I hardly feel like sitting down to it anew. But I am determined to keep it going and am hoping for a new blast of inspiration to strike. Until them I’m relying on interviews, memes and food events to keep my blog alive and kicking!

2. Would you rather be a really famous food blogger, a really famous
book blogger or a really famous mommy blogger and why?

I really don’t want to be famous at all in any shape or form, I’m happy with small audiences of friends and family, the glare of the public eye would have me running and hiding! But if I had to choose one it would be as a food blogger – famous mommy bloggers have to take so much flak and open so much of their personal lives to criticism by all and sundry, so that the comfortable and friendly small scale mom blog transmutes into a controversial monster that is a free for all terrain for the mommy wars.. Food bloggers can lunch at wonderful places, talk about delicious meals, cook, enjoy sharing and only let people into their personal lives as much as they feel comfortable with! And for some reason people feel less inclined to criticise your food choices than your parenting choices. I’m not speaking from personal experience here at all – my blog friends and commenters are the loyal and wonderful few who keep coming back even if I don’t post for a week or two.

3. Money is no object. Describe your dream holiday.

A beautiful, comfortable and unpretentious house somewhere gorgeous near water, full of books and shady places to read them, boats and activities enough to keep everyone happy and a magical source of delicious meals completely unorganised by me appearing at regular intervals. Occasional excursions to beautiful historic Italian towns and markets for some art and culture and good friends and family joining us.

4. If Nigel Slater was catering your birthday party what three
recipes would you demand he made for you?

My birthday is in August which is usually still chilly here, so I would go for a really greedy and rich meal eaten overthe course of a nice long evening by the fire.

To start with I’d like him to cook us some grilled fish with lime leaves on the outside braai, so they’d be full of smoky flavour but with an extra zing from the lime leaves. We could start the meal early so he would be cooking at sunset and we could keep him company with a glass of wine by the braai!

Then a bit later we’d have his Italian slow cooked aromatic lamb, braised with orange, red wine and herbs with cannellini beans. Or else the Moroccan lamb shanks with aubergines ...

And this being a fantasy meal where we don’t need to worry about the seasons, we’d finish off with a fig tart with honey and mascarpone and still feel as light as a feather and able to dance till dawn …this is a fantasy after all.

5. You educate your children at a Waldorf school. What does the
Steiner philosophy mean for you and your family?

Do you want the short or the long version!?!

Short: – friendly comfortable school, where our kids thrive.

Long: – read on…

The Steiner philosophy is very broad and all encompassing, not just about education, and we don’t really live our lives by it. We really like his educational ideas and the way the primary schools work with it. Steiner really observed child development thoroughly and worked out what ages were best suited to learning certain things and what teaching methods worked best at which age. (Interestingly several of the new, modern schools here in Cape Town have adopted quite a lot of his methodology and also poached quite a few Waldorf teachers!)

He says that until the age of 6/7 children learn best by non-academic methods, really by observation and imitation and are busy taken up with learning about social interaction and their place in the family and the immediate world around them. Kindergarten is all about play, learning rhymes and rhythms and games, developing co-ordination, but with plenty of free play and physical activity. For our children it meant a really relaxed and positive start to their school lives.

Children in the first three years of primary school learn a lot through the use of stories, starting with fairy tales, then the stories of the saints, old testament and ancient mythologies over the years. Once they get to age 10/11 the stories evolve into history and science and a more academic but still holistic approach.

One of the more controversial things for most people is that the children only start to learn to read and write in grades 1 & 2 at quite a slow and thorough pace. We had to make a leap of faith for this too. I could read when I was five already and my children could easily have learned, if we’d tried to teach them then. However with our son we can now see the results. He started reading at the end of class 2, when he was about 8 and has been a voracious reader ever since. Our middle daughter is slower to read by herself but is doing well and looks set to take off any minute. Her writing is coming on well and that always seems to develop first with the Waldorf approach.

I think what this approach allows is more time for children to develop a broad and solid base of abilities: they draw their stories, learn them by heart, practise writing them and thus absorb them very deeply as they learn to read. They first learn the fine motor skills needed to form their letters, learn the patterns of the letters, the feel of them, then they learn first to write and only then learn reading from what they have written.

I like the way that subjects are integrated and the fact that the children remember effortlessly the things they learned several years ago, because they really did absorb them, rather than learn them by rote and then forget them again. They don’t use text books in primary school but write and draw their own main lesson books for each subject, which become really beautiful works of art.

I also like the way that spiritual development is considered important, but is fostered by stories and appreciation of beauty and the world around them rather than any specific religious teaching. They learn the bible stories as stories without any dogmatic baggage attached.

Waldorf gives children time to grow up at a child’s pace – they don’t rush things but still seem to get there, in a much less stressful way than traditional schools in our experience. Our son gets little bits of homework which he usually finishes off himself without any help in 10 minutes or so, while his friend at a good Cape Town school spends afternoons grappling and getting stressed out over his, leaving both him and his mother exhausted and fed up!

I think the two best things that our children have really gained from Waldorf, which they might not have got from a mainstream school, are self-confidence (they are all quite shy but have learned to speak in public and take part in concerts without thinking twice about it) and creativity, not just in the way they draw, but also in the way they are learning to think for themselves.

Having said all that we are looking at more mainstream high schools for our son in two years time, partly because the Cape Town Waldorf high schools are just too long a commute for us and partly because we think by then he’ll benefit from a more academic approach and with the Waldorf grounding we hope he’ll be able to keep a balanced and creative approach to life and hang on to that precious self-confidence.

The Rules of the Interview Meme
1. Leave a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. Please make sure I have your email address.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment, asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Current Addictions Meme

I haven’t done a meme for ages but Jeanne of Cooksister just tagged me for the Current Addictions meme, so how could I resist?

The rules:
* Post at least five current addictions (with some details, please).
* Mention the person who started this meme (Being Brazen) and also the person who just tagged you
* Type your post with the heading "Current addictions".
* Tag at least two people and pass on the above rules.

1. Lindt Intense Orange chocolate – dark chocolate is my secret indulgence. I hide it in the larder and in moments of stress, or just when I feel like it, I sneak in and a grab a few squares. Unfortunately this Intense Orange has also grabbed my husband’s taste buds, so now I have to get it out openly in the evenings and share it with him.

2. Mamma Mia – Jeanne listed this and I am totally in agreement with her – we’ve seen it twice now, once on our movie date and then we just had to go back with the children and friends – it gives you a total wild and wacky teenage high just by going and singing along! As long as you don’t have a disapproving neighbour glaring at you that is.

3. NCIS – we used just to catch the odd episode every now and again, then it became a regular weekly date.. then Kate was shot. Devastated, as it was the end of the series, we had a year’s break and then we started watching the DVD set of series 3. Series 4 was my husband’s birthday present and then series 5 was released in time to be mine! We love the characters, who would think crime investigation could be so funny and so emotionally involving – love Abby the goth forensic girl and Gibbs is gorgeous (except when he grew a moustache at the beginning of series 4!).

4. Messages – I compulsively check my e-mail far more often than necessary. Text messages on my phone, comments on my blog, e-mails, Facebook messages – it is probably some deep psychological fixation – I get messages therefore I exist. They have to be written messages though – I’m useless on the phone!

5. Reading blogs - even when I’m frantically busy I still turn to Bloglines for distraction at regular intervals. I read everybody’s blogs even when I’m not blogging myself and turn into a non-commenting lurker. Just tuning out of my every day and getting fresh perspective by reading all your views, stories, rants, raves and musings is good therapy, even if it is just a short term escapist measure and I then have to return to the translation or article that I was plodding through.

6. Marmalade - I love marmalade and have to have a supply available at all times. Nobody else in the house likes it, so when I make a batch it is pure self-indulgence and self-protection. You simply cannot buy proper marmalade in the shops here - unless it is home-made by someone else. It has to have chunky bits of peel in - none of this Golden Shred nonsense! My current combination is Orange, lemon, grapefruit and lime. Perfect on bread or toast and essential to round off lunch with, sometimes if I'm feeling degenerate, combined with crunchy peanut butter!

As if you haven’t already got enough to do I’m tagging Mary Alice and Caffienated Cowgirl!

Catch-Up Meme

How to fill the hole of a whole month's absence from my blog? Instead of wringing my hands and apologising madly for being such a bad blogger, citing reams of extenuating circumstances, I should of course take a leaf from Special Agent Gibbs' book in NCIS, his rule number 9 being 'Never Apologise'. So I shall just swan in and borrow Meredith's meme designed for catching up with friends you haven't seen for fifteen years in ten simple bullet points. Fifteen years/one month... the answer has to be bullet points:

1. The rest of our time in England was packed full of seeing old friends, most of whom we hadn't seen at all since we moved to SA. It was wonderful how easy it was to pick up the threads again as if no time has passed and so great to see them all. Each of our children got to meet one of their name-parents (our equivalent of god-parents) again for the first time in about three or four years, and it was amazing to see that they still had an instant close connection with them, following them around and climbing all over them as if they'd seen them every day of their lives.

2. From a quiet Somerset village we went to stay for one night in a friend's North London flat in a street full of take-aways. The novelty of pizza and Chinese, the thrill of nipping down to the shop two doors down at eight o'clock in the evening for milk and butter for breakfast had me bouncing around like a kid playing house, but after a noisy night filled with London traffic and pub closing time I was very happy to be moving on - even though I was leaving my husband to several more nights of take-away food and noise, while he stayed in the big smoke for some work meetings.

3. We went to North Norfolk to a typical seaside town. The children invested their pocket money in shrimping nets and we had one perfect sunny morning on the beach, building castles and looking in rock pools. The other windy, cool and rainy days we spent riding on a steam train, walking in some amazing rhododendron woods, playing croquet and trawling the souvenir shops in an agonizingly slow pocket-money spending-spree.

4. We discovered the joys of Satnav borrowing our friends' Tomtom to talk us into and around South London. Apart from the fact that I was concentrating so hard on it that I missed a turn that I used to know off by heart, it worked well and the novelty of it kept us all entertained for ages. It did have a major wobble once on our return journey when it tried to send us back into London again, instead of the road we knew we were supposed to take. We almost followed it and then rumbled its cunning plan and got ourselves back on the right road again, much to its annoyance.

5. We had a totally touristy day out in central London and introduced the children to the joys of trains, the tube and London buses, took in the dinosaurs in the Natural History museum and ate ice cream in Trafalgar Square. We even took a cab and asked the driver to take us to Victoria Station via Buckingham Palace, thus underlining the fact that we are no longer cool Londoners. The children were rather disappointed by Buck House - not their idea of a palace at all.

6. The first thing that struck us when we reached home was how enormous our house felt after all the houses we'd stayed in in England. It has since shrunk back to its normal size and feels just right again now.

7. Role reversal on the domestic front as a big re-writing and editing project has chained me to the computer for the last two weeks and my husband has been doing the school run both ways to give me more time to work.

8. Middle Daughter's birthday that she had in England this year still had to be celebrated with a party at home complete with treasure hunt and cake, so last weekend was spent composing a butterfly treasure hunt and the weather co-operated with sun-shine and the first white daisies flowering.

9. Middle Daughter finally had the dental surgery that we agonised over for so long and then postponed for months because she had a cold every time it was booked. The whole general anaesthetic thing was majorly stressful for both parents and not something that I want to have to do again with any of my children if I can possibly help it, but she is fine, her teeth are fine now and it's over.

10. We've been ODing on NCIS watching series 3 at a rate of two episodes per night, every night and then being so horrified at Gibbs' apparently retiring that we had to go out and buy the next series for my husband's birthday present. Nothing like a bit of stress, drama, corpses and tension to make you look forward to your evenings on the sofa in front of a fire.

Normal blog service should now be resumed and I may even get round to posting some photos, I've hardly even looked at them yet myself. Lots of love and thanks to everyone we saw, as well as those we didn't quite manage to meet up with this time. It was great to go back to England and after the initial disorientation it's great to be home again too.

Five Habits Meme…

I was tagged by Tanya to do the Five Habits Meme, so here goes…

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Our son has just turned ten, so ten years ago I was living in our London photographic studio, sleeping in the mezzanine over the main studio and looking after our new baby in the office mostly, whenever the studio was hired out, and spending lots of time walking round Battersea Park with him in the pram. The best thing about living in the studio was that there was always another pair of hands around to hold the baby. The worst, the fact that the phone would ring, or else the very loud doorbell, just when he was about to go to sleep, so I always used to take hime out in the park to get him to sleep. He was also good at sleeping in the car, so spent a lot of time asleep in his carseat on the kitchen table of the studio kitchen/office.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non-weight gaining world:
1. Chocolate.
2. Freshly baked bread still warm from the oven, slathered in butter.
3. Rediscovered in England this trip – McVities chocolate digestives – plain chocolate of course!
4. Cake – of practically any description – if any of you need help finishing up Christmas cake at Easter, I’m the person to invite to tea!
5. Italian pasticceria – but it’s been so long I can now only imagine the flavours...

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:
Same as Charlotte and Tanya.. all of the above…
AND…
1. Raw carrot sticks as I chop them for supper.
2. Crunchies, rusks or whatever home-made biscuits I have managed to bake that week. I’ll eat the shop- bought ones, but with the exception of the ones mentioned above, which are not available at home that I know of ( or if they are would be ridiculously expensive), I don’t really enjoy them that much, eating them is more a habit that I can’t quite chuck.
3. Raisins
4. Naartjies – especially clementines.
5. Bread and marmalade – both home-made.

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. Buy homes for all the immediate family that don’t already have their own...
2. Fund our children’s school with all the buildings they need and sponsor all the children that need it now, so that they can all keep their places secure and so that the teachers can be paid as they deserve. Then help it develop a middle and high school, so that the kids can go all the way through.
3. Travel first class, with beds that fold out, so that we can all sleep on the flight over here! A private jet would be attractive, but my eco-principles might hold me back!
4. Eat out in all the wonderful restaurants that I possibly can, at home and abroad.
5. Build a dam on our property, so that my husband can have the water he craves, or else buy a farm with a river or a lake on it.

Five jobs I have had:
1. Advertising production assistant on a computer magazine for about three months.
2. Tour Manager for a travel company in Italy.
3. Photographer’s assistant to a shoe photographer.
4. Running our photographic hire studio, after I met my husband.
5. Freelance writer

Five habits:
1. Clicking on Bloglines, when I get stuck writing something and distract myself with someone’s blog for a minute or two.
2. Grabbing a handful of raisins, whenever I pass the kitchen counter.
3. Twiddling my hair.
4. Bursting into song whenever a phrase reminds me of a song I know – usually from the late Seventies or Eighties – very annoying for my children.
5. Trying to be exactly on time for everything, which usually translates as being several minutes late, as I usually forget something and have to run back for it.

Five places I have lived:
1. Somerset
2. Rome
3. Battersea, London
4. Streatham Common, London
5. A farm outside Cape Town

Five people I’d like to get to know better:
Caffienated Cowgirl
Hen
Mary Alice
Rose & Thorn
AliceBand

consider yourself tagged!

The Marriage Meme

Charlotte tentatively tagged me for this one and it's so long since I did a meme that I leapt on it. Plus it's lovely to be invited to spend time recollecting our wedding day of course!

1. Where/how did you meet?
At his photographic studio in London. A friend of mine was taking part in an exhibition he was putting on and I was at a loose end so went along to help …and stayed!

2. How long have you known each other?
14 years. We were late starters!

3. How long after you met did you start dating?
It took about a week of me being a calm and indispensable presence in the middle of a maelstrom of exhibition mayhem. We never did the going out on dates thing though, too broke for the most part, so we just hung out at the studio a lot.

4. How long did you date before getting engaged?
A year and a bit. He was always intending to come back to South Africa, so we made a couple of trips over here and met his family before he popped the question on the second visit, once I'd proved I could cope with SA and his family!

5. How long was your engagement?
5 months. We had to arrange yet another trip back to get married in South Africa as his parents were getting too old to travel. Mine we knew would enjoy the trip out here ..at least we hoped they would!

6. How long have you been married?
12.5 years

7. What is your anniversary?
30th September

8. How many people came to your wedding reception?
About 30 or so.

9. What kind of cake did you serve?
I don't think we had one at all!

10. Where was your wedding?
At his parents cottage in a small town in a wine growing area in the Cape. The local magistrate was very kind and came to the house to marry us on a Saturday rather than have us come to her office, as we were flying over from the UK just before the wedding.

11. What did you serve for the meal?
A friend brought her own farm butter and home-made bread, which we had with gravad lax to start. Then we had the most wonderful whole fillet steak, cooked on the braai and crusted in black pepper and sea salt - it was so tender and succulent, I can still taste it! I can't remember what the puddings were but there would have been lots of them.

12. How many people were in your bridal party?
All 30 of them. They all crowded into the sitting room together then my father walked me up the garden path to the door and we had a very short and simple ceremony. My husband vowed to bring me breakfast in bed sometimes amongst the usual things!

13. Are you still friends with them?
Yes - they were all family and close friends, though the friends are spread over a wide range of countries now. We've only completely lost touch with my brother's then girlfriend, now ex.

14. Did your spouse cry during the wedding ceremony?
Nope!

15. Most special moment of your wedding day?
All of it - I felt all aglow the whole day.

16. Any funny moments?
My sister-in-law thought we should have some music to come in to and started singing Happy Birthday! My brother with perfect timing after we'd given each other a first big kiss as a married couple solemnly intoned "You may now kiss the bride". Otherwise there was a constant stream of talk and laughter through the day.

17. Any big disasters?
No - though it was all very last minute organization - we were buying the champagne from Graham Beck at the estate at 4.30 the afternoon before our wedding day, and only got to the next estate, where we wanted to get our red wine from, just before it closed!

18. Where did you honeymoon?
We had an enormous breakfast at the Mount Nelson, Cape Town's finest old Belle Epoque hotel, with some of the friends who'd come out from England, before parting ways, then we headed up the West Coast to explore. We then had a massive sea-food blow-out on the beach, where I over-indulged on the warm pot-bread and got massive indigestion, prior to coming down with the flu, so we headed back to his parents house and took to our bed!

19. For how long?
We had about three weeks in SA altogether, but the rest of it was visiting with family, so we never really got the romantic honeymoon experience.

20. If you were to do your wedding over, what would you change?
The only thing we didn't think of was music, too busy concentrating on food. I'd have got somebody to play for us and had some great background music too.

21. What side of the bed do you sleep on?
Left.

22. What size is your bed?
King size to have room for kids too, though now they hardly ever need it.

23. Greatest strength as a couple?
We like being together and can work together too.

24. Greatest challenge as a couple?
Neither of us is at all tidy. Actually that isn't really a challenge - it just means we live in a messy house.

25. Who literally pays the bills?
These days he does - I used to, but once the babies came I handed over the chore.

26. What is your song?
Soppy stuff - Dusty Springfield - The Look of Love!

27. What did you dance your first dance to?
We didn't dance at the wedding - what a missed opportunity!

28. Describe your wedding dress?
I'd always wanted to get married in red and orange - so I had a dark red silk wrapover skirt and a burnt orange silk vest top, with a dark red and gold silk scarf and orange nasturtiums plaited into my hair.

29. What kind of flowers did you have at your wedding?
I carried three arum lilies, freshly picked that morning from a ditch by one of our guests.

30. Are your wedding bands engraved?
No.

Ex-pat Meme

I found another meme that I couldn't resist joining in with at Charlotte's Web. It is the Ex-pat meme. I don't particularly label myself as an ex-pat, with no language barriers and a lot of similarities with English culture here (though before I offend a whole bunch of South Africans, also a whole lot of unique qualities too!), South Africa doesn't have the feel of a Foreign Country to me. Since I have started blogging, though, I have found a huge community of like-minded bloggers residing in countries other than their native ones and the experience does seem to give us all a whole lot in common, especially that of bringing up our children in a different culture to the one we grew up in. If anyone would like to join in consider yourself tagged.

5) Name five things you love in your new country

• The views of the mountains and wide, open spaces.
• The sunshine
• The wonderful fresh fruits in the shops and the gardens. Trees loaded with lemons for the picking, though not in our garden yet unfortunately.
• The pioneer spirit and maak'n plan attitude and that it, as yet, doesn't suffer from the European overburdening of rules and regulations on every single aspect of daily life.
• The variety of people, language and culture.

4) Name four things you miss from your native country

• Old buildings and the sense of history and continuity
• Green fields and hedgerows, spring flowers - primroses, daffodils, bluebells, cowslips
• Family
• The proximity of Europe and its diverse foods, languages and cultures

3) Name three things that annoy you in your new country

• The lagging behind in telecommunications, we've just got a 24 hr wireless connection but the international portal is still so slow. This is why I still haven't really got to grips with You Tube.
• Banks, though that applies to most countries.
• We're talking annoy here, which implies minor irritation, so I won't get into the major political issues of which there are plenty to rant about. How about picking a mild one - that in a country with year-round sunshine and an electricity shortage, too dependant on an elderly nuclear power station for most of it, solar panels are still not widespread and are expensive… could Eskom, the only national power supplier, have useful contacts in the government?

2) Name two things that surprise you (or surprised you when you arrived) in your new country

• Seeing people crammed into the open back of bakkies (pick-ups) driving down the fast roads.
• That major supermarkets run out of ordinary things and don't have more in the back. At the moment it's Cadbury's Hot Chocolate, which has been off the shelves for about two months, they have other brands but the children like Cadbury's..! Maybe what you're after will come in a couple of weeks later, maybe it won't.

1) Name one thing you would miss in your new country if you had to leave.

• Our lovely house and farm with its view of the mountains.

Five Questions Interview Meme

I blithely put my hand up to be interviewed by Johanna, of A Passionate Cook, in this interview meme that is doing the rounds. She writes a wonderful food blog and is also blending cultures as an Austrian living in London and travelling lots. She put five questions to me to be answered on my blog and, to pass on the meme, if anyone would like five questions from me in return, just sign up in the comments. I got so into her first question that it has made a post all by itself and I could have written more but I'll save the book version for another time!

The whole world is slagging off British food – you’ve grown up with it, but also travelled widely. What is the food of your home country: wheat or chaff? And do you cook it for your children now?

Wheat! I think that British food has never really recovered its reputation since the war and rationing made it a pale shadow of its former self. People had got used to doing without, using substitutes instead of fresh ingredients, boiling up vegetables and scraggy meat together and calling it stew. When the economy recovered people looked to Elizabeth David and Europe to revive their cooking skills and palate, and British food became the dire province of institutions, in people's minds at least.

That said British cooking is actually alive and well, but is best sampled in the home of a good cook rather than in a restaurant or pub. In fact I can only really speak for English food, as Scottish and Welsh food have their own traditions and I'm not all that knowledgeable about them.

My mother brought us up on a mixture of English cooking and French inspired dishes and is a very good cook, so I grew up eating English food as it should be. I absorbed English recipes at home, many Italian and French ones on my travels and these days my culinary repertoire is a mixture of them all. I try to feed my children a wide range of food styles including stir-fries and spicy Indian dishes but what they really like best are the English staples.

The best of English food is comfort food, nursery food, food that kids like, simple and unfussy. A Sunday roast of lamb, beef, pork or chicken, roasted with some herbs and an onion in the tin, golden crispy roast potatoes, vegetables steamed just long enough, gravy made from the meat juices and a slosh of wine, this is pure culinary poetry and is the star of the English food brigade holding its own against its European rivals!

Cottage or Shepherd's Pie is another classic that is pure comfort food for the family, maybe not impressive enough to serve to guests but one that features every other week on our menu here in winter, in fact I'm cooking it tonight. Sometimes I get moans of "I don't like Shepherd's Pie". But when the plates come back for seconds and thirds I'm not that convinced. Bangers and mash, with good butcher's pork sausages is another, as are baked potatoes alongside any stew. In fact potatoes feature strongly altogether in many forms. My stews and casseroles I can't really claim as English Cooking, they have amalgamated with French cooking, taken to the (wine) bottle and no longer remember their origins!

I haven't even started on the puddings, which is probably where English cooking shows its most creative variety. Summer pudding, made with bread and berries, treacle pudding, fruit crumbles with custard, milk puddings, fruit fools, mince pies, apple pies - there is an endless succession of ways to end a meal. When I was growing up every main meal finished with a pudding. Nowadays I only make them on Sunday, when we have guests, or for special celebrations, when as a family we make several rather than just one because it is just too hard to choose between all our favourites!

What has been the best part of emigrating to South Africa – and what are the worst bits?

The space and views that we have here on our small farm, together with the South African sunshine are an amazing contrast to living in a small terraced house in London. We share the farm with several of my husband's family and have a safe little community where our children can run between the houses and have a freedom that hardly exists in city living. Something about our view of the mountains feeds the spirit too.

We have landed up just down the road from a multi-cultural Waldorf school, which is great for our children as they get to learn about the whole variety of South African culture and are in an educational environment that suits them too.

On the food front we get wonderful fresh fruits in season, that are plentiful, ripe and cheap and have never seen cold storage. We are in the middle of the Cape Winelands, so can drive across country and have a wonderful meal at a wine estate, when we have visitors. There are loads of beaches, Table Mountain and loads of outdoor activities.

On the minus side - when I first arrived I looked in vain for the vast array of organic products that I was used to in London supermarkets. There is far less consumer choice here, as it is a smaller society and far from other countries so that imports are expensive. I adapted of course and being out in the country, where I do just one weekly grocery shop, have got used to making and baking most of our treats at home, also baking our own bread, making jams and generally being a farm housewife!

The other infuriating thing for us computer-dependant business people is that communications technology is way behind Europe and the US, still hardly shifting from the monopoly of one company, so we have to put up with slow connections, connections falling over regularly etc.

Every one of us copes differently with living abroad and as cultures mix, do you immerse yourself in the culture(s) of SA or do you strive to maintain your own, for yourself or maybe for the sake of your children?

I think we've evolved our own family culture, blending a bit of South African, a bit of English and a bit of our own invention. My husband's family is South African but his parents came here from England after the war, so there is a strong strain of English culture adapted to South African life. We've fully embraced the braai as a summer weekend activity and my son supports South Africa in the rugby and cricket. The children learn Afrikaans and Xhosa at school and come home singing songs in those languages, though I have yet to learn either language, despite being a linguist in European languages. We have cut and pasted the English traditions of bonfire night and Christmas mulled wine and mince pies into a Midwinter Celebration here and our Christmas is a summer version of my English Christmasses.

Given the choice, who would you employ as your personal (celebrity or not) chef?

Nigella Lawson. My personal chef would need to be at home in a house full of children and dogs, produce delicious meals without too much formality and be good company. She would be just right. Nigella if you would like a busman's holiday in South Africa, you'd be very welcome here!

Which memory of a food moment do you cherish the most?

For the first few days after our first child was born all my senses seemed to be enhanced. I don't know whether it was the after-effects of the epidural or just hormones, but colours were brighter, Battersea Park looked fresh and lush and food tasted fantastic. I can still remember the flavour of a goats' cheese from Sainsbury's, with bread and tomatoes, as if it were the best thing I'd ever eaten. I even gave a rave review in the hospital questionnaire for their food…so it must have been an altered sensory state!

There are lots of other more gourmet moments from restaurants around Italy, but this was the first thought that leapt to the page.

DIRECTIONS FOR THE INTERVIEW MEME
1. Leave a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. Please make sure I have your email address.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment, asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

When I was 25

This was started as a writing prompt and is a powerful memory stirrer. I read Charlotte's post, which set me off reminiscing, finding some similarities and many differences in our experiences. Then even though I've already posted once today, I had to follow through, write and post before the memories faded and my 25 year old self disappeared back into the mists of time.

When I was 25, I turned my back on the full-time office job, with the travel company I was working for, and returned to the itinerant nature of tour managing, travelling with the clients on their walking holidays in Italy. I'd done one season and then accepted the office job at the end of it, which I'd coped with reasonably well over the winter months. When spring came and the other Tour Staff flew off to sunnier climes and Italian food, I chafed under the demands of office life and decided that I wasn't cut out for it after all. The decision was a huge relief and as I turned 25 I headed back to Italy to breathe the aromas of Tuscan cooking once more.

When I was 25, I had the confidence to meet a group of unknown clients at the airport and drive them off in to the countryside, with the enjoyment of their holiday entrusted into my hands. I always had pre-trip nerves, like stage fright, especially being a shy person, but I did it over and over again. I'm glad I was that person then as it gives me a memory of that ability to cope and trust in myself, to refer to now if ever I doubt my abilities.

When I was 25, I thought nothing of driving from Pisa to Oxford in 24 hours on my own in a Landrover, driving through the night on the French autoroute, sustained by Pocket Coffees (chocolates with a whole espresso concentrated into its liquid centre) with a cargo of Italian cheeses and a whole ham, unsure whether this was a legitimate import or not but driving through the Nothing to Declare at Dover anyway.

When I was 25, I had my first (and only, fingers crossed) car crash, when a new driver swerved across the road into me, writing off my beautiful butter-coloured Peugeot 205, breaking a bone in my foot and my nose and wrecking beyond redemption a beautiful soft scarf in the autumn colours of the Tuscan hills, that I'd bought in Italy. It left me with my foot in plaster for a month, back home revisiting the comfort of child-like dependance, with my mother in attendance, and appreciating the convenience of fully comp. insurance.

When I was 25, I thought I'd better catch up with my friends on the property ladder and bought a flat with a friend in London. That is where I'd been off to at the time of the car crash. Due to being immobilised for the whole month of February, I left all the house-hunting to my friend and, as time was running out before the season would be sending me off to Italy again, I found myself, without much thought on my part, a North Londoner in Willesden Green, when by inclination I subsequently discovered myself to be a South Londoner - and there is a cultural difference that goes with the divide of the Thames! I indulged myself by buying my first ever bed, double of course, even though there was no-one to put in the other side, with a wonderful pocket-sprung mattress, which has survived to this day, but is now our spare bed. The flat ended up being merely a base to return to after my stints in Italy, a winter perching place, and I got to know all the routes to South London very well!

25 was a time of being young, free and single, when my earnings could be spent on myself, and although they weren't huge, I could afford to trawl the London markets and sales for frivolous items of furniture, ridiculous clothes and bric a brac. In between intense periods of work I had cavernous spaces of free time to spend at the Everyman Cinema watching old Italian movies, explore London and read.

When I was 25, I was still five years from getting married and three years away from finding the right man, so there was an empty space, or rather, a sense of circling looking for the direction I was supposed to be heading in, I was marking time, knowing that I wanted to marry and have children one day, but not knowing what to do in the meantime, apart from experience life as it presented itself. Maybe I could have relaxed and enjoyed it more if I could have looked forward five years, but that tension of uncertainity is all part of life's rich tapestry!

Eight Food Things

This latest food meme comes from Charlotte's Web, where Charlotte has been presiding over a long weekend baking extravaganza and setting everyone drooling with the aromas pervading the blogosphere.

Eight Food Things:

What are your favourite foods?

Besides dark chocolate? Fresh line-fish, roast lamb and roast potatoes, ripe avocado on bread with a dash of sun-dried olive paste, prosciutto crudo, home-grown strawberries and mulberries, anything someone else has cooked for me, pastry anything, marmalade, chocolate biscuits…

What foods do you hate?

Kidneys, salt-cod, anchovies

Foods you like but are embarrassed to admit:

Peanut butter and jam, Smarties, English chip-shop chips, left over chocolate butter icing…well how embarrassing is it really, to admit to an immature palate?!

Strangest food you’ve eaten and enjoyed?

Snails were fine but overrated. Probably, through lack of recent exposure to exotic cuisines with strange animal parts, the award goes to my own power-cut invention Scrambled Quiche, which experiment has yet to be repeated.

Cooking failures that still rankle?

My subconscious has deliberately blotted them out. I know there are some but the details elude me, it was obviously too painful to contemplate!

Ingredients you don’t want to consider living without?

Olive oil, garlic, butter, flour, sugar, lemons, onions, instant yeast, cocoa, oats, salt, tomatoes, wine.

Cuisine you’d like to know more about?

Asian. I wish I were more confident in whipping up a thai green curry. For some reason I'm also very hesitant about cooking with fish at home, though it is the first thing I choose in a restaurant, probably due to the reason listed below.

Foods you’ve hated but have grown to love?

Fish. As a child fish meant steamed cod for school lunch, the smell of it permeating the whole school(or so it seemed to me) . I spent the whole morning, through lessons, dreading lunch time and would even feign illness, to avoid having to face the white flaky lump that would make me gag, as I tried to swallow down the minimum requisite portion with copious glasses of water. Now I love fish - grilled, braaied, fried, sea food and all - and it is what I usually choose when we go out for a meal..not boiled cod though, ever ever ever, and preferably not in white sauce either.

Vinegar. I never really liked very strong, sour flavours, until my second pregnancy when I craved chips with vinegar. Since then I actually like the tang in French dressing, pasta sauce and if I ever eat proper chippie chips.

Current kitchen conundrum?

I'm lucky enough to have the kitchen I always dreamed of, with plenty of counters and a big long table that stretches down the room and amalgamates with the sitting room, to accommodate anything from five to fifty. The only downside I can think of, is that we have no extraction system so if I burn something (which of course is a rare event, unless the computer lures me away from the stove… OK it happens every other week) in the absence of containing walls, the whole house smells of it.

Otherwise the main oddity is the towering stack of empty yoghurt pots leaning like the Tower of Pisa next to the sink, because they are so useful that they really ought to be reused and recycled. Except, when do I think I am ever going to use up 200 empty yoghurt pots?

You're tagged if you want to be.

Muffin Meme

Oatmeal and yogurt muffins

It's official - muffins are the new meme. This oatmeal and yogurt muffin recipe is whizzing around the globe. I saw it at Charlotte's Web in Germany, she got it from bindi nestor in Australia, who has also send it winging to other parts of the globe. The baking bug has grabbed everyone, fettered them to their stoves and turned mothers into evil witches cackling with glee, as they watch their children tucking in:

"Haha! you’re eating oatmeal, oatmeal and plain white yogurt, and you don’t even know it"quoted verbatim from Charlottes Web..except for the evil witch bit, added by an over-active imagination.

Here is the recipe at epossums. It has been documented with chocolate chips by Charlotte, coconut and strawberries in bindi's latest batch and I tried it with banana and cinnamon, which was all that I had available, that the kids would conceivably eat. I didn't want to alienate them by adding raisins - its just so labour intensive picking them all out again, for the poor dears. So to give the muffin recipe a fair trial, one mashed banana and half a teaspoon of cinnamon was added to the recipe.

The verdict: husband - "good muffin recipe"; children - "mmm, how many are we allowed"; mum - well I scoffed several more than I allowed the children, as they are decidedly moreish and with all those healthy ingredients, there just seemed no point in resisting. Part of the batch did last until the next day, so that I could assess their staying power - it only took me two more muffins to decide that really they keep very well, just as moist and chewy the day after baking and would probably be so the day after that too, if there were any left.

I tag any of you out there who haven't already baked these deceptively healthy muffins.

Thinking, I think

In the rather gloomy aftermath of the Easter weekend, as autumnal cloud cover and wind dispatched the last vestiges of summer and my jeans emerged from the wardrobe for the first time this year, a glint of sunlight came my way from Jenny- Prairie Farmeress, who has tagged me for a Thinking Blogger Award. Thank you Jenny, it has cheered up my day, when thinking at all has been a struggle!

I think I will put up the elegant trophy icon on my sidebar instead of the gaudy SA Blog Awards one...I haven't yet reported back on those, (not because I was sulking because I didn't win, I was very pleased to have come a respectable fifth, so thank you for voting and saving me from the ignominy of being last) but because there was too much else going on and they faded out of my consciousness.

Now I have to pass the award on to five more blogs that make me think. I may be nominating blogs that have already had the award, as I know I've seen it around over the last few weeks. This being an entirely democratic, non-divisive awards ceremony, I would like to add that all the blogs I read make me think, so choosing five is hard and I still love the ones I didn't choose here too!

Charlotte's Web for making me think about writing, books and family.
Tongue in Cheek for making me think about spirit, love and beauty.
Planet Nomad for making me think about other places, other cultures.
Cook Sister for making me think about food and new flavours with new enthusiasm.
Toddled Dredge for writing so thoughtfully about family life - right now the 'joys' of pregnancy, when that baby just doesn't want to come out.

How participation works:
If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
Optional: Display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

"I am from" Contest

Owlhaven has a writing contest going on at the moment using the "I am from" format. I loved doing this back in June and am kicking myself that I only just saw the contest ten minutes ago when the closing deadline was right now. I quickly entered my one from June but would have loved to have a go at Mary's alternative format, which takes in your whole life rather than just childhood memories. I think I still will attempt it, though there's nothing like a little competition for motivation. She's giving books as prizes and I never look a gift book in the mouth...

Anyway for some good reading go and read through some of the entries by clicking on the Mr Linky button at the bottom of the contest post.

10 Things I like beginning with N

This latest meme comes from Charlotte, who had the letter L, Kerryn got M so I helped myself to N a nice, nebulous theme for a post when monumental change is all about.

Nasturtiums – I’ve always loved these bright cheerful flowers. When we were kids we used to suck the nectar from the flowers. Here in South Africa there are places that they grow rampaging in glorious profusion. Our soil doesn’t suit them so well but I usually have enough for little posies on the table all winter. Their leaves are a source of natural antibiotic too, so you can eat a couple with their peppery flavour if you are going down with a sore throat or other lurgy.

Naartjies – In south Africa all satsumas, clementines, tangerines go under the name Naartjie. In winter we get huge bags of them very cheaply as they grow here – plenty of vitamin C to keep us all going.

Night-time so I can sleep

The Net so I can blog

Numerology – I’ve been learning about numerology, what the numbers mean, how to read charts, a bit like in astrology and how to look into the future. I still have a lot to learn about interpreting though – intuition has to be harnessed as well as the numbers to get any true meaning.

Noah’s Ark – we have a lovely wooden Noah’s Ark with brightly painted wooden animals that is one of my favourite children’s toys – it has lasted through all three but unfortunately Mrs Noah went off a long time ago, leaving Noah to cope with all the animals himself.

Novels – my escapist drug of choice. Recently the kids have been experimenting with the words addicted and allergic and using them interchangeably. Then they worked out that addicted was for things you love – so youngest is going around saying that she is addicted to her unicorn. I explained that addicted is for something that you can’t help wanting all the time and that you feel bad if you don’t have it..well that just about sums up my relationship to novels...good ones of course!

Natural Medicine – we try to use homeopathy, as much as we can for all the family ailments. We’ve just started going to a classical homeopath who sorted out an incipient urinary tract infection in youngest, and saved us from having to use antibiotics. We try to reserve antibiotics for emergencies as they take their toll on the immune system even as they blast the bacteria they are targetting. Homeopathy when correctly prescribed seems to rebalance the whole system effectively and without any side-effects.

Nemesis – “that Greek fellow who creeps up behind you and puts you in the basket” this masterly definition is one of my favourite quotes from Georgette Heyer.

New books there is nothing like the pristine pages of a new book as you flick through prior to savouring a new story by a favourite author. New beginnings – well 'like' isn’t the right word, but new beginnings are sweeping us up and we are beginning to feel a spirit of adventure and following our destiny sparking through the sense of loss and upheaval.

The Green Meme

Charlotte is suffering from unseasonably mild weather in Germany and was inspired to start this Green Meme from a Newsweek report.

1. What do you for the birds and the bees? According to the report, we need to plant a pollinator garden to counteract the effect pollution, pesticides and habitat destruction are having on birds, bees and insects. Bees, for instance, like yellow, blue and purple flowers.

This part we can polish haloes on if nowhere else. We live on a smallholding, so have loads of space to plant trees – indigenous ones that support local bird and insect populations, plus lavender for the bees. There are loads more birds around, than when we moved here, when the land was overgrown with Port Jackson, an invasive alien that crowds out all the indigenous fynbos.

2. Household products. Chemical or organic? Household chemicals contribute to indoor and outdoor pollution.

Not so great here – I’ve tried switching to Ecover products, but they don’t work so well - the laundry didn’t smell fresh, the dishes were greasy. I’m interested in finding out from Zia about her lye soap recipe, which she says works great and is soft on the skin.

3. Do you junk?

We get very little junk mail and no catalogues at all. Most of my junk comes via email so is eco-friendly junk!

4. Air-dry or tumble-dry? Line-drying saves money and stops carbon emissions.

Always line dry. In South Africa there is enough sun to dry most of the year round. If we have a rainy spell in winter the dirty laundry just builds up until the sun shines again.

5. Old gadgets. Recycle or toss ‘em? According to the report, we have to find a way not to fill up landfills with electronic objects.

There are so many people here on the poverty line that if an appliance breaks we can give it away to an employee, who will know someone to fix it and sell it on. That goes for a lot of things we’d otherwise throw out.

6. Lightbulbs - incandescent or fluorescent? Fluorescent light bulbs use 70% less power and last ten times as long.

We changed over to the fluorescent ones a long time ago. We are bad at leaving lots of lights burning in the evenings though and several all night long, for insomniacs to wander the house.

7. Meat or veg? Meat production is energy inefficient. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat.

We do eat meat, several times a week, but the price of meat here has soared recently, so I usually alternate, one day meat, the next pasta, rice or soup.

8. Loo paper. Virgin or recycled? The paper industry is the third largest contributor to global warming. If every U.S. household replaced one toilet-paper roll with a roll made from recycled paper, 424,000 trees would be saved.

We totally fail the eco-friendly test here. For one thing recycled loo paper isn’t that widely available here and for another I have a family of delicate bottoms, who require two ply comfort. It’s not worth it for the sake of domestic harmony.

9. Tap or bottled water? According to Newsweek, it takes a lot of oil to make and ship water bottles, and most end up in landfills.

Always tap water from our borehole, which is the nicest water around anyway. Occasionally I buy a bottle of water when we’re out, then it usually gets reused multiple times. There are no facilities for recycling plastic bottles around Cape Town, that I know of. The worst offender here is our plastic milk containers, which build up into a mountain very quickly.

The only downside on the water front is the amount of electricity needed to drive the pump that sends the water from the borehole to the houses. Solar panels would make us much greener.

10. Dating - metrosexual or ecosexual? Newsweek says two recyclers are better than one.

Theoretically we’re both into being as green as possible. We’d like solar panels to heat our water, a reed bed to recycle our grey water and all the rest - money to install these things is the issue. Having said that though, lack of money is the greatest incentive to recycle, mend, reuse and save energy

Our straw bale house is very energy efficient and well insulated. We don’t need too much heating in winter and have no air-con in summer. That hopefully offsets the amount of energy used in other areas like the water pump.

We do a fair amount to live greenly but there is still room for improvement. As we live on a farm far from urban recycling facilities, we don’t always manage to recycle all we should, plus once you’ve factored in the petrol to get there, it doesn’t always make sense. South Africa is also way behind Europe on what can be recycled. Rubbish is usually burnt here at municipal dumps. Our worst offence is burning our own rubbish in a pit, but we do then plant a tree over all the ashes once the pit is full. The tree usually does brilliantly so that salves our conscience a little.

La Meme Chose

Following Jen at Coasting Richly and Charlotte at Charlotte's Web, I am abandoning any idea of writing scintillating prose and succumbing to the lures of the meme.

1. Explain what ended your last relationship
He sensibly realised that we were both just filling in time till we met our real soul mates. I met my husband later that same year.

2. When was the last time you shaved?
This morning. It's a summery Saturday, my official day for washing my hair and using up all the hot water for my shower. There isn't enough time in the week, as I'm not one to get up early in order to attend to my appearance. Our hot water tank wouldn't stand for it either and my husband doesn't like cold showers!

3. What were you doing at 8am today?
Laying the table for breakfast, after having read everyone's blogs. I woke up early, which was annoying as on Saturdays we can lie in bed late till eight o'clock, while the children stew their brains on Animal Planet and Disney DVDs.

4. What were you doing 15 minutes ago?
Resizing the school photos that I took on Thursday and learning more than I ever thought I'd need to know about Fireworks.

5. Are you any good at maths?
Afraid so, or at least I used to be. I chose it as an A'level subject, cos I thought it'd be a doddle and was slightly peeved to find I had to work at it to get through my exams without disgracing myself. Now I don't do any Maths stuff but I'm fine around numbers.

6. Your prom night?
We didn't really have one, unless you count the Leavers Dance which as far as I remember was a non-event. There wasn't any of the glamourous date or dress wow factor.

7. Do you have any famous ancestors?
No. I do remember thinking for a long time that I had a great grandfather who was a butler, which I thought was quite fun. Then it turned out his surname was Butler - nothing like as interesting!

8. Did you have to take out a loan for university?
I was one of the last generation in England who still automatically got grants and tuition fees paid regardless of parental circumstances. Mine was the minimum grant, which meant my father had to provide more for living expenses, but I emerged debt free for which I am suitable grateful.

9. Do you know the words to the song on your Myspace profile?
Do I have one?

10. Last thing received in the mail?
Tax statement

11. What beverages have you had today?
Rooibos tea x 4

12. Do you leave messages on people’s answering machines.
Usually, unless I suddenly turn blank and can't think what to say.

13. Whom did you lose your CONCERT virginity to?
Can't remember if it was Brian Adams or Motorhead. I only ever used to go with my younger brother, so it reflects his taste rather than mine!

14. Do you draw your name in the sand when you go to the beach?
Yes. And the children's and play hangman and doodle patterns.

15. What is the most painful dental procedure you have ever had?
I'm fairly lucky in that my wisdom teeth came through late and turned out to be pathetic undersized specimens. It was OK under local anaesthetic.

16. What is out your back door?
A ficus, struggling, because the patch of earth at the back of the house doesn't seem to be a good place for trees.

17. Any plans for Friday night?
Friday night is DVD night with my sister-in-law. Yesterday she got out 'The Lake House' which we hadn't heard about but was great. Complicated time dislocation plot, romance, well acted and it keeps your brain engaged with the intricacies of the plot.

18. Do you like what the ocean does to your hair?
Not really. I didn't grow up with sea, salt and sun, rather earth, wind and rain. I have long hair and it gets tangled and sticky. What a wuss I am!

19. Have you ever received one of those big tins with three different kinds of popcorn?
Don't even know what they are.

20. Have you ever been to a planetarium?
Nope. There is one in Cape Town and I'll take the kids one day.

21. Do you re-use towels after you shower?
I'm also amazed that anyone doesn't - unless it is asking if I use them to mop the floor or fashion them into a fetching turban, both of which sometimes.

22. Some things you are excited about
I'm going on a numerology workshop tomorrow, a surprise early Christmas present from my sister-in-law. Excited to be stretching my brain in new directions after all these years of pure motherhood. Also excited about writing so much, for my blog, articles etc. It seems the brain likes the exercise.

23. Your favourite Jello flavour
I quite like the stripey jellies I make for Christmas, purely for the nostalgia element. It just tastes Christmassey to me.

24. Describe your key chain
I just use the standard- issue beeper thing that operates the car alarm. It is quite satisfyingly ergonomic though.

25. Where do you keep your change?
Useful silver in my wallet. Those annoying 5c go into a bowl with a candle in it. It's supposed to show the Universe that we're taking care off the pennies and would like the pounds to take care of themselves. I hope it will start taking effect soon!

26. What winter coat do you own?
A dark blue wool duffel coat that was a hand-me-down from the friend of a friend in London years ago. Winter here isn't so cold that I wear one out often enough to replace it and it is warm and comfortable.

27. What was the weather like on your graduation day?
Can't really remember - I think blustery but dry.

28. Do you sleep with your bedroom door open or closed?
Open for the same reasons as Charlotte, otherwise we'd have to get up every five minutes for the dogs, cats and even the children.

After the Festival

All the left-overs have been duly dispatched. The last batch of chicken stock made into soup or frozen. We found our praying mantis lying on his side on the stoep today. The girls thought he might be sleeping. He feebly waved a leg at us and when we attempted to put him upright, he fell back over. This evening the girls held a funeral for him, burying him with flowers and ceremony in the circle. For me it symbolised the end of our spring celebrations and it felt rather sad, until I noticed a large, equally handsome one clinging to the wire wastepaper basket in the bathroom. The herald of a new cycle? Or maybe it is just praying mantis season, warm spring weather bringing them out in droves? They do seem to resonate strongly with spiritual life though, the Bushmen had it right. I also have strong memories of reading Gerald Durrell's My Family and other Animals - his memories of life as a child on Corfu with his eccentric family. I still remember his accounts of a praying mantis battling it out with a gecko on his bedroom ceiling, even though from my place in the English countryside I had never seen one. Now they are part of our daily life too, but still seem as mystical as ever.

I was tagged for this meme by Jenny and have been struggling with imagining answers to the ancestor questions but had no trouble thinking of weird things about me! So here it is as far as I've got and as for tagging five more people..just consider yourself tagged if you haven't already done this one..sorry for breaking the rules by not doing it properly!

RULES: List 5 weird things about yourself or your pets.
Tag 5 friends and list them.
Then these people need to write on their blogs about 5 weird things, state the rules, and tag 5 more people.
Don't forget to let the people you tag know by commenting on their blog!

5 weird things about me:

1. I have an irrational hatred of dishwashers. I would rather wash up 40 of everything by hand than give in and get one. My husband differs on this, so it is only a matter of time before I relent in favour of convenience.

2. My long term investment strategy is limited to a belief that it is a good idea to buy a house on a hill, in case of sea levels rising in the future.

3. I save half used birthday cake candles in a tin just in case they are needed for a science experiment one day.

4. I often start reading magazines at the back and work forwards (Meredith’s answer to this meme reminded me of this)

5. I’ve only recently begun to allow dishcloths to re-enter my life. A pathological avoidance of them began after a biology experiment in my teens revealed the amount of germs they harboured. Ever since I have advocated drip drying. It might also have been a convenient ploy to escape drying-up duty as a teenager. Only the enormous quantities of washing up provided by our feasts and the point mentioned in 1. has made a supply of clean cloths seem like a good idea.

Next part of tag: Can’t think of any intelligent answers to these right now, but I’ll leave them in in case any one else wants to have a go.

1. Which famous person would you most like to learn that you're descended from?

2. Which famous person would you hate to learn you're descended from?

3. If you could be an ancestor to any famous living person who would it be and why?

4. If you could go back in time and meet any known ancestors of yours, who would it be and why?